Kabbalism correctly anticipated many modern scientific concepts, including biological evolution and the big bang theory, more than 1800 years ago. The level of anticipation is astonishing.For thousands of years, Kabbalists have held a firm conviction that eventually the human race would make discoveries about the natural world which would verify or refute their remarkable explanations of the stories in scripture. It seems this conviction had been held some 3500 years before the first scientific verification of their teachings happened. Great perseverance, to say the least. In the scholarly community of the modern age, past ideas which have been verified my modern understanding are given a specific identifying term; anticipations. Over the past 500 or so years, a remarkable number of western scientific discoveries have occurred which appear to have been anticipated by Kabbalists for a long, long time. Below are listed some of the more astonishing anticipations of modern science to be found in Zohar...a book written over 1800 years ago!
- Copernicus - Kabbalism never taught that the Earth was the physical center of the universe. We may be located at a point of spiritual nexus for the universe, but we're not located in the astrophysical center of it all. Kabbalism has also taught that the Earth spins about the Sun in the same way the Moon spins about the Earth. Further, the handful of relatively fast moving stars seen in the night's sky were taught to be other planets also spinning about the Sun. This is precisely what Copernicus deduced from his detailed observations of the night's sky, over several decades, and verified using precise mathematical derivation. Copernicus' book, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, was published more than 450 years ago. (Zohar - Books III, IV, VIII, LXVI)
- Darwin - Kabbalists have always taught the concept of evolution, both in the progression of the universe and the development of living creatures, which so closely parallels Darwin it would be incorrect to say the respective ideas are in any way different. Some of the more remarkable Darwinian anticipations include, (Zohar Books VIII, XXXVI-II, XLI-III, LXXXVII)
- The age of the Earth - Kabbalism has taught that the age of the Earth is so great that putting it in numbers of years, in accurate measurement, would be impossible. It is taught that we will never better than approximate the Earth's age. Darwin wrote exactly the same thing. They are both correct. Currently, science posits that the Earth is roughly 4,500,000,000 years old. Any number with that many zeros is certainly an approximation.
- Evolution of life - Zohar states that living creatures came into being through a long process that began when Elohim made the "elements differentiate with powers of attraction and cohesion, and the power of repulsion" to form larger clusters. These basic clusters of the elements further grouped together to develop "the elaboration of forms and bodies" in an "evolutionary" process. All living things owe their existence to living things that came before them, and this process has been going on for too many years to accurately measure. Is this not precisely what Darwin told us?
- Extinction - Kabbalism rejects the entire notion of species extinction. Rather, when the Earth's environment changes sufficiently, the forms of creatures naturally change in order to survive in the new environment. Zohar states "There is no annihilation" of species. This was also Darwin's opinion on the matter. He said that species tranmutation is often so extreme that it seems as if a species has gone extinct, but actually the species has transmutated into an entirely different form. The older, less survivable form dies out and the new form prolifierates.
- And, etc. - There are many, many more anticipations of Darwin to be found in Zohar, but these should give the reader a good idea of the high degree of similarity between Kabbalistic evolutionary theory and Darwin's evolutionary theory. One key difference, though, is that Darwin uses the term "evolve" only once in his The Origin of Species, and never uses the term "evolution" or any other derivative of the term. On the other hand, the use of "evolutionary" terms in Zohar are many and diverse.
- Big Bang - The incredibly precise anticipation of the Big Bang Theory to be found in Zohar's explanation of the creation story in Genesis is literally unbelievable. Believe it! It's there. All of it. Every step in Big Bang precisely corresponds to every step in the Zohar explication of Genesis, and vice versa. The words used by each are often identical. You won't find "quantum singularity" in Zohar, but the number of actual terminological coincidences is quite disarming. (Zohar Books I-IV, VII-III)
- Temporal theory - Kabbalism has never taught that time is the measure of change. Rather, we measure the operation of time in intervals of change. In other words, Kabbalists have always treated time as a force of nature. Further, if the seed of creation occured at the first moment of the divine timepiece, the divine timepiece must have wound up to the first moment before the seed of creation happened. In other words, before there was physical substance there was time. Time is prior to substance. This is precisely what Hawking said in his seminal paper on temporal theory in 1971, albeit in quite different terms. Hawking refers to the cosmic clock, and there were no clocks other than the movements of heavenly bodies 4000 years ago. Further, modern scientific cosmologists now treat time as the fundemental force of our universal cosmos. Without it, change would not be possible, and the only true constant in our universe is change itself. (Zohar Book XXIII)
There are many more anticipations of modern scientific understanding to be found in Zohar, but the 4 summarized above are perhaps the most stunning. To understand that these anticipations were derived at least 1800 years ago, using largely an analysis of scripture derived from mysticism and phonics, is both incredible and humbling. It should also be noted that so far there does not seem to have been any scientific discovery which has refuted any scientific theory anticipated in Zohar! Utterly remarkable.
references:
1. Manhar, Nurho; The Sepher Ha-Zohar (Book of Light); Edited by H.W. Percival; Theosophical Publishing Company, New York; 1914. http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/zdm/zdm000.htm (Books, I, VII, XLI -XLVI, LXVI, LXXXVII)
2. Cooper, Rabbi David A.; God is a Verb : Kabbalah and the Practice of Mystical Judaism; Berkley Publishing Group of Penguin Putnam Inc., New York. 1997
3. Hawking, Stephen W.; A Brief History of Time; A Bantam Book, Toronto, New York, et. al.; 1988.
