[Avodah] Rambam's naturalism

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 05:40:48PM -0400, David Riceman wrote:
: As far as I know, there are two models which describe God running each 
: detail of the world.  One is the model the Rambam attributes to the 
: Kalam, which is that each thing that happens in an individual expression 
: of God's will....    The other is the model of the world as a clockwork 
: mechanism, which I think is due to Descartes, and certainly was 
: advocated by no Rishon (I don't know whether it remains tenable after 
: quantum mechanics).

I believe RDR's is a false dichomoty.

The most common amongst the rishonim is actually a mixture of the two:
HP for humans or only for deserving humans, and hashgachah kellalis
(HK; Divine Wisdom as expressed in nature) for everything else. The line
between HP ("an individual expression of G-d's will") and the clockwork
(HK) therefore shifts with the person, baasher hu sham.

Then there's the question of bechirah and the consequences others feel
of my choices. The famous (at least in our chevrah) Or haChaim on why
the brothers threw Yoseif in a pit rather than kill him outright. If
they killed him outright, he would die because of their bechirah and
they wouldn't know if it was really Retzon haBorei.

To those three, the Kuzari (5:20) adds miqreh. (Although I should note
that he considered HK to be more about indirect causation than General
Providence.) His examples of miqreh, though, are all cases of human
action without complete planning. Quoting from
<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Kitab_al_Khazari/Part_Five>, Dr
Hartwig Hirschfield's 1950 translation:
    As regards the arbitrary actions, they have their roots in the free
    will of man, when he is in a position to exercise it. Free will belongs
    to the class of intermediary causes, and possesses causes which reduce
    it, chainlike, to the Prime Cause. This course is not compulsory,
    because the whole thing is potential, and the mind wavers between an
    opinion and its opposite, being permitted to turn where it chooses. The
    result is praise or blame for the choice, which is not the case in the
    other classes. An accidental or natural cause cannot be blamed, although
    some of them admit a possibility. But one cannot blame a child or a
    sleeping person for harm done.

However, one needn't add miqreh or bechirah and still have a mixture, not
either extreme. This one-or-the-other that RDR presents is false. Second,
even with only bechirah chafshi added to the mix, we still have a universe
without randomness.

I'm not sure, therefore that *every* rishon believes in a random
element. It could be that everything is either clockwork, HP or another's
bechirah. And, since most events have are from a convergence of many
causes -- some combination of all three. (Although I don't know of a
rishon who discusses this added level of complexity rather than speaking
of an event having /a/ proximate cause; looking at a chain of causes
rather than a net.)

: Consequently all Rishonim accept that randomness exists in this world 
: (see Ramban's commentary on Iyov 36:7 and see Kuzari 5:20).  That's why 
: (or at least the first paragraph of why) many Rishonim held that 
: hashgaha over animals extends only to species....

But that too could be Clockmaker-level hashgachah over nature. Not
random, as everything can be traced back causally and
determinallistically to events that

: Raavad (in H. Tshuva 5:5) can distinguish between Divine knowledge and 
: Divine causation (cf. KLaH Pithchei Hochmah #28).

I'm not sure I personally would distinguish between Divine knowledge
and the existence of the known. IOW, I (as a product of a post-Besht
generation) do not find the Raavad's position as appealing as some
others'.

: Unfortunately "mikreh" ("accident") is a technical term with two 
: meanings, and often the meaning "random" gets drowned out by the more 
: prevalent meaning (the opposite of "essence").

Miqreh as happenstance
vs
miqreh as an attribute that's not a defining feature.

Nice chiluq. Thinking out loud:
I think the former meaning is primary, c.f. the tokhahah "vehalachta imi
beqeri". Then it grew to include things that happen to be true of an item.

Also related is the Kantian concepts of analytic vs synthetic.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic-synthetic_distinction> defines them
as "Analytic propositions are those which are true simply by virtue of
their meaning while synthetic propositions are not." IOW, "All triangles
have three sides" is an analytic proposition. "This triangle is black" is
a synthetic statement, and would be true if I had a particular triangle
in mind and it did indeed happen to be black. It's an accident in the
sense of non-defining attribute of one particular triangle.

A modern might define miqreh in the second sense as a synthetic
proposition, rather than a non-essential one.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             I long to accomplish a great and noble task,
micha at aishdas.org        but it is my chief duty to accomplish small
http://www.aishdas.org   tasks as if they were great and noble.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                              - Helen Keller