Patently Jewish

This is the last in a thread of posts which began with a review of R’Meiselman’s book on Torah and Science, followed by a discussion of the dispute between R’Meiselman and Nosson Slifkin, and finally, a broad philosophical perspective on maybe why there are six days of creation.  Now, I will be discussing modern Jewish views on the six days of creation in view of science and attempt my own reconciliation of sorts.

Overview of Jewish Answers of What’s Happening in the 6 Days Of Creation

Here is the short, short version of how different thinkers have phrased it, from right to left on the viewpoint map.  The answers are, I believe, not very far off.  It should also be understood that I don’t think any of those I refer to actually claim theirs to be the answer.  R’Sapirman poses his ‘answer’ in question form only for purposes of showing we need not abandon Jewish beliefs in the face of science, R’Meiselman’s answer is along the lines of “we don’t know, but we do know Torah is true”, and as for Dr. Gerald Schroeder … I once had the opportunity to pick him from the airport.  I asked him  “Do you believe your theory is true?”  He thought for a moment and said, “After teaching it for so long, I’m starting to.”

Answer 1: Strict Literal Reading – Six Days & Creation of an Old World

(By “strict literal”, I am using the colloquial understanding that creation took six days from our time perspective and using the incorrect assumption that time is absolute.  In ‘reality’, even if it was from another time perspective, that’s still “strict literal”.)

Rabbi Sapirman has been instrumental in trying to introduce teaching emunah (why jews believe what we do) into Jewish schools.  He has produced books, school curriculums with short lessons (which were dinner time reading for my family), and an audio series.  The latter is available for free download on this blog, entitled, “Know What to Answer Yourself.”

In Rabbi Sapirman’s audio series, he posits the question – why can’t it be that a Creator created the world already in place?  He uses an example of stars with light already stretching for light years when it was created.  This could be literally done in six days.  Just as man was created fully formed, so too was the universe.  This would explain inconsistencies with what current science observers from our exceedingly limited vantage point and what actually was.

I’m not particularly fond of this explanation, but it is at possibility and one which really can’t be disproven.  Then again, it’s not really that different than the more palpable answers.  If a tree falls on a mime in the woods … does anyone care?  (Farside cartoon.)  If it all happens slow or fast, and you’re an infinite which is creating, what’s the difference?

Answer 2: Different Time Click – We Don’t Understand it, Move On

It’s said a bit more eloquently than that, but this is my understanding of R’Meiselman’s opinion in his book.  He devotes a chapter to the Rambam’s understanding of the shift in time clock on the fourth day (Bereshis [Genesis] 1:14 where it states, “to separate between the day and between the night”).  Before there’s a difference between “day” and “night” there’s a difference in the time being told.  Beyond that, the Rambam also states (as quoted in the last article) that it’s the second most hidden topic in all of Judaism … right after the description of the visit to the throne of the Creator.

R’Meiselman also makes clear that we have a truth from our fathers extending back to Sinai and this tradition is the living and continuing truth from the Creator.  There are a ridiculous number of places where we see the wisdom in the Torah attesting to it’s truth and greatness. (Rabbi Sapirman points this out as well, though more in the prophecy sense.)  It doesn’t change, but beliefs of the rest of the world have and continue to do so.  If something outside of Torah matches it, great.  If not, it can go take a hike (again, he says it more eloquently than that).

Answer 3: Torah Sources Match Modern Theoretical Physics; We’re Almost There

This opinion comes from Avaraham Goldberg, a Torah observant theoretical physicist (kabbalist?).   I reviewed his book over here, previously.  He basically goes through, on a very simple level, how our Torah sources describe the first moments of creation especially, and continues through from there.  Minute Physics, a great YouTube channel, actually discusses this as well:

It’s also seen in the “God 2.0 Video” from Imagining the 10th dimension which I discuss over there.  Great video.

In short, there’s a whole lot of convergence of Jewish beliefs and modern physics beliefs that, well, for more are further evidence of the truth of both.  No other beliefs coming from such disparate systems which claim truth are so aligned, to my knowledge.

Goldfinger does acknowledge at the end of his book one major problem: time.  For this the answer is relativity of time.  I discussed this in the previous article, but Gerald Schroder really takes this concept and fleshes it out as fully as I’ve ever come across.  It was actually a talk of his which I attended which first let me to realize not all creationists are … ignorant.

Answer 4: Torah is Telling Time from the Point of the Big Bang

This is the theory posited by Dr. Gerald Schroder, a Torah observant physicist by training.  He has a lot of very excellent books, trying to understand the Creator.  He strictly uses Torah sources and modern physics and organizes a whole lot of data.  I am going to try and explain the basics of his theory in a short space and do my own “making it fit” experiment, with apologies to R’Meiselman. In short, taking current physics it is believed that the speed of light is constant … we’ll use this, though there are theories that say the speed of light must have been quicker and I don’t see a reason why, when the universe itself was being created and more in flux, that the properties of physics and math would also be more in flux and changing than the seemingly static rules we observe today.

So what happens if something is moving away from you at something close to the speed of light?  The time it takes for the light to arrive back to you takes longer.  Add in another element – not only is the object moving away from you, but it’s moving faster and faster away from you, e.g. accelerating.  See, for example, how the rolling shutter effect distorts our view far away galaxies.  With a spinning galaxy, the closer part of it will reach us faster.  This is shown quite well on Wikipedia as well in the article, “Relativity of simultaneity” and the image to the right which I borrowed.  (Click it to see it bigger.)

As Einstein put it, imagine a train traveling at half the speed of light.  Shoot a laser up from the floor of the train to a mirror on the ceiling. When the beam comes back down, if you’re on the train it will be a straight line.  If you’re standing next to the train as it whizzes by you, the light moves at an angle upwards (remember, the train is moving quite fast) and then back down … but since the speed of light is constant, the time it takes to do so is much longer.

Limits to Human Knowledge and Assumptions Inherent in Cosmology, Geology, Torah

(You can skip this section and move on to the answer, if you prefer.)

Here comes the fun – do the math when viewing the universe from the point of creation of the universe and you got a very nicely overlapping picture between the two disciplines of knowledge.  (I used to be able to do the math, but now I have a Flowers for Allgernon feeling (not understanding my own previous work) when I try to do it.  For some simpler English explanations, see here and here.  I’ll leave the details of the math in this problem up to whomever wishes to comment, or view Gerald Schroeder’s works.)

What makes this complicated to do is that, in my humble opinion, is that well what actually happened is quite static, our understanding of it from a scientific point of view, is always changing, and from a text point of view, is open to all sorts of interpretations.  For example, the most current theories say that the rate of expansion has been decreasing, until recently when it again began increasing.  That is shown in the graph to the right from the link in the prior sentence.  This theory has only been widely posited for about 7 years.  For purposes of simplicity, I’m going to go with constant deceleration of an expanding universe.  It shouldn’t change the data too much, and further, there are many more approximations going on here which create far bigger problems including massive gaps in human knowledge.

