Orot Channel – Faith and Science: Can the Existence of God Be Proven? – TOV Jewish Current Affairs

[Speaker A] Hello. We’re continuing the series of programs on faith and science. Hello to the writer Zvi Yanai. Hello to the physicist Dr. Rabbi Michael Abraham. Dr. Abraham, how can one be at one and the same time a believer and a scientist? Isn’t there an inherent contradiction here?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not only is there no contradiction, in my opinion you can’t establish a rational worldview without a basis of belief in God. You can’t establish one—in the philosophical sense, again. Now what do I mean by that? I mean to say that when I offer an explanation for some scientific process, I use a system of laws of nature. The physico-theological proof, as I mentioned last time too, basically says: complex things are not created by chance. Then the neo-Darwinist comes and says, what are you talking about—here, I’ll show you a mechanism. Not by chance, but without a guiding hand—a mechanism that creates something complex out of something random. The philosophical question is whether it’s reasonable that a world governed by rigid protocol laws does this by itself, or whether someone wrote those protocol laws and causes things to operate according to them.

[Speaker A] So you’re expecting scientific inquiry to prove to us the existence of God?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “Prove” is too strong a word. Scientific inquiry will show the rigid laws according to which the world operates. If people argue about the physico-theological proof, that’s a philosophical debate, and there are sides to it. Kant himself criticized this proof; in my opinion not very successfully, but he did criticize it. Evolution has nothing to do with this issue. Our situation with regard to the physico-theological proof after evolution is exactly the same as it was in the middle of the nineteenth century. Nothing has changed in that respect.

[Speaker A] So, Zvi, according to Abraham, you have no problem being both a scientist and a believer?

[Speaker C] The point is that of course I can’t accept that principled claim. First of all, we have to distinguish between the inanimate world and the living world. The inanimate world is governed by the laws of entropy, while in the living world there is actually negative entropy—that is, negative entropy, where structures are formed instead of things breaking down; new things are actually created. But even if you take the particles, the initial state of the world, you still see that from this chaotic state of particles and neutrons, structures were created—full structures, including the Earth. Elements were formed, all kinds of things were formed. That is, precisely from this you can see that from an almost chaotic initial state, complex structures can definitely emerge. Some of the chemicals that make up our DNA are found in asteroids that fall to the Earth’s surface, and then you ask, wait a second—so did God create life in asteroids too? Not just on Earth—did He create it in all kinds of places in the universe? Meaning, His hand is in everything throughout the whole universe. And then another question arises: all the time people ask, what’s the probability that a cell would be formed—say, the first replicating cell, or the first replicating material before it was destroyed by the hostile environment? What’s the probability that such an entity exists—one with infinite intelligence, eternal, present everywhere, managing the whole world?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To that claim I give a twofold answer. The question “what is the probability of God’s existence” is of course a completely undefined question. The words have no meaning. Because probability is always calculated within a given situation among defined possibilities. When we ask what the probability is of the formation of some protein chain or another, we’re asking how many such possible chains there are altogether. One divided by the number of possibilities is a measure of probability, assuming the distribution is uniform. But the probability of God’s existence—you need to define the event space. In other words, what is the total range of possibilities, and count…

[Speaker C] Wait, wait—excuse me, but that sounds like hairsplitting to me. There is an entity involved in the world; some people think it’s even involved in human destiny. It determines who will be sick and who will be healthy, and who will die and who won’t. So I ask: if this involvement exists to that extent, to the point that it even created—and I don’t really understand the purpose of it—it created the AIDS viruses, it created the chickenpox viruses, it created jellyfish with their stinging tentacles, and it’s not clear for what purpose it creates them—if there is such an intelligent plan, then why create chickenpox viruses that destroyed almost… a quarter of the world’s population, and so on and so on? In other words, according to your belief, there is deep involvement by God in the world.

[Speaker A] And why should it even be science’s business to test or investigate whether there is a God or not?

