I still haven’t managed to read everything you wrote, and later on I’ll send another question.

Let me stress that this is not a religious or faith question. It’s a question of how it could be that Maimonides, who is clearly seen from the Guide for the Perplexed to have been an extraordinary sage, understood things as follows, whereas to me it seems impossible. Where is the mistake here?

Throughout Part II of the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides explains that there is no rational way to prove demonstratively that the world is created and not eternal, and not necessarily emanating from God the way an intelligible conclusion follows necessarily from intellect — meaning that the world came from God without intention and will. (Part II, chapter 21.) Therefore we need prophecy, through which we received that the world is created and does not necessarily follow from God.

I do not understand his words at all. After all, the world and everything known to us are only contingent existents, and we need to find a reason why they exist; and that reason must necessarily be such that it is a necessary existent.
A necessary existent and a contingent existent are utterly different from one another, as different as can be (obviously conceptually, as Maimonides himself elaborates in Part I, chapter 55 and on).
And it is impossible to conceive that the contingent would emerge from it except through what we call will — that truth willed there to be contingency.

So how could Maimonides not have concluded that the world is created, and that the necessary existent willed there to be a world?

I don’t answer the question of how so-and-so made a mistake. That doesn’t interest me and involves speculation. The important question is what is a correct argument and what is not. By the way, what you wrote here is an argument for the existence of a philosophical God, not for Jewish faith.

The premise of the question, of course, is that since Maimonides was certainly wise, then if I, for example, think his words are incomprehensible, then obviously I’m the one who is mistaken. And that interests me very much: where am I mistaken in this line of reasoning? Why isn’t this a decisive proof?
Or should we explain that although this is strong evidence, it can still be understood differently, and therefore Maimonides did not prove it — and if so, I would like to know how.

It’s a long and wearisome matter. It’s detailed in the notebooks on my site.

I’d appreciate it if you could point me to better places to look into out of the sea of material that has now been sent.
Thanks.

I can’t. It’s material that is built in a linear way.

I copied a passage from what you wrote rejecting the idea of an eternal universe,

because I want to ask about it, since I couldn’t understand this rejection at all. For according to the eternal-universe view, this is not an infinite chain of causes. Rather, suppose we look at some clod of earth — we say that it didn’t come into being out of empty space, but that it itself was always there. So where does your claim enter here?

That is true only regarding changing things, like human beings, where one is the cause of the next, not regarding something stable.

As for scientific proof, I saw someone who wrote a proof from the decay of substances: uranium, for example, slowly turns into lead; from the fact that there is still uranium, it is proven that the universe had a temporal beginning, and so on. Is that really a good and strong proof?

Introduction

Ever since the cosmological argument has existed, the Aristotelian possibility of an eternal universe has stood against it. Even if we accept the premise that everything that exists must have a cause or reason, that applies to entities that came into being at some stage. But what about entities that have existed forever? Here, seemingly, there is no room to assume the existence of a cause or reason. In the previous chapter we saw that the principle that says there must be a cause for the existence of an entity is learned by applying the principle of causality to the process by which those entities came into existence. But entities that never came into existence never underwent a process of coming into existence, and therefore, seemingly, there is no need to posit a cause for their existence.

Reversing the direction

What this challenge attacks is the assumption that everything in our experience (including the universe) must have a cause for its existence. But the other side of the coin is that the cosmological argument is addressed to someone who adopts its premises. And someone who adopts this premise presumably assumes implicitly that the things in our experience, and especially the universe, are things that came into being in time or at some stage, and therefore must have a cause for their existence. What justifies such an assumption? We will bring here several such justifications: one scientific and two philosophical.

First philosophical rejection: concrete infinity again

First, the proposal that our universe is eternal takes us back to the discussion of concrete infinity. In chapters 3–4 we examined what can be said about infinity and what cannot. We saw there that concrete references to infinity are problematic, and at most one can speak of infinity in potential terms. Is speaking about an eternal universe a concrete or a potential reference?

