[Avodah] Bereishit

[Micha Berger]

On Fri, Oct 05, 2018 at 11:40:01AM -0400, Alexander Seinfeld via Avodah wrote:
: 2. We know that Adam HaRishon was created 5,779 years ago. There is no
: significant debate about that.

Quibble: +/- 168 years during Galus Bavel, and perhaps other issues.

Also, the Seder Olam, R' Yossi bar Chalafta (acc. to Yavamos 82b &
Niddah 46b), is only one tanna among many. For that matter, he is "only"
the primary author, as it quotes people who lived later than RYbH. Of
course there are machloqesin about many of his positions.

(Our calendar is Sefer Olam chronology with a different year 0. Seder
Olam numbers the year of Adam's creation as 0, and we use year 1
for the week before Adam, so that our numbers are SO + 2. But the
same age.)

But in a much smaller scale than you intended to, there are numerous
debates.

I have a pet theory that these factors are the reason why shetaros,
and in particular gittin, explain the year is only as "beminyan she'anu
monim kan ba'ir Ploni-ville..."

But in any case, since lemaaseh no din relies on the year, pesaq doesn't
apply, and machloqesin neither have to be nor even can be resolved.


: 3. We don't know for certain the meaning of the 5.9 days before Adam
: HaRishon. The sun was created on Day 4, so what was the meaning of a
: day before that, if there was no sun? Not clear.

The Ramban is clear -- a yom was 24 hours on a hypothetical clock, the
way we measure time now.

R' Dessler explains the Ramban as equally saying that a yom was 1,000
years. Which wouldn't be long enough to help, but it gets weirder --
not just any 1,000 years, but a millennium of the 6,000 of world history.

According to REED, the Ramban correctly holds that time is non-linear.
(Michtav meiEliyahu vol II pp 150-154, Yemei Bereishis veYemai Olam,
I paraphrase it paragraph by paragraph at
<http://www.aishdas.org/asp/rav-desslers-approach-to-creation>)

R' Dessler writes that the arrow of time and the whole concept of a
time-line is specific to how human beings perceive reality, and even
that only as people have done so /after/ the cheit.

Which gives him the room to say that the scientific age of the universe
is not so much wrong as choosing a less than optimal way of viewing a
problem that doesn't admit any one answer. The age of the universe is
6 millenia or so plus 6 days as seen from the perspective the Torah
advises us to adopt. But that doesn't make some other answer less
correct, or less useful for some other purpose.


: 4. Learn the Ramban on the first perek -- sounds a lot like the
: descriptions we have of the Big Bang.

: 5. There are things in this world that look millions of years old. To deny
: that they look that way is like denying that the Earth is round....

Well, the Ramban on bara mentions hyle, which is the Greek for chomer
in chomer vertzurah (which they called hylomorphism). So Hashem first
made substance without form. Or maybe, less hard to imagine, the current
substance, but in forms that no longer exist.

Now, Quantum Mechanics is nothing at all like hylomorphism, but...

According to Big Bang theory, in the first fractions of a second after
yeish mei'ayin, things were so hot that individual particals had no
identity. What now appears to be four kinds of particles, for kinds
of fields, mediating forces was just one mush, not so mention the
particles we think of as matted. As things cooled, the symmetry split
again and again until the types of particles and forces we know today
differentiated.

Does sound like chomer beli tzurah.


: - Expansion doesn't prove anything. It's a fact that requires a theory
: to explain it. We know and believe that for some reason when HKBH made
: the world 5,779 years (+ 6 days) ago, he decided to make it continuously
: expand.

How do we explain "Shakai"? That He said "dai" and the expansion ended, no?


: 7. Yet to constantly answer, "Hashem just did/does it that way" is a bit
: facile and reminds me of young people who give this answer when asked,
: "What causes a hurricane?" If we dismissed every question with "Hashem
: does it" without looking into the mechanism that HKBH uses to do it,
: we would be much poorer...

But there is no way to disprove "the universe is young and Hashem had
His Reasons for doing it that way", reasons we can't identify.

We might want answers that feel less facile, but that doesn't make it
false. Might just be human hubris, to need a universe we can understand.

That is different than what you're talking about, which is more similar to
separating a scientific study of cause with a Torah study of purpose. But
it does raise the question of whether "a bit facile" is a meaningful
RELIGIOUS problem. You want to know the science, fine. But life's values
doesn't rest on it. Nor should you assume science can't his a wall.


: So what's the answer to point #5 above? Is the universe vastly ancient,
: or was it just made to look that way?

REED says both. Because, in his typical Kantian perspective, he has
science address the world as humans perceive it, believing the world
as it exists "out there" is actually unknowable.

And so, the world before eitz hadaas and observation by human
consciousness of our sort is amenable to different descriptions.
Each capturing a different shadow of the basic unknowable.


On Mon, Oct 08, 2018 at 09:26:27AM -0400, Zvi Lampel via Avodah wrote:
: Know that G-d brought out these creations, all of them, to physical reality
: during the six days of *Breishis* by Himself, in His Own Glory -- not by means
: of an agent, meaning Nature. Creation was contrary to the way things are
: after the conclusion of the six days of *Breishis*, wherein *Hashem
: Yisborach* conducts His world by means of the agent, i.e. *Nature*.

While the Rambam treats nature as a hypostatis, the Ramban famously says
there is no "it" to nature. That natural is just a term we use to describe
the patterns by which Hashem usually acts. It is all "by Himself".

>From RZL's quote of the Rambam:
:> + When any one of us is deprived of breath for a short time, he dies, and
:> cannot move any ‎longer. How then can we imagine that any one of us has
:> been enclosed in a bag in the ‎midst of a body for several months and
:> remained alive, able to move?‎

Which doesn't mean that creation happened by miracles we could understand
either. It justifies the Michtav meiEliyahu's position that creation is
incomprehensible by any means. And instead we pick which simplified model,
which perspective, we choose to explain the unknowable from.

See pereq 30. There was no time, no 6 days. Just 6 steps in logic.

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             A pious Jew is not one who worries about his fellow
micha at aishdas.org        man's soul and his own stomach; a pious Jew worries
http://www.aishdas.org   about his own soul and his fellow man's stomach.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                       - Rav Yisrael Salanter