[Speaker C] Because religious people come and say, for example—and this is always the example used also by Reverend Paley—here, take the eye, such a complex structure; how could it possibly have arisen on its own? And I say: if you keep attacking us with questions like that, provocative questions, then please—what is the probability of God’s existence?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The claim that the probability of the emergence of a watch, or an airplane, or all kinds of things like that, is very small—that’s a claim that has to be understood; it can be understood in two ways. I keep coming back to this point. The first way: given the laws of nature, what is the probability that such a thing will happen? My answer, for the sake of discussion, is one. Probability one—it’s certain to happen. My second question is: given that I know nothing, there are no laws of nature, what is the probability that such a thing will happen? The answer is, for all practical purposes, zero. That is, negligible. Okay? Now the neo-Darwinist comes and says, true, but within these scientific laws I can show you that it was formed. I agree. I am not attacking science the way Zvi just put into my mouth. I did not attack science. I think this is the best scientific explanation we have today, I don’t have a better explanation than that, and we should look for scientific explanations. I’m asking the philosophical question. And the philosophical question isn’t examined through probabilities, as I said before, because there is no sample space, no event space, no way to ask the probabilistic question. So how do you address it? A philosophical question is addressed with philosophical tools. And the philosophical tools say the following: when there are things that do not appear to be their own cause, they are not things that are necessary, whose existence is necessary, the simple assumption—this is called the principle of sufficient reason in philosophy since Leibniz—is that someone brought this about, and maybe someone brought that about. And then people say, fine, where do we stop the chain? The questioner, as Dawkins asked: and who brought God about? So I say: my argument is philosophical, not probabilistic—that’s exactly the difference. My philosophical argument says something like this, and it’s very simple, and in my view it’s a very powerful argument. I don’t know a good answer to it. The argument says this: every chain of explanations—if we want to stop it, because otherwise we’re not committed to the principle of sufficient reason, but if we do believe that we’re looking for an explanation that will ultimately give an explanation, not turtles all the way down, like the famous story—there is no other way to stop the explanatory chain, no way in the world. In the end, anyone who accepts the principle of sufficient reason has to find a first cause. Science will never have a first cause; it cannot.

[Speaker C] We’re standing here by apes—here, in this case, gorillas; here orangutans; what I’m missing here is the chimpanzee. I’d like to hear a very clear answer from you: is the origin of man a divine creation? Is man a divine creation, or is man part of nature? And just as tens of thousands developed—once there were five hundred thousand species, today we only have something like sixty thousand species—and all of us are developments out of twenty-five life systems that emerged after the great extinction two hundred and fifty million years ago; only four remained, and after that three; all of us are products of those three systems. And I’m asking: the line passes through there. Do you accept that line, that at one of its almost final stages the apes developed, and after that the gorillas split from the orangutans, and after that the chimpanzee, and after that there was a common ancestor for us and the chimpanzee seven million years ago—which, by the way, could change if more fossils are found? Do you accept this unfolding?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So my answer is this: in principle I accept it, provided that I become scientifically convinced that it’s true. There are still gaps in the theory, but there are gaps in many theories, and therefore for the sake of discussion I accept it—and not only for the sake of discussion. At the moment I don’t have a better explanation, and I accept it.

[Speaker C] So there’s no creation? There’s no question here of divine creation?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. But I do have a correction. With three or four fundamental laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and everything branching out from them, in the end, at the tip of the tree, sits a human being. Whoever created those laws caused it—whether intentionally or unintentionally, you can argue about that—caused it so that in the end a human being would emerge. In my eyes, that counts as divine creation.

[Speaker A] Zvi, we’ve just gotten a bombshell here from Michael Abraham—that the origin of man, according to Michael Abraham, is from the ape. You don’t need—no need to ask for more. You got me to pull that out of him. We’ll end here. Thank you very much, we’ll see you on the next program. Thanks to Asaf Roznayanai, thanks to Dr. Michael Abraham, we’ll see you next time. Goodbye and see you again. Hello to our dear viewers, we’re here with another episode of This Is the Origin of Man, a series dealing with the thought of Dr. Michael Abraham. Hello, Rabbi Michael. Hello and blessings. Today we’re dealing with another chapter from the book Sciences of Freedom, a very significant book in your thought, and with the issue of moral realism—or in other words, whether morality is an invention or a discovery. So first of all, explain to us what the term “moral realism” means. Moral realism is the name of a philosophical position that claims that moral values have objective validity. That is, when I say that a certain act is bad, or that a certain act is good, I am actually describing a fact in the world. Similar to saying that this wall is white, or that one plus one is two, or whatever, that the Earth revolves around the sun. It’s not something that reflects my feelings, or my sensations, or my social conventions; rather, it reflects an objective reality that exists outside of me. I merely perceive it. That’s the simple meaning of the term realism. So if that’s moral realism, then what is the opposing approach? Subjectivism? Relativism? What is it called? The opposing approach is usually called subjectivism, or more broadly anti-realism. That is, someone who claims that moral values are not facts. Now under this umbrella of anti-realism there are various positions. There is one position that says morality is simply an expression of feelings. Suppose I say that something is bad—that’s basically a cry of disgust. As if I had said “yuck” or something like that. If I say that something is good, it’s like a cry of “hooray.” In other words, I’m not describing anything; I’m only expressing my feeling about that act. There are those who say morality is a social convention. Society decided that this is the proper way to behave and that is not the proper way to behave, for pragmatic reasons or for one reason or another, and therefore when I say something is bad, what I mean is that society does not want us to do it. And there are other versions as well. But what they all have in common is that morality is not a discovery, but an invention. An invention of the individual, an invention of society, an expression of emotion—whatever it may be. But there is no such thing in the world as “good” or “bad,” aside from what we ourselves pour into those concepts.