Faith – Lesson 23

Table of Contents

• Shifting the plane of the discussion to “outside the laws”
• Rejecting “God of the gaps” as a substantive claim
• The alternative of “everything is mathematics”
• Constants of nature, empirical content, and fine-tuning
• Evolution, abiogenesis, and why this is still “within the laws”
• Randomness in evolution and the distinction between epistemic doubt and ontic doubt
• Applying the distinction to Jewish law: psik reisha, doubtful psik reisha, and a “common-householder” way of looking at things
• Determinism in nature and its implications for evolution
• Evolution as strengthening the evidence for a guiding hand
• Questions about the time span, the anthropic argument, and multiple worlds
• Redundancy, suffering, and non-optimality versus the question of existence
• The age of the world as an interpretive datum rather than a binding determination

Summary

General Overview

The lecturer reformulates the physicotheological proof as an argument “from the laws” rather than an argument “within the laws,” and argues that even if evolution and abiogenesis explain how life can arise within the framework of the laws of nature, they do not touch the fundamental question of how the laws themselves came to be and why the values of the constants are tuned in such a way that chemistry, biology, and life can emerge. He rejects the accusation that this is a “God of the gaps” argument, because the gap here is essential: every scientific explanation relies on laws, and therefore cannot close off the question of the origin of the laws without leading to an infinite regress. He then argues that the randomness in evolution is mainly epistemic, meaning lack of knowledge, rather than ontic, meaning randomness in reality itself, and therefore the entire process is deterministic; from this he concludes that evolution is not an alternative to a guiding hand but actually strengthens the argument for design. In discussion with questioners, he distinguishes between the question of whether there is a “watchmaker” and the question of the optimality and morality of the mechanism, and compares claims about suffering and redundancy to a complex watch that is not built the way we would have built it, without that undermining the claim that there is a watchmaker.

Shifting the plane of the discussion to “outside the laws”

The lecturer argues that the standard physicotheological argument relies on the improbability that complex life arose by chance within the laws of nature, and that in response to it people propose evolution and natural processes that generate complexity without a guiding hand. The lecturer “steps one level back” and asks what the odds are that laws would arise within whose framework a random process could create life, instead of asking what the odds are that life would arise within the laws. He compares this to a coordinated factory or a working washing machine, and explains that presenting “rules” that explain how something functions does not replace the question of who wrote the rules and who created a machine that responds to a simple press with complex activity.

Rejecting “God of the gaps” as a substantive claim

The lecturer agrees that proofs from ignorance are not proofs, and argues that the problem is not tactical but essential: lack of knowledge should be filled in by research, not by metaphysical assumptions. He argues that the argument “from the laws” is not God of the gaps, because the gap cannot in principle be closed, since every scientific explanation will rely on another system of laws and will once again raise the question of the origin of those laws. He presents this regress as “turtles all the way down,” and argues that even a unified field theory would still leave one law about which the question would remain: “And who created that?”

The alternative of “everything is mathematics”

The lecturer presents one possible way to close the regress: to argue that all the laws of nature are the result of definitions and logical-analytic analysis of concepts, so that the entire world is mathematics and there is no need for observation. He argues that almost no “sane” person accepts such a position, and that if an atheist is forced to retreat to it in order to defend against the argument, then the alternative becomes so far-fetched that the proof stands. He uses Sherlock Holmes’s rule from The Sign of Four, that once the impossible is eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, is probably the truth.

Constants of nature, empirical content, and fine-tuning

The lecturer sharpens the point that the observational component in the laws of physics lies in the constants, whereas the mathematical structures of the laws can seem as though they are derived from conceptual structure. He illustrates this with the law of gravitation: the ratio of \(1/r^2\) is the “structure,” whereas the constant \(G\) is the “physical element” determined by measurement and could have had a different value. He argues that the special properties of the world depend on the values of the constants, and that small changes in them would eliminate chemistry, biology, and life; from this it follows that the question is who set the values so that life would be possible, and this is the fine-tuning argument. He rejects the expression “a few simple constants” and argues that even if there were only one constant within a narrow range, the very need for high precision in order to get a life-permitting world makes it rare and therefore “complex,” and he identifies complexity with rarity through entropy.

Evolution, abiogenesis, and why this is still “within the laws”

The lecturer says that evolution operates within laws of nature that are not themselves “evolutionary,” and adds that even before evolution one needs abiogenesis: the formation of the first protein chain or genetic code from which the evolutionary process begins. He describes current research that is trying to observe processes of abiogenesis in the laboratory and notes that there are “initial indications” of progress toward proving the possibility of life arising from nonliving matter. He argues that even if a laboratory experiment were to show that life arises spontaneously, this would only show that our laws of nature allow it, and the question would still remain: “Who created this system of laws?” Therefore, such experiments may close scientific gaps, but they do not touch the question of the origin of the laws.

Randomness in evolution and the distinction between epistemic doubt and ontic doubt

The lecturer focuses the debate on the random components attributed to evolution, such as random mutations and changing circumstances, and argues that there are two types of randomness: epistemic, meaning lack of knowledge, and ontic, meaning randomness in reality itself. He explains, using the example of rolling dice, that there is no randomness in reality, only mechanical determinism, and the probability arises from our inability to measure and calculate the initial conditions given chaotic sensitivity. He brings halakhic examples from tractate Kiddushin: an agent who betrothed a woman and then died creates an epistemic doubt, because there is one specific woman who is betrothed but we do not know who she is; whereas the statement “one of your two daughters is betrothed to me” creates an ambiguity in which there is no defined fact as to which one is betrothed, and he defines this as “fuzziness” rather than probabilistic doubt.

Applying the distinction to Jewish law: psik reisha, doubtful psik reisha, and a “common-householder” way of looking at things

The lecturer presents a dispute between the Taz and Rabbi Akiva Eiger regarding the law of closing a box when there is concern that flies may be inside it, and describes the Taz’s position as lenient because there is no certainty that there are flies there, while Rabbi Akiva Eiger’s position is strict because if there are flies, then trapping them by closing it is certain, and so this is a “doubtful psik reisha.” The lecturer proposes a distinction according to which Jewish law tends to adopt the categories of the “reasonable person” rather than those of an expert, and therefore in the case of dragging a bench across the ground, the perspective is as though there is doubt, rather than a professional deterministic assessment. He argues that Jewish law “was not given to the ministering angels,” and it goes by the way ordinary people perceive situations.

Determinism in nature and its implications for evolution

The lecturer argues that in physics “there are no ambiguities, there are doubts,” and that the physical world is deterministic, apart from the quantum exception, which he says he will deal with later and notes is difficult to explain. He concludes that the random components biologists talk about are epistemic, because the systems are so complex that in practice one cannot calculate weather, circumstances, and paths of predation and survival, but in reality the processes themselves are determined. He argues that from a deterministic point of view, if one had complete data and enormous computational power, one could derive from the Big Bang the unfolding of the world all the way to the present human reality.

Evolution as strengthening the evidence for a guiding hand

The lecturer argues that if evolution is understood as a deterministic process under a “cloak of randomness,” then it does not weaken the evidence for the existence of God but strengthens it, because the laws are tuned in such a way that a long process leads to the creation of immense complexity. He compares this to a lump of plasticine in a locked room that you would return to after 14.5 billion years and find had become a “safari,” and argues that you would not conclude that plasticine “sometimes” turns into a safari, but rather that whoever created the laws of the dynamics intended the result. He argues that neo-Darwinism “shoots itself in the foot” if it relies on randomness, because in the absence of true randomness it is left with a pre-scripted trajectory that points to design.

Questions about the time span, the anthropic argument, and multiple worlds

The lecturer addresses a question from someone in the audience about the difference between simple basic laws that lead to life on only one planet and creating a complex machine, and replies that this parallels the anthropic claim and that he will get to it later. He notes that the question “maybe there are other worlds” is also the other side of the same coin of the anthropic argument, and promises to return to it. He argues that the question is not only “who created it,” but also about the rarity of the values from which life emerges, and therefore the complexity does not disappear even if the starting point looks simple.

