Just curious,

How many people from that group of committed Jews had a professional background in science?

That (“blind faith in science”) is a typical reaction of those committed Jews who themselves have no scientific education.

Hi Rabbi Rothstein,

Wouldn’t the legitimate opinion that all miracles have already been “programmed” into the creation of the world allow for the belief that God cannot change nature? While this would not exonerate the group of people that you’re referring to (as they should still understand that the possibility of a miracle exists) – they won’t change the natural order, which may or may not include a miracle in this instance.

Yehudi, Sadly, I have met Jews with a professional background who nonetheless had that attitude. As for Jenny, I think the “programmed miracles” view is a lot more complex than people believe– if, e.g., we believe in freewill, the course of history isn’t so determined that miracles could just pop up on program– but leaving that aside, it would still be in the nature of miracles that they would violate the laws of Nature as understood until that point. So, there might be a natural explanation for how a donkey spoke up to Bilam, but it’s taken thousands of years for us to find it, and we’re not there yet. Yet some scientists today– and the Jews who follow them– speak as if the laws of Nature they know are the categorical truth, and rule out anything that violates them. So even if the exceptions are already there in the program somewhere, we wouldn’t know them ahead of time, and would be shocked to see them, even if after the fact we could find a technical natural explanation for what happened. And, with all that, we still couldn’t say that Nature rules the world; only God does.

What do you mean by “miraculous recovery”? See the Sforno on G-d’s command to talk to the rock: there are miracles within nature (daven for a sick person); there are miracles that bend the laws of nature (the “garden-variety Biblical miracle”); and then there are miracles that toss nature out the door (Joshua did one of those; Moses almost did).

I believe R’ Dessler makes the same logical connection between belief in the forces of science and idolatry, and even takes it further. I’m not sure if he is trying to argue that it is idolatry on the technical level or it is a theological outlook that too closely resembles it.

Unfortunately, if one views rationalism as the only legitimate Jewish philosophical POV, the reactions described by R Rothstein are predictable. Perhaps, that is why we constantly need reinforcement and reminding about the power of Tefilah.

To Shalom, miraculous can mean any of those three, and many Jews would deny any of them if they step outside the realm of science. Moshe, I’d love to get the citation from R. Dessler, and Steve Brizel, I’m not sure it’s a question of these people viewing Judaism from a rationalist POV, because there have been rationalists who are also perfectly faithful; it’s more pernicious, it’s an attachment to the articulation of rationalism found in the outside world, and that version is outside the bounds of Torah.

It may be theologically problematic to not believe in miracles, and definitely if one doesn’t believe G-d is involved with the world, but I do not see what it has to do with avodah zarah. Avodah zarah means worshiping or accepting *as god* some other power. People do not worship science or accept it as a god, they just believe G-d created absolute rules that He never violates. You cite only one proof: “the fact that simply accepting any power as one’s god shows that it is not the expectation of a response that makes something idolatry, it is also the underlying attitude the person brings to it.” Fine, maybe one doesn’t need to expect a response to be oved avoda zarah, but they to accept it as god!
I think it is a fundamental aspect of Judaism to believe G-d is involved with the world, and to believe that miracles in some form have happened, but I do not think its kefirah to attempt to minimize all miracles so they fit with common natural laws. The rationalists who do that may be going against much of tradition, but as long as they believe G-d is directing things, they are probably not going against any Ikkar of the Torah.

R. Rothstein’s article is a tendentious and disturbing attempt to count more modern orthodox Jews as idolaters because they supposedly believe that God is incapable of abrogating the laws of nature.

Believing that God does not intervene in nature is not the same as Believing that God could not. Rambam, to my understanding, says that God does not interfere in the regularities of nature, but R. Rothstein apparently has a long Torah he does not share with us here about why this reading of Rambam is wrong, and we should therefore take his word that believing otherwise is idolatry.

In Salem, those who wanted to find one always managed to find a witch to burn. So to here. It is apparently not enough to condemn modern Orthodoxy for laxity in observance, ideological muddle, or cultural assimilation, we must also be idolaters!

Hi Rabbi Rothstein. Stimulating as usual! Torah-Science issues have intrigued me since I became frum.
With regard to
>>Abbaya and Rava tell us, Shabbat 67a, that anything that has actual medicinal value cannot be prohibited as imitating the ways of idol-worshipping nations.

