The claim that there are no laws of nature that would lead “to the same results without the unnecessary or inferior appendages” sounds strange to me. I can very easily imagine a possible world in which there are such laws of nature. In fact, others did so before me, and not as an exercise in hypothetical speculation. They believed these were the correct laws of nature. In the 19th century through the early 20th century, many researchers thought about evolution analogously to the development of a living creature from infancy to adulthood. Species that were simpler, in their view, “matured” into more complex species, analogous to the way a baby matures into an adult. This was perceived as a law of nature, similar to how we view the physical laws of nature we are used to.

If this idea has the scent of a divine plan behind nature, that is entirely intentional. The people who conceived it were mostly theists with a strong fondness for teleological thinking. They used the biological phenomenon available to them—the development of an individual from infancy to adulthood—to try to understand how species were formed in a “directed” way.

Think of a universe in which such a law of nature exists, where the “mature” form of the living world resembles the living world familiar to us, only “without the unnecessary or inferior appendages.” Why would a universe in which such a law of nature exists not be a universe God could have created? At first glance, there are several objections. Some would object to this proposal because these laws of nature are not formulated mathematically. Others would object that they are not physical laws but biological ones. Since biology as we know it is “built” from “the stuff of physics,” in a universe where a law of nature of the kind I mentioned prevails, that probably would not be true. In such a universe, “the stuff of biology” would be “above” “the stuff of physics,” or at least “equal” to it.

Superficially, these sound like good objections, until we remember what we were asked to imagine. We were asked to imagine laws of nature that would lead “to the same results without the unnecessary or inferior appendages.” If “the same results” specifically means a living world in which biology is “built” from “the stuff of physics” and every law of nature in that world must have a mathematical formulation, then yes, a universe in which a law of nature of the kind I described operates is impossible. But why should that be the only kind of living world a God who wants to create “a world governed by laws” could create? I don’t know. It sounds completely arbitrary to me to decide that God is limited in that way. There is no reason He could not create a world in which a “biological law” has a “status” “equal” to or even “higher” than the physical laws that prevail in that universe.

Ethologica, why are you bothering? Already in the story of Genesis, a creation is described that isn’t supposed to produce unnecessary and inferior appendages. Interesting what logical contradiction the Rabbi found in it.

Mr. B, from between your eyelashes it is apparent that you’ve never encountered scholarly literature. Well then, welcome. For 200 years people have been studying chapter 1 and pointing out that the reality of evil, desolation, and chaos preceded the creation of the world, and the Creator contends with it and extracts order and good from within it. And Ethologica, is that really you, or someone decked out in your feathers? As is known, the peacock’s feathers were created by chance according to “biblio-lution” (Amnon Yitzhak coined that one). If it is you—welcome to Rabbi Michi’s arena. We’ve been waiting for you a long time. This is the time to make one last wish 🙂

b, your words are puzzling. Didn’t the story of Genesis lead to the sin of the Tree of Knowledge and to the exile of the Jewish people? The claim is not that there is no “creation story” without evil, but that any world governed by laws must produce evil.

Gil, how can there be evil when there are no living creatures suffering?

D, read again what the question was about. It’s not about evil, but about unnecessary and inferior organs in living creatures.

@b: Interesting point. I’m not sure the biblical text describes the creation of a world similar to ours, only without “the unnecessary or inferior appendages.” I can’t build a good textual argument in favor of that idea.

There just aren’t supposed to be unnecessary/inferior appendages according to the biblical creation story. The argument is pretty simple: I say the inferior organs indicate that there is specifically no Creator; the Rabbi will say he knows of no possible way to do it differently, so I’ll point him (how convenient) to one of the most famous texts in history that does exactly that, and wish him luck finding what’s impossible there.

With God’s help, 11 Elul 5778

When one sees a sophisticated and highly advanced machine that likely was not formed by chance, and finds details in it that are not understood—it may be assumed that they have an explanation; we simply have not yet arrived at it. That is how science advances. When a researcher finds contradictions or situations that are not understood, he makes an effort to find a satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon—he labors and finds one! And if he does not find one, the puzzle remains as a challenge for the researchers of the next generation, and they find the solution.

That is what happened with the appendix. For many years people thought it was a useless remnant of earlier stages of evolution when our ancestors were herbivores. But it turned out that in humans the appendix is larger than in those considered his predecessors in the evolutionary process—the apes (see Yoram Sorek’s article, “The Appendage Shaped Like a Worm,” on the Channel 10 website).

Studies conducted from 2007 onward strengthened the explanation that the appendix, rich in immune tissue, serves as a refuge for “good bacteria” needed for the proper functioning of the intestines. In the case of an infection that harms the intestinal bacteria, the body “draws out” the good bacteria preserved in the appendix and uses them to restore the proper functioning of the intestines (see the Wikipedia entry “Appendix,” which also contains a link to the above-mentioned article by Yoram Sorek).

In short: puzzling things in the sophisticated system of nature are the opening for research that will uncover the wisdom hidden within them.

