[Avodah] Some thoughts on a recent book "Knocking on Heaven's Door"

[Micha Berger]

On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 02:55:19AM -0400, T613K at aol.com wrote:
: HOWEVER, it is a fool's mission to try to persuade someone like Lisa
: Randall of this.

: You asked her,

: "Why couldn't the creator of the universe create the universe in such a
: way that the scientific rules you study are the rules the creator embedded in
: the universe?"

: [Dr Lisa Randall] is too arrogant and too enmeshed in the ideology of
: "scientism" to even give a moment's consideration to such a possibility.

I don't like the term "scientism" as it's a label used to distinguish what
the speaker doesn't like from the good stuff of science -- and never gets
defined. It therefore introduces too much wiggle-room to the conversation.
(I might say the same thing about Moslem vs Islamist extremist, but this
isn't Areivim. <grin>)

Here is how I would define the flaw in her mindset, trying to actually
provide parameters to the split. Then if you choose to call that worldview
"scientism" or something else, at least we're talking about something
specific.

I think the underlying problem, before the theological one, is
epistomologial -- how the person defines proof, knowledge, and truth.

Many people today are Empiricists. You know that which you can experience
with your senses more certainly than anything else. For something to
really be known, it has to be amenable to reproducible proofs that you
could use to convince others.

The problem is that religious experience is inherently personal. You
can't experience my Shabbos. I think we would all agree that anyone who
followed Torah correctly would have experiences that would demonstrate
the truths upon which halakhah is based as certainly as we know the
color of the sun at noon on a cloudless day.

So, I can't help someone "follow Torah correctly", and someone who failed
to do so would think we're just pushing the No True Scottsman fallacy
on them. (Hamish McDonald believes that no Scotsman would rape a woman.
But then he reads day after day of such stories in the Glasgow Morning
Herald. Rather than conceding his belief, he now articulates it as
"No TRUE Scotsman would rape a woman.")

But that doesn't make the proof any less real for the person who had
the experience.

Many people have died to save their spouses, even though none of them
could prove to others that their love actually existed.

We also have no less certainty that (on a Euclidean plane) parallel lines
do not meet, even though none of us could ever experience perfect lines
nor Euclidian planes.

So, the very same people who get all Empiricist when it comes to religion
don't actually operate that way in other venues.

Second, they confuse proof with truth. Perhaps something is true even if
it isn't provable? We simply can't know, or can't know with certainty,
that it's true -- but that inability to prove doesn't change the reality.

Only answers that can be falsified through a repeatable empirical
experiment are within the topic of science. But there could still be
other fields of knowledge with different proof or at least justification
systems.

Dr Randall doesn't believe in G-d because she started out with the
assumptions that only the empirical experiement is proof and only the
proven is really true. The atheism is inherent in her assumptions about
what /can/ be fact.

Personally, I don't think absolute proof exists. (I'm in good company
with Kant.) And even if we encountered the perfect proof, we could never
be perfectly sure we had one and didn't overlook an error. Certainty
of the sort they're trying to get with repeatability and proving to others
doesn't exist.

What we do have is what I call the Sanity Level of Proof (SLP). Things
we are so sure of, we would start questioning our own sanity if we were
faced with reason to question them.

When you consistently find that a Shabbos in which making tea involves
questions of irui keli rishon, keli sheini, kalei bishul, boreir, ein
tzevi'ah be'okhlim, etc... has a profound experience one doesn't have
from a mere day off of work and heavy labor...

When you consistently find consistency between disparate areas of
halakhah, so that (eg) a chiddush in dinei mamunus would explain a
problem in bal yeira'eh...

Etc, etc, etc...

You eventually get SLP confidence in the TBSP as it reached us. Which
then argues back to the assumptions upon which it is based -- the halachic
process, Torah miSinai (necessary for the legitimacy of derashah), etc...

(As I said in the past, I believe in the iqarim because I try to keep
the Torah, not the other way around.)

...
: In her article she makes fun of one of the current Republican presidential
: candidates because he prayed for rain when his state faced a terrible
: series of wildfires. She says snidely that by praying, "he is displaying the
: danger of replacing rational approaches with religion." In other words, in
: her book, if you pray, you are not rational and you are anti-science....

Yes, because she thinks there is only one domain of knowledge, and thus
a god is something an ignorant person uses to fill in gaps that will
someday be filled in scientific (being the only real) knowledge.

The flipside of this error is at times found among frum Jews:

1- Eg those who feel that scientific explanations of creation or of
nissim imply that Hashem played any less of a role. In fact, most
rishonim felt the need for nissim to be a question they had to answer:
Hashem is omniscient, so why would He create a universe that requires
later intervention? (E.g. the Ramban says the nissim were written into
the natural laws ab initio.)

2- When one of us have the attitude, "We have reached the limits of
medicine; all we can do now is pray." Medicine and prayer are orthogonal
approaches to the same problem, and *intellectually* we all know we
need tefillah just as much when the doctor has a clear idea about how
to proceed.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             It's nice to be smart,
micha at aishdas.org        but it's smarter to be nice.
http://www.aishdas.org                   - R' Lazer Brody
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