[Avodah] torah u-madda

[Chanoch (Ken) Bloom]

On Tue, 2010-03-23 at 23:22 -0400, T613K at aol.com wrote:

> Sounds like a fascinating and thought-provoking symposium.
>  
> Right at the end there, though, you have a good example of what's
> wrong with TuM.  They care way too much about what is and isn't
> "science" and they believe that science has an exclusive claim on
> "truth."
>  
> [A] It may be that the universe is the product of Intelligent Design
> -- that the Creator set it up to develop along certain lines.  
>  
> Two other possibilities are:  [B] Bereishis is literally true and
> there is no "design" -- just instantaneous creation.  The world was
> created in seven days, evolution is a totol hoax, the universe is only
> 5000 years old, the scientists are wrong about everything and don't
> know what they're talking about.

There are two variations on B. [B1] Bereishit is literally true and
there is instantaneous creation. The world was created in 7 days, but
the end product is something that could reasonably be interpreted the
way the scientists do (i.e. God created a mature world.) I've heard it
attributed to the LR that God created the world this way as a test of
our faith in what the Torah says. In this worldview, the scientists
aren't being unreasonable. The world was actually designed for the
assumptions that scientists use to advance their knowledge of the
physical world, and therefore there is in fact quite solid basis for
using science as the bedrock for engineering and technological progress.

Science can't prove that God created the world under view [B1] because
[B1] depends on the idea of an undetectable change in the laws of
physics, and a fundamental assumption of science is that there's we
cannot account for an undetectable change in the laws of physics.

[B2] Bereishit is literally true and there is instantaneous creation.
The world was created in 7 days, and the scientists are wrong when they
say they see a 15 billion year old universe and evolution. 
In this worldview, it's hard to be a scientist, because you'd have to
say the world was not designed for the assumptions that scientists use
to advance their knowledge of the physical world, so there is no solid
basis for using science as the bedrock for engineering and technological
progress.

> [C] There was no Creator and no Creation, the universe just "is."
> This is what Science believes.  Is this also what TuM believes?

There are several camps in what science believes. You could read "A
Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking to understand these views. A
summary (focused on physics/cosmology rather than biology) is here:

[C1] There is no Creator and no Creation -- the entire theory of physics
fits together logically without anything arbitrary to it. All of the
physical constants can be predicted from some more fundamental theory.
The Big Bang was the result of initial conditions from a universe that
collapsed before us.

[C2] There's no creator and no creation. The universe that we see is one
of many (each with somewhat different values of the physical constants)
and it's tautological that we live in a universe where the values of the
fundamental physical constants can support life, because we couldn't
live in a universe where they didn't support life.

[C3] There's only one universe. God caused the big bang and created
exactly one universe with the right values of the physical constants to
support life.

If you add certain beliefs about evolution to position [C3], then you
have position [A].

All of these three views are just hypotheses at this point. There isn't
enough scientific evidence yet to select between these views, and it may
not be scientifically possible to select between C2 and C3 at all.

> I think that MO try to distance themselves from Intelligent Design
> because they know that ID is viewed with utter disdain by the
> scientific community.  Well I have bad news for them.  Es vet zey
> gornisht helfen.  The Scientists whose approval they crave view them
> as one of the lowest forms of life, barely above the worms known as
> Charedim.

I find the idea difficult in position [B1] that God created a world
designed to deceive us. To believe this, I would expect to see Torah
sources supporting the idea that God created a world whose physical laws
and physical history are designed to deceive us.

There are people in camp [B2] who are eager to disprove science by
showing gaps or inconsistencies in scientific reasoning, yet these
people are totally ignorant of conclusions within science that are
beyond the scope of the narrow point they are arguing, which would
refute their disproofs if these people knew them. This bothers me. There
is a similar problem with people who believe [A] trying to prove it with
arguments that show their ignorance of how science explains things (the
claim of irreducible complexity commonly used by the proponents of [A]
tends to show such ignorance).
>         
--Ken