Faith and Its Meaning – Lesson 14
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- Faith, intuition, and “simple faith”
- Axioms, proof, and the strength of an argument
- Logical argument, “begging the question,” and persuasion
- Logic versus rhetoric and changing basic assumptions
- The six ways to faith and types of evidence
- God as a function of the argument and the connection to evolution
- The physico-theological proof: the midrash of Rabbi Akiva, Paley, and Fred Hoyle
- Deism, the “Flying Spaghetti Monster,” and the difference between proof and explanation
- “Who created God,” infinite regress, and lex specialis
- Complexity, the second law of thermodynamics, and entropy
- Why the second law is not a scientific proof of God and how it serves the philosophical argument
Summary
General Overview
The lecturer argues that the distinction between “simple faith” and faith based on philosophical arguments is artificial and misleading in both directions, because every argument ultimately rests on basic assumptions whose source is intuition. He defines intuition as direct apprehension of truth that is not emotion, and concludes that there is no faith that is not based on intuition, even when it is presented as derived from proofs. He explains that logical arguments cannot turn an atheist into a believer; at most, they can reveal to a person what was already latent in his assumptions, whereas changing basic assumptions is done through rhetorical tools. After summarizing the six types of paths to faith and clarifying the connection between the type of argument and the image of God inferred from it, he turns to the physico-theological proof from complexity, presents its classic formulations, responds to common objections, and uses the second law of thermodynamics to sharpen the point that complexity is not merely “in the eye of the beholder,” even though the law itself is not a scientific proof of the existence of God.
Faith, intuition, and “simple faith”
The lecturer states that there is no certainty about anything—not about faith, not about God, and not about anything else—except for the claim that there is no certainty about anything, and therefore the question of certainty is not essential. He argues that rejecting philosophical faith in the name of “simple faith” is mistaken, and that preferring philosophical faith as “more solid” than intuitive faith is also mistaken, because philosophical arguments always rest on assumptions. He defines intuition as the ability to directly recognize that something is true, not by force of an argument, and stresses that emotion and intuition are two different things, even though people sometimes confusingly use the term “emotion” in both contexts. He concludes that at the base of every argument sit assumptions that are based on intuition, and therefore there is no faith that is not based on intuition, while “simple faith” is a case in which the argument leading to faith is trivial.
Axioms, proof, and the strength of an argument
The lecturer compares axioms and theorems in geometry and argues that the axioms are stronger than the theorems, because the conclusion of an argument can never be stronger than its premises. He explains that a proof in geometry means grounding a theorem in axioms that are accepted in advance, and if the axioms are not acceptable, the proof is of no use. He argues that the concept of proof is limited, because proof is needed only for what is not self-evident, and then one looks for claims that are self-evident and derives the desired claim from them. He rejects the conclusion that intuition is arbitrary, and argues that intuition is like adopting axioms “because they are self-evident,” whereas emotion is something arbitrary.
Logical argument, “begging the question,” and persuasion
The lecturer defines a valid logical argument as one in which the conclusion “sits inside the premises,” and illustrates this with the syllogism “All human beings are mortal… Socrates…” He argues that “begging the question” is not a fallacy but a synonym for logical validity, and declares that what is written in many logic books about “begging the question as a fallacy” is “nonsense in tomato juice.” He distinguishes between question-begging that is valid but has no persuasive value, and an argument that succeeds in persuading because it rests on premises accepted by the listener and helps him see that the conclusion is already included in them. He uses the example of “our forefather Abraham and the hat” to show a “stupid” case of begging the question, in which the conclusion appears “as is” inside the premises and is therefore useless for persuasion.
Logic versus rhetoric and changing basic assumptions
The lecturer argues that logic can at most reveal to a person what his position has always been, similar to a mathematical proof that shows that certain content was already implicit in the axioms. He presents the image of a “safe” and argues that a logical argument is a “key” that gives a person access to a treasure that was already his, but inaccessible to him. He concludes that it is impossible to “prove to an atheist that God exists,” because if the proof is valid then the conclusion is already included in the premises, and an atheist will not accept premises that contain the conclusion. He argues that an argument can at most try to show the atheist that he is “not really an atheist,” but rather was unaware of what follows from other assumptions that he already accepts. He adds that changing basic assumptions requires rhetorical rather than logical tools, and presents rhetoric as description, storytelling, changing one’s angle of vision, and a kind of “light-bulb moment” that enables a person to adopt a different assumption.
The six ways to faith and types of evidence
The lecturer summarizes that he spoke about “six ways to arrive at faith”: the ontological proof (Anselm, Descartes), the cosmological proof, the physico-theological proof that he will discuss, a path of “theological proofs” in quotation marks that will be detailed later, the path of tradition such as the revelation at Mount Sinai, and the path of direct intuition, which is “simple faith.” He says that each person needs to examine himself to see whether a given path convinces him, and that there are different shades of arguments within each path. He argues that one path is enough to conclude that God exists, and that finding an error in some of the proofs does not undermine the conclusion if there is another valid proof; and even finding an error in all the proofs does not prove that the conclusion is wrong, only that we do not have a proof in hand.
God as a function of the argument and the connection to evolution
The lecturer argues that the God one proves is a “function of the argument,” and that each argument assumes a different definition: the ontological argument proves “the perfect being,” the cosmological argument proves “God the creator of the world,” and the physico-theological argument proves “God as the engineer of the world,” while tradition points to “God as the giver of the Torah.” He says that all these faces may be those of one and the same being, and it is also possible to see them as different beings, but each argument captures a different aspect. He argues that presenting evolution versus God as a zero-sum game is “nonsense at the logical level,” because evolution attacks at most a certain version of the third type of proof and does not touch the other paths. He explains that both sides, the “neo-Darwinians” and the “creationists,” are mistaken when they agree that one must choose one and abandon the other, even though he himself considers the physico-theological proof to be a common and powerful argument and therefore “worth addressing.”
The physico-theological proof: the midrash of Rabbi Akiva, Paley, and Fred Hoyle
The lecturer presents a midrash in Temurah from Otzar HaMidrashim about a heretic who comes to Rabbi Akiva and asks, “Who created this world?” and Rabbi Akiva answers with an analogy to a garment that points to the weaver, a house that testifies to the builder, and a door to the carpenter, and thus “the world points to the Holy One, blessed be He, who created it.” He presents Paley’s familiar argument about a watch in the street that points to a watchmaker, and argues that the world is more complex than a watch and therefore “all the more so” it is unreasonable that it came into being on its own. He brings a version from Fred Hoyle that compares the probability of the world arising by chance to the probability that a typhoon passing over a junkyard would assemble a working Boeing airplane. He formulates the argument as the claim that a complex and coordinated structure does not arise spontaneously, and therefore there is a “guiding hand” or a creator.
Deism, the “Flying Spaghetti Monster,” and the difference between proof and explanation
The lecturer defines the conclusion here as deism rather than theism, and argues that the argument proves only that there is an entity that created the world, without immediately drawing religious conclusions such as “to put on tefillin.” He responds to the “Flying Spaghetti Monster” claim by saying that the name makes no difference as long as the claim is that there exists an entity that created the world. He rejects the claim that “God is not an explanation” because it “doesn’t say anything about Him,” and argues that he is not offering an explanation but bringing a proof for the existence of an entity, like the claim that footprints testify that someone passed by even if we know nothing about him. He explains that the criticism mistakenly assumes a religious God with descriptions and dogmas, whereas the argument itself does not assume that.
“Who created God,” infinite regress, and lex specialis
The lecturer presents the objection that “if everything complex has a creator, then God too is complex and must have a creator,” and explains that this leads to an infinite regress. He uses the image of “turtles all the way down” and defines infinite regress as an escape from explanation, bringing as an example a rule in Indian philosophy that if you enter an infinite regress, “you’ve lost.” He argues that the intuition that “complex things do not arise by themselves” is very reasonable, but one cannot accept it across the board because then the chain never stops, and one cannot give it up across the board because then one must give up central intuitions about the world. He proposes a solution in terms of the legal principle lex specialis, illustrating it through the contradiction between “it is forbidden to murder” and “whoever murdered is liable to death,” and argues that preferring the specific principle preserves the general principle with a qualification and yields a “minimal price.” He applies this and argues that one must assume at least one exception to the principle that everything needs a cause in order to avoid infinite regress, and in his view the lowest-cost option is to say that every complex thing of the kind found in our experience requires a cause, and the world is such a thing and therefore has a cause, whereas the generating entity is not “within our experience” and therefore need not be included in the rule.
Complexity, the second law of thermodynamics, and entropy
The lecturer presents the atheistic claim that “complexity is in the eye of the beholder” or that a complex thing can arise by itself, and rejects the claim that complexity depends only on prior experience, such as our experience that watchmakers make watches. He proposes using the second law of thermodynamics to give complexity an objective definition, and explains through the example of gas spreading in a container that the reverse direction will almost never be seen. He describes the gap between the reversibility of microscopic laws and the macroscopic asymmetry, and explains this through the rarity of states and the number of microscopic states corresponding to a macroscopic state, including a discrete example of balls in cells. He defines low entropy as an ordered, special, and rare state, and high entropy as a disordered and common state, and formulates the second law as the claim that entropy does not decrease in a closed system unless there is an external factor that imposes order.
