Introduction
For Judaism, the scientific and religious outlook have one thing in common, i.e., the recognition of orderliness in nature. This is expressed in the very story of creation. The first act of creation, according to the Bible, was followed by an act of division: “And God divided the light from the darkness”. The principle of division was the first principle of order. The memshelet hayom and the memshelet halayla (the order of day and night) was the establishment of a basic law of nature. The creation of all living things “after its kind” presupposes the idea of well-defined categories in the botanic and zoological realms. The unchangeability of Hukkot Shamayim va’Arets (Laws of Heaven and Earth) is a well-known biblical concept. The rabbis in the Talmud affirmed the principle that Olam k’minhago noheg, the world continues in accordance with its established order, and God should not be expected to interrupt that order. The Sidrei Bereshit (Order of Creation) is a well recognized principle, which is identical with the concept of an established natural order. The entire structure of the Hal’aka presupposes the existence of a universe in which the kind of orderliness obtains which is the subject matter of scientific inquiry and interpretation. The Jewish calendar, the entire Talmudical order of Z’raim, (Agricultural Laws) the very times for the daily prayers, every aspect of the Halakik order, involve reference and application to a form of reality which is objectively controlled by the uniform orderliness of the laws of nature. According to Maimonides’ interpretation, the teachers of the Midrash already felt uncomfortable at the thought of a miracle, which should interrupt the natural course of events, and attempted to see the miracle itself as something originally envisaged in the act of creation and incorporated in nature from the beginning.
However, the acknowledgment of orderliness in nature, or the scientific search for its laws, does not in itself yield a world view. A world view is an interpretation of reality. Of necessity, such an interpretation cannot be derived from experience. As a view of the world, it must be comprehensive; but no human experience may comprehend the All. Every world view is a creative act of the imagination, based on a very limited experience of the world. In relationship to the whole of reality, all exact human knowledge is fragmentary; yet man, in order to live significantly, must have a vision of the essential quality of the whole. However limited his actual knowledge of the world may be, in its light man must venture out into the unknown and seek to behold the structure of the All. The great metaphysical systems have been such adventures of the human spirit. They cannot be “proved”. The question concerning them may only be whether they can be significantly maintained in the light of what is provable.
A scientific world view is not science, but the leap of faith undertaken by the scientist who ventures to interpret the whole of reality on the basis of the exact knowledge gained from the scientific investigation of a relatively small segment of the whole. Neither is a religious world view religion. It, too, is a leap of faith, which attempts to grasp the essential nature of the whole in the light of a necessarily limited experience and a specific insight.
The relationship to the world which is to be viewed has at least two aspects. There is the world, which confronts the human being; there is the human being, which confronts the world. Reality has an objective and a subjective aspect. There is, however, a third aspect to reality which requires consideration. It received its metaphysical dignity in the critical philosophy of Kant. When Kant distinguished between phenomena and nomina, between the world as it is revealed — or constituted — in human experience, and “the thing in itself”, as it may exist beyond all possible experience, he was inquiring into the third aspect of reality. At every instance, when man experiences the external reality, he is really involved in Kant’s problem of the “thing in itself”. The world is never given to us in immediacy of experience. Man is never in direct contact with the external world. The world as object is always given to us through the mediation of our senses. It is the source that emits the stimuli which are responsible for the sense impressions. The world for us is its representation in sense perceptions. What we call external reality is the imprint made by it on our senses. The point has been ingeniously illustrated by Edwin A. Abbott’s familiar Flatland. In one of his essays, Professor Eddington compared the world around man to a broadcasting station. The messages are rather different from the station itself. We may be the recipient of the broadcasts, but we cannot identify the programs that we receive with the size and structure of the station itself or with the nature of its functioning. Attempting to pierce beyond the world of phenomena, we are confronted with the problem of the ultimate ground of reality.
Needless to say once we become aware of the problem of the ultimate ground of reality with reference to the object world, it is easily realized that the problem is an all-embracing one, comprehending both the world as object and the realm of the subject. A world view must therefore take cognizance of the three-fold aspects of reality: of the world, experienced by man as the object; of man, who experiences, the subject; of the ultimate ground of reality in both its manifestations, the subjective and the objective.