Re: SKEPTIC article on O Jews and science

On Fri, 21 Jul 2006 15:19:02 +0000 (UTC), Matt Silberstein <RemoveThisPrefixmatts2nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
: If God is behind everything then, in a very real sense, there are no
: laws of physics, only the appearance of them. As such God can make any
: initial conditions God wants and then let things work by those
: apparent laws.

Rav Dessler says just that. Theat "teva" (nature) is merely a set of
patterns G-d willingly uses when conducting most of His actions (or
most of the impact of His one Act of creation, to be pedantic).

:>Second, even with the same laws of physics, the results would be
:>unpredictable and defy the apparent value of having laws of physics if
:>the inputs were unpredictable by those law.

: No, physics, all science, only goes one way. You put in initial
: conditions and produce results. That the laws, the human made models,
: would produce erroneous results, is irrelevant. God is certainly not
: constrained by our models.

Actually, physics goes both ways. There is much ink spilled as to where
the arrow of time from past to future comes from, since physics is time
symmetric. If I know the location and momentum of a ball, I can compute
its past trajectory as well as its future. Theoretically, I could just
add some info and compute backward to the hand that threw it no less
than forward to the ground it tore up.

But my point is that even if the model is correct, if the inputs are
not predictable, the results won't be either. Thus, if the inputs don't
conform to the results of natural law, the outputs, the reality we have
today, will lack predictability. We could talk about how situations we
know will change, at least to the extent that we know them. But not plan
situations we didn't yet encounter.

....
:>Since the world gives you only "is", not "ought", that's a world in which
:>religion is less

: I think you miss my point. In order for me to see a book or a teacher
: or a community or whatever as having the ability to tell me something
: I have to trust my senses. The Torah may well be some eternal object,
: but I can only read the physical book and in a language taught to me
: by people in the world.

Not only your senses. You are also self-aware. Which means that you can
also "read" the internal experience of obeying the Torah. Admittedly,
it is very difficult to separate that experience from the emotions that
it causes. There is the experience of keeping Shabbos, the emotions
raised by keeping Shabbos, and our judgment of Shabbos as being what
the Torah (written and Oral) claims it is. But in practice, I think that
our difficulty separating the first two are that much of an issue. Our
emotional reactions are themselves part of the judgement you're trying
to make.

A person doesn't become observant because he enjoyed Shabbos. He becomes
observant because the experience of Shabbos was a data point that argued
its truth. The enjoyment was part of his self realizing the value of
the experience itself.

:>: The Church of Last Thursday says that God created
:>: the Universe Last Thursday (obviously a holy day), we were all created
:>: with memories intact of previous time. As you said, how can we
:>: distinguish between that world and one really created 14 billion years
:>: ago?

:>Not what I said. I said that they are ontologically the same thing. A
:>universe created last Thursday with a backfilled history is the same as
:>one that created at the beginning of that history. They're the same thing,
:>not just seem like the same thing.

: They are *epistemologically* the same: they are indistinguishable to
: us. That speaks to what we can know, not what is.

True to. But I'm saying we can not know the difference because there is
no difference "out there". Both describe the same 4D universe, and only
differ in what point in time they attribute their naarative of G-d doing
it. Since G-d didn't act within time, it's mere words.

:>The only difference is assigning a time
:>to when the creation took place. But since the time itself was created,
:>creation had no "when", only a "when the effects were first manifest".

: I don't see how you end up disagreeing with me. If we accept that God
: faked the evidence then the world could be 6,000 years old, 14
: billion, or brand new. We can't know and so the only meaningful
: conclusion is that the world is what it appears to be. Anything else
: is madness.

I tried to be clear that I'm discussing two things:

1- Defending the false-history theory, which is held by people I respect.
I myself do not believe it, so my defense is limited to addressing the
alleged trivial problems, allowing that they and I could well disagree
on more subtle issues.

On that I wrote that there could be motivations other than trying to fool
us. I suggested one possitibility, and also that the idea of trying to
understand G-d's motives is usually futile.

2- Explaining what I believe is the subtle error. That's the ontological
identity between a "fake history" perfectly made as part of creation and
a real history.

:-)BBii!
-mi

--
Micha Berger The fittingness of your matzos [for the seder]
micha@xxxxxxxxxxx isn't complete with being careful in the laws
http://www.aishdas.org of Passover. One must also be very careful in
Fax: (270) 514-1507 the laws of business. - Rabbi Israel Salanter
.

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