Simply put, when the claim is raised that our universe is eternal, this is a concrete infinity and not a potential one. The reason is that this claim is meant to negate the need for the existence of a first cause. What always exists needs no cause. But here we must assume that the universe exists for an infinite time, and it is not enough for us that it exists for as long a time as we wish (“as much as we want”). In terms of the turtle chain, there is an assumption here that there is some turtle “down below,” and we are not satisfied with only a potential reference to successive stages.

One may now ask: why, when the cosmological argument concludes that God is the first cause of the universe, is it not exposed to the same difficulty? After all, there too we claim that God is eternal, and seemingly here too we are speaking of a concrete and not a potential reference to His infinity. We already dealt with this question throughout chapter 4, where we explained that the claim of eternity regarding Him is דווקא a potential use of the concept of infinity. How is that different from the claim about the eternity of the universe?

Regarding God, the assumption that He exists for an infinite time does not come to negate the need for a cause. He does not need a cause because the principle of causality does not apply to Him. On the contrary, we did not assume there at all that God is eternal. The conclusion that He is eternal was a result of the conclusion of the cosmological argument that He does not need a cause (He is the first link in the chain, which by its very nature and type does not need a cause). One may now ask how long He has existed, if before Him there was nothing. To that we answered that He fills the time axis, and regarding the time axis one can speak in potential terms. Beyond that, the infinity of the time axis is an assumption not connected to the cosmological argument. By contrast, the assumption that the universe is eternal, or infinite, is brought precisely in order to reject the need for a cause for its existence. That is the body of the argument. As stated, the premise of the refined cosmological argument was that the universe is the kind of thing that does require a cause, and therefore there only a claim about its eternity can serve as a basis to deny the need for a cause for its existence. Therefore, when we speak about the eternity of the universe, we really do require a concrete infinity and not a potential one. By contrast, the conclusion of the cosmological argument with respect to God does not directly assume His eternity, and a potential determination is enough for us, as we explained.

I didn’t understand your question. I explained that infinite time is a concrete infinity. I wasn’t talking about an infinite chain of causes.
Decay proves nothing, because the question is when it began. It didn’t begin at the Big Bang, since the materials familiar to us today did not yet exist then.

Thanks.
I didn’t understand why decay doesn’t prove that at least the universe is not eternal, because over an infinite amount of time it would already have decayed.
The point of this proof is that even if we don’t know from the Big Bang, we would still know this much: that we don’t have infinite time behind us.

By the way, Fred Hoyle rejected the proof for the Big Bang from redshift by raising a doubt — perhaps the universe pulsates and from time to time returns backward.

I explained that the decay of a certain element can begin only from the point at which that element existed. But it was formed at some stage in history. The things that existed before it already decayed and disappeared, if they were of the decaying sort at all.

Meaning, then, that these things were not always there,
and if enough time passes, many elements should already no longer exist as they do here,
and therefore it necessarily had a beginning.
Is that a good proof?

No. The end of your own comment already said so, about the contractions/pulsations of the universe. And that is only one possible line of rejection.

So is he also right regarding the redshift?

It should be clarified that if we assume the universe returns to its first point from time to time, as he says, then we still need to bring proof from order, when we ask how it returned and re-expanded into such an ordered state.
But if we assume the universe goes backward only a little, then perhaps all the order is eternal too, and then there is not so much room to ask for a reason for the order, because that’s just how it is and always has been.
Only perhaps such a claim cannot stand, because if for some reason the forces that cause expansion were to cease, then the forces of attraction would act to the end and everything would collapse.
Is that correct?

Anything could be right. I can suggest lots more crazy models. Usually people prefer the simpler one.

Seemingly, if we’re looking for simplicity,
the same should apply to the proof from the decay of materials — or is that easier to dismiss there?

And on the main issue of eternity, one should note that the matter is seemingly contradicted by the fact that the reality before us is only contingent and not necessary, whereas an eternal universe is in truth necessary. And we perceive contingency, so according to our intellect it is necessary that it is not eternal.

