The Strangest Belief of the 21st Century: When 'Something From Nothing' Replaced Idols

Once upon a time, nearly every nation worshiped idols. People bowed to statues of stone and wood, the masses and the sages alike. With the exception of Avraham Avinu and a select few, humanity believed in gods with bodies and forms, with desires and wars, who lived in the clouds or beneath the earth. It was the Torah of Israel that introduced the world to belief in one, infinite, eternal Hashem, the Creator of all.

Look Around, It’s Not Exactly Simple
Take a moment and really observe the world around you. Human beings think and speak, have hands and feet, and walk city streets with two cameras in their heads and stereo hearing. Modern people often look back at idol worshipers with mockery and disbelief, asking how anyone could have believed in something so foolish, statues and idols.

Here’s the Surprise
We live in the 21st century, the era of satellites, artificial intelligence, and autonomous cars, yet there are people who believe in something far stranger and more extreme than any idolatry you have ever heard of.

The Dazzling Machine We Live In
Consider the human heart, beating about 60 times a minute, pumping oxygen-rich blood to every cell. Consider the brain, with its 86 billion neurons, surpassing the complexity of any human technology. We navigate a world with gravity, sunlight, climate systems, and a water cycle, clouds that deliver rain every year, soil that produces fruits and vegetables. A world of trees, flowers, and millions of sophisticated animals, all coexisting in wondrous harmony.

Physics has revealed a lawful universe in which fundamental building blocks are organized into complex forms, atoms and molecules, producing 92 different elements. A deviation from the mathematics of these laws would cause the universe to collapse. We live inside an astonishing machine, one whose wisdom the human mind cannot fully comprehend.

And Yet, Some Say It All Just Happened
Today, there are people who believe this vast, sophisticated machine simply appeared on its own, that out of nothing emerged a universe with precise mathematical laws, that atoms and molecules spontaneously organized themselves into galaxies, stars, and planets, and then, suddenly, life appeared, a biological factory with motion, heredity, and DNA carrying a colossal library of 3 billion letters. Look around. Human beings think and speak, have hands and feet, and now walk the city streets. Have you ever heard of a belief stranger and more extreme than that? As one religious sage once said, “I do not have enough faith to be an atheist.”

Looking Ahead
After the coming of the Messiah and the redemption, we will live in a world where everyone will know Hashem, “from the smallest to the greatest” (Jeremiah 31:13). In that future, we will no longer understand how anyone could have believed in such delusions, that nothing produces wisdom and a world, a fantasy even more extreme than the worship of statues.

There is no doubt that in every generation, we must thank Hashem for granting us a Torah of life.