Faith and Its Meaning – Lesson 12

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, because I don’t think that’s the distribution, from my impression—I didn’t check. I don’t think that’s true. But fine, I don’t know, that’s something you can find out. Someone who stays for ten years will usually also stay for the next ten years. That’s the claim. And it won’t keep dropping in the same way. All the idiots dropped out in the first ten years. Someone who stayed ten years and made money will usually keep making money afterward too. Usually—or at least the correlation isn’t one, but it’s not very small either. Okay, good enough for this. Anyway, so that’s the evolutionary process. Now the claim is that we see there’s an alternative description to the description of intentional creation—what’s called creationism—that assumes no involvement of some external guiding hand. Right: Big Bang, abiogenesis, evolution. That’s it. Overall, we can see that the laws of nature take us to the present state, and there’s no need to assume the involvement of an external hand. Okay, that’s basically the neo-Darwinian claim. And therefore this claim says that if you want to prove the existence of an external hand from the fact that sophisticated creatures with low entropy are formed here—yes, life—then there’s no proof, because there is also a natural description of this process. There is also a spontaneous description of this process. Yes, that’s basically what?

[Speaker H] Yes, evolution has intelligence in it. Why—what intelligence is there in it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The intelligence that if you can’t get away, the tiger eats you. What intelligence is there in that? It’s like—you know—when two people are walking in the savanna and suddenly a lion pounces on them. So one starts running. One—sorry—one is putting on his shoes. The other says, are you crazy? Start running, we don’t have time to put on shoes. He says, if I put on shoes—they apparently have time to talk—if I put on shoes, then I’ll run five kilometers an hour faster than without shoes. He says, yes, but to the tiger that’s a joke. He says, I don’t need to run faster than the tiger, I need to run faster than you in order to survive. So that’s the logic of evolution. Anyway, the claim is that the development of life, the development of the sophistication, of the complexity of the world, doesn’t have to lead us to the existence of a guiding hand, okay? Because we have a natural description of this process. Look, I brought here a passage from the author of Sefer Ha-Ikkarim, not important, I’m not going to open the projector now, but: “When we examined the forms found in matter and in all the lower beings that come into being, we found that they all proceed along a path of perfection, some after others; that is to say, the later form is more distinguished than the one before it. It is as though matter is always moving in receiving forms from levels of deficiency to levels of perfection, for it first receives the baser form and afterward the more distinguished form, and rises step by step to what is more perfect.” Fine, and so on, in short.

[Speaker B] Yosef Albo, Sefer Ha-Ikkarim, yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that’s really, yes, a description of evolution. Yes, and the next stage is to bring this to an Arachim seminar and show that we already knew evolution here in the twelfth century. Nonsense. Why is it nonsense? Because it’s like the people who find relativity in the Zohar and I don’t know what in Rabbi Tzadok. Meaning, the fact that you can find some remark that has some affinity to ideas from relativity is very nice. Relativity is something that has predictions; it defines constants with specific values; that is, you’re talking about something very, very specific, not some general idea that you can find here or there. Anyway, the claim is that the natural description makes the conclusion about the existence of God unnecessary, okay? Now here I want to make another remark. The fact that life is formed by evolution does not mean that life was not created by God. It could be that God created life by means of evolution. Okay? We talked about this—that the laws of nature describe what happens. Okay? The laws of nature are not an explanation of why something happens, because they only describe what happens. I said—I distinguished between the law of gravitation and the force of gravitation. The law of gravitation is not the reason bodies attract one another. It is only a description of the fact that they attract one another. The force of gravitation is a cause. The force of gravitation is the thing, the entity, that generates gravitational attraction. That is the cause; that is the explanation of why it happens. The law of gravitation only describes what happens. Therefore the laws of nature are not an explanation of anything. They only describe what happens. What happens happens according to such-and-such laws. Now the question is: who is it that generates these things that the laws describe? That’s a different question. So first of all, neo-Darwinism in itself does not contradict faith in God, and not even faith in God as Creator. But apparently it does attack—it does attack—the physico-theological argument. It attacks the physico-theological argument because the physico-theological argument assumes that a complex thing does not come into being spontaneously, and evolution shows us that it can happen. So there is no contradiction between the conclusion that there is a God and the conclusion that evolution is correct, but there is apparently a contradiction between the physico-theological argument for the existence of God and evolution. The assumption of the argument apparently conflicts with evolution—that is, evolution shows that this assumption is incorrect. Basically, if I need to pinpoint where the clash between faith and evolution is, it’s here and only here. I’m not talking about the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), only about the existence of God. Now I return to the God of the gaps, which I also spoke about in previous sessions. It’s very common among creationists to point this out, because after all they have to choose. That is, if there is God then there is no evolution; if there is evolution there is no God. Both sides have to choose. So the creationists often point to gaps in evolutionary theory, things evolution can’t explain. And if evolution can’t explain them, then there is God—that’s the claim. I already mentioned that whenever the weather forecaster is wrong, they declare a second day of a Jewish holiday in Yated Ne’eman. So the claim is that as soon as there are gaps in evolutionary theory, you haven’t presented a real alternative to the God claim. You say you have a natural alternative; I have a completely natural explanation for how the whole business arose, I don’t need to get to God. No—you don’t have an explanation, because there are gaps. Those who are stricter—or more meticulous—speak about irreducible stages, stages that can’t be broken down. What does that mean? There are evolutionary leaps that have no explanation in terms of intermediate stages. For example, there was such a claim—I think many have already answered it—but there was such a claim regarding the formation of the eye. An eye is a terribly complex thing, a super-complex mechanism. Now, to explain its formation in evolutionary terms, you need to explain that first a retina formed and then an iris and then this, and there was evolution and this went extinct and that, and eventually an eye formed. But what advantage does an iris have without a retina? Suppose—we don’t even know exactly what that means—but suppose that with an iris and no retina, you can’t see. So why would an iris form without a retina? It has no advantage at all. But that’s exactly the point: if that stage has no advantage in itself, then it would go extinct and not continue on to a retina. It would go extinct because it has no advantage. And if there is a whole series of stages that has to form until the advantage appears, and the advantage appears only with the complete eye, and every component of the eye is formed in another evolutionary stage, then some crazy miracle would be needed for that to happen. Because each stage by itself wouldn’t survive, since it has no advantage. So why would it form, or why would it survive? And then on top of it there has to be another stage and another stage and another stage—and a thousand stages—until an eye forms. That’s not reasonable. And therefore, the creationists say, this means that if such a process happened, then God is responsible for it. He made sure that the iris survived even though it has no advantages, and after that the retina, and after that this, until an eye was formed. And then everything is fine. From that point onward we manage on our own; we say to the Holy One, blessed be He, thank you, now that we have eyes we’re set. But through all the intermediate stages He made sure we would get to that point. That’s called the argument from irreducible stages. And over that there are world wars. Why are there world wars? Because first of all, you can never know what is reducible and what is not reducible. Because who knows—it could be that the iris has some advantage not necessarily in the realm of vision but in some completely different realm. I don’t know exactly what realm—something else. Fine, maybe the iris makes you prettier, so you’ll find a mate more easily, I don’t know—someone with an iris as opposed to someone who has some dark hole there instead of an eye. I’m just throwing something out. Okay? There’s something here—you really can’t determine that there’s no breakdown. On the other hand, apparently the burden of proof is on those who challenge it. You need to show the breakdown that brings us to a complete eye. So there’s some debate about this.