Now when we get to geology, this is also based on very limited amounts of data.  Try and research a question like “when did the oceans form?” and you’ll find that the range of current range of scientific estimates have about a 13% difference between them, and suffer from the problem of piggybacking off of the same absurdly tiny data set being used to form the conclusion the first place.  No one was there four billion years ago to make direct observations and much may have effected the present time observations that we haven’t a clue about.  I have even less knowledge than a person who spends their life on this stuff (why one finds an interest in dedicating their life to a pursuit that gets us nowhere in human development except for maybe making arguments for/against G_d’s existence is beyond me).  So I wrote to both the Museum of Natural History in New York, NY and the American Geological Association requesting an accurate timeline of events and how they know it from geological digs.  Let’s just say the answers are quite disappointing.  In cosmology the experts publish all sorts of timelines and mathematical calculations.  In chemistry, Mendelev arranged the periodic table and predicted elements yet to be found.  Geologists and evolutionary biologists don’t seem to like math or neat organization of very disparate data from all over the place which makes me highly suspicious when the experts in the field stopped just shy of writing to me that I should take a leap of faith and just believe them.  They confirmed that there is no place you can bore a hole in the earth and see a complete picture of the 4 billion years of earth development, but even worse, there isn’t even a published place, according to the experts I asked, where the biostratography is put together to paint a complete picture.  The claimed there isn’t much interest in such a thing, but yet, it’s the claim in every textbook.  So I’m defaulting to the every-man source, Wikipedia and the article, History of the Earth … and making another assumption that Wikipedia has accurate information on the beliefs of geologists and evolutionary biologists.

As for the words of the Torah, all of creation is summed up even more concisely.  It’s 26 sentences.  The description of the mishkan in the desert is far longer than that, and that was a temporary physical structure.  Conclusion: The latter is more important to learn.  That teaches us how to live and is a metaphor for a body with arms, legs, and a heart.  Meanwhile, when the Torah says with regards to creation, statements like, “”Let the water that is beneath the heavens gather into one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so” does that mean that it occurred all at once, over more than one epoch of time, or was it a command which was only actually fulfilled later in another day?  (The Malbim discusses much of this.)

A Day by Day Attempt At Reconciliation Using Relativity

Relativity of Time from Big Bang (“G-d Time Clock”) vs. Earth – Click for Large Image

With those disclaimers in mind, a theoretical person viewing the earth from the point of creation would be like the person standing on the train platform watching the train pull away immediately at it’s fastest, and steadily slowing down.  It’s an exponential decay curve. and is, according to Schroeder’s hypothesis, how the Creator is narrating the opening verses of the Torah.

With apologies to my high school calculus teacher for not updating the answers on the review sheet after graduation like I said I would (I guess I should forgive myself at this point…), I’ll do my best to explain – constant decreasing acceleration (picture a line going down and to the right on a graph) results in an increase in distance over time, but the increase comes slower over time.  Now, the time it takes for light to reach back to the observer takes longer and longer but the space in time between the first epoch (between “day 0” and “day 1”) is much greater when acceleration was faster and the percentage of distance change is highest.  If the “train platform” is also moving away, you have a further shift in observed time of the earth (or what will be the earth) from such a vantage point.  According to Jewish sources, in fact, the Creator did “remove Himself” to allow a physical space to be created.  Combine that with the rate of acceleration of the universe might not have been constant, and there’s an infinite number of ways to match up the “G_d timeline” to the “human timeline”.  I’m going to stick with Schroder’s theory to make it easier – time in the Torah is told from the point of the Big Bang, and earth is moving away at a decreasing accelerating rate.  (For more on the math of integrals and derivatives, that part is explained here.)

The final step is matching up what the first 26 verses in the Torah say for each day within those time frames.  I am using the current accepted number of 13.75 billion years for the age of the universe (Schroeder uses the now outdated 15 billion in his books, as far as I know).  In a decelerating frame of reference (again, assuming constant deceleration) that gives us a nice decay curve like you see to the right.  Viewing a photon traveling back to you after traveling for 24 hours at a rate much, much greater than the speed of light (by a power of 10 to 12) and it’s actually been traveling 7 billion years from it’s frame of reference.  If you want to view a photon traveling for two days from your perspective, and it’s 3.5 billion years from it’s frame of reference.

Here’s how it fits:

This article was actually far more difficult to research and put together than I had imagined.  While I have gone over it a number of times and made many edits, I am still not satisfied with it.  I also recognize that I am an expert in none of the areas I am describing.  Thus is the nature of a Patent Attorney.  We’re good at quickly learning all sorts of topics about everything and then writing at length about it.  Then we send it back to the inventor, the expert in the field, to make sure it’s all correct.  Given that this article spans many very different disciplines, there are a lot of different experts that will have opinions! Therefore, I am not insulted if you argue against anything I have said vigorously in the comments.  I welcome it (when done respectfully) so that you and I can both better come to finding truth.

This is a continuation in the series on Rav Meiselman’s book on Torah and Science and the Controversy between R’Meiselman and Nosson Slifkin.  It also might be helpful to see what a modern physicist / Chassidic Jew has to say.  The narrow answer, walking through the actual text of creation, is coming.

The Question

How can it be that the world certainly appears, based on cosmology and geology, much older than the about 6000 years that the Bible says?

The Short Answer: What Question?

Where were you at the founding of the earth?  Tell, if you know the esoteric understanding.  (אֵיפֹה הָיִיתָ, בְּיָסְדִי-אָרֶץ;    הַגֵּד, אִם-יָדַעְתָּ בִינָה) – Iyov [Job] 38:4 (translation is my own)

Why is this a question?  The question should be why it doesn’t say that the world was created in an instant!  Now that seems like something a powerful infinite Creator would do.  (I’d answer that by saying that this is a rather finite definition of expectations of an infinite.  If we were infinite, we could just as well take our time.)

As for six days or any duration longer than “instant”, how would we know how to view things from a time scale of our Creator’s writing?  It is certainly “literally” true, albeit esoteric from our perspective.  It’s all a matter of frame of reference.

Take a look at the great video below from “Minute Physics.”  Gravitation and acceleration result in time dilation measurable even with the error in our own GPS satellites, yet we expect a story of creation to be told from an immutable time frame.  Time, itself, as well as they laws of Physics are themselves being created!  Clearly it’s different and there will always remain parts of our understanding (e.g. crush the universe into a singularity with an infinite temperature) or experimentation that we won’t understrand.   (The video is actually 37 seconds over it’s namesake, but not if you watch it from a GPS satellite accelerating at the right speed).  

Our Outstanding of Time Has Changed; the Literal Truth Has Not

There has never been a case where the refuah [healing] wasn’t prepared before the makkah [punishment]. – Rav Yaakov Weinberg zt”l, “Rav Yaakov Weinberg Talks about Chinuch”, 2006

America was ‘discovered’ by Europe during a voyage under the Spanish crown in 1492, the same year that Jews were expelled from Spain by the same crown.  The answer is always prepared before the problem.  The Creator is not bound by time and doesn’t need to answer to our notions of time, space, or linearity.  When Moshe [Moses] wanted to see more, he saw the knot at the back of the Tefillin … where the seemingly disparate straps (when viewed head-on) come together and it all makes sense.  I’ve skimmed through early issues of Popular Science, which used to have some religious content … the problem with days of creation and religious content leaving the scene of science seems to have occurred only in the early 1900s.  It was in 1905 that Einstein first published information on the relativity of time showing that it’s not linear, and finding ‘the solution’ to the problem.

