The Machine
When God began to create heaven and earth—the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water— God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. Genesis 1:1-3 JPS Tanakh
Began to create– I’m guessing that you’ve never read the opening verses of Genesis like the ones in this investigation. That’s probably because you read English Bibles with considerable theological influence. The above translation isn’t based on Western theology. It’s based on Jewish commentators (Rashi) and a Jewish view of the opening verses. That doesn’t make it “more correct.” It just makes it different; different enough for us to pause a bit over verses we thought we knew so well.
One of the things we try to do in this community is reveal those basic, and usually unconscious, assumptions that govern the way we look at the world. In other words, we’re interested in examining our own paradigms. This isn’t always easy. These verses are a good example. For most Western thinkers, God “created” everything at some point in time, which, by the way, He also created since we adopt the Greek philosophical view that time is basically a measure of change and since nothing existed before God created everything there was no time because there was nothing that could change. But enough of that. For most of us, God started it all. That’s our basic, and unexamined, assumption about God’s relationship to the creation. And that’s why the Rashi-influenced translation jars us. The JPS translation could imply that “stuff” was already there when God began the creative process. Our basic assumptions are shaken.
I want to use this example to introduce another very basic assumption about our world. It is eloquently described by Lionel Trilling:
“ . . . the machine, or the idea of the machine, exerts on the conduct of life, imposing habits and modes of thought which make it ever less possible to assume that man is man, . . .”[1]
“The mind is not to be a machine, not even that part of it which we call reason. The universe is not to be a machine; the thought that it might be drove Carlyle to the verge of madness. It was the mechanical principle, quite as much as the acquisitive principle—the two are of course intimately connected—which was felt to be the enemy of being, the source of inauthenticity. The machine, said Ruskin, could make only inauthentic things, dead things; and the dead things communicated their deadness to those who used them. Not, in his view, is it only actual machinery which produces dead objects, but any mode of making that does not permit the maker to infuse into the artifact the quality of his being.”[2]
“The belief that the organic is the chief criterion of what is authentic in art and life continues, it need hardly be said, to have great force with us, the more as we become alarmed by the deterioration of the organic environment. The sense of something intervening between man and his own organic endowment is a powerful element in the modern consciousness, . . .”[3]
Trilling’s words should shake us as much as the JPS version of Genesis 1. Why? Because we unconsciously operate as if the world is a machine—predictable and controllable. Of course, this is a very useful fiction. It allows us to maneuver and manipulate the world around us. It convinces us that we are in charge of our lives. And it “explains” so much of what we experience (if we ignore those little disparities between experience and theory). But most of all, for believers, it pushes us to think of creation as machinery, and of God as an engineer. Deism grew out of this orientation. It helps us maintain a certain “distance” from God; a distance necessary for us to run life as we wish and engage God when it’s convenient. After all, we aren’t the machine. We are the operators of the machine. As the Greeks suggested, nature is everything except us. So we can “employ” God to fix the machine when things don’t work out as we wish. We can reliably count on God to show up at church (how many times have you heard the minister invite the Spirit into the service as if God were an outsider?), but He can stay home the rest of the week while we’re busy controlling life. This is a direct result of the machine view of the world.
And it’s, obviously, a long way away from the organic, immanent view of God in the Hebrew Bible. But just because we acknowledge that this machine view is not biblical doesn’t mean we don’t slip into the machine view whenever we stop thinking deliberately about its false basis. As a fundamental assumption of the West, it becomes our automatic way of operating in the world unless we deliberately resist it. Even when we are reading the Scriptures or observing the mitzvot. Paradigm thinking will always take over without conscious and deliberate redirection. So today, just in the next few hours, pay attention—and see if you can catch yourself acting according to the machine.
Topical Index: Genesis 1:1-3, beginning, paradigm, machine, assumptions
Right brain – left brain thinking, according to Dr. Caroline Leaf (and brain research in general) is, roughly, about either detail to big picture, or big picture to detail: pieces to whole, or whole into pieces. Most people fall into either one general approach to life, or the other, depending upon which side of their brain dominates.
I think of the West as a detail-to-big-picture paradigm. Because I think we Westerners inherited a desire to worship the Ultimate Detail – I do mean the atomic dream of ancient Greece, where reality is controllable – even buildable – by means of a grasp of the pieces – we are going to naturally think reality is a sum total of building blocks of matter. We seem to think of ‘one’ as the smallest (indivisible) bottom of all dimensions: the single point of 1-D, the endpoints of 2-D, and the building blocks that make up 3-D, too. (I know ‘one’ as the whole out of which all parts derive was not taught in my first grade math!)
It seems creation (in the West, anyway) is built with things (one’s) out of a vacuum of no-things, where the nouns – the things – of reality construe what reality IS, with life – function – ‘naturally’ following once the ‘machines’ of matter are in place. Life, according to the West, is not possible without the ‘form’ of matter within which to put it. We read that YHVH “formed” man out of dust and THEN breathed life into him. The (obvious) formula, then, is matter – then life: parts – then whole: form – then function: IF we think of man as a machine, that is: a machine that, once it is there, has the capacity to (‘naturally’) reproduce itself. The beginning of man was, like the rest of creation, (obviously) pieces – then the integrated show. At least it seems to us. But perhaps that all depends upon where we START: where we begin.
