Doubt and Probability—in Halakha, Thought, and in General—Lesson 36 – Rabbi Michael Abraham

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The testimony argument and the method of testing hypotheses
The physico-theological argument against atheism
Miracles, tradition, and probability according to Hume
Empiricism and the foundational assumptions of science
The problem of induction and the dissonance between theory and practice
An internal contradiction in Hume’s argument against miracles
Begging the question and lack of falsifiability
The reliability of testimony and accepting improbable events
Testimony versus probability and a “statistical mistake”
Miracles in “primitive” societies versus educated ones
Closing questions and continuation

Summary

General overview

The text presents the testimony argument and David Hume’s critique of it through a comparative method of setting up two hypotheses and choosing the one more reasonable in light of the data, while arguing that this method is important even for someone who does not accept Hume’s conclusions. The speaker also applies the method to the physico-theological argument and reaches the opposite conclusion from the atheists: the complex world requires a cause, and he calls that cause God, while further claims about the divine will or commandments require separate discussion. He then attacks Hume’s empiricist foundation, points to non-empirical assumptions on which science relies, and argues that Hume contradicts himself, begs the question, and turns his position on miracles into something unfalsifiable. The speaker emphasizes the weight of the reliability of testimony, tells a number of anecdotes to illustrate trust in witnesses versus rare events, and concludes by arguing that “educated” societies may reject testimony about miracles in advance, whereas “primitive” societies may accept it, alongside open questions about the reliability of tradition as a religious foundation.

The testimony argument and the method of testing hypotheses

David Hume is presented as someone who sharpened the critique of the testimony argument by testing hypotheses in a statistical style, where one sets two possibilities against each other and asks which is more probable. The speaker adopts this methodological principle of comparison to an alternative rather than examining a claim “in itself,” and brings Sherlock Holmes’s image that once the impossible is excluded, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth. He presents the testimony argument as based on a tradition transmitting a report of a miracle, such as the revelation at Mount Sinai or the splitting of the Red Sea, and the two alternatives: either the miracle happened and the tradition is reliable, or the miracle did not happen and the tradition was distorted accidentally or deliberately.

The physico-theological argument against atheism

The speaker describes an atheistic response to the physico-theological argument according to which, although the emergence of complexity “by chance” is improbable, the existence of God seems even less probable, and so the argument is rejected. He argues that this is a faulty use of the comparative principle and reformulates the alternatives as “the world has a cause” versus “the world has no cause,” without assuming God in advance. He states that if the probability that the complex world happened without a cause is negligible, the conclusion is that there is a cause, and he calls that cause God, while further properties of that cause—such as giving the Torah, wanting him to put on tefillin, “turn the other cheek,” or “dance around the fire and say cock-a-doodle-doo”—do not follow from the argument and need to be discussed on their own. He accuses atheists of begging the question by assuming in advance that the probability of God is very small and then “calculating” accordingly, and argues that one must start from assumptions accepted by both sides and compare fair alternatives.

Miracles, tradition, and probability according to Hume

The speaker presents Hume’s claim that the possibility that the miracle happened has negligible probability because miracles “do not happen” and are contrary to the laws of nature, whereas the possibility that the tradition became distorted is at least possible because distortions do occur and do not contradict the laws of nature. He describes how, given this presentation of the two possibilities, the conclusion that the miracle did not occur seems to follow automatically, and recounts atheistic reactions celebrating this as a “death blow” to religious traditions. He allows for a position of “I have no answer, I don’t want to choose,” but rejects it with regard to the argument from the world’s causality and argues that the answer is that there is a cause.

Empiricism and the foundational assumptions of science

The speaker identifies Hume’s attack on the testimony argument as rooted in empiricism, that is, reliance on experience, according to which the world behaves according to the laws of nature and therefore a report of a miracle is suspect. He argues that empiricism is problematic because science itself relies on assumptions with no empirical basis, including causality, induction, the universality of the laws of nature across space, the stability of the laws of nature over time, and the assumption that there is “no action at a distance.” He notes that David Hume himself attacked causality and induction, and therefore consistent empiricism leads to a very “thin” picture of the world that at most accepts direct observations and casts doubt on generalizations.

The problem of induction and the dissonance between theory and practice

The speaker states that if one adopts consistent Humean empiricism, one cannot establish general laws of nature at all, because they are the product of induction, and this yields broad skepticism. He argues that there is a dissonance between skeptical worldviews and practical behavior such as boarding airplanes, and attributes this also to logical positivism. He refuses to argue ad hominem about Hume as a person and stresses that he is discussing a position, but he describes Hume as a skeptic who was “more consistent” than others at the theoretical level.

An internal contradiction in Hume’s argument against miracles

The speaker argues that in his argument against miracles, Hume prefers induction over direct observation, because even if a person were to see a miracle, he would still have to prefer the possibility of perceptual error over the possibility that a miracle occurred. The speaker defines this as a frontal contradiction to Hume’s empiricist doctrine, according to which direct observation should be the foundation. He argues that the claim that a miracle is “impossible” itself rests on induction, and so Hume uses a tool he himself undermines in order to disqualify miracles.

Begging the question and lack of falsifiability

The speaker argues that Hume begs the question when he concludes that “we have never heard of miracles,” because every report of a miracle is rejected in advance on the basis of the assumption that there are no miracles, and so a circle is created. He adds that Hume’s position is unfalsifiable because even repeated occurrences of a phenomenon would be interpreted as an unknown law of nature and not as a miracle, while a one-time event “against nature” would be rejected categorically. He argues that attributing such a position to “science” sounds strange because it blocks in advance the possibility of decisive evidence.

The reliability of testimony and accepting improbable events

The speaker defines the eyes and the senses as a kind of “witness” that can err, and therefore the problem of reliability exists both in direct testimony and in a chain of transmission. He argues that Hume ignores the weight of trust in a witness or in a chain of transmission, because he determines in advance that a miracle is impossible and therefore any trust will be overridden in favor of distortion. He tells an anecdote about a reliable secular friend who reported on a workshop in the Midwest where six Black people were not invited to speak, and illustrates a Hume-style argument that would lead one to dismiss the story as “zero probability,” then says that in practice he believes his friend because of his reliability. He also gives an example of a report about curing jaundice with pigeons, describes how at first he accepted the report because he trusted the informant and looked for a sensible explanation, and only later adopted an alternative natural explanation that ruled out the mystical interpretation.

Testimony versus probability and a “statistical mistake”

The speaker compares Hume’s argument to the example of the red and blue buses and to eyewitnesses, and argues that comparing the rarity of the event to the chance that the witnesses erred can be a statistical mistake. He states that when there is reliable testimony identifying a rare event, the relevant probability is the conditional probability given the testimony, not the base rate of the event’s rarity. He concludes that an improbable event is not rejected merely because it is rare, but is weighed against the reliability of the reporting mechanism, and therefore one should not accept a categorical rule according to which induction overrides all testimony about a miracle.

Miracles in “primitive” societies versus educated ones

The speaker presents Hume’s claim that reports of miracles come from primitive societies and not from educated ones, and agrees that there is something to this, but adds a possible reversal. He argues that societies with a Western scientific mindset tend in advance to reject reports that do not fit science, and therefore even real miracles would not be accepted there, whereas less “civilized” societies may absorb both nonsense and the few genuine cases. He brings a passage from The Wizard of Oz about how in “civilized countries” there are no witches left, and says that expertise can help but can also get in the way when testimony contradicts the existing theory.

Closing questions and continuation

The speaker leaves for later the question of how one can ground a religion based on testimony and tradition when the issue of reliability is central and hard to decide. He ends with a short exchange in which someone suggests that he write something or make an organized series on philosophy of science and the connection between general philosophy and religion, and he replies that he will think about it.

Full Transcript

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Last time I started talking about the testimony argument, Hume’s critique of the testimony argument, and basically Hume’s novelty was this: the testimony argument is really reliance on a tradition that transmits to us some report of a miracle—the revelation at Mount Sinai, the splitting of the Red Sea, or something like that. Now Hume’s critique of this argument—the usual critiques of it are, fine, traditions can get distorted and all sorts of things like that, and who says so, and so on and so forth. Hume formulates this very same critique, but in a more precise way, the way it’s done in statistics as hypothesis testing. You set two hypotheses against each other and have to decide which one survives in light of the data, or which one is more probable. And that’s a methodological rule that in any case I think is worth adopting from Hume, even if I don’t agree with his conclusions. Methodologically, I think it’s definitely important to proceed that way. Yes, this is Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four, where he says that after we eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is probably the truth. Because the fact that a certain possibility is very, very improbable does not mean it’s false. It could be that the alternative is even less probable. So we need to get used to not examining things in themselves, but always against the alternative—that is, comparing two alternatives.

Yes, the other side of the same coin, since we’re already talking about it—the other side of that same coin is that many times, say, I bring people a proof for the existence of God, the physico-theological proof. I say: the world is complex; a complex thing does not just come into being without some guiding hand, and therefore there is God. Then people say: yes, but the claim that there is God seems to me much less probable than the claim that this complex thing came about by chance. Everyone agrees that’s improbable, but the claim that there is God is even less probable, and therefore we don’t accept the physico-theological argument. But in my opinion, that is a faulty use of the comparative principle I talked about earlier, because you can actually present this in Hume’s form—but this time against the atheists. The claim is either that the world has a cause or that it doesn’t. If the probability that this thing happened without a cause is negligible, then one says there was a cause, and that cause is God. In other words, this is really, in a sense, a proof by elimination. There is no third possibility: either there is a cause or there isn’t. And if the possibility that there is no cause has a very, very tiny probability, then the probability that there is a cause is one minus that tiny probability. That’s all. So this is a completely valid and logical proof that a cause exists.

