Faith – Lesson 38

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Last time we dealt with Hume’s critique of the witness argument, which in the last generation has been adopted in a very enthusiastic way, I would say. And the claim is basically this: Hume does set two alternatives against each other. One alternative is—let’s apply it to the revelation at Mount Sinai, though we can speak about any report of a miracle—that the revelation happened, the report is reliable, and everything is fine. The second possibility is that the revelation did not happen, and the report is some kind of myth that developed over the generations. And he says that in principle, when we want to make a decision, we always have to compare the two alternatives against each other. Yes, like Sherlock Holmes: when you eliminate the impossible, then whatever remains, even if it isn’t plausible, is apparently the correct option, because the other option is even less plausible. So in this context, true, one can argue that inventing and embedding such a myth within the broader public and keeping it there for thousands of years and so on is not a plausible scenario—but the alternative is that a miracle happened here, against the laws of nature, which is impossible or at least blatantly implausible. And therefore, when you compare these two options, then even though the first option is implausible, it is still less implausible than the second option, and therefore you have to accept it. And I said about this briefly two things. First of all—I prefaced this and said that yes, Hume ends his discussion by saying: just imagine that such an argument comes to you about events that deviate from the laws of nature—would you really accept it? After all, you’ve never seen in your life an event that deviates from the laws of nature, so why would you accept such a report? And here I said that the rarity of an event does not mean that it is implausible or that I should not accept a report of its occurrence. Eclipses of the sun, the moon, and so on are rare events, but they are natural events, and we certainly do accept reports that such things happened. The fact that an event is rare does not mean that it is extraordinary, meaning implausible—those are two different things. Now, a revelation of the Holy One, blessed be He, may also be rare—there was at least one public instance of it, before an entire people—but the fact that it is rare does not mean that it is implausible. How should we decide whether it is plausible or not? That really is an a priori position. And I said—I keep returning to this point—that if I start from the assumption that I have good philosophical arguments for the existence of God, then I have no principled obstacle and no principled resistance to a report that He also revealed Himself and said various things. Someone who of course does not accept those philosophical arguments relates much more skeptically to reports of that kind, and then it may be that he says: look, this is impossible, I’m not going to accept it. So very often the starting point determines the conclusion, our final conclusion; even our attitude toward arguments is determined from different starting points. And since we already went through all the proofs for the existence of God, then even if the report of revelation is rare—meaning it happened once and so on—fine, but God exists, so if they tell me that once He revealed Himself, then once He revealed Himself because He decided to reveal Himself once. But from the starting point from which I conclude that He exists independently of revelation, I have no principled problem with reports of revelation. Someone who does not accept the philosophical arguments can say: look, the event of revelation is completely implausible in my eyes. So then—what are these arguments for? What are they worth? In other words, doesn’t this just mean that everyone stays in his original position? If you assumed there is a God, you stay with the conclusion that there is; if you assumed there isn’t, you stay with the conclusion that there isn’t. So what good are these arguments? Yes, it’s like proofs from the Holocaust. There are those who say that the Holocaust proves that Zionism is a grave sin, and that we were punished for immigrating to the Land of Israel and establishing the Zionist movement here—the Zionist movement brought about the Holocaust. And of course, people who support Zionism say the exact opposite: that the Holocaust was a punishment for opposition to Zionism, for those who didn’t cooperate with that move. So the Holocaust proves to everyone exactly what he thought beforehand, and I think that’s generally true—of most arguments that try to prove things from history. So apparently, in our context too, this whole argument—the witness argument or the critique of the witness argument—is meaningless. The whole question is just what you thought in advance. Here I want to qualify that a bit. It’s not precise. There is value to such an argument, because what this argument actually shows or completes is that after we’ve gone through arguments in favor of the existence of God in the philosophical sense, now we get some report that He also revealed Himself. Now, I will treat such a report seriously if I assume there is a God, and I’ll reject it if I assume there is no God. But on the assumption that there is a God, then this report—it’s not true that it adds nothing. Even on the assumption that there is a God, I still would not know that He revealed Himself, and I still would not know that I have to keep commandments. In other words, you need this report—or the revelation and the report about it—so that someone who believes will also adopt the religious dimension, to move from deism to theism. So revelation is important. Those who oppose revelation—indeed, for them, in the end, the arguments only leave them with what they thought in advance. But those who support belief in God and afterwards revelation—for them, revelation adds another layer to the conclusion they had on the philosophical plane. After there is a philosophical God, now that gets translated into revelation and into religious commandments, halakhic / of Jewish law, religious, and so on. Therefore it’s not true that this argument is meaningless. In short, if I believe in God in the philosophical sense, then here there is an argument that also tells me that it is proper to become religious, not just a philosophical believer. Someone who does not believe in a philosophical God obviously will not relate to this argument and will not see any importance in it. So the fact that our conclusion regarding this argument depends on basic assumptions does not mean that the argument is meaningless or unimportant. That’s not true. It is true that this argument has importance only if I assume a certain background assumption. If I don’t assume it, then no—but if I do assume it, then the argument adds something. And therefore it has significance. Now, when I spoke, I said that basically my claims against Hume’s critique were twofold; it was a double argument. One claim was that this promotes intellectual conservatism: what I have thought until now is probably what is correct, and there is no reason to accept testimony that something happened that doesn’t fit what I think right now. And then I said that according to this, no unusual scientific finding, no new phenomenon—I basically won’t accept a report of its occurrence because it doesn’t fit what I’ve thought up until now. And then this is basically a recipe for intellectual conservatism. In other words, it will be impossible to tell me about anything that contradicts what I think right now. Which unfortunately happens with many people—we entrench ourselves in positions we currently hold and are not inclined to change them. But it shouldn’t be that way. We need to examine the quality of the report or of the argument and be willing to change our positions. The second argument was that this is really begging the question. As I said earlier, because someone who assumes there is no God also of course assumes that such a revelation cannot happen. And more than that: when a report of such a revelation arrives, he rejects it. A miracle or a revelation—it doesn’t matter, any extraordinary event—he rejects it because he says it is not plausible that such a thing happened; it is more plausible that this is a myth created over the course of history. But if that’s so, then it may be that history is full of extraordinary events that deviate from the laws of nature, except that I will never accept a report of any one of them occurring, because I assume a priori that this cannot happen. And consequently, I’ve never heard a report of an event that deviates from the laws of nature, so of course it cannot happen, and therefore I continue not to accept reports of that kind. Which is begging the question. So I’m really entrenching myself inside a position that assumes the conclusion in advance. I’m basically saying: a supernatural event cannot happen, therefore every report that comes about it I do not accept, but if I have accepted no report of a supernatural event, then supernatural events cannot happen. After all, we’ve never heard of such a thing, therefore it cannot happen, and once again I won’t accept a report of it, and everything is wonderful. And then you present this whole business as a scientific argument against mythical, religious, primitive thinking—when the most basic requirement of a scientific argument, even if not the whole story, is that it be falsifiable. But your argument is not falsifiable. Because even if thousands of reports come in about events that deviate from the laws of nature, you won’t accept them. You won’t accept them, because it can’t be, so thousands of people made it up—that is still better than something that simply cannot happen. And therefore the atheist theory in this case—or atheistic, not deistic—this atheist theory is an unfalsifiable theory. It begs the question and is therefore unfalsifiable, and you can’t—you simply can’t—deal with a theory of that kind. This always reminds me of a story. Let me tell you a story. There was once that friend of mine I told you about, who had done some pro bono work there in the American Midwest, right? I told that story last time. So that same friend called me many years ago already, when I was still at Bar-Ilan or at the Weizmann Institute, I don’t remember anymore—at least thirty years ago, maybe more. He called me and said: listen, there’s someone I know who