Why the second law is not a scientific proof of God and how it serves the philosophical argument
The lecturer says that the second law of thermodynamics does not scientifically prove the existence of God, because if it were a scientific proof one would need to show empirical violations of the law as a result of divine action, and he argues that no such contradiction has been found in experience. He explains that the formation of “islands” of order is possible if they come at the cost of increasing entropy in the surroundings, like creating an orderly house at the price of “disorder” in the quarry and in processes of energy and pollution, so the total entropy does not necessarily decrease. He mentions “Maxwell’s demon” and the accepted answer according to which planning, information, and thought are part of the entropic accounting, adding that in information theory information is measured in entropy. He concludes that the use of the second law is meant to show that complexity and order are not subjective, and that on the philosophical level he still does not find it plausible that life comes into being “just like that” without a guiding hand, even though the discussion is not being presented as scientific.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so as I said in the previous lecture, basically in the first semester we talked about the concept of faith, about the principal ways of arriving at it, the different possibilities. I spoke a bit about emotion versus intellect, about the meaning of intuition in contexts of faith. Sometimes people call it simple faith, but that’s a term that in my view misses something. It misses in both directions. I didn’t talk about that last time, so maybe I should say something about it now. Very often there’s a contrast drawn between what’s called simple faith and faith based on one philosophical argument or another. That’s an artificial distinction. An artificial distinction that makes a mistake in both directions. The first mistake is made by those who reject faith that isn’t simple. Someone who deals with philosophy somehow gets seen in certain places as doing something undesirable, maybe even something that somewhat clouds faith, because faith has to be simple and absolute and not philosophy and things of that sort. So the fact that faith is not absolute—we already talked about that. There’s no certainty about anything. Not in faith, not in God, and not in anything else, except for this statement itself, that there is no certainty about anything. So that’s the only certain thing I know. And therefore the point of whether it’s certain or not certain is completely meaningless. Nothing is certain. But the two mistakes I’m talking about are: the mistake of disqualifying philosophical faith because you have to be a simple believer, or the opposite—preferring philosophical faith because it’s supposedly more solid than simple faith, which maybe is just habit, maybe just your comfort zone, and so on. And on this point I want to note something that I don’t think I went into last time—maybe I did, but briefly. There really isn’t any genuine difference. I mean, faith based on a philosophical argument—there is no philosophical argument that isn’t based on premises. Right? Every argument is based on premises. And then the question always comes up: where do the premises come from? They leave us with premises, so to speak. Where do the premises come from?
[Speaker B] We agreed on them for the sake of the discussion.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But on what basis do we agree to the premises? Forget someone else—I myself. Right? Intuition. By intuition I mean some kind of capacity to realize that a certain thing is true not by force of an argument but directly. Okay? That’s what I call intuition. I distinguished between that and emotion. There’s no connection. Emotion and intuition are two different things, even though people use the term emotion in both of these contexts, but that’s just a confusing usage, and it’s a shame. I think it’s worth being careful about that distinction. And if that’s the case, then it basically means that even when my faith is based on an argument, at the base—at the base of the argument—sit premises that are based on intuition. Therefore in the end there is no such thing as faith that is not based on intuition. So what is what people call simple faith? It’s faith where the argument leading to it is a trivial argument. The premise is that God exists. You don’t need to derive anything more from that, okay? But that’s not essentially different from the claim that everything has a cause—just as an example. Everything has a cause; the world must also have a cause; therefore God exists. Why is that any more grounded than the claim that says: I have an intuition that God exists? Right, I have an intuition that everything has a cause, correct? And from that intuition I derive the existence of God. So it’s not true that something based on an argument is stronger than something based on direct intuition. As I mentioned before, yes, I asked students more than once: what is stronger in geometry, the axioms or the propositions, the theorems? I mentioned this last time. The theorems have proofs, right? The axioms don’t. So what do you say? Are the theorems stronger than the axioms? Obviously not. What is a proof? When you prove a theorem, what does it mean to prove? That you can verify it. Not verify—a proof. This isn’t science, it’s mathematics. Science you can test; mathematics you can’t test. In mathematics either there is a proof or there isn’t a proof. So I’m saying, what does it mean to say that there is a proof for a proposition in geometry? The sum of the angles in a triangle is one hundred and eighty degrees. I proved it. What does that mean, I proved it? I grounded it in the axioms of geometry, right? That’s what it means to prove. But if the axioms are not acceptable, then what good does it do that I grounded the proposition in the axioms? Grounding the proposition in the axioms can help if I accept the axioms. If I don’t accept the axioms, then why should I care that there’s a proposition built on the axioms? Therefore it’s obvious that the axioms are stronger than the propositions. The conclusion of an argument can never be stronger than the premises of that argument. But the premises of the argument are founded on intuition. Therefore anyone who thinks that faith on the basis of arguments is stronger than simple faith simply doesn’t understand what an argument is. Doesn’t understand what an argument is. So what then? Of course, that doesn’t mean that faith is something… you could say that faith is arbitrary. Fine, I have this intuition, he has another intuition, to each his own intuition. Okay? Rav Shagar’s circle of differences. No, it’s not like that. Intuition is not arbitrary; emotion is arbitrary, intuition is not. Intuition is something that cannot be proven, because I can’t—I can’t ground it in prior premises. And that doesn’t mean it’s arbitrary. There are… you know, when I say for example: take the axioms of geometry—through two points there passes one straight line, Euclid, right? Through two points there passes one straight line. Is that arbitrary? If someone tells me, no, in my opinion there pass minus pi lines through two points, not one—what do you do with such a person? Well, he has one intuition and I have another—is that what you would say? I would hospitalize him. Why? I have no proof that through two points there passes one straight line; that’s the axiom of geometry. I have no proof for it. Right? So isn’t it arbitrary? No, it isn’t arbitrary. I have no proof because it doesn’t need proof. Because it is self-evident. There are situations in which I have no proof of something because indeed there is no proof—it’s arbitrary, it’s just something where I have no… either you say this or say the opposite, how would you know? I can’t know. Okay? But there are things we adopt as axioms because they are self-evident—they don’t need proof. It’s not that I don’t have proof; that’s not the point. The point is that they don’t need proof. And notice, this is important, because it means that every conclusion I have a proof for rests on claims—that is, the premises of the argument—for which I have no proof. So the whole concept of proof has very limited significance. What is a proof? I need a proof for something only if it is not self-evident to me. Right? If it’s not self-evident, I look for other things that are self-evident to me, and if I can derive it from them, then I know that it too is true. Okay? But it certainly does not become stronger than those things that are themselves self-evident to me. Right? It’s just a misunderstanding, plain misunderstanding. Okay? I’ll say more than that: all those who are wary of philosophy—I mentioned the opposite mistake, right?—those who say no, no, faith has to be simple faith, they’re afraid of philosophy. Why? Because if you engage in philosophy you might arrive at the conclusion that there is no God. Maybe that’s true. But you might arrive at the conclusion that there is no God. So what? Then I conclude that I think there is no God. I don’t understand—what’s the problem? So what do you want, that I should believe with simple faith? After all, if I arrived at the conclusion that there is no God, what does that mean? We saw that in a valid logical argument the conclusion sits inside the premises. That’s why it’s a valid argument. Why must someone who accepts the premises also accept the conclusion? Because the conclusion is inside the premises. I gave the example: all human beings are mortal, Socrates is a human being, conclusion: Socrates is mortal. Why must someone who accepts the two premises accept the conclusion? Because the conclusion is inside the premises. If all human beings are mortal, let’s spell it out in detail, then Moshe is mortal, Yankele is mortal, and Socrates is mortal too, right? I’m just saying briefly that all human beings are mortal, but in fact I’ve said billions of claims here: this one is mortal and that one is mortal and that one is mortal, right? So in fact I already said that Socrates is mortal in the premises. Therefore anyone who accepts the premises must also accept the conclusion. Or in other words, a valid logical argument is an argument whose conclusion in fact already sat inside the premises. It’s an argument that begs the question. Usually people think that begging the question is a fallacy, and I explained that begging the question is not a fallacy. Begging the question is a synonym for a valid logical argument. That’s it. A valid logical argument always begs the question. If it didn’t beg the question, it wouldn’t be valid. If it doesn’t beg the question, then just because I accept the premises, who says I’ll accept the conclusion? I might accept the conclusion and I might not. Why must I accept the conclusion? Because it is inside the premises. You accepted the premises, and inside them there is also the conclusion. Meaning that a valid logical argument always begs the question, by definition. That’s the definition of a valid argument. Yes, in every logic book you open, you’ll see that an argument that begs the question is a fallacy. Nonsense in tomato juice. Every valid logical argument begs the question. There are cases of begging the question that are stupid forms of begging the question. I gave the example of our forefather Abraham and the hat. How do we know every Jew has to wear a hat? It says, “And Abraham went,” over there, and a Jew like him surely didn’t go around without a hat, right? Now if Abraham wore a hat, then we, his faithful students, his faithful descendants who follow in his path, also have to wear a hat. Which is what we wanted to prove. Why is that argument problematic? Because it begs the question. What do I mean? When I say a Jew like him surely didn’t go around without a hat, what have I said? Basically, that every Jew has to wear a hat, right? It’s hidden in there. Okay? Therefore it begs the question. That’s a stupid case of begging the question, and that’s why everyone laughs when they hear that argument. It’s a stupid case of begging the question because