How To End Some Torah/Science Disputes

During the meal at the second seder, the topic of discussion turned to astronomy. When the subject of the planets came up (specifically regarding the decision to "demote" Pluto), my fourteen year old niece, who tends toward the fundamentalist side, announced that the Torah says that there are only seven planets. When I mentioned to her that there were, in fact, more than seven planets, she simply repeated her assertion with a "that's-what-the-Torah-says-and-that's-that" tone.

I didn't press the point any further that evening, but as I thought about it the next day, I realized that my niece was both right and wrong. The problem, very simply, is that she and I were not using the same definition of the word "planet."

Allow me to give some historical background.

When the ancients studied the skies at night, they made some observations about the positions of the stars. They noticed that as the sky rotates overhead during the night (remember, they didn't know that it was the earth that was rotating), the stars in the sky moved, but kept their positions relative to each other. In addition, they kept their positions during the year as well -- a particular star could be counted on to disappear below the horizon at a certain time of the year and reappear at the same position (relative to the other stars) at a later point during the year.

However, there were seven heavenly bodies, they noted, that did not keep their positions. These planets "wandered" among the other stars -- sometimes moving forward against the other stars, sometimes regressing backwards (and sometimes displaying both behaviors at different times). These seven wanderers became the "planets," from the Greek word for wanderer. The seven bodies that displayed these properties were the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

Of course, as time went on, we gained a better understanding of the heavens than the ancients had. Copernicus showed that most of the "planets" actually revolved around the sun, not around the Earth. The sun was eventually identified as a star, one of the billions of stars in our galaxy. The word "planet" now no longer referred to the wanderers of the heavens, but to heavenly bodies (of significant size) that orbit the sun. In addition, with better optics than the ancients had at their disposal, we even discovered that most of the planets in our solar system had moons of their own. Better telescopes and observations have allowed us to find Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Sedna and other minor ("dwarf") planets. And, of course, within the last fifteen years, we've gained the ability to detect planets orbiting other stars and have, to date, discovered 442 of them.

So, what is the true believer to do? If one believes that the Torah says that there are seven planets, and one wants to remain "Torah true," how does one reconcile the astronomy of the last few hundred years with the words of Chazal? Does one say that astronomy is a sham and that the data is faked? Does one say that the pictures NASA released from the Pioneer and Voyager missions are fakes? Does one say that the astronomers know the truth, but are simply faking it to suppress God's truth?

Well, you could take that approach -- although I think it's really very silly. The simple answer is also the best answer -- that when Chazal (or the Rishonim) talk about planets, they are referring to points of light that "wander" against the background sky. Using that definition, they are correct -- there are only seven* planets. But one has to recognize that the definition of the word "planet" has changed over the years and that when we discuss planets today, we are using a different definition of the term. As a result, it is also correct to say that there are well more than seven planets.

I often wonder how many Torah/science arguments could be avoided if we simply recognize that the meanings of words, including planet, species, bird, animal, star and even science among many others have had their definitions change over the years. Of course, not all Torah/science arguments would end -- but a fair number of them could be put to rest.


The Wolf


* Yes, I know Uranus is sometimes visible with the naked eye which would make eight planets -- but it's so infrequent and it's orbital period so long that it was probably just not noticed by the ancients. And, of course, this also excludes comets.

Can You Possibly Get Stupider Than This??? (Rambam and Science)

I was over at ChabadTalk, that old bastion of geocentrism, among other things. While there, someone (not me) made the comment that the Rambam was mistaken about science. Another poster asked for some elaboration, which I provided:

The planets aren't attached to spheres, for starters. Even the most ardent geocentrist would have to admit that the Rambam was wrong on that.

In addition, even if you're a geocentrist, the orbits of the planets are ellipses, not spheres, as the Rambam describes.

The Rambam states that the Earth is 40 times larger than the moon - in reality, the Earth is eighty times as massive as the moon. He also states that the Sun is about 170 times the size of the Earth -- that, too, is wrong, by quite a margin -- the Sun is about 333,000 times more massive than the Earth.

The Rambam states that there are no stars larger than the Sun. That's true to the observable eye, but is clearly false -- there are many stars that are much larger than the Sun.

He also states that there is no "star" smaller than Mercury. Well, that's true on the face of it -- a body that small cannot start nuclear fission. However, if you're going to posit that the Rambam used the term "kochav" to mean any celestial body (as you would have to, unless you are positing that Mercury and the other planets are stars too), then that statement is false, as there are plenty of celestial bodies smaller than Mercury.

All these statements of the Rambam can be found in Hil. Yesodei HaTorah chap. 3.

One poster decided to answer my challenge regarding the weight of the moon with what has to be the single most mind-numbingly stupid thing that I've heard in all the science/Torah debates (bolding mine):

The moon isn't made of gas, as far as modern scientists know (the bunch of crackpots that they are).

