How do we know what we know? What can we know if we determine that we can indisputably and truly know? Ah! Enter Science with a capital “S.” And enter the long trail of scientists going back to, say, Archimedes, or back to Galileo and Bacon. Galileo, experimenter and theorist, seeing the math in Nature and the nature of math, still held onto his belief system. He was in search of an indisputable way to affirm his belief though his nemesis Pope Urban did everything he could to quash the science and favor the Inquisition. Religion was thereby forced into a war with science, particularly over the nature of a creative force, an intellectual battleground between religious leaders and scientists. We might argue that today, after the proclamations of Popes who have been more friendly to scientists than Urban was to Galileo, that the war is over except for those nagging questions in the minds of some about Creation, Creator, and evolution. Generally, however, science has its place. Religion has its. The two are separated as though by an oceanic rift valley, the forming plates of evolving ideas moving off in opposite directions. But then there are those nagging questions that keep bringing them together again, like plates colliding at subduction zones, some undergoing destruction, some undergoing collisions that produce violent eruptions, and some producing jumbles of distorted old rocks piled to Himalayan elevations and set as challenging slopes to conquer by the fearless or foolish.
If you read through archived copies of Scientific American, a magazine that started in the mid-nineteenth century, you will find statements that today’s writers would not (could not?) incorporate in scientific literature because of 1) political correctness, 2) a fear of ridicule by condescending peers who “don’t believe” in belief, and 3) a cultural change that occurred over the past 100 years to eliminate any philosophical or theological references from scientific work and a haughty disdain for any teleological explanations. Scientists have weaned themselves, they believe, from belief. And yet… And yet, there’s much that scientists must believe if not in labs, then in their lives. Not all the world is quantifiable. Not all lends itself to prediction, and not all, once “verified,” can be so repeatedly. And then there’s another nagging question: “Why?” Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the Here and Now right here now?
Let me give you an example of a thought probably few, if any, contemporary scientists would write in one of today’s scientific journals. In a 1921 issue of Scientific American, the author, writing about Einstein’s Relativity, says, “Divine wisdom, perfect and boundless, if we conceive it ever to have had beginning at all, must thus have come into full being. We today should prefer to think of it as without beginning, as having always been….”*
Talking about an eternal God in a scientific journal is now anathema, to use a religious term. Instead, talk centers on an eternal universe. But in an Observations/Opinion section of Scientific American online you can find an article by a former editor entitled “Can Science Rule Out God?” surely a title that, in itself, probably draws condescension from many “scientists” who would, like Scrooge, exclaim, “Bah! Humbug.” It’s an interesting break from the supposed surety of experiment and formalism.
“Poppycock!” a very old scientist might exclaim, “science and religion don’t mix. We have traveled well past that mix with the help of Galileo and Darwin, both men of faith, but both ‘scientists’ through and through, and then with the help of Einstein and his statement that uses a nebulous reference to God. Sure, Einstein mentioned the word God, but he did so in the context of a deterministic universe—‘God does not play dice,’ he said—where cause leads to effect.”
And most scientists would go on to explain how experimentation, exploration, and formal math are the only avenues to understanding the universe and either its origin or its lack of origin. “The universe,” they might say, “is what it is because it made itself so out of necessity. Nothing demanded something, if one holds that the current universe had a beginning.” And in the contrasting view (belief?) if one doesn’t accept a “beginning,” they might explain, “Whatever exists today is merely a continuation of an eternal universe that keeps re-creating itself, filling nothing with something, not just in its previous image, but rather in every possible image, an endless progression of multiverses that require no conscious deity for an eternal unfolding.”
As the opinion-writer in Scientific American continues, “Nothingness is unstable.” Such a statement calls to mind the “quantum foam” argument that postulates energy in nothingness as though energy is itself “nothing.” Yet, by all our definitions of energy, it is measurable either directly or indirectly, as it seems to be with Dark Energy. If it weren’t, we could not determine the cost of running our furnaces and vehicles, and we couldn’t determine that the universe undergoes an accelerating expansion. Quantifying Nothing or the energy in Nothing, is a bit of an oxymoron, but there seems to be proof enough that such vacuum energy exists. In saying that Nothingness contains energy, however, we impose something on nothing: When we are told the composition of the universe, the numbers come up at 4 to 5% ordinary matter, and the rest Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the latter making up the bulk of “what is.” That’s a measurement.