the conclusion that appears there appears as is inside one of the premises of the argument. So it’s idiotic. Why is it idiotic? Because when you make an argument in order to persuade someone, you have to take premises that are acceptable to him and try to show him that from them you can derive the conclusion. That way maybe you’ll persuade him. But if the conclusion is one of the premises, then the moment he disagrees with you about the conclusion, he also disagrees with you about the premises of the argument—so what value does the argument have? It’s not that the argument isn’t valid; the argument is perfectly valid. It’s just worthless. Because an argument is meant to persuade someone. Now if I have an argument—say someone tells me, no, I don’t think every Jew has to wear a hat. We have a dispute. Now I want to persuade him. I tell him, look, it says “And Abraham went,” right? Yes. I tell him, a Jew like him surely didn’t go around without a hat. So he says to me, why not? Because every Jew has to wear a hat, what do you mean? No, but that’s exactly what we’re arguing about. He says, not true, I don’t agree with that. So you understand that the argument is valid. If I assume those premises, then indeed it follows that we all have to wear a hat. Why is this question-begging argument problematic? Because it has no persuasive ability, no persuasive power. Because if you come to persuade someone who disagrees with you, and the conclusion you are arguing about is one of the premises, then the argument rests on a premise he doesn’t agree with. So what value does the argument have? You gain nothing from it, right? So you’ll say, fine, but every valid logical argument begs the question, so what’s the point of studying geometry? In geometry too, the conclusions, the theorems, sit inside the axioms. So what’s the point of studying? The answer is: there is no essential value. Rather, there are sometimes situations where we don’t know how to extract all the information that is inside the axioms. That requires skill, wisdom that not all of us have, okay? So you need help from a teacher, from a teacher, I don’t know who, who will help us figure out how to extract from the four axioms that we all know the theorem that the sum of the angles in a triangle is one hundred and eighty degrees. After the teacher shows me that, I understand that it is inside the premises. It isn’t something new. So what’s the point of the whole business? Because I myself didn’t manage to see that it was inside the premises. I needed help. Now that she helped me, I understand that it is inside the premises, and that’s what it means that she proved this claim to me. Proved it to me means she showed me that I had always agreed to it. That’s what it means to prove. Therefore I said that you can’t prove to an atheist that God exists. There’s no such thing. Because if you prove it to him, that means that in one of the premises sitting in the argument, the conclusion that God exists is already there inside that premise. But he’s an atheist—he doesn’t accept that premise, right? So what’s the point of arguments to prove that God exists? These arguments can only show the atheist—maybe, try to show him—that he’s not an atheist. He thought he was an atheist, but after all, you accept such-and-such premise, and I’m showing you that from it I can derive the conclusion that God exists. Oops. So apparently you weren’t aware of it—you’re actually a believer. An argument can reveal to a person that he is already a believer; an argument cannot turn an atheist into a believer. A logical argument. It can’t do that. Because an argument’s conclusion always sits inside the premises. And if you dispute the conclusion, you also won’t accept the premises. If you do accept the premises, and the conclusion that comes out is that God exists, then what becomes clear is that you had always been a believer, only you weren’t aware of it. Like in geometry. I had always known that the sum of the angles in a triangle is one hundred and eighty degrees. Already in third grade I knew it. Even in third grade everyone understands that through two points there passes one straight line, and that two parallel lines do not meet, and the axioms of geometry—every fourth grader understands them. But no fourth grader knows that the sum of the angles in a triangle is one hundred and eighty degrees. But after you prove it to him, he basically understands that already in fourth grade he knew it, because it was inside the axioms, inside the premises that he knew. The thing is, I don’t always understand what is inside the things I know. You can liken it to a safe, right? A logical argument is a kind of key to a safe. Inside my safe I have a whole treasure, but it isn’t accessible to me. I can’t get to it. Someone who manages to open the safe gives me access to things that had always been mine. Right? I just couldn’t use them until someone opened the safe for me. Same thing here. A logical argument basically reveals to me that there are more things I believed before, only I wasn’t aware of it. I was aware of the general premise, but I didn’t understand that from these premises—from within these premises—there also sits belief in God. And the logical argument can reveal to me that I’m really there. I had always been a believer; I was just living in error. I hadn’t diagnosed myself correctly. That’s what a logical argument can do. A logical argument cannot turn an atheist into a believer. Okay? But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to turn an atheist into a believer. The way isn’t through logical arguments. So what is it through? As we said. It has a bad name in our circles, a synonym for demagoguery. But demagoguery and rhetoric are two completely different things. Demagoguery is manipulation. Demagoguery is someone who toys with you and somehow supposedly manages to convince you by means of arguments that don’t really hold water. He just has good ability, so he manages to demagogue you. Okay? But rhetoric is not the same thing. Rhetoric is how I… let’s go back for a moment to how we adopt basic premises. We adopt basic premises through intuition. Now what is intuition? Intuition is a kind of contemplation. I look and I say, yes, through two points there passes one straight line—that’s clear to me. I simply see the situation, I understand that it’s one straight line, there isn’t more than one there. Okay? I don’t have a proof, but it’s clear to me. Okay? Now someone says to me, look, no, in my opinion it’s minus pi lines. I don’t see why it has to be exactly one line. You don’t have a monopoly on the number of lines that pass through two points, as they say in our postmodern circles. Okay, so then how will you know how many lines pass through two points? So I say to him, look, try playing with it a bit, try drawing lines, look from here, look from there. He says to me, drawing lines isn’t a proof. Maybe you haven’t found them, but there are more lines. But after you play around a bit, it could be that suddenly you too will see—with the eye of the intellect, but see—that through two points there passes one straight line. Just as I came to realize that through two points there passes one straight line. That’s a way in which you really can change a person’s position—not reveal to him that he didn’t understand what his position had always been. Logic can do only that: reveal to a person that this had always been his position, he just wasn’t aware of it. And by the way, that’s perfectly fine. I mean, very often it’s needed, because a person doesn’t always fully understand what the positions are that he really believes in. But if I want to change basic premises—not show you what is latent inside your basic premises, but change the basic premises, cause you to arrive at a different conclusion, adopt a different premise from the one you think you hold—here you need to use rhetorical tools, not logical tools. Rhetorical tools—I can describe a situation to you that suddenly illustrates something for you, some coin drops, right? Often people call it the coin dropping. What does that mean? I suddenly see it from a different angle and I understand that it’s true. It’s basically just changing the angle of vision. And sometimes the need, the ability required to do that, is not logical ability but something more literary. I write you a story, and in that story I describe a situation you hadn’t thought about, okay? And suddenly you understand how absurd what you thought was, and then you say, okay, I understand, my premise was wrong, I’m adopting another premise. That can happen, and it can also not happen, okay? But the way to change basic premises is by means of the rhetorical toolbox. The way to clarify things to you that you weren’t aware of before is the logical toolbox. Okay? That’s the claim. So therefore that is the meaning of proof, that’s what can be expected from it, and that’s what cannot be expected from it. You cannot expect it to turn an atheist into a believer. You can expect it to reveal to that atheist, or help that atheist discover, that he isn’t really an atheist. He decoded himself incorrectly, okay? He thought he was, but dig deeper into other premises that you adopt, and suddenly you’ll see that in fact you do believe in God—you just weren’t aware of it. Like with geometry, okay? And by the way, this happens a lot, a lot. A lot of people can discover—not regarding God, but regarding many things—a lot of people hear a logical argument and it convinces them. Now how does a logical argument convince you? After all, every logical argument begs the question. What happens is that you discover there is something you thought you didn’t agree with, and it turns out you do agree with it. You simply hadn’t decoded yourself correctly. That’s all. And that’s what happens in logical arguments when they succeed in persuading someone. It’s always like that. If a logical argument succeeds in persuading you of something, it means that basically you discovered something about yourself that you didn’t know before. But it was already inside you beforehand. That’s the point. Okay. Good. Now, in the previous semester we started talking about the various kinds of proofs, we started going through them one by one. I think I spoke about six ways to arrive at faith, six kinds of ways. The ontological proof, that’s the conceptual analysis of Anselm and Descartes and others. The cosmological proof, which means: there is something, so presumably someone created it. Yes, of course these are all very rough formulations. The physico-theological proof, which we’ll talk about today, which means: there is something complex, planned, coordinated, therefore someone created it. Similar to the previous proof, but the previous proof assumes nothing about the something. It says: if something exists, then someone created it. Here I assume about the thing that it is complex, that it is planned, that it is coordinated, whatever, and from that I infer the conclusion. That’s Kant’s division into these three types. Beyond Kant’s three types, I said there is another way of looking at these same types; I call it theological proofs, in quotation marks—it’s not exactly theology in the usual sense, but I’ll talk about that later. And there is tradition. Someone who accepts, I don’t know, the tradition that at the revelation at Mount Sinai God was revealed, then I believe in God. I arrived at the conclusion that God exists, so one can also arrive by way of tradition, and by way of direct intuition—what is called simple faith. It seems to me that God exists, my intuition tells me that God exists. Okay? So those are, I think, more or less the six ways. In each of these ways, a person has to examine himself and see whether it convinces him or does not convince him, but these are the six ways or six kinds of ways. There are different shades of arguments within each way, but these are the six kinds of ways one has to examine in order to reach a conclusion about whether I believe or do not believe. And as a result of that, I said two things. First, the God that I prove is always a function of the argument I use. Every argument assumes a different definition of God whose