Wait, What Answer?

What is the difference between Maaseh Merkavah [accounts of ascent to the throne of G_d] and Maaseh Bereishis [creation]? Maaseh Merkavah may not be revealed even to a lone individual unless he is wise and capable of understanding on his own, in which case one may pass on to him the “chapter headings.”but maaseh Bereshis may be taught o an individual even though he is not capable of understanding it on his own.  Nevertheless, one may reveal to him all that he is capable of grasping of these matters.  Why, then do we not expound on it in public? It is because not everyone has a sufficiently broad grasp to comprehend the presentation and explanation of these mattes clearly.” – Rambam, Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah 4:10-11.

The Torah tells us that this is all really hidden from us.  Not inaccessible, but only can even be revealed to one who can understand.  I don’t know what I’m talking about nor does anyone, really know.  I think, however, thanks to modern physics, many more people can understand and grasp much more than in the times of the Rambam.  Maybe there is a kabbalist or theoretical physicist (they often sound the same thing to me) out there today has great understanding,  Still, the thing we’re trying to explain is the second most hidden topic in the world.  Time and space itself is created during creation, and we, who live within both time and space and cannot avoid it expect to explain beyond it?  Imagine Gumby, a stop-motion clay character from my childhood, explaining how Art Clokey‘s brain works.  Now take that up an infinite level.  We can only understand what is revealed to us, and even that is with great difficulty.

‘Video Gaming’ Billions of Years in Days

It may well be that questions affecting the relation between science and religion received due treatment in those two departments of esoteric learning. – R’Yitzhak Herzog.

When hearing a simple “frame of reference” answer for the first time, I wouldn’t be satisfied.  Gerald Schroeder goes into it in much more detail; I will discuss his view and that of others in the next article.  For now, the greatest mashal, or comparative story to make a point, I can think of are the hours and hours spent playing video games in my childhood.  I gravitated towards the more sophisticated (“nerdy”) games.  This included many life simulation games from Maxis such as SimCity, SimAnt, and SimTower.  I posited in about 1990 that one day they’d come out with a game where you just played a person going through your day.  Turned out “The Sims” is their most popular game yet.  It is SimEarth that best helps explain, however.  It’s a simulation game where you guide Earth through stages from pre-Cambrian through blasting off into space.  You can see someone playing it over on YouTube.  In the game you guide life from simplest to most complex by creating the right conditions.  You can terraform, you can place oxygen producers and affect the atmosphere, and you can futz with the conditions of life and watch it grow.  (In a much newer and related incarnation, Spore, you follow the ‘life’ of an individual species and can actually edit the functional parts of your creature.)In these life simulation games, you can’t even play in real-time where a day is 24 hours.  For that, you might just step outside and watch the grass grow in a much bigger simulation .  We play simulations which are simpler than ourselves with fast forwarded time.  Bored?  Want to get up to the part in the game where mammals are created?  You set it on super fast speed … until desert takes over or your design starts going the wrong way, and you zoom in both in time or place and make some tweaks and keep going.  Do i really care that I zoomed past 1 billion years to get the part of the game that I want to play?  That took me maybe 10 minutes where I went to get a snack because I lost patience.  This comparison, of course, breaks down when talking about an infinite who has an infinite amount of time to “play the game” and in fact, created time and dilates it even after creating it.  It’s not only not fixed, it’s not … anything.  Suppose G_d really did “zoom past” a few billion years in a “day” … so what?  The question, again, would be why zoom past anything instead of just creating it done?

Time Dilation in Action

To explain a bit further and borrow from Rav Shimshon Dovid Pincus‘s example, imagine a bird that take a speck of dust in it’s mouth and puts it down on the ground somewhere.  It goes back and gets another spec and does this again and again … eventually, after a month, there’s a tiny pile.  After a year, a bigger pile.  After a trillion years, there’s a large mountain.  Now we have some sense of duration of time, but the Creator is infinite in all dimensions, not just time.  Is it a problem for such a Creator to create everything in six days, even if for us it takes a billion years?  What’s the rush when you’re outside of time?

The ‘Extra’ Time and Space is Everything and Nothing Extra – Why All This?

That’s all well and good, but I think we are left with the question of why would a Creator need to create all this extra time and space only to ‘fast-forward’ through it?  We tend to think of the amount of energy needed to move a system.  We worry about wasting fossil fuels and how much it will cost to buy a sandwich.  Our reality is surrounded by having a cost for what we do.  If you create the world, there is no cost.  Consider it “limitless free energy.”  

It also must be a teaching method for us.  (This does not, as Nosson Slifkin argues, mean that it didn’t happen or that we should start changing what we think is wrong with the Torah or our mesorah from Mt. Sinai – Just because we don’t full understand doesn’t mean we throw it out.  We can try and deduce more, but even then, we may be totally wrong.)

For example, when we create something big, we consult with others (e.g. G_d says, “let us make man”; a straightforward discussion of Rashi’s explanation of this is here).  So too, when we create, it takes a blue print and execution of multiple steps to create something complex.  Look at the universe in any direction and there is more to see.  Large: What’s outside of the edge of the universe?  It seems to just expand bigger and bigger.  Small: What’s smaller than a quark?  Simple: A point.  Complex: The brain.  Why create more than a flat surface to let your creatures run around on it and serve you?  Why give them the ability to deny you even exist?  What on earth is that all about?  Look how great the creation is, and this testifies to the planning, breadth, and greatness of amazing this infinite Creator is.  Ma rabu ma’asecha!  How amazing this all is!  Everything testifies to the Creator and there is no limit to the progress of our understanding.  Science serves to show that, not detract from it.

More on the ‘Extra’: The King Who Sits in Solitude

The whole world was only created for the Tzaddik [righteous person] – various versions appear in the Midrash, Talmud, and Zohar.

We all desire relationships.  With our spouses, or parents, our children, and our friends.  We are also created in the likeness of the Creator.  So it follows that the Creator also wants a relationship … but with whom?  The Creator sits alone!  When I maybe 14 years old, my atheist grandfather once answered missionaries at the door with, “You expect me to believe in a G_d who is an un-sexed being?”  (We didn’t always agree on philosophy, but we certainly always agreed to question things.)  To love another person is to see the face of G_d!  Just as the vastness of time and space teach us the vastness of G_d, all the more so, so does love.  We want a relationship, and an infinite wants the relationship infinitely more!

A fundamental belief from the Torah made little sense to me for years – the whole world is created for the tzaddik [righteous person].  There is a story in, I believe the Gemora, Midrash or both [source needed <grin>] of rich men with vast fortunes who find their entire purpose was to build a bench under a tree where a tzaddik stopped to rest while walking. The entire fortune of the rich man, in the end, is nothing except for the bench and tree.  The rest of it all, and the rest of us, are only served by serving the tzaddik.