Now, that cause—I call it God. Meaning, of course any additional claim I want to make about that cause—that it gave the Torah, that it wants me to put on tefillin, or that it wants me to turn the other cheek, or that it wants me to dance around the fire and say cock-a-doodle-doo—all those claims are obviously claims that have to be discussed on their own merits. But the basic claim that there is a cause is a good claim. And so here, in fact, the proper application of the Humean principle leads precisely to the conclusion that there is God, not that there isn’t. Because when you say that it seems very improbable to you that there is God, you really have no way to check that. What does “improbable” mean? Intuitively improbable. Fine. So let’s examine the two possibilities now: either this world has a cause or it doesn’t. That the world has no cause—the probability of that is very, very small, that something so complex arose on its own without a guiding hand. The probability that there is a cause is one minus that. In other words, if that probability is small, then the second probability is one—one minus epsilon. Okay? So of course you can assume that the probability that there is God is very, very small, and then of course the conclusion will be that the probability that there is no cause—sorry—is very, very large, almost one. But that’s just an artificial assumption; you’re begging the question. You assume there is no God, and then you start doing your calculations. I’m saying: let’s assume nothing. Let’s look with plain reason and reach conclusions about whether there is or isn’t God, rather than assume there isn’t and then see what comes out. Religious people are often accused of motivated thinking. In my opinion, atheists suffer from it.

Now he says: a tradition reaches us saying that there was a miracle—whether a revelation at Mount Sinai, or the splitting of the Red Sea, or whatever, some miracle. Doesn’t matter what exactly, something supernatural. And we have two ways to relate to this. One possibility is that the miracle happened—that is, the tradition is reliable and the miracle happened. The second possibility: the miracle did not happen, and the tradition distorted something—deliberately, accidentally, by mistake, whatever. The tradition distorted something. Now he says: the first possibility, that the miracle happened and the tradition is reliable, is a possibility whose probability is zero. Because miracles don’t happen; it’s supernatural, it goes against the laws of nature. By contrast, the possibility that the tradition got distorted and reports a miracle that never happened—even if the probability is small, and I’m willing for the sake of this discussion to accept that it’s small—still, it can happen. That is, it doesn’t contradict the laws of nature. It happens sometimes; people get things wrong. Anyone who’s ever played broken telephone knows that. And therefore, he says, if I compare these two possibilities against each other, then in practice I need to accept the conclusion that the miracle did not occur and the tradition got distorted. So when you present the issue this way, as two possibilities set one against the other, where I have to choose which one is more reasonable and which one less, the conclusion is apparently obvious. And I already described all the superlatives—the way atheists really celebrate around this argument and explain that it’s a death blow to religious beliefs and religious traditions, there’s no recovery, fallen is the virgin of Israel, she shall rise no more.

[Speaker C] Wait, I have a question. What about an answer that says: I’m standing before these possibilities, they’re beyond me, I have no answer. I don’t want to choose. I have no answer.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Possible, sure, everything’s fine, why not? And then? Then you have no answer.

[Speaker C] And what do you do with the fact that there’s no answer? I don’t know, because in the end what you’re saying too is just presenting probabilities this way and that way, but—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m claiming that my argument is not like the atheistic argument, because my argument starts from a premise that the atheist also accepts. Everyone agrees that a complex thing does not come into existence without a guiding hand, right? That’s a principle every reasonable person agrees with. Leave God out of it for now—just that principle in itself.

[Speaker C] No, no, that’s understood. What I’m saying is that when you move toward the options, you present two options: one, there is God; the other, it happened for no reason.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, that’s exactly why I don’t present it that way. I say: the world exists and it is complex. Two possibilities: either it has a cause or it has no cause. Those are the two possibilities. Forget God—we haven’t talked about that yet. Either there is a cause or there isn’t. If there is no cause, the probability is negligible. A complex thing does not come into being without a cause. Conclusion: there is a cause. The probability is one minus that negligible probability that there is a cause. Now, to that cause—I now begin—I call that cause God. Doesn’t matter, it’s just a name, I call it God. So I claim that this proof is an excellent proof; it doesn’t beg the question. It proceeds from a premise accepted by both sides in the debate: that it is not plausible for a complex thing to come into being on its own. Everyone agrees on that. What does the atheist answer me? He says: yes, but the probability that there is God is even smaller. So then, like God gets removed…

[Speaker C] No, no, I understood that, I understood that. But I’m asking: why even smaller—

[Speaker D] Smaller—in what sense?

[Speaker C] No, no, that I actually understand. But the argument that says, okay, so there is a cause, and then the fact that you call it God is nice, but that’s just a definition you’re choosing for yourself. But in terms of the inner substance of the controversy, we don’t really have an answer. It’s beyond us; we don’t have an answer.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course we do. There is a cause. What do you mean, we don’t have an answer? There is a cause for the world—that’s the answer. What will you call it? Call it Yankele, what difference does it make what you call it? There is a cause for the world. Why is there no answer? There’s a wonderful and highly reasonable answer.

[Speaker D] I don’t understand—David Hume is addressing… wait, one at a time…

[Speaker E] Rabbi, after all, very explicitly agrees with David Hume. In this argument he’s not talking about the physico-theological proof and he’s not talking about—wait, wait, wait—David Hume is talking about the proof from testimony, right? Tradition. So he said, if I came to the rabbi—suppose the rabbi didn’t have the—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The physico-theological proof and only had the proof from testimony—

[Speaker E] Wait, I haven’t even—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Started. I haven’t started this discussion yet, so there’s no point arguing. Shmuel, I haven’t started the discussion yet. I’m only explaining the question. At this stage I’m completely with Hume. You don’t need to defend him. I’m with him. I haven’t yet raised the arguments for why I disagree with him. For now I’m completely with him. And I said that despite what he says here—which I don’t agree with, but I’ll explain that later, I haven’t raised the arguments yet—for the time being his argument looks very, very sensible. No wonder everyone’s dancing around there. Okay? What I’m saying is that around the physico-theological argument, when you set up the two alternatives—when you present it as two alternatives between which you have to choose—the conclusion comes out the opposite of Hume’s conclusion. That’s my claim.

Now, what happens with why? I haven’t talked about that. Why? I said: because there, the assumption that a complex thing does not arise on its own spontaneously is an assumption accepted by everyone. It’s not plausible that it arose on its own. So the probability that there is a cause is one minus that small probability—which is basically one.

[Speaker E] But then the rabbi is importing the physico-theological proof into Hume. That’s a different issue under dispute, but there he is speaking specifically about the argument from tradition.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not talking to Hume, okay? I’m not talking to Hume.

[Speaker E] And the rabbi started today with David Hume.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I started with David Hume and then moved to another example, where too I set up two alternatives exactly according to David Hume’s method. I set up two alternatives, and when you set those two alternatives against each other, there you can reach a conclusion. David Hume in his own context also reached a conclusion after setting up two alternatives. I haven’t said there’s any contradiction to David Hume here; this is not an argument against David Hume. It’s simply an example of another topic where, if you present things as two alternatives set one against the other, it becomes easier to make progress. Rather than using these hand-waving statements like “a complex thing doesn’t arise on its own” or something like that, which is the usual formulation. I’m saying: yes, that’s a correct formulation, but let’s formulate it more precisely, as David Hume said. Either there is a cause or there isn’t. No cause—the probability is small; conclusion: there is a cause. It’s simply a more precise formulation of the argument, that’s all. In that sense I go with David Hume—I take his method, and I say absolutely, we should learn from him. That’s how these things should be discussed: set up two alternatives and only then begin thinking which is preferable, instead of thinking about one alternative and asking whether it’s reasonable or not. David Hume?

[Speaker D] Yes. Was David Hume referring to creation or to the revelation at Mount Sinai?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To Mount Sinai? No. No, he didn’t refer to Mount Sinai either. He spoke about miracles; Mount Sinai didn’t interest him. That’s not—

[Speaker D] Fine, okay, because with respect to creation it’s a different argument. Creation is certainly a miracle by any view.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, fine.

[Speaker D] I mean, again, the argument that we don’t see miracles today doesn’t bear on creation, because it’s obvious that when the laws of nature came into being, that was a miracle.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who says they came into being? Maybe they were always there. Fine, but never mind, I’m talking about the assumption that there is a cause as something derived from some cause—I didn’t bring that up as part of a discussion of Hume’s principle. I simply brought another example of an issue where, when you place the two alternatives against each other, the argument becomes more precise, that’s all. Yes, I’m saying Hume’s argument doesn’t bear on creation—

[Speaker D] It bears only on Mount Sinai.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He talks about miracles, yes. Mount Sinai is our issue. He spoke about miracles in general. In the testimony argument he talked about Jesus walking on water, or I don’t know, various miracles of that kind—he was a Christian. But never mind, the idea is the same idea. When a tradition comes and conveys to me a report of a miracle, the question is how I’m supposed to relate to such a report. Okay? Now my example with the physico-theological principle is not connected to the discussion—again, let’s not mix it in. I simply brought another example of a discussion where, if you frame it the way Hume frames it—as two alternatives I need to choose between—it becomes more precise, clearer, more correct to do it that way. That’s all.

Now I want to really get into the discussion of David Hume’s argument itself, about his objection to the testimony argument. The first criticism I want to make is this: first of all, David Hume’s starting point is an empiricist starting point. He believed in experience as the only instrument that can teach us about the world. And so, basically, his attack on the testimony argument is an attack based on experience. In experience, we see no miracles; the world behaves according to the laws of nature. And therefore a report of a miracle is a very dubious report; its probability is very small, if it exists at all. That is basically the claim. This is an argument that is, in essence, empiricist.

Now first I want to make a general remark about empiricism, even before Hume’s arguments. Empiricism is a very problematic approach. Because today at least, empiricists are people who argue on behalf of science. That is, they see science as the ultimate tool for learning about the world—in fact, the exclusive tool, not just the ultimate one. But you need to notice that science itself is based on quite a few assumptions that have no empirical basis. The idea that science is the result of pure observation, only observation—that’s naive. It’s simply not true. There are many assumptions there. One assumption is causality. A second assumption is induction—two assumptions that David Hume himself attacked, and we’ll get to that in a moment. A third assumption is that the laws of nature do not change from place to place; the laws of nature are universal. A fourth assumption: the laws of nature continue over time in the same way all the time. The laws of nature do not change, neither in place nor in time. A fifth assumption is that there is no action at a distance. One body here and another body there do not act on each other unless something is transmitted from one to the other. That too is an assumption of physics—that there is no action at a distance. There are lots of assumptions. And these assumptions are just assumptions; they have no empirical basis.

