Reply To: Is Learning Science Spiritually Dangerous?

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WolfishMusings
Participant

Such evidence does not, and never will, exist. Including the lice issue. (See my earlier post discussing it.)

No, you did NOT address it in your previous post. EDITED

Allow me to summarize:

Chazal said that lice can be killed on Shabbos because they don’t come from eggs.

Your post brought several approaches:

1. The Pachad Yitzchock suggested that perhaps now that we know better than Chazal on this matter, we should not allow the killing of lice.

2. Rav Yehuda Breil ZTL rejected this by saying that it is certain that rabbinic science is more accurate than empirical science – and that the rabbinic point of view will eventually be proven correct.

3. Others (your source did not specify who) state that the halacha is independent of the fact that it is based on. IOW, regardless of whether or not lice come from eggs, you can kill them on Shabbos. The reason was just a vehicle to convey the actual halacha.

So, of the three aproaches, at least two of them allow for the possibility that Chazal can err in science (one suggests that the halacha should change because of it and the other says it shouldn’t — but both make the underlying assumption that the science of Chazal can be proven wrong.

As for the second approach, I don’t quite see how you can fit that into the lice case. If I actually show you a louse coming from an egg, how can you go back and say that Chazal were right and they don’t come from eggs?

Or is it your approach that it’s impossible to show you that lice come from eggs?

The Wolf