existence I am proving. The ontological proof assumes the existence of the perfect being. God is the perfect being. The cosmological proof is God the creator of the world. Right? If there is something, then someone created it. The physico-theological proof from complexity, from design, is God as the engineer of the world. He built the complex systems. Not the creation of the thing’s very existence, or not only that. The creation of the thing’s very existence, but also the engineering of the matter. Okay? And so on. Say, tradition—then God as the giver of the Torah. Doesn’t matter. Each such argument basically proves the existence of a different being, a being defined differently. That doesn’t mean they are different beings. It may be that the perfect being, the being who gave the Torah, who created the world, and who engineered it, is the same being. But it has different faces, and each argument deals with a different aspect of it. You can say these are different beings, or you can say it is the same being that fulfills all these functions, and each time each argument captures a different aspect of that entity. Okay? But of course, in order to arrive at the conclusion that God exists, one of the ways is enough. You don’t need them all. Therefore if I think that ways one, two, three, five, and six don’t work, but four does, then fine, I believe in God. I don’t care. It’s like if someone offers four proofs that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. I found an error in three of the proofs. But one does work. Then the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. Correct conclusion. The fact that I found an error in three arguments changes nothing. Even if I found an error in all four arguments, that doesn’t mean the conclusion is incorrect. It means I don’t know whether the conclusion is correct or not. Right? Because I don’t have a proof. And maybe there is a proof I haven’t thought of. Okay? Therefore finding a bug in a proof doesn’t say much about the conclusion. Why am I saying this? Because a lot of people, for example in the context of evolution—I mentioned this at the end of last time—in the context of evolution there is always this feeling that it’s a zero-sum game. If you are a neo-Darwinian, you accept evolution, then there is no God. If you believe in God, you have to abandon evolution. Here you have to choose. Now that, of course, is nonsense. It’s nonsense at the logical level even before the question of what you think about evolution and what you think about God. It’s nonsense at the logical level. Why? Because evolution—and I’ll talk about this further—but evolution only attacks one of the versions of the proofs of the third type. Physico-theological. That’s it. Now suppose it succeeded in attacking and toppling that version. Then version three-fifteen fell. Okay. So what? What about versions three-a, three-b, three-c, three-d, three-e, and so on? Versions one, two through one hundred, versions four, five, and six? You understand that this whole discussion of evolution or God becomes fairly minor. Even if we say the neo-Darwinians are right, that it knocks down the proof for the existence of God—which is complete nonsense—but even if we say yes, fine, so proof three-fifteen is gone. Okay. So what? You still have to check all the other proofs, and even after all the proofs, there can still be direct intuition saying that God exists, which is completely legitimate. Someone who doesn’t have it doesn’t have it, but someone who does have it shouldn’t feel under attack because evolution is true. That’s nonsense.
[Speaker D] No, it’s just because there are grounds for it, it’s like a function—as if I thought there were eight proofs.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, when you say there aren’t, you mean the arguments don’t convince you. Fine. But if there are arguments that do convince me, then the fact that they knocked down a certain version of the physico-theological proof tells me nothing. So what?
[Speaker E] But what if that’s the only version—the only one that convinced me?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So here I’m saying: if all the proofs have fallen, that’s a different discussion. Even then, it still doesn’t mean there is no God. It only means there’s no reason to assume there is. But if… a certain kind of proof falls out of a whole range of many other proofs, then what does that mean? It doesn’t mean very much. Right? So that’s just to understand the context of all these discussions. Why does evolution nevertheless sound so disturbing, and why is everyone fighting over this issue? And by the way, on this issue both the neo-Darwinians and the creationists are partners. Yes, it’s a shared mistake of the two rival camps. Because both of them feel that this is a zero-sum game, meaning the question is what to choose: choose God or choose evolution. And both sides agree that you have to choose one and abandon the other. Okay? And that’s where the mistake is. On this issue, both sides are wrong. But why is it so significant for them? Because in fact the physico-theological proof, I think, is maybe the strongest argument, or the most common argument, for the existence of God. In that sense it’s not just one more argument, okay, so you knocked it down, so what, who cares? There are lots of others. Okay? It’s not exactly like that. This argument is considered by many, at least, a strong argument, a central argument, a widespread argument, and therefore I think this argument deserves a bit more respect. Respect in the sense that it’s worth addressing. Whether it’s right or wrong, we’ll see, but it has to be dealt with. Meaning, it’s not just some throwaway line, right? There’s something here that does occupy a more significant place for many people, and I think to a large extent justifiably. In my view, by the way, it really is a strong argument. But we’ll talk about that later. I’ll try to convince you that this argument is a strong one. Good. So as I said before, up to here this is more or less, with a few additions, what I did in the previous class, and to bridge over the first semester. Now I want to get into the physico-theological proof. Here I’m still… who came in here? What’s your name? Noam. Noam what? Rashbash. Resh?
[Speaker F] Vav, Shin, Bet, Shin.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What, it’s not on my list yet. Okay, fine. And who else? Yosef, right, you also joined, okay. Alright. So I really want to get into the physico-theological proof. I remind you: the physico-theological proof is a proof that relies on the complexity of the world, the coordination among its parts, something along those lines, yes? There are different versions, but that’s the basic direction. So there is… maybe I’ll start with a midrash. The midrash speaks about a heretic who came to Rabbi Akiva, Midrash Temurah, Otzar HaMidrashim. “It happened that a heretic came and said to Rabbi Akiva: Who created this world? He said to him: The Holy One, blessed be He. He said to him: Show me clear evidence, bring proof. He said to him: Come to me tomorrow. The next day he came to him. Rabbi Akiva said to him: What are you wearing? He said to him: A garment. He said to him: Who made it? He said to him: The weaver. He said to him: I do not believe you; show me clear evidence. He said to him: What can I show you? Here it is in front of you, and you know that the weaver made it. So Rabbi Akiva answered him: And you do not know that the Holy One, blessed be He, created His world? That heretic left. His students said to him: What was the clear evidence? He said to them: My sons, just as a house testifies to the builder, and a garment points to the weaver, and a door to the carpenter, so the world points to the Holy One, blessed be He, who created it.” That is basically the physico-theological proof in a nutshell. The better-known argument in this context, the one atheists really love to ridicule, is the argument of an American priest named Paley from the nineteenth century. And Paley said this: suppose you’re walking down the street and you see a watch lying on the ground. You say to yourself: who made this watch? Apparently there’s some watchmaker or somebody who produced this watch, right? Why? Because it’s not plausible that such a complex thing came into being on its own. So your atheist friend walking with you says, what are you talking about? It came into being on its own, everything’s fine, what’s the problem? The claim is that the watch points to its maker, right? That’s basically what Paley says. You wouldn’t say about a watch that it made itself. So the world, which is much more complex than a watch, all the more so it is not plausible that it came into being by itself. That is basically Paley’s argument. Now there are lots of objections to this, and we’ll talk about at least some of them later. But that is basically the physico-theological proof. Now maybe another version, from the physicist Fred Hoyle, a cosmologist, who also takes a lot of heat from his colleagues and from atheists over this argument. He says that the probability that the world was formed accidentally, without a directing hand, is in his view similar to, or even smaller than, the probability that a typhoon would pass over a junkyard and turn all the… gather all the parts lying there into a functioning Boeing airplane. A working Boeing plane. Okay? That’s more or less the chance of the world having come into being on its own. If I gather all these formulations together, basically what they say is this: there is a world, it has a very complex and special structure, right? Something like that. A complex thing does not arise spontaneously, meaning without a directing hand, by itself, and therefore clearly somebody created it, or something created it, somebody created it. That’s the physico-theological argument. Okay? Now notice again: I didn’t say you have to put on tefillin, and I didn’t say anything like that. What I said is some philosophical claim. This is called deism, not theism. It’s belief in God in some philosophical sense, not connected right now to religious questions, and whether He’s Christian or Jewish or just doesn’t care about anybody, that’s not the point. But He created the world, meaning there has to be something that created the world. And of course the first argument that immediately comes up in this context is: okay, but who says it’s God? Maybe it’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You know that famous atheist joke. Yes, so maybe it’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What’s the answer? Maybe it’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Why should I care? Call it whatever you want. The claim is that there is something that created the world. You want to call it God, you want to call it a monster, you want to call it Yankee Doodle, call it whatever you like. What difference does it make? As long as I haven’t said anything about that God except that He created the world, the names don’t matter. Now obviously I really can’t claim as a result of this, alright, so tomorrow morning we all need to put on tefillin, right? Because I haven’t said anything about that entity that created the world. But precisely because of that, don’t attack me by saying, “But who said you have to put on tefillin?” I didn’t say you have to put on tefillin. I’m discussing a philosophical question. Does there exist some entity that is responsible for the existence of our universe? And the claim of this argument is yes. Who is that entity? Does it want something from us? Is it Jewish, Christian, pagan, or a turkey? It doesn’t matter. What difference does it make? We’ll discuss that later. Right now I’m talking only about this. Okay? So that’s the first point, and this is a misunderstanding. A second claim that comes up in this context: God is not an explanation. Why? Because after all, you’re not saying anything about Him, you understand nothing about Him, you can’t say anything about Him, and therefore basically you haven’t said anything. You’ve said that I have no explanation, that’s what you said. To say there is a God when you haven’t said anything—what does that word even