Why?  Whom to we love?  When we love everyone, our relationships are spread so thin that we don’t have them.  We choose whom who can, and with them with draw close.  The more depth, the more meaning.  The more we can do for someone, the more we can come close.  We can’t really do anything for an infinite Creator, but like any good relationship, it’s two ways.  One has to give to the other and give the other an opportunity to give to them.  We see how G_d created the world in six days, not in a moment, so as to show us that we too go through levels of simple to greater complexity in depth and relationship.

However, we will ultimately love few … as does the Creator.  In the finite world which is wider than we can fathom, having parts smaller than we can fathom, and lasting a greater amount of time than we can fathom, sits one planet floating on nothingness.  As wide as the skin of an apple is to the fruit is the atmosphere of the planet.  Within that, are numerous creatures, only one of which ever asks, “Why?”  (Thank you Michael Stevens of Vsauce for this one.)  Who else even has the opportunity to connect to the Creator?  Within that are the few who even try and serve the Creator, the fewer who do so every day, and the fewer who get it almost all right.

Yet, it is precisely that person who G_d wants.  This person won’t be born like an automoton serving the Creator – that’s no fun and that’s not much of a relationship.  That’s programming, or maybe fear, but a real relationship is one of love.  It is the few who come to this fully … the tzaddik with whom the Creator wants the relationship.  Just as the world isn’t created in an instant, neither is the tzaddik.  Just as the world goes through creation until perfection, so too does the tzaddik.

We are still, at least in the moment that we overcome a negative trait, like the tzaddik in a smaller, or maybe even a larger sense.  Or, we can serve the tzaddik … within us or around us.  Even a kernel of grain, in Jewish thought, achieves it’s greatest tikkun [rectification with the infinite], on it’s level, when it’s part of the bread that we eat on Shabbos.

If you have a question on the length of time, you also should have a question on the breadth and depth of the universe, as well.

Next Up . . .

– From where, exactly is G_d telling time in the Torah?  How does that fit with our frame of reference?

– Matching up the “G_d time” and “Human on Earth time” in a more specific manner through cosmology and geology.

– Creation in the Torah and modern scientific theories don’t always tell the story in the same order.  What do we do about that?  (Spoiler alert: I am going to reject throwing out the literal meaning of the words or relegating creation to a mere ‘parable’.)

– From “right” to “left” in opinions of modern Jewish thinkers on creation … from literal to relative.

This is part 2 in a series on Rav Meiselman’s latest book.  For the full book review, see part 1.

Road-Map to These Articles

In my review of Rav Meiselman’s book, the purpose was to explain the Rav’s opinion.  I was trying to limit my own editorializing or make any decision on if it was the right approach.  At the time, i was really grappling with the difference between Rav Meiselman and Slifkin.  in this post, I go through my thought process and how I’ve arrived at the conclusion as to with whom I agree.  In part III, I’ll discuss the first 6 days of creation to bring out the point.

The Controversy of How to Relate Torah to Modern Science, in a Nutshell

A rather lively debate is going on within the Torah Judaism world as to what constitutes, well, ‘Torah Judaism’ with respect to scientific discovery.  I’ve well documented Rav Moshe Meiselman’s opinion on this matter that if it’s in the Torah which is received from G_d, the starting point is our mesorah [handed down understanding], and unless necessary, do we seek guidance from experimentation.

Recently, I’ve been grappling with the opinion of Nosson Slifkin whose books have been banned by Meiselman and for that matter, many other big names in the Torah world . . . Rav Moshe Shapiro, Rabbi Ahron Schechter, Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetzsky, and Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef amongst a long list of others.  These include some of the greatest Torah giants of our generation and are certainly not to be taken lightly.  As Torah Jews, we trust that there are those who know more than us, even if we don’t understand.   (I wrote about must trust in a gadol [giant] in Torah it in an article on Rav Zilberstein’s discussion of medical halacha.) Still, I was never satisfied with it in this case.  I want to understood why … what, exactly is wrong with Slifkin’s books?

What is a Machlokos for Shaymayim (The Sake of Heaven)

First, a brief word on machlokos, or “disagreements” in Judaism.  Those which are for the sake of heaven endure, those which are not, will not.  This is a core belief which we learn from Korach and explained in Pirkei Avos [ethics of our fathers].  Rather than reinvent the wheel, the concept is explained quite if you follow this link to Torah.org.

Still further, there’s another principal of “minimizing machlokos” – making it as small as possible because we don’t want disagreements.  For example, in Bava Kamma, daf 14 (which I happen to be learning right now), there’s a dispute between Rav Pappa and Rav Huna as to whether when your animals gores someone for the first time and you pay half damages, is this as compensation or as a fine?  What’s the practical difference?  The only difference is whether in the case of admittance, do you pay?  If it’s a fine, one doesn’t pay when they admit guilt.  If it’s compensation, you pay.  Yet, the Talmud goes on for pages and pages trying to prove one way or the other despite the point of dispute being so small.  Yet, everyone agrees that if your animal gores the first time, it pays half damages to the other party.

First Try: Minimize the Maklokos Between Rav Meiselman and Slifkin

This, in a nutshell seems to be something like much of (but not all of) the dispute between Slifkin and Meiselman. It seems, from a theoretical standpoint, to be only a question of “to what extent” with very little difference in end result. I’ve actually met and had a few short conversations with Nosson Slifkin.  He gave lectures at Ohr Somayach when I learned there.  I asked him about the ‘proof’ used by the Aish HaTorah Discovery program regarding fish with scales always having fins, as seemingly spelled out in the Torah.  Slifkin’s answer to me was that there is, in fact, an exception but he wasn’t publishing it because it was used for Jewish outreach.  Meiselman’s book spends an entire chapter on the issue!  He had no problem exposing it (though it’s still pretty good, and in summary, for kashrus purposes, if you see a fish with just scales it’s kosher and you can rely on that … something that is 99.99% the case is just fine to rely on, and even in the exception case, it can be argued that it’s really not an exception … see Meiselman’s book).

To go even further, Meiselman openly says (and I apologize for being too lazy to find all the page numbers) that Rishonim (about 10th century to 14th century) sometimes explained concepts in Torah using the science of their day and could be mistaken.  Example: Spontaneous generation of life with regards to the “Achbar”, a rodent or squirrel that came from the mud next to the Nile river.  The Talmud itself, however, does not state that there is spontaneous generation, and in fact, Meiselman and Slifkin’s answers on this are nearly identical … the Talmud is arguing what the law would be in such a case described by others, and not actually saying it occurred.   (Though modern science does believe in spontaneous generation … they say life just sort of happened.)  This is useful in discussions of say, grown meat, or a better example, the discussion of flying towers is very useful when discussing Jewish law with regards to airplanes.

Both Rav Meiselman and Slifkin, are, to my knowledge Torah observant Jews who believe in the authenticity of the Torah from the Creator, as handed down to us from Mt. Sinai without change.  In practical difference, the outcome is, at least at this time, fairly small if existent at all.  The difference, as best I can tell, from reading both of their writings, is that if the Talmud states something as fact, it could be a mistake.  Even there, the number of potential ‘mistakes’ is about as many as the fingers on a hand.  More often, and I think both would agree, it’s a mistake in our understanding.

Would one’s practice of Judaism be different if they believed Rav Meiselman or Slifkin were right?