[Speaker E] Rabbi, why is that true? Rabbi, why is that true? After all, it’s clear that even those foundational assumptions that come from intuition are because we are exposed to reality. Like AI—we’re exposed to infinitely many facts, and somehow we acquire a sense that there’s something unifying all of it…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The fact that you acquire a sense—that’s true enough. The whole question is just what that sense is worth.

[Speaker E] An assumption is an intuition, an intuition that grounds an assumption.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so I’m saying: the fact that a sense arises in you is a simple fact; there’s no dispute about that. The question is what that sense is worth.

[Speaker E] I’m saying, what the rabbi said, that empiricism—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] David Hume himself attacked the reliability of that sense. Can’t hear. As David Hume himself attacked the reliability of that sense.

[Speaker E] He himself says against—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The principle of induction, against the principle of causality. Where did you get it from? It has no empirical basis. He does not accept intuition as a reliable instrument. On the contrary, my claim is that the only way to solve Humean doubts is to trust our intuition. That’s my old thesis. Okay? David Hume doesn’t go with that. He’s an empiricist. So now basically I’m saying: if you really are an empiricist all the way, then you have to make do with very little… can’t hear.

[Speaker E] What? We can’t hear, rabbi, it cut out for a second.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Can you hear now?

[Speaker E] Maybe it’s just me.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Can you hear me?

[Speaker E] Yes, we can hear you.

[Speaker F] I’ve heard perfectly the whole time.

[Speaker E] Okay, it’s back on my end.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying that if David Hume really is such a tight and consistent empiricist, then he ought to be left with very few facts that he is prepared to accept. At most, facts he observed directly. And even there, one can always cast doubt—who says our senses are reliable? That they reflect reality correctly? But even if I grant that, you’re left with a collection of facts that you observed directly. But no general law of nature can you accept, because that is the result of induction; it’s the result of a generalization we make, and David Hume is not willing to accept induction and causality as valid instruments regarding the world. He sees them as certain feelings of ours, constructions of ours, a way we use to handle clusters of facts because that’s most convenient for us—but that says nothing about the world itself.

And therefore David Hume himself, who was actually a relatively consistent empiricist, much more perhaps than many others who came after him, really was a great skeptic. I’ve spoken about this more than once in the past. That is, he really cast doubt on everything that was not direct observation. And again I say: even direct observation he should have doubted too; it’s not clear why he exempted that. But still, that was his conclusion. So he, in himself, is consistent; I have no complaints against him. But if someone sees science—just a second—as an instrument for grasping reality, understanding reality, knowing something about reality, then he cannot be a Humean empiricist. That is, he cannot accept only results of direct observation; he must rely on various assumptions that have no empirical basis. Science cannot exist without them as a tool for knowing reality. Unless you view science as some kind of game of arranging facts in ways convenient for us. There are people who want to claim something like that. It’s absurd, but there are people who want to claim it.

[Speaker E] Rabbi, after all it’s obvious to anyone who studies Hume and has some minimal appreciation for the man that if he were alive today, he’d board airplanes without a second thought. He’d fly between continents with no fear at all. So what does it mean to say he casts doubt? That phrase, “casts doubt,” is not so simple. He wasn’t really in doubt—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not discussing the person; I’m discussing the position.

[Speaker E] The position too—he didn’t hold the position like that… yes, but he didn’t mean to say that he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know the world in itself, but as far as his own practice goes—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course in practice, yes—that’s exactly the point. His practice doesn’t match his principles, his worldview. Right? There are things like that today too. Lots of people today cast doubt on everything that is not direct empirical observation or a logical derivative of direct observations—that is, logical positivism for example—and yet they still get on airplanes. Ask them why. You’ll get crooked answers. Because we’re used to it, because we don’t have anything better, because—fine, bottom line, you do believe in it, stop fooling around. So I’m saying: there is a dissonance between your declared theoretical worldview and your practice. There is such a dissonance there; nothing will help.

[Speaker E] But that’s not essentially different from Kant’s approach, where he says many things and only says that the thing in itself we do not understand. What does that mean? You don’t know the thing in itself, and yet you board airplanes? Sure. What does that have to do with anything? The world as we see it—no? Why doesn’t the rabbi make this claim about Kant himself?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why doesn’t the question arise there?

[Speaker E] What? Because there’s no contradiction?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s no contradiction at all. What’s the problem? He says: I don’t know the world in itself; I know the way it appears to my eyes. And in the way it appears to my eyes, airplanes don’t crash.

[Speaker E] And maybe tomorrow they will crash?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but that’s exactly it—David Hume doesn’t say that. David Hume claims airplanes do crash; we’re just used to thinking, because that’s what we got used to in the past, that airplanes won’t crash—but the past says nothing about the future.

[Speaker E] He wasn’t that stupid, rabbi. It can’t be. Why?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s no point getting into ad hominem discussion. I’m discussing the position, not the person.

[Speaker E] Of course, of course, me too. But apparently I interpreted him differently.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That is the position.

[Speaker D] That is the position, there’s nothing to do about it. Wait. Yes. David Hume basically casts doubt on our senses—does that mean he casts doubt fifty-fifty, does that mean he casts doubt five—wait a second—does that mean it’s fifty-fifty, does that mean—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A single percent, or does he say it’s even zero? Like, it really says nothing. First of all, he doesn’t cast doubt on the senses. And second, the doubt he casts is fifty-fifty.

[Speaker D] No, with respect to the future, I mean. With respect to the future, is it fifty-fifty? Or does he say that what happened in the past says nothing about the future?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct, that’s what he says. So fifty-fifty.

[Speaker D] Maybe he just meant to say that it’s just not one hundred percent?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If that’s what he meant to say, then he said nothing. Everybody knows that. The fact that generalizations are not certain—there is nobody in the universe who disputes that.

[Speaker E] Rabbi, I think that just as in ethics, David Hume’s emphasis is not that we don’t know reality—that’s something many perfectly fine rabbis say too—but rather he puts the emphasis on feelings. He says morality comes from feeling, because there is nothing else.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s not mix in ethics right now.

[Speaker E] But it’s the same thing. In the same way, his conclusion is one: in both cases we go by feeling, and he attributes very great importance to feelings.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not interested in importance. The question is whether it’s true, not whether it’s important.

[Speaker E] What do you mean whether it’s morally true? That’s very important.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does morally true mean? Factually true—do airplanes crash or not?

[Speaker E] So the same thing, the same thing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not the same thing. David Hume says they do crash.

[Speaker E] No, absolutely not.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, then he says yes. You can defend him until tomorrow; that’s okay. Maybe inwardly he didn’t think that—

[Speaker E] Okay, but if that’s what he said, then it follows from what the rabbi is saying that David Hume said murder is permitted, because if I have such a feeling, my heart itches and it doesn’t feel nice… What does this have to do with ethics now?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “Murder is forbidden” is not a factual question at all. That’s a completely different discussion.

[Speaker E] No, because there too—no, rabbi, I think it’s not a completely different discussion. It’s the same doctrine of David Hume, who puts all the emphasis on feeling and emotion.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s really no point. I don’t like arguing about David Hume. I’m arguing about David Hume’s position, and David Hume’s position is what I described.

[Speaker E] So I simply interpret it differently.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, okay, so we have a disagreement. That’s okay, allowed.

[Speaker A] Rabbi? Yes. If an empiricist looks at the world and examines it according to the facts and what happens around him—relating to the world itself—can that be called a fact? Or still you can’t call it a miracle, he’ll still accept it as a fact?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, what in the world itself?

[Speaker A] For example, Maimonides—on one hand he was an empiricist, on the other hand in The Guide he writes that the greatest miracle is that the sun rises every day, and that days alternate, and that the earth revolves—meaning all the things in nature, in creation. That all the things in nature are, as it were, the miracle. But on the other hand he was also, in a way, some kind of empiricist—just the facts, just reason.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he didn’t mean that it’s a miracle in the sense that it departs from the laws. He meant that the laws themselves are a miracle. So that does not contradict empiricism.

[Speaker A] That’s what I’m asking. So with David Hume—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That does not contradict empiricism?

[Speaker A] It doesn’t contradict it, right? Obviously not. So then with David Hume, his empiricism too—you can accept it as some kind of fact that exists together with us, meaning what?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That the laws of nature are true? Yes, certainly. No—David Hume says no. You have no way of knowing. What happened in the past is not certain to continue in the future; there’s no reason to assume it will continue in the future.

[Speaker A] Yes, but over the course of his life, what he saw when he was young, what he saw at the end of his life—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, so that’s the problem of induction. He says: what I’ve seen until now is obvious. What he saw is what you saw and what I saw. He only claims that from here you cannot learn what will happen in the future.

[Speaker D] I don’t understand—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So he denied science, basically?

[Speaker A] Wait, wait—what is the basis for that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, I understand his claim.

[Speaker A] No, I understand—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s asking: what is the basis for your belief that what has been will continue to be?

[Speaker A] Well, over the generations, for generations upon generations, we’ve observed and seen the same thing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. David Hume himself rejects that argument. He says: what do you want to claim—that we learn the principle of induction itself by induction? Because it worked for us in the past? The principle of induction worked for us in the past?

[Speaker A] But everything that worked in the past also works today.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, what do you mean it works today? You don’t know what will happen tomorrow, right? Rather, you’re saying that what I observed the day before yesterday also happened yesterday, right? Right. Good. So that means the principle of induction worked for me in the past, and therefore I assume it should also work in the future. But that itself is induction, so you can’t use induction to establish the principle of induction.

[Speaker A] You could say it the other way around. After all, he was a scientific person, and in science that’s exactly what we rely on.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But he attacks exactly that point. Of course he understood science, but he attacks science precisely at that point. There is an assumption there that he does not accept. He claims it is merely a habit of thought embedded in us, but there is no real reason to assume that what was will continue to be, or that everything has a cause. He attacks the principle of causality, attacks the principle of induction—that’s what he claims. He has the same intuition that you and I have; he just says there is no justification for it.