started, founded some sort of journal or student newspaper. It was called, rather pretentiously, Intellect, no less. In any case, it came out at Tel Aviv University and was distributed to students and so on. He said: listen, they wrote an article comparing yeshiva students and university students. That yeshiva students are parasites, and university students work hard, and so on and so on, and they pay yeshiva students lots of money, and so on. And he had interviewed two iron-sitters in some Jerusalem yeshiva and showed what idlers the yeshiva students are. So my friend—who, as you’ll recall, was completely secular—said to this guy from the newspaper, the student paper: listen, if you want to be fair, I have a religious friend, ask him for an opinion, hear what he says about your arguments. Yes, me—he meant me. Fine. The guy showed intellectual honesty worthy of note. He contacted me and said: come, I’ll send you the article and we’ll publish your response next to it. Fine. I read the article, asked him roughly what length I could write, how many words, as is customary in newspapers, and I wrote him a response that did not leave one stone standing from that demagogic article. Fine. Then I forgot all about it. After I don’t know how many months, someone came to me and said: listen, I saw a few lines of yours in some student paper, and I didn’t understand at all what you said there, what the point was, what you meant to say. At first I didn’t understand what he was talking about, until I realized it was that story. So I said to him: do you have the paper? Give me the paper for a second to read. It turned out that from my response he had kept some three sentences that had no connection to one another, pasted them together, and that was the response. Fine. So I was very angry, and I asked my friend, I said to him: listen, talk to that guy, ask him what this is supposed to mean, what kind of conduct is this? Fine, he said: I’ll check. So he spoke to that guy, and the guy said to him: listen, it wasn’t a fair fight. It wasn’t fair. Meaning, my writer is a student, a young guy, he wrote some article about this issue—true, not the sharpest pencil in the case—but he wrote some article about the matter. And now this other fellow comes along, he’s older than him, and he just tears him to pieces. It wasn’t a fair fight. So because of that, I decided to leave things in a more equal form. Now that is absurd. What do you mean, it wasn’t a fair fight? If it wasn’t a fair fight, then give these things to someone who agrees with the opposing view but so that it will be a fair fight. But you can’t take foolish arguments that somebody makes mincemeat out of and say: okay, the one who made mincemeat of them is at a much higher level than the one who wrote them, so I won’t bring the opposing arguments. The better arguments I won’t bring; I’ll leave the bad arguments because otherwise it won’t be equal. It’s really a strange approach—which is basically, yes, the way people—and not only on that side, by the way, on all sides—feed on information that is filtered according to their a priori positions. Right? This is one of the hard problems in this age, what people call the information age—or disinformation age—that basically the algorithms, yes, of Facebook and Google and all those people, the algorithms filter the information that reaches us according to our perceptions and what we want, like, agree with, and so forth. And then what happens is that someone on the right is convinced that all the facts are on his side and everyone else is just living in a movie, and someone on the left—well, someone on the left of course thinks exactly the same thing; that’s what Haaretz was doing even before the internet. And then what happens, basically, is that everyone lives inside a bubble built to his own measurements. In other words, if he thinks in a certain way, then all the information and arguments and everything necessary will be filtered in accordance with what he thinks, and that only keeps strengthening—it’s positive feedback, right?—keeps strengthening more and more the sense that I am right, and creates social bubbles in the public, bubbles of such positions that keep fueling themselves. And then everybody is absolutely sure that they are right and everyone else is living in a movie, and ostensibly the facts support what they are saying, because all the facts you discover on Google are really facts that fit what you think, because Google is of course doing the filtering. And so this thing, obviously, leads to polarization and so on—but polarization is a consequence. I’m talking about the fact that it creates an incorrect picture of reality for all of us. In other words, the algorithm basically creates an incorrect picture of reality in each one of us, and that is a claim that I think is very important. Most of us are aware of it, but I’m not sure how aware we really are of it in daily life, in how we consume the information that comes to us. That information is filtered both by us and not only by us, in a very, very tendentious way. And everything gets interpreted here—like with the Holocaust, what does the Holocaust prove? Same thing. Every event proves exactly what I thought. That’s true—we see it in the news every day; you don’t have to go far. Everything that happens proves that I was always right. And by “I,” I mean right, left, center, I don’t know what, communism, capitalism—whatever happens, it doesn’t matter, everything that happens proves what I thought. That’s the principle. And by the way, in everything that happens there probably really are aspects like this and aspects like that; the whole question is which aspects you filter and which aspects you notice. And this filtering of information is very dangerous, because it strengthens your confidence in what you think—now even all the facts are on your side. So yes, let’s return to David Hume, the father of social networks. In other words, David Hume is basically filtering all the information that reaches us, because he is unwilling to accept information about supernatural events, and then he says: well then, you see, my position that there is no such thing as supernatural events only gets stronger. After all, I don’t accept any other report. Google has already filtered out all the other information for him, and that’s it, everything is fine. So this approach of begging the question and of claims that are not open to the test of refutation is a very problematic approach. Now, not every claim stands the test of refutation; we talked about the fact that the claim that God exists also does not stand the test of refutation. The fact that a claim is not falsifiable does not disqualify it, but it should arouse suspicion. When you tell me that we have never heard a report of an event that deviates from the laws of nature—that’s bubbe meises. Here, a report like that came to you, and you reject it because we have never heard. I assume that any other reports that came to you, you would reject in exactly the same way. So don’t tell me we have never heard; we have never agreed to hear—that’s the point, not that we have never heard. There is something here that is a very problematic claim; it is immune to refutation, it cannot be attacked. And a claim that cannot be attacked is a suspicious claim, from every side, by the way. Also the claim of faith—if a person really presents a claim in such a way that it cannot be attacked, and for every difficulty he has pilpulim explaining why he is still right, then there is no point in discussion. Then the claims are worth nothing, and the counterclaims are worth nothing. Yes, it’s like the communist apologetic literature I mentioned. I once had a book called Lenin and Modern Physics, from Poalim in Struggle publishing, from the 1950s or 1940s, even before the founding of the state. Sifriyat Poalim had some communist branch, and in Sifriyat Poalim in Struggle they published world classics, and among these masterpieces there was one by someone named Omlenitsky, I think—don’t remember exactly—a little pamphlet that I simply couldn’t put down. It was fascinating. He proved how Lenin was always right and how he had foreseen all of modern physics, and anything he didn’t foresee simply wasn’t true—it was a conspiracy of anti-communists, counterrevolutionaries. So therefore everything fit the theory and everything—there were pilpulim and explanations for why everything fit. Yes, go to Har HaMor, to Torat, to the Kav yeshivas—it’s all the same thing. In other words, all those people who have global theories that always, always work with everything, and if they don’t work then this is the way redemption works, sometimes it rises and sometimes it falls, yes, in the Arbel Valley and so on, we have spiritual excuses for that too. So this dogmatic approach is a very problematic one; you have to beware of dogmatism. And dogmatism exists both among believers and among atheists. And this dogmatism immunizes you—or castrates the possibility of—holding a discussion. And I think that to a large extent Hume and all those who rejoice and are delighted over Hume’s crushing argument are, all in all, people who are living in a movie. They are people living inside a bubble they built for themselves, and they are very happy because all the facts that penetrate the bubble confirm what they have thought from the beginning. As people say—after all, the standard criticism of Anselm or all those who present arguments for the existence of God is that none of them began to believe because of the arguments. They were always believers, and then they found the arguments. For some reason, people don’t notice that it’s exactly the same with atheists. In other words, all the arguments raised against belief—those are not what caused them—or not all of them, but most of them—to abandon belief; they never believed. After they didn’t believe, they also found arguments for why they don’t believe. In other words, everyone really sees—not his own afflictions, but the afflictions of others. But these diseases exist on all sides of the game, and therefore the lesson is not that atheists are stupid and not that believers are stupid. The lesson is that we ought to try to be wise. And right now I don’t care whether I’m an atheist or a believer, but one has to see the picture in a balanced way and not filter information according to what I thought in advance. Yes, filter it—but filter it in a reasonable proportion, because what I have accumulated, what I think right now, really is the best of—

