Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Do You Believe In Miracles?

Here's a patch I started writing around Pesach, but its fine for any time of year, really.
This year, a I felt a new pre-pesach fear. After only recently becoming a navoch stooped in patchionalism, I was worried about how badly tainted my view of the miracles of Egypt would be. Patchionalists claim to minimize the quality and quantity of miracles. They happen less often, and when they do, they are less than supernatural.
So I began to think about how my opinion of yetzias mitrayim would be affected.
I contemplated my own view of miracles.
I recently read the view of R' E. E. Dessler on this issue, and the following are my thoughts about it.
He says that while God generally runs the world according to tevah (nature), miracles are completely removed from nature. He says this in contradistinction to the opinion that miracles are just nature stretched.
While this was satisfactory at first glance, a closer look into the term tevah can show that it doesn't really answer my dilemma.
Nature simply means the way the world naturally goes about its course. An thing that happens that isn't usual, is miraculous.
Science, however, is entirely another thing. Science is the explanation for anything that happens in the universe. Miracles have to have a scientific explanation. Perhaps that science isn't physics. I don't know. Maybe its, "miracology," but the way to gain scientific knowledge of something is to study it repeatedly in a lab. That would undo them being miracles. Any thoughts?

OR

One could argue that miracles ARE within laws of saying, despite the fact that they are unnatural. One would then have to research if they break any laws of science. (Much of modern physics nowadays is only theory, educated guessing though it may be, which is much more easily discarded. But most of all science we have is empirically proven fact.)
If they do, no respected intellectual, or even a simple patchionalist  for that matter, of our time, would accept it. Firstly because we believe that science is God's creation just as much as the Torah is, and they can both teach us things. Secondly, because that would make the world of our forefathers similar to that in Lord of the Rings. Not that that is impossible, but I disagree with it theologically.

If they don't, great, but you've just made the miracle that much less cool. Oh, and now let me guess, there's a moral that we can appreciate better now that we know that that is what the Torah/Midrash/Gemara is actually trying to tell us in the first place (and not a historical accounting). and let me guess, I'm supposed to apply that moral to my life to make myself a better Jew and a better person? Lame, I hate making myself a better person. (Not that this is the only reason yeshivists don't like patchionalism, especially because very often yeshivists do stress the morals that can be learned from these stories, even if they at the same time believe them in the technical sense. It's just that its emphasized, and very often coupled with the expectation that never picking your head up from a gemara will grant you these superpowers.)

Meh, what do I know. I guess I'll wait until I die, or Mashiach comes.

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