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[Speaker D] Yes, but you could argue it a little differently: that it was proven that what we thought last year would happen this year did in fact happen in the end. Right? Meaning, what we thought in the past about the future, we thought would be the case, and therefore what?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Gone. You see? What was, will not be. There, he was here a moment ago and now he’s already gone.

[Speaker A] No, but King Solomon apparently didn’t read that, right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Anyway, this extreme empiricist claim led David Hume to a very, very thin picture of the world. Meaning, he was prepared to accept only things that we directly observe, not things that involve hypotheses, like generalizations, the principle of causality, things of that sort. And I’m saying that this thin and narrow conception may be consistent, but the accepted view in the scientific world is not like that. In the scientific world there definitely is reliance on those a priori assumptions, and we still accept them. We accept them as something reliable about the world, not merely as our own methodological habits. That’s really the claim. But I’ll say more than that: what matters more here is that so far this still doesn’t attack Hume; it only says that Hume is on one side and there are those who think differently from him. That’s allowed. But here we move to a problem within Hume’s own method: if Hume really isn’t prepared to treat induction seriously, then on what basis does he attack the witness argument? After all, he attacks the witness argument because until now we’ve seen that the world is conducted according to laws, and it’s not reasonable that miracles occur, right? But that itself is induction, a generalization. You assume that what you’ve seen—the laws you’ve seen until now—are in fact binding laws; that the world always behaves and will behave that way. But if you yourself attack the principle of induction, then how can you afterward come to me, as a believer who accepts traditional testimony, and say: look, all our experience proves that miracles don’t occur. Okay, so up to now you haven’t seen miracles—but maybe miracles occurred that you didn’t see, or maybe miracles will occur in the future that you can’t see because that will be in the future. And suddenly the enormous trust he places in induction is very strange, after the foundational thesis—all the attacks with which we attack induction are based on his arguments.

[Speaker E] He himself doesn’t, but he says: according to your view—he says, according to your view, since you believe in induction—then of the two options that are built on induction, one is more probable.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But this isn’t built on any induction. I saw God reveal Himself, therefore God was revealed—that’s an observation.

[Speaker E] No, but reliance on the—if he himself had seen God, Hume too would agree that there is a God. He says: you and I didn’t see.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Read my column. I had an argument about this also with Jeremy Fogel, and in the end he agreed; the columns were written following the debate with him. No—David Hume raises doubts even if I myself were now to look at a miracle. He would say: it didn’t happen; you have an error in perception. We can have errors in perception; that’s something that can happen. Miracles cannot happen. His problem isn’t only the chain of transmission; his problem is even with the observer himself. Even the observer himself, when he looks there, says: what, I have two possibilities: either a miracle happened, or no miracle happened and something happened in my perception, and therefore I saw something here incorrectly. The second possibility does not contradict the laws of nature; it may be rare, but it does not contradict the laws of nature. The first possibility is impossible; it is against the laws of nature. And then you’re not supposed to accept even the evidence of your own eyes, not just a report from a chain of transmission.

[Speaker D] So the arguments are separate, no?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s the same logic; it makes no difference. What difference does it make? The same logic. The logic says: you set up two possibilities. If a miracle is impossible, then if you see a miracle, apparently the distortion is in you, not that a miracle actually happened. Now, how do you know that a miracle is impossible? That’s induction, right?

[Speaker E] No—you see, you keep looking and you see that there is no miracle.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, exactly. That’s what’s called induction.

[Speaker A] No, induction is continuously looking at the same things, right. True.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Induction is that after you’ve seen it again and again, you reach the conclusion that it’s always like that. That’s it. That’s exactly induction.

[Speaker A] On the other hand, by the way, he argued that in order to cast doubt on something, right, I need to accept some things that stand, that have some basis, that hold water.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you go in that direction, then David Hume can’t even begin speaking. He casts doubt on lots of things not because he has a reason to doubt, but because he has no reason not to doubt. Jewish law, the standard halakhic conception, is definitely not Humean. The halakhic conception says that if there is something that sounds reasonable, I accept it; in order to doubt it, there has to be a reason. But David Hume went in the opposite direction. David Hume says: in order to accept something, there has to be a reason; if I have no reason to accept it, then as far as I’m concerned it’s not admissible. Okay? So fine—he’s a philosopher. Again I say, a philosopher thinks differently; a philosopher talks about things in some abstract way. In practice, I’m sure his consciousness was like mine and yours. It’s clear that his natural feelings and intuitions were like all of ours. He argued as a philosopher. He says: as a philosopher, I’m aware that these things are ultimately constructions; they’re not really true in some sense. That’s basically the claim.

[Speaker D] But if he really was a philosopher, then he knew his intuition was lying to him, because actually it isn’t true that what was is supposed to be in the future. Right. So he should have understood that his intuition was deceiving him. So how does he trust airplanes?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s a different question. I told you—on that point you get crooked answers to this day. Yes, on that I agree.

[Speaker A] Would Hume accept Aristotelian logic? What? Would Hume accept Aristotelian logic?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, why not? Logic isn’t something that’s a factual claim; you don’t need observation for it. Let’s put it in a very, very direct way: suppose I see a miracle. David Hume would say that I’m supposed to deny it. The chance that I’m mistaken does not contradict the laws of nature, but the chance that a miracle occurred does contradict the laws of nature. And then that basically means that David Hume prefers induction over direct observation. I have direct observation that a miracle happened here, and my induction tells me that miracles don’t happen. He tells me: you should prefer the induction over the direct observation. And I say: that contradicts your entire doctrine. Your entire doctrine says that I should throw away my intuitions and go only with direct viewing, throw away my intuitions and go only with direct observation.

[Speaker E] But isn’t he still speaking in the context of a tradition of a miracle, and not seeing the miracle itself?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Like Maimonides. Again, read my columns. I deal there with the difference between these two claims as well.

[Speaker E] Maimonides too, after all, says regarding a tradition about miracles that suspicion can be cast on them; about the seeing itself he doesn’t say that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but David Hume attacks both things. His logic attacks both things too. It doesn’t matter at all what he writes. His logic attacks both things equally; there’s no difference whatsoever. If the miracle is impossible, then the miracle is inadmissible even if I saw it myself.

[Speaker E] But as an empiricist, on what the eyes see—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —he doesn’t dispute.

[Speaker E] As an empiricist, he relies on what the eyes see.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. There’s a contradiction here between his empiricist conception and his argument against the witness argument. That’s exactly what I’m claiming. Just generally speaking. The opposite. It’s the exact opposite, one hundred and eighty degrees. It’s a frontal contradiction. In his general doctrine he prefers observation over induction, and in his attack on the witness argument he prefers induction over observation.

[Speaker E] Again—not about the witness, about the one who saw, the first one; not about tradition, not a witness who saw, but that I saw it myself.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that’s called the witness argument.

[Speaker E] The witness argument is both.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, okay, whatever—it’s terminology. I mean both.

[Speaker E] So the Rabbi agrees with half of what he says? About tradition, the Rabbi agrees that it can’t really hold water?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I don’t agree there either.

[Speaker E] Yes, but in principle that doesn’t contradict the principle of induction.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] With tradition too it contradicts it, because if I have a reliable person—if I have a reliable person who conveys to me a fact that he saw—then I tend to believe him. My induction tells me that this fact cannot occur because it’s a miracle. Okay? Same dilemma. What’s the difference?

[Speaker E] But my induction tells me that in the transmission of tradition, many times it doesn’t hold up.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you saw that it was true, the Rabbi himself agrees with that.

[Speaker E] The Rabbi agrees with that himself.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, again—I agree with that in principle. I’m not claiming that tradition is immune to error and always works, not at all. I’m far from that. But I’m claiming that you cannot argue categorically, reject categorically a tradition about a miracle by the force of induction. You can’t. You have to weigh what is preferable and what is less preferable. Sometimes this will be preferable and sometimes that will be preferable. But the categorical statement that induction overrides every report of a miracle—that’s not true. If I have an observer or a transmitter whom I regard as reliable, then from my perspective it’s as if I myself saw it. So it’s the same dilemma as what I saw versus induction—what’s the difference? Same thing at the principled level. You can tell me maybe the transmitter isn’t reliable. Fine—but once I’ve assumed he is reliable, from experience or from acquaintance or whatever the source may be, then it’s the same discussion, exactly the same discussion. And if I have a reliable transmitter, then I’ll be willing to accept his claims even though they seem to me to be very strange claims.

[Speaker E] But there is no reliable transmitter.

[Speaker A] Okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re pessimistic. I’m not so pessimistic. Yes.

[Speaker A] Did David Hume die of internal contradictions? What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Did David Hume die of internal contradictions? I’m asking. No, I didn’t understand.

[Speaker A] He was Christian, right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Again—no, I don’t know. I don’t think he was a religious believer. He was Christian culturally, that is—

[Speaker A] Meaning, in upbringing, in a devout family—that’s how I remember it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t think he believed in God; I think not. But I don’t know. His arguments are atheistic arguments at root. I’m not such a great expert in his doctrine, so I don’t know how to answer you, but I think not.

[Speaker A] In principle I just want to ask a question following everything we said. If I put empiricism aside and also put Judaism and all that aside, and I stand strictly, strictly on science—then is a miracle really impossible?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does “impossible” mean? It contradicts the laws of science. The question whether something that contradicts the laws of science is impossible—I don’t think it’s impossible. Hume thought yes. But the fact that it contradicts the laws of science—that’s the definition of a miracle.

[Speaker F] It also doesn’t have to be that it contradicts the laws of science; it could be an addition.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly what I wanted to ask. What? It could be that it doesn’t contradict them at all. It could be an addition—that the world is an open system.

[Speaker F] If it doesn’t contradict the laws of science—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —then it’s not a miracle.

[Speaker F] No, it’s a miracle in the sense that the world is an open system; it receives influences from outside the laws of nature. Meaning, usually it is governed by the laws of nature; sometimes someone comes and intervenes and changes them. But this miracle operated not—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —according to the laws of nature.