[Speaker B] my judgment.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So it is certainly reasonable to examine, in light of that judgment, information that comes to me. But one has to beware of overly dogmatic filtering that does not allow me to challenge what I think. That is a dangerous approach, and it exists on both sides of the argument. So—

[Speaker C] If the Holy One, blessed be He, really wanted to overcome these arguments of Hume, or Google, and so on—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who said He wanted to?

[Speaker C] If God wanted—I’m saying if He wanted, and therefore He revealed Himself—in any case, He did reveal Himself, He saw fit to reveal Himself in order to prove that faith is true or—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He revealed Himself in order to give us the commandments He wants from us, not in order to overcome Hume.

[Speaker C] Fine, okay, but He knew there would be Hume’s argument and people like him, and Google and the like, so why didn’t He flood us with revelations? Why did He do it as a one-time thing? What difference would it make to Him? Flood us with them so that we wouldn’t be able—in the end it would settle the matter.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no idea why He didn’t do that, I don’t know. You’d have to ask Him. But the question is whether, with this one revelation that He did give, I have enough force to reject it and say it didn’t happen or not. It’s like Paley’s watchmaker argument, which I mentioned once. I have all kinds of objections about why the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world by means of evolution. Right? After all, along the way an enormous number of chips fell, an enormous number of creatures became extinct on the way—why not just create the final product directly? Why do we need this whole path full of suffering, this harsh struggle for survival? So I said—we spoke about this when we discussed the physico-theological proofs—so I said, let’s return to Paley’s argument. You find a watch on the seashore—or just in the street, doesn’t matter—lying there, and you have two possibilities. Either it came about by chance, or someone made it, some watchmaker. Paley says: a watch is an astonishingly complex thing. Therefore it is obvious that it did not produce itself, not even through a process stretched over many years; someone made it. The same is true of the world. Now someone comes and says: you know, this watch is two hours slow. Well then, what kind of stupid watchmaker is this? If he’s already making a watch, let him make a watch that works. Why make a watch that is two hours slow? Wonderful question. I don’t know—the mind of this watchmaker isn’t clear to me. Does that mean there is no watchmaker? No. If this watch is complex, then it is still true that it did not come about on its own, but that there was a watchmaker who made it. The fact that I don’t understand how this watchmaker’s mind works is something else. But the question whether there is or isn’t a watchmaker is decided by whether this thing is sufficiently complex, or whether the evidence for a watchmaker is sufficiently strong. If yes, then there is a watchmaker. And the fact that I have objections about the watchmaker only means that his mind is built differently from mine. Maybe he made a mistake, maybe I’m mistaken, maybe I don’t understand—it doesn’t matter at the moment—but it says nothing about the existence of the watchmaker. Now, the fact that I don’t understand why the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t take care to deal with Hume’s arguments and flood us with revelations—although I don’t know, maybe even if He flooded us with revelations Hume wouldn’t accept a single one of them—but let’s say he would, that is an objection about Him. So I don’t understand how the mind of this watchmaker works. But still, the argument in favor of revelation, if it is convincing, is convincing. The fact that I have a problem with how His mind works is a problem that should be set aside in this discussion. Therefore these are two independent planes of discussion.

