Q&A: Is Maimonides' Proof of God's Infinity Still Correct Today?
Is Maimonides' Proof of God's Infinity Still Correct Today?
Question
Maimonides writes in Chapter 1 of Foundations of the Torah, halakhah 7: “And our God, blessed be His name, since His power has no end and is uninterrupted—for the sphere revolves continually—His power is not the power of a body.” Is it still correct today to say that “the sphere revolves by a power that has no end”? After all, every form of energy seemingly has an end. And if that is not correct, is there any created thing that can be defined as “infinite,” so that we could validate Maimonides’ proof from somewhere else? Thanks, Eli
Answer
The rotation of a sphere, assuming there is a vacuum (and of course that there is a sphere), does not require energy. As long as no force acts on a body, it continues moving at a constant speed in a straight line.
I didn’t understand your question. If energy really does have an end, then that itself is the proof. The fact is that the sphere keeps rotating all the time.
Discussion on Answer
If you place a body in a state of rotation around some center (let’s say it’s held by a string) in a vacuum, it will keep rotating forever. You don’t need infinite energy for that. It has a certain amount of energy, and it remains with it forever and isn’t used up (rotation doesn’t consume energy, because the force acting on the body is perpendicular to the direction of its motion).
Eli,
It’s hard for me to understand how your words form coherent sentences, but in any case it seems that you’re asking whether there is proof from physics for the existence of God. So the answer is of course no. Even if the energy that exists in the world is infinite, that is still just the energy that exists in the world, and it doesn’t require any God. It might require God for the creation, but that is precisely not Maimonides’ proof (that is, Aristotle’s proof).
And more generally, a gap in our knowledge of physics is not supposed to prove the existence of God, except perhaps if it’s an essential gap (that is, one that further research likely cannot close). An ordinary gap in physics requires more research to close it (that’s what in this discourse is called: God of the gaps). But as noted, here there isn’t even a gap in physics.
Does the Rabbi think the Big Bang is enough scientific knowledge to require God?
After all, creation ex nihilo cannot be, and the Big Bang claims that time, energy, and matter were created.
The Big Bang does not claim creation ex nihilo, but the opposite: the explosion of something that already existed.
That doesn’t seem to be what the Davidson Institute says….
Maybe there’s a dispute among scientists?
When the Davidson Institute becomes scientists, we’ll talk (by the way, neither am I). Given the amount of nonsense fabricated in their name that reaches here, I really already don’t think they should be taken seriously. It seems to me like an institute for promoting agendas.
The proof is built on something that no creature has ever seen: eternal motion. No observer will ever see eternal motion, because “eternal” applies only to something that does not end until eternity ends, and not a minute earlier. But when eternity ends, there will be no one there to see that the motion persisted until then.
Since it is known that there is no knowledge, nor can there be any knowledge, of the existence of perpetual rotation, there is no need at all to explain perpetual rotation, and there is no way to learn anything whatsoever from perpetual rotation.
Correct. By that logic, the Euclidean assumption that in Euclidean space two parallel lines never meet is also foolishness. And so too Newton’s claim that any two bodies with mass attract one another is baseless, absurd speculation.
If we assume that the rotation of the sphere—that is, the astronomical rotation—came, say, from the Big Bang, then even though that energy operates in a vacuum, is it defined as infinite?