I am listening to some lectures about traditional Chinese medicine, to see if there is anything useful to be learned. Some of the underlying philosophy involves concepts of yin and yang and different elements. As long as the content deals with (possibly effective) medicine, is the background philosophy, to the extent it is descriptive, any more dangerous than assumptions about intelligences and elements from the Aristotelian cosmology which Rambam accepted within certain limits?

Gmar Chatima Tova.

KT, Ariel Segal

Ariel,
The possibility of separating ideas from their original background is always there– much of American Buddhism has no connection to the ideas, just as many people practice yoga without a clue as to the ideological underpinnings. If some version of medicine identifies things about how the body works, in a natural way, then we can learn from it to heal ourselves better. We just have to be careful to wall ourselves off from the other.

We ought to be especially careful of politicized science, namely, science bent to serve a political agenda. Modern political movements, both “left” and “right”, have often become secular substitutes for religion. United with a sort of science or quasi-science, extreme politics can become an intoxicating avodah zarah.

The object of worship of such an avodah zarah can be the human race itself, some portion of the human race (The Party, Academia…), oneself, one’s human leader, or no one in particular (remember that Amalek and the Ba’al Peor cult stood for nihilism).

I think that Bob Miller is correct. We should always be careful to separate our applause for scientific advancement and achievement from the all too prevalent AZ of scientism and the fact that merely possessing a scientific degree is far from an indicia of being an ethical individual.

Seemingly ethical people who are nonbelievers are basically running on the “fumes” of religious ethics. In due course, possibly in the next generation, those fumes dissipate.

The comment I was referencing from R’ Dessler, I believe is a larger theme in his thought. Specifically, he has a piece in Michtav M’Eliyahu volume 1 page 181, in which he delineates the various levels of belief of extent to which nature is a force unto itself. The lowest level is one who believes that generally nature runs its course with the possibility that G-d could shift it a bit. He equates this belief to “shittuf,” as if one’s own actions “combine” with G-dly decree to chart out the course of all events.

I think that it is critically important to read the articles of R Rothstein and R Bieler together and ask oneself whether the unfettered rationalist belief in scientism is a hindrance to taking Tefilah seriously. If a person is so secure and confident in his or her way of life and subscribes only to the view that Hashem Yisborach reserves His right to intervene only in cataclysmic events but not in advancing human knowledge or technology, then such a person will not take Tefilah , its halachos and related minhagim seriously.

I would be remiss in not noting that RYNS viewed air and water pollution as directly caused by man in his striving for technological progress and that some of the worst events in human history have been perpretrated by people who believed in scientism such as many of the devotees of Nazism and Communism, Yimach Shmam VZicram.

It’s a chutzpah to make one’s own reason the absolute arbiter of what to think and do. Since when do we or can we have enough of the big picture to rely only on our reason? Not only that, but we have personal biases, as Rav Elchonon Wasserman ZT”L noted, that can degrade our ability to reason.

A couple of side points:
1. Don’t think the Ramban’s perspective is quite as cut and dry as normally assumed. He clearly accepts laws of nature; for one example, see his reluctant acceptance of “Greek words” due to natural proof in his comment on the rainbow in Bereishit 9:12-17.
2. I assume what you are suggesting is an asmachta, as I find it hard to see how an unstated attitude or assumption, even if it can be teased out with thought experiments or targeted questions, would literally be biblical avoda zarah, even b’shogeg. Is my assumption here correct?

More to the main point: it seems perfectly reasonable to me that people will assume that the world will operate as they have seen it operate and as it has been documented to operate. That assumption has no necessary relation either to God or to science, per se. I also don’t think the recognition that the world may sometimes deviate from expected patterns requires any belief in God’s power; it just requires a recognition of the limits of our understanding.

So it seems like the cases you outline feature two related underlying issues:
1. Arrogance about the presumed extent of scientific understanding of the world.
2. The type of proof we require to establish “fact”. Do we accept knowledge only from direct observation? From reports of observation? From tradition? From revelation, or reports of revelation? etc.

On #1, it is pretty clear that we should accept scientific observation with the caveat that it is not perfect; even from a scientific perspective, I would have a hard time taking seriously anyone who says it is perfect.

On #2, I am not really sure what to say–if tradition contradicts observation, when do we follow one or the other? After all, no one today follows most medical advice in the gemara, and many would prohibit doing so.

Rabbi Rothstein,
Could you share insight into whether your concern relates more to the certainty people ascribe to scientific findings, or to the tendency to elevate scientific data over Tanakh or other religious sources? Or are those two issues so interconnected as to be indistinguishable?