[Speaker F] Right, so it’s in addition to the laws of nature. Meaning, it doesn’t, say, contradict the principle of causality.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] According to the laws of nature this wasn’t supposed to happen, and it happened.

[Speaker F] And that’s not true. I think it’s not precise to say that according to the laws of nature this wasn’t supposed to happen. It may be more precise to say that the laws of nature do not cause this to happen. But something other than the laws of nature can indeed cause it to happen.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right—that’s called a miracle that is against the laws of nature. I didn’t understand why you brought this argument. If a certain body moves without a force acting on it, that contradicts the laws of nature. Something else caused it to move—not a force. Fine? That contradicts the laws of nature, because the laws of nature say that if no force acts, the body does not move. That contradicts—

[Speaker F] —the laws of nature. The question is whether, say, a miracle contradicts the principle of causality. Meaning, in a local instance clearly it—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —acts not according to the principle of causality. I don’t want to get into that. I’m not claiming that it contradicts the principle of causality.

[Speaker F] That’s exactly the question.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Excellent. That’s what I wanted. No—it could be yes and it could be no; that’s just not what I claimed. I’m not disagreeing with you; it’s simply not what I was claiming, so it’s a shame to get into that discussion. I’m not talking about that.

[Speaker F] Yes, yes, so excellent.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so the first claim is basically that there is some internal contradiction here. Second, there is also begging the question. Why? This. And I think I mentioned this last time: David Hume basically says, look, we’ve never heard of miracles; things happen according to the laws of nature; therefore miracles cannot occur. Meaning, everything is conducted according to the laws of nature—yes, the induction that underlies his argument. Now, why have you never heard of miracles? Because every time a report of a miracle reached you, you rejected it in exactly that way. You said there are no miracles and therefore the report cannot be accepted; rather, there is some problem with the reporter, right? But that means that you basically cannot accept reports of miracles. So what’s the wonder that you’ve never heard of miracles? So what? Your argument assumes itself. Your argument assumes that reports of miracles cannot be accepted. Why? Because we have never heard of a miracle. But you haven’t heard of a miracle because a report of a miracle cannot be accepted.

[Speaker D] No—“because we’ve never heard” isn’t it; it’s because we’ve never seen.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right—never seen and never heard, what difference does it make? No, even if we saw, you still wouldn’t accept it. It has never happened that we threw a ball— We’re returning to the same point. Come on, friends, we’re returning to the same point. Both seeing and hearing are the same thing; there is no difference whatsoever. There is induction—but seeing is a different argument. What? No, it’s not a different argument; it’s the same argument. Even if we saw the miracle, David Hume would not accept it.

[Speaker E] Okay, but it’s a separate, stronger argument.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s not a separate argument; it’s the same argument.

[Speaker D] Because we saw so many times that it doesn’t—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s the same argument because the induction goes against either seeing or a transmission of seeing. And you prefer the induction over both of them—that’s all. It’s the same logic. Maimonides himself brings— I’m talking about Hume.

[Speaker E] No, but also—

[Speaker D] Maybe he really didn’t rely on induction; maybe he relied on his seeing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He didn’t rely on his seeing. What is this—did you see everything? Have you ever seen, I don’t know, a submarine? Have you ever seen a submarine? I haven’t, but I have seen that the laws of nature persist. Have you ever seen a submarine? There is such a concept as submarines because people told me they saw them. Fine, so I believe them. So what?

[Speaker D] I didn’t see every detail, but I saw that the laws of nature persist.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no—you saw nothing. I saw nothing.

[Speaker E] I didn’t see a single detail. I never saw a submarine. And in fact when the Rabbi saw those pigeons, after some time with the jaundice he was convinced it was nonsense.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what did you understand from that? I was convinced it was nonsense—so what? What does that have to do with anything? Not because I’m unwilling to accept such reports, but because afterward I understood that the reports don’t indicate—

[Speaker E] —they’re less probable, because there’s no logical mechanism that explains them, and there are other mechanisms.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no—not because of that. Because there was a mechanism that explained why it happened. Not because there is no mechanism that explains this thing, but on the contrary: there was a mechanism that alternatively explained why it happened. The blockage of their breathing hole.

[Speaker E] Yes, yes, yes—that’s it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but that’s not because—on the contrary. The whole story with the pigeons—yes, that’s a story I should have mentioned here too, I think. The whole story with the pigeons says exactly the opposite. The story with the pigeons—let’s maybe tell it for whoever hasn’t heard it; I’ve already told it several times. In the yeshiva I had some guy who was sick with jaundice for a long time, two years older than me—a well-known figure today. He was hospitalized at home, I don’t know, for about half a year with jaundice; he didn’t return to the yeshiva. A mutual friend of ours visited him in the hospital once and said to me: listen, some Haredi witch-like woman came with pigeons, put them on his belly button, the pigeons died, and after— they died on the spot. They put them on his belly button, the pigeons died, and two or three days later he came back to the yeshiva. Yes, you know, there were lots of stories like this about pigeons curing jaundice, drawing out the bilirubin or I don’t know what, all kinds of legends of that sort. So I said: this friend of mine is a reliable person. He’s not a mystic or anything like that. I said: okay, if he said it, then apparently that’s what he saw there. I have no reason to doubt that that’s what he saw, and I also saw that the sick fellow afterward returned to the yeshiva, a short time later.

[Speaker E] But at that very moment when the Rabbi was exposed to this and disagreed with his parents on this point—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, wait—we’ve reached my parents. Shmuel, you know the story; let me tell them so they’ll be in the picture too. We already heard, we already heard. I went back to my parents and said to them: listen, such-and-such happened—pigeons, jaundice, he recovered, came back to the yeshiva. They clapped their hands—what a dark yeshiva in Gush Etzion, what a dark yeshiva, filling my head with all kinds of mystical nonsense, they don’t understand that a little rational thinking shows it’s all nonsense. So I said to them: absolutely not. That’s what Shmuel would say, but I don’t agree. Why? Because I tell them: look, if I have a reliable friend who saw it, I have no reason to doubt it; it’s probably true. A rational person, as distinct from a rationalist person, says: okay, so apparently it happened. What remains is to try to look for a sensible explanation for why it happened. Now if I find a sensible explanation, great. If I don’t find a sensible explanation, less great—but I still believe my friend.

[Speaker E] No way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The stage at which I rejected belief in these stories was the stage when I heard Rabbi Tao’s alternative explanation—yes—when he presented it in a matter-of-fact way.

[Speaker E] Rabbi, I hadn’t heard Rabbi Tao’s explanation until the Rabbi told it, and it was already obvious to me in advance, at ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine, that it’s nonsense. There is no logical mechanism to invent some metaphysical entities that transfer the bilirubin to pigeons—that’s absurd and stupid.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then luckily for us, luckily for us, most scientists until today didn’t think like you. Because if they had thought like you, today we’d be in the state of Adam in terms of our scientific knowledge. Because according to your approach, every story that contradicts the laws of nature as I know them—I do not accept.

[Speaker E] No—if I did a double-blind study and saw that the pigeons do it, then I would certainly say so.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And you still wouldn’t find a mechanism.

[Speaker E] No, no—if I conducted a study, even before I found a mechanism—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You didn’t find one, and even afterward you didn’t find one.

[Speaker E] Then I’d say: I need to investigate; I have a problem.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so that’s what I’m saying.

[Speaker E] Since I have—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —trust in the fellow who told me, I have trust in the fellow who told me, so if I have trust, then it needs investigation. And if I didn’t find a mechanism, then it needs more investigation.

[Speaker E] But I know that jaundice also passes without this. That too is in the background.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what? What does that have to do with anything?

[Speaker E] I didn’t understand. So why shouldn’t I doubt his reliability? But I know that jaundice passes on its own too. So the pigeons died? I’m asking—did the pigeons die?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. So there’s a way in which I know there was an interest in having them die.

[Speaker E] Someone had an interest in them dying.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And such a thing requires its own separate discussion. That’s all. I’m not willing to assume anything there in advance.

[Speaker E] The basic initial intuition is that someone wanted them to die. Obviously there’s an interest in them dying.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] An initial intuition—sure, we all have intuitions. And when there are facts, we need to be honest enough to give up our intuition when the facts contradict it. That’s all. But someone who isn’t talking about facts, but about intuitions, and rejects on their basis plausible facts—that is a dogmatic person.

[Speaker E] But they aren’t plausible at all, because there’s no—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —logical mechanism that we’ve encountered until now. That contradicts your intuition.

[Speaker E] But the intuition is based on a whole lot of empiricism.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Many times intuition is based on a whole lot of things.

[Speaker E] And nevertheless, despite—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —the fact that intuition is based on a whole lot of things, when new testimony arrives, I don’t plug my ears. I listen.

[Speaker E] And there’s a good explanation for why his jaundice passed. It passed on its own, like all jaundice.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And what does that have to do with anything, Shmuel? Good Lord—if you have an explanation, then fine, I’m with you too. I’m bringing this as an example now. I’m talking about a case where you have no explanation. You have no alternative explanation. The pigeons died, the man recovered, and it doesn’t fit with the medical knowledge we have today. So I investigate. I checked five times and I still don’t have an explanation.

[Speaker E] Before I change the paradigm and create a new medical theory, I’ll test it until it’s proven, until it repeats itself enough times, and then, like Thomas Kuhn, I’ll think: okay, I need to rethink.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But not before that—not on one case. Fine. So you do accept such a thing even though you don’t have an explanation, and you also didn’t find an explanation after the investigation? Certainly, certainly. Meaning, if you trust a fact that you saw or that was conveyed to you, then your intuition and your accumulated experience will be respected and set aside. But that depends on the alternative. Wait. Now the question is whether one testimony is enough or whether you need five. Fine, we can argue about that; it’s not important.

