Gate Five: Science and Concepts — Weaknesses and Strengths

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This is an AI-generated English translation of a chapter from the book A Presence and an Absence (את אשר ישנו ואשר איננו) by Rabbi Michael Avraham. Translated by OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 model with high reasoning effort. Read the original Hebrew (PDF).

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From the book A Presence and an Absence by Rabbi Michael Avraham. Translated from Hebrew using gpt-5.4 (reasoning_effort=high, batch API).

Science and Concepts — Weaknesses and Strengths Inherent in the Scientific Approach

Introduction

In this gate we will deal with several weaknesses that are built into scientific inquiry by virtue of its very discipline and methods. As we shall see, these very weaknesses are what make scientific strengths and scientific progress possible. We will offer here a top-down description of many phenomena connected to what we have seen thus far. This description may shed light on the root of these phenomena, and clarify the meaning of the rapid scientific progress of recent generations in contrast to those that preceded them.

Here we will make use of concepts and principles that we encountered in the second and fourth gates, and by means of them we will prepare the ground for the discussion in the final gate.

Chapter One: Degeneration and Specification of Concepts

Preface: Matter and Form of Concepts

As a necessary preface to this chapter, we will briefly restate the conclusions of the discussion in the second gate of the first book regarding the nature of concepts, and see also the first gate here.

There we saw that the analytic-synthetic debate, which ostensibly deals with the logical plane of the concepts of truth and certainty, tends to spread into the epistemological plane as well, that is, into the conception of human cognition. Those who hold the analytic position generally tend toward a conventionalist conception of concepts. According to this conception, a concept is no more than a linguistic abbreviation for a collection of characteristics or properties. By contrast, those who hold the synthetic position tend toward an essentialist conception of concepts, that is, they see the concept as a kind of entity that has both “matter” and “form.” The “matter” of a concept, as it was defined in the first book, is the concept itself. The “form” of the concept is the collection of the concept’s properties and characteristics. As noted there, the concept itself is an entity, and it is the bearer of all these properties.

For example, the concept Jew, according to the conventionalist position, is nothing more than a word in a language whose purpose is to describe a collection of characteristics agreed upon in society.¹ By contrast, the essentialist position maintains that the concept Jew is a kind of entity whose characteristics are properties, just as the characteristics of an object are the various properties that describe it.

If we apply this distinction to theoretical entities, we obtain as a derivative the dispute described in the second gate regarding the conception of science. On the one hand, analytic interpreters of science maintain that theoretical entities do not really exist. On their view, they are building blocks of a theory, which itself is nothing more than a sophisticated description of observable facts. On the other hand stand synthetic interpreters of science, who maintain that theoretical entities exist and act upon reality.

Beyond the distinction between the matter, or substance, of a concept and its form, one can also distinguish within the framework of the concept’s form between several layers. First, there is the distinction between accidental properties and essential properties. A concept’s essential properties are those that characterize it always, and therefore are included in its definition. Its accidental properties are those that appear in one case or another, and therefore are not part of the definition of the concept as such.

Within the essential properties there are further concentric circles of division, distinguishing between internal properties, which are more essential to the concept, and properties that are more external to it.²

Two further important points should be added here.

Almost all of our statements concern the characteristics of the concept and not its essence, except for the statement that it exists, as we saw in the second gate of the first book, and perhaps a few others.³
A description of any entity is given in terms of predicates or attributes. An attribute, by its very nature, always refers to a class of objects, and therefore only a collection of many attributes can help us focus on the object or entity under discussion. When I describe a shirt by saying that it is red, I have done so by means of a concept, namely “red,” which describes many objects. But there are very many red objects. Therefore, in order to arrive at a better description of the shirt in question, we must add further characteristics, each of which also refers, on its own, to a different class of entities. The more characteristics we add, the more we narrow the class of objects to which the description fits. This is the intersection of all the sets corresponding to the various characteristics. The total collection of characteristics is supposed to describe well enough that particular shirt alone.

Degeneration and Specification of Concepts

In light of the foregoing, we can now define a new operation on concepts: degeneration. One may view the structure of a concept, as described in the previous section, as a collection of conceptual circles, like the layers of an onion, surrounding one another. The onion’s layers are defined by the various properties of the concept. The degeneration of a concept is the definition of a new concept by “peeling” some layer off the parent concept, that is, by removing one property from the total set of its properties. There can also be a greater degeneration, achieved by peeling off several layers. An extreme peeling of a concept of all its form, that is, removing all its characteristics and leaving only its matter, is a degeneration that does not define any new concept at all. The result of that process is merely matter without form, and therefore it cannot be defined. It is the same concept itself, only abstracted from all its form. We will not deal with this type of degeneration, which characterizes mainly mystical doctrines, those that speak of an unmediated union between subject and object, or a direct interaction with reality without the mediation of external form and characteristics.

