Sunday, September 29, 2024

Propositions that are true only in specific circumstances

 

 

It long bothered me when we say in the morning ומותר האדם מן הבהמה אין that these words do not take into account the Neshama. It is inconceivable that there is no superiority of the human being including his soul over animals.

 

Similarly, when the Rambam says [MN III:13-4] that man cannot be the purpose of creation because he is inferior to the spheros since their knowledge of the Creator is superior to his And they exist unchangingly, this leaves out the uniqueness of the human soul which the Rambam says that after death understands the essence of the Creator il teshuva:

רמב"ם הלכות תשובה פרק ח

ומהו זהו שאמרו נהנין מזיו שכינה שיודעים ומשיגין מאמתת הקדוש ברוך הוא מה שאינם יודעים והם בגוף האפל השפל.

 

I've received some comfort from the following midrash which takes the word אין not as a negative - meaning nothing - but as the description of what in fact does distinguish man from animals even though that does not seem to be the peshat in the verse.

 

מדרש תנחומא (בובר) פרשת אמור סימן כא
ומותר האדם מן הבהמה אין (קהלת שם /ג'/ יט), מהו אין, שהוא מדבר והיא אינה מדברת, ועוד שיש באדם דעת, ובבהמה אין דעת, ועוד שהאדם יודע בין טוב לרע, והבהמה אינה יודעת בין טוב לרע, ועוד האדם נוטל שכר על מעשיו, אבל הבהמה אינה נוטלת שכר על מעשיה, ועוד האדם מת מטפלין בו ונקבר, והבהמה אינה נקברת, [הוי] ומותר האדם מן הבהמה א

 

It occurred to me that perhaps sometimes statements are made and intended to be understood within very specific circumstances. If one were to expand the context then the statement would be false. Sometimes the statement about man sees him only as a physical being in this world and does not take into account his soul. If one were to take into account his soul then the statement would be false.

 

And now I have found a direct expression of this idea in the Maharal:

 


דרך חיים על אבות פרק ד משנה ד

משנה מסכת אבות פרק ד משנה ד

[*] רבי לויטס איש יבנה אומר מאד מאד הוי שפל רוח שתקות אנוש רמה 

ועל זה יש לשאול מה שאמר מאוד הוי שפל רוח שתקות אנוש רמה, והלא תקות אנוש הוא שנשמתו צרורה תחת כסא הכבוד ולמה אמר שתקות אנוש רמה, ועוד יש לשאול וכי תקותו רמה שאין האדם מקוה לזה ולשון תקוה נאמר על הדבר שהאדם מקוה לו, ועוד קשה כי התחיל לדבר לנוכח הוי מאוד שפל רוח וסיים בלשון נסתר והוה ליה למימר שתקותך רמה. פירוש המאמר הזה אף על גב שבודאי האדם מקוה אל תכלית טוב ואחרית לאיש שלום, מ"מ אין ראוי לאדם שיהיה בעולם הזה מתגאה שמצד עולם הזה תקותו רמה, כי מה שהאדם נשמתו צרורה בצרור החיים אין זה מצד העולם הזה כי בעולם הזה נקרא אדם על שם אדמה, ולפיכך אף אם יהיה לו אחרית ותכלית גדול מכל מקום אין לו להתגאות בעולם הזה שהוא בעל גוף ורמה ותולעה, ואם כאשר תפרד הנשמה מן הגוף יהיה לו אחרית, מ"מ מצד עולם הזה שהוא נקרא אדם על שם אדמה אם אינו שפל רוח הוא מתגאה בדבר שאינו ראוי לו:

 

That is to say, it says the hope of man is the worm and on that account he ought to be very Humble and self-negating, but that is only true when you look at him in the context of this world. If you were to take into account his soul and his future in the next World, this statement would be false. So there is room for statements whose truth is limited to a particular context and which in the larger context would not be true.

 

I still do not have a good understanding of what the purpose is of making those limited statements.

 

 

 

 

 


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Do not trust interpretations of fossils

 Fossil Friday: When Paleontologists Let Turtles Fly

Günter Bechly

September 27, 2024, 6:44 AM

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/09/fossil-friday-when-paleontologists-let-turtles-fly/

This Fossil Friday features the reconstructed skeleton of the pterosaur Thalassodromeus sethi from the Lower Cretaceous Santana Formation in Northeast Brazil. This animal must have been a very impressive sight to behold with its estimated wing span of 17 feet and its enormous skull that was 56 inch long and “crowned” with a large crest.