But that’s where we are in our quest for a substitute “Creator.” Science, in spite of its warranting certitude, is surprisingly uncertain about much that is or how it came about. And always the question “Why?” shadows all scientific inquiry. We know, for example, that photons are both wave and particle. We know what they do, but we don’t know why they do what they do? We have a science of “nothingness,” but we are in the dark about Dark Energy and “vacuum energy.” And in this darkness we have yet to answer both questions: How does Dark Energy work? Why does it work the way it does? Ditto for any vacuum energy.
To answer me, I believe most scientists would say, “There are no mysteries, only mysteries that we have yet to explain.”
“Fine.” I note. “But doesn’t that include a bit of belief?”
“Bear with us, O ye of little knowledge, and we shall point the way to truth.”
“Okay,” I add in humble patience, “run this stuff past me. How will we unveil the veiled?”
The op-ed continues with reference to three views of God. 1) That of St. Thomas Aquinas: The chain of events—continuous change—that we know as the universe had an origin that was not part of the chain, a transcendent, unchanging Being outside Time and, therefore, outside whatever is inside. Wouldn’t an act of creation, the moment of creation, like the hypothesized Big Bang, be a singular, and not a continuous act that brought the Something into existence? If the act of creation were continuous, then is it ongoing even today, implying a presence of, for want of a better word, Providence? Therein lies a conundrum over how to think about Creation that the biblical writers tried to verbalize. The stumbling efforts of the writers of Genesis to define a transcendent Being indicate our difficulty in describing the origin of All and the Originator as a transcendent Cause. In the most commonly known English translation, “In the beginning the Earth was void and without form” are words that start with a prepositional phrase that traps the writers*** into having an ‘imperfect’ Deity spend the next ‘six days’ (the Hexaemeron) fixing up as an afterthought the initial act of creation by, for example, separating light from darkness. Is that the favored translation and therefore the favored belief? If so, then God had to work with that which He created, putting Him in His creation or somehow involving Him in it. In another Genesis translation by E. A. Speiser, “When God first set about creating Heaven and Earth” lies an expression that eliminates God’s having to say to Himself, “Shoot, I forgot to…” because the Creation isn’t a single act, but then, again in confusion, it presupposes a time before time with a dependent adverbial clause and a Creator Who is part of time because any continuous act involving change is our definition of time. Is that what the scientists argue is a vacuum energy, the quantum foam, the coming and going of virtual particles in a nothingness filled with energy? If Creation is ongoing, doesn’t that make either quantum effects and the Infinite Creator part of Time and subject to the underlying laws that govern the “creation”? If it is ongoing in a multiverse of branes, are chance encounters of branes in different dimensions the actual “creators”? If so, we don’t need God because we have a happy accident to thank for being able to thank. Thus, if we adopt the view of Aquinas of a First Cause, we find ourselves pondering whether or not the First Cause is, in fact, the Continuing Cause, something like the quantum foam or vacuum energy, something like Dark Energy.
2) That of Leibniz: “a necessary being which has reason for existence in itself.” God is, in that sense, Being with no outside obligation: Existence Itself. That view calls to mind Deism and its Clockmaker God who made the Clock (the universe), wound it, let it go, and then stood back, removed from the Creation, having nothing to do with its running. Look for no miracles Here. Divine intervention, Divine Providence, is a myth because a First Cause isn’t a Continuing Cause. God might have made Nature, but then abandoned it like some heartless sea turtle mother who labors up the beach, digs the hole, lays the eggs, and then lumbers back down the beach to re-enter the sea. “Goodbye, little turtle eggs; when you hatch, run fast to the water so the seagulls don’t eat you, and once you enter, stay near the bottom to avoid the eyes of hungry sharks.”
3) That of agnostic Einstein and maybe Spinoza: identifying God with Nature. That almost takes us back to the animists and definitely takes us back to pantheists. Certainly, it invokes some Native American views of the Great Spirit and our connection with Nature. As part of Creation, we are part of God, a view that has led some to say all is divine because the Divinity is in all (Wasn’t that what Heraclitus was saying with his cyclical Eternal Fire?). Nature is the self-driven pullulating force with an innate plan of laws by which it operates, chief among them that cause breeds effect.