Of course, we have to realize that 1) nature changes (so maybe in times of Rambam the moon was takeh made of gas), 2) modern science does not rely on certainties but only on probabilities, so it is only 99.999% probable that moon isn't made of gas; on the other hand, everything that Rambam wrote was guided by h"p, so he can't be wrong, even if he himself said (for kiruv purposes surely) that sages of Torah may be wrong in the matters of science. Which makes it 100% true that moon is made of gas.

The moon is made of gas?? Forget the fact that we've sent out probes to the moon. Forget the fact that twelve people have actually walked on the surface of the moon. Forget the fact that moon rocks have been bought back to earth. What the poster doesn't seem to realize is that you can simply go out at night and look at the darn thing in the sky and see that it's made of rock. Gas doesn't cause the craters that you can see on the moon on any clear night.

Lest you think that the stupidity ends there, I followed up by asking the following question:

So, how do you then explain away all the data indicating that the moon isn't made of gas???

The response I got from another poster (warning: brain-numbing response ahead!):

well, that's your problem. The Torah is absolute(ly) true.

I'm just completely flabbergasted. Seriously, what we need in our yeshivos is a good re-education as to what exactly is Torah and what is science and where the two intersect. The Rambam's statements regarding astronomy (despite the fact that he placed them in Hilchos Yisodei HaTorah) are not actually fundamentals of Torah. There is no Torah source before him that states these facts - they simply represent the science of the day as he knew it. It's not like he looked up in a Gemara where it says that there is no celestial body smaller than Mercury - it was something that he either observed on his own or learned from other astronomers. The simple facts that he presents can easily be disproved, and yet, people are so blinded by the mistaken notion that everything the Rambam ever put in writing is Torah (and therefore irrefutable - even by the evidence of our own eyes) that these people are forced to come to the mindboggiling conclusion that the moon is either (a) made of gas or (b) somehow changed from gas to rock sometime since the Rambam.

I'd say that the parents of these people should ask for their money back from the yeshivos they went to, but, sadly, they probably got exactly what they wanted.

The Wolf

Pillars of Creation - Destroyed!

Check out the picture in this post.

The image you are seeing is a portion of the Eagle Nebula, a stellar nursery in the Serpens constellation, located about 7000 light-years from Earth. This portion of the nebula has been called "The Pillars of Creation," and is one of the most famous image in astronomy. What the images shows are massive columns of gas within the nebula that will one day likely become part of a star.

Sadly, however, it was reported that the columns were destroyed by a supernova explosion about 6,000 years ago. However, since the nebula is located 7,000 light years away, the nebula will continue to appear to us as it once existed and will continue to do so for another thousand years.

Or, perhaps, as young-earth Creationists would have you believe, the pillars never existed at all and were created in an already destroyed state and the image we are seeing never really existed in the first place.

Take your pick (I know which makes more logical sense to me). But be quick... the pillars will only be visible for another millenium.

The Wolf

Mah Rabu...

Take a look at the picture at right. This is an image known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) is a composite image of a small patch of sky in the constellation Fornax. The area covered is about 3 arcminutes square - or smaller than the amount of sky covered by holding a grain of sand at arm's length.

Aside from a few exceptions, all of the objects in this picture are not stars, but galaxies. A galaxy, very simply, is a large collection of stars, usually numbering anywhere from ten million to a trillion. Just about every little point of light in that picture contains millions, or billions, or trillions of stars -- and the whole picture is a miniscule portion of the sky.

A star, let us not forget, is not a trifiling thing. We have one pretty close to us - a mere 93 million miles or so. But as far as stars go, our sun is a pitzy little thing - not nearly as large as some stars, certainly not large enough to ever go nova (thank goodness!). The nearest star to us (aside from the sun, of course), is about 4 light years away - that's about 24,689,625,089,476 miles. If you took the space shuttle there, you'd reach there in about 150,000 years. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains about 80,000 - 100,000 light years across and contains about 200 - 400 billion stars.

In that little patch of sky, there are thousands of visible galaxies, each with it's billions of stars and each thousands of light-years across. Multiply this number by the number that would be visible if you observed the rest of the sky, and you see the wonderousness of Creation.

Of course, none of these observations would have been possible without science. Without science, mankind would never have bothered to explore the heavens beyond what is visible with the naked eye. Without science, we would have never discovered the extent of creation that we have: from quantum particles to galactic superclusters - and, I have no doubt, there is more out there to discover.

Personally, when I behold Creation - whether it be the image of a distant galaxy, a bird gathering sticks for a nest, a shooting star, a picture of an ameoba or the look in my children's eyes, I can only exclaim "Mah Rabu Ma'asecha Hashem."

Scientific observation does not have to lead us away from HaShem. Indeed, it should lead us to Him.

The Wolf

Note: You can download a high-res image of the HUDF here.