Q&A: Rational Faith
Rational Faith
Question
Hello Rabbi,
From what I understood from you, faith based on the causal proof is completely rational, and someone who does not believe it is not rational. As an example, you bring the example of the tides and inferring the unknown, and that the only way to come to know new things about the world is by inferring the unknown from what is known. So in the same way, God is also a valid explanation. But my question is this: after all, the force of gravity is not a “novelty” in the same sense as God. In the end, it is just another law, only a more inclusive one. By contrast, God is a concept that does not require a cause, and is not from the world of phenomena. Even so, is it still appropriate to say that the comparison is a good one and that the two are equivalent?
Answer
I distinguished between the law of gravitation and the force of gravity. The law of gravitation is only a description of phenomena. But the force of gravity is an entity. We infer the existence of that entity from the phenomena (together with the assumption that there are no phenomena without a cause that produces them). The same is true regarding the existence of God, which is inferred from the complexity of the world and from the principle that there is no phenomenon without a cause that produces it.
Of course there are differences between the entities, but the logical move is definitely similar.
Discussion on Answer
The descriptions in terms of force and of geometric curvature are equivalent to one another. As far as I understand, the question of whether there is or is not a force has no real meaning. These are two forms of description.
You can make do with a divine entity, and still there is an entity that produces the gravitational phenomena. It is more convenient to refer to it as the force of gravity. The assumption is that God does not play on the physical field. This is really a semantic matter.
Sorry for pulling this question out of the archive; I tried to “save” a new question for myself (assuming that is more convenient for the Rabbi), and while searching I got here.
My physics knowledge is weak, but I understood that according to general relativity there is no such thing as the force of gravity. If so, then this is not an inference from the known or from the new, but only a more precise description of the motion of bodies in space. Does the Rabbi nevertheless think that a gravitational force exists, or was this just an illustration based on Newton’s line of reasoning at the time?
Another question: why not be satisfied, on the basis of the phenomena, with a divine entity that compels the world to behave according to its laws? Why invoke an additional intermediate entity called “the force of gravity”?