This seems to be a hashkafic/halakhic analysis of a phenomenon noted already by Dr Haym Soloveitchik in Rupture and REconstruction:
pivotal question, however, is not God’s sensed presence on Yom Kippur or on the Yamim Noraim, the ten holiest days of the year, but on the 355 other—commonplace—days of the year: To what extent is there an ongoing experience of His natural involvement in the mundane and of everyday affairs? Put differently, the issue is not the accuracy of my youthful assessment, but whether the cosmology of Bnei Brak and Borough Park differs from that of the shtetl, and if so, whether such a shift has engendered a change in the sensed intimacy with God and the felt immediacy of His presence? Allow me to explain.
We regularly see events that have no visible cause: we breathe, we sneeze, stones fall downward and fire rises upward. Around the age of two or three, the child realizes that these events do not happen of themselves, but that they are made to happen, they are, to use adult terms, ’caused.’ He also realizes that often the forces that make things happen cannot be seen, but that older people, with more experience of the world, know what they are. So begins the incessant questioning: “Why does . . .?” The child may be told that the invisible forces behind breathing, sickness and falling are “reflex actions,” “germs” and “gravitation.” Or he may be told that they are the workings of the “soul,” of God’s wrath” and of “the attractions of like to like” (which is why earthly things, as stones, fall downward, while heavenly things, as fire, rise upward). These causal notions imbibed from the home, are then re-enforced by the street and refined by school. That these forces are real, the child, by now an adult, has no doubt, for he incessantly experiences their potent effects. That these unseen forces are indeed the true cause of events, seems equally certain, for all authorities, indeed, all people are in agreement on the matter.
When a medieval man said that his sickness is the result of the wish of God, he was no more affirming a religious posture than is a modern man adopting a scientific one when he says that he has a virus. Each is simply repeating, if you wish, subscribing to the explanatory system instilled in him in earliest childhood, and which alone makes sense of the world as he knows it. Though we have never actually seen a germ or a gravitational field, it is true only in a limited sense to say that we “believe” in them. Their existence to us is simply a given, and we would think it folly to attempt to go against them. Similarly, one doesn’t “believe” in God, in the other explanatory system, one simply takes His direct involvement in human affairs for granted.99 One may, of course, superimpose a belief in God, even a passionate and all-consuming one, upon another causal framework, such as gravity or DNA. However, a God “believed” over and above an explanatory system, functioning through it as indirect cause, in brief, a God in a natural cosmology, is a God “believed” in a different sense than way we now “believe” in gravitation or the way people once “believed” in God in a religious cosmology, a God whose wrath and favor were the explanatory system itself.
God’s palpable presence and direct, natural involvement in daily life—and I emphasize both “direct” and “daily”—, His immediate responsibility for everyday events, was a fact of life in the East European shtetl, so late as several generations ago. Let us remember Tevye’s conversations with God portrayed by Sholom Aleichem. There is, of course, humor in the colloquial intimacy and in the precise way the most minute annoyances of daily life are laid, package-like, at God’s doorstep. The humor, however, is that of parody, the exaggeration of the commonly known. The author’s assumption is that his readers themselves share, after some fashion, Tevye’s sense of God’s responsibility for man’s quotidian fate. If they didn’t, Tevye would not be humorous, he would be crazy.
Tevye’s outlook was not unique to the shtetl, or to Jews in Eastern Europe; it was simply one variation of an age-old cosmology that dominated Europe for millennia, which saw the universe as directly governed by a Divine Sovereign.100 If regularity exists in the world, it is simply because the Sovereign’s will is constant, as one expects the will of a great sovereign to be. He could, of course, at any moment change His mind, and things contrary to our expectations would then occur, what we call “miracles.” However, the recurrent and the “miraculous” alike are, to the same degree, the direct and unmediated consequence of His wish. The difference between them is not of kind but rather of frequency. Frequency, of course, is a very great practical difference, and it well merits, indeed demands of daily language, a difference in terms. However, this verbal distinction never obscures for a moment their underlying identity.
As all that occurs is an immediate consequence of His will, I events have a purpose and occur because of that purpose. Rationality, or, as they would have had it, wisdom, does not consist in detecting unvarying sequences in ever more accurately observed events and seeing in the first occurrence the “cause” of the second. Wisdom, rather, consists in discovering His intent in these happenings, for that intent is their cause, and only by grasping their cause could events be anticipated and controlled. The universe is a moral order reflecting God’s purposes and physically responsive to any breaches in His norms. In the workings of such a world, God is not an ultimate cause; He is a direct, natural force, and safety lies in contact with that force. Prayer has then a physical efficacy, and sin is “a fearful imprudence.” Not that one thinks much about sin in the bustle of daily life, but when a day of reckoning does come around, only the foolhardy are without fear.
Such a Divine force can be distant and inscrutable, as in some strains of Protestantism, or it can be intimate and familial, as in certain forms of Catholicism. In Eastern Europe it tended toward intimacy, whether in the strong Marian strain of Polish Catholicism in the much-supplicated household icon, the center of family piety the Greek Orthodox devotion. And much of the traditional literature of the Jews, especially as it filtered into common consciousness through the Commentaries of Rashi and the Tzenah Re’enah,101 contained a humanization of the deity that invited intimacy. God visits Abraham on his sickbed; He consoles Isaac upon the death of his father. He is swayed by the arguments of Elijah or the matriarchs, indeed by any heartfelt prayer, and decisions on the destiny of nations and the fate of individuals, the length of the day and the size of the moon, are made and unmade by apt supplications at the opportune moment. The humor of Sholom Aleichem lay not in the dialogues with God, but in having a “dairyman” rather than the Baal Shem Tov conduct them102. The parody lay not in the remonstrances but in their subject matter.
The world to which the uprooted came, and in which their children were raised, was that of modern science, which had reduced nature to “an irreversible series of equations,” to an immutable nexus of cause and effect, which suffices on its own to explain the workings of the world. Not that most, or even any, had so much as a glimmer of these equations, but the formulas of the “new country” had created a technology which they saw, with their own eyes, transforming their lives beyond all dreams. And it is hard to deny the reality of the hand that brings new gifts with startling regularity.
There are, understandably, few Tevyes today, even in haredi circles. To be sure, there are seasons of the year, moments of crest in the religious cycle, when God’s guiding hand may be tangibly felt by some and invoked by many, and there are certainly occasions in the lives of most when the reversals are so sudden, or the stakes so high and the contingencies so many, that the unbeliever prays for luck, and the believer, more readily and more often, calls for His help. Such moments are only too real, but they are not the stuff of daily life. And while there are always those whose spirituality is one apart from that of their time, nevertheless I think it safe to say that the perception of God as a daily, natural force is no longer present to a significant degree in any sector of modern Jewry, even the most religious. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that individual Divine Providence, though passionately believed as a theological principle—and I do not for a moment question the depth of that conviction—is no longer experienced as a simple reality.103 With the shrinkage of God’s palpable hand in human affairs has come a marked loss of His immediate presence, with its primal fear and nurturing comfort. With this distancing, the religious world has been irrevocably separated from the spirituality of its fathers, indeed, from the religious mood of intimate anthropomorphism that had cut across all the religious divides of the Old World.