mean? So it’s not an explanation. Another version, yes, this is another version—in fact a different argument, but a cousin of this one: the claim that the world was created by chance is very implausible. But the claim that there is a God is also implausible. So why should I prefer this implausibility over that implausibility? You solved one unresolved question by replacing it with another unresolved question. That didn’t help me at all. That is basically another kind of argument saying God is not an explanation. Okay? Where’s the mistake in these claims? They are completely mistaken. These claims are wrong in the same way the previous one was wrong. They are speaking about some specific God because they think I’m aiming at the religious God who also tells me to put on tefillin, who is omnipotent, and this and that, and has descriptions, or has no descriptions, or can’t be described. I didn’t say anything about Him. Maybe He can be described. It could be that His shape is a triangle and He likes dancing hora once every three hours. I didn’t say anything—maybe He can be described too. I’m not getting into descriptions because I don’t need them. Leave me alone with the religious God and all the religious dogmas. I didn’t talk about them; I’m not assuming them. All I’m saying is that I have a proof that God exists. Okay? By the way, I’m also not offering explanations. A proof is not an explanation. I didn’t try to explain anything. All I did was present a proof that God exists, that’s all. What difference does it make whether it’s an explanation? Think about—I’ll give an example from Winnie-the-Pooh, okay? Winnie-the-Pooh, in one of Milne’s stories, Pooh walks along and sees footprints in the sand. He follows those footprints and wonders to himself who made them. Of course in the end he turns around and discovers they’re his own footprints. I see some kind of shape there; I don’t know exactly what it is; it’s not something random the wind made, and therefore I claim that someone made those footprints. Someone says to me, wait, you haven’t said anything about that someone, so it’s not an explanation to say that someone made those footprints. Would you accept such a claim? No! I didn’t come to explain anything; I came to say that someone made them. I have a proof that someone passed through here. I’m not saying anything about him; I don’t know how to say anything about him—so what? Does that in any way damage the proof that indeed someone passed through here? No. So this argument is irrelevant. Okay? I’m not trying to explain anything; I’m trying to prove a claim. And if I proved that something exists, even though I can’t say anything about it, and that something created the world because otherwise it’s not plausible that it arose without some directing hand, then I have proved its existence. You don’t accept it? Fine, then we’ll talk, but the argument that this is “not an explanation” doesn’t refute anything. It’s simply a misunderstanding. Another argument: if you assume that everything has to have a cause, right? What’s the argument? There is a universe and it’s complex. A complex thing doesn’t just arise without a directing hand. Therefore there was someone who created this complex universe, right? That’s the argument in short. What are you really assuming? That every complex thing needs something that created it, right? Well then what about God Himself? If He created the world, He’s probably complex too, right? He too is complex, meaning if He has the ability to produce such a complex universe. So He too should need someone to have created Him. So what have you gained? Again, it’s not an explanation; it’s just an infinite regress, an endless regression. Okay? What do you say about this argument?
[Speaker D] So if we say that God is the one who created the complex world, and that He Himself also doesn’t need someone to create Him—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s define God as something that doesn’t need someone to create Him. I can define whatever I want. Definitions don’t help with anything. The question is what you do with the assumption, assuming this is an insight you believe in. It doesn’t help to define something. Definitions don’t get you out of arguments. You need to claim something in order to answer a refuting argument. Defining isn’t enough. Okay? There is a God—
[Speaker B] —such that no second god created the God I’m talking about.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, and who created Him?
[Speaker B] What, so it’s an infinite chain. So what do we do then?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So does it prove there is a God or not?
[Speaker B] God is the being—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —the first one that nobody created. And who created that first one? What do you mean nobody created Him? So there is something that… let’s go with you. So there is something at the start of the chain that nobody created? Well then your assumption that every complex thing needs someone to create it has fallen apart. So forget the first in line—go with the world itself. Why do you have to assume someone created it? The assumption on which you built the whole thing, that every complex thing needs someone to create it, is not true. Meaning you are undermining it with your own hands, because in the end you have to arrive at the conclusion that there must be some entity that no one created. Well then that itself means the assumption from which you started out—that every complex thing needs someone to create it—is not true. Okay? Where is the problem here? So I’m telling you: in my opinion the problem is this. So what do you really say? After all, reason does tell us that complex things don’t come into being on their own, right? It’s simple statistics. I’ll sharpen this more later when I talk about the second law of thermodynamics. When these are mathematical formulations, people are often more convinced, although you don’t need mathematical formulations for this. A complex thing doesn’t come into being on its own. Meaning, you see a watch, as Paley said—you see a watch, and anyone who tells you it came into being on its own, you’d hospitalize him; it didn’t come into being on its own. Or a Boeing airplane with the typhoon—if someone tells you a typhoon accidentally created a Boeing airplane, I don’t know, you’d hospitalize him. It just doesn’t happen. So don’t tell me stories that complex things can come into being on their own. Fine, but then the claim really is a correct claim. I’m not willing to give up that assumption that stands at the basis of the argument, that every complex thing needs someone who made it, right? It’s a very reasonable thing. Again, nothing is certain. We talked about that: nothing can be certain, not faith and not anything else. But on the level of probability, it’s very plausible, much more plausible than its opposite. And if I see a complex thing, it’s much more likely that something made it than that it came into being on its own. For me that’s called a proof. Probability—I’m not talking about certainty. So the claim is: okay, then this principle really is a true principle. But this principle cuts off the branch it is itself sitting on, as we said before, because it leads to infinite regress. Regression means stepping backward, yes? It leads to endless retreat. You know the story we talked about in the cosmological proof last semester, about that Greek physicist—yes, William James, the philosopher and American psychologist, I think brings this example. The Greek philosopher giving a lecture and explaining that the world stands on the back of a giant turtle, Atlas, yes, from Greek mythology. Then one woman from the audience raises her hand and says to him: what does the turtle stand on? So he says: there’s another turtle. There’s a turtle underneath, and this turtle stands on it. She doesn’t give up, she raises her hand again: and the second turtle, turtle double-prime, what does it stand on? On turtle triple-prime, yes, the third turtle. Okay, there’s a first turtle, second turtle, third turtle, like in the army. So he says it stands on yet another turtle. When he sees her raising her hand for the fourth time, he says, listen, you’re completely stupid, don’t you understand? It’s turtles all the way down. Now, what does this thing mean—turtles all the way down? It demonstrates why an argument of infinite regress really cannot hold water; it doesn’t constitute an explanation. You cannot assume infinite regress. When you basically tell me that the turtle stands on a second turtle and the second turtle stands on a third turtle and so on, you are basically telling me: I have no explanation for what the world stands on. Why? Because in mathematics—and we talked about this last semester—in mathematics the general conception, at least the accepted conception, though there are some marginal disputes about it that in my opinion really don’t hold water, infinity is a potential concept, not a concrete concept. And when you speak about infinity in mathematical contexts, yes, in calculus and some of you certainly know this, you talk about it as some kind of limit, yes, something bigger than every number we know. You never say anything positive about it; it’s always negative descriptions. Yes, it’s some process tending toward a limit, and we call that limit infinity. I never speak about infinity concretely, to say I have infinitely many objects. No, I don’t say I have infinitely many objects. I say the number of objects here is greater than every natural number I know. That I can say. I cannot say that I have infinitely many objects. Many times people use the words “I have infinitely many objects,” but what they really mean is the potential sense. The language is concrete, but the meaning is really potential. And when we talk about infinity in a concrete sense, we get into problems—Hilbert’s hotel, we talked about that too, and all the paradoxes of infinity. There’s Cantor’s infinities, which always challenge this claim that infinity cannot be concrete but only potential, but I’ll leave that aside for now. So the claim is basically that really, turtles all the way down is not an explanation. You can’t say there are turtles all the way down. So what yes? So really, what does the world stand on? There has to be some turtle—a first turtle, as it were. There must be some first turtle that is not standing on any other turtle; it knows how to hover in the air, if you like. Maybe that turtle is the world itself—that the world itself hangs in the air. Yes, today we think that way, right? Physics—the universe itself hangs in the air. There is no down. The notion of “down,” of course, is a notion that doesn’t exist in cosmology. There’s no such thing as down. Down exists when you’re on Earth. Down means closer to the Earth—that’s called down. When you look at the universe, in the universe there’s no down. What is down? If you want to say there are turtles all the way down, the notion of down simply isn’t defined. Is down that way or that way? It could be in any direction. It could even be like this, down. And therefore the claim is that if you want to argue that the Earth stands on a turtle, then you have to assume that there is some chain of turtles of length zero up to who knows what, and in the end there is some particular turtle that is an exceptional turtle. It doesn’t need another turtle to stand on; it can stand in the air. Otherwise you haven’t provided any explanation; otherwise you haven’t said anything. Okay? To speak about infinitely many turtles… Now, if you talk about infinitely many turtles in the potential sense, you’ll say there are infinitely many turtles in the sense that the number of turtles is greater than every natural number I know. That won’t help. Why? Because when you offer an explanation of what the Earth stands on, you are talking about a concrete chain of turtles. You’re not talking about lots of turtles. In the end, in the end, it’s not… you’re just escaping from me. Right? Because an explanation has to relate to the whole chain concretely. If you say, my explanation is this: the Earth stands on a turtle, that turtle stands on another turtle, and there