Redundancy, suffering, and non-optimality versus the question of existence

The lecturer responds to the question of why God supposedly chose a long process that includes “hysterical redundancy” and the suffering of many creatures, and distinguishes between the question of whether there is a watchmaker and the question of the quality of the design. He uses the example of “Paley’s watch” and argues that even if the watch is not optimal and it seems it could have been built more efficiently, that does not negate the existence of a watchmaker; it only means that the watchmaker thinks differently, or that the questioner does not understand his considerations. He argues that the proof is not based on optimality but on complexity and rarity, and therefore claims about suffering do not refute the claim of existence, but belong to a different philosophical question: “Why is there suffering in the world?”

The age of the world as an interpretive datum rather than a binding determination

The lecturer presents the possibility that the world appears to be 14 billion years old, but may have been created 6,000 years ago “with all the dinosaurs and skeletons in the ground,” and notes that one can also suggest ideas about an accelerated process at the beginning of the Big Bang in which long stretches of time “passed” in a different way. He argues that the difficulties surrounding cosmic history require factual assumptions that are not necessarily proven, and in any case they do not touch the core of his claim about the origin of the laws. He concludes by saying that questions about the Creator’s policy are different from the philosophical claim he is trying to establish: that such a complex and finely tuned world is not reasonably explained as the product of no guiding hand.