I would agree, that, to what degree this is true, this is very disturbing on a hashkafic level

In my opinion, Rabbi Rothstein has seriously misunderstood Hawking. He quotes Hawking as maintaining that “the laws of physics precludes the existence of God”. Hawking says no such thing. In his new book (“The Grand Design”) he says: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” Note the distinction between the term Hawking actually used (necessary) and the term Rabbi Rothstein ascribes to him (“preclude”). According to Hawking, God is not necessary for the creation of the universe, which can come into existence spontaneously as a fluctuation. However, Hawking does not “preclude” God’s existence, nor does he deny the possibility that God ordained the laws of nature that allow the universe to come into existence as a vacuum fluctuation.

Saul,

You misunderstood my point, especially since I haven’t read The Grand Design. In his Brief History, Hawking says that if there is a God, He is necessarily limited by the laws of Nature; that statement was what I was pointing out precludes the existences of the kind of God in which Judaism believes.

R. Yolkut,

I wasn’t going as far as you’re trying to– I wasn’t weighing in on how much of day-to-day experience we should or shouldn’t see as coming from God. I was speaking about the more theoretical question of whether we believe that God *can* impact our lives in ways that get away from Nature. The loss of that piece of faith, I was arguing, turns our belief in Nature into something at least close to idolatrous.

Science is not avoda zara but kfira – if az is the 49 gates of tum’ah then science would be the 50th. The goal of modern (i.e. enlightenment based) science is to explain the world in terms that exlude any outside (i.e. Divine) force, hence Stephen Hawkings position. But you to be careful in labelling things like Feng Shui as az; az has quite specific issurim, and handling spirits is not an issur if you realise that their power is Divine. See for example the story of the Holy Rhizhiner and the ?leprechaun in Ner Yisroel p81 in the volume on stories (can’t remember exactly which one).