העורך Editor

Chazon Ish Kovetz Iggros 1:33 (I didn’t see within now):

… עיקר עלי’ בתורה היא להבין דעת הניגוד תמיד, ואחר כך לשקול בפלס איזו דעה מכוונת טפי כו’ וחובה למי שקבע בדעתו את התמיהה להעמיק ולשמוע דעה השניה ואחר כך לשקול.

John Stuart Mill (Chapter Two of his “On Liberty”):

“Even in natural philosophy, there is always some other explanation possible of the same facts; some geocentric theory instead of heliocentric, some phlogiston instead of oxygen; and it has to be shown why that other theory cannot be the true one: and until this is shown, and until we know how it is shown, we do not understand the grounds of our opinion. But when we turn to subjects infinitely more complicated, to morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life, three-fourths of the arguments for every disputed opinion consist in dispelling the appearances which favour some opinion different from it. The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.”

We have written elsewhere wondering about the Chazon Ish disciple, Rabbi Dov Landa’s apparent departure from this rule.

(And no contradiction to the one on Bayesianism…)

From the Daily Mail (by A N WILSON) on an evil, commie historian:

On Monday evening, the BBC altered its programme schedule to broadcast an hour-long tribute to an old man who had died aged 95, with fawning contributions from the likes of historian Simon Schama and Labour peer Melvyn Bragg.

The next day, the Left-leaning Guardian filled not only the front page and the whole of an inside page but also devoted almost its entire G2 Supplement to the news. The Times devoted a leading article to the death, and a two-page obituary.

You might imagine, given all this coverage and the fact that Tony Blair and Ed Miliband also went out of their way to pay tribute, that the nation was in mourning.

…

Eric Hobsbawm took part in one of the most extraordinary conversations ever on British television. Speaking in 1994 to the author Michael Ignatieff about the fall of the Berlin Wall five years earlier, the historian was asked how he felt about his earlier support for the Soviet Union.

If Communism had achieved its aims, but at the cost of, say, 15 to 20 million people – as opposed to the 100 million it actually killed in Russia and China – would Hobsbawm have supported it? His answer was a single word: ‘Yes’.

Just imagine what would happen if some crazed Right-winger were to appear on BBC and say that the Nazis had been justified in killing six million Jews in order to achieve their aims. We should be horrified, and consider that such a person should never be allowed to speak in public again – or at least until he retracted his repellent views and admitted that he had been culpably, basely, wrong.

Yet the awful thing about the phenomenon of Eric Hobsbawm is that the exact opposite to this is what happened.

He was awarded a Companion of Honour by Tony Blair – one of the highest accolades it is possible to bestow upon a British intellectual. A professor of history, he was regularly lionised on the BBC and in the liberal newspapers as our ‘greatest’ historian.

It is true he modified his hard-line support for Stalin and his death-camps as the years went by. The elderly Hobsbawm was not the same person who, in 1939, co-wrote a pamphlet defending not only Stalin but Hitler, too – and justifying the Nazi-Soviet pact to carve up Poland and dominate Eastern Europe.

But as far as the history of the 20th century was concerned, he never learned its lessons. The tens of millions dead, the hundreds of millions enslaved, the sheer evil falsity of the ideology which bore down with such horror on the peoples of Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany, never occurred to this man.

…

The truth is that, far from being a great historian who sometimes made mistakes, Hobsbawm deliberately falsified history.

In his book The Age Of Extreme, published in 1994, he quite deliberately underplayed the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland in 1939-40, saying it was merely an attempt to push the Russian border a little further away from Leningrad. He also omits any mention of the massacre of 20,000 Polish soldiers by Russian Secret Police at Katyn.

In the same book, he dismisses the appallingly violent suppression by the Nazis of the Polish resistance in the 1944 Warsaw uprising – when a complacent Soviet army ignored desperate pleas to come to the Poles’ aid – as ‘the penalty of a premature uprising’.

These are not mistakes – they are wicked lies.

Nor were Hobsbawm’s rewards merely the sycophantic praise heaped on him by Lefty academics and silly chatterers at London dinners. Having cultivated his group of Left-wing protégés at Birkbeck College in London, where he dominated the history department and went on to become President, he was showered with accolades by academics of the Left.

…

Read the rest of it here…

(Reread the title. Must I add that my objective in this and similar illustrations is to lessen despair by showing things didn’t suddenly change for the worse?)

היסודות הדתיים של המדע

אברהם קשלבסקי נולד בארה”ב ועלה ארצה עם משפחתו בהיותו בן תשע. לאחר לימודיו בישיבת סלבודקה בבני – ברק ובישיבת חברון בירושלים נסע לאנגליה ללמוד פיזיקה. סיים את התואר הראשון באוניברסיטת מנצ’סטר, ואת לימודי הדוקטורט השלים באוניברסיטת סאותפורד. מאז חזרתו ארצה עובד באוניברסיטת הנגב ע”ש דוד בן גוריון בבאר – שבע, בה הוא מלמד ועורך מחקרים בתחום הפיזיקה הרפואית ושימוש הפיזיקה ברפואה ובביולוגיה. פרופ’ קושלבסקי חבר באגודת אנשי מדע שומרי תורה. המאמר המתפרסם כאן הוא חלק מספר רב – היקף שפרופ’ קושלבסקי עובד עליו עתה.

מקובל בציבור כי מדעי הטבע, כגון פיזיקה וכימיה, מבוססים על ניסיונות אובייקטיביים, וכי הדת, העוסקת בענייני רוח, מבוססת על אמונה סובייקטיבית. אין פלא שכאשר מתגלות סתירות, כביכול, בין המדע לדת, ההכרעה היא לטובת המדע.