[Speaker C] By the way, regarding Paley’s argument—what the Rabbi just said, the difficulty is serious. After all, we don’t only believe in God, we believe in God as the ultimate good, and to create a world with such struggles for survival, with unimaginable suffering over billions of years—that is an extremely difficult question.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So first of all, it could be that He is not the ultimate good. Second, it could be that you don’t understand, and He is still the ultimate good. And still, as I say, all these objections are good objections, but I still think they have answers. By the way, I also wrote them up. But I think the arguments still have to be examined on their own terms. The objections come afterward. So I don’t understand the watchmaker’s mindset, but the question is whether the arguments for the existence of the watchmaker are good arguments. Can a complex world come into being by chance? I think not. So therefore it’s clear that someone built it. Now, whether the one who built it is benevolent or not benevolent, whether His mind is built this way or some other way—I don’t know. It could be that I don’t understand. But that doesn’t answer the arguments, and it doesn’t cancel the arguments that show His existence. So those are two different things. As for our beliefs about what He is and who He is—fine, that needs discussion. It could be that our beliefs are not accurate; maybe yes, maybe no. But that is an additional argument. I just want to add one more interesting remark. It’s almost an anecdote. David Hume, whom I mentioned in one of the talks about the previous proofs—one of the hard problems David Hume raised was the problem of induction. And he basically argued—he was the first to formulate it and really put it on the table clearly, even though people had sensed it before him—that the fact that I saw a certain pattern of behavior in certain cases still doesn’t mean that this is the general law. In other words, the question is whether those cases are a representative sample, and then what happened in them probably happens in all cases, in all such situations, or whether it’s a non-representative sample. You can’t know. And therefore, you can’t infer a general conclusion from a certain set of cases you observed. Right, that’s the problem of induction. What are you basing your generalization on? Your generalization is based on several observations, but the observations are in particular cases, while the generalization turns that into a law that deals with all cases—all cases of the relevant type. So how can you justify such a thing? That’s the problem of induction. So David Hume really said that causality, induction, and all the problems he raised there—he basically proposed a solution by reducing the claims we believe in. In more modern language, I’d put it like this: you can’t say that the laws of nature are true. You can say that this is the most natural way for us to interpret the cases we have observed. That’s all. And as long as it hasn’t been refuted—say, according to Popper—as long as it hasn’t been refuted, I keep using it. But you can’t say that the laws of nature are a claim about the world, because that claim has no justification. Same thing with causality. So David Hume says: causality—what you actually see with your eyes is just that the cause precedes the effect, and the effect always comes after the cause. Okay? But you have no way to see with your eyes that the effect was produced by the cause, that it was caused by the cause. You didn’t see that relation itself between them. So David Hume says, fine, then apparently the very concept of causation is our illusion. It’s just a form of our thinking. What exists in the world is a connection, a correlation, yes, or temporal priority of cause over effect and a correlation between them. That’s it. So in the end, because of his own objections, David Hume became a skeptic—we talked about that—he became a skeptic, because as an empiricist, anything that doesn’t come from direct observation he cannot accept as a claim about the world. So he will continue using causality and induction and generalizations and all kinds of things like that, but he will use them in a merely methodological way. He is not claiming that this is really what happens in the world; rather, this is how our thinking is structured, and therefore we will keep thinking this way until it is refuted. Now notice what happens in his argument here against the witness argument, yes, against miracles. There suddenly the problem of induction becomes the best possible instrument for telling me what happens in the world—contrary to his whole conception of induction that he laid out in the previous context. Because suddenly he says: look, since up to now we haven’t seen events that deviated from the laws of nature, or we have seen that the laws of nature are such-and-such, therefore clearly that is reality, and any event that happened differently probably didn’t happen; it probably isn’t true. Suddenly there is extravagant confidence in the results of induction, of generalization. But until now, David Hume, you explained to me that induction is something we bring with us from home, that generalization has no real validity. We are used to thinking that way, and that’s fine; as long as it hasn’t been refuted, let’s use it. But now look what happens. Now it has been refuted, and he still keeps using it. More than that—he rejects the refutation. In other words, some testimony or finding comes to him and says: the laws of nature you believed in are not correct, or they don’t always hold, whatever. And you say: that can’t be, therefore clearly this report is false. I don’t understand. You yourself taught us that induction is only a methodological tool. You can’t take the result of the generalization and treat it as a claim about the world. It is only the way that is convenient for us to think, that’s all. But if it turns out not to fit, then fine—as Groucho Marx said, I have many principles, and if you don’t like these principles, I have others. Meaning, I can replace this claim if there are findings that contradict it. But here suddenly he entrenches himself in some dogmatic conception of induction—and he is the father of the problem of induction. So this is really an astonishing bias. Meaning, not only does he treat his generalizations in a way that cannot be refuted, where any argument that tries to refute the generalization he simply rejects—he doesn’t accept it—and then of course he always remains right. But he is also the father of the very method that forbids us to do this. He’s not just some random person; he is the man who told us: listen, your generalizations are very questionable. What you saw in the past in no way means it is a general law, that it will always happen. We are used to thinking that way and that’s fine, that’s how we are built, but don’t be hasty and say that this really describes what happens in the world. Rather, it is only the way we currently organize the facts for ourselves. And now suddenly there is a conception that the world behaves only this way, and every other report must be thrown out, must be rejected. That really seems to me to point to a very problematic bias. Meaning, it’s not only that he entrenches himself in a theory that cannot be refuted; he is the father of the method that insists on the importance of refutations, on the significance of refutations, on the fact that one must not entrench oneself against refutations. So there really is, in short, this argument against the witness argument—in my view, despite how excited people get about it—is a very, very problematic argument. Maybe I’ll add one more sentence connected to this point. We really do see that usually the world behaves according to the laws of nature. Now I’m leaving Hume aside; I’m now talking about myself, not Hume. I don’t think induction is a dubious tool. I think our generalizations are a good tool—not perfect, not always correct, you have to examine them, respect them but suspect them—but it’s not a shot in the dark the way Hume presented it, or the way Popper continued that. It is a working tool. Meaning, it is something through which we can say things about the world. Now, if I—not David Hume—do believe my generalizations, then maybe from my perspective Hume’s argument can indeed be stronger. Hume himself is internally contradictory in his doctrine. But I’m interested in my conclusions, not Hume’s conclusions. After all, in the end, an event that goes against the laws of nature is an improbable event. So why should I accept testimony that it happened? Overall, I do believe my generalizations that the world behaves according to the laws of nature. Here there are two important points. One point is that when basically what I am being told is to follow my experience—if you saw many cases that are like this, then probably all the cases are like this. Now, I’ll say this as a kind of parable. There’s a story about Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeschitz: a priest came to him—yes, all the good stories are about Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeschitz—and said to him: why don’t you Jews adopt Christianity? After all, we are the majority, and the Torah says, “follow the majority.” So Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeschitz said to him: I follow the majority when I am in doubt, but if I know what the truth is, I don’t care what the majority says. Then the majority is wrong. Now again, there is some kind of statement here—you see the connection to our issue. There is an argument against your position: after all, the majority thinks otherwise. And you say: yes, but I’m sure I’m right, so I don’t accept counterarguments. A bit similar to what I described earlier. But it’s not like that, because think for example: Jewish law says that if I find a piece of meat lying in the street, its status is determined by the majority of stores in the area. Let’s say it came from that city, the city gates are locked, no pieces of meat come in from outside, so I check the stores in the city. If most of the stores are kosher, then strictly speaking I am allowed to eat that piece. If most of the stores are non-kosher, then it is forbidden. There is also the law of meat that left one’s sight—that’s the practical Jewish law—but in terms of the basic law, it goes according to the majority. Now what happens if most of the stores in the city are non-kosher, but the piece of meat I found in the street has a premium kosher certification seal on it? Do I still follow the majority? Most of the stores are non-kosher, so I say this piece is non-kosher? Obviously not. Why not? Because genuinely—and this is not a joke—that is the halakhic rule. The halakhic rule says that I follow the majority where I am in doubt. When both possibilities exist, I follow the majority because it is more probable than the other possibility. But where it is clear to me which of the two possibilities is correct, then why should I care that the majority is against me? I know what the truth is. The majority is a tool for decision in situations of doubt. If I am not in a situation of doubt, the question of following the majority has no significance at all. Now of course, if the majority says otherwise, someone may come and say: reconsider your position—do you still think the truth is such-and-such or not? It could be that there is some weight to the fact that the majority thinks otherwise. But if I reconsidered my position and reached the conclusion that it is clear to me that a piece with a premium kosher seal is probably kosher, then so what if the majority is against me? So there is a majority that most stores are non-kosher, but this piece came from the kosher store, not from the non-kosher one. Yes, that reminds me—Rabbi Shimon Shkop explains: there is a rule in the Talmud, just random halakhic associations, but it is exactly this pattern of thought. There is a dispute between Rav and Shmuel whether in monetary matters one follows the majority, and in practical Jewish law we rule that one does not follow the majority in monetary matters. Now what does that mean? For example, in the Talmudic case, one of the cases discussed is someone—Reuven—sold an ox to his fellow, Shimon. Shimon took the ox for plowing, and the thing dropped dead on the spot. He sues Reuven and says: you sold me a defective ox; you can’t plow with it. So Reuven says to him: I sold you the ox for slaughter, not for plowing. For slaughter, just slaughter it—it doesn’t need to hold up under strain. That wasn’t what you bought it for. What are you talking about? I bought it for plowing, not for slaughter. They come to a religious court. Now it turns out that most oxen are sold for plowing. That was the market situation—most oxen are sold for plowing and not for slaughter. So apparently one ought to follow the majority, and the one who says it was sold for plowing—in this case, the buyer—is right. Now the Talmud’s claim, in practical Jewish law—it’s a dispute between Rav and Shmuel—is that in monetary matters we do not follow the majority. Now there are other places, and therefore the assumption is that the claim that the ox was sold for slaughter is a claim that holds water. Meaning, one can rely on it even though most oxen are sold for plowing. Now there are other places in the Talmud where you do see that in monetary matters one does follow the majority. For example, in a court in civil cases one follows the majority of judges. So Tosafot at the beginning of tractate Sanhedrin and Tosafot in tractate Bava Kamma 27 and a number of medieval authorities (Rishonim) ask how this fits together. So Rabbi Shimon Shkop offers the following explanation. He says: in principle, one does follow the majority in monetary matters. A majority is good evidence—why shouldn’t we follow the majority in monetary matters? But this majority, in the case of an ox sold for plowing or slaughter, is a special kind of majority. Why is it special? Because it is a majority that depends on human decisions; it is not a statistical event. People decide what they want—an ox for plowing or an ox for slaughter. It’s not like I’m tossing a coin and deciding. Each person according to his needs. Someone who needed slaughter bought for slaughter; someone who needed plowing bought for plowing. In the aggregate, yes, usually most oxen are sold for plowing. But it’s not like I’m rolling dice when I buy an ox and deciding whether to buy it for slaughter or for plowing. Now someone comes and says to me: look, I sold this ox for slaughter. True, most people choose plowing, you’re right, but I belong to the minority. After all, every person decides why he wants to buy or sell an ox. So he says: what, are you going to claim against me that it can’t be that you are six foot five because most of the world is under five foot eleven? Fine—so it can’t be that height? What can I do, I belong to the minority and I’m six foot five. So what if the majority is against me? If that is the fact, then the majority is against me. Now again, where I don’t know—say height is assigned randomly and now the question is whether it is likely that I would come out six foot five—the answer is no, because most people, most outcomes, will be around five foot eleven. Okay? So if I claimed that by random chance I came out six foot five, then yes, maybe that claim is less probable than the claim that I came out five foot eleven, because there are more people who are five foot eleven. But that is only if I was selected randomly. If I belong to the tall minority—everyone agrees there is a tall minority. I belong to that minority—what do you want from me? So what do I care if most people are not like that? So when a person chooses whether to sell or buy an ox for slaughter or for plowing, that is his decision. He can make either of two reasonable decisions, because both happen. True, plowing happens more. So because of that, should we reject the claim of a person who says, I chose to buy or sell an ox for slaughter?