Best regards,
S. Z. Levinger

Even the appendix’s role in breaking down the cellulose in grass has a place in humans, in line with the designation in Genesis 1: “And I have given you every green herb for food.” Man’s placement in the Garden of Eden “to work it and to guard it” marked his transition to a diet of fruits, but when he sinned and was expelled from the Garden of Eden, it was decreed upon him once again, “and you shall eat the herb of the field,” until Noah arose and invented the plow (as Rashi says based on the Sages), thereby fulfilling his father’s prayer: “This one shall comfort us from our work and from the toil of our hands, from the ground which the Lord has cursed.” By improving the cultivation of the soil, Noah freed humanity from the need to eat grass.

b,
It seems to me that it would be enough if you tried to formulate an argument that expresses what you wanted to say (instead of making do with declarations), and then you’d realize on your own that you can’t.
There is no statement there that creation is free of defects. And even if there is such a statement, it is itself contradicted by reality (in which we see that there are defects), and if so then there is no need at all to enter into a discussion of evolution and divine creation.

Ethologica,
Imagining is good for the Beatles. I’m talking about a concrete proposal for such a system of laws. In my objective assessment there is no such thing (I find it hard to believe one can create a rigid system of laws with all the results except for removable discontinuities of evil and the unnecessary), and not just because it’s a convenient excuse for me. But I may be wrong. In any case, I claim that the burden of proof is on the challenger, not on the one offering a resolution. If you claim there is a better system and ask why the Holy One, blessed be He, did not choose it, then please show that there really is such a thing.
The fact that you come up with such a phenomenology is meaningless. I can describe something much simpler and more efficient: simply clean all the unnecessary appendages out of our creation. The question is whether you can show that there is a system of laws of which that is the “phenotype” (that is, the product it generates). It’s like proposing a recipe for peace in the Middle East: that all sides should behave rationally and sensibly, stop killing, and compromise. A wonderful proposal.

A world in which the biological laws stand above the laws of physics is just words. Do you have such a system that you can present here? It’s similar to the description I gave above (the same thing as exists today, only without the evil). But again, that is a phenomenological description, not the presentation of a system of laws.

You can of course ask why He wants specifically a world with laws, but to that I have no answer (though there are suggestions—to make things easier for us), and in any case it does not matter for the discussion here.

With God’s help, 12 Elul 5778

As Gil and Ramda mentioned here, the creation story presents a reality that is not complete—a chaos of desolation and void, into which the Creator gradually introduces order: beginning with the appearance of light (as the “Big Bang” theory also says), the separation between day and night, the separation between the firmament and what is beneath it, the separation between sea and dry land, the creation of the plant world, the creation of what moves (the heavenly bodies), the creation of animal life, the creation of man, and the creation of the Sabbath.

And in the process detailed in chapters 2 and onward, it becomes clear that everything that was created needs completion. The plant world needs rain to make it grow and man to work and guard it, and man discovers that it is not good for him to be alone and that he needs “a helpmate corresponding to him,” and she discovers that she lacks “knowledge of good and evil” and seeks to complete her deficiency by forbidden means and gets entangled, and the sons of Adam and Eve feel a need for positive feedback from their Creator in response to their turning to Him, and the one who thought he did not receive the proper feedback sins and discovers repentance.

The linear process of ascent in chapter 1 turns into a more complicated process, full of rises and falls, crises and recovery from them, where the process of repair elevates man and humanity to new heights. The desire to break through the “glass ceiling” is what brought about the fall, and the process of repair reveals to man the way by which he can rise without breaking and destroying.

Eve’s aspiration toward the good, described as “And the woman saw that the tree was good,” is corrected in the mother of Moses, of whom it is likewise said, “And she saw him, that he was good.” But Eve failed in seeking to attain knowledge of the good not through connection to the Creator, whereas Moses would bring to the world knowledge of the good by hearing and learning it from the mouth of divine power.

In the words of the Maharal in Netzach Yisrael, chapter 3, the error of idolatry was its failure to understand that from a perfect Creator there can emerge an imperfect creation full of oppositions and struggles; and from this idolatry concluded that the upper world is torn just like the lower world.

The intellectual answer to idolatry is given by Manasseh when he teaches Rav Ashi that the blessing over bread is recited from the place where its baking begins. A created being, by virtue of being created, cannot be complete, and it requires constant completion. This is not a chaos of oppositions, but a process in which, the more creation recognizes its deficiency and aspires to rise and draw close to its Creator, the more complete it becomes.

Best regards,
S. Z. Levinger

A fundamental explanation of the Maharal’s approach appears in the book by Prof. Benjamin Gross, An Imperfect World – Toward Responsible Freedom.-

Quite apart from the clear principled answer, one can also add that very often this is simply due to our lack of knowledge, and in the end it turns out that even supposedly unnecessary organs do have a role (because protein X or organ Y are multifunctional—which is more economical from an evolutionary standpoint—and even if some of the functions are no longer relevant, others definitely still are)

@b: And still, where in the biblical creation story does it say that God created a creation “without the unnecessary or inferior appendages”?