There is also an opposite kind of degeneration, namely “peeling away” the matter and remaining with the form, with the layers, alone. Conventionalism relates to concepts as form without matter, and in that sense it is a degeneration of the concept.

We will later see that this peeling is of the essence of how science operates. Science does not deal with the individual object as such, but with what it has in common with objects similar to it in certain properties, that is, it deals with properties. In Kantian terms, science deals with phenomena and not with noumena. For example, the law of gravitation deals with objects that have mass, and ignores their other properties, which may differ from one another.

It is important to understand that such degeneration omits the individual object itself, and shifts the discussion onto the track of classes of objects, sorted according to their properties. In the second gate of the first book we saw the principle of individuation of the object, and extended it there to concepts as well. This principle says that an object, or a concept, is individuated only by its “matter.” Its properties characterize it only through its belonging to sorted groups. To say that a given object is red means that it belongs to the class of red objects. Reference to the particular object before us always turns to its matter. Descriptions are nothing more than classifications and the determination of the place of the object in question within sorted classes. Therefore, peeling the concept or the object of its matter and leaving only its form in effect removes the object and the concept themselves from the discussion, and shifts the discussion to qualities and classes alone. As we shall see below, this is the basis of generalization in general, and of scientific generalization in particular.

Before we get there, however, we should note that a concept can be degenerated in additional ways. For example, one can peel it of all its accidental properties and gather all its essential properties. This is, in effect, the act of definition. Another form of degeneration that will interest us later is an intermediate kind: peeling away part of the essential properties of the parent concept. Since the collection of essential properties constitutes the definition of the concept, such a peeling creates a new concept whose definition contains fewer characteristics than that of its parent.⁴ In the language of information theory, we would say that it contains less information than its parent.⁵ In such a case, of course, there will be more objects whose description fits the degenerated concept.

Let us now add a claim that applies to all kinds of degeneration. Above we saw that peeling away the matter is the basis of generalization. Other kinds of generalization are based on the fact that the fewer the characteristics, the more particulars belong to the new definition, and vice versa. The more characteristics we include, the more concrete the definition is, and consequently it fits fewer particulars. The more characteristics we peel away, the more we are left with a definition that fits a larger class of objects.⁶

For example, let us take the definition of the concept “a physics lecturer at An-Najah University.” We can peel it once and arrive at the concept “a physics lecturer at a university.” This is a more inclusive concept, and clearly more particulars fit it, so it contains less information. The next peeling gives “a physics lecturer.” This is a still more inclusive concept, and clearly many more particulars correspond to it. The next peeling yields “a lecturer.” This is already a very general definition, containing very little information.

Let us note here that in principle one can also degenerate the definition of the concept “lecturer” if one breaks it down into its components as well, that is, if one peels the definition “a person who teaches a certain subject to a group of students in some institution.”

The maximal degeneration of the definition under discussion is the peeling away of all its form and the remaining with its matter alone. It should be noted that this is not simply one further step after the last degeneration. Once even one characteristic remains in the definition, that is already a concept different from the original. Therefore its “matter” is also different. Peeling the “matter” from a concept is the first step in the process of degeneration, not the last, for it transforms our approach to the concept from essentialist to conventionalist.

We can now understand the terminology we have chosen to describe this process: degeneration. In modern physics, one speaks of the degeneracy of physical states as a situation in which there are several states with the same properties. A “degenerate” energy level means an energy level containing many states. When we say of a particle that it has such-and-such energy, we have not said enough to define it, since it may still be in many physical states with that same energy. Removing degeneracy means defining the particle in sufficiently detailed terms so that the definition fits one unique state of the particle.

One can also perform the opposite operation to degeneration, that is, the removal of degeneracy, which one might call specification. Specification is the creation of a new concept out of a parent concept by adding information, rather than by subtracting information, as in degeneration. The attempt to describe a certain object, or a certain person, as exhaustively as possible, though not necessarily in the best or most successful way, consists in adding as many characteristics as possible. This process can continue until one arrives at a description that fits only the particular object or person described. We try to “close in” on the object or person as tightly as possible by collecting all its properties. In other words, the endpoint of specifying a general concept is a tight description that can fit one concrete object alone.⁷ Along the way we pass through concepts that are less and less inclusive.