are infinitely many turtles—what does that mean? There are as many turtles as you like. That’s not an explanation. That’s escaping from explanation. Okay? Explanations always need… And therefore infinite regress is regarded by philosophers as a failure. Once I heard a course at Tel Aviv University when I was in my undergraduate degree; I went to hear Biderman’s course on Indian philosophy. He’s an expert in Indian philosophy. So it surprises people who don’t know, but in Indian philosophy there is a very rigid, logical, precise, binding method of argument. They are very, very not mystical types; they are very logical, precise, and allow no deviation in any direction—at least that branch. I don’t think that’s all Indian philosophy; there are lots of Indians. But the branch he was talking about, the philosophical debate in the world of Indian philosophy, is built on a very, very defined set of rules. One of the rules is that if you enter into infinite regress, you’ve lost. You’ve lost because that basically means you failed to answer. Okay? And I think in the West too, although there it is less rigid and I’ve already seen people argue about it, but in my view there’s no logic to it. Meaning, it really is a failure. Meaning, when you offer an explanation and for the sake of that explanation you use a chain with infinitely many links, a concrete infinity of links, then basically you have not offered an explanation; you are escaping from explanation. Okay? And therefore the claim is this: if I say, as with the turtles—now I come back to our case—if I say that every complex thing has to have a composer, it doesn’t arise on its own, then you ask: what about the composer? He too needs a composer. We get to infinity. What is the only way to stop this? That there is some chain of composers, but there is one composer at the beginning who does not need a previous composer to compose him. There has to be one, otherwise I fall into infinite regress. Okay? Now of course I can say that the length of this chain is zero, and the universe itself is the universe that doesn’t need something to have created it. There doesn’t have to be one turtle before it and stop at that turtle, or the third turtle, or the seventeenth. No turtles are needed; the universe itself stands in the air. Okay? But that already gets us into a problem. Why? Because the principle that a complex thing does not arise on its own is something we do accept. That’s what I said before. Ask yourselves exactly—ask yourselves intuitively—when you look at a complex thing, it is intuitively obvious to you that there has to be something or someone that assembled it, right? It did not arise on its own. And I’m not willing to give up wholesale on that principle that a complex thing requires something to assemble it, right? That’s not… On the other hand, you also can’t accept it wholesale. You can’t give it up wholesale, and you can’t accept it wholesale, because if I accept it wholesale, I fall into infinite regress. So what do we do? Neither swallow nor spit out—what do we do? So the answer, in my opinion, is a legal-philosophical principle called in Latin lex specialis. Lex specialis is the principle of preferring the specific. What does that mean? If I have a general principle saying that murder is forbidden, and I have a specific principle saying that someone who murdered is liable to death—we execute him. Okay? Now apparently that’s a contradiction within Jewish law, because on the one hand there is a principle saying murder is forbidden, so how do you kill the murderer or the Sabbath desecrator? Or whatever—there are various… Sorry, an emergency case involving my mother has dropped on me, sorry, okay? I’ll try anyway. She’s hospitalized, so I’m sorry. So what do you do in such a case when there is a contradiction? So the rule is—and this is a legal rule—the rule is… Hello? Hello? Mom? I’m in the middle of a class, can I call you back afterward? Okay, bye bye. Okay. So yes, when there is a contradiction. So yes, there is a contradiction between these two principles. What do we do? We have to decide which one overrides the other. Now if we decide that the prohibition “do not murder” is what overrides, then the duty to kill the murderer is canceled, right? On the other hand, if I decide that the duty to kill the murderer overrides, then the prohibition “do not murder” is not canceled. As for a murderer, you kill him, but still, but still, with respect to everyone else, the prohibition “do not murder” remains in force, right? Meaning, it is preferable for me to prefer the specific principle, because preferring the specific principle does not completely nullify the second principle as well. After all, if I believe in both principles, I want to pay as little price as possible. Now if I adopt the general principle, the specific principle is completely void. Even though I thought it was true, I have to give it up. That’s not plausible; I think it’s true, so I won’t give it up. Therefore it’s preferable for me to adopt it and qualify the general principle. The general principle says murder is forbidden, except for this case and that case where it is permitted. So I qualify it; it isn’t canceled, it still exists. Therefore legally, and also in halakhic interpretation, and everywhere. What? You mean general and particular? That’s not exactly it.
[Speaker D] No, if it came out—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A thing that was included in a general rule and then singled out. Yes, maybe you could connect it to one of those interpretive principles, I don’t know, I’d have to think about that. It’s not the standard general-and-particular in any case.
[Speaker D] No, it’s not the classic case.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “A thing that was included in a general rule and singled out was singled out not to teach only about itself, but to teach about the whole rule.” I don’t know, I’d have to think about it; that’s an interesting comment. In any case, the claim is that I always prefer the specific principle. Now let’s return to our issue. We basically have a dilemma. On the one hand, everything has a cause. That’s the basic principle I intuitively agree with; it seems right to me, okay? On the other hand, clearly it can’t be absolute. There has to be at least one exception, right? “You have only its novelty; we do not multiply disputes.” Meaning: there will be one exception here, but no more. Why make more exceptions if the basic principle that I am qualifying seems intuitively correct to me? There’s no reason to give up more than I have to. So if I have to say, look, at least one entity is exceptional, otherwise I get to infinite regress, then I’ll make that one entity exceptional, but with respect to everything else the principle will remain in force. Therefore, when I have a contradiction between two such principles, if I have a solution of the lex specialis type, I’ll adopt it. It’s not always right; sometimes both principles are general, sometimes both are specific, but if it’s a specific principle against a general principle, then this is basically a principle of minimal cost. I give up as little as possible of the things that intuitively seem true to me. Now clearly if I say, alright, then this whole principle is not true, that every complex thing needs a cause—that means giving up a great deal of intuition that I have, and there’s no reason to give it up. I’m not going to decide now that a watch came into being by itself, or any other thing I encounter, right? So the entire universe too is ultimately just a collection of watches or complex things, meaning it’s of the same kind, only bigger and more complex. So why on earth should it come into being without a cause? But the cause that created the universe could be of a different type—not the type of things we know here, right? And maybe there it really doesn’t need a cause, I don’t know, maybe. And if it does need a cause, then maybe its cause doesn’t need a cause. At some point I will arrive at one link that is apparently exempt from this principle that every complex thing needs a cause. And the claim, it seems to me, in the end from this tension that I described, is that the most plausible way out, or the way out with the lowest cost in terms of giving up my beliefs, is the way out that says: everything in our world has a cause, but there exists some entity, there exists some other entity, probably not of the type of watches or things I know from our world, which—even if it is complex—it doesn’t need a cause; or perhaps it isn’t complex at all, and it manages to produce a complex world even though it itself isn’t complex. Maybe. That could also be. I don’t understand it, so I don’t know. But there must be such an entity. Now understand: I have proof that it exists. This, by the way, is speculation. I have proof that it exists, because if it doesn’t exist, I get to infinite regress. This is a proof by contradiction for the existence of such an entity. And there you have the proof of the existence of God. This very tension, this very objection that leads me to infinite regress—the atheist tried by means of this objection to lead me into infinite regress, right? But what he actually did by the back door was rebuild the proof for me. Because he is basically saying, wait a second, and I answer him, wait a second—you don’t accept infinite regress. Infinite regress is not an option, right? So what are you saying? The world itself—or the kind of things I know, you too agree that they need to have a cause, right? So apparently there has to be something else.
[Speaker D] I don’t know, Rabbi, it’s not that convincing to me, because we could say that the world itself is the first entity, almost like Ockham’s razor. We won’t build another God if we don’t need one. The world itself came into being. You tell me, what is the world after all? It’s just floor and wall and table and things like that. I’d say first of all we still don’t know enough about quanta that come into being out of nowhere, and admittedly they come in pairs, like we said, so there’ll be plus and minus, but in the end there is something here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So hold on. What we know—I’m not talking about empirics, I’m talking about intuition. Tell me what you say intuitively: does a complex thing come into being on its own? The kinds of things you see here—do they come into being on their own? No. So then what?
[Speaker D] The universe itself did.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So the universe itself. The universe itself is a collection of those things. The universe is not another entity. The universe is the collection of things.
[Speaker D] No, why? Evolution creates the complexity afterward, after the thing came into being.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Evolution creates living complexity; we’ll deal with that later. But leave evolution aside—talk about the complexity of inanimate matter, not living things, okay? Just so that—even evolution won’t help you, but we’ll leave that for later. Okay.
[Speaker D] So what? Wait, what complexity is there in inanimate matter that we—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What, there’s no complexity in inanimate matter? Where? Try solving some problem—we can’t solve the three-body problem. What are you talking about, bodies organized in all kinds of forms—you know how complex a rock is? Completely inanimate. Do you know what unbelievably complex physics that is? There is absolutely no chance of calculating the structure of a rock by normal means. None, no chance. Maybe only statistically, in one way or another. Inanimate matter is very complex too. Biology is not a field considered harder than physics.
[Speaker D] I understand, so it’s complex.
[Speaker C] Huh? Biology is even more complex because the things there are bigger.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Atoms are bigger? In biology? No, I don’t think so. I don’t know.
[Speaker C] Rocks are made of carbon and aluminum and all kinds of things like that, which are the smallest atoms.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, I never thought about that.
