In Plato’s Revenge, biologist Richard Sternberg recounts his high hopes, shared with others at the National Institutes of Health, that the Human Genome Project would reveal the hidden secrets of the human body. It was supposed to be like a recipe, he says, so that “we’ll be able to read… the blueprint for making a human being, and it should be more or less self-explanatory.” Such wonders as “personalized medicine” would follow.
Those hopes were bitterly disappointed. You cannot “read out” a human from our genome, which, among other problems, contains wildly insufficient information for that. It’s not a recipe. Instead, as Sternberg and other scientists have come to realize, an “immaterial genome,” some kind of existence, like a Platonic realm outside of time and space, guides much of the development of an organism and many operations of the cell, purposefully using genetic information but far from being limited to it.
A Disagreeable Character
I thought of that this past Friday night in the course of a very interesting dinner conversation with friends and family. One Christian friend has been listening to the Bible straight through and admitted that, subjectively, the God of the Old Testament seems like a disagreeable character — “mean,” was the word he used. And how did I, he asked, deal with that as a Jew? Of course, that’s not the only hard part of the Hebrew Bible.
It’s a good question, and I tried to answer it with an analogy from Sternberg’s immaterial genome. See what you think. Imagine that an intelligent extraterrestrial comes down to Earth, knowing nothing about the planet’s human history or cultures. Say you teach him to speak and read English, being careful to isolate him from any knowledge of civilization. One day you give him a book to read.
It’s the Bible. First you give him just the Hebrew Bible and ask him to read out from it what the authors, writing some thousands of years ago, had in mind as a “religion.” (You have withheld that word from his vocabulary until now.) Would he “read out” something like Judaism in any familiar form — say, Orthodox Judaism? No way. Not a chance.1 I think he would be very confused and curious about what the Israelites’ descendants could have been doing since the Hebrew Scriptures were closed as a canon.
Tuning to my friend’s faith, I said let’s imagine now we tell the alien there’s another Scriptural work, the New Testament, that more than 2 billon people in a different faith community, called Christianity, add to the Hebrew Bible, seeing the two works as one.2 Can the alien “read out” any form of Christian practice or affirmation that this longer Scriptural body is advocating? Again, keeping in mind that this Bible has long been set as a canon. Would he read out, say, the Roman Catholic Church or Martin Luther’s Protestantism?
I Think He Would Not
The many forms of Christianity that exist in the world tell me, at least, that no single reading of the Holy Bible is the “obvious” correct one. I believe our alien would be, again, very curious to know how people had enacted the teachings of the Old combined with the New Testament.
I suggested to my friend that faiths are like organic species, drawing on the information in the spiritual DNA of Scripture, being guided by a “spirit” (for want of a better word) to make use of that information, and how. Each faith’s spirit has its own integrity, its personality (again for want of a better word), that shapes what it does with that DNA. The DNA can be formulated as a text to read from a physical object, a Bible. But the reading does not tell you what form the resulting spiritual community will take, any more than reading the physical genome tells you what a human will be like.
The analogy works with the terms changed, too. There are clues, for sure, but the physical genome can only tell you so much. In an organism or in a faith, the immaterial genome — intelligent design in real time — is ultimately in charge. I believe, to answer my friend’s question, that this helps us understand how to deal with some difficult parts of the Bible.
Notes
- The alien’s problem would be compounded if you taught him Hebrew and gave him the Hebrew Bible in that language, which in the original includes no vowels or punctuation.
- I am limiting this to Judaism and Christianity because they are the only faiths I know enough about to say. I’ve read the Quran but don’t feel qualified to offer a view on Islam in this respect. I have not read, for instance, the Bhagavad Gita or the Book of Mormon.