Chapter Two: The Scientific Process as the Treatment of Degenerate Concepts

The Meaning of Generalization: Generalization and Degeneration

When we try to understand a certain event or some structure, we always encounter an essential problem: nothing concrete, singular, and self-contained can be understood in the scientific sense. This claim is true on two levels:

The thing itself is matter without form, whereas every explanation is required for the form of the thing, that is, for its characteristics. Almost nothing can be said about the matter of the thing, and certainly not scientific statements.
As we have seen, a scientific explanation has a deductive-nomological structure, that is, it proposes assumptions on the basis of which one can construct a deductive argument whose conclusion describes the occurrence in question. By its nature, deduction derives the particular from a general law. There is no law of nature that concerns a single object or one isolated occurrence. Science is a collection of generalizations, that is, general laws about the nature of the world. This follows from its first feature: it deals with characteristics rather than with the object itself, and characteristics always describe a whole class and not a single object.

An example of this, though not taken from the natural sciences but from mathematics, is the way different mathematical theories are constructed. As we saw at the end of the second gate, in chapter 5, pure mathematics constructs a world of abstract forms by generalizing forms familiar to us. Theories of groups, spaces, fields, and the like are generalizations of intuitively clear operations achieved by degenerating them. For example, multiplication resembles addition if one gives up certain properties of addition. If we define a general mathematical operation as a generalization of multiplication and addition in the following way: an operation acting on two members of a set whose result is another member of the set. This is a generalization of operations between two numbers whose result is a number. Operations such as taking a square root, squaring, negation, or taking the opposite, annihilation or sign reversal, see gate twelve in the first book, are not included in this generalization, since they operate on only one number.

As we saw in the note referred to there, one can continue and specify this generalization by requiring the operation to be commutative, that is, interchangeable: ab = ba. We saw there that in group theory, for example, the structure defined in this way is called an Abelian group.

Thus we generalize the operations known to us and classify them by sorting them according to different properties, and in this way obtain results relevant to entire classes of operations or of entities, not only to those familiar and known to us from which we started. After the generalization, one can return and specify again, and this specification will bring us back to the operations familiar to us, which we will also find classified within a hierarchy of classes of operations similar to them from different aspects. Below we shall see such procedures in various fields.

We are accustomed to saying that science deals with generalizations and abstractions, and then with their re-particularization. That is, when science creates a theory or an empirical law, it deals in generalization. Afterwards, when it explains a specific event in terms of the general theory, it descends back to the particular.

Here, however, we intentionally do not use the terms generalization and abstraction, but the new concept degeneration, because the process of scientific generalization and abstraction is always accompanied by the opposite side as well. One might initially think that generalization is simply the establishment of a general law concerning an entire class of objects, a class including many objects or concepts, and not only the concrete and singular object or concept we are trying to understand. For example, the generalization deals with all chairs, and not specifically with the one chair that interests us at the moment.

But this is neither a complete nor an accurate description of the process of generalization. As we have seen, the more we generalize, the more information we lose. A more general concept has fewer characteristics and therefore contains less information. Generalization, then, does not deal with a collection of several objects of the same type, but with a collection of degenerate objects. None of these objects resembles the concrete objects of our world, which are in fact what we scientifically seek to explain. Each of them is a concrete object abstracted from most of its properties, containing only the characteristics relevant to the scientific inquiry and explanation. The scientific “art” lies in making generalizations that explain the phenomena in question while giving up, as far as possible, only irrelevant information. The goal of generalization is to create an ideal object whose properties are only those needed for explaining the phenomenon under discussion.

For example, when a scientist observes an object falling to earth, he explains this phenomenon as resulting only from the fact that the object has mass. All the object’s other characteristics are irrelevant to this phenomenon. What is actually happening here, then, is a degeneration of the concept of the object, that is, its abstraction from most of its properties, except for its being possessed of mass, in order to explain its falling to the ground. The law of gravitation does not deal with a collection of concrete objects that have mass, but with a collection of degenerate objects, that is, objects that have only mass, and nothing more. Their other properties do not exist within the scientific description of gravitation. Usually, if the degeneration is successful, that property really is the relevant one for explaining the phenomenon, and the other properties really are irrelevant to understanding it.

If this is indeed the case, then we are dealing with ordinary objects that possess a full range of properties, except that only the property of having mass is relevant to the operation of the law of gravitation. Yet, as we shall see below, the degeneration is not always successful in every respect, and in fact we give up properties that may be relevant to the phenomenon in certain senses.

It should be noted that without the degeneration science performs upon concepts and objects, we could explain nothing at all. Explanation, by its nature, ties occurrences to various characterizations, that is, to certain predicates of the objects or of the situation. As was noted above, predicates, by their nature, refer to general classes.

The predicate “possessing mass” refers to a very large class of objects, namely all objects that have mass. Each of them differs greatly from the others in many other respects. To explain the fall to earth, we left the individual object and generalized the phenomenon by assigning it to an entire class of objects that have mass and therefore, by their nature, fall downward. As stated, this generalization stripped the objects in question of their other properties.