[Speaker E] But with a miracle it collapses into itself, because if the miracle happens a thousand times, a million times, then it will just be another law of nature that we simply haven’t discovered yet.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The law of gravity is also a law. A miracle doesn’t need to happen a million times. What needs to happen is that the reporting mechanism be reliable. And if the one-time reporting mechanism is, from my point of view, reliable, I don’t need ten more cases to occur. I don’t need that. No—but if there’s an alternative explanation for the report, one that requires frequency and repetition, that whole story stems from the question of when the testimony seems reliable to you. At the scientific level it’s accepted to require repeatability—yes, the ability to repeat the experiment. But if I have testimony from someone that is reliable testimony, I don’t need to repeat it. It is reliable, period. Unless I have an explanation that explains why it isn’t reliable or why it happened.

[Speaker E] The Rabbi hears from countless people that alternative medicine cured them of cancer and terminal illnesses. The Rabbi doesn’t buy those stories, even though these are people who aren’t lying, not frauds who come to tell the Rabbi stories. Why? Because the basic intuition says that it’s not—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not because of the basic intuition—because I have an explanation. What? I have an explanation: it hasn’t passed orderly trials.

[Speaker E] Ah, that’s very—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Cases can always happen.

[Speaker E] Right, so from one case—so if I see a miracle, I still won’t immediately change my position. I intuitively know that if I—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —investigate enough, I’ll find an explanation for the miracle. I didn’t say you should immediately change your position. What I said is that you shouldn’t immediately reject the report of the miracle. I didn’t say you should immediately change your position. I’m only saying that what Hume demands—to reject the miracle immediately—is wrong. Not true. I’m not saying to accept it immediately. And I’m also not claiming that it should be rejected immediately, because it’s against my accumulated experience. That’s my problem with David Hume. I’m not claiming that reports of miracles should always be accepted. You know me; you know that usually I do not accept such reports. True. But what Hume claims is that a priori I cannot accept such reports. Not that I won’t automatically accept them. I also agree that it’s wrong to accept them automatically. But you should investigate them. So this is just Hume begging the question. You—

[Speaker E] —cannot a priori.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying: if it seems plausible to me, I’ll investigate. The fact that it’s a miracle doesn’t matter—so what if it’s a miracle? But it’s an assumption. It comes out that David Hume is simply begging the question. I don’t believe in miracles because I say in advance that I cannot accept miracles. That’s really foolish. No—but it isn’t plausible; that’s what he means.

[Speaker E] That’s exactly what he says.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly what he says. A millimeter less.

[Speaker A] By the way, there’s a Wikipedia article about it—about the pigeons. Okay. Yes, it comes from Hungary.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, I don’t know where it comes from, but bottom line—today I think, once they did this, I heard at Meir Hospital they worked with it.

[Speaker A] A lot, a lot, we—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Today I think nobody believes in it anymore, I think.

[Speaker D] Specifically, specifically pigeons aren’t connected to a miracle; it’s connected to something we currently have no explanation for.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that’s what I said to my parents. It doesn’t have to be a miracle; it’s something that doesn’t fit the scientific knowledge currently available—not that I’m some great doctor, I’m not. But I understood that according to accepted medicine it doesn’t fit the scientific knowledge at the moment. So what? There may be some medical explanation that isn’t yet known to us. Everything’s fine.

[Speaker A] Jerusalem birds, though—even today they still use this, definitely.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, they understand in the ways of fools, yes.

[Speaker A] No, also those who advanced somewhere and so on—because it’s written in the book Believe in Customs, so it has lots of segulot. There’s almost no Hasidic rebbe who didn’t touch this.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly today, exactly today I read something—some article—Tikochinsky, my friend Shlomo Tikochinsky, who today is a rabbi in Switzerland or something.

[Speaker A] Gilo’s brother? What? The brother of the one who lives in Gilo?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know. I don’t know his brother.

[Speaker A] The son of Rabbi Tikochinsky, yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. So he wrote some post—exactly today someone sent it to me—about how the days of Bein HaMetzarim are propitious for this, and these days are propitious for redemption, and these days and those days. Meaning, all year long there are propitious days. Meaning, there were only about two or three weeks left that weren’t propitious, so they found that those are propitious for I don’t know what, for something, and then they found—so now everything is fine, our whole year is arranged, yes. Everything—all the days are propitious. Anyway, back to our matter. So what I basically want to say is that David Hume, first, contradicts himself; second, begs the question; and third, of course, also presents a thesis that cannot be falsified. Because no report of a miracle will ever be accepted by him; and of course if we report a miracle and it recurs again and again, then he’ll simply assume that it’s not a miracle but another law of nature that perhaps we just don’t yet know—but at best it’s another law of nature. Okay? But a miracle—something one-time, or something that is against nature, not some law of nature we don’t know—he will not be prepared to accept that categorically. So once that’s the case, then the claim becomes unfalsifiable, and to make it in the name of science sounds a bit—to me at least—a bit strange. And now I want to say one more thing. I mentioned earlier that a very important factor in the discussion is the reliability of the testimony—the reliability of the testimony that conveys the miracle to me, or my own eyes; from my perspective, that too is a kind of testimony. We talked in previous classes about statistical evidence in law, right? And we talked about the fact that even eyewitnesses sometimes make mistakes, or don’t see correctly. Meaning, my senses too deceive me, so from my perspective the senses are also a kind of witness. That is, they are a witness that brings me something, and now that witness is not necessarily correct. Likewise, a human witness or a chain of human witnesses—also a testimony that is not necessarily correct. Therefore, from my perspective, Hume’s argument is the same both against my own seeing and against a chain of transmission. Now, I claim that Hume ignores the trust I place in the chain of transmission. Why does he ignore it? He simply says: because a miracle is impossible anyway, so even if you place perfect trust in the chain of transmission, but a miracle is impossible, then clearly there must have been some distortion in the chain of transmission. I have a proof, because the alternative is that a miracle happened, and that cannot be—what was to be proved. Right? We already talked about that. So his argument basically ignores the reliability of the chain of transmission. Now I’ll tell you an anecdote; I also wrote it on the site, and in the book too. I have a good secular friend—we’ve been friends since childhood, and we discuss things a lot, philosophize together quite a bit. And he founded some company for inventive thinking. What? I can’t hear. He founded a company for systematic inventive thinking; it’s called the SIT company. Yes. Systematic Inventive Thinking. Meaning, ostensibly it sounds like an oxymoron—as if inventive thinking, but systematic, structured. I make inventions, but in a systematic, structured way. Not in a burst of creativity. Okay? Fine, whatever. He has some technique that some Russian man invented, some Altshuller, a Russian Jew, and he imported it to Israel and built a company. Among other things, he provides services to large companies around the world, to municipalities, to governments, when they get stuck with things that require creative thinking, and he tries to guide them how, in a systematic way, one can find the creative solution. Okay, that’s his occupation in the world. Among other things, he told me that once he was brought to facilitate a group in the American Midwest. There was some town there with a lot of friction among different population groups—blacks, whites, Jews, non-Jews, gays, LGBT people, others, all kinds, in short. The place was boiling socially. So they decided to take representatives from every population group, gather them for some two-day workshop. There were sixteen of them, I think. He facilitated the workshop. Fine. He got there, facilitated the workshop. On the first day he did whatever he did—I don’t know exactly what he did. On the second day he said to them—he opened the discussions on the second day by saying: each person will tell us some insight he learned from the previous day, then invite someone else from among those seated here, and sit down. Then the other person who was invited will tell some insight from the previous day, invite someone else, and sit down, and so on until everyone is done. Fine. So they started telling. One person got up, said such-and-such, invited someone else or some other woman, and sat down. And so they continued. At some point it ended, and the people said: okay, we finished the round, let’s move on. So Amnon, my friend, says okay, sums up a little of what they heard and is about to move on. Suddenly some black woman there raises her hand and says: wait, I have a comment. Did you notice—there were six black people among the sixteen in the group—did you notice that none of the six black people was invited to speak?

[Speaker A] The ones who spoke were the ten others—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The others, one after the other, each invited the next, and after those ten were done they announced: okay, the round is finished, and moved on. Six out of the sixteen were black; not one of them was invited to speak. Innocently, as it were—everyone came with good intentions. This was a workshop meant to create relationships and connection between the various groups, so the intentions were good. It was a kind of gender—no, it was simply apparently a natural reaction; there was some disregard for the black participants there in the circle, but probably not intentional. It was simply something that happened—they were apparently invisible in the eyes of the whites there in that environment, and so they didn’t invite them. Now Amnon, my friend, went into shock. He’s liberal and tolerant and pluralistic and whatever you want, and he’s facilitating a workshop whose whole point is precisely that. He was stunned. So of course he immediately leveraged it: “See how there are groups that are invisible to us,” and so on, all sorts of conclusions that served his discussion. That’s all. Afterward he wrote it on his company’s website. I don’t remember whether he sent it to me or whether I happened to read it—I don’t remember. Later we talked about it because it no longer appears on the site; I don’t know why it was taken down from there. But I verified it with him—it happened. Meaning, I heard it from him. Now I said to him: look, since we are already old sparring partners, and he’s secular and I’m religious, we also have discussions about these things among other things. So I said to him: look, the truth is, I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that this happened. I have two possibilities—this is my argument, yes? One possibility is to say that this thing really happened, and you’re telling me the truth, you’re describing to me what happened accurately. But that cannot be. How can it be that six out of sixteen people were black and no one invited them, in a workshop whose whole purpose is to create connection between groups and pluralism and equality and peace and fraternity? The second possibility is that it didn’t happen—you made it up, or you erred, your mind got confused, or you’re intentionally lying because it serves you in advancing your pluralistic agenda, which you believe in, so you invented a fictional story. And that’s good—it helps you show that others are invisible to us; the lessons are lessons you very much like. Okay, now explain to me why I should accept this story from you. That’s my argument, okay? Now this is not a miracle in the metaphysical sense, yes? It’s not against the laws of nature, but the probability that such a thing would happen is zero. Okay? So it’s basically like Hume’s argument, and on that basis I said to him: listen, I don’t believe you. You’re lying. Lying, mistaken—it doesn’t matter—but it didn’t happen. Okay? Now we talked about this a bit; it was amusing. I don’t even remember the details of the argument anymore. Obviously the truth is that I do believe him. I do believe him. Because he is a reliable person; I know him; I believe him. Why do I believe him? Because he is a reliable person. So what if he’s a reliable person? If he is a reliable person and tells me something that sounds highly implausible, I won’t reject it out of hand. Because if he is reliable, then I think he is telling the truth. The trust I have in the reporting mechanism—if I see it, that is trust in my eyes; if I receive it from a chain of transmission, that is trust in the chain of transmission. That trust is a very important factor. If I have trust in the transmitting chain, I will be willing to accept even a report of miracles. If there were some scientist here, someone who in my eyes is not suspect of mysticism and not suspect of being led astray by all sorts of nonsense and delusions and things like that, and he told me that he saw a body standing in the air despite gravity—I would not reject it out of hand.

