Summa Metaphysica Book 2

The author sent me a copy of his book to read and review:

I’m not Jewish. And even if I was, I probably would not understand what I just read. If you have a large brain like the scholarly author David Birnbaum must have...you have a 25% chance of understanding his second book in the Summa Metaphysica series. For an average Joe like me, it was inevitable that I would not comprehend this book. I did my best to try to unravel what he was trying to tell the reader. Okay, so I broke down some of his words in order for me to fathom his complex thoughts. I figure that summa means summarizing a subject. All right, then cosmos must mean the universe as an orderly system. The hardest thing to grasp was potentialism. I assumed that that (I love using that back to back) word meant: a new way of understanding and interpreting the world we live in. The author states that the temperature of the universe is a constant 2.73 degrees above absolute zero. And what does that have to do with the cosmic womb of potential (his words, not mine)? On page 82, the author ask some questions that I thought I would learn the answers to...not. “Where did it all come from?”, “What are the origins of the cosmos?”, “What triggered the Big Bang?”, “If there is a classic God, why is there gross evil?”, and the big question is: “What is the purpose of man?” If he answered these questions in this book, they went way over my head. Look, maybe it’s me, but if so, why did Mr. Birnbaum have D. N. Khalil, a teacher of Jewish Philosophy at Long Island University, translate his complex mumbo jumbo (as it seemed to me) throughout the book? Mr. Khalil says, “Birnbaum employs a linguistic ensemble that at times resembles the water-tight, nitty-gritty reasoning of God and Evil, while at other times feels like terse jolts to the psyche.” What? Sometimes I couldn’t even understand the interpreter.

To prove my point, on page 84, Mr. Birnbaum says, “Don’t get stuck on any one sentence or paragraph or page. If stuck on a sentence, re-read it once, perhaps, then roll forward regardless. No one sentence or paragraph makes-or-breaks book #2. The concepts are all attaching to the core ‘spinal column’ of POTENTIAL...Extraordinariation (his word, not mine). Your subconscious will connect-the-various dots. Matters will crystallize further.” Mr. Khalil says on page 90, “Birnbaum is positing throughout Summa Metaphysica that the original ‘leveraged buyout’ concept was cosmic. The cosmos was created, he hypothesizes, out of the cosmos’ own potential. Birnbaum’s paradigm, on the other hand, is ‘bootstrap’, i.e. the potential of A ignites A retroactively. The Torah itself has a one-phrase all-encompassing treatise on Jewish philosophy: Eheyeh Asher Eheyeh. This is Potential within Potential, which Birnbaum seizes upon as the crux of Summa Metaphysica.” My contention is that this book (and the rest of the series) should be studied at Yeshiva University if you are going for your doctorate. It’s not for the hoi polloi. Later in the book, the author says, “We do not know what existed pre-Big Bang. Let us call it ‘0’. We can make assumptions about ‘voids’ of various flavors, but we certainly do not know (of course we don’t!!). Best to just call it ’0’. Now moving forward...at CREATION, ‘0’ is presumably divided in multiple ways, many beyond our capability of even beginning to fathom at this point...counter-balancing Negatives and Positives...0 divides into +1,-1……+2, -2 etc., Positives and Negatives; Polar and anti-Polar, Male and Female; (see book #1).”  Are you getting this are am I a tad stunod?

So as I struggled to page 103, I splashed water on my face and said to myself, I can make sense of this. But the page starts off with, “To our readers - By now you ‘have-the-drift’ regarding the core concept of Quest for Potential (but I didn’t have the drift), but ‘having-the-drift’ is not sufficient for a major metaphysics presentation,-so we will proceed forward in more formal fashion...Quest for Potential is an overarching and all-encompassing Near-Infinite Entity/Dynamis transcending TIME and SPACE seeking to evolve fully into Infinite Divine Extraordinariation.” “Viruach Elohim mirachefet al p’nei hamayim*, Everything-past, present and future-is integral to this ONE entity/dynamic, of which we are an organic part.” *Khalil tries to explain the above Jewish phrase by saying, “Torah use A: There are two ways to quote a biblical passage. One might either reference a detail from the Torah and use it merely to introduce a concept that is otherwise unrelated to biblical principles. Or, one might take a hold of-and embrace-central biblical principles, and use them as a foundation for developing a thought.” Thanks, Khalil, but I still don’t understand anything that I’ve read. I must say that this was one of the most difficult books I’ve ever read. There is no question that Mr. Birnbaum is a bigtime intellectual, but he must learn to write using mostly elementary terminology. I eagerly wanted the answers to the questions in paragraph one, but I didn’t get them. I do recommend this book but, mainly to Mensa society members (just kidding).

RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

Comment: At the end of the book, Birnbaum has a discussion with Professor Stephen Hawking of Great Britain. Hawking: “For millions of years, mankind lived like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. Mankind learned to talk and we learned to listen.” Birnbaum: “To reach its potential, mankind was thrust into a greater level of complexity/sophistication than the animals around him. The form of that advanced complexity included higher-level reason, language, emotion, and consciousness. Per Potentialism Theory, the notion that ‘advancement’ would happen was a given; it was only a question of when, where and what form it would take.”

Hawking: “I don’t believe that the ultimate theory will come by steady work along existing lines. We need something new. We can’t predict what that will be or when we will find it because if we knew that, we would have found it already!” Birnbaum: “Right again, Professor Hawking. Exactly.” (the possible ‘ultimate theory’ is Birnbaum’s Potentialism Theory).

I still don’t understand and will soon put this book to rest for forever.