In previous gates we saw that scientific generalization is problematic, because it is not clear how one can justify the conclusion that the fall downward depends specifically on the object’s possession of mass and not on some other properties, for example that it occupies space, that it is composed of certain atoms, or of other components unknown to us, and so forth. In our present terminology, the problem is whether we have performed a relevant degeneration of the concept being explained, or whether in the process of degeneration we have given up other characteristics that are also relevant to the explained phenomenon.

But our concern here is not with the shortcomings that science unwillingly suffers from, but only with those it knowingly takes upon itself. In other words, our concern here is with science that performs successful and justified degenerations. As we shall see in the examples that immediately follow, even the fact that we are dealing with degenerate objects or concepts, even when the degeneration is successful, limits the relevance of the scientific explanation. That is so not because of possible errors in scientific generalization, but by virtue of the fact that generalization, by its very essence, entails the degeneration of concepts and objects. We shall see that even correct generalizations are problematic and partial, precisely by virtue of being generalizations.

Degeneration as the Foundation of Scientific Progress

We have thus seen that it is precisely the degeneration of the concept, that is, the giving up of some of the information we have about it, that leads to the possibility of generalization and therefore of drawing scientific conclusions. The scientific conclusion does not concern ordinary, real objects or concepts, but degenerate, that is, abstract or theoretical, objects and concepts.

One may offer an analogy. Sometimes throwing off excess cargo, which is a kind of renunciation, is precisely what enables us to move forward. As in the analogy, sometimes the information thrown overboard, the information peeled away in the process of degeneration, is indeed relevant. When we have no choice, we throw away even cargo that matters to us in order to advance. The shedding of relevant information takes place on two different levels:

Sometimes in the scientific procedure we simplify the problem excessively in order to explain it. A well-known joke among physicists speaks of someone who proposes a scientific explanation of the donkey’s full set of properties and says: “Let us begin with a point-donkey.”

All the basic laws of Newtonian mechanics deal with a point mass, although no such thing exists in the world. They also ignore friction, although there is no motion in the world without friction at all.⁸

But, as stated above, we wish to see the problematic aspect that accompanies science’s correct generalizations, not its possibility of error. Unlike the postmodern rehabilitation of religion and myth, we are not trying to ground their relevance and possibility at the expense of the significance and reliability of scientific achievements. We are dealing with this precisely from a synthetic perspective, one that grants high credibility or reliability to scientific results, and tries, from that very standpoint, to examine additional explanatory levels.

Example: Anaximander’s Theory of Creation ex Nihilo

To illustrate the phenomenon of degeneration that inherently accompanies scientific explanations, let us discuss the problem of creation ex nihilo.

The creation of matter out of nothing contradicts the basic conservation laws of physics. It also contradicts our simple intuition. As we shall see below, there is often a difference between these two formulations, contradiction to the laws of physics and contradiction to intuition, and not necessarily because modern physics runs contrary to common sense, but precisely because of the degeneration of scientific concepts.

At first glance, one could explain the process of creation in a way that does not contradict the principles of physics or the conservation laws. Perhaps this was the intention of the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist Anaximander, although this is not usually the accepted interpretation of his words. Since it was his words that inspired this example for me, I will use them as the point of departure for the discussion.

Anaximander was a Greek physicist and philosopher, a student of Thales of Miletus, who is considered to have written the first Greek philosophical book, which was probably also the first prose book composed in Greek. He is known for having spoken of an unlimited and undefined matter, as did his predecessors, except that in his thought this matter is not one of the elements found in our world today. From this unlimited and undefined matter emerged all opposites: hot and cold, dry and moist, and so forth.

The only original fragment of Anaximander’s thought that has come down to us says the following:[^108]

The Boundless is the beginning and principle of all that exists. It is neither water nor any other of the things called elements, for it has another nature, one that is boundless, and from it came the heavens and all the worlds within them. From the place from which all beings come into being, to that same place their destruction also goes, according to necessity. For they pay one another penalty and retribution for their injustice according to the order of time.

In this single passage, Anaximander formulates, for the first time known to us, the foundation of being in an unlimited entity that is not composed of any of the elements of the reality familiar to us. This theory later received many more familiar formulations, such as prime matter in Platonic thought, matter out of which everything is formed. This principle is also a cornerstone lying at the basis of Jewish esoteric thought, Kabbalah.⁹

To modern ears these words sound like an ancient cosmology long since obsolete, because we “understand everything” through the explanations of modern science. We will try to clarify the matter and show that science, because of the conceptual degeneration that inherently accompanies it, cannot answer the problematic nature of the creation of the world ex nihilo.

