Every one who tries to know the following four things, it were better for him if he had never come into the world, viz.: What is above and what is beneath, what was before creation, and what will be after all will be destroyed. And every one who does not revere the glory of his Creator, it were better for him he had not come into the world.”  -Talmud

I just finished and excellent little book by Martin Gardner called Undliluted Hocus-Pocus which at the age of 95 is a brief summation of his life and thoughts. Gardner is author of about 100 books, a lifelong amateur mathematician, magician, poet, and skeptical inquirer who wrote a monthly column in Scientific American on Mathematical Games. Many of his musing struck a chord with me.

One thing that fascinates me is the limits of understanding. Gardner notes  what we all have heard  many times, that humans and chimps have virtually identical genes. But there are many human concepts beyond chimp understanding. No matter how you try you will never teach a chimp the square root of 2. I have noted over the years so many things that are way out of the range of human understanding. Not many people are aware that the limits of human cognition seems to be a central theme in Jewish religious thought. (In regard to Jewish philosophy  I feel it necessary to make a strong disclaimer. Anything that I write here is my own understanding and I am unqualified make any representation as to Jewish thought,  only my own personal thoughts.)

Over the thousands of years of Jewish history the very core of human striving indeed the purpose of existence was considered the struggle to understand and become closer withThe Eternal. Jacob, father of the the twelve tribes, wrestled with an angel, won, and was thus given the name Israel, he who strives with the Lord, by which it is meant that the Children of Israel, will always be striving through their generations, to understand the Eternal. The greatest Jewish authors over the eons have been obsessed with this single endeavor.  Ranging  from fervent believers to militant atheists, most don’t even seem realize how smitten they are with the idea of knowing the Eternal, even in their vehement arguments that He does not exist.  Moses, who tradition presents as the greatest prophet, came closer than anyone. Moses at the time of the giving of the Ten Commandments, seems to have requested to see the Countenance.  Moses was told that would destroy him but was placed protectively in a crag of rock and allowed a limited view. He returned after that episode transmuted, with horns of light, wizened. A recurrent theme in Rabbinic writings is that only some select few worthy individuals are able to withstand the revelation of certain deep truths.  The unprepared would be destroyed by intense light.

There is a common theme of a cult of secrecy, of deep codes, in to many cultures and expressed also in Freemasonry, certain secrets being available to some few worthy initiates, but in Jewish philosophy this goes further.   There is a much stronger identification, indeed equivalence, of unraveling a secret code with discovery of knowledge about the universe. In other words, the struggle to discover scientific and physical truths, is bound strongly with the desire to get closer and understand the Deity. I like to think that just as animal sacrifice was the basis of religious rituals of the past, now replaced by prayers and other devotional rituals, scientific inquiry replaces revelation in the discovery of truth in the modern mind. This will eventually be superseded by another post scientific system. The mathematical and physical language may be beyond the understanding of most of us, but the vocabulary of Albert Einstein as well as other physicists reveals strong entanglement of scientific and religious concepts.   In  Einstein’s writings understanding the universe is equivalent to becoming closer to seeing the Deity. I half thought the imperfections in the mirror of the Hubble telescope occurred because we were looking at things we weren’t prepared to see. And for a long time when I was growing up, we thought that smashing the atom, before we were prepared to handle this technology, would ultimately destroy us all, just the same as Moses’ request. The same may hold for revelation of the human genome and many other technologies before we have the wisdom to use them for our own betterment.

We need be humble in face of the contemplation of the truths of the universe. There are so many things we humans lack the capacity to understand,  at least in our current state,  and we need to be aware of that. Maimonides was a great intellect of the Twelfth century. He is a particular hero of mine because as hard working physician he was also a philosopher and deep thinker and I like to think his medical practice was crossed fertilized by his thought. A recurrent theme in his Guide for the Perplexed, is that the virulent rejection of Biblical teachings is not so much the fault of these ancient and revered writings, as the insufficiency one’s own understanding. Thus we should embrace not so much a rejectionist or nihilistic outlook as to seek a further discipline and perfection in ourselves. We would be best served by understanding in humility, our own limits.

One of the concepts hardest to fathom is our own existence, and the emergence of consciousness and appreciation, as paltry and limited as it seems to be, the profound beauty of earth, solar system, universe.  Scientists are aware that we are here as if by accident.  If  the mass of a proton were only slightly different, the strength of electromagnetic force, abundance of water, precise position of earth and moon as an inner planetary system shielded  by larger outer planets, earth’s particular distance from the sun and literally hundreds of other precise accidents hospitable to life, and then conscious life, which may be termed the Goldilocks effect, we would not be here. This highly fortunate series of improbable accidents which allowed humans to emerge and thrive,  is termed the anthropic cosmologic principle.  As specified by someone, maybe a Goldiocks, our universe is just this way, because humans are here to regard it. Many scientists feel that if our human universe exists, there must be a whole array  universes with physical conditions not compatible with life and consciousness. But if our own existence is implausible, imagine the existence of thousands, millions, billions of other universes just as immense or maybe many of these universes are contained in the space of a single proton or even inside quarks.   These mind-blowing entertainments are now common topic of discussion and are known to virtually everyone but with poor appreciation of their extreme implausibility.  Not only alternate universes are quite popular but consider the notion that the entire universe was once with all of its matter and energy compressed into a tiny volume smaller than the size of a single atom, or current ideas about conventional matter comprising around just 4% of the actual constituents of the cosmos, the  other 96% being comprised of dark matter and dark energy. All of these concepts are to me unreasonable and I can’t say I believe in them even as a scientific type. But my own inability to get my mind around these ideas,  has to be the result of my own intellectual insufficiency. I blame myself.

In reading Martin Gardner’s little valedictory, written at the end of his life,(some say mostly by his friends but I am attracted to the idea of the old man making his final statement) I felt more than a little resonance with his own philosophical point of view and found in his writings a name for this basic concept of human cognitive insufficiency, Mysterianism. I have long realized that there are certain problems beyond the limits of human cognitive capacities.  The understanding of the problem of human consciousness and the origins and purposes, structure of the universe is among this class of problems.  Gardner was obsessed as many of us are, with the hope of some form of life after death, rejecting the Dantean Christian and other classical views.  We need never stop wrestling with these problems, but we should not be fooled into thinking we have solved them. Here I see the kernel of amicable amalgam of all of our previous religious differences.