WHERE TO GO FROM HERE IN TERMS OF GOD’S KNOWLEDGE

In our story thus far, Rambam has basically denied the possibility of our saying anything about God’s knowledge. As he did for other aspects of God, he radically separated the meanings of the term "knowledge" when it came to God and when it came to people. Incidentally, he did the same thing for the word "providence," which should lead us to wonder what he meant earlier in the Moreh when he said that providence extends to individuals as they develop their intellects more, but only to species of animals. I believe that our study of chapter 21 will provide answers to this question, because in this chapter Rambam advances an analogy that strikes me as highly suggestive about God’s knowledge. In reviewing that analogy, we will see that Rambam makes two kinds of points in this chapter about how we can approach questions having to do directly with God.

TWO SIDES TO THE QUESTION—SUBSTANTIVE AND METHODOLOGICAL

On the substantive side, Rambam compares the difference between God’s knowledge and ours to that between someone who invented a mechanism and someone who witnesses the mechanism at work. The particular mechanism Rambam refers to is an early type of clock. Since I am not an historian of science, I have no idea of the specific clock to which Rambam refers, but I do know that measuring time accurately was one of the early scientific challenges that humans undertook. Rambam thus provides us a glimpse of the state of the question in his time.

The clock Rambam knows seems to have had balls tied to threads which were moved by water at such a pace that you could tell the time (in terms of hours) by how many balls had been moved. The actual mechanism matters less than the difference Rambam notes between the person who invented (or put together) that clock, and someone whose only knowledge of it is gained by observing the clock at work.

The inventor, who knows the exact details of how the clock works, and therefore what it will do under any circumstances, need never look at the clock again, and yet will not ever need new information to "know" the clock fully. The observer, on the other hand, will have to watch the clock for a while to learn its rules of operation. Even after watching for a sufficiently long time, the observer will never be sure that he has understood all the rules of operation of that clock, or whether there may be some rule he has not yet learned.

HUME’S SKEPTICISM IN RAMBAM?

Rambam’s last point, about the permanent gap in an observer’s knowledge, reminds me of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who pointed out that there aren’t really any "laws" of nature, there are only the accumulated guesses we have about how Nature will react, based on our observance of the past. If the sun were not to rise tomorrow (or some other violation of a law of Nature), we would simply have to readjust our understanding of the way the world works.

Rambam, too, seems to be suggesting a similar skepticism in terms of our ability to claim that we have understood and "know" how the world works. Since we only know by observing, the more complicated the mechanism gets—and Rambam says that the universe is infinitely complicated--the less likely it is that an observer will be able to fully understand the mechanism.

RAMIFICATIONS FOR MIRACLES

Although Rambam does not raise the topic here, his notion of the world as a complicated mechanism suggests a way for him to explain miracles without requiring that God Himself become actively involved in the world (since that would mean that there had been change in God, a notion to which Rambam is adamantly opposed). While we observe miracles as a significant break in the Laws of Nature, Rambam might counter that this break was embedded in Nature’s laws from the beginning of Creation. Indeed, Rambam says exactly that in the Commentary on Avot. When the Mishnah refers to those objects created at twilight on Friday, Rambam says the point of the Mishnah is that God put into Nature the mechanisms to violate it when necessary.

RAMBAN’S IDEAS IN RAMBAM?

Before we flesh out the ramifications of Rambam’s notion, I would just point out that this comes close to sounding more like Ramban than I would have imagined, although in the reverse way. Ramban believes that the whole world is miraculous, that we witness miracles every day. The difference between events we easily perceive as miraculous and ordinary events is only in how they appear to us—but they are all miraculous. Rambam also equates all events in the world, although he thinks they are all embedded in Nature. Thus, while Ramban thinks the plants growing is miraculous, Rambam would say that Balaam’s ass talking was a natural event, allowed to come about in certain situations by the original rules of Nature. The similarity is that both see nature and miracle as two ends of a continuum; the difference is only in whether it’s a continuum of God’s active involvement or of the world working according to a predetermined plan.

CONDITIONS OF NATURE THAT ALLOW FOR MIRACLES

The easiest way to understand Rambam’s reading of that Mishnah in Avot is to assume a deterministic universe-- Rambam sounds as if he is saying that God knew the Red Sea would need to split, Balaam’s ass would need to talk, and so on, and put those specific events into nature. That reading, however, means that miracles can only happen in a predetermined way, which rules out a flexible history. What if Balaam had chosen to follow God’s will and refuse to try to curse the Jews? What if the Egyptians had given up and not chased the Jews at the sea? Since Rambam strongly (and in several places) supports the idea of freewill, it seems odd to imagine that he believed in a predetermined universe.