Okay, good morning. Let me briefly summarize where we are in this whole discussion of the physico-theological argument. What I’ve actually done up to now is shift the plane of the discussion, because I moved the discussion to a plane that lies outside the laws. That is, usually people base the physico-theological argument on what happens within the laws, right? How can life arise by chance? It’s not reasonable; there’s an extremely complex structure here, and so on. And to that people usually answer: okay, I’ll show you—there’s evolution, and there are other explanations that show that life can arise without a directing hand. In other words, a random process can lead to continuous improvement and to the creation of complex creatures, low entropy if you like. And to that I said: if so, then I retreat the argument one step backward and say: how did laws arise within which a random process can create life? That’s really the argument. In other words, now I’m asking not what the probability is that life would arise, but what the probability is that laws would arise within which biology and life and so on arise. And about that I said—the formulation, yes, maybe one more sentence before we proceed—that if I arrive at a factory that functions properly—I gave these examples—a factory that functions properly in a very impressive and coordinated way, and so on, or a washing machine that I suddenly see functioning in this very coordinated way among its parts, and I say: okay, apparently there was someone who runs the factory or created the machine. And to that the atheist says to me: what do you mean? Let me show you—there are rules in mechanics that show that a machine, if you press it this way and there’s such-and-such an electrical current, operates in this way. Or in the factory there’s a list of rules hanging there on the wall in the room, and everyone looks there and sees what his role is, and therefore the business runs; there’s no need to assume the existence of a manager or a creator of this complexity. That’s of course an argument we wouldn’t accept. Why not? Because you immediately ask: fine, but who wrote those rules that are hanging on the wall? Those rules explain the whole operation of the factory, but did someone write the rules? And that’s a question you have to answer for me. Without that you haven’t really presented an alternative. And the same thing with the washing machine. I can understand—the people who know mechanical engineering know that if you build a machine like this and that and press the button and the current comes and so on, then it operates in this particular way—but that of course doesn’t mean there wasn’t someone who created it. On the contrary, it means there probably was someone who created it in such a way that simply pressing a button would produce all this complex activity, because otherwise it doesn’t just happen by itself. Therefore the formulation from the laws—what I called from outside the laws—in other words, the question of how the laws arose, not how things operate within the laws—that really is the more precise and up-to-date formulation of the physico-theological argument. And regarding that, all the objections from evolution and so on are irrelevant, because evolution takes place within a system of natural laws that did not arise evolutionarily—not to mention abiogenesis and the formation of the first protein chain from which the evolutionary process begins onward, but until that point there was no evolution. Okay, we’ll still talk about abiogenesis. In any case, that’s the formulation I called the formulation from the laws. I said that this formulation, unlike other formulations, is not God of the gaps. That is, people usually attack arguments of this type by saying that they are based on a gap in scientific understanding. In other words, there’s something science doesn’t know how to explain, so that means there’s God. And to that the atheists answer, rightly: science once didn’t know how to explain lots of things, and we’re progressing; slowly but surely it knows how to explain more and more things. So true, we still haven’t finished the job—there are still things we don’t know how to explain—but wait, science will advance further and explain those too. If you build the proof for the existence of God on gaps in scientific knowledge, your future does not look bright. And again, I’m not talking here about a tactical argument—that it’s not worthwhile because then when they discover there’s no gap everyone will become atheists. Rather, that’s not the point. Granted, if that were my argument, then one really should become an atheist afterward. What’s the problem? That doesn’t scare me—that would be the conclusion. My problem isn’t that; my problem is that the proof is not good. It’s not because in the future maybe they’ll abandon the issue; it’s because already in the present I don’t accept that proof. It’s simply not a good proof. This is not a tactical question, it’s an essential one. A proof from lack of knowledge is not a proof. It’s not a good proof. Lack of knowledge should be remedied through research, not by positing metaphysical hypotheses such as the existence of God and the like. Why is the physico-theological argument not God of the gaps? Because there too, seemingly, I’m saying: after all, you don’t know how such a special system of laws came into being, and therefore there is God; apparently He created it. Wait, there’ll be more research, and they’ll discover why this particular system of laws arose and not another one. So apparently here too we are dealing with an argument of the God-of-the-gaps type. But that’s not true—I explained this, I’m just repeating it—it’s not true because here the gap is an essential gap. In other words, no research will ever close it. Because I’m not asking how a system of laws produces something; I’m asking how the system of laws itself came into being. Now assuming scientific research will discover how the system of laws arose—after all, every scientific explanation, by virtue of being scientific, is based on some scientific laws—then it will show me other laws that govern the formation of systems of laws. Fine, that will be a scientific explanation of how the scientific laws—the laws of nature—came into being, okay? But there too there will be laws, and I will ask about them: who created them? And in the end, even if we complete the journey like Einstein’s dream and arrive at a unified field theory, we will still have one general law from which all the other laws can be derived. But we will never get rid of the question: okay, and who created that one? No scientific research can close this—not because we lack knowledge and need to investigate more and then we’ll… no, that’s not it. Scientific research, by definition, is something that tries to find laws that explain the phenomenon you are studying. But when I ask where the laws came from, that lies outside the possibility and the definition of scientific research. Scientific research cannot close that. And if it closes it, then it will close it on the basis of another system of laws of the new science we discover, and it will explain to me how that system of laws came into being. Okay, then I’ll ask about the other system. Turtles all the way down, right? Meaning that in the end we will always remain with this. The only alternative is to say that all the laws of nature are the result of definitions and logical analysis of concepts. Basically the whole world is mathematics—there is no physics, no chemistry or any natural sciences, or not only natural sciences but at all; everything is mathematics. That is, once you understand the concepts well enough, define the concepts correctly, you derive the relations between them by analytical analysis, logical analysis. And then in principle you wouldn’t really need observations in science; all you need is to do the mathematics correctly. Now since almost no sane person believes in this possibility—that there’s no such thing as science and everything is mathematics and conceptual definition—I muted because there are noises here—so therefore I think I’m exempt from dealing with that. Theoretically it’s possible, very, very, very unlikely. And if the atheist, in retreating to defend himself against the physico-theological argument, has to end up in such a position—well, I rest my case. In other words, it seems to me that if in order to defend yourself against this argument you have to arrive at such an untenable, unreasonable, utterly unacceptable position, then come on—better just believe in God already. Once the alternative becomes extremely strained, that’s it. There’s always some strained alternative that can reject any proof. The whole point of the proof is to show that the alternative is strained, and therefore it is not reasonable to hold it. Yes, you know, I already mentioned Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four: he tells Watson that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. In other words, maybe you have a very, very improbable option, but if the alternative is impossible, then the improbable is a better alternative. So here too it’s the same: if you get to a point where you turn all of science into an empty activity—basically it’s all mathematical definition and we’re just idiots for making observations—then as far as I’m concerned, that’s perfectly fine. If that’s the alternative, then it seems to me I’ve proven the existence of God. That’s really the claim. That’s where we stopped last time. Maybe a short question? Yes. Again, suppose everything started with some simple law and some basic fundamental law or some six very simple constants, and now we need to discuss who created them, but they’re very, very simple, and in billions of galaxies this didn’t do anything, and on one tiny planet it created complex life. That’s very different from creating a washing machine, because a washing machine requires thousands of steps, each one distinct in itself, that someone sat and thought about their purpose and how to carry them out. And here we’re talking about someone who thought of some basic law that in one of billions upon trillions of stars rolled into complex life. So really we return to the cosmological claim of who created it, but the complexity claim kind of loses its force. I’ll get to that claim. I’ll just say that according to that thesis, with the washing machine too I would say the same thing. In other words, the washing machine really is a complex thing built on many, many steps, but you know, in all the other worlds you won’t find—in all the other planets you won’t find washing machines. So here it arose, okay, one time out of who knows how many—that’s basically the anthropic argument, I’ll get to that later. I’m saying there is basically a hidden assumption here: that there’s some marvelous product that maybe can’t arise on its own, and that assumes someone aspired to reach that marvelous product. But that’s circular—and what does it remind me of? That old skit by Rivka Michaeli and Yossi Banai: look what a masterpiece they made! They created ears for us, wow, so we’d have somewhere to put our glasses. That was their skit forty years ago. I’ll get to that later; that too is really the anthropic argument. I’ll get to that in a moment. Okay? Today I’m still planning to get there. Good. And there was also the question whether maybe there are other worlds or something—or ones that failed and we don’t see them, this is the only one, or they exist. I promised last time that I’d get to that, and that’s the other side of the same coin of the anthropic argument. I’ll show in a moment that it’s really the other side of the same argument; it’s not something additional, it’s two sides of the same coin. In a moment. So the claim is basically that the