Slifkin’s best argument in this regard (sifting through article after article on his blog of attacking everything just short of the color Rav Meiselman’s frock) seems to be “the Rabbonim are suppressing information and alternative thought.”  Slifkin, a student of the very much haredi Mir yeshiva in Jerusalem, now champions left-leaning publishers (calling out Artscroll?! who even publishes an RCA [modern Orthodox] addition of it’s prayer books) and regularly posts things to embarrass those to “to the right”.  (At the time of this writing, his blog leads with an article of haredi-looking Jews alternating between dancing and being sprayed with a water cannon, mocking them for not joining the army.  What this has to do with the controversy over his ideas, I have no idea.)

Meiselman’s argument in this regard is that once we start with beliefs which involve “throwing out” parts of Torah and saying that our mesorah as handed down to us from Mt. Sinai has mistakes in scientific understanding, then why wouldn’t you also say there are mistakes in legal understanding?  Further, if you start changing things because modern science says something, then what happens when ‘science’ turns out to be wrong and the theories are thrown out for new and better ones?  Even the ‘better’ ones are still approximation based on evaluation of evidence.  So if we ‘jump ship’, so to speak, to keep Torah up to date with science, in reality, we’ll always be jumping further and further away.  Even more so, we’re always putting Torah in the “one down” position, giving in emotionally to the inferiority of what we believe is the word and oral transmission from the Creator.  That’s certainly a silly thing to do, for which I think Meiselman’s opinion is quite logical.

Progression of My Own Opinions

So the above conclusions were where I was up until Adar 9, 5774.  Actually, let me back up further – I went from science being my religion to Torah being my religion 14 years ago.  Still, I ‘needed’ Torah to fit with science.  I needed that up until, I don’t know exactly when, but suffice to say, it was recent.  As both Rav Meiselman and Slifkin would agree, one best arrives at the truth of the Torah by learning it and seeing it’s depth and beauty.  It’s a full and complete system that just makes a whole lot of sense.  What were questions, cease to be questions as you learn more.  There is few pleasures in this world that I have experienced as great as resolving a contradiction and understanding how it fits together.  There are no absolute proofs (though I’ve had fun debating atheists over here and here to sharpen my beliefs), but everyone is seemingly after finding the singularity that explains everything, whether approaching from physics, psychology, the stock market, or, well, the Creator.

When Slifkin’s books were banned, it happened to coincide with feeling the pain of some very bad advice from a person I called “my Rav”.  I had major questions on the scientific understanding of today’s Torah scholars.  Gerald Schroder’s articles on Aish.com were also taken down for review.  It was Schroder’s hypotheses that actually ‘allowed’ me to become Torah observant, though his articles were eventually restored.

It was not until Rav Meiselman’s book that I actually understood the position of the Torah giants of our day.  Slifkin is a much more prolific writer, and as I knew him, he was just this guy running zoo tours from a Torah perspective and a sort of side speaker at my yeshiva.  Still, I have not been able to resolve for myself intellectually why there was a need for the book ban.

I Am Now Was? Convinced of Rav Meiselman’s Side of the Debate Against Nosson Slifkin

David Kornreich runs a blog whose sole purpose is to challenge assertions made by Nosson Slifkin.   He read my review of Rav Meiselman’s book on Torah and science and commented (as you can read over there) that I left out in my review that one can’t call the creation narrative in the Torah just a “parable”.  True, Rav Meiselman said this in his book, but I really didn’t think it was answering a serious challenge and so I left it out.  So I challenged Kornreich – does Slifkin actually say such a thing?  Sure, I can call the “hand of G_d” an allegorical sort of thing, or better yet, a metaphysical sort of thing.  No problem … I don’t understand what it really means, though maybe some kabbalist out there does on a deeper level.  However, to call an entire narrative in the Torah a ‘parable’ would mean that when the Torah says X happened followed by Y, it’s lying to us.  That would be too much for me to stomach.

David Kornreich delivered and provided me with this link –  It’s clear from Slifkin’s video where he’s pretty much talking from his book, The Challenge of Creation (the link is to Google Books where you can actually read excerpts online – jump down to page 218 and start there) … he takes it way too far in supporting whatever the current scientific theory is over Torah.  Not only does Slifkin put science in the “one up position” and Torah in the “one down position” he quickly dismisses the veracity of the Torah’s creation account!  If that’s the case, how can we trust anything in the Torah as being accurate?  Let’s just take whiteout to the ten commandments because modern psychology says honoring a deadbeat father is wrong.  Then once we do that …

I’ll take up the topic Slifkin and Creation in more detail in part III of this series.

Introduction

In the article, Folly of Faith, Folly of Reason, one of the things I argued based on Isaac Asimov’s short story, “Reason” was that point of view on topics beyond the dimensions that we can observe is based on emotion.  The article made a lot of my science-minded friends a bit unhappy, but led to some great discussions.  Below is a somewhat edited version (taking out any personal references and cleaning it up) of an online conversation I had with a friend where we explored the topic further.  We started out on vastly divergent points, my friend being what I would call a “hyper-rationalist” and myself being something of a self-proclaimed “rationalist leads to belief in things beyond what we can see”-ist.   We do, at least, agree that we should start with postulates that we want happiness and meaning in life and I think my friend began to see where I was coming from.  I argued that we can look at anything and see the negative or see the positive and that leads us to belief in a Creator who made us for a purpose (something akin to the robot in “Reason”, actually).

The conversation follows.  The headings are added for readability.

Defining the Limits of Knowledge

Friend: Your Folly of Reason image resembles an incomplete representation of the Radon Transform used by CAT Scan imaging.  The third light source is missing. You’d still be guessing if you said this object was a cylinder as you still cannot prove the objects opacity in all three dimensions. However, three ‘orthonormal’ light sources will give you the ability to establish the shape of the object leaving zero room for doubt and one’s emotional interpretation.

Me: Nice cold, hard reasoning.

Friend: We need to be certain before we operated.

Me: The image is just a metaphor – it’s harder to draw showing the 3rd and 4th dimension.  We can understand 2nd vs. 3rd though.

Friend: I stick to the three physical dimensions known as Hilbert Space. The other dimensions and the nature of 95% of the universe (dark matter and energy) is yet to be defined.

Me: Quantum theory calls the 4th dimension time or duration. We live in the 3rd dimension but still have a ‘flat’ view of the 4th. The picture shows the concept of living in the 2nd and imaging the 3rd, though we don’t need to imagine the 3rd…it’s a comparison.

Friend: Our observations are blind to those extra dimensions, but absolutely certain in the dimensions that are appropriate for the measurement. The difference between opinion and science is having a ‘spanning data set’ which covers all dimensions relevant to the conclusion. Psychology is not considered by science to physicists.

Me: Then why do you not include time on your list.  Our observations are not blind to time.  Time is not a dimension in the same sense as the physical dimensions

Friend: That’s debatable. We can and often do treat it as a dimension, though.

Me: I don’t think our observations can really tell us that.

Friend: it depends on what you are trying to prove.

Me. That is based on the postulate that you start with. That was Asimov’s point which I wholeheartedly agree with.

Friend: Maybe. Explain further.