In fact, as mentioned above, it is known that Anaximander added another statement about the opposites that emerged from that unlimited and undefined matter, and our fragment only hints at it. For our purposes, then, Anaximander makes two claims:

The world was created through a process of generating different opposites: cold and heat, liquid and solid, and so forth.
These opposites were preceded by a kind of prime matter that did not possess the characteristics of the matter familiar to us. The splitting of that prime matter is what created these opposites, and not that they were created out of the vacuum, as in the conception of modern science.

The first of these two claims seems to provide a brilliant, and astonishingly modern, solution to the problem of creation ex nihilo and its relation to the conservation laws of physics. If we assume that every particle of matter that is created is accompanied simultaneously¹⁰ by the creation of an antiparticle with precisely opposite properties, then the total sum of properties in the world does not change through this creation. That is, all the physical conservation laws are preserved.

For example, if the particle created is an electron, which has mass M and electric charge Q, then along with it there will be created an anti-electron, whose mass is -M and whose electric charge is -Q. Thus there are now two new particles in the world, but the total mass and total charge in the world have not changed. None of the conservation laws of physics, all of which deal with physical properties of particles, has been violated.¹¹ We thus have a theory that succeeds in describing creation ex nihilo in a way that does not contradict the laws of physics. As it were, together with the world an anti-world was created.

In light of this, however, it is not at all clear why Anaximander needed to add his second principle as well, namely the principle that everything emerged from an undefined foundation or from prime matter. At first glance, that seems to be a superfluous assumption, since on the scientific plane everything is now explained perfectly well. Let us note that modern science describes the creation of such opposite pairs out of a vacuum and does not require a prior prime matter for that purpose. According to Ockham’s razor, therefore, according to which we should not posit unnecessary assumptions, as we saw in the second gate, we ought to give up the second assumption in Anaximander’s theory.

But here a further layer enters, one that science tends to ignore, and that is exactly what illustrates the degeneration that accompanies scientific explanation. If we look carefully, a kind of conservation law has still been broken here. After all, two new entities have been created out of nothing. Previously the world was empty, and now it is full, without any apparent reason that existed in reality beforehand. There is indeed no law in physics that forbids this, for physics deals only with properties and not with the thing itself, with the matter in the philosophical sense of the term. At the level of properties, the total sum of the world’s physical properties, its characteristics, is preserved. There is no addition of electric charge and no addition of mass, and therefore no physical law has been violated. Nothing has been created here beyond what was there before.¹²

Common sense says that even though no physical law contradicts this process, it is nevertheless implausible “from a physical standpoint.” It is a physically implausible process, even though it does not contradict the laws of physics. This implausibility is transparent to physics. Physics does not detect it, because it deals with characteristics and not with the things themselves. It is blind to questions that concern entities as such, such as the question of their ontological status.

Another formulation of this difficulty would say that a kind of law of conservation of being has been broken here. Entities have been added to the world that were not there before, and in that sense there is no complete and full conservation of the world as it had previously been. Even though the total charges, or physical properties, have not changed, something has nevertheless been created here out of nothing.

It seems to me that Anaximander’s purpose was to answer precisely this problem. That is why he added his second principle as well. His claim is that there has always existed in the world a prime foundation lacking properties, since all properties emerged from it. It was not physical matter in the sense familiar to us, because matter in its presently familiar form emerged from it. The only thing that can be said of it is that it exists, that it is a being. Therefore, the creation of opposites from it, a creation that preserves the total sum of properties, that is, charges, in the world, also preserves the law of conservation of being. There was being even before the existence of the matter familiar to us, and it merely split. There was being before the process and after it. The properties, the charges, that were created cancel one another out. But in order to preserve the “quantity of being” in the world, we must posit the existence of prime matter. Thus Anaximander was right: only the two assumptions together offer a genuinely scientific solution to the problem of creation.

In the language of Kabbalah, this process is described as the creation of the thing in itself, that is, prime matter, in Kabbalistic language, the World of Creation, and only afterwards the creation of form separately, the World of Formation. The word “formation” here is linked to form.¹³ Finally there comes the joining of form to matter and the making of our world, the World of Action. The only difference is that in Kabbalah even prime matter is created out of nothing, and that is, this time indeed, a true process of being from nothing.¹⁴ But in order to believe such a thing, we need to assume the existence of a Creator, for otherwise such a process is impossible, according to the laws of intuitive physics, though not according to the laws of scientific physics, for which, as we have seen, Anaximander’s first principle alone is sufficient.¹⁵

From another, though very similar, angle, one can also speak at the level of the form of objects, their qualities or predicates. Another “conservation law” has been broken here, for the concept charge and the concept mass have now come into existence, and they were not in the world before. Thus not only has being been added to the world, being that was not there before, but new qualities have been added as well, qualities that characterize that matter, and they too are innovations out of nothing. This process too occurs in opposition to common sense and to its “conservation laws.” It is true that the total mass and charge have not changed, but the very coming into being of these qualities is a novelty that did not exist in the world before their “creation.”