argument from the laws is not God of the gaps. Now in order to sharpen the argument from the laws a bit more, I want to refine it. If indeed we do not see the laws as merely the result of logical conceptual analysis, but there is also something observational here, then where is the observational element found within the laws of nature? Say the laws of physics for the sake of discussion. It lies—as was mentioned earlier—it lies in the constants. The previous questioner spoke of a system of constants, a simple system of constants—there is no such creature, that’s an oxymoron, a simple system of constants—but I’ll return to that in a moment. It is basically found in the constants. That is, the laws of nature, the laws of physics, are usually built in such a way that they have a certain structure of relations between the physical variables, and within that structure there are also constants hanging there—some numbers. We all know the law of gravitation. The law of gravitation, as far as its structure goes, says that the force of gravitation between two masses is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, one over r squared. That’s the structure. Okay? This structure in principle can be derived from conceptual analysis. Draw a sphere around one of the masses, the area of the sphere goes like r squared, and from that somehow you can derive that the form of the force will be one over r squared. But when I look at the formula for the force, the formula also includes a coefficient. Right? The formula is G—the gravitational constant—times the first mass times the second mass divided by the square of the distance. The G is actually the physical element in this law; everything else is structure. Only structure. It just says that it spreads out like spherical ripples from the central mass. That’s just structure. But there is a constant there, and that constant could have been one, two, 0.1, or ten to the minus eight. In other words, it could have had all kinds of weird values. And observations usually—not always, but usually, and the more science progresses the more this is true—focus on determining the value of the constants, not on the structural description. The structural description we usually know. We’re only asking what is this number, what is this G that’s sitting there. I know it goes like one over r squared. I’m asking: but what is this G? And for that I need an experiment. Now more than that—not only do I need an experiment for that, this is actually the scientific content of physical theories. Everything else really is mathematical structure. But for this you need observations. Now what I’m saying is not entirely exact, but that’s the essence: the more we advance in scientific understanding, the more it goes in that direction. We can derive the structures from conceptual analysis—that it goes like one over r squared—but the numbers we still need to measure, the constants. Now more than that, the special properties—the special properties of our world—are usually not found in the structural properties of the laws, but in the constants. In other words, to say the constants—the dielectric constant, the gravitational constant, Coulomb’s constant, whatever, the speed of light. There are various fundamental constants in physics. They used to talk about six or seven independent ones, but that surely changes by now with all the string theories and so on that try to find relations among the values of the constants. But again, those relations won’t help; at most they will reduce the number of constants to one. But that one will always be there, otherwise we’ve turned physics into mathematics. So one constant will always be there. Now what happens is that the values of the constants actually govern everything that happens here. In other words, if the values of the constants were a bit different, even by a small amount, everything we know in the world would not exist. In other words, there would be no chemistry, there would be no physics, there would be no chemistry, there would be no biology, there would be no physiology, and there would be no life. Okay? In other words, the special properties of the world—or of living creatures, let’s say, since that is the peak of lowest entropy because they have the highest complexity—are basically a result of the values of the constants. And if I translate the argument from the laws into this language, then I am basically asking: who fixed the values of the constants so that biology and life and complex creatures and so on would emerge here? And that is essentially the fine-tuning argument—the coordination among the values of the constants, the fine-tuning. And here I want to note—I’ll return to the expression that came up in the earlier question—there are some simple constants, right? That’s how the questioner put it. What does it mean, simple constants? Let’s say there’s only one constant in physics, okay? And that constant can take any numerical value whatsoever, say a real number—let’s keep it simple, not complex, everything’s fine—a real number between zero and one. In other words, let’s narrow it down even further. There is one constant on which all the laws of nature depend, that’s it, unified field theory, we’ve arrived—one constant on which all the laws of nature depend, and it takes values between zero and one. And because its value is 0.678159—right, continue to infinity, I don’t know whether it’s irrational, probably, odds are it’s irrational because there are more irrational numbers—so we get chemistry and biology and life and everything. If you changed it a little, that wouldn’t happen. Now this is the simplest situation one can speak of as a simple system of constants, right? But even here I can ask: okay, now let’s randomly choose a value for this constant. Okay? Suppose we randomly choose a value. What is the probability that we hit exactly that value that gives me chemistry, biology, and life? That’s not simple. It’s very complex. In words it sounds terribly simple. But to say there’s—yes, I already said that complexity translates into rarity. You can translate complexity into rarity; that’s exactly what entropy does. Entropy measures complexity through the rarity of a state. If the state is very, very—I showed this at the beginning of this series, right?—if I showed that the state is very, very rare, that means its entropy is low. Therefore rarity and complexity are two sides of the same coin. And now when I ask, assuming you need a very precise value of this constant—because of course if any value between a quarter and three quarters would give me our whole world, then the probability is one half, that’s not complex. Fine, I could get values between zero and one, and all the values between a quarter and three quarters are okay, so a random draw means the probability of getting it is half. I wouldn’t be impressed by that. But that’s not the situation. What was actually needed was—and I don’t know how many digits after the decimal point of precision for the constant are needed in order to get chemistry and biology and everything. So the probability that such a thing would come out of a blind, random, arbitrary drawing, without a directing hand, is negligible. And therefore in my view there is no such thing as a simple system of constants, because once a precise value of the constant is required, that means it is not simple but rare. Or it is complex or rare—for the purpose of the discussion here, these are synonymous words. Therefore the question remains exactly as it was, and that is basically the fine-tuning argument, yes? How is it that the tuning of the values of the constants fits exactly the emergence of life? Now later I’ll also get to the question raised earlier: that every other value would have created complex beings too, just of a different sort—not the life we know, but something else. There is such a claim too, and then again that drains my argument of content. I’ll get to that in a moment. But I want to make one more comment on this. Some people want to argue—I said earlier that evolution offers some kind of alternative to the spontaneous emergence of a complex system without a directing hand, but I said that this takes place within laws, and therefore the real question is: who built the laws? I spoke about the drunk and the canal, remember? I gave various examples of this, or dice being thrown. And therefore evolution is not really an alternative. There is another claim: even if evolution were an alternative, still before evolution began there first had to be abiogenesis. There had to arise a first protein chain from which the evolutionary process begins onward, or several protein chains from which the evolutionary process I described in previous sessions would begin. But how did the first protein chain arise? That doesn’t happen in an evolutionary process; there is not yet any evolution as long as there are no such chains—there is no evolution. So how did this thing arise? That is the process of abiogenesis. So there are those who want to argue against the atheists that even if you explain things by means of evolution and offer the evolutionary alternative to creation, you still won’t succeed in explaining what preceded evolution—from the Big Bang until the formation of the first living chains. So here there is actually very intensive work in current biological research trying to see whether processes of abiogenesis can be observed. Can life arise out of non-life? Not in an evolutionary process, which is the improvement of life, but I mean the emergence of life. That is, to take inanimate matter and somehow, out of it, within some primordial soup or another, suddenly a living chain can emerge from it, a genetic code chain. The question is whether such a thing can happen, and there is already some initial evidence—I’m not fully up to date on the state of the art, okay? On the current state. But there is initial evidence that they are making progress toward proving the possibility of such a thing. In other words, such things are formed. Now what do I ask—and this comes up a lot in debates. You see, this too is not an argument against us, say the neo-Darwinians. True, there are stages that preceded evolution, but there too we have a scientific explanation of how the business works. And once again this falls into the same fallacy I described earlier within evolution. Why? Because the question within the laws really does get an answer here. How can, within these given laws, a living chain arise spontaneously? A living chain can arise. So you show me that it can arise. I ask: but who created this system of laws within which life can arise spontaneously? This is a very special system of laws. Or in other words, I say this: if I think that life is something very complex and cannot arise from inanimate matter through a spontaneous process without a directing hand, then if you show me an experiment in which life really does arise in the laboratory from an inanimate system, what I say is: okay, then here too the Holy One, blessed be He, created life in that laboratory. Because after all, this doesn’t happen spontaneously. How did He do it? We didn’t see Him, He wasn’t there, He didn’t interfere in the experiment. How did He do it? Through the laws of nature. After all, the laboratory too is not exempt from the laws of nature; it operates according to the laws of nature, it measures them, it examines how they work. So basically what you showed me in the laboratory experiment is that within our given laws of nature here, life can arise. But who created the laboratory itself? Understand that if there were not a very, very special system of laws here, there would be no abiogenesis. Life would not just arise from inanimate nature if the basic laws of nature were different. Right? That is clear to us. This