@mikyab: This was the closest thing to an argument in favor of your position that you wrote:

I find it hard to believe one can create a rigid system of laws with all the results except for removable discontinuities of evil and the unnecessary

In my opinion, a religious person will have to believe that it is entirely possible for God to create a universe in which exactly what you claim cannot happen does happen. God can “look” at our universe as it is now, including the living world. He can imagine, in far greater detail than the Beatles, the living world “fixed,” “without the unnecessary or inferior appendages.” If the religious person thinks the laws of nature prevailing in our universe are deterministic, he will have to agree that God can plug the “fixed” state into the relevant equations and run time backward in the equation several billion years. As output, God will get the state in which He must create the universe so that in the end a living world “without the unnecessary or inferior appendages” will arise. Therefore, God could have created the world so that in the end a living world “without the unnecessary or inferior appendages” would arise.

The same conclusion follows even if the religious person thinks the laws of nature prevailing in our universe are not deterministic. Religious people believe that God planned and intentionally brought about the emergence of life, the emergence of intelligence, the revelation at Mount Sinai, the emergence of man, and many other things that are entirely dependent on the non-deterministic behavior of the laws of nature. Therefore, if a religious person believes God created “a world governed by laws” and those laws are non-deterministic, he will have to conclude that God is capable of tuning His creation from the outset well enough that He would not need to intervene along the way and “violate” the laws of nature in order to ensure that all the things I mentioned indeed happen. If He is capable of doing that for the emergence of life, man, intelligence, and all those other things religious people believe He brought about through planning and intention, every religious person will have to admit that God is capable of doing that also for a living world “without the unnecessary or inferior appendages.” Therefore, God could have created the world so that in the end a living world “without the unnecessary or inferior appendages” would arise.

The problem is that God did not do that. That is your problem.

The argument I gave above is sufficient to clarify that you were mistaken. The ball is in your court to find a relevant error in it. At this stage, I could make a tactical retreat, retract everything I wrote in my previous response, and focus on the argument I raised above. I won’t do that for now, because your counter-response was simply so non-responsive.

You dismissed the scenario I presented in my previous response as “phenomenology.” It would take Rashi to understand which of the many meanings of the word you intended. You used an analogy to a “recipe for peace in the Middle East” that would require opening Tosafot to grasp its peshat, consulting aggadic midrashim to understand its relevance, and prophecy to extract from it something that looks like an argument. All I understood from your response is that you think the scenario I presented in my previous response is not detailed enough. There is enough “meat” in the previous response to warrant a clearer and more explicit counter-argument than that. If you really think the scenario I presented in my previous response is not detailed enough, specify which points need elaboration and explain why it is important that I elaborate on them. I promise I’ll do my best to expand as needed.

I’ll finish with a request for the future. In your response, more than once, you demanded that I present a set of laws of nature and show that it will yield a living world “without the unnecessary or inferior appendages.” I’m amused that you claim I am obligated to do work that you really do not feel any need to do. Your response makes clear that you did not even sample possible laws of nature before forming your opinion that they would all produce “the unnecessary or inferior appendages,” and certainly did not prove non-existence. And yet you express dissatisfaction with the level of detail of the scenario I gave in my previous response. Let’s talk straight. By the standards you present in this conversation, an argument is to say “I find it hard to believe” that I am wrong, and somehow that becomes “my objective assessment.” Unfortunately, from a conversation at that level, I won’t learn anything, so what is the point of it? I prefer conversations with explicit arguments. I hope you’ll cooperate.

I’ll conclude with the words of the Beatles:

Don’t let me down, don’t let me down
Don’t let me down, don’t let me down

Happy New Year to you and to all the Jewish people!

Ethologica,
It seems that you are missing the logic of the discussion.
1. We have a world before us. I claim that God created it (that is, the laws that created and govern it). And I have my reasons.
2. Against this, the following argument was raised: why are there defects in the world? God can create a perfect world, and if the world is not perfect then apparently He did not create it.
3. To that I answered that the defects are probably necessary (given the fact that He wanted a world governed by rigid laws. There is no other system of laws that would create a world without defects).

Since in this discussion you are the challenger, the burden of proof is on you. I do not need to show that there is no such system of laws; you need to show that there is. You have not shown that. The example of peace in the Middle East reflects exactly what you did. You are simply proposing that the Holy One, blessed be He, make a perfect world, and that’s it. Many thanks indeed in His name, but the question in this discussion is whether that can be done. The question is not what a perfect world would look like, but how to do it and whether it is possible. That is, whether there is such a rigid system of laws. To that you did not respond, and of course you also cannot respond. Naturally I did not expect you to respond, because this is a difficult question and I do not think anyone can answer it. I only pointed out the mistake in the question, because as long as you have not shown such a system of laws, you cannot raise your objection.

Therefore your claim that I am demanding of you something I am not doing myself is of course factually true but irrelevant. In other words: I admit the facts and deny the charge.

A happy new year to you too, and to all of us.