Q&A: Hello Rabbi, regarding the series on science and faith that the Rabbi wrote on Ynet, about the physico-theological proof
Hello Rabbi, regarding the series on science and faith that the Rabbi wrote on Ynet, about the physico-theological proof
Question
Hello Rabbi, regarding the series on science and faith that the Rabbi wrote on Ynet, the Rabbi used the physico-theological proof.
As I understand it, talking about reality and causality in reality before there was a human being is meaningless, because according to Kant the entire phenomenal world is a result of the human soul (or consciousness…). In essence, speaking about how everything was created, what the first cause was, is problematic, because it takes us back to a place where there is no human being, and there there is no world that we "produce" in our consciousness. So speaking about the phenomenal world and causality before the creation of man is meaningless; is causality in the world a product of the human soul?
Rabbi, I’m not really asking a question, I just don’t understand, and I’d be happy if the Rabbi could expand on the subject, because I can’t connect what Kant says — that the reality we see is a product of the soul/consciousness — to the proof… because what sense does it make to talk about the phenomenal world before there was a human being? We have no idea there… (forgive the poor wording…) I’d appreciate an answer, thank you.
Answer
Greetings.
A similar argument to yours was raised by Rabbi Shem Tov Gפן (an ancestor of Moshe Dayan, Yonatan Geffen, Aviv Geffen, and others), who claimed that all questions about the age of the world are meaningless, because the age of the world is like the age of man, since time is a form of human perception (man created time).
In my opinion there is a double mistake here:
- Who says Kant is right?
- Even if he is right, and these categories are forms of human perception, they describe something real. For example, I see a table in the color red. Clearly, the sensation of the color red is only a result of how I am built. In the world itself there are no colors (except perhaps the crystalline structure of the material of the table, which reflects to me the wave of the wavelength that creates in me the sensation of the color red). But the color reflects a real phenomenon that exists in the world itself (the crystalline structure). Therefore, even if causality is only our way of describing the world, it still has a root in reality itself. In our language, that is causality.
- A different formulation, which is really the other side of the coin of argument 2: after these forms of perception were created, I look at the world through them, and I use them even when I look at or think about the world that is not before me. For example, in the case of time, even if time is a human set of glasses, I still, as a human being, look through it at the world, including the world that existed before there was man on earth. After all, if time is subjective, then in principle I should not be able to use it even about a time after the creation of the world but before my own birth (as long as I do not exist, my personal glasses do not exist). Am I unable to speak about the birth date of my father or grandfather? Clearly I can, because in my present mode of reference I describe the past that way as well. The same is true regarding causality. Even if causality is my glasses or my language, I use it in relation to every reality, at every time and in every situation. That is the form through which I think and perceive things.
Discussion on Answer
I didn’t understand.
Have a good week, Rabbi Michi. Could you expand on your rejection of Shem Tov Geffen’s argument? After all, even if today we can, by scientific means, claim that the world was created billions of years ago by inference and extrapolation, the Torah spoke in human language, and in their time — in fact until not long ago — they could not infer back so many years. Isn’t it correct to say that, at any rate, according to what they were able to attain, time was indeed created only with the development of human consciousness that apprehends that time — and this, according to the Torah, happened only 6,000 years ago? In other words, I am trying to say that the Torah’s answer was the absolute truth until the development of modern science. Is there a mistake here?