Engineer: I read everything. Old and New Testaments – from Genesis to the Apocalypse. I can’t read books differently. I always read it completely first in order to understand the boundaries: what is at stake and what is not in the book. And then I go back to the moments that were hooked.
Writer: There are fifty books in the Old Testament, if you count non-canonical ones! I can't even believe that you have mastered everything.
Engineer: It was difficult, I will not hide it. But it was precisely while gnawing through the stories of the Old Testament with me that an insight happened, as our Consultant says. Just don’t be offended, it’s you who go to Church, and I am a man of science, I love facts and cause-and-effect relationships. Let me tell you in order how I saw it.
Consultant: It's getting more and more interesting!
Writer: Calm down, let him tell us what he understood…
Engineer: Let's start with the fact that laws are not invented, but discovered. The real laws, I mean, are related to the organization of the universe. Apples fell to the ground before Newton discovered the law of universal gravitation, and will continue to fall. In any case, first some pattern is caught, a hypothesis is made, the collection of facts begins, the identification of cause-and-effect relationships, the hypothesis is corrected. And only then, when the facts obtained by scientific methods are not refuted by experiments, a law is postulated. And even in this case, the field of application can expand, and new experiments will lead to a new law, in relation to which the old law will be a special case, working on a partial subdomain – one of the projections of a more multifaceted reality.
Consultant: Square, triangle, circle.
Writer: Don't interrupt! Please continue.
Engineer: It must be admitted that there are incidents in science. For example, the laws open to the microcosm do not work for the macrocosm and vice versa. String theory tries to combine the quantum mechanics of the microcosm and the general theory of relativity of the macrocosm, but we are already talking about at least ten dimensions of space-time.
So back to the laws and the Bible. In the Old Testament there are ten commandments, read – laws. There are only two in the New Testament, but they replace the previous ten. What are these laws about? About social behavior. What to do and what not to do. At first I thought, "Isn't Moses taking on a lot?" – where did he get these ten laws, why exactly these. And so, reading one of the countless stories about who gave birth to whom, who went where, who exterminated whom, it dawned on me: “Jews are a unique people!” It is not known why, but from the very ancient times they began to write down everything that happened to their people. Methodically, meticulously, in detail. For many hundreds of years, they have been fixing the facts of the life of the Jewish people with perseverance, which would be the envy of laboratory assistants and sociologists. And it turns out, having such records, one could see social patterns unfolding over the centuries, which is absolutely impossible for one person to do, observing the facts only during his life, even having the stories of his parents, who, as a rule, are also rejected in the heat of youthful immense energy.