[Speaker A] But what does trust depend on?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I trust the person. And true, I don’t understand how it can be that this body is standing in the air. It needs to be investigated. And maybe even after investigation I still won’t find anything. And maybe it really was supernatural, so I can’t find anything—there’s nothing to find here. There is no law of nature here. It was a miracle, supernatural. Anything is possible. But if I trust the person, then that trust definitely carries very important weight. And it may be that if I have trust, I will accept testimony even though the content of the testimony is very, very implausible.

[Speaker A] What does the trust depend on?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know—my acquaintance with him, all sorts of things.

[Speaker A] And if you don’t know him?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then it may be that I won’t have trust.

[Speaker F] The trust is that he is convinced.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—why “trust”?

[Speaker A] Why should trust in another person play any role here at all? Why, exactly?

[Speaker E] Why not?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. I don’t understand—what, if I believe him, then it’s not likely that he’s lying, no?

[Speaker A] Again, if there is—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —for the improbability of a miracle, against that there is the improbability that he is lying.

[Speaker A] I’m not talking now about the miracle. I want to ask—this is a question that’s really flashing in my head about everything you said, everything is perfectly fine. Okay, if there is trust. Now most of the things that we encounter today in… I’m talking now about Judaism pure and simple only, all the books and so on, right? So on what basis and why? What not—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I understand. What do you mean, on what basis and why?

[Speaker A] From the Sages of the Talmud until today, right? Why should I accept anyone at all, in principle?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who told you to accept? Don’t accept. I don’t understand the claim.

[Speaker A] No, I mean, what does trust depend on? Only on personal acquaintance?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t understand. No—however you want, I don’t care, you decide what trust depends on. If you give trust, that thing itself is an important consideration. That I understand. I’m asking what that trust is based on.

[Speaker A] I didn’t understand. I’m asking, yes—I’m projecting this now onto our Jewish life that we all live in, right? The sages of the Talmud, the Talmudic text and so on existed, the whole people accepted them, that’s it, the Talmud was completed, then came the Savoraim, the Geonim, the medieval authorities (Rishonim), and so on.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Practically speaking, what’s the question?

[Speaker A] The question is why one has to accept—maybe we all need to…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Don’t accept. I don’t understand—who said you have to accept? Don’t accept.

[Speaker F] No, I—

[Speaker A] In any case I don’t accept. But in principle, yes—in principle, the trust I’m supposed to give, yes, in my view, only to a person I know?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, you decide. What, do you want instructions from me about whom you should trust? Trust whoever you trust. I can trust someone because his face looks trustworthy to me, I don’t know, everyone has his own considerations. But I’m saying that once I’ve decided that I trust, that thing itself carries very significant weight. And if the price of saying that the event didn’t happen is that this trustworthy person lied, that itself is a consideration in favor of the occurrence of the miracle. Trust—the whole matter of science—you did a very unusual experiment that doesn’t fit the currently accepted way of thinking, the currently accepted paradigm, but people believe you, let’s say, or something like that. So fine, people will invest a lot of money to do such an experiment and check it. Why? Assume the experiment didn’t happen and the person lied. People sometimes lie; miracles don’t happen.

[Speaker A] I’ll tell you something—by the way, in science, in science we rely not only on what I see or what I do. We have around us a huge number of people. When I studied electronics at the university, right? So we did one, two, three, four things here, right? For example, the development of radio frequency, and all those things.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Someone who got the Nobel Prize a year or two ago—I don’t remember—in physics, it was the Aspect experiment. Aspect, yes. Right. So that experiment is an experiment that nobody did besides them. Right. So why believe it’s correct? Maybe it isn’t correct? What happened there is completely improbable according to accepted thinking. Why believe it’s true? And doing such an experiment costs a huge, huge amount of money. Even investing more money to repeat that experiment—I don’t see the justification, because the chance that it happened is zero, it’s so implausible. But they believe him. Why do they believe him? Because he inspires trust. The scientific world more or less knows how to smell when it’s right to trust a person and when not. This notion that repeatability—yes, the fact that experiments are repeated—is what confirms the matter, that’s not right. It’s not precise—not not right. It’s clear that you need repeatability, but we give trust even before the experiment has been repeated. There is some kind of trust in people. And if you’re not willing to accept things that are improbable within the existing paradigm, then don’t accept them. Why do you trust people? I claim that trust in people is a very important consideration. It’s not something that can be ignored. Maybe I’ll connect this to things we saw in previous classes. We talked about eyewitnesses, right, maybe the prisoners in the courtyard and so on. And I said that there the chance is, say, one percent that he’s innocent, but eyewitnesses also have some chance—two percent—that he’s innocent. So why do I accept eyewitnesses and not accept that statistical proof? So one of the explanations—you remember the blue and red buses and so on. One of the explanations was: true, those witnesses have a two percent chance that they don’t see well. Okay? But suppose they saw. Suppose they saw that the red bus ran someone over. Okay? The red bus hit him. Now the red bus is only one percent of the buses in the city.

[Speaker A] But that’s the percentage of knowledge, as we said then.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Meaning it’s like when they say to a person: pick out a ball for me from a container—you remember that example? There are a hundred balls there, one white and 99 black. Now if the person chooses—he sees the colors and he chooses—the chance that he’ll take out the white one is fifty-fifty, not one percent. Because if he likes white, he’ll take out the only white one there. If he likes black, he’ll take out a black one. Here it’s very similar. These two witnesses may have a two percent chance that they made a mistake, yes. But if they tell you that it happened—say two witnesses come and say it was a red bus, yes. Now the percentage of red buses in the city is one percent. And the witnesses have a two percent chance of error. What do you say? I have two possibilities: either assume the witnesses were mistaken—two percent—or assume the red bus hit him—one percent. So it’s better to assume the witnesses were mistaken, right? So I can’t accept testimony about rare events. That’s essentially the claim. You understand that this is Hume’s claim? I can’t accept testimony about rare events—events that are completely improbable. Okay? Now why is that not correct? Because if there’s a small chance—after all, there is a small chance that the red bus would hit someone, right? Now this is not—it’s an event that can happen. Now the witnesses saw that event; they didn’t see some random event and then we ask what the chance is that it was red. They saw that it was red. It’s like choosing the white ball because I like white balls. So what difference does it make that there’s a two percent chance they’re mistaken? It’s not relevant at all. The chance they were mistaken is two percent; there’s a 98 percent chance they’re right. Even though the chance that it was a red bus is one percent. Because once they said it was a red bus, then most likely it was a red bus, because they are reliable—there’s a 98 percent chance they’re right. The testimony is reliable, so what difference does it make that the event is improbable? If testimony was given to the occurrence of the improbable event, then I claim that this improbable event indeed happened. And the chance that I’m wrong is two percent. And anyone who says that this two percent stands against the one percent of red buses—that’s a statistical mistake. It’s a mistake. It’s not correct to compare them.

[Speaker E] Wait, what’s the statistical probability that they were mistaken? What? What’s the statistical probabilistic chance that they were mistaken? Two percent. So why is that stronger than the one percent of most buses?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because assuming that two witnesses who are 98 percent reliable saw a red bus, what’s the chance that it was red? That’s not the question—exactly. The question isn’t—it’s not 98 percent because it’s the other way around. But the question, is: what’s the chance that a red bus would have an accident? The answer is one percent. But that’s irrelevant. I’m talking about a situation where the witnesses reported that it was a red bus. Now, conditional probability. Given that the witnesses said it was a red bus, what’s the chance that it was a red bus? The answer is ninety-eight percent, or yes, whatever the exact calculation is.

[Speaker E] That’s not—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Does it matter that the event is rare? It’s as an event—

[Speaker E] So there are still two percent that they’re mistaken, and I rely on the ninety-eight percent?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. There are two percent that they’re mistaken. But to compare those two percent to the chance of there being a red bus—one percent—and say that the two percent is more grounds for doubt than the one percent, that’s a statistical mistake.

[Speaker E] Why? Why? Rabbi, explain, I didn’t understand.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Two witnesses come and say that a rare event occurred. Fine? A rare event happened, something that happens once in a hundred times—one percent—a red bus ran someone over. Now if I knew nothing, I only knew that a bus ran someone over and knew nothing else, and now you ask me what’s the chance that it was a red bus? The answer is one percent. But that’s not the knowledge I have; I have additional knowledge—that there are two witnesses here who saw that a red bus ran someone over. Now true, there are two percent that they’re mistaken, but there are ninety-eight percent that they’re right. So now when I ask what’s the chance that it was a red bus, the answer is not one percent but ninety-eight percent. Exactly like, if you remember, the one-in-a-million chance with lottery tickets and the notice in the newspaper—it’s exactly the same kind of mistakes. And therefore Hume’s argument is simply a statistical mistake. If I have reliable testimony attesting to a rare event—if you say it’s impossible, then fine, it’s impossible. But if you say no, it’s not impossible, only according to my current knowledge it’s not likely to have happened, it’s an improbable event—an improbable event is not interesting. Because if two witnesses who are worth ninety-eight percent come and tell you that the improbable event happened, then the chance that it happened is ninety-eight percent.

[Speaker A] Yes, but Hume isn’t talking in statistics; Hume simply rejects outright that there is—because…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hume says categorically that a miracle cannot occur, so yes, then nothing can overcome that—a miracle cannot occur. Even if witnesses of two-percent reliability come. But if there’s one percent, a quarter percent, a tenth of a percent chance that a miracle can occur, if I have witnesses who are ninety-eight percent reliable testifying that it occurred, then that’s the chance it occurred—ninety-eight percent.

