You are currently browsing the archives for the Faith category.

Archives

Subscribe

Subscribe

Subscribe to receive new posts:


 

Available Now!
When Judaism Meets Science

 

“a rare masterpiece”
– Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, HUC

“careful research, passionate analysis, and good sense”
– Rabbi David Teutsch, RRC

“clear, engaging”
– Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman, Sinai and Synapses

“a tremendous tome”
– Rabbi Wayne Dosick, SpiritTalk Live!

“an absolutely fascinating book”
– Rabbi Richard Address, Jewish Sacred Aging

“scholarly, judicious, and fair–minded . . . and very ‘readable’”
– Ronald W. Pies, MD

“a fresh way to explore Jewish topics . . . useful in teaching adults”
– Rabbi Gail Shuster–Bouskila

“A must read! . . . careful thought and such literary excellence”
– Rabbi Jack Riemer

Upcoming events

There are no events to display

Archive for the ‘Faith’ Category

New Planets, A God For The Cosmos and Exotheology

Monday, January 30, 2012 @ 09:01 PM
posted by Roger Price

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

Share

Science and Judaism: WWMD? What Would Maimonides Do?

Wednesday, December 21, 2011 @ 08:12 AM
posted by Roger Price

Earthrise as seen from Apollo 8

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.

 

See Explanation.  Clicking on the picture will download<br /><br /><br /><br />
 the highest resolution version available.

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

Share

The Big Bang: Science, Death and the Unknown

Thursday, December 15, 2011 @ 02:12 PM
posted by Robert Magrisso, M.D.

            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

Share

Science and Judaism: The Strange Claim of Dr. Schroeder (Part III)

Wednesday, November 9, 2011 @ 08:11 PM
posted by Roger Price

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

Share

Science and Judaism: Would That You Were Right, Rabbi Mitelman

Tuesday, October 11, 2011 @ 10:10 AM
posted by Roger Price

   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

Share

Have Some Lost Their Yiddishe Kups?

Thursday, September 22, 2011 @ 02:09 PM
posted by Roger Price

JPAC Anti-Evolution Exhibit 9-20-11

 

   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

Share

Sutton Foster and Three Jewish Guys

Friday, September 9, 2011 @ 10:09 AM
posted by Roger Price

              Albert Einstein was a Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist, a dreamer and a thinker.  Einstein was born in Germany, and moved to America in 1933, affiliating with Princeton University. He died in 1955.

               Aaron Zeitlin was a writer, a playwright and a poet. He was a leading figure in the world of Yiddish literature in the twentieth century (CE). He came to the America in 1939, taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City and died in 1973.

                Sutton Foster is a Tony award winning actress, a singer and a dancer. Foster was born in the state of Georgia about a year and a half after Zeitlin died. She also has ties to New York City, but is very much alive. read more

Share

No More NOMA (Part II)

Friday, August 26, 2011 @ 07:08 AM
posted by Roger Price

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

Share

No More NOMA (Part I)

Friday, August 19, 2011 @ 08:08 AM
posted by Roger Price

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

Share

GOULD IN THE FULLNESS OF LIFE

Wednesday, August 10, 2011 @ 08:08 AM
posted by Roger Price

Stephen Jay Gould was both a solid and a popular American scientist in the late twentieth century (CE). His essays in the magazine Natural History over a quarter century on arcane aspects of biology, paleontology and evolution were models of elegant and engaging writing, proving that the pen, if not necessarily mightier than the sword, is still quite powerful. read more

Share