is a very, very special process. So even if it can happen, that only means the laws are special, because obviously they allow such a special process to happen. And once again I ask the question from the laws, not the question within the laws. Who is responsible for this being the system of laws within which our world operates? And now all the experiments you do change nothing. Because the experiments you do merely close scientific gaps for us. They close lacunae, lack of scientific knowledge; up to there we gradually learn how the business works. But when I ask who created science itself—not what happens within science, but who created the laws within which this business works—that scientific research cannot explain in principle, by definition. That’s not a gap. Okay? That is the claim. Therefore these experiments in abiogenesis too have no significance in this discussion. Now the claim I want to make—I want to go one step further and say this. Basically what is always under discussion here is the question: why do I need to assume the existence of a directing hand? After all, I have an alternative in which a random process can do the same job. That’s evolution. A random process can do the same job. And a random process means there is no directing hand. Okay? So basically there’s no need to arrive at the assumption of a directing hand. The focus of the discussion is on the random components that exist within the evolutionary process. What is the component? There are several random components in the evolutionary process. One of them, for example, is mutations, the changes that the codon chains, the genetic chains, undergo—they undergo various changes. I already described that in previous sessions, and those changes are a random process. It happens in all directions, and of course whichever of them has adaptive ability survives. The one more successful in coping with the circumstances is the one that survives. All the rest go extinct. That is the evolutionary description. There are also random elements in the circumstances, not only in the mutations. After all, each time the creatures produced by those mutations face different circumstances. What creates those circumstances? I don’t know, chance—sometimes there’s heat, sometimes drought, sometimes cold, and creatures that can’t withstand the cold go extinct, creatures that can’t withstand the heat go extinct. The circumstances are random circumstances, and each set of circumstances will of course lead evolution down a different path. Because each time it depends on the circumstances, that will wipe out the creatures not suited to those circumstances. Therefore there are random components in the evolutionary process, and they basically take us to life without a directing hand. That is the essential meaning of the debate. In other words, what do we do with the random components of evolution? To that I want to answer on two levels. One level is that even if there is a random component in evolution—and that is basically what I’ve said until now—even if there is a random component in evolution, it is randomness that takes place within a system of laws, and the laws themselves are not random. There are laws of physics or laws of nature—chemistry, biology, whatever—and within them there are various mutations and different physical circumstances that cause the evolutionary process to proceed in all kinds of apparently random directions. But all that takes place within a system of laws that is a rigid system. Therefore when I ask what created the system of laws, you can’t answer me: it’s a random matter. No, this random matter takes place within a system of laws, and without the system of laws the randomness would lead us nowhere. Remember the example of the drunk and the canal? There I illustrated this. So that’s the claim I’ve made up till now. Now I want to add something even more far-reaching. In fact, the random components in evolution aren’t really what they seem. And here there are various studies trying to examine this. Again, I’m not familiar with the details, I’m not a biologist, but I’ll speak in the big picture. We basically distinguish between two kinds of randomness. There is what we may call epistemic randomness, and there is ontic randomness. Epistemic—epistemology is the theory of knowledge; ontology is the theory of being. In other words, randomness in reality itself versus randomness in our perception of reality. What do I mean? Let’s say I roll a die, okay? Or flip a coin. Usually we handle the outcomes of such an experiment using probability, probabilistic calculations: what’s the probability of an even outcome on a die? One half. What’s the probability of an odd one? Also one half. What’s the probability of a result greater than five, greater than or equal to five? One third. What’s the probability of a four? One sixth. And so on. Right? We speak in the language of probabilities. Now when I throw the die, is there anything random in that process? The answer is no. There is nothing random here. It is a mechanical, rigid, completely deterministic process. I take a die, throw it upward with some initial velocity I impart, in some direction I impart, with environmental conditions, air density, winds, whatever you want, the shape of the die—everything is data. In principle, if I feed all that into a very, very sophisticated computer—and it’s a very complicated calculation—it will tell me on which face the die will land. It will tell me it comes out four. If I give it all the data, the result is predetermined. And that basically means that rolling a die is not a random process. There is nothing random here. So why do we use probability to analyze the outcomes of this? Same thing with a coin, of course, and so on. Because we do not know the parameters that determine the outcome, or we don’t know how to do the calculation, or we don’t know the parameters. We don’t know the exact speed given to the die at the start, or in exactly what direction it is going, or what the momentum is, whatever—all kinds of data I need in order to calculate the trajectory the die will follow until it falls. It’s very complicated, and it is also very dependent on initial conditions. Exactly which direction—if it’s half a degree to the right or left—it will give a totally different result. Therefore there is sensitivity to initial conditions here; that’s what usually happens in chaos. And since there is sensitivity to initial conditions, we cannot really carry out this calculation precisely, and we move to probabilistic calculations. And that’s what happens in chaos, by the way. In chaos, since the calculations are complicated because there is a very sensitive dependence on initial conditions, people often do probabilistic calculations even though there is nothing probabilistic in chaos. It is all deterministic, completely deterministic processes. So this means that in rolling a die or flipping a coin, the gap in information, or my need for probability, is an epistemic need. In other words, I don’t know reality well enough, I lack information about reality, and therefore I use probability. If I had full information, I wouldn’t need probability; I would do a Newtonian calculation and tell you what the coin or die will land on. The use of probability comes from a lack of information. I lack the information; the problem is with me, not with reality itself. Therefore I call it epistemic doubt. Cognitive doubt. In my cognition I do not have all the data, I don’t know, so I do probabilities. I do probabilistic calculations. If I had all the data, I wouldn’t need probability—and the data exist. As far as the world itself is concerned, there are very clear data. The die set off with a given speed, a given momentum, in a certain direction; the environmental conditions are known, they are fixed. I don’t know them, but someone who did know them—like Laplace’s demon—if you gave me all the data and a sufficiently strong computer, I would tell you where the die will fall and on what face. That is the first type of doubt; I call it epistemic doubt. There is ontic doubt. Ontic doubt is doubt—I actually call it not doubt but vagueness. Vagueness in reality itself, not in my knowledge of reality, but in reality itself. I’ll give you an example; there are halakhic examples of this. Actually the penny dropped for me from Jewish law. For example, the Talmud in tractate Kiddushin discusses betrothal that is not fit for intercourse. Someone sent an agent to betroth a woman for him. Now the agent betrothed one of the women and died. We have no idea which woman he betrothed. So the Talmud says that I, the sender, am forbidden to all the women in the world. Why? Because for any woman in the world, it could be that her sister is married to me or her mother is married to me, and therefore it could be that she is my wife’s sister or my wife’s daughter, and I am forbidden to her. That’s what the Talmud says. That is epistemic doubt. Why? Because there is a particular woman who was betrothed to me; I just don’t know who she is. In principle, if it were revealed from Heaven, right, I could ask the Holy One, blessed be He, and He would tell me who the woman is. I’m just not the Holy One, blessed be He; I don’t know. There are things—I have a lack of information about reality. That is epistemic doubt. But what happens in another situation? I give—or the agent gives, doesn’t matter—a father a prutah who has two daughters and says to him: one of your two daughters is betrothed to me. Without defining which one. One of them, I don’t care which, they’re both nice, both perfectly fine, I don’t care which one—one of them, give me one of them. Okay? Take a prutah, give me one of your daughters. So there is a dispute between Abaye and Rava; this is what is called betrothal not fit for intercourse. What does that mean? After all, here, let’s say these are Rachel and Leah. Suppose I decide that Rachel is the wife. Then if I have relations with Leah, I’m having relations with my wife’s sister; I’m forbidden to have relations with Leah. But by the same token I’m also forbidden to have relations with Rachel, because maybe Leah is the wife and Rachel is my wife’s sister. That means that in practice neither of them is now permitted to me for intercourse. And because of that it is betrothal not fit for intercourse. And on this they disagree: Abaye says it is valid betrothal, Rava says it is not valid betrothal. Now the Talmud—and also the medieval authorities (Rishonim)—treat this as a kind of doubt. Because of doubt each of them is forbidden to me. Because if Rachel is my wife, then Leah is my wife’s sister. If Leah is my wife, then Rachel is my wife’s sister. So because of that, each of them is forbidden to me out of doubt. Now I ask: what is the problem? According to Maimonides, Torah-level doubt is ruled leniently. Only rabbinically is it ruled stringently. But at the Torah level, in a case of doubt, one can be lenient. So how is there betrothal not fit for intercourse? At the Torah level I am permitted to have relations with either of them, because it is only a doubt, and Torah-level doubt is ruled leniently. Only rabbinically am I forbidden to have relations with them. So at the Torah level this is betrothal fit for intercourse. So why does Rava say it is betrothal not fit for intercourse and therefore not valid betrothal? My answer, following what Rabbi Shimon Shkop explains in the passage—he doesn’t answer this point in Maimonides, but I think this point in Maimonides is very good evidence—he explains it by logic. And it is clearly correct logically even without the difficulties from Maimonides. The doubt being discussed here is not a doubt at all. Suppose in the case of the agent who betrothed a woman, I could go to Elijah the Prophet and say to him: listen, find out