Torah and Jewish Idea > Torah and Jewish Idea
The Reversal of Retrograde Rotation
Kahane-Was-Right BT:
--- Quote from: galileerat on July 23, 2009, 03:13:40 AM ---
Does the Jewish date 5769 have any meaning to you?!
--- End quote ---
We didn't always date ourselves that way. But either way, that says nothing about how old the earth is. It's a convention.
--- Quote ---"Some people believe in the Torah implicitly, but they believe in evolution too. Exactly how you reconcile evolution with the Torah, that’s not so easy!
--- End quote ---
If one insists upon a literalist fundamentalist reading of Torah and to pretend that it's a science book, then for sure that's not easy. But the vast majority of people who believe in Chumash and also have seen the evidence for evolution/old universe and are convinced the science is true, these people do not insist upon fundamentalist readings of Chumash, and so it is not quite so difficult. Like all great rabbis, Rabbi Miller is seeing the arguments of his opponents through his own lens - just like the rishonim did - but when one realizes that his opponents in this argument do not begin with the same starting assumptions that he does, much difficulty drops away.
--- Quote --- "The universe will exist 6000 years" (Sanhedrin 97)!
--- End quote ---
Once again you are quoting a midrash. Other contrary midrashim exist and one is not forced to take this as the only, immutable objective truth. Most kabalists don't even agree with this. And I mean the real kabbalists, not the clowns running around today. But whether they do or don't agree with it is not the point. You present it as dogmatic, as a gospel. In no other facet of Jewish law or Jewish hashkafa do we treat midrashim in such a way. It is an fundamentalist approach to do so.
With your denial of the heliocentricity of the planets, which has been proven through innumerable observations and fact, you are basically claiming right now that 2+2 = 5.
Yochai:
--- Quote from: Kahane-Was-Right BT on July 23, 2009, 02:41:41 AM ---
--- Quote from: Yochai on July 22, 2009, 08:48:35 PM ---
I can tell you as a person who is very close to the Lubavticher community, that most Lubavitchers will agree with the Rebbe and state that the universe is in fact geocentric.
--- End quote ---
And they are also mistaken, but if any of them ever went to university got a degree in biology and then went on to do real scientific research, they would no longer agree to such things. Unless they are delusional. Some people believe anything a certain rebbe says is 100% true and infallible. This to me is poisonous ideology and certainly not consistent with a rebbe being human and rabbis being fallible like anyone else. Not to mention that rabbis with an expertise in Torah often do not have the means or the time to develop an expertise in all other subjects known to man, let alone even a simple example like, say, biochemistry. So it is unreasonable to think such things that rabbis will know everything. Like the Rambam would say, best to consult a doctor about medicine, not a rabbi who is not trained in it. Same here with regards to complicated science.
--- End quote ---
One of my good friends at University is a Chabadnik, who is now on his way to a masters in biology, and he has stood by this. I am not a science expert, so I cannot judge his research, but I do know that he drives many professors and students crazy because he uses their own theories to show that they cannot prove him wrong.
I am not going to pick a side on this issue, because truthfully, science is not my expertise. But I will say that it is naive to say that anybody has been proven 100% wrong about science. The Lubavitcher Rebbe was very knowledgable in science (regardless of the leftist drek that states he did not attend the schools he claimed- If you believe those stories, the it means that HaRav Soloveitchik is also a liar, as he talks of his experiences with the Rebbe in Berlin), and his final conclusion (with the help of many of his Chossids- think of all the Baalei Teshuvah in Chabad who have great scientific knowledge from the secular world.) was that the universe is geocentric.
The issue also lies within the fact that the Rambam is a key source on this. As the Rambams work was mostly uncited, one must delve through many seforim to find the basis for his rulings. On this, I trust the Rebbe's knowledge of Rambam over my own. The fact is that the Rebbe had no problem stating that some of Rambam's medical ideas were incorrect upon investigation, even though the Rambam was a doctor, so the Rebbe was not just a blind follower. He undertook serious Chakiro, much like the Rambam, and came to his conclusion.
You are right, it is best to consult a doctor about medicine, not a Rabbi who is not trained in it. But if you can have both, then that is ideal. The Rebbe had access to Baalei Teshuvah who were doctors in biology, physics, etc, and they came to the same conclusion, which is that geocentrism cannot be disproved.
Lastly, on the age of the universe, there is nothing in the Torah stating that the universe is 5769 years old. To say so is to say that one has a complete understanding of the process of creation, which in itself is probably the most difficult and complex area of the Chumash
Moshe92:
Before I saw this thread, I didn't even know that there are people alive today who believe in geocentricism. Newton's Laws and Kepler's Laws show that the earth has to revolve around the sun.
Yochai:
--- Quote from: Moshe92 on July 23, 2009, 12:04:30 PM ---Before I saw this thread, I didn't even know that there are people alive today who believe in geocentricism. Newton's Laws and Kepler's Laws show that the earth has to revolve around the sun.
--- End quote ---
Scientific laws have also proven that something cannot be formed out of nothing. Which means that creation is bogus.
Let me restate, I am not a geocentrist, and I believe that the intricacies of science in our world is a creation of Hashem, so I am not scared to state that there are many complex biological processes, and that many of them are real, and not created by scientists, but by Hashem.
At the same time, I do not believe that any scientist with a prestigious title is always going to be right.
Hashem made the life process in this world very complex, with set rules and so forth. Nonethless, when a scientist makes an observation, we are not bound to think that he is right just because it makes sense in the created world of theory that academic scientists have created for themselves.
Kahane-Was-Right BT:
--- Quote from: Yochai on July 23, 2009, 11:05:08 AM ---
--- Quote from: Kahane-Was-Right BT on July 23, 2009, 02:41:41 AM ---
--- Quote from: Yochai on July 22, 2009, 08:48:35 PM ---
I can tell you as a person who is very close to the Lubavticher community, that most Lubavitchers will agree with the Rebbe and state that the universe is in fact geocentric.
--- End quote ---
And they are also mistaken, but if any of them ever went to university got a degree in biology and then went on to do real scientific research, they would no longer agree to such things. Unless they are delusional. Some people believe anything a certain rebbe says is 100% true and infallible. This to me is poisonous ideology and certainly not consistent with a rebbe being human and rabbis being fallible like anyone else. Not to mention that rabbis with an expertise in Torah often do not have the means or the time to develop an expertise in all other subjects known to man, let alone even a simple example like, say, biochemistry. So it is unreasonable to think such things that rabbis will know everything. Like the Rambam would say, best to consult a doctor about medicine, not a rabbi who is not trained in it. Same here with regards to complicated science.
--- End quote ---
The Lubavitcher Rebbe was very knowledgable in science (regardless of the leftist drek that states he did not attend the schools he claimed- If you believe those stories, the it means that HaRav Soloveitchik is also a liar, as he talks of his experiences with the Rebbe in Berlin),
--- End quote ---
I don't know of any such "drek." And I never claimed the Lubavitcher Rebbe or anyone else was a liar. It IS a mistake to say he was trained in science though. He studied philosophy and was at least an acquaintence of Rav Soloveitchik while they both studied at University of Berlin.
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