[Speaker A] Obviously, but Hume isn’t there.

[Speaker E] But why is that better than just ordinary statistics, where most likely the bus that came from the majority—the ninety-nine percent—is the one that hit?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because the witnesses saw that it was red. It’s not a random event. When you have no knowledge at all and you say you know a bus hit someone, what’s the chance it was red? One percent.

[Speaker E] No, suppose that… no, I’m saying, let’s say in the opposite case we’re talking about. We’re talking about the opposite case, where the bus came from the majority group.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are no witnesses at all, and the majority is ninety-nine percent—

[Speaker E] Ninety-nine percent of the buses are red.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then I’m saying: based on that majority alone, I do not convict. Exactly, that’s the thing—

[Speaker E] Even though there’s a ninety-nine percent chance it’s true, and I don’t rely on it. But on witnesses where there’s ninety-eight percent I do rely. Why?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s our question—why the difference? Figure out why. Because with witnesses, not… again, why is that ninety-eight preferable to that ninety-nine? That was the subject of our class there. But I’m talking now about Hume’s question. I’m asking what’s the chance that it was a red bus? I’m asking now factually, what’s the chance that the bus was red? From Hume’s standpoint it won’t be—according to Hume it won’t be. Ninety-eight percent. Not one percent—ninety-eight percent. There’s no difference whether the witnesses testify that it was a blue bus or whether they testify that it was red; the reliability of the testimony is the same.

[Speaker E] Fine, on that we didn’t argue.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It can still be that ninety-eight maybe isn’t enough, because ninety-nine there also wasn’t enough. That’s the question we dealt with then. I’m currently talking about a different question, Hume’s question. Is it really ninety-eight percent? Because after all there’s only one percent that it was a red bus, so why not—no, that’s just a mistake, clearly, clearly it doesn’t override that. Okay, it’s simply a statistical mistake.

[Speaker A] Yes, but Hume didn’t deal in statistics.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, no matter, so he was mistaken. I don’t care right now whether he’s guilty or not, but he was mistaken.

[Speaker F] If I may go back to what the Rabbi said earlier—if I understood correctly, perhaps the only consideration when we have to examine the truth of a person’s testimony, when he testifies that a miracle happened to him, that he saw a miracle, that he saw a supernatural event, is his reliability. And the studies prove that reliability is a very, very small issue in these cases. The studies prove that most reports, if not ninety-nine—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, leave statistics aside, leave statistics aside. I’m saying: if you reached the conclusion that you have trust in the witness, then that trust is a very critical consideration. If you made a mistake and wrongly trusted him, fine, that’s unrelated. But I’m saying that assuming there is trust in a reliable witness, then that reliability is a very important factor in the discussion.

[Speaker F] What I want to say is that a reliable witness is perceived as a witness who doesn’t lie, and a witness who doesn’t lie is not relevant here to the discussion at all.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A witness who doesn’t lie and doesn’t err—that’s called a reliable witness.

[Speaker F] Exactly, except that when it comes to supernatural reports, even people who usually don’t make mistakes—here the mechanisms…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Leave the supernatural aside; let’s talk about buses. Leave the supernatural aside; let’s talk about buses.

[Speaker F] Yes, yes, about buses I agree completely with the Rabbi. I’m only claiming that if… if a friend comes and tells me about something he saw, some flying thing or any supernatural thing, I would reject it categorically—not because of intuition but because of the statistical likelihood proven in hundreds if not thousands of studies.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe, it doesn’t matter, I’d have to examine those studies, but that’s not the point. I’m speaking right now under the assumption that I give trust; that consideration is very important. Now we need to discuss whether the trust is justified, unjustified, or whether I should correct my granting of trust—everything is fine. Okay? That’s a very, very important point. Maybe one last point, if you’ll allow me a bit more—I see we ran over, just one more sentence. One of David Hume’s claims is that usually reports of miracles come from primitive societies. Educated societies are societies where you don’t hear reports of miracles; therefore, he argues, this is basically a fabricated story. Now, therefore he claims that this is basically a far-fetched story, an invention of primitives. On this matter I’ll just make one remark. There’s something to it; I don’t deny it. I think you know my views on the matter. But one has to notice one very important point. Intelligent populations or groups, with Western scientific thinking—I don’t know what to call it—those are groups that generally tend to think like David Hume. And since that’s so, even if a report of miracles reaches them, they won’t accept it. That—

[Speaker A] Is further proof that education and intelligence in this case—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —help the reliability of judgment; sometimes they actually work against it. Because these are people who have some tendency to cling to science and not accept reports of things that don’t fit science—which can prove itself in many areas, but sometimes it can be the cause of failure. And precisely primitive populations, which are willing to accept testimony even if it contradicts science, because they aren’t so attached to science—precisely there it may be that true testimonies will be accepted. And in an intelligent population the testimonies, even if true, won’t be accepted—just as David Hume himself made his theory unfalsifiable, because he wouldn’t accept a report of a miracle even if it came to him. So therefore even if miracles do occur, there’s no chance that in the civilized world—yes, the Western one, I don’t know what to call it—they will accept these reports even if they are true. By contrast, in the primitive world there’s a lot of nonsense, but if a true report does arrive, at least it will be accepted there. In this connection—and with this I’ll finish—there’s a passage I’m very fond of from The Wizard of Oz.

[Speaker A] What about a witch?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. After Dorothy lands, right—lands in Oz with the storm and her house—she meets the Witch of the North. So she introduces herself as the Witch of the North, and Dorothy says, Aunt Em told me that all the witches had died many years ago. “Who is Aunt Em?” asked the little old woman, the witch. “She is my aunt who lives in Kansas, where I came from.” The Witch of the North seemed to think for some time, with her head bowed and her eyes upon the ground. Then she looked up and said, “I do not know where Kansas is, for I have never heard that country mentioned before. But tell me, is it a civilized country?” “Oh yes,” replied Dorothy. “Then that accounts for it,” said the witch. Right? “I think that in the civilized countries there are no witches left, nor wizards, nor sorcerers, nor magicians. But, you see, the Land of Oz has never become civilized, for we are cut off from all the rest of the world. Therefore we still have witches and wizards among us.” Maybe the listener—

[Speaker E] Aren’t… like Maimonides’ demons.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hm?

[Speaker D] Yes, like the demons of—

[Speaker E] Maimonides.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right.

[Speaker D] But to come and claim that the experts are the ones who are mistaken—that’s a bit…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, not that the experts are the ones who are mistaken. But you need to know that expertise can sometimes interfere. When testimony comes about events that don’t fit the existing theory, expertise can work against you.

[Speaker D] Yes, but you can’t come and say that precisely the doctors and precisely the scientists are the ones who are mistaken, and the uncivilized are the ones who are right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t say such a thing.

[Speaker D] I didn’t say in every—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In every dispute between a primitive person and an educated one, the primitive person is right—did you hear me say that? Not on the subject of miracles.

[Speaker D] On the subject of miracles.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Even on the subject of miracles, no. I’m only claiming that when there is a reliable report of a miracle, it will be accepted in a primitive society and not accepted in an educated society. That’s a positive datum. Now you ask me: if a report of a miracle comes from a primitive society, should I believe it? The answer is no. Why? Because most of their reports are nonsense. But those few true reports that really are true—they will get through only in a primitive society; in an educated society they won’t penetrate.

[Speaker A] Meaning anyone who today calls the Haredi public primitive is supposedly right, because miracles happen there every day.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, without the “supposedly.” Okay. Rabbi, there is—

[Speaker G] I also have a question, and I think it’s also connected to one of the questions Abraham asked. If we understand the importance of reliability and understand that it really plays a major role, that it carries very great weight in testimony, how can we so easily base our whole religion—which in the end is based on testimony—when we don’t know how reliable it is?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So let’s leave that; I’ll devote a few minutes to it at the beginning of next time, because that’s the part I didn’t manage to get to. Okay? Okay. It’s important, it’s important.

[Speaker E] Okay. Rabbi, may I suggest something not exactly related to today’s discussion? I think that anyone who has heard the Rabbi’s classes at the institute lately has seen what we always knew—that the Rabbi is truly a phenomenal teacher in many subjects, but especially in philosophy of science. Really, both the creativity and the didactics and the explanation are truly unmatched; I don’t know anything comparable. Maybe the Rabbi should think about—first, I think maybe the Rabbi should write a serious book that gathers all these things together, and maybe do some long series, or both, because it’s really a shame. It’s just…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A book on science?

[Speaker E] The connection between general philosophy and religion and everything. The whole framework is really what the Rabbi explained this week—really wonderful, truly. In which class?

[Speaker A] In “A Broad Look at the Torah”?

[Speaker E] Shmuel? Yes.

[Speaker A] It was interesting, that’s true. We’ll think about it. Okay, goodbye, Sabbath peace.

Doubt and Probability—in Halakha, Thought, and in General—Lesson 36 – Rabbi Michael Abraham

Table of Contents

Summary

General overview

The testimony argument and the method of testing hypotheses

The physico-theological argument against atheism

Miracles, tradition, and probability according to Hume

Empiricism and the foundational assumptions of science

The problem of induction and the dissonance between theory and practice

An internal contradiction in Hume’s argument against miracles

Begging the question and lack of falsifiability

The reliability of testimony and accepting improbable events

Testimony versus probability and a “statistical mistake”

Miracles in “primitive” societies versus educated ones

Closing questions and continuation

Full Transcript

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Table of Contents

Summary

General overview

The testimony argument and the method of testing hypotheses

The physico-theological argument against atheism

Miracles, tradition, and probability according to Hume

Empiricism and the foundational assumptions of science

The problem of induction and the dissonance between theory and practice

An internal contradiction in Hume’s argument against miracles

Begging the question and lack of falsifiability

The reliability of testimony and accepting improbable events

Testimony versus probability and a “statistical mistake”

Miracles in “primitive” societies versus educated ones

Closing questions and continuation

Full Transcript

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