[Speaker I] Was there something in between the ape and the human? Was there something in between the ape…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the chain is—that is, we did not come from the ape, contrary to the common myth. The ape and we came from some common ancestor, or common ancestress. And that’s not… anyway, not important. So irreducible stages were, twenty or thirty years ago, the latest hit among creationists. The Christians do this seriously; they’re not clowns like us. Meaning, over there they establish a university in order to research these things and produce arguments and findings and critique evolution. Here, we do it—whoever has time during the lunch break reads the Wikipedia entry and writes a reflection on the subject. What the Christians have forgotten, we still won’t know even in another hundred years in these matters. Anyway, so there is a lot of research effort on these irreducible stages. But there is a basic claim here that says—we talked about this last time too—you cannot prove the existence of God on the basis of gaps. Fine, there may be a gap here that I currently don’t know how to explain. You cannot prove the existence of God on the basis of gaps. Why not? Because gaps used to be bigger. We’ll wait, there’ll be more research, we’ll understand more things, we’ll think more. In the end we may close this gap too, at least. So you can’t bring me proof that there is a God from the existence of a gap. The existence of a gap may be temporary. Maybe after some time we’ll close it, understand it, and everything will be fine. We’ll understand how the eye developed and everything will be fine. So what if we don’t understand it right now? There are many things we didn’t understand. A hundred years ago we understood less, two hundred years ago even less. Scientific knowledge progresses, that’s all. Therefore you cannot really argue for the existence of God on the basis of the existence of gaps.