To answer the problem of the conservation of qualities, that is, conceptual conservation, we must add to Anaximander’s unlimited and undefined matter primordial properties, namely qualities such as charge or mass. Yet we cannot say that it was charged with some particular charge, or that it had some particular quantity of mass, for these came into being only after the split. Their matter, that is, the concepts mass and charge themselves, lay latent within it.¹⁶

The second angle of the problem that Anaximander was trying to answer concerns the matter of the concept rather than the matter of the object, but its logic is very similar to that of the matter of objects. As we saw above, science does not deal at all with matter, neither the matter of the concept nor the matter of the object, but only with properties and characteristics, that is, with forms. Therefore the scientific conservation laws also deal only with forms and characteristics. But this is a limitation science imposes on itself, it “peels away” the matter from objects. Science deals with concepts and objects that are degenerate, this time in their very essence, in their matter. Yet it is clear that there are additional parts of reality, and in order to understand the world we must take these into account as well, as we have seen here. In the following note we shall see implications of the relation between opposites and the concept they share, in various contexts.

Note 38: What Opposites Have in Common

We saw above that in Anaximander’s creation process two entities are produced with opposite charges, yet there is a concept common to both of them, namely charge, and that concept is created ex nihilo. This is a general principle: every two opposites necessarily have a common basis, the magnitude with respect to which the opposition is formed. Let us bring a few examples of this principle.

In the second gate of the first book, in note 8 dealing with the concept good, we saw that the different interpretations of this concept, if we really grasp them as opposed to one another, must necessarily have something in common: they are claims about the definition of the very same concept. We saw the same there with the concept Jew, and others. We recognized there that if the two sides were not speaking about a shared concept of good, or Jew, there would be no disagreement at all. In other words, the matter of the concept must be shared by all participants in the discussion.

Here I wish to bring an example of a different kind, dealing with the similarity in behavior between groups that are ideologically opposed. The fiercest opposition usually arises precisely toward those who are closest. Jews get angrier at Jews whose views differ from theirs than at others. Religious people are angrier at religious people whose positions and behavior patterns differ from theirs than at the nonreligious, and so on.

One can give a psychological explanation of this, but here I wish to argue that the philosophical condition for two concepts, two ideologies, or any other pair of things, to be opposites is that they possess a shared layer. In other words, what is proposed here is an explanation of these phenomena on the philosophical plane as well, and not only on the psychological one.

As an example, several writers have compared the characteristics of the two dominant ideological movements in Israel over recent decades: Gush Emunim and Shalom Achshav.

Yaakov Hasdai, in his book On the Threshold of the Jubilee,¹⁷ points out that the two movements share many characteristics. Both agree that the main problem of the State of Israel is the problem of the territories, whether occupied or liberated. Both are marked by the same impatience, which says that the mission must be completed now, settlement must not be postponed, just as peace must not be postponed, and both agree that everything depends on us. If we want it, the land will be ours; or if we want it, there will be peace. The other parameters on the real and ideological map are, in the view of both these movements, marginal.

With respect to these three characteristics, there is much room for discussion as to whether they should be accepted or rejected, and that is what he does there. Here I wish only to point to the great and non-accidental resemblance between these two opposed approaches.¹⁸ This is a clear expression of the similar basis that always exists beneath opposites.¹⁹

There are halakhic (pertaining to Jewish law) examples of this as well. Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner, in Pahad Yitzhak²⁰ on Purim, explains the statement that a person is obligated to become intoxicated until he no longer knows the difference between “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordecai.” His point is that only by perceiving the two as similar can their essential difference stand out. When two types look different, it is harder to discern the additional essential difference between them. Their differing character may then be attributed to any of their other features. In order to perceive correctly and focus on the fact that Haman was accursed and Mordecai righteous, one must imagine them in such a way that their appearance is identical, their qualities similar, the conditions of the environment in which they acted similar, and so forth, precisely so that it will be clear that Haman’s accursedness follows from his wickedness and not from anything else.

As an example, he cites there the two goats that the High Priest must offer on the Day of Atonement, one to Azazel and one to holiness. Halakha requires that they be identical in height, weight, value, and so forth. In his language there: “The deeper the equivalence, the deeper the distinction.” In order for the difference to be clear and not attributed to secondary and irrelevant features, one must strive to erase those features.