With respect to this Science-God problem, we’re in a bind, aren’t we? Our training in Euclidean geometry has made logic our go-to way of thinking. We believe inductive reasoning can never reach a final answer. Thus, no “evidence” for God can pile up to support a final conclusion. We can’t say, “But, by some miracle, she was cured. And so were many who visited the shrine. Miracles are evidence for God.”
Instead, coupled with Galilean experimentation and Renaissance-like exploration, deduction and its partner, formal math, have become the only acceptable methodologies for proof. All else is just faith, mere wishful thinking that some Protector watches over and intrudes and whose supposed “intrusions” we use inductively to prove His existence and his creation as a warm and fuzzy place of comfort in the midst of its random ills.
We deem ourselves to be rational in what we accept as truth. We are scientists, one and all, in this “modern” world of debunked myth. Yet, we accept the unrepeatable social-science “science”—all that Margaret-Mead kind of “science.” We say we want to quantify to do proper science, but now we have all those academicians doing “qualitative research”—their term for that which cannot be verified by repeating whatever it is they did to reach their conclusions, again, a Margaret-Mead kind of “science,” nondebatable and one not subject to repetitive experimentation, a “science” based on interpretation passed off as “analytical” anthropology or sociology, the surety of which seems demonstrably feeble in light of political polls that serve as prophecies like those of the 2016 American elections. Those among us who would distinguish between the “soft” and “hard” sciences would argue that only experimentation and formal math can supply undeniable truths. Think of luck at the casino. The slot machine pays, pays again, pays again, so we accept the accruing money as evidence Fortune is with us until it isn’t. Regardless of how luck runs, we can never know with surety that the next spin of the wheels will come up three sevens. And even if we have a “feeling” that our ship is about to dock, we can’t explain the feeling other than out of seven billion people wishing for luck to run in their favor, it is simple, random chance that our wish, our slot machine, comes to fruition.
Of course, if experimentation is a guarantee, then we’re all settled on what we should and should not eat. No conflicting studies there. Right? Eat eggs. Don’t eat eggs. Eat fat. Don’t eat fat. All the while there are those who outlive those who adopt the opposite advice. Anecdotally and inductively, I’m thinking of my own parents, one living almost to 96 and the other almost to 98. Processed meats a staple in their diets: baloney, salami, pepperoni. Butter and bread. Pasta and red meats—the cheap cuts, for we weren’t very rich. Desserts. One not exercising even with moderate daily walking for the last couple of decades of her life. The other stopped from walking golf courses by an inability to see the golf ball in his eighties because of macular degeneration that forced him to take up bowling—scoring the year’s high, almost 300, in his league, by the way. I’m thinking also of Jack Lalanne, famous exercise and juicing guru who lived less by a year than my father, the former exercising vigorously, the latter, walking daily to work and back and then in retirement the golf course until failing eyes became his handicap. And I’m wondering: If we apply what we see through experience to life and belief or what we see through experimentation and deduction, do we have a discernible trustworthy difference? Scientists would say yes. Trust the science. Look at the difference in longevity brought on by science. “Yes,” I see and add, “wasn’t the science of clean water the most significant cause of increased longevity in the twentieth century? And isn’t it true that though average life spans were lower for millennia than they are now, there have always been individuals with long lives, long enough to at least to slightly offset the higher infant mortality rates of the past?”
Does science really have anything to say about God? The opinion writer in Scientific American suggests that we need more “telescopes and other scientific instruments that provide the needed data to researchers studying fundamental physics. And maybe the effort will lead to breakthroughs in theology as well.” Really? So, this is how we will unveil the veiled?
I’m sorry, but that sounds naïve at best and primitive at worst. Didn’t the ancients look to the heavens as the place to find God. Could we really accept that a better telescope might have helped them see that which is unseen? Remember the “firmament,” that dome of sky on which the stars were pinned; remember the Ptolemaic cosmos of concentric, embedded spheres and the celestial music? I’ll bet the ancients would have loved a better than a naked-eye view of it. But from the perspective of the present and all that we know about myth and matter, about energy and process, and about history and process, could we really accept the principle that better scientific instrumentation is all that separates us from finally knowing God?
*Scientific American. 2 Jul 1921. P.8. Online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015024546437&view=1up&seq=11&size=125
Accessed December 30, 2019.