[Speaker E] It’s the same whole… you don’t know that things can form on their own? Wait twenty years. You don’t know that complex things…? Wait forty years.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Now the question is what kinds of arguments are resistant to this refutation, so that they won’t be God of the gaps. Okay? That’s a good question. And I think that indeed the arguments… but before I get to that, we need to understand that it’s not just some claim of “well, if we research more then maybe we’ll also understand how an eye formed.” We need to understand that a hundred years ago—not a hundred, two hundred years ago—before Darwin came along, in 1870, I think that’s when the book came out, say about a hundred and sixty years ago, nobody even imagined that there could be an explanation for the formation of life without a guiding hand. Atheists had to be a little irrational in order to be atheists, okay? Up to that stage. You could say, okay, it requires analysis, I don’t know, move on to the next Tosafot. Meaning—but they had no answer. The fact that evolution advances and that we constantly understand more and more natural processes—the formation of creatures through natural processes—also gives us a hint regarding the future. It tells us that if there is some part we don’t understand, for example how the eye formed, there’s a pretty good chance that we’ll understand it after some time. In other words, it’s not only a hope—well, maybe we’ll understand it… We see progress in those very directions. That is, those same arguments that one hundred and sixty years ago—today no one even looks at them, they just don’t hold water at all. So when we are advancing in this particular direction and have already made very significant progress, it becomes much harder to say, “Yes, but you don’t know how the eye evolved, therefore there is God.” In other words, it’s not just some ungrounded hope that maybe science will explain it in the future. Two hundred years ago it really was an ungrounded hope. But now, after a hundred and fifty years of research into evolution, it is a much better-grounded hope, because overall a huge number of things we didn’t understand and a huge number of puzzles have found their solution. And therefore the God-of-the-gaps argument becomes stronger. The counterargument, that is. Don’t bring proofs for the existence of God on the basis of gaps in scientific knowledge. That claim becomes stronger and stronger. Okay? So therefore this God-of-the-gaps claim is really significant today. And now an important point: say two hundred years ago, if I had raised the physico-theological argument, I would have said—look, how did life form? Without a guiding hand? How did life form? Impossible, it can’t form by itself. So if someone tells me, “Well, when we research and research more, then we’ll understand that too,” that’s just a hope with no basis. You can say that about anything, fine. About every miracle that happened here, you can always say: okay, maybe there’s some explanation that I don’t understand. So it sounds a bit evasive. Today the situation is not like that. That’s exactly the point. Therefore evolution does play an important role here. This big struggle around evolution is not for nothing. Because after evolution showed us that this utterly unexpected thing happened, and we really do understand things that there was no chance at all we would be able to understand, then now to say that we’ll also understand the formation of the eye—we already understood how an ape formed, how a human being formed, how all these creatures formed—fine, then we’ll also understand how the eye formed. We’ll understand that too. It’s no longer just some hope that you toss out without any basis. There is something much more grounded here, let’s call it that. And therefore the debate starts to become more meaningful. That’s the first point. The second point: usually it is very important for the neo-Darwinians’ argument to point out that evolution contains random, accidental components. That’s essential. What does that mean? Where in the process I described earlier—the evolutionary process—where are the random components? The formation of mutations, we said all kinds of such things arise, one form or another, various distortions or defects or changes in the genome. The second thing is the environment. That is, if by chance a fire broke out here, then those who survive are the ones that survive fires. If there was a tsunami here, then those who survive are the ones that survive floods or winds or something like that. The circumstances—if a tiger passed through here, then those who survive are the ones who know how to climb trees; if a lion passed through here. If a tiger passed through here, then those who survive are the ones who run faster than the tiger. That is, different abilities survive in a way that depends on circumstances that are completely accidental. In such circumstances, survival will be determined according to these parameters; in other circumstances, survival will be determined according to other parameters. So that too is a random component in the evolutionary process. In other words, it mainly appears in two places: the formation of mutations and natural selection. Those are random processes. Genetics less so. Once you have a given genome, there are laws of nature that say how genetics will continue to work. Okay? Again, there too there are somewhat random matters—recessive traits and probabilities and all kinds of things of that sort. But there there are already fairly clear laws governing the matter. Now here I want to point to a point that could be a very important point. On a simple view, there really isn’t anything random in evolution. It’s simply not true. There is no random component in evolution. And again, maybe before that, why is it important to discuss whether there are random components in evolution? Why does it matter at all? Because if there were no random components, then this would not be a real alternative to the existence of God. You’re basically saying there are laws of nature that generate life in a completely deterministic way, so somebody is running the show. And if you tell me, no, no, without any guiding hand, the whole business is completely random, and—boom—human beings arise. Okay? Then you’re saying: here, you have a completely random process, uncontrolled, unregulated, with no external hand involved, and it succeeds in producing complex creatures or products. In other words, the randomness in evolution is very essential to the discussion. And therefore I want to remark here that this essential thing for the discussion is on a very limited warranty. On the face of it, there are no random things in evolution. It’s simply not true. Why? Because suppose we’re reductionists for a moment, then basically at the base, in the end, the processes are all physics. Biology is basically just complicated physics. Physics of a huge number of particles connected to one another in various ways, through chemistry to biology—with a salute. Right? But this… at the base it’s all physics. At least according to the common view today, that there is such a reductionism, that biology can be reduced to chemistry and physics. Okay? It’s only complexity; it’s only a question of our inability to calculate what so many particles are doing, therefore they build laws that are laws of chemistry or laws of biology because the laws of physics won’t get us anywhere. It’s impossible to carry out that many calculations. Okay? But in principle we could do calculations on the particles and in the end get, I don’t know, a sonnet of Shakespeare. That is, yes, if we know all of Shakespeare’s particles, all their history and what they are doing at any given moment, we will know exactly what sonnet he is going to write now. Okay? That’s the claim. Now, so in fact it turns out that there isn’t—that is, first of all it turns out that randomness is an important thing. This discussion of whether there is randomness in evolution is an important discussion. The second claim I want to make is that on the face of it, it seems there is no randomness in evolution. Why not? Because in physics we know—if everything is physics—in physics we know there is no real randomness. What does that mean? Let’s leave quantum theory aside for the moment—I’ll get to quantum in a second—but in the physics we know, Newtonian mechanics, whatever, electricity, electromagnetism, the physical theories we know that describe the world around us, they are all deterministic, completely deterministic. Some time ago I wrote on my website about Norton’s Dome, yes? Norton’s dome. Do you know it? It’s a fascinating phenomenon. It shows a case in classical mechanics where there is a non-deterministic solution. That is, a certain shape of dome—there is a formula that gives the shape of the dome—you put a little ball on top and ask yourself what will happen to the ball. And the answer is that it can choose, at any given moment, to start rolling downward whenever it wants. And everything still solves the equation. That is, all of those are solutions of the equation. Newton’s equation, Newton’s laws. Well, that’s a whole story in itself. Someone sent it to my website and I only just became acquainted with it a week or two ago. Can it choose? I don’t know, it will start rolling at some time. I call that choosing; doesn’t matter what you call it. It can roll at any given moment whatsoever, and that is a valid solution of the equation of motion. And all those are solutions. You cannot know at what moment it will happen. That is, every moment at which it happens is a solution of the equations of motion. Okay? Anyway, but for our purposes, it probably can’t happen—such a dome probably can’t exist, in my opinion. But never mind, it’s a dome that has no second derivative. So the question is whether there is such a thing in nature. In any case, the claim is that the laws of nature are deterministic. So why do we speak about random processes? Like I said before regarding the formation of mutations and so forth—that’s not real randomness. It’s just complexity. Think, for example, about a die or a coin. When I throw a die, okay, in principle that’s a Newtonian mechanics problem. There is no principled problem with doing a calculation and telling you which face the die will land on. There is nothing random at all in rolling a die. Notice that. And not in tossing a coin, and not in anything else you know. Nothing random. Okay? That’s one of the problems in creating random generators in a computer or something like that—you need some kind of pseudo-randomness because there is no randomness. There really is no thing that is truly random. So you try to imitate randomness in some way. But in truth, in all the phenomena we know, there is nothing random at all. Why do we use probability? Because the calculation is complicated. That is, I don’t know how to calculate what will happen to this die because it is very sensitive to initial conditions. That is, at exactly what angle you threw it or with what exact force you threw it, the air conditions around it—anything like that can completely change the result. And because of that, we have no real way to carry out this calculation. But such a calculation exists. That’s what matters. We can’t do it; it’s too complicated. Okay? So what do we do? We use probabilistic tools. We say: fine, each face has a one-sixth chance, and we can work with probabilistic tools instead of doing the calculations. Now from that point on, this whole story is, for us, a random process that we describe with probability, and everything is fine. That’s what we work with. That’s how lotteries are done, that’s how everything is done, and it is completely fair. Throwing a die is considered a fair lottery. If the die is fair, of course. Then the lottery is considered fair. Okay? Even though there is no lottery here at all. There is no lottery here, nothing is random, it is completely deterministic. In principle I could tell you which face the die will land on, so what is fair here? The fairness is that none of us knows how to say that. It’s too