from the Holy One, blessed be He, which woman the agent betrothed for me—let Him reveal it to me in secret. And if he were willing to reveal it to me, I would know who the woman is. And assuming the Torah is not in Heaven and so on, I would know who the woman is. As far as Heaven is concerned, it is revealed; the Holy One, blessed be He, knows who the woman is, I don’t know. I have a lack of information. But in the case of betrothal not fit for intercourse, I betrothed one of the two sisters without defining which one. Here even the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t know which of them is betrothed to me. There is no specific one who is betrothed to me. It’s not that there is one, I just don’t know which one. There isn’t one; it is one non-specific one. I betrothed one woman without defining which one out of the two. That is what I call not doubt but vagueness, fuzziness, right? Doubt is handled with probability; vagueness is handled with fuzzy logic. Often they are very similar, but conceptually or philosophically they are completely different. Since there is nothing to handle with probability here, there is no point in using probability to deal with this problem. When you ask me what the probability is that Rachel is the one betrothed to me, you are basically saying: what is the probability that the truth is that Rachel is betrothed to me, I just don’t know it. But here there is no truth. It is not that one of the two is betrothed to me and I ask what the chances are that it’s this one or that one. There is no one who is really, truly betrothed to me. One of the two is betrothed to me without defining which one. That is not relevant to probability. Probability deals with a situation where reality itself is fixed. I just do not know what reality is, so I do a probabilistic weighting of the different possibilities before me. But if in reality itself there is no answer—not because I don’t know, but because reality itself is not fixed, not defined—then in such a case this is really fuzzy logic, not probability. It is a state of vagueness and not a state of doubt, or if you like, ontic doubt and not epistemic doubt. Yes, it is doubt in reality itself, in being, in the entities of reality, not in my knowledge about them. Now it turns out that we use probability in both of these kinds of situations. For example, in the standard interpretations of quantum theory, what we are talking about is not doubt but vagueness. Right, Schrödinger’s cat, as is well known—it is not perhaps alive perhaps dead. It’s not that there is a true state of the cat and I just don’t know what its true state is. It is in a superposition, in a state that combines the possibility of life with the possibility of death, and it is in a combination of these two states, and measurement collapses it into one of them, right, collapses it into one of them. Could someone explain Schrödinger’s cat to ignoramuses like me, because I didn’t understand why that is vagueness and not doubt in reality? So I’m explaining now, again, without getting into quantum theory—I’ll explain only the meaning of the quantum statement. The meaning of the quantum statement is not that the cat is either alive or dead and I don’t know. The cat is in a state of superposition, which is both alive and dead simultaneously. And is there any way to explain briefly why that is so? If there were a way to explain briefly why that is so, I assume they’d be doing that in all the universities. I don’t know anyone who can explain briefly why that is so. Okay, thanks. You know, there’s a famous story that someone once asked Arthur Eddington—British Nobel Prize winner, astronomer—they say there are only three people who understand relativity. So Eddington asked who the third was, besides Einstein and himself. But afterward they asked Feynman, also a Jewish American Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman, a famous clown, a similar question about quantum theory, and he said: leave it, relativity is simple, every idiot understands it. Quantum theory nobody understands. Quantum theory we don’t know how to explain; we’ve simply gotten used to it. That’s all. When you ask why it is like that, I don’t think there is any physicist or philosopher or anyone else who can explain it to you. We’ve simply gotten used to it—it’s just like that. There are scientific indications that this is the situation. To explain to you the meaning of the situation and what it means, I can’t, because any such explanation will try to map that situation onto patterns I know, but that is exactly what they’re telling me: that it doesn’t map onto the patterns I know. As for Jewish law, there are several such cases. There’s the difference between an androgynous person and a tumtum, and twilight according to some commentators, right? There are several passages… Right, right. Again—but there I’m not sure it’s the same thing. Well, we could get into that; I think it’s not exactly the same thing. In other words, a tumtum is really epistemic doubt. That is, the person is something, we just don’t know because it is blocked. But the androgynous person, who has both kinds of signs, is not exactly the same as Schrödinger’s cat. Okay, so this is not the place to get into it. But it is similar. There are other places. If you want, I’ll give you another example from Jewish law—after all, this is supposed to be some kind of Torah lecture, right? So in Jewish law there is another example. For instance, there is what’s called an inevitable consequence that one does not care about—you know, never mind, I’m already drifting, but let’s talk about it a little. There is a dispute between the Taz and Rabbi Akiva Eiger; the Biur Halakha is lengthy on this. You know there is the law of an unintended act, a dispute between Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Yehuda, and according to Rabbi Shimon an unintended act is exempt, or even permitted. Okay? What is an unintended act? Someone drags a bench and a furrow is made in the ground on the Sabbath, and the question is whether he violates plowing or building or not. If he did not intend it—he just wanted to drag the bench, he did not want to make a furrow—then he is exempt. Okay? In a situation where the ground is soft so that it is certain in advance that if you drag a bench there a furrow will be made, that is called an inevitable consequence. There Rabbi Shimon agrees that one is liable—an inevitable consequence. Okay? So if the ground is such that I do not know in advance for certain that a furrow will be made, I am exempt. If I know for certain that a furrow will be made—it is soft ground—then I am liable. That is an inevitable consequence even according to Rabbi Shimon; and we rule according to Rabbi Shimon. Now the Taz and Rabbi Akiva Eiger disagree about what happens if I want to close a box on the Sabbath. Now there is a concern that there may be flies inside. And if I close the box, then I trap the flies. Now I don’t know whether there are flies inside. Okay? So I’m basically in doubt as to whether there are or aren’t flies inside. May I close the box? I am closing the box not in order to trap the flies—trapping is one of the prohibited labors on the Sabbath, right?—I am closing it not to trap the flies, but because I want to close it for all sorts of reasons. But it is possible that unintentionally I will also trap flies with this closing, okay? So the Taz claims that in such a case it is permitted to close the box. Why? And again, one can discuss at length whether the Taz really says this and exactly what he says, but this is the standard understanding. Why? Because after all it is not certain there are flies inside, I’m in doubt. Right? Therefore this is not an inevitable consequence, because an inevitable consequence is only when the forbidden result will certainly occur. I know in advance for certain that it will occur. But that’s only because you don’t know; the flies are already there. Okay, and that’s exactly why I’m bringing this example. So the Taz says that here this is really a case of not an inevitable consequence, because it’s not certain to happen; you don’t know whether there are flies there or not. Rabbi Akiva Eiger says against him—this is in Yoreh De’ah—that in such a case it is called a doubtful inevitable consequence, and it is forbidden, because Torah-level doubt is ruled stringently. What is a doubtful inevitable consequence? Seemingly that’s an oxymoron. If it’s doubtful, it’s not inevitable. The whole idea of an inevitable consequence is that there is no doubt. If there is doubt, then there is no inevitability. In other words, if there is doubt here, then it’s not an inevitable consequence. Rabbi Akiva Eiger says no. After all, if there are flies inside—if the truth is that there are flies inside—if you close the box, then you will certainly trap them; that is an inevitable consequence. If there are no flies inside, then you didn’t trap anything at all—you certainly didn’t trap anything. The whole difference is that I don’t know whether there are flies inside or not. That is merely an epistemic matter. I don’t know whether there are or aren’t; that is doubt. Doubt does not exempt you from an inevitable consequence, because if there are flies, even if you don’t know it, in reality there are flies, and then the closing will certainly trap them, right? Therefore this is really an inevitable consequence. But what? You don’t know whether there is a prohibition of an inevitable consequence here. It is a doubtful inevitable consequence, and therefore Torah-level doubt is ruled stringently, and you must be stringent. What would Rabbi Akiva Eiger say about the one of two women case? The fly inside is Schrödinger’s fly, okay? Now if it’s dead, then I close the box and I haven’t trapped anything—there’s no prohibition in trapping a dead creature. But if it’s alive, then I have violated the prohibition of trapping. I claim that in such a case Rabbi Akiva Eiger would say this is not an inevitable consequence. It is not a doubtful inevitable consequence; it is permitted. He would agree with the Taz, because this is ontic doubt—or really vagueness—and not epistemic doubt. Epistemic doubt and not ontic doubt—sorry. Okay? But in the case of dragging a bench over the ground, think about it. That’s the example the Talmud gives for an unintended act. Now that doesn’t make sense. Why? When I drag a bench—what? With the bench too it’s the same thing. Exactly. I don’t know whether the ground is soft or hard. In every situation you can think of, it’s like that. After all, it is always only epistemic doubt. Suppose one drags the bench across the ground. If I were an expert in soils, a geologist or whatever, who knew exactly how to analyze what will happen there, the geologist would tell me whether a furrow will be made there or not. The fact that for me it is uncertain whether a furrow will be made is only because I’m not a soil expert. And even if there is no geologist in the world who knows it, that doesn’t matter, because on the principled level the answer is clearly predetermined. I just don’t know it because it’s complicated, because I’m not enough of an expert, for all sorts of reasons. So if that’s the case, Rabbi Akiva Eiger should have said there too that this is always doubtful prohibition—not that it is or isn’t an inevitable consequence. Once there is doubt, if the prohibition occurred in the end, then you are exempt, right? I’m talking about a case that is not an inevitable consequence. Rabbi Akiva Eiger says: what do you mean? If a furrow was made in the end, that means from the beginning it was already determined that a furrow would be made. So if a furrow was made, then that retroactively reveals that it was already an inevitable consequence, and you should be liable. How can