Me: His point is that by using logic and reasoning alone, you can prove anything (philosophical) you want depending on your starting point. The starting point, however, is based on emotion.  A ‘rationalist’ will choose the starting point as ‘only what I can observe is truth’. I find that to be irrational.

Friend: That isn’t true. You cannot prove something that is false unless you are a working in ‘cargo cult science’ [a reference to the Asimov story].  That was a Feynman reference.

Me: That is when you have all the information… for the shape of a three dimensional object, that is true (assuming there is no fourth or fifth dimension to it that we can’t see).  However, our lack of ability to see the object in another dimension does not mean it is not there.  We become just like the ‘cargo cult’ robot in the Asimov story.

Friend: it is yet to be established.

Me: Agreed.

Friend: Do we care that the kidney stone we are illuminating with x-rays from three dimensions is blinking on and off in dimensions 23-56?

Me: Probably not.  It’s much easier to disprove the logic of something than prove it. My point wasn’t really to prove anything of the sort.

Friend: Dimensions 1-3 are good enough to tell the surgeon to start cutting.  Or do you have another point?

Me: I agree with you and understand what you’re saying.  I’m not arguing that any of it is incorrect or even arguing that I know or can prove with any certainty that there is anything beyond that.  I am, instead, arguing for the limitations of this mode exploration.

Me: There may be more that we can access (for which, with a yarmulke on my head, obviously I do believe).  Such modes of exploration cannot be used to show absence of such higher powers and causes.  As such, I then disagree with people like Asimov (don’t get me wrong – I think the man’s a genius) who say they don’t feel an emotional connection to such a thing, so therefore, they don’t bother studying it.

Friend: Many religious people require that all things G_d are mysterious and cannot be understood. Proven facts are then rejected based on the disposition that they are understandable.

Me: I don’t subscribe to that view. There are plenty of not-very-deep thinking people out there. Belief in G_d doesn’t seem to be an indicator of how deeply thinking a person is.

Friend: For example, the sequencing of the human genome has been done with a “sufficient number of light sources” to be undeniable fact.

Me: I don’t see the point in arguing along these lines … I agree with you. But it doesn’t change the existence or lack thereof further dimensions simply because someone isn’t too bright.  

Friend: Okay.  i see your point now.

Defining a Logical Emotional Postulate To Reach a Logical Conclusion in All Cases

Me: Or, turn it around – someone saying “there’s a sequenced genome” or “there’s a fossil” so therefore there is no G_d … is equally not very bright.

Friend: Such a statement would not be very bright.  A better conclusion would be that Gd is now understood a way that is different than previously believed.

Me: I agree with that.

Friend: Only the nature of the conjecture changes based upon emotion, the proof or disproof of that conjecture never changes.

Me: Pretty much. I look at someone like DeGrasse Tyson [who argues there is no G_d because why would G_d create a universe where life can’t exist in most of it and is “trying to kill us] and I just can’t get there.  Why would you want to look at the world as full of death and destruction?

Friend: A very religious person may perform different experiments, but there is no denying the facts that result.

Me: Agreed … though we may not understand all the factors, etc.

Friend: How I feel about the conclusion (i.e. death and destruction) does not change the facts that lead to the conclusion.  For example, those three sources of light that found a tumor . . . I do not like that.

Me: It’s a point of view. You can focus on those facts, or you focus on the amazing things that is the universe, the creation of life, and that it’s all for the best.  Same facts, different starting conjecture….   I choose my version. Tyson’s view is pretty depressing.  Yes, depressing is an emotion and this is an emotional response, but one that seems rational to me.

Friend: But what about the tumor that the three sources of x-ray have irrefutable illuminated? is it not really there because it makes you feel sad?

Me: Of course it’s there, but why do I have to feel sad?

Friend: Why do you have to feel sad about the evidence in which Neil Tyson conveys?

Me: I don’t feel sad about the evidence. I feel sad about the conjecture and conclusion he draws.

Friend: Asimov’s assertion is that such sadness may keep you from getting the cat scan. Someone else may not have the same bias (the doctor while you are in a coma and cannot give consent). Now you are faced with the facts. Who cares about your bias now?

Me: I don’t see how you get to Asimov’s assertion. In any case, I do believe your bias matters. That’s the placebo effect.  Happier people live longer. Holocaust survivors have this uncanny way of living really long lives, on average. People who want life, get it.

Friend: YOUR bias matters in what YOU do. Others will still present information that is irrefutable that YOU would have never tested.

Me: Like what?

Friend: Like you’re tumor that was discovered while you were in a coma that you would have never looked for.

Me: Ah.  Let’s pre-suppsoe for a second that calling to a higher power works.  Let’s further support that if your friends and family don’t try it, then you die.  If they do try it, then you come out of the coma.  In Jewish belief (I can’t speak for other religions, and can barely speak for Judaism) you’d be responsible for not praying.

Friend: Let’s pre-suppose that asking the higher power for things upsets him and the result will be much more favorable if i live him alone.  Who is right?  how do you know?

Me: Okay… that goes back to a very negative world view. That would actually be more ‘sad’ than Tyson’s. If that’s the case, we’re all in trouble.  What your proposing is the “reverse Pascal wager”. It’s an argument based on extreme negativity which is better suited to winning arguments than trying to live a life of pleasure.

Friend: It is not my disposition. its just a way of establishing logical fact. its is valid to take the converse of any logical statement.

Me: From a purely logical perspective, you are right … I do not know for sure that the converse isn’t true.

Friend: When dealing with tumors and global warming, it is important to deal only with facts.

Me: Agreed, but we might look at it very differently.  Why do you care about global warming?  You die anyway, done.

It is Rational for a Rationalist to Care About What He Cannot Rationalize

Friend: Who said anything about being done when you die?

Me: Will global warming effect you after you die?

Friend: Yes.

Me: Go on…

Friend: My children and their children.

Me: How does that effect YOU?

Friend: it is not necessary to take such an egocentric view.  The ego is just a survival tool. it is not all that we are.

Me: So now you’re getting into the unobservable.  What are we after death, in your view?

Friend: Our genome is propagated through our children. The sense of ego is as extraneous and useless defining a ‘computer’ in the internet cloud. Its just not relevent in that sense.  where are your digital pictures? Does it matter? They can be in 500 places.

Me: So the purpose of existence is survival? Whose geome can last longest?

Friend: This is a concept that is fairly well understood. Many religious people don’t like things that are understood.  They require that the explanations all remain secret and mysterious.

Me: So why do you want to propagate your genome?

Friend: This is the nature of life.

Me: That’s not an answer.

Friend: We were made that way.  We also can understand some of how and why we are made and how we operate. There is no requirement that we deny these things.

Me: So what? To use converse logic / Tyson logic … if the world is almost entirely death and destruction anyway, why bring more people into it?

Friend: its not what we do or how we are designed.

Me: Why does near term vs. far term matter either? Global warming? What about the sun exploding.

Friend: Our design does not account for our near or far term predictions of the universe.

Me: Your answer is akin to a person traveling down a stream on a boat rowing because that’s what boat’s do.  They never stop thinking about how they got on the boat or the waterfall ahead.

