USA Today bestseller Publishers Weekly bestseller Wall Street Journal bestseller Many people today think the Bible, the most influential book in world history, is not only outdated but irrelevant, irrational, and even immoral. This explanation of the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, demonstrates clearly and powerfully that the opposite is true. The Bible remains profoundly relevant—both to the great issues of our day and to each individual life. It is the greatest moral guide and source of wisdom ever written. Do you doubt the existence of God because you think believing in God is irrational? This book will give you many reasons to rethink your doubts. Do you think faith and science are in conflict? You won't after reading this commentary on Genesis. Do you come from a dysfunctional family? It may comfort you to know that every family discussed in Genesis was highly dysfunctional! The title of this commentary is "The Rational Bible" because its approach is entirely reason-based. The reader is never asked to accept anything on faith alone. In Dennis Prager's words, "If something I write is not rational, I have not done my job." The Rational Bible is the fruit of Dennis Prager's forty years of teaching the Bible—whose Hebrew grammar and vocabulary he has mastered—to people of every faith and no faith at all. On virtually every page, you will discover how the text relates to the contemporary world in general and to you personally. His goal: to change your mind—and, as a result, to change your life.
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1.1 In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.1
The first verse of Genesis is, in some ways, the most important verse in the Bible. While many Torah verses influenced history, Genesis 1:1 changed history in monumental ways.
• First, the verse posits a Creator of the universe. That means, among many other things, there is meaning to existence. If there is no Creator, there is no ultimate purpose to existence, including, of course, human existence. We humans can make up a meaning because we are the one species that cannot live without meaning. But the fact remains that we made it up.
Of course, atheists argue that believers in God made up God; therefore, God does not really exist. But they don’t always apply this rule to the existence of what they acknowledge they made up: meaning. If what we make up (God) doesn’t exist, what atheists make up (meaning) doesn’t exist.
If there is no God, we know there is no ultimate meaning or purpose to life: that all existence—including, of course, our own—is the result of random chance. But we do not know there is no Creator. So, unlike those who know they make up meaning, neither we who believe in God nor atheists know we made up God. On the contrary, there are very strong arguments for a Designer of the world, but there are no arguments for an ultimate purpose to life if there is no God.
• Second, the word “created” (bara) implies nothing preexisted Genesis 1:1. When bara is used in the Torah, it is used only with reference to God—because only God can create from nothing. Human beings cannot create; they can only “make,” like making something from something, such as wood and paper from trees.
• Third, everything—with the exception of God—has a beginning. Prior to God’s creating, there was nothing. That includes time. Thanks to Einstein, we know that time, too, had a beginning. God, therefore, also created time, which means God exists not only outside of nature but outside of time. God precedes time and will outlive time.
• Fourth, for the first time, a creation story has but one Creator. The moral and intellectual consequences of the Torah’s monotheism have changed the world. They are listed in detail in the commentary to Exodus 8:6 (and summarized in the commentary to Genesis 35:2).
• Fifth, unlike pre-Bible creation stories, there is complete silence regarding a birth of the deity. The God of Genesis 1:1, the God of the Bible, is not born.
• Sixth, for the first time in history, we are presented with a god who is completely separate from nature—because God created nature. God, for the first time, is not part of nature.
• Seventh, for the first time in history, the Creator and the act of creation are completely desexualized.
All of that is contained in this opening verse of the Bible.
ON THE QUESTION “WHO CREATED GOD?”
As noted above, Genesis 1:1 is completely silent with regard to God’s origins. All prior creation stories contained descriptions of how the gods came into existence (these are called “theogonies”). Therefore, Genesis 1:1 begins not with God’s origins—because He has none—but with God acting (creating the world).
For this reason, the question “Who created God?” while meaningful regarding pagan religion, is meaningless with regard to the God of the Bible. If God were created, God wouldn’t be God. God’s creator—we’ll call him God’s Dad—would be God. But the same people who ask “Who created God?” would then ask “Who created God’s Dad?” And after that, they would ask “Who created God’s Dad’s dad?” Ad infinitum. People who ask this question would feel intellectually at home in the pagan world where this question was meaningful.
If God were created, God wouldn’t be God. God’s creator would be God. But the same people who ask “Who created God?” would then ask “Who created God’s Dad?”
The question is akin to asking, “What is the highest number?” and after being told “googolplex,” asking, “What about googolplex plus one?” It is playing with words, not serious thought. The God of Genesis—the God the Western world came to affirm—is the First Cause, Who always was and always will be. That cannot be said about any other ancient god.
