“I didn’t even get a lousy T-shirt,” quipped the Jerusalem-based scientist during a recent phone interview from Israel.
Schroeder, the author of such books as “Genesis and the Big Bang,” “The Science of God” and the just-released “Hidden Face of God,” will speak Tuesday evening at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. His topic will be the intersection between science and religion — the very same topic that got him barred from a Christian radio station in Ohio.
As an observant Jewish scientist, Schroeder walks a very fine line. On one hand, his scientific inquiries raise hackles among biblical literalists, whom Schroeder called “theological shibboleths.” They maintain that scientists like Schroeder, who believe that the universe has been in existence for 15 billion years, are borderline heretical. (Hence, his radio invitation was rescinded.)
Conversely, many scientists who identify as atheists, agnostics or as religious moderates, are puzzled by Schroeder’s belief that the universe was created in six days, as the Book of Genesis states. Schroeder, however, sees no contradiction between his scientific and religious beliefs. In fact, Schroeder, a former professor at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science who is now at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said his beliefs have been reconciled in the tracts of the Kaballah, the Jewish mystical tradition.
In “Hidden Face of God,” subtitled “How Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth,” Schroeder explores the kaballistic teachings that insist the six days of Genesis (essentially the time prior to Adam) are 24-hour days that also include all the ages of the world.
Schroeder, who describes his age as “sixtysomething,” says he is often asked, “How can six days contain billions of years?”
He offers one response in “Hidden Face of God,” which correlates the six 24-hour days containing billions of years not with “changes in gravity or in differences in velocity, but based on the effect which the stretching of space has on the perception of distant information — a concept used many times daily in astronomy. And the location of this perception is not from any particular point in space, but rather from a particular moment in time, the time at which energy and quarks confined into the stable matter, that is, protons.”
For those who have difficulty deciphering such technical language, a diluted, lay translation might read, “There are questions for which science can provide no answers.”
Those nagging questions, which form the crux of Schroeder’s work, led the New-York-born scientist and MIT-trained physicist to become more observant. (Growing up, he said, “the family synagogue none of us went to was Orthodox.”)
The fusion of his identity as an observant Jewish scientist has also given him the ability to speak in less academic parables.
“I would encourage anyone with an interest in science to go to the library and check out a book on human physiology,” said Schroeder. “Spend five hours reading about how one simple human nerve works. It’s like Disney World in your body — which is something that really goes against all the laws of nature, because nature loves chaos and disorder.
“Think of the random way a leaf falls from a tree. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, but the human body functions magnificently.
“I don’t know how God interacts, and frankly, I don’t even know what I mean when I say ‘God,'” he said. “But I do know that the likelihood of the fingers used to type an article just evolving that way by chance are probably 0.2 on a scale of 0 to 1,000.”