[Speaker D] No, it’s not similar.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That would mean that nobody ever buys an ox for slaughter—yes, I’m returning to Hume—that would mean that nobody ever buys an ox for slaughter, because anyone who says he bought it for slaughter is not believed, since most oxen are for plowing, and there you have the proof that people always buy oxen only for plowing and not for slaughter. Because anyone who says he bought it for slaughter, we simply won’t believe him.

[Speaker D] But it’s not similar, because here, if I’m selling something unusual, then I really ought to tell the buyer, listen, you should know this is non-kosher.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s a different question. I’m not going into the details of the passage right now. There is a question there whether one really had to inform or didn’t have to inform; the commentators discuss it. Whether the price indicates it—there’s also a difference in price between an ox for slaughter and one for plowing. Maybe through that you can tell. I’m not going into that right now because I’m only bringing the example to clarify the idea. What I’m basically saying is that statistical arguments are good arguments where a priori the two options are evenly balanced. But if I have good arguments in favor of one of the options, then the fact that the other option is statistically more probable should not change my position in any way. If I reached the philosophical conclusion that there is a God, and therefore there is no obstacle to His also revealing Himself, then the statistical fact that He usually does not reveal Himself and that the laws of nature forbid His revelation, as it were, or whatever you want—that is a true fact. But this piece has a seal. In other words, what do I care about your statistics? When that possibility seems correct to me, then the statistics are irrelevant. If I came as a tabula rasa and knew nothing, maybe the statistical argument would have weight or importance. But the information or assumptions with which I come in advance to the discussion are very important even after the statistics. We have a certain tendency—and it’s a modern disease—after statistical tools were developed and really began to be used somewhat more intelligently than in the past, it came back like a boomerang. It turns the use of statistics into something much more problematic for people who are not skilled in it, and sometimes even for people who are.

[Speaker E] I didn’t understand why the minority is stronger if it depends on a person’s judgment than if it depends on something else.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because suppose I know the die is fair, and I throw it, and a hundred times I get six. Then something here is unreasonable; it is very improbable that this happens. But that is because I know beforehand that the die is fair. If I know the die is unfair, then I have no problem with it; maybe it has a tendency to fall on six.

[Speaker E] And if I say, I knew it was not a non-kosher animal, because I checked it or something like that—even though it’s a minority case, we don’t follow the… I’m saying I know… I didn’t understand.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the claim that you checked it is not the same claim as that you decided. Because saying you checked it already gets into the laws of evidence, and the question is whether that inspection overcomes the majority or does not overcome the majority, because after all you also have an interest in lying. So that has to be examined. But here they are talking about my behavior. Now don’t tell me how I behave—I’m telling you how I behave. You can’t tell me, okay, you belong to the majority, because you know there is a minority and I’m telling you I belong to the minority. What do you want? I trade in meat, not in plowing cattle. And you tell me there is no such thing, we won’t accept what you say? So there are no slaughter cases? After all, anyone who says he is for slaughter, we simply won’t believe him? Because the majority says plowing. There are people who are in the minority, and the minority that behaves this way says: me. After all, it’s my decision. I decided to buy an ox for slaughter—what is the problem with that? That is a completely reasonable claim. I think that in this respect it differs from the case where I say, I checked it. When I say, I checked it, I am bringing evidence that the animal is not non-kosher. So that is measured on the evidentiary plane. But here the whole discussion is not on the plane of evidence; the discussion is really about what I did. I’m telling you what I did—why are you debating what I did? It’s not a matter of evidence. I belong to the minority; there is such a minority.

[Speaker E] Got it, okay.

