[Avodah] Rav Keller's JO article on evolution

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, October 5, 2006 4:03 pm, Zvi Lampel wrote:
:      The sugya in Pesachim is dealing with accepting testimony that is
: possibly imprecise, given the factor of innocent human error, attempting to
: understand what the witness really means. This contrasts with the opposite
: idea in Rav Yosef Albo's piece: There, precision is not the issue, but the
: normal meaning of words. In such cases, we do not reinterpret someone's
: testimony to mean something we really know is different from what he really
: meant.

But that's just it, WRT people, we empathize and as fellow human beings, can
deduce what people mean when they say something, e.g. the word "yom". WRT the
Torah, we have rules of derashah and sevara for such things, we have a mesorah
to clear things up, and we have unanswered questions. But we do not have the
same means of deciding what "He really meant". So I think your comparison
fails at the step before, not at the rineterpretting, but at the "we really
know".

BTW, I had a chance to look over RSS's essay at length on the way into work
this morning. He posits that there are two clocks -- that of the Light and
Dark of the Light created on Yom 1, and the clock of nature. With the
"vayeqadeish oso" of Shabbos, sacred time and physical time were set in sync.
But before then, one could go through a yom at a very different pace and in
fact irregularly, compared to the other. If all physical processes move very
rapidly, there is no physical way of knowing. People detached from the
spiritual would simply experience more time as their minds ran the same extra
speed as their pulse, objects coming at them, the bonds in their atoms, etc...
Only through awareness of the holy can one detect time as per the or haganuz
latzadiqim. And thus, scientists looking at the empirical will never see a
young universe, but we who have access to the path to tzidqus are told in its
first chapter about time on another clock.


Tir'u beTov!
-mi

-- 
Micha Berger             One who kills his inclination is as though he
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