Question

Hello Rabbi,
I know that you deal with these topics, and I wanted to know what you think about the following idea (sorry for the length):
 
The Torah explicitly promises effects in this world regarding prayers, reward and punishment, and of course the phenomenon of prophecy, as well as open miracles (like the splitting of the Red Sea).
In our time we do not recognize these phenomena. The assumption is that in the period of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) they did in fact occur. We do not know when each phenomenon ceased, although regarding prophecy this is fairly clear.
The question is: if there was such a change, what caused it? And about that I would like to suggest an idea.
 
Let us begin with the period when these phenomena did occur.
We may ask: back then, did the rains really stop every single time the Jewish people sinned? Did the Holy One, blessed be He, always immediately hear the cry of the oppressed? Did the prophets always prophesy in a clear style, and were their prophecies always fulfilled immediately?
Clearly not, because otherwise all the nations would have converted, the Jewish people would not have dared to sin—it simply would not have been worth it—and faith in the Holy One, blessed be He, would have existed without choice.
So it is clear to us that on the one hand the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted these phenomena to occur, for obvious reasons, and on the other hand it is clear that this could not happen across the board, because otherwise there would be no free choice.
Therefore it seems that even in the period of the Hebrew Bible, the things did indeed happen, but not across the board. Some of the phenomena, even at their source, are vague: what counts as “if you surely heed,” about exactly what period certain prophecies were said, and so on. And yet it is clear to us that they existed at some level in the biblical period, unlike what we see today. So how was there still free choice in their time? Because people did not live by statistics and did not document data; they did not make precise comparisons of when rain fell and when it did not, and what the behavior of the Jewish people was in the different years. Who died young and who old, who violated prohibitions carrying karet and who did not. To what extent the prophecies of the prophets were fulfilled, as against other phenomena such as necromancy or the prophets of the nations of the world. What miracles there were among us as compared to wonders that were occasionally reported among other nations as well, and so on.
In this way the Holy One, blessed be He, could act on a certain level (though not absolutely), and still leave free choice.
By contrast, when humanity gradually adopted a more scientific view of the world, people began to investigate and document phenomena and connect them to their causes—the Holy One, blessed be He, could no longer act in that way, because every such action, deviating from the statistics, would be an “open miracle” that would negate free choice.
Let us return to the question of when these phenomena stopped. Regarding most of them we have no information. Regarding prophecy, we are speaking roughly about the 6th century BCE (Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi). This is the period of Thales, the first of the Greek sages, about two hundred years before Aristotle.
We can therefore say that the rise of the scientific outlook abolished these phenomena.
 
I would be happy to hear your opinion.