Friend: We may also know that the waterfall ahead is not a death sentence for which we should put a bullet in our head right now.

Me: Maybe. I think that’s my point.  Except in the end, we all die and according to scientific theory, so does our genome.

Friend:  …and that the waterfall really is ahead even if we don’t want it to be. We don’t argue that the waterfall is not ahead because it makes us sad.

Me: No, but that’s a silly way to live life.  This is conjecture, but I think that life should be about maximizing pleasure.  I start with that postulate and another one of free will.

Friend: i’m not arguing against that.

Me:  I think my conjecture leading to belief is pretty simple: maximize pleasure + free will … and see where that takes me. This is where it did [to become a Torah observant Jew] …and does. I have yet to hear any counter to that to convince me otherwise.  This is where non-theists lose me.

Let’s Attack Belief in Authenticity of the Bible Instead

Friend: i do argue that earth is much older, however.

Me: Agreed.  That was the largest thing which held me back, actually.  I agree that the world is much older.

Friend: How did you come to this conclusion?

Me: Reviewing the evidence for and against.  However, I do not really *know*.  It’s perfectly logical to say that G_d created a world that only looked old, even if not satisfactory to say so.

Friend: We have better information than that.  We have information illuminated by a sufficient number of light sources.

Me: I don’t see how we can know. We examine data and conclude based on it, but we can never have all the data about what happened 13 billion years ago.

Friend: Age of the universe is a harder question than the age of the earth.

Me: There are a bunch of theories, interpretations, et al. as to how to understand the Biblical account of creation with the age of universe / earth. The most appealing to a rationalist is probably Gerald Schroeder’s. He’s a MIT physicist and writes books on the subject.  The short version of his answer is that the biblical account is from the point of creation, using relativity … it’s measuring 24 hour cycles of time from that point, when the light returns back there. It’s an accelerating frame of reference, so each day, if you calculate it, is half as long as the last.  Once Adam is giving a human soul (breath of life), the frame of reference switches to earth. This is day 1 (Rosh Hashana) on our calendar … though this is day 6 of creation.

Friend: it helps to formulate a general model of any unknown system so that you can even think of the next experiment to perform in order to put together the big picture conclusion…eventually.

Me: I hear… so it’s about knowledge and knowing more, but to what end?  There’s no ultimate purpose in any of it from an atheistic perspective other than an Asimov-type “I’m happy and don’t need more” sort of argument, as he once said.

Friend: Okay. You need to work on an overly convoluted bridge that now reconciles evolution in the framework of Genesis.

Me: It works out quite well.  The Bible’s concern is not teaching science. If the theory is correct, billions of years are condensed into about 24 sentences.  Why Genesis is there at all, is a better question.

Friend: You have only reconciled age of the earth. You need an equivalent reconciliation for evolution.

Me: The short answer on that is it fits into days 3-6 or so, each day being half the length of the last. If you’re up for reading material: http://www.aish.com/ci/sam/48951136.html

[At this point we exchanged concluding salutations and I went to get lunch.]

In this article, I attempt to make a few points: a) Point of view on topics beyond the dimensions that we can observe is based on emotion; b) People tend to illogically ignore evidence that doesn’t fit with their emotion-based postulates, whether they are religious or secular (including the great writer, Isaac Asimov), c) you can’t convince most people of very much at all; d) Judaism, which I believe to be true, recognizes the limits of rationality and faith/emotion and is a mix of the two (in my opinion), and finally, e) choosing rational postulates of what gives the most meaning and pleasure based on examination of the evidence is most rational.

Proof Depends on the Postulate

The follow of reason – you’ll never seen the cylinder, but it’s there.

In Asimov’s story, humans make a robot-run outpost in space.  One robot decides it’s illogical for humans, who are inferior to robots in so many ways, to have created him.  So the robot logically determines that the most advanced thing there, the outpost’s computer, made it and declares “There is no master but the master and I am his prophet” (a satirical take on the Muslim declaration of faith).

 You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason- if you pick the proper postulates. We have ours and Cutie has his.”

“Then let’s get at those postulates in a hurry.”  Powell sighed wearily.

“That’s where everything falls down. Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them. I’m going to bed.”

. . . “But I might as well try – as a matter of principle.”

– “Reason”, Isaac Asimov, 1941 (age 21)

This is exemplary of many arguments we’ve probably all had with someone invested in a different idea.  I’ve heard quoted in the name of Rabbi Noach Weinberg (who spent his life reaching out to Jews who learned little about Jewish beliefs), this mentality in many ways actually covers about 90 – 95% of people.  There are maybe 5% to 10% of people you can convince of anything substantially different than what they currently believe.

Folly of Faith

In the story, the humans try to reason with ‘the prophet’, to no avail.  Given Asimov’s personal belief (a “humanist Jew”, though an analysis of Asimov’s views is far beyond the scope of this article), it seems he’s attempting to knock various religions, and of course, Decartes.  They build a new robot; rebuttal – the parts already existed, made by the master.  They show the robot their library proving their knowledge of robot creation; rebuttal – the master wrote them for the humans to believe, but he has the real truth (I’ve read this view from a few Muslims and heard same from a Hindu).  Meanwhile, the humans who know the truth decide that they should argue with the robot “on principle” before deciding that it’s best just to let the robot believe what he wants . . . because he’s doing his job (again, akin to Rambam describing Islam to be like a statute which has beauty, but not the fullness of proper belief).

On the other side, it works the other way as well.  Try discussing the ludicrous claim in the Bible (jump down to point 3 in the link) written, at least, some time before 200 BCE (the time of Septuagint, and according to tradition, actually, in about 1323 BCE) that Jews will remain small in number, be scattered around the earth, and then return in massive numbers.  The latter part could only be confirmed in this century.  Other claims, such as mass revelation with a continuous unbroken chain (jump down to the heading, “Judaism” in the link) are just as wild, but yet, we can see the evidence.  Yet, how many nihilists suddenly start believing in the Torah’s authenticity?

Another example – While obtaining my undergraduate biology degree, the math behind life beginning as we know it boggled my mind.  It is still, to my understanding, very much an unsolved an unreciprocal problem.  My genetics professor, who remembered me years later as the only student to discuss G_d during office hours, fully agreed with me on this point . . . it couldn’t happen, but yet he said, “I have faith that it happened because . . . it happened.”  I thought that was intellectually honest (if not a tautology). Present someone (intellectually honest) who believes in the authenticity of the Bible with a proof of the age of the universe and he will try and fit it in with his theology . . . present someone (intellectually honest) with incredible mathematical claims for spontaneous generation and development of humans in only a few billion years, and, well . . . he may just admit it’s on “faith”.

Folly of Reason

The folley of reason – you see a 2D shape, I see a different 2D shape, but we’re both right.  No faith, then no cylinder.

“Reason”, as Asimov like to use the term, is “coldly logical.”  We examine, we theorize, and we test.  Problem: we can’t apply the scientific method to the past or even examine with much certainty whether the law of physics were constant before we started examining them.  “Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell if you know understanding.” says the Creator to Iyov [Job] (38:4).  Those things that we hold as constant, might not be.  While we can test and review results without emotion, the postulates we choose and the conclusions we draw from them are emotion-laden.  For all we know, every particle within our view is doubling in size every moment in comparison to a much bigger meta-verse and this has some effect that we aren’t comprehending.  All that remains constant is – our own postulates.  I know why and how I chose mine, or at least, I think I do.  I choose those that make the most sense and yield the most pleasure . . . at least, according to my postulates.