I think one must identify the necessary with the eternal, but not the eternal with the necessary. There can be something eternal that is not necessary.

Another question:
In the notebook, Aristotle’s claim of an eternal universe was presented.

It should be noted that Maimonides in the Guide for the Perplexed does not agree to attribute this view to Aristotle or Plato at all.
He claims that in their opinion there is necessarily a cause for creation, and that is God; they only hold that creation necessarily followed from God, the way an intelligible conclusion follows from intellect (Part II, chapter 20), and therefore God cannot intervene and change anything, and miracles are impossible.

That is why I remarked at the beginning that I don’t understand at all how one can grasp such an idea — that from God, who is utterly different from creation, which is contingent and material, there should necessarily emerge automatically, without intention and will, something that is His opposite.
When there is no continuity between things, this can come about only through intention and will.
And as above, the assumption is that Maimonides was wiser than him, and therefore apparently it is possible to think this way. The question is how.

Maimonides explicitly says that Aristotle accepted an eternal universe. The fact that there is a God who emanates it is not relevant to the matter.
I didn’t understand the question. Maimonides’ wisdom is not relevant here. Ask the question itself, without connection to the wisdom of this or that person.

Now, this week people are accustomed to speak about the power of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, etc.
I want to clarify the whole matter of the power of the righteous — what is the explanation?
A. How does Rabbi Meir have the power to bring his teacher “Acher” out of Gehenna? Babylonian Talmud, Chagigah 15.
B. What does it mean that the death of the righteous atones, and why? It is very forced to say it is because people repent then, because if so that is not the death of the righteous itself, and more besides.
C. What does it mean that the righteous suffer for the sins of the generation? What is the sense of that, what is the connection?
And especially since in the holy books (Ramchal, The Way of God, and others) it is described that the righteous takes the suffering upon himself in order to appease the attribute of justice. What does that mean? Surely it cannot be that there is some destructive angel that wants to destroy, so they send it to vent its rage on the righteous person who is willing to give his life for his people.
D. A person can pray and repent a great deal and still hardly be saved, while another person goes and receives a blessing from a righteous person or sits on his chair and the salvation comes immediately. What is the justification for this?

I know nothing about any of this, and in my estimation nobody else knows either.

Do you have a straightforward explanation
of resting on the Sabbath according to the plain meaning?
What is the connection between the fact that God rested on this day and our obligation to rest on it?
And from the Torah itself, mere resting is enough, without delight and such.
What is the simple content of our concept of rest, and especially how does it connect to God’s rest?

Note that the Torah’s main demand is rest in itself, and not delight and enjoyment from the rest on our part. On the other hand, it is clear from Scripture that with God the main point was the day on which He rested and looked at the creation prepared for Him — a kind of ultimate delight, and therefore He blessed it. But we are not commanded to bless that day, only in the Prophets. And the main thing is the rest. That needs clarification.
Also, it cannot be explained that the Sabbath is God’s day in itself, and when it arrives one must rest as in a situation where the master of the house is present, because the Sabbath is on our seventh day, after our days of labor, and there is no independently existing world-date of “the seventh day.”
Rather, there is a parallel here: we need to be like God. That seems to be the main demand.
But in the verse “a Sabbath to the Lord” it sounds a bit different, as though God took the seventh day for Himself, and that needs clarification.

I also still didn’t understand what was written in the notebook rejecting the claim of the eternity of the world on the grounds that you can’t add as much time as you want backward. The claim of eternity says that this is simply how it was and it was never created — eternal and not dependent on time.

Two answers can be given:
1. The way to remember the creation of the world is through rest, not through delight. What matters is that the Holy One, blessed be He, created, not that afterward He delighted in creation. He also did all kinds of other things, and we did not make commemorations for all of them.
2. There are additional goals to the Sabbath, beyond remembering creation. For example, the goal of spiritual elevation, rest (social?) and the like.

I’m not familiar with the claim that you can’t add time backward. Bring the quotation and then we can discuss it.