In 2013 two scientists reported about a new species, Thalassodromus sebesensis, from the Upper Cretaceous Sebeş Formation in the Transylvanian Basin of Romania (Grellet-Tinner et al. 2013), which they described two years later (Grellet-Tinner & Codrea 2015) based on a single bone that supposedly represents a premaxillary crest. The authors commented that “without doubts, T. sebesensis is one of the most significant pterosaur discoveries in Romania” because it is “an out of place and out of time Gondwanan tapejarid pterosaur.” The authors also built some elaborate evolutionary hypotheses on this discovery: for example they considered the small size of this new species Thalassodromus species as caused by island dwarfism on the ancient Haţeg Island. Because of associated plant fossils they speculated about a co-evolution of tapejarid pterosaurs with flowering plants, and interpreted T. sebesensis as a forest dweller. Isn’t it really astonishing what a single bone allegedly can tell us about the past?

A Fly in the Ointment

In the very same journal a large team of twenty other scientists (Dyke et al. 2015), including leading experts like Stephen Brusatte, Darren Naish, Mark Norell, and Mark Witten, immediately responded to the sensational discovery and strongly disputed its identification as a pterosaur remain. Instead they present convincing arguments that the bone represents nothing but a piece of the ventral shell (plastron) of the fossil turtle Kallokibotion bajadizi from the Upper Cretaceous of Romania. That a turtle shell can be misinterpreted as the jaw of a flying reptile by academic scientists who studied their field for years is quite a revelation about the limits of fossil data as well as the limits of researchers. The critics do not mince their words and concluded: “Based on their incorrect identification of ODA-28 as a pterosaur crest, GTC built a classic ‘house of cards’ scenario: the misidentification of one fragmentary fossil leading to a cascade of elaborate ideas with increasingly far-reaching implications.” Bummer! In spite of this devastating critique, the original authors still defended their interpretation as a tapejarid pterosaur. They boldly stated that “the comment of Dyke and his close-knit collaborators with their respective students may actually be most premature, as they were clearly formulated without examining the fossils” and presented this conclusion:

It is rather transparent that [the] Dyke et al. comment rests on assumptions (the main text) and predictions (the conclusion) rather than on first hand examinations with ensuing interpretations. Hence, considering their erroneous interpretations of the several above-mentioned UBB ODA-28 anatomical features, our conclusions are 1) that UBB ODA-28 is presently justified as a new pterosaur species coined T. sebesensis, and 2) Dyke et al.[‘s] conspicuous persistence, hastiness, and zeal of writing this comment, may indeed reflect of deeper, perhaps irritating, issues in Transylvania.

Irritating issues in Transylvania? What’s that supposed to mean, a vampire conspiracy? This more than weird response invited a scathing comment by Mark Witten (2014) titled “Lies, damned lies, and ‘Thalassodromeus sebesensis‘”, which is dated to 2014 because the article and its discussion was already available online a year prior to the printed publication in 2015. The whole affair made a splash in the paleontological community (Black 2014, Peters 2014, Anonymous 2016), which widely agreed with the re-interpretation as a turtle shell (Pêgas et al. 2018).

When Renowned Experts Err

However, such misidentifications are not restricted to some inexperienced and obscure fringe scientists, but also happen to renowned experts such as one of the world’s leading authorities on pterosaurs, Dr. David Unwin from the University of Leicester. Together with his colleague Nicholas Fraser he had described (Fraser & Unwin 1990) two bones from the Upper Triassic of Gloucestershire as the earliest fossil record of pterosaurs in Britain. They even identified the material as belonging to a small new taxon of the superfamily Rhamphorhynchoidea. About 15 years later a re-examination of these “purported pterosaur wing metacarpals from the Upper Triassic of England” by Dalla Veccia & Cau (2014) showed that they did not belong to a pterosaur at all but to a drepanosaurid terrestrial reptile (also see Black 2014), which rather resembled a green iguana (read the Wikipedia page on drepanosaurids to learn about their highly controversial phylogenetic relationships). The latter authors concluded that “there is no definitive evidence of the presence of pterosaurs in the Triassic of the UK.” In several previous articles (Bechly 2022, 2023a, 2023b, 2024) I have elaborated on numerous other problems with the origin of pterosaurs and the interpretation of their fossil history.

A Heavy Dose of Interpretation

Do such misidentifications and interpretational problems show that Darwinism is false and intelligent design is true? Of course not, but it shows that fossils are very much data that require a heavy dose of interpretation that can and often does introduce errors. If such misinterpretations are then used as support for far-reaching evolutionary hypotheses, we definitely leave the realm of real science and enter the murky waters of pseudoscientific musings. This is relevant to the question of whether unguided Darwinian evolution is supported by the hard evidence of the fossil record. Spoiler alert: It is not, and all claims about alleged fossil proofs must be taken with a large grain of salt. The hard data of the fossil record may tell us something about the existence of extinct organisms, and of long gone biota, but they are completely silent about the process that brought them into being. What they do show, though, is a pattern of discontinuities and abrupt appearances, which is arguably better explained by intelligent design than by gradual incremental changes of neo-Darwinian evolution (Bechly 2024).

References

 

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