**Observations/Opinions. 23 Dec. 2019. Online at https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/can-science-rule-out-god/
Accessed December 30, 2019.
***The “writers” of Genesis use two different expressions for God, indicating different traditions. One group or writer, for example, refers to God as Elohim, a plural that might foreshadow a Trinitarian God, and a name that occurs at the outset of the book and then throughout the Bible. Genesis contains two creation stories, however, and in the second one God is Yahweh (Jehovah, for some, “The Name of the Name” for others), a word that doesn’t contain the vowels we commonly see in English transliteration (YHWH) and that might derive from a reference to being itself.
If you read through archived copies of Scientific American, a magazine that started in the mid-nineteenth century, you will find statements that today’s writers would not (could not?) incorporate in scientific literature because of 1) political correctness, 2) a fear of ridicule by condescending peers who “don’t believe” in belief, and 3) a cultural change that occurred over the past 100 years to eliminate any philosophical or theological references from scientific work and a haughty disdain for any teleological explanations. Scientists have weaned themselves, they believe, from belief. And yet… And yet, there’s much that scientists must believe if not in labs, then in their lives. Not all the world is quantifiable. Not all lends itself to prediction, and not all, once “verified,” can be so repeatedly. And then there’s another nagging question: “Why?” Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the Here and Now right here now?
Let me give you an example of a thought probably few, if any, contemporary scientists would write in one of today’s scientific journals. In a 1921 issue of Scientific American, the author, writing about Einstein’s Relativity, says, “Divine wisdom, perfect and boundless, if we conceive it ever to have had beginning at all, must thus have come into full being. We today should prefer to think of it as without beginning, as having always been….”*
Talking about an eternal God in a scientific journal is now anathema, to use a religious term. Instead, talk centers on an eternal universe. But in an Observations/Opinion section of Scientific American online you can find an article by a former editor entitled “Can Science Rule Out God?” surely a title that, in itself, probably draws condescension from many “scientists” who would, like Scrooge, exclaim, “Bah! Humbug.” It’s an interesting break from the supposed surety of experiment and formalism.
“Poppycock!” a very old scientist might exclaim, “science and religion don’t mix. We have traveled well past that mix with the help of Galileo and Darwin, both men of faith, but both ‘scientists’ through and through, and then with the help of Einstein and his statement that uses a nebulous reference to God. Sure, Einstein mentioned the word God, but he did so in the context of a deterministic universe—‘God does not play dice,’ he said—where cause leads to effect.”
And most scientists would go on to explain how experimentation, exploration, and formal math are the only avenues to understanding the universe and either its origin or its lack of origin. “The universe,” they might say, “is what it is because it made itself so out of necessity. Nothing demanded something, if one holds that the current universe had a beginning.” And in the contrasting view (belief?) if one doesn’t accept a “beginning,” they might explain, “Whatever exists today is merely a continuation of an eternal universe that keeps re-creating itself, filling nothing with something, not just in its previous image, but rather in every possible image, an endless progression of multiverses that require no conscious deity for an eternal unfolding.”
As the opinion-writer in Scientific American continues, “Nothingness is unstable.” Such a statement calls to mind the “quantum foam” argument that postulates energy in nothingness as though energy is itself “nothing.” Yet, by all our definitions of energy, it is measurable either directly or indirectly, as it seems to be with Dark Energy. If it weren’t, we could not determine the cost of running our furnaces and vehicles, and we couldn’t determine that the universe undergoes an accelerating expansion. Quantifying Nothing or the energy in Nothing, is a bit of an oxymoron, but there seems to be proof enough that such vacuum energy exists. In saying that Nothingness contains energy, however, we impose something on nothing: When we are told the composition of the universe, the numbers come up at 4 to 5% ordinary matter, and the rest Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the latter making up the bulk of “what is.” That’s a measurement.
But that’s where we are in our quest for a substitute “Creator.” Science, in spite of its warranting certitude, is surprisingly uncertain about much that is or how it came about. And always the question “Why?” shadows all scientific inquiry. We know, for example, that photons are both wave and particle. We know what they do, but we don’t know why they do what they do? We have a science of “nothingness,” but we are in the dark about Dark Energy and “vacuum energy.” And in this darkness we have yet to answer both questions: How does Dark Energy work? Why does it work the way it does? Ditto for any vacuum energy.