complicated to say it, but at the principled level there is such a calculation that can give you the answer. Okay? What does that actually mean? It means that all the phenomena we relate to as random phenomena are not really random; they are simply complicated. We use probability because we don’t know how to do the direct calculation, so instead we use probabilistic tools, chances. But that is only methodology; it is only our way of handling the matter. There is nothing here that is truly and genuinely random, nothing accidental. And that is true for all of physics—I say, except perhaps quantum theory, but in a moment I’ll get to that too. So that is true for all of physics. If it is true for all of physics, then a living body is also, overall, just a collection of physical particles, right? Our body is a collection of particles, a huge number of particles, but overall a collection of particles. Every such particle, I know exactly what it will do; it’s all deterministic. So if it’s deterministic, then there is nothing random in biology and evolution. Nothing. Why do we call it random—the formation of mutations or natural selection or things like that? Why do we call it a random process? Because it is complicated to calculate. If a lion got here or a tiger got here, there is a clear deterministic reason for that. We cannot reconstruct it, so we cannot know it, who will show up here. But in principle, if a lion showed up here, then it had to show up here; it is deterministic. There is nothing random here. We talked about this a bit in the lesson on the categories of prohibited labor, I think, about a doubtful inevitable outcome. In any case, the claim is that when we talk about random processes in biology, that is really a methodological statement, not an essential statement. On the methodological level, we treat it as though it were a random process, because it is complicated, we don’t know how to do it otherwise. And this is not a criticism of biologists, what I’m saying now—I don’t know how to do biology better than they do—but this is the right way to handle biology. Biology has to be handled this way because that is the only way to handle it; you can’t do a physical calculation of all the particles. You can’t do it. But notice: when you take—and this is a common mistake—you take a methodological rule and turn it into an essential rule. What does that mean? You assume methodologically that the process is random, and now suddenly you forget that this is only methodology and you say, look, there are random elements in nature. No, there are no random elements in nature. Methodologically you assume that this is a random process because it is convenient to handle it that way, and that is perfectly fine on the scientific methodological level, but when you move into philosophy, you are actually turning the methodological claim into an essential claim, and you are basically saying there are random things here. Not true. There are no random things here. Nothing here is random; everything has been fixed since the six days of creation. Let me maybe give you another example. Materialists assume that in the living body there is nothing except physics and chemistry and biology—again, reductionism—but nothing beyond matter. There is no such thing as spirit, soul, or things of that kind. Now again, maybe they are right and maybe not; on the methodological level they are certainly right. And on the methodological level it is much more correct to make the materialist assumption in order to advance research. Why? Because if you assume there is a spirit, you have no way to deal with it. What do you do with spirit? How do you measure it? How do you know how it affects the body and how it doesn’t? So therefore, for the sake of research, I say okay, let’s ignore the question of spirit, assume we are dealing here with a completely material body, and try to see how far we can get with this assumption, because that is the scientific way to advance. Does that mean we have no spirit? No. It only means that methodologically, on the scientific level, it is more convenient to advance if we assume there is no spirit. Think even about vitalism, yes? The claim—it’s not exactly dualism—vitalism is an approach even in biology that says there is such a thing as living matter, which is different from inanimate matter. Living matter is different matter; it has something extra in it, some vital component. Vitality means life; there is some vital component here. Today this is a dirty word among biologists. Vitalism means you’re benighted; I don’t know where you live, in the twelfth century BCE. But it’s a dirty word. Now even on the level—I’m not talking about spirit, I’m talking about the kind of matter biology deals with. That is a question in biology, not in philosophy. The existence of a spirit is not a question in biology; it’s a question in philosophy or metaphysics, I don’t know exactly where. But vitalism is a question in biology. And can physics and chemistry explain all of biology? I don’t know—maybe yes, maybe no—but that is a question in biology. Now methodologically, certainly. But does that mean that in reality this matter has no additional vital component? I don’t know—maybe yes, maybe no. In other words, a methodological statement does not necessarily have to describe reality itself. Sometimes it is very convenient to limit ourselves for methodological needs and deal with reality using a certain model that may be more limited than actual reality, but that is what we know how to handle. As the jokes about physicists always say, we want to understand how a donkey works. So let’s start with a point donkey. A donkey that is just one mathematical point mass, okay? That’s how physicists work. Meaning, in order to understand how a donkey works, you begin with a point donkey. After that we’ll also add a tail, legs, ears, volume, I don’t know what, more things and more things and more things, and maybe we’ll also succeed in understanding—but in the first stage we drastically limit ourselves so that we can advance. By the way, I think all the progress of modern science comes from the fact that science stopped wanting to understand, unlike Aristotle. Aristotle looked for explanations, essential explanations, and therefore he didn’t make progress. And modern science says: let’s make observations, let’s make generalizations on the basis of observations, I do not pretend to understand, I describe. No teleology, no explanations of why, no motivational explanations, nothing. Let’s stick to the facts. Okay? Now once you stick only to the facts without anything around them, you are limiting yourself. But that limitation is what enabled modern science to advance. Therefore, very often a methodological decision to narrow your field of concern, the toolbox you use, and so on, is a very wise decision on the methodological level. The problem is that once it succeeds too well on the methodological level, people tend to turn it into an essential claim. They say, well, if it worked methodologically then it’s probably true too. And here it may be true, but it may also not be true. And here one has to be very careful. So therefore, as a methodological assumption, I think one can speak about random components in evolution. Does that mean that there really are random components in the world? Ask physicists; they’ll tell you no. Usually the answer is no. By the way, there are studies of how, after all, in the DNA molecule or the molecules of life, which are very, very large molecules and in principle shouldn’t have quantum phenomena there, some people want to argue that there nevertheless can be changes there that are truly random, because this is quantum theory, on small scales, and so on. Usually—and here I maybe come to the issue of quantum theory—in quantum theory, yes, at least in the accepted interpretations, there is a random component. The current state does not define in a one-to-one way what will happen in the next stage. From one given present state there can be various results in the next stage. That is, the accepted interpretation of quantum theory is that quantum theory is not deterministic. There is randomness there, there is accidentality. But I think that does not change the basic picture I talked about, because… first, because that randomness occurs on the scale of individual particles, on very tiny scales. It does not happen on the scale of a micron already, or I don’t know, ten microns. In my doctorate I dealt with mesoscopic systems. Mesoscopic systems are systems of intermediate size in which one can still see quantum phenomena, but they are already large enough that these are large-scale quantum phenomena. The sizes involved there are on the order of a micron, and even that has to be prepared at very low temperatures and in a very special way in order for a quantum phenomenon to occur there. At all larger scales, or at temperatures—well, much less than room temperature, but still higher temperatures—there are no quantum phenomena. The quantum phenomena are erased. This happens for several reasons; one of them is the law of large numbers. Take a soccer ball, yes? If you have a particle, then in quantum theory we know there is an effect called tunneling. A particle can pass through barriers. A soccer ball can pass through the wall. Simply pass through. You’ll see it disappear here and appear there. Okay? That can happen according to quantum theory. But it will never happen. Why will it never happen? Because quantum theory says this about an electron, with an electron’s potential barrier. But a soccer ball… a soccer ball is a collection of so many particles that if you want to know what will happen to the soccer ball as a whole, you really need to talk about the law of large numbers. And the law of large numbers always behaves like the average, and the average is classical physics. Therefore the ball will not pass through the wall, ever. For the ball to pass through the wall, all its electrons would need together to go through in exactly the same—that is, they would all have to enter exactly the same phase that crosses the potential barrier. Now that doesn’t happen, because each one behaves differently; that’s the law of large numbers. Therefore overall the soccer ball will stay here. Okay? No. Maybe one of its particles might pass, but that doesn’t matter; in the macroscopic world the soccer ball stays here. Fine? So what does that actually mean? It means that in our world—and biology deals with the macroscopic world, not the microscopic world—there are no quantum phenomena. Not to mention that this also concerns world temperatures: room temperature, twenty degrees, zero degrees, fine, but not minus two hundred. Okay? Those are the temperatures relevant for quantum phenomena—almost absolute zero. Okay? Meaning, if the temperatures are somewhat higher and the scales are larger, there are no quantum phenomena. Now you want to tell me that all of evolution, with all its random components, is quantum theory? That’s crazy. To see a quantum effect in the macro world, you need to do an experiment that is almost impossible to carry out, yes? Some Schrödinger’s cat kind of experiment, or something like that—an experiment you need to prepare in advance and cool everything and arrange things in such a way that there won’t be distributions canceling each other out. You have to prepare the system so that it all has long-range correlations, yes? Synchronization, so that all the particles behave the same way. For example, if I could arrange this soccer ball so that all the particles had correlations between them—meaning that if something happens to one, it happens to all—then maybe the soccer ball would pass through the wall. Because if one particle passes through the wall and they are all in the same state, then they would all pass through the wall. But that doesn’t happen. At high temperatures it doesn’t happen, in large bodies it doesn’t happen. Okay? Therefore to assume that all the phenomena of evolution—or the phenomena of evolution in general—are the result of quantum randomness is simply completely implausible. There are no such phenomena.