[Speaker D] Fine, but I accept that. So the universe itself came into being as the only complex thing that exists. Again, I’m saying, with quanta teaching us this.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but the universe doesn’t create the complexities within it. The universe is the collection of these complexities.
[Speaker D] It’s the collection of complexities that came into being, that’s—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —the first thing.
[Speaker D] That’s God for our purposes, that thing that—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but I’m saying again: a watch doesn’t come into being on its own, right? No. The watch is… but the collection of all watches, which is the universe, did come into being on its own? That doesn’t make sense. Why? Because it’s the kind of thing to which I apply this very assumption, that a complex thing doesn’t come into being on its own. It’s those same things. It’s about those very things. What you really want is for me to give up that assumption. Things of the kind of a watch can come into being on their own—that’s basically what you’re saying. Just one watch. But those are things of the kind of a watch. No—things of the kind of a watch, we have experience of them, I don’t think they come into being on their own.
[Speaker D] No, the whole universe. Then later the universe comes into being on its own, now a star crashes into old whatever, creates here some volcanic eruption that creates—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the universe—I’m talking about the universe itself. The universe itself is the collection of things in it. What does that mean? It doesn’t matter right now what process it underwent until it got to the form we have now. In its foundation, when it was first created, all this complexity was already there. It wasn’t actualized yet, but it was all there.
[Speaker D] Okay. And that’s complex. A watch—someone built it. Why?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But why do you say that about the watch, and about the collection of all the watches together you don’t say that?
[Speaker D] No, because it’s not the collection of all the watches; it’s the basic, the basis that I have to say—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, you don’t have to say that. No, you don’t have to. You can also say that material things, or things of the sort I have experience with, if they’re complex then apparently something made them. There is something outside the range of my experience, unfamiliar to me, something of a different type that can come into being without something assembling it.
[Speaker D] That’s even more “God”; that’s even worse than a thousand watches. A thousand watches, okay, but God is something much more—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Complex—the one who created everything, that’s much more complex. No, but He’s not of the same type, not of the same type of thing. If I need to give up my intuitions, I’ll give them up with respect to entities I don’t know. Fine, those I don’t know—maybe something different happens there. But these beings around me, I know them. Why assume that here my simple intuition doesn’t work? That’s not plausible.
[Speaker D] Because I have no intuition regarding God, so that’s an escape.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re telling me, listen, not here. Exactly. But regarding the question whether this is an escape, I already talked about that earlier. That’s not an argument.
[Speaker D] No, but it’s an escape from a thousand watches. Because I’m saying it’s a billion watches—God.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s not a billion watches, because He isn’t watches. He isn’t a material being, He isn’t one of the kinds of things we’re talking about. That’s exactly the point. He’s of a different kind. Let me now formulate the argument differently. Earlier I formulated it in a simplistic way. I said every complex thing needs a cause, the world is complex, conclusion: the world has a cause. That’s God, right? Not right. It’s not true that every complex thing has a cause. Every complex thing of the kinds of things in our experience needs a cause. The world is a complex thing of the kinds of things in our experience, therefore it has a cause. And now it’s fine. Because now when you turn this against God, God is not something that is in our experience. Now there’s another argument, another claim. Complexity is in the eye of the beholder. Yes, every self-respecting atheist website, you’ll see this claim there: complexity is in the eye of the beholder. Or alternatively, even a complex thing can arise on its own. With a simple watch, you have experience that watchmakers build watches. It’s not that automatically a complex thing requires an assembler. You simply have experience that watches are made by watchmakers, so when you see a watch, you assume there was a watchmaker. But from the watch itself, in and of itself, if you didn’t have that experience, you wouldn’t assume it. So to me that’s really nonsense. It’s obvious that when we see a complex thing, even if I didn’t know. A person from Africa who has never seen a watch in his life comes here, sees all the complexity of the watch, he’ll understand that someone made it. I don’t think you need experience of watchmakers for that. It’s a foolish argument. But another argument that comes up is that complexity is in the eye of the beholder. What seems complex to you seems less complex to someone else. So the fact that you decided that life is specifically the complex thing that can’t arise on its own—you decided that on your own responsibility. Or alternatively, someone else says: in every world some kind of complex thing will arise—again, some complex thing of another type. So in our world the complex things of the sort we know came into being. Slightly different arguments, but they’re cousins.
So in order to explain why these arguments are not correct, I want to talk a little bit about entropy, or the second law of thermodynamics. And I’m using this not because I think the second law of thermodynamics proves the existence of God, but because in the context of the second law of thermodynamics we have a mathematical definition of complexity. And from that point on you can’t say that complexity is in the eye of the beholder. We have a definition of what complexity is. Now, what is that mathematical or physical definition? The mathematics here isn’t what interests me; the physics is what interests me, because physics is a claim about the world. What is complexity in the physical context of thermodynamics?
So for example, let’s say we have a container and inside it there is gas. And now in one corner of the container I’m holding the gas inside a plastic bag, and now I tear the bag. So the gas spreads throughout the container, right? Now, the gas started from a state where it was all concentrated in one corner of the container and reached a state where it is distributed throughout the container, throughout the whole space of the container. But the reverse direction doesn’t happen. I don’t start with gas distributed throughout the whole container and suddenly have it all gather in one corner. You’ll never see that.
Now, this is a strange thing, because we know that at least the microscopic laws of physics are all reversible. You can reverse the time axis; the equations are second-order. Newton’s law is the second derivative of position equals force. You see? Acceleration is the second derivative. So once you have a second derivative, it’s symmetric in time, because it’s t squared. t squared means plus t and minus t behave the same way. Okay? So basically the basic laws of physics, the microscopic laws of physics, are reversible. Meaning, if there is a certain process—say you’re looking at a ball rolling or an object moving—and now you film it and project the film backward. In principle, the viewer can’t tell you which is the forward film and which is the reversed one. Because if this process is lawful, then the reverse process is lawful too. That’s the reversibility of the laws of physics. Symmetry with respect to the time axis, yes, CPT.
So the claim is that on the microscopic level everything is symmetric with respect to the time axis, to the flow of time, but on the macroscopic level, like the example with the gas, it isn’t. Here, you see: we start with all the gas concentrated on one side, and end with it all spread throughout the container. But the reverse process doesn’t happen. How can that be? After all, the gas is just a collection of molecules, and each molecule is a microscopic body governed by Newton’s laws. Okay? So how can it be that a collection of molecules creates asymmetric behavior when the individual molecule is governed by symmetric laws?
I’m really presenting this in a very schematic way, but it’s important to understand because I want to convince you that complexity has an objective definition. It’s not an invention. The claim is basically that the state in which the gas is located at one end of the container is a more complex or rarer state—rare and complex are the same thing—than the state in which it is spread throughout the whole container. So what follows? Assuming the gas passes through all possible states all the time, okay? If there is a state that is less rare, we will see the gas in that state for more time. Because it passes through all the different states, right? If there is a state that is very rare, then even if the gas is in it for one second, we won’t see it, because it happens once in I-don’t-know-how-many seconds and then immediately disappears. And therefore the claim is that thermodynamic flow is from rare states to less rare states. Or from special states to less special states, and not the other way around, although that’s not really true. You can walk around with a gas container in which the gas fills the whole container, and yes, at some moment you will reach a state where all the gas is in one corner—but it will happen for one second, you won’t even see it, and it will immediately spread out again, because it’s an extremely special state. By contrast, the state where the gas is spread throughout the whole container is a normal state you can remain in for a long time; it’s not a special state.
Now let me explain what special and not special means. Look for a moment—I’m moving to a discrete space. Yes, look for a moment at a chain of cells, ten cells. All right? We have three little balls. Each little ball can sit in a cell, okay? Now, I have one state in which all three little balls are in cell number one; that’s one state, for example. A second state is that the three little balls are in cells one, three, and eight, okay? One ball in each cell, okay? How many different states of the balls correspond to the state in which all three balls are in cell number one? Only one: that all three are there. There are no other possibilities. This will become clear when I say the opposite. But when I have cells one, three, and eight, I can show you that there are several arrangements that all look macroscopically the same. Ball number one is in cell one, ball number two is in three, ball number three is in eight—that’s one possibility. A second possibility: ball number three is in one, ball number one is in two, ball number three is in eight, and so on. Okay? Basically there are six possibilities, or about six possibilities, right? Three factorial. There are six such possibilities that on the microscopic level are six different possibilities. But when I look at the system on the macroscopic level, all six of those possibilities look the same to me: a ball here, a ball here, and a ball here. I don’t care whether it’s ball number one or number two or three, right? By contrast, when all three balls are in cell number one, there is only one such microscopic state, that all three are there; you can’t swap the roles of the balls.
Therefore, what this means is the following: when I look at how many microscopic states correspond to a given macroscopic state, that is what defines the rarity of the state. The state in which all three balls are in cell number one is rarer. Why? Because there is only one microscopic state that fits it. The state in which there is one ball in one, one in three, and one in eight is a less rare state. Why? Because there are six different states, all six of which look the same: one in one, one in three, and one in eight. Okay? Now of course one versus six is nothing, and if you look at, I don’t know, ten thousand balls inside however many cells you want, you’ll get ratios such that when the balls are all in one cell there is simply no chance you’ll see such a state. By contrast, the state in which the balls are spread over all the cells is the state you’ll always see. They’ll just switch positions; each time it will be a different ball in a different cell, but overall that’s what you’ll see all the time.