Skeptics will respond that just as the theist posits God always existed, the atheist posits the universe always existed. But this is untenable on both scientific and logical grounds.
Regarding science, the predominant view at this time is the universe did indeed have a beginning, what is popularly known as the Big Bang. This has disturbed scientists committed to atheism. Some have therefore posited an infinite number of Big Bangs and/or the existence of the “multiverse,” an infinite number of universes. But this is truly a statement of faith because there is no possible way of finding another universe. Nor is there evidence for an infinite number of Big Bangs.
The logical argument is this: How does the atheist explain existence? Why is there anything? To that, the atheist has no answer. The theist has a plausible—not provable, but easily the most logically compelling—answer: A Creator. God.
ESSAY: GOD’S EXISTENCE
Given the supreme importance of Genesis 1:1—that is, of God’s existence—to life, to meaning, and to morality; and given the Bible rests on this verse and its premise of God’s existence, a brief review of the rational arguments for God’s existence is necessary.
The most compelling rational argument is, as noted, the question “Why is there anything?” Science and atheism have no answer to this question. Nor will either ever have an answer. It is outside the purview of science. Science explains what is. But it cannot explain why what is came about—why something, rather than nothing, exists. Only a Creator of that something can explain why there is something rather than nothing.
Science cannot explain why something, rather than nothing, exists.
It is true that the existence of a Creator cannot be scientifically proved. Given that a Creator is outside of nature and that science can prove only that which is within nature, the fact that science cannot prove God’s existence is not meaningful.
Moreover, a Creator remains the only rational explanation for existence. And if only one thing can explain something, it is overwhelmingly likely that one thing is the explanation. The only alternatives are a) creation created itself from nothing or b) creation always existed. But each of these propositions is considerably less rational than a Creator, and neither can ever be proved.
Nor can science explain the emergence of life on earth. It is as mystified by the emergence of life from non-life as it is by the emergence of non-life from nothing. Again, only a Creator can explain that.
And science cannot explain consciousness. Why are human beings (and perhaps, to a much lesser degree, some animals) self-aware? To the best of our knowledge, nothing else in all the universe is self-aware. How did self-aware creatures emerge in a universe of non-awareness?
To be an atheist is to believe the universe came about by itself, life came from non-life by itself, and consciousness came about by itself.
On purely rational grounds—the grounds on which I believe in God—the argument for a God who created the world is far more intellectually compelling than atheism.
It is not belief in the existence of a Creator God that most troubles intellectually honest people; it is the existence of unjust suffering—both natural (diseases, earthquakes) and man-made (murder, torture). In other words, the intellectually honest atheist should acknowledge that the existence of the universe, of life, and of consciousness argue for God; and the intellectually honest believer should acknowledge that the amount of unjust suffering challenges faith in a good God.
However, I have never met a believer in God who has not acknowledged this challenge, whereas atheists, by definition, do not acknowledge the overwhelming evidence for a Creator. If they did, they would no longer be atheists; they would be believers or agnostics. To paraphrase the American rabbi and theologian Milton Steinberg (1903-1950), the believer has to account for the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for the existence of everything else—for the world, life, consciousness, beauty, love, art, music. It would seem the believer has the upper hand.
So, then, how do believers in the good God of the Bible rationally affirm their faith?
The primary rational arguments are these:
It does not make rational sense that the Creator wouldn’t care about His creations.
It does not seem likely that the Creator of beings who care about good and evil does not Himself care about good and evil.
It does not seem likely caring beings were created by an uncaring Creator.
I believe the most intellectually honest response to all the unjust suffering in the world is not to deny God exists, but to be occasionally angry with God. That is, in fact, one of the reasons I believe in the God of the Bible—because the name of God’s People is “Israel,” which means “Struggle with God” (see the commentary to Genesis 32:29). The very Book that introduced God to humanity invites us to fight with and even get angry with that God.
If Genesis described exactly how the world was created, it would be unintelligible to us, let alone to all those who preceded us over the past three thousand years.
Finally, I believe God is good because this Book—the Bible—makes such a compelling case for God’s goodness. If after reading this commentary, the reader is not persuaded the world is governed by a just and good God, I will have failed my primary task in writing this commentary.
ESSAY: DO SCIENCE AND GENESIS CONFLICT?
A major barrier to many modern men and women taking the Bible seriously is the belief that science and Genesis conflict and, consequently, that religion and science c...