דעה זו היא שטחית ביותר. המדע מבוסס על האמונה לא פחות מן הדת. המדע מניח כי יש קשרים פנימיים בין תופעות המופיעות זו אחר זו, וכי לסדר של התופעות יש חשיבות. המדע מניח כי הקשרים האלה קבועים ואינם משתנים מעת לעת, וכי על סמך התבוננות במשך תקופת זמן קצרה אפשר למצוא את הקשרים האלה. כמו כן מניח המדע כי לקשרים אלה תוקף של חוקים אוניברסליים וכוחם יפה במעבדה ובכל מקום בעולם; בגלקסיה שלנו ובגלקסיה שבקצה היקום; עכשיו, בעבר הקרוב והרחוק, ובעתיד עד אין סוף. המדע מניח כי חוקים אלה, המוגדרים עבור מסות נקודתיות שאינן תופסות מקום, קווים ללא עובי וזמנים קצרים אין סופית, מבטאים אמת אובייקטיבית על עולם חיצוני אמיתי. המדע מניח כי לחוקרים צורה פשוטה. לדוגמא למרות שמבחינה ניסיונית אי – אפשר להכריע בין חוק הפועל לפי 1/R² או לפי  251/R²000000, הניסוח הראשון נכון בגלל פשטותו וצורתו האסטטית. ללא קבלת הנחות אלו אין בסיס למדעי הטבע כפי שאנו מכירים אותם היום.

אולם הנחות אלו אינן נכונות אפריורית ואין גם אפשרות לבדוק אותן ניסיונית, כי השיטה הניסיונית מניחה את אמיתות הנחות אלו. קבלתם כרוכה באמונה. אין תימה שרק לפני מאה שנה עוד קראו למדעי הטבע באנגליה ובסקוטלנד, פילוסופיה טבעית, מי שאומר ”אין לי אלא מה שאפשר למדוד ואין לי עסק עם אמונה”, גם מדידה אין לו.

האדם הדתי העוסק במדע מקבל הנחות אלו כחלק אינטגרלי של השקפת עולמו הדתית. הוא מתיחס לטבע כהתגלות תבונתו של הבורא, ולמדע כאמצעי להתקרב אליו. ממבט ראשון הטבע מגלה שוני, רבגוניות, ורבוי תופעות. המדע – המקרב את האדם לאלוקים – מגלה פשטות ואחוד מכל עבר.

האדם הדתי מצפה למצוא חוקיות, אחדות והרמוניה פנימית בטבע. המשקפים את אחדות הבורא וחכמתו. כך, הוא מאמין בקיום חוקי התנועה אוניברסליים הקובעים את התנועה של כוכבי – הלכת ונפילת תפוחים על כדור – הארץ, עוד לפני שהוא מתחיל לחפש אותם ע”י הסתכלות וניסיון. כך, הוא מאמין בקשר פנימי עמוק במיבנה החומר ובקיום חוקי שדה אחידים, גם אם הניסיונות שלו לגלות אותם במשך עשרות שנים אינם מצליחים. הוא מאמין שאין דברים אקראיים בטבע ולכל תופעה יש סיבה ומטרה.

עבור האדם המאמין, ובמיוחד היהודי הדתי – האמונה הדתית והאמונה במדע משלימות זו את זו. אך, עבור המדען הכופר, המדע מהווה חידה ללא פתרון.

[הועתק מכאן והוגה ע”פ גליון א’ של “באור התורה” קיץ תשמ”ב, עמ’ ג-ד. לא הצלחתי להעתיק את הנוסחאות כדבעי.]

Learn about the Supreme Court appeals here.

What strikes me most here is the Dept. of Agriculture’s sheer cruelty in battling their victim as long as they could…

An old story, probably apocryphal, is told of a lawyer in a murder trial.

Since the body was missing, although the murder evidence was overwhelming, the lawyer told the court right before the final judgment he has new, shocking information which will overturn the whole trial: the supposed murder victim is, in fact, alive and well, and will be walking right through the front door in ten minutes!

Ten minutes later, after nobody showed up, the lawyer admits he was lying but argued that since everyone in the room gazed avidly at the door for the appearance of a person supposedly murdered by his client, they ipso facto cannot have been convinced “beyond a reasonable doubt” of the defendant’s guilt. So, the man should go free.

Well, said the judge, “A for effort“, except for one thing. The defendant, alone among us all, never so much as glanced at the door these past few minutes. Your client knew all too well: the victim wasn’t coming back. The defendant knew that because he murdered him and must have hidden the body.

End of story.

Once one accepts the conspiratorial view of history as presupposition, one can then accept proof of various conspiracies. But to prove the very notion that quasi-government conspiracies are common in our own age, it is necessary to show that powerful insiders have no problem with the idea, no matter what they say to the cameras.

On a personal note, what finally convinced me to view the world differently wasn’t some anomaly but learning of (and also observing on a few occasions) the thoroughly unsurprised response of powerful and very wealthy people upon hearing of outrageous conspiracies. I may not know how the world works, but they sure do.

For example, Bobby Kennedy himself suspected Lyndon Johnson was behind the JFK assassination (yes, he hated LBJ, but the point is the very notion of conspiracy was not foreign to him, nor was he ashamed to voice the thought). There are other examples I can’t recall now.

Point is, the “usual suspects” themselves smell rats and do expect such goings-on. (Hmm, I wonder why…?)

(By the way, here’s an interesting list of strange deaths after Kennedy was shot, which may be related.)