Subscribe
Subscribe to receive new posts:
Available Now!
When Judaism Meets Science
Archive for the ‘Life Sciences’ Category
New Planets, A God For The Cosmos and Exotheology
We are blessed to live in an age of great discoveries. Prior to about fifteen years ago, astronomers had not been able to identify planets in orbit around stars beyond our solar system. These planets, known as extra solar planets or exoplanets, have now been found. In fact, in the first dozen years from the discovery of the first exoplanet, about 500 such planets were located in diverse areas of the known universe.
Then NASA initiated the Kepler space mission, which was designed to find Earth sized planets within the habitable zone of a star. The mission focused on a relatively small star field in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, perhaps the extent of the sky obscured by an average extended fist. The discoveries have been phenomenal, and the pace seems to be accelerating. As science writer Timothy Ferris has said, “We live in a changing universe, and few things are changing faster than our conception of it.” (Ferris, The Whole Shebang (Simon & Schuster 1997), at 11.) read more
Science and Judaism: WWMD? What Would Maimonides Do?
Credit: NASA AS8-14-2383
Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, Maimonides, also known by the acronym Rambam, lived just over eight hundred years ago (1138-1204 CE). He never saw the planet Earth as astronaut William Anders did on December 24, 1968 when module pilot Anders took the now iconic photograph above while flying over the lunar surface during the first manned orbit of the Moon. We do not know if Maimonides even imagined such a sight.
Credit: NASA/JPL P41508
The picture above shows Earth with the Moon in the background. This scene was captured by the Galileo Orbiter on December 16, 1992 at a distance of almost four million miles from our home planet. Maimonides never had the opportunity to see Earth and Moon from this perspective either.
Credit: NASA, The Hubble Heritage Team and A. Riess (STSci). PRC2003-24.
Living some four hundred years before Nicolaus Copernicus considered the nature of the solar system and Galileo Galilei fashioned his first telescope, Maimonides did not realize that the Earth circled the Sun, and not the other way around as was commonly understood in his day. Nor could he have known that the Sun was but one medium sized star in a rather unremarkable galaxy known as the Milky Way which spans 100,000 light years and is similar in size and shape to the spiral galaxy NGC 3370 shown above in a picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Similarly, he would not have known either that our galaxy consisted of a few hundred billion stars, give or take, or that the Milky Way was but one of perhaps a hundred billion galaxies, give or take, in the visible universe. See Tyson and Goldsmith, Origins (W.W. Norton, 2005), at 27, 150. read more
The Big Bang: Science, Death and the Unknown
Suddenly, Einstein lifted his head, looked upward at the clear skies and said: “We know nothing about it all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of school children.” “Do you think we shall ever probe the secret?” “Possibly we shall know a little more than we now know, but . . . .”
R.W. Clark, The Life and Times of Albert Einstein (Avon, 1971).
One of the very few textbooks that remain from college is my Halliday and Resnick Physics for Students of Science and Engineering. On its side remain, in very faint but still readable pencil, the words “Physics is a fraud,” which I wrote as a freshman. It was the culmination of one of the first of a long series of ambivalent encounters that I have had over the years with science. I wrote those words as an act of blasphemy and liberation towards what was then, essentially, disillusionment with my first religion: physics. I majored in physics in college not so much for practical knowledge as under the presumption that I was dealing with truth, and not just simple truths, but ultimate Truth. To me, attending lectures, doing the experiments, learning the mathematics, reading the books and doing the problems was equivalent to Talmud study.Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Maxwell, Planck, Heisenberg, Galileo . . . these were the prophets. Feynman was our hero. read more
The Wise Scientists of Chicago Debate About the Latke and the Hamantash
What is it about latkes and hamantashen anyhow? What makes these two foods different from all other foods? Which food is better and which best represents the values and aspirations of the Jewish people?
Since 1946, these and related questions have occupied some of the greatest minds of the Western hemisphere. In that time, world renowned scholars have gathered annually under the auspices of the University of Chicago Hillel to debate the merits of the latke and the hamantash.
As often happens when scholarly pursuits become intense, everybody wants to get into the act, and imitations of the Chicago debates have been attempted at other institutions. But in all these years, no one quite does it like the Maroons, with grand entrances, flowing academic robes and standing room audiences in excess of 1,000 at venerable Mandel Hall. read more
Science and Judaism: The Strange Claim of Dr. Schroeder (Part III)
Fernando Botero – Adam and Eve
In two prior posts, we have reviewed Dr. Gerald Schroeder’s strange claim in The Science of God (“TSOG”) (Rev. Ed. 2009) that billions of years of cosmic evolution and six biblical days of creation actually occurred simultaneously. With his self-imposed standard of not bending the Bible to science or science to the Bible in mind, we have analyzed how objective Schroeder actually was with respect to the Bible and science. In both instances, we have found Schroeder’s work sorely lacking. He has failed to meet his own standard and other more objective ones as well. read more
Science and Judaism: Would That You Were Right, Rabbi Mitelman
Shortly before this blog was launched several months ago, Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman of Beth El Synagogue in Northern Westchester, New York wrote an article for Huffington Post titled Why Judaism Embraces Science. See, www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-geoffrey-a-mitelman/why/can-judaism-embrace-s_b_880003.html. There Mitelman presented three “especially significant” reasons for his thesis.
At the outset, I recognize that Mitelman was writing a brief essay and not an academic paper, let alone an expansive book. And I also recognize that his audience was whoever was reading or may read the HuffPost blog and not a dedicated group of adult learners. Nevertheless, the three bases for Mitelman’s post, even if assumed to be correct, do not compel the conclusion for which they are mustered and they raise more questions than Mitelman answered in his piece. read more
Five More Jewish Nobel Laureates: What Does it Mean?
This past week the Royal Swedish Academy of Science announced the award of Nobel Prizes for 2011 in, among other fields, physics, chemistry and medicine. Seven individuals were honored. Apparently five are Jewish. What, if anything, does that mean? read more
Have Some Lost Their Yiddishe Kups?
The picture above first appeared yesterday, to my knowledge, on www.failedmessiah.com. Apparently, the sponsoring group, whose members I suspect do not read this blog, also issued a public relations piece, which follows replete with all original typos: read more
No More NOMA (Part II)
In previous posts (August 10 and 19, 2011), we have considered Stephen Jay Gould’s promotion of NOMA, the proposition that science and religion occupy two equally important but non-overlapping magisteria, or domains of authority. We have also considered how scientists have acted with respect to Gould’s promotion of NOMA. Yet if Gould and NOMA have some trouble on the science side of Gould’s aisle, it is nothing compared to what has been said or done on the other. read more
No More NOMA (Part I)
In a previous post (August 10, 2011), I discussed Stephen Jay Gould’s book Rocks of Ages and his support for the proposition that science and religion occupy (or should occupy) two non-overlapping spheres, or magisterial, of authority (“NOMA”). In the decade since Rocks of Ages was published, Gould’s approach to science and religion has been both praised and reviled, both followed and rejected. Some of the reaction is attributable to the form of his argument, some to the substance. read more