it be that one is exempt when dragging a bench and making a furrow according to Rabbi Akiva Eiger? And the claim is much broader, because this is basically true of every situation in the world. There are no ontic doubts in the world; all the doubts in the world are epistemic. Therefore the law of inevitable consequence—or of an unintended act that is not an inevitable consequence—gets drained of content, because once the prohibition happened it turns out retroactively that it was already inevitable from the start that it would happen. So how are we to understand Rabbi Akiva Eiger? I can’t hear. So how are we to understand Rabbi Akiva Eiger? That’s what I’m asking. Unless we say there is also a component depending on how he will pull it—we don’t know how hard he will pull. No, that changes nothing. Because how he will pull is also a physical question. You don’t know how he will pull, but in reality his physiology already determines how he will pull. If you understood that too, you would know how he will pull. But he has free choice; we’re talking about a human being. He has free choice; everything is in Heaven’s hands except fear of Heaven. This isn’t a question of fear of Heaven. How he drags the bench is just a technical decision. If you knew his whole physiological and mental structure, you would know how he drags. Again, you wouldn’t know because it’s complicated, but it’s still epistemic; it’s all epistemic. And then I think the answer is that the halakhic perspective is usually a layman’s perspective, not an expert’s perspective. And if you ask ordinary people whether dragging a bench like this will make a furrow or not, they’ll tell you: look, it depends, maybe yes maybe no, it’s doubtful. So ordinary people see it as ontic doubt even though in truth the experts know it is epistemic doubt. But the halakhic treatment of these situations is as epistemic doubt and not ontic doubt. Whereas with flies inside a box, every sensible person you ask—not something that depends on sophisticated understanding and expertise—every sensible person you ask will tell you: what do you mean, if there are flies inside, then obviously if you close it you are certainly trapping them. And if it turns out in the end that you trapped them, that means there were apparently flies there, and from the beginning this was an inevitable consequence. Therefore there Rabbi Akiva Eiger says that this thing is a doubtful inevitable consequence—epistemic doubt and not ontic doubt, sorry. Okay? But in the case of the ground, where on the expert level, on the professional level, it’s the same thing, on the layman’s level it isn’t the same thing. Because the layman sees it as doubt and not as vagueness. And Jewish law goes with the categories accepted in the world. The Torah was not given to ministering angels nor to experts. It was given to the general public. The way the public sees things—that is the binding perspective on the halakhic level. Yes, that’s Rabbi Daniel Adler’s motto; he repeated it a lot in various contexts. But for our purposes, what I want to say is that these two situations, which we often tend to mix together, are different situations. There are doubts and there are vaguenesses. Vagueness means reality itself is fuzzy, not well defined. In doubts, reality is well defined; I just don’t know all the information about reality. Why is this important? Because in reality itself—this much I still want to get to, I’m just a bit delayed today—because in reality itself, all the doubts you can think of, all the doubts we know, are doubts and not vaguenesses. In physics there are no vaguenesses; there are doubts. Physics is deterministic. At most I don’t know how to do the calculation, and therefore I don’t know what will come out. But if someone did know, then the calculation would be deterministic, and therefore all the doubts are epistemic doubts. Now I’ll deal with quantum theory. I know some of you already want to ask about quantum theory. I’ll deal with it, because there, apparently, it is an exception. But first I just want to finish the idea in order to close the circle. My claim is this. In fact, there are no random components in evolution. Biologists tend to speak of random components in evolution. Why? Because they’re not physicists. And rightly so—that’s not a criticism, they’re right. In their mode of treatment they really should see this as a random event. But if you ask me as a physicist, is there anything random here? Absolutely not. There is nothing random at all; everything is deterministic. It’s just so complicated to do the calculation and see whether there will be heat or cold. Ask the weather forecasters. Can they tell with certainty where and when it will be hot and for how long and how hot? We don’t know how to do those calculations; it’s complicated. Does that mean there is ontic vagueness? The answer is no. Meteorological processes are completely deterministic processes; there is nothing quantum there. Deterministic processes. So why do we speak the language of probabilities and why are we often wrong? Because it’s complicated; the calculation is very complex. That’s all. So when you ask whether there will be a drought—what will the process of evolutionary adaptation do?—that depends on the circumstances: will there be drought, will there be heat, will there be cold, will there be lions there, leopards, monkeys? What will you have to cope with? So apparently this is random—that’s what biologists say. All the simulations are simulations that assume the circumstances are determined randomly. But that is of course exactly like a die or a coin; rolling a die or flipping a coin is random only in the sense that it is difficult to calculate. But it is not really random. There is nothing random there. It is random only in the sense that it is difficult to calculate. But really, if I knew everything, as Laplace said, if you gave me all the data, I would calculate for you exactly where the drought will be and when, and where there will be lions and leopards, and what you’ll have to deal with. Therefore notice what this means. It means that if you gave me the Big Bang—the data at the moment of the Big Bang—I would tell you that right now I am saying the word “word,” by deterministic calculation. Why can’t I do that? Because I don’t have enough computational power and not all the data are in my hands. But on the principled level—I’m not speaking right now about human choice; of course there is also choice here—but let’s say in the natural world without choice, the inanimate and the living world. In such a situation basically nothing is really uncertain; there is nothing that is truly random or accidental. We don’t know, and therefore we use probability, just as with dice and coin tosses. From the perspective of physicists this whole business is deterministic. That’s just why physicists don’t know how to handle these situations, because predicting the physical calculation of whether the tiger will eat the monkey on the right or the monkey on the left has no chance—it’s a terribly complicated calculation, and that a tiger will even get there at all. Therefore biologists are right to work with probabilistic tools, because at their level of integration—which is not microphysical but macro, tigers and weather—at the macro level these are random processes as far as I’m concerned. So this basically means that the entire evolutionary explanation—not only does it take place within a rigid system of laws, and therefore even if it has random components, they are random components operating within a rigid framework, and I ask who created the framework. Now I’m making a more far-reaching claim. Even what happens within the framework is not random. What happens within the framework is completely deterministic. I use probability because I do not know how to perform the calculation, that’s all. But there is nothing random there. So now I ask an even stronger question, and I’ll get to it later. If so, the whole evolutionary process from the Big Bang until the lecture I’m giving to you now, and your sitting here facing me, is all basically deterministic; it is all essentially predetermined. There is nothing random here. You understand that if this is the way we look at it, then the claim that there is a directing hand behind it only grows stronger. Evolution does not offer an alternative to the claim that God created the world and life. Evolution strengthens the proof for the existence of God; not only does it not weaken it, it strengthens it. Why? Because in the evolutionary process I suddenly understand that this entire business is really taking place deterministically under a cloak of randomness—as if we can’t see, so we use probabilistic calculations—but in fact everything is deterministic. So now tell me: in a deterministic calculation you begin with a singular point of concentrated matter, and after fourteen and a half billion years people are sitting here listening to a lecture; there are airplanes, there are all the technological wonders of our world. So there’s no directing hand that did this? The alternative evolutionary process proposed by the neo-Darwinians not only does not weaken the idea, it strengthens it. If I were to leave a lump of plasticine in the corner of the room and come back after fourteen billion years and find a safari there—the room locked and sealed, nothing there—and I’d find a whole safari, what would I say? Well, plasticine can turn into a safari sometimes, it happens? Obviously not. And if I tell you that all the laws governing the dynamics of that plasticine all the way to the safari are deterministic, rigid, then that means that whoever created the laws intended from the beginning that we start with plasticine and end with a safari. And He made the laws in such a way that they were fine-tuned, well-tuned, so that from the point of a Big Bang you get all of life and all the craziness we know around us. So this is the father of physico-theological proofs. This is the strongest possible formulation: following evolution and scientific understanding, we understand much better that the physico-theological proof only gets stronger and not weaker. Therefore the random components of evolution, which supposedly come to produce an alternative to the assumption that there is God—since they are not random, they are sawing off the branch they sit on, shooting themselves in the foot. Because once I show you that this is not random, I have really shown you that you are only strengthening the proof that there must be external involvement here by some factor; this does not happen on its own. Because this is a process whose destination was clear from the outset. It wasn’t clear to me because I don’t know; it’s terribly complicated. But to whoever created it, it was clear. So you can ask: was it aimed at this fourteen and a half billion years in advance? Well, if that isn’t the directing hand of a genius being, then I don’t know what is. So one could ask—in the end, if we come down now from this peak and go back, we defined that there is no knockdown proof. Fine. We’ll get to the point where not probability but plausibility is what decides. The data will be such that in the end every reasonable person will tend in that direction. And I ask a simple question—not only about today, I’m stepping back. This whole story exists, and you say for billions—I don’t know how many—years the Creator of the world is sitting there. Billions of years, just relaxed, chilling, as they say, nothing interests Him. Then suddenly today He decided, a few thousand years ago, okay, let’s make human beings. And then you made human beings, then the Jews as some tiny fraction of a percent, and suddenly—how, where is the plausibility in this? What? No, everything I said is exactly against what you’re