To answer me, I believe most scientists would say, “There are no mysteries, only mysteries that we have yet to explain.”
“Fine.” I note. “But doesn’t that include a bit of belief?”
“Bear with us, O ye of little knowledge, and we shall point the way to truth.”
“Okay,” I add in humble patience, “run this stuff past me. How will we unveil the veiled?”
The op-ed continues with reference to three views of God. 1) That of St. Thomas Aquinas: The chain of events—continuous change—that we know as the universe had an origin that was not part of the chain, a transcendent, unchanging Being outside Time and, therefore, outside whatever is inside. Wouldn’t an act of creation, the moment of creation, like the hypothesized Big Bang, be a singular, and not a continuous act that brought the Something into existence? If the act of creation were continuous, then is it ongoing even today, implying a presence of, for want of a better word, Providence? Therein lies a conundrum over how to think about Creation that the biblical writers tried to verbalize. The stumbling efforts of the writers of Genesis to define a transcendent Being indicate our difficulty in describing the origin of All and the Originator as a transcendent Cause. In the most commonly known English translation, “In the beginning the Earth was void and without form” are words that start with a prepositional phrase that traps the writers*** into having an ‘imperfect’ Deity spend the next ‘six days’ (the Hexaemeron) fixing up as an afterthought the initial act of creation by, for example, separating light from darkness. Is that the favored translation and therefore the favored belief? If so, then God had to work with that which He created, putting Him in His creation or somehow involving Him in it. In another Genesis translation by E. A. Speiser, “When God first set about creating Heaven and Earth” lies an expression that eliminates God’s having to say to Himself, “Shoot, I forgot to…” because the Creation isn’t a single act, but then, again in confusion, it presupposes a time before time with a dependent adverbial clause and a Creator Who is part of time because any continuous act involving change is our definition of time. Is that what the scientists argue is a vacuum energy, the quantum foam, the coming and going of virtual particles in a nothingness filled with energy? If Creation is ongoing, doesn’t that make either quantum effects and the Infinite Creator part of Time and subject to the underlying laws that govern the “creation”? If it is ongoing in a multiverse of branes, are chance encounters of branes in different dimensions the actual “creators”? If so, we don’t need God because we have a happy accident to thank for being able to thank. Thus, if we adopt the view of Aquinas of a First Cause, we find ourselves pondering whether or not the First Cause is, in fact, the Continuing Cause, something like the quantum foam or vacuum energy, something like Dark Energy.
2) That of Leibniz: “a necessary being which has reason for existence in itself.” God is, in that sense, Being with no outside obligation: Existence Itself. That view calls to mind Deism and its Clockmaker God who made the Clock (the universe), wound it, let it go, and then stood back, removed from the Creation, having nothing to do with its running. Look for no miracles Here. Divine intervention, Divine Providence, is a myth because a First Cause isn’t a Continuing Cause. God might have made Nature, but then abandoned it like some heartless sea turtle mother who labors up the beach, digs the hole, lays the eggs, and then lumbers back down the beach to re-enter the sea. “Goodbye, little turtle eggs; when you hatch, run fast to the water so the seagulls don’t eat you, and once you enter, stay near the bottom to avoid the eyes of hungry sharks.”
3) That of agnostic Einstein and maybe Spinoza: identifying God with Nature. That almost takes us back to the animists and definitely takes us back to pantheists. Certainly, it invokes some Native American views of the Great Spirit and our connection with Nature. As part of Creation, we are part of God, a view that has led some to say all is divine because the Divinity is in all (Wasn’t that what Heraclitus was saying with his cyclical Eternal Fire?). Nature is the self-driven pullulating force with an innate plan of laws by which it operates, chief among them that cause breeds effect.
With respect to this Science-God problem, we’re in a bind, aren’t we? Our training in Euclidean geometry has made logic our go-to way of thinking. We believe inductive reasoning can never reach a final answer. Thus, no “evidence” for God can pile up to support a final conclusion. We can’t say, “But, by some miracle, she was cured. And so were many who visited the shrine. Miracles are evidence for God.”
Instead, coupled with Galilean experimentation and Renaissance-like exploration, deduction and its partner, formal math, have become the only acceptable methodologies for proof. All else is just faith, mere wishful thinking that some Protector watches over and intrudes and whose supposed “intrusions” we use inductively to prove His existence and his creation as a warm and fuzzy place of comfort in the midst of its random ills.