What if God was already filling it all with Himself before our ‘beginning’? What if matter/space/time is where He humbly VACATED Himself so as to have a place to put what was not Him? What if time itself is a ‘space’ for us to exercise free will: to willingly choose whether or not we will will the will of God? What if God is the whole; and creation – the pieces of the other – is a derivative of the completeness of love, designed to recreate that love (“in the image of”) by means of that other? What if you cannot have pieces if there wasn’t a whole, first? What if you cannot have space (time too, don’t forget) if there wasn’t a “fulness” in which to put it (and just what does “the fulness of time” mean?)? What if creation is where God separated Himself from reality so as to make the potential for others to love Him back? What if it is about big-picture-to detail: life-to-nonlife?
What if the ‘pieces’ – the “dust” of matter ‘plus’ the “breath” of life – we think make up (=) the entirety of ourselves (like any good machine), actually is where God separated the Oneness of Himself from a place – dimensionality – (3-D matter, 4-D time/space, etc) in which to put us? What if you cannot have pieces without a Whole out of which to derive them? What if you can’t have what is not-life without life first?
While we are on the subject: what if evil is dependent upon good for it’s ‘existence’, too? What if our lives are not possible without the life of God in us: that our ‘beginning’ was not the “dust of the ground”, but, instead, the design of the Designer coupled with His shared life (“breath”) in us, with some dirt mixed in, in the middle? What if we have been evil so long that the good is the last thing – not the first thing – we ‘naturally’ think of?
Wow oh, you said a mouthful. Need to read this a couple of times. My head doesn’t quite wrap around it all at once.. I do like your reference to Caroline leaf. I shared her teachings with my cousin about 5 years ago. His brain was a little confused. But Carolyn help him straighten thanks out.. It was really a miraculous healing. She’s really come along in her ways as the Christian world has really embraced her teachings. The part of the machine that I’m dealing with currently is. That for me when it all started the machine had control over me oh, now I have control over the machine. The machine being the devil. The accuser of the brethren, the enemy. I heard someone read just yesterday. The Works of the flesh are. We know what they are. Even when we’re doing something right oh, we can be doing it for the wrong reasons. The Works of the spirit are…. We must let the spirit take control of us. The. God of the universe. Has stepped out of his place in time to not only do well with us, but in US. And help us to discern what is really important…. This is only how it works for me. Maybe it helped someone else. Thank you
Amazing…you’ve helped congeal some rather nebulous thoughts I’ve been trying to ‘form’ for several days now…maybe I just needed some ‘space’…and ‘time’…and inspiration.
In all sincerity, thank you, Laurita.
Well, Richard, when yours do congeal I hope you share them back with me because I am still stuck in the middle of the process of trying to blast my reinforced concrete ones apart and start over (thank you so much, Skip). I sure do hope no one thinks I have it all together!
Cute, Richard. Space and time. Makes me think of the lyric. I love you in a place where there’s no space and time. Would that apply here? But I don’t think that is what Skip is saying. 🙂 I am a part that feels complete when I am connected to the whole. When I am disconnected, I feel great pain. I am not sure I could handle it. Being totally disconnected.
I’ve done some informal polling that indicates a lot of people feel the same.
Hey Marsha, thanks for the reminder of a great old song by Leon Russell from Oklahoma. It reminded me of an old girlfriend. She sang it to me not very well 🙂 but nevertheless with love. Defining love is somewhat elusive as I guess is time. Or so the scholars say. But then again as Skip says it is defined by actions, love that is.
Laurita,
I can relate to your words. Reading them makes me feel as if you have scooped up many of my un-categoried thoughts of God, that are randomly hanging out in my mind, and thrown them out onto the page! There are times when these kinds of ideas become overwhelming and not at all comforting. That’s when I remind myself that pretty much everything in modern life is demanded to be explainable by man. If it’s not, then it’s considered rubbish, and never to be ‘certified’ or ‘authentic.’ I can’t do anything about that, but my real connection happens when I can get beyond words, and my own thoughts, and experience the AWE of the Creator.
Gayle, I am finding that there is real freedom in the fact that we can love, trust and obey without having to understand ANYTHING except that God loves us, because that frees us up to question everything else without fear that we will ‘lose’ our religion. (I am beginning to suspect that the sooner all of us ‘lose’ that religion the better!) I am not saying that “sound doctrine” is not essential: I think I am saying that it (the principles of love) works just fine whether or not we think we understand it or not. The important thing is to not be blocking the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. I no longer think I have to believe that my salvation is dependent upon how ‘perfectly’ I understand how that salvation works.
I think it interesting, if not significant, that the creation story of Genesis 1 renders the details (“particulars”) as proceeding from the whole; whereas, from Genesis 2 thereon the particulars (“generations”) of the cosmos are cast in the setting of separation and isolation, in need of (re)integration to be made whole.
This is great! Love all the comments!
My 1917 copyright JPS does not read this way, Skip. Which version are you quoting from?
1985
http (colon slash slash)nocr.net(slash)bexpo(slash)english(slash)engtnk/index.php/Ge/1/
Thank you Skip, and Laurita, for the feast for the mind today.
I don’t think we truly want to be aware of GOD continuously. Being aware of The Creator oppresses us with our true position in relation to Him, son of dust. I for one struggle with the presence, it’s so much easier to relate to the world.
I can relate…except I don’t find it easier to relate to the world. All I sense is alenation. Thankfully, that drives me to seek Him…(“YHVH, YHVH, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness…”)