This also suggests a recommendation to writers of educational literature, especially in the Haredi sector, and generally in ideological-synthetic sectors that are not inclined to “understand and accept the other.” In books produced in such circles, it is customary to portray figures of “the other,” that is, characters viewed negatively from their perspective, in stereotypical and externally repulsive ways. In books found in the religious world, the figure of Esau, like any gentile, is presented as ugly and repellent in outward appearance. But this approach causes educational damage. The student will infer that there is some relation between ethical evaluation and external appearance. The educator must emphasize that ethical evaluation is derived from a person’s behavior and not from his appearance. One must show that two human beings identical in their given data can behave in the mode of “cursed Haman” or of “blessed Mordecai.” That is the important and relevant parameter, and it is that which must be highlighted and sharpened.

This is another aspect of the same phenomenon discussed earlier. To emphasize and sharpen differences, one must increase similarity. Difference exists only against a background of similarity. It is important to note that this is not merely a didactic trick intended to influence the observer psychologically. This phenomenon has an “objective” philosophical explanation.

At the end of the third gate, in the discussion of the reliability of historical myths, we proposed the claim that every psychological phenomenon derives from a real reality. A pure fiction has no legs to stand on and no existence. In light of what we are saying here, it follows that this kind of emphasis on differences is also not a psychological illusion, but the result of a metaphysical reality. Without a basic similarity between two things, they cannot be opposites, and not merely in the weaker sense that it would be hard for us to perceive them as opposites. In this example we saw that this is also the philosophical root, as opposed to a merely psychologistic explanation, of the more extreme hostility between opponents who belong to the same camp.

Let us now return to the Anaximandrian description of creation. This example illustrates for us that science, as such, always limits itself to properties and characteristics, of objects or of concepts, and not to their essences.²¹ About essences nothing can be said, and therefore this limitation is a condition of scientific progress. Before science understood that it had to limit itself and deal with degenerate concepts, it could not make real progress. But even now one must know that scientific claims, and I mean the correct ones, are only partial. They describe the degenerate, abstract, and theoretical objects in which science has chosen to be interested.

But real objects, like concepts, also have matter and not only properties. Therefore, if we seek a complete picture, we must add to the discussion principles that will solve the problems touching this aspect of entities as well. Beyond that, in order to discuss a real world one must also restore the properties that were removed in the process of degeneration, and not only the matter, or essence, which is always removed. These principles often look to us like myth, or some kind of theology, but they are a completion of scientific principles. As we saw in the example of Anaximander, only all the explanatory planes together constitute a full explanation of real, non-degenerate reality.

The tendency to regard Anaximander’s theory as an ancient myth stems from an incorrect conception of science, as though it offered explanations of real objects. But, as stated, science deals only with those things it chooses to deal with, that is, with degenerate concepts. In this example we saw that science chose to peel away the matter from the concept and leave it as abstract form, and this is something science always does. In the world of forms there is no obstacle to understanding the whole world through Anaximander’s first principle alone. There only the conservation laws of accepted physics are valid.

We thus see here a conceptual conventionalism characteristic of science. It treats concepts as a collection of characteristics without matter. But we must not make a mistake: as we argued above, this is correct science, not mistaken science. Our purpose is not to undermine scientific truths, but only to point to their specific domain of application and to the limitations that follow from the conscious choice made by scientific inquiry. Science chose, rightly, to restrict itself, for otherwise it could not have advanced. Within the restricted domain in which it operates, it says true things, according to the synthetic interpretation. This is not an argument intended to undermine the reliability of science, but to bring awareness to the scope and validity of its determinations.

As we saw, the analytic thinker understands science as describing the virtual reality that it itself creates for the sake of its own progress, and therefore refuses to recognize it as making claims about reality. The advocate of the synthetic position, by contrast, understands that science does make claims about the world, but only about a degenerate picture of it. In this context one may be a sort of conventionalist, provided one keeps in mind that this is not the whole of reality.

Entropy and the Formation of Life: Common Sense and Science

A very similar process to the Anaximander argument, and to our discussion of it, appears in the discussion of the formation of life. Let us preface that discussion with a brief description of the second law of thermodynamics. In everyday language, this law states that the world moves toward disorder, or more precisely: in a closed process, that is, one without outside influence, and random, the amount of order cannot increase, but only decrease.

Examples of this principle are visible everywhere. For example, if a flowerpot falls from a roof, it will shatter into pieces. The reverse process never occurs: pieces do not fall from the roof and turn into a flowerpot. If we leave a small child alone in the house, we will always find a less orderly house, not a more orderly one. When matter is left without outside intervention, without maintenance, it decays and falls apart; it does not improve and strengthen itself.

In the scientific context one defines a quantity called entropy, which serves as a measure of disorder in the world. The second law states that in a closed system without outside intervention, entropy never decreases with time.²²

Yet the process by which life comes into being in a random and evolutionary way seems, at first glance, to contradict this principle. In the historical process of the formation of life, creation became more sophisticated on its own, and certainly did not become less ordered. There is an evolutionary chain of development from less sophisticated creatures to more sophisticated ones, or in other words, a reduction of entropy.