[Speaker F] Rabbi, can’t you say that in matters of opinion, for example, outlooks and things of that kind, then on the contrary, specifically when you’re in the minority it means you thought more independently, when you’re…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m talking here right now about the principle. Hume isn’t talking about most people; he’s talking about most cases. He says: I have many cases where I see that the laws of nature are such-and-such, and now the question is whether to accept testimony about another case that did not proceed according to the laws of nature. I’m saying that in places of this kind, beyond the statistical argument, we also have some philosophical arguments, we have a priori assumptions, various intuitions, and we have to remember that all of them have to be weighed together. In these discussions, often—and by the way, this is mainly a disease of the atheist side—people say, wait, let’s leave all that aside, let’s come as a tabula rasa and see whether statistically you’re right or I’m right. No. I don’t come as a tabula rasa. I have excellent arguments in favor of this matter, and therefore I’m not willing. If I were tabula rasa, I would be an atheist—true. But I’m not, because I have testimony that the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed Himself, I have philosophical arguments that He exists, and therefore for me this is a piece of meat with a seal. Don’t tell me to ignore the seal, because after all most of the stores here are non-kosher stores. I’m not ignoring the seal because there is a seal. In other words, there is a certain magic to statistical arguments in our generation, as though they erase everything else; all the other things are superstitions. And people forget that statistics has no standing on its own. Statistics is a tool for deciding between possibilities when I have no other way to decide between them. If I have equal possibilities, or possibilities I don’t know how to decide between, statistics will tell me which is preferable or more probable. But that comes after I have decided that all these possibilities are of equal weight, or that I don’t know how to decide between them. If I have a way to decide between them, why would I use statistics? Statistics is not the relevant tool. Even though apparently statistics is mathematics—who can argue with mathematics? There is a confusion between concepts of plausibility and concepts of probability. They are not the same thing. Probability is one of the tools that helps us decide plausibility, but there are other tools besides probability. Where I cannot make a probabilistic calculation—there is no event space, no sample space—then I cannot make a probabilistic calculation. So what, then I can’t make intelligent decisions? Of course I can. I make decisions using my intuition—decisions based on plausibility, not on probability. There is some kind of holiness attached to probability because there are calculations there, formulas, mathematics, so it makes a huge impression on people, especially people who don’t understand it, and therefore they also misuse it, but they are also terribly confident that the result is correct because after all there are statistics. I think that to this day I have almost never encountered a news report—or in the media generally, in arguments in the media—an argument based on data that did not contain an error in interpreting the data. I have almost never encountered even one such case. And there are ten such arguments a day. It’s always, you know, everyone knows that whenever you do this, that happens—these are everyday arguments. Now there is not one such argument that holds water. It’s unbelievable when you look critically, and people bring experts and talk in numbers, because it sounds terribly serious—there are numbers and data. Don’t just say things out of your overheated imagination; use quantitative data. And it is very convincing. But it’s nonsense. The quantitative data, precisely because it is quantitative, takes us captive. We have a certain tendency to believe it because it is quantitative, and we forget to pay attention to the context, to the meaning of those quantities and calculations, and to the underlying assumptions or possibilities, to our a priori view of the possibilities. And that is no less important—perhaps more important—than the statistics. Statistics is the last tool. After I have no way—like Occam’s razor, yes? Occam’s razor is often applied in favor of the simpler theory. Let’s choose the simpler theory because of Occam’s razor. So according to that logic, Newtonian mechanics is more correct than Einstein’s theory of relativity because it is simpler. Why isn’t that true? Because there are experiments showing that it is not true, that Einstein’s theory is correct. Wait, but Newton’s theory is simpler. So what? Occam’s razor is always the last principle in the chain of decision. Meaning, I examine all the data; all the theories that do not explain the data I throw aside. I’m left with the theories each of which explains all the data, and now between them, if I need to decide, I take the simplest one. But I will not take the simplest theory when there is data against it just because it is simpler. Simplicity is the last principle. After I’m left with several theories I cannot decide between, I choose the simpler one. Statistics is the same way: statistics is the last tiebreaker. After I have no decision between several possibilities and I’m left with several options and need to decide between them, I do a statistical calculation. If one is more probable, I choose it. But that doesn’t really mean—I mean, I’m not going to use statistics to decide in favor of a theory when I have good reasons to say it is not correct. There is even in Jewish law a difference between a doubt of an established prohibition and a doubt of no established prohibition. One piece out of two pieces and one piece alone. I have one piece of meat and there is a doubt whether it is kosher or non-kosher—fifty-fifty. That is one type of doubt; it is called no established prohibition. And you have a second doubt: before me are two pieces of meat; one I know is kosher and one is non-kosher, I just don’t know which is which. That too is fifty-fifty. Any piece I pick is fifty-fifty. But Jewish law treats the second doubt as a more serious doubt—one brings a provisional guilt offering for it—whereas for a doubt of no established prohibition one does not bring a provisional guilt offering. Although this is fifty-fifty and that is fifty-fifty, what is the difference? The difference is that in the case of one piece it is a negative fifty-fifty. It is fifty-fifty because I simply have no information. So in light of the lack of information I have, either it’s non-kosher or it isn’t non-kosher—fifty-fifty. I’m not really positively saying it’s fifty-fifty; I just don’t know anything, so the assumption is that from my standpoint the two possibilities are of equal weight. But if I say no, I know all the information—there are two pieces here, one kosher and one non-kosher—then when I take one of them, it really is fifty percent kosher or non-kosher. This is not a negative doubt; it is a positive doubt. I have reason to assume that there is a fifty percent chance this piece is non-kosher and a fifty percent chance it is kosher. I’m not inventing the doubt; it is not a doubt created by lack of information, it is a doubt created by information. So where I have no information, I also apply statistics—fifty-fifty, no information. But where I have information, statistics does not work against the information; it works within the framework of the information. So if I have incomplete information—one piece kosher and one piece non-kosher—I make a statistical calculation and say there is a fifty percent chance it is kosher and fifty percent chance it is not. But I can’t say that if I have, say, three pieces, of which two are non-kosher and one is kosher, now I say that in the world there are fifty percent kosher and fifty percent non-kosher—or not in the world, but since I don’t know what this piece is, then fifty-fifty, because either it is kosher or it is non-kosher. That is a distorted use of statistics. Why? Because it ignores information that I have. If I had three pieces here and knew nothing about them, then any one I picked it would be correct to assume regarding it that it is fifty-fifty. That would be correct in a negative sense—in other words, since I have no other information, I say okay, then I’ll assume fifty-fifty; that is the default. But if I have information, I say: among these three pieces, two are non-kosher and one is kosher. So what relevance is there in saying it could be kosher or non-kosher and therefore it is fifty-fifty? Such a use of statistics is a use that ignores non-statistical considerations—the other, prior, a priori considerations. It is a distorted use of statistics. Okay, so that is basically the claim against Hume’s critique. I just want to make one more point. I owe an answer because I promised it in the previous class, so I didn’t forget. Someone asked me in the previous class and I really want to address it here. He asked me: if reports of miracles come to me, I generally reject them. I personally—now I’m talking about myself, my own approach. He says: how does that fit with all your arguments against Hume? After all, that is exactly what Hume said. A report comes to him that looks dubious about miracles and he rejects it. You too—someone comes and says Elijah appeared to me, Rachel our mother appeared to the soldiers in Gaza, or all that bullshit—and you say it’s all nonsense, you don’t accept it. Why not? Why do you reject it out of hand? Clearly you reject it out of hand because Rachel has never appeared. Why? Because every time there is a report that Rachel appeared, you don’t accept it. Exactly the fallacy I accuse Hume of, I myself fall into. Someone asked me in the previous class: how would you yourself treat reports of miracles in light of the impressive pluralism you are showing here? After all, I too tend not to accept such reports. So here I really return to what I said now. I really do agree with Hume on the starting point. Meaning, if I have no good reasons, I will assume the miracle did not happen, and therefore I examine everything on its own merits. If I have good reasons, say like at Mount Sinai, then apparently it did happen, and the report stands, and the statistics too can remain in their proper place. But if I do not have good reasons to assume the miracle happened, then I return to the statistics, and then Hume is right. Okay. If someone comes to me and says Elijah the prophet appeared to me, and he does not strike me as a particularly reliable person, and overall there are very many cases like this, and usually once you start digging a little into those testimonies you discover the problems in them, then a priori I do not put trust in it. By the way, I do not reject it categorically. If he brings me good evidence, fine, I will accept it. But my a priori approach is that usually it is nonsense. Usually it is delusions or superstitions or whatever. But that is not because I am in principle unwilling to accept such reports; it is because when such a report comes, I will want to see arguments that justify it. Then I will be willing to accept it. But without that, the statistics stand. One of the arguments—and I spoke about this last time or the time before, I don’t remember—is indeed the reliability of the person conveying the report to me. If the report, or the chain of transmission of the report, sounds reliable to me, then I will accept it, as with jaundice, as we discussed. Then I will accept it. And if the person is not reliable in my eyes, then I won’t accept it—and that is an impression. Look, when you come to court, in court you could make exactly Hume’s argument. A witness comes and says: Reuven murdered Shimon. Now I have two possibilities. Either I assume that Reuven really murdered Shimon, the witness is telling the truth, and I convict Reuven of murder. Or second, I say Reuven did not murder Shimon and the witness is a liar. Now tell me what is more probable: murder or lying? Murder is a much graver and more far-reaching offense. It is much easier to suspect a person of lying than to suspect a person of being a murderer. So in fact the more sensible alternative is to say that the witness is lying and Reuven did not murder. Why assume someone murdered? Let’s assume someone lied—that is a more reasonable assumption. So why does the court accept the testimony about the murder? Sometimes they try to cross-check and so on, but in principle they accept that testimony because the witness stands before them and sounds reliable to them. What about Hume’s statistical calculation—that murder is less probable than lying? With all due respect to statistics, I have some kind of immediate impression of the witness, and this witness sounds reliable to me. Therefore I accept his testimony. Of course there is also something else here: in most cases—exactly, in most cases—there is the corpse, as someone writes here; there was a murder. Meaning, factually there was a murder, so to think that someone murdered is not an implausible suspicion because certainly someone murdered—there was a murder here. Fine, one could say no, maybe someone died naturally, maybe someone disappeared and wasn’t murdered and now a witness comes and says he was murdered; one can imagine situations where there is no body. And still, if the testimony sounds reliable to me, then yes. By the way, when an appeal comes to the Supreme Court, the accepted practice—not always, but it is the basic rule they work with—is that the court does not go back and re-examine the testimony. The Supreme Court. It checks the legal considerations. But the impression from the witnesses it leaves to the first, lower court. Why? Because they saw the witness face to face. And whoever saw the witness face to face has some kind of immediate impression whether that witness is reliable or not. Of course that can mislead—no one says it is certainly correct—but it has some weight, and you rely on that witness, you get an impression whether the witness is reliable or not. A court that never met him, all it can do is statistical calculations. So from the standpoint of the Supreme Court, which did not meet the witness, it should really say: leave it, it is more probable that the witness lied than that the defendant murdered. Because it did not meet the witness. But the court of first instance, the lower court, did meet the witness. Once it met the witness, it formed the impression that this is a reliable person. Once it forms the impression that this is a reliable person, even if the statistical calculation still says it is more probable that there was lying than murder, with all due respect to the statistical calculation, it remains on the side. And the Supreme Court also respects that distinction, and therefore it will not get into re-examining the testimony. Because it did not meet the witness. And it will not say that it is more probable that there was lying than murder and overturn the first court’s ruling. No. Because the first court met the witness. Same thing here. We talked about the Midwest story, what I discussed with Amnon, my friend, and I brought many other examples for this: many times we are willing to accept testimony even about things that seem very strange to us if the testimony is reliable, if we are immediately impressed that the person is trustworthy, speaks truthfully, and is not hallucinating. Even if the testimony is absurd, and apparently hallucination is a more probable option than saying the absurd testimony is true—that it really happened. No. But if I believe the person, then I will accept his testimony. Therefore the use of statistics is something that has to be done with great caution. We have a certain magic attached to numbers. Once there are numbers, then obviously it proves everything and it is right and everything else around it disappears. No. The use of statistics is done within a certain conceptual framework. One has to exhaust all the arguments around it, and only at the very end, the last step, is the statistical calculation. Good, so with that we’ve finished Hume’s witness arguments. Comments or questions are welcome.