[Speaker K] Can one say that the randomness in quantum theory isn’t really randomness, but as you said, maybe it’s because we don’t know?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s possible, which is why I said it depends on interpretations. But the claim that in another hundred years we’ll understand it—that’s not so simple, because there are experiments that test exactly this point: whether it’s genuine randomness or not really randomness. That’s what’s called hidden variables, meaning concealed variables. In other words, there are people who want to argue that basically everything is deterministic; there are hidden variables that we can’t manage to measure, but they actually determine everything, and because we can’t measure them it looks random to us. Now there are all kinds of hidden-variable theories, all kinds of people who believe in them. Most of them have already been ruled out experimentally. Maybe not all of them, if I’m not fully up to date, but most of them have been ruled out experimentally. Experiments were done in order to rule out the existence of hidden variables. So this claim—well, in the future we’ll know—is not so simple, because there are arguments, meaning there are already attempts today to prove that even in the future we won’t know, meaning that it’s impossible—that this is genuine randomness. Okay? In any case, where were we? So that’s why I’m saying: yes, it’s true that quantum theory contains genuine randomness, but I don’t think that changes anything for our discussion.

Okay, so if that’s the case, then basically we currently have two claims facing one another. Either God created the world—this complexity doesn’t arise without a composing factor, the physico-theological argument—or, here you are, we have the Big Bang, abiogenesis, evolution, and true, there are still gaps, but with God’s help, so to speak, they’ll be closed in the future. Okay? If He dozes off for a moment and helps the guys who are against Him, then they’ll be closed in the future. Now if there really are no random components in the evolutionary process, that changes the picture a bit—though later I’ll say that even if there are random components, it doesn’t really matter all that much. And the claim is basically what I call the argument from the laws. Okay? Let’s think for a moment. I’ll describe to you an example from an article that appeared, I think, once in Nature, and ever since then everyone keeps recycling it, and every atheist website pounces on it like they’ve found treasure.

