[Avodah] kol hamosif, gorea

[hankman]

R'n TK wrote:

Another argument could also be made, viz., that anything that is
demonstrably true -- e.g, the laws of physics that enable planes to fly,
or laws of biology that enable farmers to grow better crops and improve
their livestock -- is intrinsically part of Torah, that everything in
the natural world was created by Hashem and therefore is part of Torah,
"Histakel be'Oraisa ubara alma."

CM writes:

I have speculated along similar lines and in addition to "Histakel be'Oraisa ubara alma" that you quoted I also considered the Rashi on "behiborom" - "behaiborom" where he brings the pasuk b'yud'hai Hashem zur olomim, so that the sodos (and its natural laws of  math, physics, chem, bio etc) of this bria are "somehow" found in the os hai, but obviously buried very deeply so only gedolei olam can deduce them via limud Torah. But I would then remain with the problem of why there is not any evidence of advanced math (I do not mean merely the value of Pi or the square root of two, but Calculus, Diff Eq., Diff Geom., etc. etc.) or physics (Newton, Maxwell, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, particle physics etc), chemistry ( post Mendeleev based on subatomic, atomic and molecular structure and energy concepts etc), biology (at a sub cellular and biochemical level) etc in any of divrei Chazal that I am aware of. Why was there not more invention (as we have today) for  toeles (to lighten the burden on people and leave more time for limud torah) if they were in fact able to derive the natural laws from the sodos of Torah. Do not trot out the Gra or the CI of our era who were post Newton and the scientific awakening (and whose scientific and mathematical writing was fairly restricted) etc. I am talking about two or three millennia ago when we had neviim and Chazal who without a doubt had as clear an understanding of sodos in Torah as any living person will have. We should  have had in reality what was fabled in legends about the scientifically advanced Atlantis.

I could only imagine that for some reason these notions were known to chazal and deduced from their limud of Torah but not revealed since they were considered as being "sodos" of Maaseh Beraishis.  However, I could not understand why? If Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Watson & Crick et al. could reveal them why not Chazal? The only alternative to this is that Chazal did not have any better scientific knowledge than the rest of the world around them, but this is rejected by the chareidi world. So all I have are questions but no satisfying answers. (Or perhaps flesh out the Zohar mentioned previously in this thread, explaining WHY only after 5600??).

Enter Slifkin ....  but we all know how that went....

Kol Tuv

Chaim Manaster


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20100222/37ff16d7/attachment-0001.htm>