We deem ourselves to be rational in what we accept as truth. We are scientists, one and all, in this “modern” world of debunked myth. Yet, we accept the unrepeatable social-science “science”—all that Margaret-Mead kind of “science.” We say we want to quantify to do proper science, but now we have all those academicians doing “qualitative research”—their term for that which cannot be verified by repeating whatever it is they did to reach their conclusions, again, a Margaret-Mead kind of “science,” nondebatable and one not subject to repetitive experimentation, a “science” based on interpretation passed off as “analytical” anthropology or sociology, the surety of which seems demonstrably feeble in light of political polls that serve as prophecies like those of the 2016 American elections. Those among us who would distinguish between the “soft” and “hard” sciences would argue that only experimentation and formal math can supply undeniable truths. Think of luck at the casino. The slot machine pays, pays again, pays again, so we accept the accruing money as evidence Fortune is with us until it isn’t. Regardless of how luck runs, we can never know with surety that the next spin of the wheels will come up three sevens. And even if we have a “feeling” that our ship is about to dock, we can’t explain the feeling other than out of seven billion people wishing for luck to run in their favor, it is simple, random chance that our wish, our slot machine, comes to fruition.
Of course, if experimentation is a guarantee, then we’re all settled on what we should and should not eat. No conflicting studies there. Right? Eat eggs. Don’t eat eggs. Eat fat. Don’t eat fat. All the while there are those who outlive those who adopt the opposite advice. Anecdotally and inductively, I’m thinking of my own parents, one living almost to 96 and the other almost to 98. Processed meats a staple in their diets: baloney, salami, pepperoni. Butter and bread. Pasta and red meats—the cheap cuts, for we weren’t very rich. Desserts. One not exercising even with moderate daily walking for the last couple of decades of her life. The other stopped from walking golf courses by an inability to see the golf ball in his eighties because of macular degeneration that forced him to take up bowling—scoring the year’s high, almost 300, in his league, by the way. I’m thinking also of Jack Lalanne, famous exercise and juicing guru who lived less by a year than my father, the former exercising vigorously, the latter, walking daily to work and back and then in retirement the golf course until failing eyes became his handicap. And I’m wondering: If we apply what we see through experience to life and belief or what we see through experimentation and deduction, do we have a discernible trustworthy difference? Scientists would say yes. Trust the science. Look at the difference in longevity brought on by science. “Yes,” I see and add, “wasn’t the science of clean water the most significant cause of increased longevity in the twentieth century? And isn’t it true that though average life spans were lower for millennia than they are now, there have always been individuals with long lives, long enough to at least to slightly offset the higher infant mortality rates of the past?”
Does science really have anything to say about God? The opinion writer in Scientific American suggests that we need more “telescopes and other scientific instruments that provide the needed data to researchers studying fundamental physics. And maybe the effort will lead to breakthroughs in theology as well.” Really? So, this is how we will unveil the veiled?
I’m sorry, but that sounds naïve at best and primitive at worst. Didn’t the ancients look to the heavens as the place to find God. Could we really accept that a better telescope might have helped them see that which is unseen? Remember the “firmament,” that dome of sky on which the stars were pinned; remember the Ptolemaic cosmos of concentric, embedded spheres and the celestial music? I’ll bet the ancients would have loved a better than a naked-eye view of it. But from the perspective of the present and all that we know about myth and matter, about energy and process, and about history and process, could we really accept the principle that better scientific instrumentation is all that separates us from finally knowing God?
*Scientific American. 2 Jul 1921. P.8. Online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015024546437&view=1up&seq=11&size=125
Accessed December 30, 2019.
**Observations/Opinions. 23 Dec. 2019. Online at https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/can-science-rule-out-god/
Accessed December 30, 2019.
***The “writers” of Genesis use two different expressions for God, indicating different traditions. One group or writer, for example, refers to God as Elohim, a plural that might foreshadow a Trinitarian God, and a name that occurs at the outset of the book and then throughout the Bible. Genesis contains two creation stories, however, and in the second one God is Yahweh (Jehovah, for some, “The Name of the Name” for others), a word that doesn’t contain the vowels we commonly see in English transliteration (YHWH) and that might derive from a reference to being itself.
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