And they did the following experiment. Suppose monkeys are jumping on a keyboard—you know this one. It’s always the example people bring: monkeys jumping on a keyboard—what’s the probability that out comes a Shakespeare sonnet? No chance, right? A very tiny chance. Now let’s take a simpler case. A sentence like “to be or not to be.” It has fourteen letters, I think, if you compress the spaces and write it continuously. Fine? I randomly generate letters, fourteen letters. What’s the probability that I get exactly “to be or not to be”? Negligible. Right? Almost no chance. Okay? And that basically expresses the claim that something complex doesn’t happen by itself; someone assembles it.

Now look at the experiment our atheist cousins did. What did they do? They had a computer randomly generate letters—fourteen letters. And they asked how many random trials would be needed to get “to be or not to be.” They never got there. Meaning, you can’t get there. It takes an enormous number of trials. Okay, twenty-two to the fourteenth power. That’s a big number. In any case, that’s even without final-letter forms. Now they say: yes, but now we’ll do a different experiment. We’ll generate the first letter, and when we get the first correct letter, we stop and move on to generating the second letter. When we get the second one, we stop and move on to the third. And after that the fourth, and so on. And lo and behold, that did work for them, and not even over such a long period of time. Okay? So it worked.

In short, if there are some laws that guide the process, then you can shorten it dramatically. Now Dawkins and his whole gang claim that this argument—the physico-theological argument—doesn’t take into account the fact that evolution actually generates laws that moderate the slope of the steep hill—if you want to call it a steep probability slope, they moderate the slope of the hill. Why? Because every intermediate stage doesn’t wait for the later stages; if it has an advantage on its own, it survives. Right? We talked about that before. And now you begin the lottery from there already, until the next stage arrives that benefits you, and then it too survives. So it’s exactly parallel to this freezing of the letters each time, and therefore, basically, you see that before evolution this argument might perhaps have held water, but evolution showed us that even a process without a guiding hand can reach this, if the laws guide the process, then it can reach the result with a much higher probability or at a much faster pace.

Now when I first read this argument, I wanted to tear my hair out. Because I thought they had copied it from the University of Notre Dame—the Christians, the Christian academy. Because this is an argument that proves the existence of God, obviously, this experiment. Why? Because what does this experiment actually say?

[Speaker E] This experiment basically says: who caused it to stop after the first correct letter?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. After all, “to be or not to be” can’t come into being by itself. That’s basically what you discovered, right? When can it come into being? If there is a programmer who made sure that it would come into being. Right? That’s what this experiment shows. Not that I need the experiment for that, but yes. I could have done a much better experiment: write a program that instructs the computer to write the words “to be or not to be.” That’s it. I’m telling you, it’ll happen in a second. Actually not a second—a millionth of a second. Okay? It’s really brilliant. Right? It’s just insane. I can’t understand these people. What? I think it was either in Nature or in Science, I don’t remember which one. Again, I didn’t read the original—maybe the original was a bit more intelligent. But the quotations people bring and the use they make of this experiment are simply unbelievable.