[Speaker B] So in the end everyone just thinks whatever they want.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, I said that at the beginning. But as I said, that doesn’t mean it has no weight. Because if I reached the philosophical conclusion that there is a God, then from my standpoint that is the conclusion. Now testimony comes to me about a revelation that happened. I ignore this statistical calculation, but this revelation has significance for me. It reveals to me that God is not just philosophical but caring, and that there are commandments and things of that sort. Now true, if I didn’t think there is a God I also wouldn’t accept this testimony. But you can’t say I’m not acting rationally. I’m acting completely rationally. Because that there is a God—there are excellent rational arguments in favor of that. Consequently, I also ignore the statistics that come afterward, and that too is a rational ignoring.

[Speaker B] And I’m going back again to the multiverse. Whether it’s plausible or not, everyone thinks what they want.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But regarding the multiverse I answered you in several other ways, unrelated to plausibility. The multiverse doesn’t solve the problem.

[Speaker B] That’s what matters—what physicists say, everyone says.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but that’s what I’m saying. It changes nothing. Because regarding the question whether there is or isn’t a multiverse, everyone holds his own position. But even if there is a multiverse, the question is whether that refutes the physicotheological proof, and I claim it does not. So I think it’s unrelated. Meaning, even if you accept that option because you have no problem with it, still in my view it does not refute the physicotheological argument. I answered that there when we discussed the argument. It’s also in the book.