COMPUTERS SUGGEST AN ANSWER (OR, TORA U-MADDA AT WORK)

Rambam does not provide any further information, but it strikes me that, having upheld two sides of a contradiction, he has sown the seeds of an answer. I cannot swear that he meant this answer, but I believe he did (Ralbag, a 14th century Jewish philosopher, held a view close to this as well).

Recall Rambam’s analogy to the difference between the inventor of a clock and one witnessing that clock. Given a sufficiently complex clock, the observer will never "know" that clock fully, since at any time the mechanism may follow a rule that had never hitherto been needed, and thus would not have been known by the observer.

For the inventor, however, the situation changes. Since the inventor developed all the workings and the rules of that mechanism, no action of the mechanism will add any knowledge to the inventor. Note, first of all, that Rambam in this analogy has equated a change of knowledge with information that is new in more than the sense of not having existed before. In a fully determined universe, of course, that makes simple sense—we intuitively understand why an object following a completely predetermined course does not add new knowledge to one who knew that course beforehand.

But how can we square that with a universe of change, where humans can choose to follow one course or another? Let’s think about computers for a moment. There are currently programs so complex that the person who programmed the computer, for all that he (or she) knows the rules inputted into the computer, could not predict the outcomes fully. There will be situations, then, where the computer’s behavior is completely novel from the perspective of the programmer.

But what if the programmer did know all the possibilities, and therefore knew all the possible results of this program, and yet, within those parameters, there was a truly random element to the program? Would we say that the programmer did or did not gain new knowledge at the results of the program? I suspect Rambam may have something like that in mind in this case—God created a world that works in such a way as to move history to its eventual end. People’s actions can make that program (the Messiah-bringing program) follow a shorter or a longer route, but its end is determined.

Included in that program are events that happen extremely rarely, but when necessary, such as water standing up like a wall to allow a people to pass through on dry land (it is Shabbat Shirah, after all). Yet none of that involves God’s direct action, since the world was pre-programmed.

The only new information is which particular route the people of the world choose in their slow march to the End of Days—which does not really constitute new knowledge for God, since it was part of the original possibilities in the infinitely complex world that God created.

This explanation, I think, also shows why there might be providence for species—since those affect the world’s plan at the large level—and individual humans, since it is their choices that affect which route we take to Messiah. Finally, it explains why the greater the development of a particular human, the greater the providence, since as we develop more greatly, our ability to affect the course of world history (in the important ways, the ones that affect how soon we will arrive at the end of history) increases as well.

Or at least, that is what I believe Rambam may have meant when he wrote Understand this about his view of God’s knowledge and human freewill.

THE SECOND UNDERSTAND THIS

Following that, Rambam writes that the method he has adopted in his analysis of this topic is also the method we should generally follow on questions that do not admit of logically compelling conclusions. That is, on any issue that the philosophers cannot determine—and God’s knowledge is one, as Rambam had stressed previously—we should follow Rambam’s method, an injunction he closes with the words "Understand this."

Rambam’s reminding us that the philosophers cannot determine this question conclusively suggests an answer as to why he was so harsh in his criticism of the philosophers earlier. Since Rambam accepts the validity of philosophical discussion where it can reach correct conclusions, he must be extremely careful to delimit the subject matter on which to take serious account of their views. Where they overstep their abilities, it becomes important to point out strongly what they have done (in modern terms, this would be the same as pointing out when science makes statements about religion that it has no right to—since we recognize the validity of science in so many areas, it becomes especially important to "catch" scientists when they speak outside of their rightful expertise).

But what was Rambam’s method? First, he noted the terminological issue that put this question beyond the full grasp of philosophy. Second, he examined Scripture for information about the relevant issues. Finally, he formulated a theory that followed the definite parameters of truth—no new knowledge can come to God—and yet followed the guidance of Scripture—the universe is nonetheless not predetermined, since people have freewill.

Thus, Rambam has given us his view of a central religious question, as well as his method of how to think about such questions, balancing the information provided by reason with that provided by revelation to produce a whole that meets the declarations of each.