[Speaker C] Here basically they’re saying that with linear dynamics we don’t get it; with nonlinear dynamics, where probability isn’t memoryless, but in this case there’s memory—but I don’t necessarily need memory specifically.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, rather, I need there to be a hand that has a policy, that directs its policy. In this case it’s memory, because you want to build something with internal connection—a word out of letters. But it doesn’t matter; it could be something else too. As long as there’s a programmer involved and the computer isn’t just choosing letters at random, obviously you’ll reach the result much faster. But that is exactly what the physico-theological argument says: when you have something highly improbable, if it happened, then apparently there was a guiding hand here that moderated the slope of the steep hill. Right? That’s the claim.

Now what does this actually mean? Basically what it means is this. I call it the argument from the laws. What do I mean by the argument from the laws? You neo-Darwinians are basically saying: look, instead of assuming there is a God who created the world and so on, I’ll show you that this can happen spontaneously, completely naturally. Take the laws of nature—evolution, biology, physics, chemistry, whatever—I can show you that things like this arise without the involvement of a guiding hand. The question, of course, is who created or wrote those laws. After all, this happens within laws, a very, very rigid system of laws. This is what’s called the fine-tuning argument, the delicate calibration. In other words, there are certain values of the physical constants on which the very existence of life depends very strongly. If the values of some of these constants changed even a little, there’s no biology, no life, and maybe no chemistry either—it depends how much you changed them. In other words, it depends very sensitively on the values of the constants and the relations among them. Okay, without that there would be no biology, no life, nothing at all.

Now the question is—this is the fine-tuning argument, but I’m speaking more generally, not only about the values of the constants. Evolution takes place within a rigid set of laws: physics, chemistry, biology, and so on. Now when you tell me that something happens within the laws and therefore it is spontaneous and there is no guiding hand, then you’re saying: but there are laws here—who set the laws? That is the guiding hand. It’s just that the guiding hand did it by establishing a set of laws that would allow life to come into being spontaneously. If I were to randomize systems of laws—say I randomized systems of laws, or values of constants if you like—what’s the probability that I would get a system, or values of constants, that would eventually produce life? Zero. So now I move from the question “who created life?” to the question “who created the laws that created life?”

The example I once gave for this was: suppose I’m walking with someone and we come to visit a factory. And this factory operates amazingly. Every part, every person knows his role, there is perfect coordination among all the departments and officeholders and so forth. So I say, look, there must apparently be some genius manager for this factory. He explains to everyone, manages them, assigns the roles—a genius. The atheist walking next to you says, what, are you crazy? There’s no manager and no such thing. Look at the wall. Here on the wall there is a series of instructions telling each person what he has to do at every stage. That’s all—no need for any manager or anything.

What would you answer such a person? Who wrote the rules? Who wrote the rules on the wall? Why are rules a substitute for the claim that there is a manager? What do you mean? The rules—the point is to determine that these are the rules, to create laws of nature. Laws of nature—to determine that the laws of nature should be these and not others. He is the legislator, so to speak, by analogy. Okay? And then the question in such a situation is who created the laws. What you’re offering me is an explanation that I call an explanation within the laws. An explanation within the laws means: given the laws, you can show me that this happens spontaneously, and let’s even say with random components, doesn’t matter. Fine? But I’m asking how this framework of laws came into being, because without it this spontaneous process would not have led to life.

You know, there’s another example—I think Stephen Gould brings this example in one of his books. He says: think of a drunk leaving a bar, swaying all over the place, with no idea where he’s going. He’s walking on some narrow sidewalk; on one side there is a wall, on the other side a ditch. Now you understand that no matter what he does, in the end he’ll be in the ditch. So you see, you don’t need to assume that he is aiming to get to the ditch in order to assume that in the end he’ll be in the ditch. And again, this is an example brought to show why evolution makes God unnecessary. Honestly, these people ought to be hospitalized. If there is anything that proves the existence of God, it’s these examples. Who built this situation in which there is a ditch on this side and a wall on that side? Once the situation is like this, within it there can be a drunk who walks in a completely random way, because the laws or the circumstances ultimately dictate the result. It doesn’t depend on all this randomness. So that is exactly the question: who made sure that these circumstances would direct the emergence of life even though in the middle there are lots of random things? And now I claim that even if there are random components in evolution, that only strengthens the proof, not weakens it. Because it means that laws of nature were set here in such a way that even if things within them happen randomly, the result is known in advance, or the result is built in in advance. And therefore this is proof of the existence of God.

[Speaker J] Maybe other laws create other kinds of life? Again? I said maybe other laws of—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Physics and chemistry could create other kinds of life? I’ll get to that claim.

[Speaker J] I’ll get to that claim.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not necessarily other kinds of life, but other kinds of complex entities. Yes, that—I’ll get to that. I’m not even sure anymore that I’ll get to it this semester, but that’s one of the objections I deal with later.

[Speaker E] But the claim itself is the fact—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That there are laws, not what they look like—the fact that there are laws. No, that there are laws, and that they are laws that create complex beings.