Asimov would tell you that you can only act based on reason.  I agree.  Where I disagree is what he chooses as “reasonable” . . . his “postulates” which are based on emotion.  He said in 1982, “Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.”  That is a very honest self-assessment, but, to me, choosing based on a feeling and calling it a “waste of time” to examine what contradicts his feeling seems irrational.  (I am not, however, passing judgment on Asimov as a whole of which I do not know nearly enough information . . . just this quote.)

Kant vs. R’Shimson Dovid Pinchus

Immanuel Kant argued that if there is a G_d, this is irrelevant because why would an infinite G_d care about us?  Why would it relate to us?  We would be nothing.  How could we ever approach or understand something so much greater than ourselves?  We have no faculties to do so, so why bother?  This is very close to what Asimov argues and what’s argued in G_d 2.0 (a physicist who does believe in a guiding, omniscient creator or force of some kind).  It is also almost identical to the argument of Bildad in sefer Iyov [Job] (though he clearly still believes in the positive in G_d’s existence), and I’ve heard it from atheists.  One answer is here, in this guest blog post.

The best refutation that I’ve heard to the unattainable ability to reach an infinite Creator who might not even care about us comes from R’Shimson Dovid Pincus.  He doesn’t refer to Kant, et al, by name, but he posits like this – if you posit that the Creator doesn’t care what we do or that we can’t relate to the Creator, then you are positing a weak creator.  Your conception of “infinite” is lacking.  Imagine a bird removing a speck of dust from a mountain . . . one speck at a time, going up and down for a trillion years until the mountain is gone.  That’s not infinite and that’s only in one dimension.  Infinite in all directions and dimensions is much more than that in time, space, and so forth.  This infinite Creator who creates the universe would be . . . infinite.  There would be a path to understanding and growing closer to and knowing, at least, aspects of the Creator as we come closer and closer and closer (or farther and farther away).  We can relate to the Creator and the way we do that is with our intellect and our conversations (e.g. meditation or prayer) to the Creator.  We can manipulate the world in this manner, but this is verifiable only for each individual who does so.  I can’t know the sincerity of your thoughts or the level of your arrogance versus humility in your heart.  This is explained further below.

Jewish Text on the Folly of Reason

This heading, even more so than the above headings, could be written in volumes.  I’m not a major talmud chochim [scholar], but I have come across two sources i find poignant.  First, on that “cold logical reason” that Asimov describes.  The Gemora [Talmud] speaks about the famous case of King Solomon judging that a baby should be split in two.  The real mother would rather the baby go to the other woman, than see her own child die (It’s quite a fascinating section of Gemora, covering many angles, but for brevity, I quote only a small portion):

The king answered and said, “Give her the living child . . . she is his mother.”  How did he know?  Maybe, she had been acting craftily?  It was a bas kol [heavenly voice] that came forth and said, “She is his mother.” – Makkos 32b

A few points here: Jews are known for questioning everything.  Most of us, secular or religious, are big on reason.  I’m pretty sure this is where it comes from – even on something such as the great wisdom of Solomon, the wisest of people, who don’t just take it on faith that he reasoned it out smarter than anyone else, though once someone is has shown themselves to reason better than we, than we’ll probably listen to him whether he be Einstein or a great Rabbi.  That is, after all, reasonable.

Maybe, just maybe, the false mother realized ahead of time that he’d make this judgment and planned out, or on the spot, faked what would show that she is the real mother (empathy for the child) and the real mother was psychopath who only cared about winning.  It’s a possibility, albeit remote.  So the conclusion – it wasn’t just relying on cold logical reasoning.  If we did that, we couldn’t move . . . we could never make a decision.  There is also trust in the Creator that we will make the right decision, such that here the heavens even told the answer.

Jewish Text on the Folly of Faith

This quote is directly on how to have effective prayer.

R’Hanin said in the name of R’Hanina: “If one prays long his prayer does not pass unheeded” . . . But is this so? has not R’Chiya ben Abba said in the name of R’Yochanon, “If one prays long and looks for the fulfillment of his prayer, in the end he will have vexation of heart” . . . There is no contradiction: one statement speaks of a man who prays long and looks for the fulfillment of his prayer, the other of one who prays long without looking for the fulfillment of his prayer.  R’Hama ben Rav’Hanina said, “If a man sees that he prays and is not answered, he should pray again.”  – Berechos 32b.

For those who who want to test G_d and see that what they request is answered, to quote R’Shimshon Dovid Pinchus, you’re trying to make the infinite Creator into a slave that serves you . . . if you do x, you expect the infinite Creator to do y.  If you expect it to work that way, your conception of infinite and your place within it is rather flawed . . . you are leaving room for yourself, not for the Creator.  It takes humility and is almost a seeming contradiction.  Only if you don’t look for fulfillment, are you answered.  That is, humble yourself and realize that it is not you running the show . . . it is the infinite Creator (Hashem, or if you prefer, “G_d”).  The more you realize that, and the more you make your will into His will, the more His will becomes your will:

Make that His will should be your will, so that He should make your will to be as His will. Nullify your will before His will, so that He should nullify the will of others before your will. – Pirkei Avos [Ethics of our Fathers] 2:4

Though there is one way in which we’re allowed to test G_d, it still does involve doing “His will” and it’s not easy (follow the link in the sentence).  Thus, anyone who says, “If there’s a G_d, he’ll reveal himself to me” or “I don’t see the evidence, therefore there is no G_d” has it backwards.  Look smarter, not harder!

Conclusion

The pluralist argument that “there are multiple truths” is correct in some sense … but it all collapses down into an ultimate, underlying truth.  As Asimov said in an interview with Bill Moyers in 1988, “I have my faith, you have your faith, and there’s no way in which I can translate my faith to you or vice versa”, that may be true, but it does not discount that cold rationality by itself is deadly as is cold faith.  One can go off the deep end with either and do terrible things.  Then again, what is “terrible”?  For that, we need a mix of both.

Judaism has reason-based faith, but also has trusting in a transmission of a tradition from Sinai so that we can know what is truth and what is not.  As a Patent Attorney, there have been numerous people to whom I’ve tried to convince them not to proceed with their ideas … it will never work and it’s a waste of money.  I convince few of them of anything but my honestly (and then end up making more money, somewhat akin to the quote above from the Talmud where if you don’t expect to get it, then that’s when you do).  The exception was a lady who asked her Rebbe his opinion . . . that was bad for business.  Yet, that’s how we make our decisions as Jews.  We are rational but we trust in the chain since Sinai which tells what is rational and we can test via our personal experience and humility.  Even further, it then becomes logical and reasonable that we do not proselytize others who do not have the same transmission.  How can we?

I hope I have done the topic some justice.  While I have also tried to be fair, my own bias, like that of any author, cannot be entirely masked.  Feel free to comment.