[Avodah] Rambam's naturalism

[David Riceman]

Me:
> : 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).
>   
RMB:
> 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.
>   
I tried to avoid discussing hashgaha in that post.  In the Rambam's 
model hashgaha works via prophecy, and hence is irrelevant to how God 
runs the world.

I was unclear in my opening sentence in the cited paragraph: what I 
meant to convey was that most rishonim reject the idea that God runs 
each detail of the world (henceforth "determinism").  Instead they claim 
that God built a certain amount of randomness into the world (reread the 
citations to Ramban and Kuzari I gave last time).  What RMB calls HK is 
incompatible with determinism.  That paragraph cites the only two models 
of determinism that I know of.  I presented the more common opinions in 
a later paragraph.
> 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 don't understand this paragraph.  I was using "randomness" to mean 
"not predetermined by God", which is how its used by rishonim.  Clearly 
RMB has another definition, but I don't know what it is.  Behirah 
requires mikreh (actually Spinoza tried to be machria, but he was after 
Descartes).
> 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.
No! Clockwork is an anachronism.  It's not that rishonim considered it 
and rejected it.  It is a concept which had not yet been formulated.  In 
the middle ages intermediaries (laws of nature) implied randomness, and 
determinism implied the absence of intermediaries.
>  
David Riceman