[Speaker E] After that it’s not—the fact that there are laws at all creates—it’s not that the fact there are laws means laws already, that’s an earlier claim. No, so I’m saying the one who created the—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question of who created the laws is the translation of the physico-theological proof, only instead of asking a question within the laws, I ask a question outside the laws. You ask who created the laws, not how life came to be. How life came to be—you have an explanation: evolution, fine, I understand. But evolution assumes a set of laws, and I ask who created the laws.

Now, to close the circle, because we’re going out on semester break, I just want to explain why this argument from the laws is not God of the gaps. Maybe you’ll say, fine, so I have a difficulty: who created the laws? We’ll investigate more, and later we’ll understand who created the laws. Why is this not an argument of the God-of-the-gaps type? Okay? What I want to claim is this. There are two possibilities. Let’s think for a moment: what would the future explanation be for the emergence of the laws, or the values of the constants if you want? Fine-tuning usually speaks about the values of the constants. But it doesn’t matter. What could that explanation be? One of two things. Either that explanation will be some kind of general theory from which all the constants and all the other laws of nature can be derived—Einstein’s dream, yes, a unified field theory. But then that theory itself will also have constants. A scientific theory will also contain constants, and I will ask: who fixed the values of those constants? Who set that theory? Why should I care that you found a theory that explains these other theories? I’m talking about the last theory, the one you found, okay? There I will ask who created it. It won’t help me that it’s turtles all the way down. What is the explanation for that theory? That theory there.

Okay, and in the very end you’ll be left with some theory that is the most basic. What is the explanation for it? Someone can always come along and say that the final theory doesn’t need an explanation. It will be an inherent mathematical necessity, like pi. The ratio between the diameter and the circumference in a circle is pi. Someone can come and ask, wait a second, how did the Holy One, blessed be He, determine that it would be exactly pi? No—because in a circle it’s pi. The Holy One, blessed be He, didn’t determine it; that’s the nature of a circle. That’s just what circles are; there are no other circles. Okay? In other words, numbers in mathematics, unlike constants in physics, are not numbers that require an explanation—they just are what they are. The limit of one plus one over n, all to the nth power, as n goes to infinity, is e. Okay? It’s e not because the Holy One, blessed be He, decided it should be e, but because that’s what the numbers say. It’s not a law of nature, it’s a law of mathematics. Okay? The Holy One, blessed be He, did not decide that a thing and its negation cannot both be true. A thing and its negation cannot both be true because the negation is the opposite of it; they can’t both be true. In other words, logic and mathematics do not require an explanation.

Okay? And the claim that could perhaps serve as an alternative to the physico-theological argument is that the final theory we arrive at, from which everything comes out, will do so by logical derivation. It won’t contain constants whose values need to be fixed; everything will be logic. But notice that if this is true—if we arrive at such a theory—then it basically means that all our empirical science is a branch of mathematics. You don’t need to measure anything; in principle you can derive everything from logical and mathematical relations among things. That’s all. Nobody believes this today.

[Speaker L] But that’s what you’d have to get to, at the very least…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, everything—not leaving anything out. All the values of the constants would be derived from mathematical relations like pi and e. To know what pi and e are, you don’t need to measure anything. Okay, similarly, the claim would be that the physical constants are like pi and e. You don’t need to measure anything; they are the result of mathematical relations among things. It has to be that way; in every possible world it has to be that way. And then indeed there is no question of who created it and why it is so special and so on.

But then notice: this basically means that if the explanation—if the final explanation contains constants, then we have accomplished nothing. If the final explanation contains no constants, then we have arrived at the conclusion that all of physics and biology and chemistry are branches of mathematics. In other words, everything is a branch of mathematics. You don’t need to measure anything; it’s only relations among things, it’s mathematics. You don’t need to measure anything. Measurements are meant to give me the values of the constants—that’s why I make measurements. Measurements are to know the values of the constants. For pi I don’t need measurements; for pi you do a calculation, not a measurement. Okay? Same for e. And the claim is that the speed of light, the gravitational constant, and all those things are like pi. I don’t need measurements for that; it’s a branch of mathematics. That’s the claim.

Now that is so implausible that I think such a thing is not God of the gaps. In other words, if someone wants to claim that in the future we will arrive at such a state, where all our science is basically a branch of mathematics, then yes, he has an alternative. Of course, then we will have to ask ourselves—look, even with pi, or with the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees, that’s all in Euclidean space. In non-Euclidean space the sum is different. So in mathematics there is no reason why the sum of the angles in a triangle in Euclidean space is 180 degrees. Will I find here in the world that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees? Here the question arises: who determined that this world would be Euclidean in the first place? Because that is a question in physics, not mathematics.

And therefore even if you find some mathematical model that describes everything, the moment you apply it to the world, it will always raise the question: and who made it so? Who made the world fit this model? And therefore I claim that the argument from the laws, or fine-tuning, is not a God-of-the-gaps argument. It’s not an argument based on a gap that is expected to be closed in the future. No. This gap, categorically, cannot be closed even in the future. That’s the claim. And therefore this kind of argument does not suffer from the problem of God of the gaps. Okay? That is basically the claim. Fine, we’ll stop here. Next week—in the next semester—I intend to continue, so I’ll give explanations, and there will be some people who weren’t here in the first semester, but please.