[Avodah] Geocentrism

[Micha Berger]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 05:06:49PM -0400, David Riceman wrote:
> There is some historical background here which the two of you are  
> ignoring.  A central insight of science is that the world runs through  
> law....
> It's been years since I looked at the LR's letter on this subject, but  
> at the time I did I remember classifying him with Rabbi Dessler and the  
> Kalam.  So I think it plausible that RZS agrees with that opinion.  But  
> I am less certain of RMB's opinion.

First, I am definitely asserting that nature has laws. General Relativity
is as much a law as Newtonian gravitation.

It happens to say that we can pick different frames of reference
and describe the same reality in very different terms. So there is a
heliocentric frame, a geocentric frame, a frame or reference that is
much like the heliocentric one but moves 312 kph northward in relation
to it, etc... They're all "true". More than that, I also cited examples
of how both geocentric and baryocentric (which is nearly heliocentric,
offset to the center of mass of the system) frames of references are
used in practice, depending on what you want to compute.

But it all obeys equations, it's all law.

It's also unclear to me that REED as generally described is what he meant.
I took him as being more Kantian. Law is part of the phenomenological
universe, the world as it fits into human perception and the cateogries
of the human mind. Not some abstract unknowable the world as it is. Thus
natural law is as real as anything else in the physical universe.

The steps he takes that Kant doesn't is the notion that someone could
lift themselves spiritually to the point of progressively having a
different set of categories. (MmE's meivi la'or, RACarmell, notes the
Kantian connection in a number of footnotes.) And this is how he accepts
the Maharal's concept of miracles in MmE I pp 304-312.

But that's too "out there" for much of the readership. So instead you hear
more of his essay about how every event is from HQBH, taken naively and
in contradiction to the above. But he doesn't mean that nature is an
illusion, he means that natural law describes Kantian phenomena. Or, the
two essays contradict. (E.g. one is philosphy, one is mussar; his position
shifted over time, etc...)

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                 Life is complex.
micha at aishdas.org                Decisions are complex.
http://www.aishdas.org               The Torah is complex.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                                - R' Binyamin Hecht