And therefore, if you think of those balls as the molecules of the gas and those cells as the parts of the space of the container, then you’ll see why when the gas is concentrated on one side of the container that is a rare state, and when the gas is spread throughout the whole volume of the container that is the less rare state. Okay? What does that actually mean? In physics we call this states with different entropy. Low entropy means more ordered, or rarer. High entropy means more disordered, less rare. Okay? You throw a flowerpot off the roof and it shatters below. We’ve never seen a shattered flowerpot below rise up to the roof and become a whole flowerpot, because the shattered flowerpot… a state of mess, disorder, okay? An orderly flowerpot is an ordered state, a built flowerpot. That’s an ordered state. An ordered state is rare, because after all there is only one arrangement of the flowerpot’s parts that will give you an orderly flowerpot, right? But messes—there are lots of messes. You can arrange the pieces of the flowerpot in many forms and it will still be a mess, right? Therefore a state of an intact flowerpot is a special state, or complex, or rare—these are synonymous words in physics. And a state of a shattered flowerpot is a common state, or not a rare state, a frequent state, okay? Or less complex.
And basically what the second law of thermodynamics says is that if no hand is involved—say you have gas in a container—the direction of flow will always be from the rare state to the less rare state. Or in other words, entropy does not decrease. It either increases or stays the same. It does not decrease. That is the second law of thermodynamics. Order does not increase. A system does not become more ordered unless someone—some external factor—is involved in organizing it. Someone who takes care of that order. Okay? Otherwise it won’t happen. Yes? The room can get messy even without us. It won’t get organized without us. A room does not organize itself without us, unfortunately, and unfortunately for our parents. Okay? And mess is the state, the basic state, the default. If you want order, you need someone to make it. Okay? What? The mess too? No. The mess—what do you mean, someone makes it? When you move from order to mess, you don’t need someone to make that happen. When you move from mess to order, someone needs to do it.
[Speaker E] Like with the room.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, if wind comes, then the room will get messy, right? And no wind will organize a messy room. Only a person, or someone investing thought, or yes, some intelligent being that is involved, can reduce entropy. There is no such thing as entropy reduction in a closed system. If entropy decreases, that means the system is not closed. Someone from outside is involved in the system. A closed gas container—the gas will never suddenly gather in a certain corner. But it will spread out even if it is closed. It will spread by itself throughout the whole container; nobody has to be involved. What does that actually mean? It means that when I talk about the level of complexity of the state, or the level of order of the state, that is not in the eye of the beholder. It has objective, precise, well-defined definitions.
When I talk about the fact that life is something with very low entropy, a very complex system—a living body, very complex and special—versus inanimate matter, which is inanimate matter with higher entropy, meaning less order. Okay? Still very complex, as I said earlier, but less so than a living body. Okay? The more coordinated, ordered, complex, special a system is, the lower its entropy. Okay? Now in order to produce something out of mess, to produce a living body out of mess, you need some kind of hand that produces it. For the living body to die, you need—you don’t need anything, nobody has to do that, that can happen on its own. It can happen on its own, okay? Because entropy increases. Entropy can increase without anyone helping it. It cannot decrease without someone helping it.
[Speaker C] But you said there is some time in the room when there will be a certain moment when all the atoms will be at this point. In your eyes that moment is a very short time. Now I can say that what we are experiencing now, the life you’re talking about as being so complex, is also basically, in someone else’s eyes, a very short moment.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’ll get to that issue. We’ll get to that issue. A very short moment over billions or billions of billions of years—so you’ve gotten the gist of it. We’ll get to it, all right? But I’m trying to do this step by step. What I basically wanted to say here is that it is not true that order or complexity are in the eye of the beholder. There is an objective definition of order and complexity. If you claim—and that’s what is claimed on many atheist websites, you can see it there—that life is not a special thing, not a complex thing. We live, so to us it seems special, to us it catches the eye. Not true. Life has a scientific definition of its level of complexity, and it has a higher level of complexity than inanimate matter. And if it were only something subjective, it would be impossible for the laws of physics to be determined by quantities defined subjectively. The laws of physics are the world, not me. The world behaves according to the laws of physics. If complexity were only in the eye of the beholder, there could not be a second law of thermodynamics, because physics does not behave according to how I see things. Physics behaves the way it behaves. As Mark Twain said, yes, the world doesn’t owe you anything—it was here first. Fine, that’s what I think.
But on the other hand I want to say that this is a cousin of your comment. I am not claiming that I have scientific proof for the existence of God. Ostensibly, the second law of thermodynamics proves the existence of God, because life comes into being in the world, whereas before there was no life. So there you have it—entropy decreased. If entropy decreased, then the second law of thermodynamics says that means there is some factor involved in the system; otherwise entropy could not have decreased. Okay? Ostensibly that is scientific proof. So it isn’t. Why isn’t it? If it were scientific proof, then that would mean the second law of thermodynamics is not correct. Not correct—because God is involved here and does all kinds of things here, and we should have measured that and seen that the second law of thermodynamics doesn’t work. Entropy could decrease even without physical influences, if the Holy One, blessed be He, were to do various things. But first, at least so far, we have not found any empirical contradiction, in experience, to the second law of thermodynamics. I am not claiming that the second law of thermodynamics proves the existence of God. What I am claiming is that the concept of complexity has an objective definition. It is not in the eye of the beholder. That’s all.
Now, why is it really not correct to say that the second law of thermodynamics proves the existence of God? Because there are explanations, all kinds of strange explanations, for how creatures with low entropy nevertheless came into being, such as living creatures for example. Very often the claim is that they take entropy from the environment. Or rather, they disperse entropy into the environment—the entropy decreases. Meaning, how can I reduce entropy? I simply disperse entropy into the environment, increase the disorder in the environment, and create a little island of order. The total entropy in the whole universe does not decrease. It does not decrease over time. But islands can form in which there is low entropy, there is order, and around them of course there will be disorder that compensates for it. Think, for example, of a quarry. We quarry stones there and build a house. So the house is something very built, orderly, special; it doesn’t happen on its own. Right? Human beings do it. But the order I created when I built the house came at the expense of the mess I made in the quarry—where I took the stones, transported them of course, used cars and diesel and pollution and all of that. All of that is the disorder that is basically the entropic compensation for the order created by building a house.
And therefore the second law of thermodynamics, which speaks about total entropy—the total entropy does not necessarily decrease. At least there is no way to know that; you can’t measure the total entropy of the whole universe. Yes? But there is no proof that total entropy decreases. When life came into being, that only means that there are local islands in reality in which there are special creatures, human beings. Okay? But that doesn’t mean it didn’t come at the expense of entropy from the environment. And therefore the total entropy is preserved; the second law of thermodynamics is not necessarily violated.
By the way, something like this can be challenged from other directions too. For example, there is Maxwell’s demon. Maxwell challenged the second law of thermodynamics. Think of a container like the one I described earlier, and in the middle there is a partition with a certain door that opens only in one direction. Okay? A kind of spring door that opens and slams shut. Now, each particle flies around at various speeds in various directions. Particles from this side can’t pass because the door does not open toward this side. But particles from that side can pass over here. Right? If they arrive with sufficient speed, they kick the door and open it, and they cross. Whoever arrives without enough speed stays, but some pass through. And in the end you get a state in which there are more particles here than there. That is an ordered state. Relatively ordered. More ordered than when the particles are spread uniformly throughout the whole container, right, as we discussed earlier. And here the system is completely closed. Everything is closed. How can it be that within a closed system a special state is created? And the answer is that the design of the box—that’s the accepted answer at least—the design of the box required thought on the part of the designer who put in that door and all the rest. That thought is equivalent to entropy. It is an investment of entropy.
[Speaker C] What about the symmetry in time?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean?
[Speaker C] The fact that a particle can only pass one way contradicts the possibility of it passing back the other way, but—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] From the outset, no, it doesn’t contradict it, because if you shift this picture to the other side you’ll get a perfectly reasonable picture. The particle—say the particle hit here, opened the door, and passed through. Let’s run the film backward, all right? The door is open, the particle goes here, goes here, now sticks to the door, goes back here, and flies backward. That is a possible process. Right? It’s not that a particle comes from here and opens the door. That’s not the time-reversibility of the forward process. That’s not the return of this process.
In any case, what I’m saying is that information too, by the way—in information theory, for example—information is measured in entropy. And when there is information or thought, that too can compensate for entropic differences. Meaning, you can invest thought and thereby create more complex or special or more ordered objects, and the thought is the missing entropy. Okay? And in that sense, if we return to the Holy One, blessed be He, and the creation of the world—yes—basically the claim is that if special things were created here, then someone invested thought and action that created those things. Because by itself, it doesn’t arise. By itself, entropy does not decrease. That is basically the claim. And again, not scientific. This is not a scientific claim. It is a philosophical claim. Okay? Because scientifically, it could be that this comes at the expense of entropy from other places. But still, I don’t think it is reasonable that life arises in some way without any guiding hand, just like that, for no reason, and suddenly a living creature appears. No—it is highly unreasonable that such a thing happens without a guiding hand, but philosophically, not scientifically. All right, we’ll stop here. Thank you very much. Please.
[Speaker F] Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Thank you very much.