saying. He didn’t sit there until six thousand years ago. He sat there fourteen billion years ago. I’m saying He sat there fourteen billion years ago and for fourteen billion years these species didn’t interest Him? Nothing? And then suddenly He decided He needed… Listen to me for a second. It’s not that for fourteen billion years it didn’t interest Him. Fourteen billion years ago He decided to create a world, and He decided that in this world, after fourteen billion years, people would be formed and receive the Torah and do whatever things He wants them to do. That plan was there from the beginning. I’m trying to understand the fourteen billion years. And it took fourteen billion years to be realized because that was His plan from the outset. It’s not that He woke up six thousand years ago. On the contrary. The whole point of the argument I just made is that nothing happened six thousand years ago. Everything was predetermined in a deterministic process. He decided to create us and the world in this way, the evolutionary way, and therefore He fixed the laws so that in the evolutionary process this would be the final result. But Rabbi, suppose there were two possibilities. One possibility, in the way the Rabbi says, which is certainly correct and deterministic, is that He thought about it fourteen billion years ago and started this process. Why didn’t He do it… and along the way there is insane redundancy, a life of suffering of billions of unnecessary, meaningless creatures that died and were killed until Abraham our forefather came along? Or He could have spared all that unnecessary suffering and that insane redundancy and created Adam the first man six thousand years ago, and after that Noah, and so on. What would the Rabbi have done in His place? So I’ll tell you what I would have done in His place—if I were as wise as He is. But I’ll answer that question later. You know what? I’ll say it now, even though we’ll get to it later. Suppose you found Paley’s watch, right? You find a watch lying on the floor, and Paley says: look, it’s so complex, it can’t have arisen by itself. There was a watchmaker who made it. Now suppose you find a watch that is built non-optimally, okay? In other words, you would have built it more efficiently. It has three springs where it could have been built with two. Does that mean there was no watchmaker? No, of course there was a watchmaker. After all, the watch is a complex watch. There was a watchmaker. But what? It isn’t built the way you would have built it. In other words, its optimality is not your optimality. That only means the watchmaker’s mind is different from your mind, that’s all. But it does not mean there is no watchmaker. Right, but he still has to answer about the fourteen billion… Exactly the same thing. You would have built the world in such a way that it immediately came into being without the redundancy. Okay, very good. I still ask what the probability is that the world with the redundancy arose on its own. The answer is zero. Therefore there is a watchmaker. True, the watch He built is not optimal, it seems non-optimal to me. That only means His mind is probably different from my mind. From His point of view, this is the optimal way He wants it, for some reason or other. The proof is not built on the world’s optimality. The proof is built on its complexity, which means that if the alternative is that there is no watchmaker, that is implausible. Clearly there is a watchmaker. But this proof is so tautological, maybe… You need to ask Him why He built it this way and not another way. I’m not interested in His policy; I’m interested in His existence. And I claim that this proves His existence. Yes, but if for fourteen billion years we are unable to understand why He waited, that means that every minute we talk is just a waste of time, because it means there is no chance in the world that we’ll understand His intentions. I’m not trying to understand. First of all, I’m not trying to understand. Second, I haven’t lived fourteen billion years; meanwhile I’ve only been on this planet for a bit over sixty. But we are trying to understand; based on this we put on tefillin every day, based on this we… No, not at all. I don’t put on tefillin because of this. That has nothing to do with tefillin. I… no, I’m saying because He commanded, not because I understand why He waited fourteen billion years. If we were in a position to understand Him… No, I’m not trying to understand Him. On the contrary, that’s exactly what I answered the previous questioner: on the contrary, my whole thesis does not depend at all on my understanding Him. On the contrary, I do not understand Him. But I claim that even the non-optimal watch—because I don’t understand, so this watch doesn’t seem optimal to me—but still such a complex watch, clearly the watchmaker created it. That’s all. I rest my case. In other words, once there is a watchmaker, that’s it. You ask me, fine, but the mind of this watchmaker is not understandable to me. Okay, the mind of the Holy One, blessed be He, is not understandable to me. That’s true in other areas too, not only in this one. But that doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist. On the contrary, when you infer from that that He does not exist, that is personification, anthropomorphism. You decide that He has to think like you, and if He does not think like you, then He doesn’t exist. No. I’m telling you He exists because there is good evidence that He exists. And the fact that He doesn’t think like you—fine, He doesn’t think like you. You yourself explained that we’re not such great geniuses, so it’s hardly surprising that He doesn’t think like we do. The proof does not depend on that. Therefore these refutations that often come up against the proof—what about the redundancy?—that refutes nothing; it’s nonsense. It’s a misunderstanding of the argument. Yes, but when you stand existentially before this infinite suffering, you stand there bewildered. Existentially, I don’t know. Go to a psychologist and take a pill. I’m asking a philosophical question. I don’t know what existential means. Does it bother you? Fine, so that’s the psychologist’s job. I’m asking what is true. No, seriously, I’m not saying it as a joke. This is not a philosophical question. Is it hard for you? Fine, so what can I do? Take a pill or I don’t know what. But the question is whether it’s true. Unnecessary suffering of billions of years is not a philosophical question? What did you say? Unnecessary suffering, meaningless. God could have created—you agree with me, He is all-powerful—He could have created everything from the start six thousand years ago and spared us the billions of creatures that lived and died in vain. That is a philosophical question. He didn’t do that, and the Rabbi says that’s not at all a philosophical question, it’s a question for medical treatment. No. It may be that the suffering is not unnecessary. Let me explain—one second. What I said is that if existentially I stand before it and it doesn’t sit well with me and my stomach hurts, that is not a philosophical question. Go to a psychologist to treat you. You ask me why there is suffering—that is definitely a philosophical question. But that is a different philosophical question. Because I’m discussing whether there is or is not God. And the answer to that is that there is. Because such a world is not likely to have arisen by itself. That is the philosophical problem I was dealing with here. If you want to take me to another philosophical question, then that is indeed another philosophical question. Why is there suffering in the world? I have answers to that too, by the way. I’m a very clever fellow; I have answers to that too. But we’ll talk about that another time perhaps, if you want. I came to prove that there is God. The Rabbi taught us in another framework that apparently there was no possibility of creating a different system of laws without… but… but to create the world six thousand years ago with such and such constants, or fourteen billion years ago and save something along the way, the Rabbi agrees He could have done that. No, obviously He could have done that, and maybe He did. Who told you He didn’t? But the Rabbi says he agrees it was created fourteen billion… No. I agree that today it looks as if it was built over fourteen billion years. Maybe it was created six thousand years ago with all the dinosaurs and skeletons in the ground? That is always possible. Right. No, I’m not saying that’s how it was. I’m only saying that when you raise objections, you need to show me why you think it was so. Maybe He did it by an accelerated process? Maybe the evolutionary process actually ran quickly in the first few seconds of the Big Bang, and all the fourteen billion years really passed in a few seconds because the mass was very concentrated. I already mentioned that there’s some physicist who even did such a calculation, that it really maps to roughly eight thousand years or something like that, and all the rest is the history we know. Many things are possible. In order to raise objections, you need to show that it really happened. I don’t know whether it happened or not. But in any case, for our purposes, that is a philosophical question, but a different one: the question of suffering. We can discuss it, but it is different. I am asking whether the world as we know it indicates that there is God. The answer is yes. The philosophical answer is yes. That is the philosophical question I am dealing with here. Questions of existential stomachaches are not philosophical questions at all. Not stomachaches. We’re okay with the fact that in the end we’ll have to weigh one plausibility against another. Doesn’t this have to do with plausibility? If suffering was created here, that isn’t plausible. I’m just saying He is cruel. What does plausibility have to do with it? Not the suffering, not the suffering. I’m saying: on the one hand you say it’s implausible that this arose by itself, that there wasn’t someone who created it. On the other hand, we see some state of affairs that seems implausible to us. Why implausible? What does implausible mean? Again: the watch is not optimal. There is a very, very complex watch here, okay? But really not optimal, built stupidly. Is there a watchmaker or not? Clearly there is. It’s just that the watchmaker is stupid. Or you are stupid and you don’t understand why the watchmaker built it this way. Either way, the watchmaker’s mind is different from your mind. That’s all. That’s the conclusion one should draw, not that there is no watchmaker. That is exactly the point. This is not two alternatives competing with each other. The question how the watchmaker’s mind works and the question whether there is a watchmaker are two completely different questions. One does not overshadow the other. If I do not fully understand the watchmaker’s mind, that does not mean there is no watchmaker. It means the watchmaker is a different kind of being. I don’t understand him. Fine. But wait, if the world were very, very simple and badly made, just a pile of chaos… badly made or simple? Those are not the same thing. Very simple and not especially good. After all, we speak about God as some sort of infinite complexity. And if the result were very poor, heaven forbid, then we would say that it is… Wait. Again, you are not distinguishing between badly made and simple. If it were not complex, then the physico-theological proof would not work. But if it is complex, only badly made—redundancy or lack of optimality—then there is a watchmaker with a different mind. I understand. Okay. Fine, I’m sure we’ll come back to this. On that optimistic note. Yes, yes, I jumped ahead a bit, but you asked, so. Okay. Have a good Sabbath, goodbye. Good Sabbath, thank you.