B'chasdei Hashem, over the past almost 20 years, Beis Mevakesh Lev has produced over 13,300 audio shiurim and over 31,000 written posts, unmatched by any one-person website - all completely free of charge. There are no paywalls or anything else. Now we are turning to you for help so we can continue - any amount will help. Even 99 cents! Thank you to my sweetest and most beloved friends!!!:-)!!
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Is the world round? No, I don't mean the smart-aleck answer that "it's actually elliptical." I mean seriously – is it really round, and not, for example, flat, or some other shape?
What a silly question, you must think. Of course, the Earth is round. Every child knows that! Let's rephrase the question then: How do you know the Earth is round?
The expected response to this question would be: What do you mean? Everyone says the Earth is round, so it must be true. But I'm not interested now in what "everyone" says, but what each of us knows personally. Almost every person we choose, and present with this question, will rely on the fact that "everyone" says so, but will not present their own established knowledge on the subject. Well, as is known, an opinion does not become true just because everyone holds it. If we asked people two thousand years ago how they knew the world was flat, they would respond with the same lack of understanding: "What do you mean? Everyone knows it's flat!" As long as the respondent cannot give a better basis for his claim than "everyone says so" (or in philosophical terms, the fallacy of "ad populum") – his claim will not be considered substantiated.
Okay, you'll say, but it's not the same. We, unlike people two thousand years ago, have solid evidence that the world is round. What is this evidence? Well, the simplest proof is the fact that many people sail and fly around the world every day, and when they advance far enough, they eventually return to the starting point, and this proves that the world is round.
To this, one must ask: How many of us have actually circumnavigated the world in this way? Many of us have flown or sailed between different countries, but very few are the people who have actually circumnavigated the entire world at once. So most of us actually rely on stories of individual people, whom we do not even know personally. In the ancient world, there were also people who said they reached the edge of the world and saw the place where the sky connects to the earth, and everyone believed them. Why should we believe the stories about people who supposedly circumnavigated the world?
And suppose there is someone among us who has indeed personally circumnavigated the world and saw that it is round. The problem with his testimony is that even if he supposedly circumnavigated the world, he did not really experience its sphericity. After all, at no point in the journey did he see the entire Earth at once. At any given moment, he saw only a limited piece of land, sea, or sky, until he finally found himself at the point where he started. It is his brain that put together all these small pieces he saw in the past, and created from them a picture of a ball; but at no point did the person see the ball itself. The ball is only a creation of his mind and imagination, trying to organize different and isolated pieces of information in a unified way. Theoretically, it is possible that some other factor returned that person to his starting point, and the brain created the illusion of sphericity only to explain to itself the experience he went through. We know that the brain has a tendency to organize isolated pieces of information and weave from them patterns with order and logic, even where it does not match reality. A famous example is the way a person's brain completes missing letters while reading, without noticing their absence. The brain also tends to ignore many things that do not fit with its perception of reality; write on YouTube for example "selective attention test" and you will see some fascinating examples of this. Therefore, the fact that someone testifies that he left a certain point on Earth, sailed or flew in one direction, and eventually found himself at the same point – does not constitute proof that the world is round. The person experienced a sequence of point experiences, but never saw a ball, but only created it mentally to make sense of what he saw. This does not mean that the world is not really round – but it is not a proven fact, but a possible theory.
And what about astronauts? After all, on a flight from space, it is clear that the world is round, and there are many photos that prove it! Well, if we mentioned earlier the small number of people who have circumnavigated the world – the number of astronauts who have flown into space is even smaller. How many of us personally know an astronaut, or even know someone who knows an astronaut? Among millions of Israelis, only one flew into space, and he, unfortunately, did not return from there alive. How can one build an entire worldview, based on the testimony of so few people, whom we do not know at all? The number of people around the world who claim to have met aliens is many times greater than the number of people who have flown into space, and yet many of us do not tend to believe them. Why should we believe what is told in the name of the astronauts then? And regarding the photos, as is known, pictures can be easily faked. Who can know if the pictures that show the world as a ball are indeed authentic? Maybe it is a deliberate forgery by the space agencies – and maybe there is an unknown factor in space itself, which distorts the pictures and causes the world to appear round in them?
What I want to say in all this is not really to doubt that the world is round – it probably is (although the "Flat Earth Society" exists and is active to this day) – but to make us pay attention to the way we build our general knowledge, based on testimonies and findings that in themselves are very flimsy. Almost no one today doubts that the world is round (except for the members of the aforementioned society), but when we come to prove it, we discover that the solid facts on which we rely almost do not exist, and in fact we rely on what "everyone says", and on distant rumors about people who supposedly proved the thing.
And if this is the case in a relatively clear field like the shape of the world, imagine how serious the situation is in much more obscure fields, such as physical, biological, historical, psychological theories, and so on. Everyone knows how to recite "known facts" in each of these topics – about atoms and molecules, proteins and DNA, the ancient world and the Middle Ages, id and super-ego, and so on. A high school education is enough to acquire basic concepts in each of these fields, and in many more. But how many people really check the reliability of this knowledge? How many people go back to Einstein and check his theory from the ground up? How many people examine the sources of information they read in books? Has anyone ever seen an atom, molecule, photon, or DNA? Has anyone met Alexander the Great or Napoleon? An entire humanity relies on information coming from the hands of a few, without bothering to examine it. Scientists and academia receive the same aura of holiness that the church once received, as a source of true knowledge that should not be doubted. Just as people in the past did not think of doubting the words of the priest, so people today swallow everything that science feeds them.
It is enough to read a little about the current physical theories, about the incomprehensible descriptions of quanta, time and space, and other fantastic concepts, to realize this. Everyone knows Einstein's twin paradox and treats it as a fact. Has anyone ever checked it? We all believe that the chair we are sitting on now is actually mostly made of nothing, with a few particles moving at high speed. Does anyone, except for a handful of scientists, even understand how it works? The wildest astrological and mystical theories in the ancient world were not as fantastic as modern physics, and yet we all believe in it and in the scientists who present it, without doubting at all. And we have not yet talked about the way our consciousness itself affects reality, and causes it to change according to the gaze of the observer (another discovery of modern physics), which makes it impossible to know the world "as it is" – if there is such a thing at all...
I want to emphasize again that my goal here is not really to doubt the accepted scientific and general knowledge – but only to illustrate how much our knowledge is actually based on faith, more than on clear evidence. It is likely that the information that science provides does indeed correspond to reality to a large extent. But it would not hurt to pay attention to the flimsy and fragile nature of what is perceived by us as "clear and proven knowledge", and to understand that we actually know much less than we think we know; our worldview is built on beliefs, not on proofs. Very few things that we supposedly "know" can we prove. There is nothing wrong with that – but we need to be aware of it. And if we do give such significant weight to faith in building our picture of the world, it is appropriate to recognize its importance and not to underestimate it, as some tend to do.
So the next time someone tells you some scientific fact, ask him: "How do you know that?", and don't let him get away with it. It will be amusing to see the results.
