Q&A: Rain as Evidence for Divine Providence
Rain as Evidence for Divine Providence
Question
The Vilna Gaon, as brought in Aderet Eliyahu on Deuteronomy, argued that the comparison in Tractate Ta’anit between rain and the resurrection of the dead is because the philosophers admit that rain has no laws of nature—sometimes it falls and sometimes it doesn’t—and this shows the mighty acts of God.
It seems to me that once you wrote that obviously there are laws, it’s just that there is no scale by which to measure them, and if there were a sufficiently sophisticated computer, we would know.
Your friend Nadav Shnerb, if I remember correctly, wrote in an article (a nice one) about the climate crisis that it’s impossible to assess all the changes involved in weather.
Maybe there really is something non-natural here?
Answer
Maybe. If they discover this in a convincing way, I’ll be glad to hear about it.
Discussion on Answer
Indeed, that’s what I wrote.
Honorable Rabbi Michi, so why in quantum theory do we say that there is no lawfulness? A computer hasn’t yet arisen that can calculate the lawfulness of quanta. People have at most 250 IQ. Maybe you need 1000 IQ to understand the lawfulness of quanta?
We don’t say there is no lawfulness, but rather that there is no causality (in the usual sense). There is always the possibility that a super-intelligence will understand something that we do not understand. So what? The conclusions we have for now are the best we’ve got. When the sages come and show us that we were wrong, we’ll accept it.
I apologize for these naive questions, but do we know, then, the behavior of quanta and can we predict it in advance?
There is no such thing as “the behavior of quanta.” Anyone who wants to understand quantum theory has to study it. You won’t learn it from questions here.
But fateful questions such as God and the implications of that—those can be learned here from questions on the site?
Have a peaceful Sabbath.
They may be fateful, but they are less complicated and more accessible to people without prior professional education. This comparison is itself absurd.
Indeed. But because of the importance of the subject, there is no room for lightheadedness even if it is less complicated. That’s how it seems to me. In order to go to war, you convene a cabinet even if the situation is less complicated than other issues.
Maybe I wasn’t understood properly, maybe I phrased it incorrectly for someone who knows physics, but my question was whether physicists today know the physics of quanta. Do they know the course of Schrödinger’s cat—can they predict whether it will come out alive or dead? That’s all. If there is lawfulness, as His Exalted Honor wrote, then does the law predict the death of the cat for me? I understand “lawfulness” as something predictive. If the terms are different in physics, then forgive me. I don’t understand why prior professional education is needed for an answer to that. It sounds to me like a question with a yes/no option. If not, and this question does require prior professional education, then again, forgive me. But my intuition says you didn’t understand what I’m asking.
R, if the subject is complicated, then you also can’t casually declare that there is a God and there is providence and there is Torah. There are books upon books showing that every day rabbis in all generations expressed opinions on the matter without any cabinet, and it doesn’t even seem that they themselves invested one-thousandth of the effort they invested in pieces of meat that become carrion.
Fortunate are the believers. Those rabbis merited simple faith—simple in both senses of the word, and both are positive. I was talking about people who investigate this topic through questions here on the site. These are two aspects of faith. In the first aspect, there is nothing to invest; the question does not even begin.
It reminds me of the period when Rabbi Michael Abraham published the trilogy and some people raised the problem of leaving religion because of engaging with these issues—not because of the way one is exposed to the topic, but because of the very fact of being exposed to the topic. There too there was lightheadedness about the matter.
Nadav didn’t write that there is something supernatural about rain, only that it’s hard to assess the full set of details. But obviously it is univocal and deterministic.