Thank you so much for this, I've been looking forward to your commentary on Schroeder since you mentioned him. Stuff like making analogies between quantum models that don't have standard causality and what we would call miracles, and the whole thing with the time dilation and the relativistic day length, were the sort of arguments that annoyed me when I heard Schroeder speak.
I agree with you that being able to show flaws in popular science accounts of either cosmology or evolution doesn't tell you much about the existence or nature of God. But I can see how pointing out those flaws, in a Jewish frame, was useful to you. I also agree with you that trying to reconcile Torah with contemporary science isn't going to work well, because Torah is eternal and scientific understandings change, that's what makes them scientific. And yeah, Nachmanides was primarily doing mysticism, not science, it's not surprising that the details of his thought in some ways hold up better than Maimonides, precisely because he went straight to spiritual insight and didn't try to reconcile anything with his Mediaeval understanding of physics. I can absolutely see the value of knowing that it is possible to find a reconciliation, very mcuh so.
Anyway, thanks again for this post, it's great stuff.
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Date: 2016-08-26 11:01 am (UTC)I agree with you that being able to show flaws in popular science accounts of either cosmology or evolution doesn't tell you much about the existence or nature of God. But I can see how pointing out those flaws, in a Jewish frame, was useful to you. I also agree with you that trying to reconcile Torah with contemporary science isn't going to work well, because Torah is eternal and scientific understandings change, that's what makes them scientific. And yeah, Nachmanides was primarily doing mysticism, not science, it's not surprising that the details of his thought in some ways hold up better than Maimonides, precisely because he went straight to spiritual insight and didn't try to reconcile anything with his Mediaeval understanding of physics. I can absolutely see the value of knowing that it is possible to find a reconciliation, very mcuh so.
Anyway, thanks again for this post, it's great stuff.