[Speaker D] Yes, but this whole long and interesting road, we’re relying on plausibility. Each person’s personal plausibility—one is deeper, sharper, less so. But in the end, when we get to a question that has no answer, our sharp logic no longer matters. I don’t understand this. So what did we do? If I throw up my hands somewhere along the way and say I don’t understand, and then there is no answer and that doesn’t bother me, so I continue with plausibility—then what is plausibility worth?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll say it again. If the thing I don’t understand keeps recurring and piling up difficulties that make me doubt the arguments for, say, the existence of God, then certainly I should not ignore that. But if all it shows me is that a watch works with a mind different from my own, that still doesn’t mean there is no watch, because the arguments for the watch are good arguments.

[Speaker D] No, not only that. Over time—and everyone could make a list here of a hundred or a thousand examples—our logic, let’s put it as mildly as possible, just doesn’t understand. So what can you do? But we already said this half a year ago. No, but half a year ago we said: one thing that is not understood, fine; one thing that is not plausible, fine. But an accumulation of dozens or hundreds of cases that—we’ll call it—that we don’t understand, doesn’t that affect the probability? The plausibility, sorry?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It definitely has an impact. It definitely has an impact. Obviously. I said that before and I’m saying it again now. If there is a very large number of difficulties in a system, that raises a question mark about its correctness, and the arguments in favor of its correctness need to be reexamined. I agree. That’s why I say—it’s like the example I brought from Thomas Kuhn. Thomas Kuhn, regarding scientific theories or scientific paradigms, says the following. After all, Popper says that a theory can be falsified, but not proven. Let’s say the theory is: all ravens are black. So I say, of course you can falsify it—bring one raven that’s pink, and you’ve falsified the theory. Thomas Kuhn says it doesn’t work like that. Even if they bring five black ravens, the theory still won’t collapse. Why? Because I’ll say, well, maybe what I saw wasn’t a raven at all, maybe it was a sparrow. There was some error in the experiment, maybe there was some problem here. You need some minimal quantity of difficulties in order to topple the existing paradigm, if that paradigm is based on good arguments. And if it has proven itself in very many cases, I’m not going to overthrow it because of one experiment in which it failed, or three experiments in which it failed. So obviously there is a question here of dosage. If there are very many difficulties, then certainly one has to go back and reexamine the system.

[Speaker D] But in most cases—a hundred, a thousand—how many examples do I need?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a matter of judgment. I can’t give you a criterion. But we… I just want to say that if there isn’t a sufficient quantity, then all these difficulties say is that the mind of the clockmaker is different from mine—but that still doesn’t mean there is no clock. That’s all. And really, you’re right that quantities can play a role here; the number of difficulties definitely matters. But in the end, my mind has to draw the probabilistic conclusion, each person according to his own understanding. Obviously, everyone has to decide what is reasonable and what is not.

[Speaker D] And that’s why I’m saying, if there is a long list of things—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —that we say we don’t understand in the clock, then that’s a problem. If there is a list long enough, in your view, then from your perspective you need to reexamine the theory. Each person has his own sense of what counts as a sufficient quantity of difficulties, but fine, everyone makes his own decisions. Completely. I definitely want to emphasize: I am really not in favor of one-day dogmatism from the religious direction. Meaning, not to dismiss any argument that raises a difficulty for a religious position just because, after all, I’m surely right. I’m not arguing against atheist dogmatism in order to be dogmatic from the religious side. As I said, I’m against dogmatism in general. But on the other hand, what was important to me to emphasize is that being against dogmatism does not mean being against arguments and assumptions. Just because the statistical calculation says something doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore what seems reasonable or unreasonable to me. I don’t think that what seems reasonable to me is necessarily correct, but on the other hand it’s not weightless either—it has some weight, and it has to be examined. Right.

[Speaker D] On that we agree.

[Speaker G] What about—what if I’m Chinese, now I’m Chinese and I’ve gone through the whole logical-philosophical process and reached the conclusion that there is a God who implanted morality and free will in me. Now I expect a revelation so I can know what I’m supposed to do, but I don’t have a tradition of Mount Sinai. So what am I supposed to do?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Convert? You’re talking about a gentile.

[Speaker G] Chinese, Chinese, yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, what can he—if he can remain Chinese and everything is fine. What, revelation doesn’t obligate him. Let him keep his seven Noahide commandments. He can convert.

[Speaker G] No, but he too reaches the logical conclusion that if he is a person with choice, and there is a God who implanted free will in him, then he too—like us, like the Jews—expects there to be some mission from God directed to him.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If he reaches that conclusion, then let him convert. But he doesn’t necessarily have to reach that conclusion. He can reach the conclusion that for most of the world, free will was given in order to behave morally, or to keep the seven Noahide commandments, while for the Jewish people free will was given also for the commandments—just as for the priests, for example, it was given also for the additional commandments of the priests, which do not apply to the rest of the Jewish people either. So such a hierarchical conception can also explain God’s policy; he doesn’t have to convert in the end. It’s true that there’s a similar argument by Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman. Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman asks this about the seven commandments, not about conversion. If the Eskimo has no idea about the seven Noahide commandments, why should he conclude that there are seven Noahide commandments? So he says that he needs to look around, see that this world was apparently created and that there is a God. If there is a God, then He probably wants something from us, and then he should set out on a journey of inquiry around the world to discover Judaism, hear from us about the revelation at Mount Sinai, and understand that he, as a gentile, needs to keep the seven Noahide commandments. Not convert—keep the seven Noahide commandments. And all this is basically demanded of the Eskimo; if he doesn’t do it, there is a claim against him. Well, I’m a bit doubtful about that, but it is true that if the Eskimo went through that whole chain, then certainly the conclusion is that he should keep his seven commandments, not necessarily that he should convert. That already depends on whether he wants to belong to that core, yes, to those who are obligated in the whole system, in which case he can also convert, which is perfectly fine. And if not, that’s also perfectly fine.

[Speaker D] They won’t let him. What? They won’t let him.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why wouldn’t they let him?

[Speaker D] Because you know they make life miserable for anyone who wants to convert.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not at all. They’re not supposed to make life miserable for him; they’re only supposed to make sure it’s serious. And in my view, in our time, making sure it’s serious is very justified. Nowadays there are excellent reasons to convert that have nothing to do with Judaism or God. So it definitely makes sense to check very carefully whether the person is converting for the reasons for which one ought to convert, or whether he’s doing it for other reasons. Yes.

[Speaker D] Fine. Well then, Sabbath peace,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Goodbye.

[Speaker H] Rabbi, Rabbi, can I just ask—Machshevet HaHalakha again, if possible with the microphone one more time, the recordings are coming out unclear.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I remember they mentioned that to me. I don’t remember whether this past Sunday I used the microphone or not yet, but now I’m trying to make an effort not to forget. The microphone is always with me, I just forget to connect it.

[Speaker H] Maybe it’s worth remembering, it’s much better, yes.

[Speaker F] Okay,

[Speaker C] Sabbath peace and a good new month.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Goodbye, Sabbath peace, a good new month.