This difficulty can be formulated in scientific terms: how is it possible that in a natural process within a closed world, one without outside intervention, order increases rather than disorder? Some bring this argument as proof that our world is not a closed system. There is an outside intervention by someone who upsets the thermodynamic balance and creates an increasingly ordered world, namely God. See more on this in the next chapter. One can also present this difficulty in terms of common sense: how can a sophisticated creature arise out of nothing, without outside intervention, that is, without a Creator? This is a situation very similar to the problem with which Anaximander dealt: the coming into being of something out of nothing, a coming into being that contradicts a scientific conservation law.

The accepted scientific solution to this difficulty seems very similar to Anaximander’s solution: the missing entropy is drawn from another part of the world. We disperse concentrated entropy throughout the world, or collect scattered order in one place, and so it seems to us that order has increased in that place. For example, when we build a building out of stones quarried from a quarry, the entropy in the region of the building decreases, because it has become more ordered, organized, and constructed. But this comes at the expense of increased entropy in the quarry, environmental pollution caused by the quarrying tools, and so forth. The stones that were not organized in nature have become organized in the building. In this way the total entropy in the world does not decrease. It is merely distributed differently among the world’s different parts.²³

The scientific problem is apparently solved, yet common sense refuses to be comforted. It still remains unclear how a natural process can produce more sophisticated creatures without any outside intervention. Once again, the scientific explanation resolves the scientific problems, those concerning degenerate concepts. The scientific concept of order is degenerate, and therefore a solution can be found for it within science. But this is not a full explanation of the problem from the standpoint of common sense. There there are additional “conservation laws,” and these concern real concepts, not the degenerate ones with which science deals. This difficulty exactly parallels what we saw in the example of Anaximander.

Another formulation would say that here the very entity of life has been created out of nothing, and a conceptual conservation law has been violated. In Anaximander the issue was the conservation of being; here it is the conservation of life, or aliveness. This too is a conservation law of common sense, not necessarily of science.

Therefore, the conclusion that there is a Creator who intervenes in the world, and thereby may perhaps also reduce the world’s total entropy, for on this description the world is not a closed system, has nothing to do with the scientific explanations of the local reduction of entropy. It stands alongside them, is neither contradicted by them nor aided by them. We shall elaborate more on this topic in the next gate.

It is important to note that similar claims arise from the other side of the religious-secular divide as well. Some religious scientists present the scientific impossibility of the formation of life as proof of the existence of a Creator. Here too there is a similar mistake. Scientific problems must be solved in the scientific context. If the second law does not operate, no God will help us with that, and we must give up the law. If one can point to an area of the world in which the second law is not correct, such as the formation of life, then that law is simply incorrect, and we have a scientific problem. The existence of God solves no scientific problem, because that is a statement describing a different plane of reference, one that exists alongside the scientific plane.

Our claim here is that the law is probably perfectly correct, and it does solve all the scientific problems. But scientific problems are not all the problems that confront us. God acts on a plane beyond the scientific plane, and the considerations that lead to Him are not found within science but beyond it, in metascience. See more on this in the next gate. It is the question of common sense, and not scientific proof, that decides in favor of the thesis affirming a Creator God.

This note returns us to the conception of science as dealing with syntax and not with semantics. Here we have seen that science deals with descriptions and characteristics of objects and concepts, and in that sense it really does only describe. Yet, as we have already noted, there are different levels in the relation between semantics and syntax. According to the synthetic picture, science also explains and does not merely describe. But its explanations concern the degenerate domain in which it operates. The real domain is richer, and it has non-scientific aspects that we too must take into account.

Let us now move on to further examples that will illustrate the degeneration of scientific concepts.

Different Intelligences and Different Scientific Fields

In recent years the claim has become very widespread that there are many kinds of intelligence. People speak of emotional intelligence, motor intelligence in sports, and so forth.

How does such a process of generalization work? First there is one simple concept of intelligence, which the world accepts as representing something worthy of esteem. But when we try to examine it scientifically, we begin to characterize it by means of different features. In the next stage we classify the features we have found: which of them characterize intelligence and are essential to it, and which are accidental, for example that the word describing it begins with the first letter of the alphabet, or that everyone we know who is intelligent happens to have yellow skin, and so forth. After we have found several essential characteristics, we look for other concepts that are endowed with those same characteristics. Once we find such concepts, the conclusion is that we are entitled to call them intelligence as well.

Obviously one can divide these concepts themselves into different kinds, since they are not identical with one another except in those particular properties. We therefore have to define what the basic properties of intelligence are. Those properties will distinguish between what we call by that name and other abilities that do not deserve to come under this honorable heading at all. Afterwards, within the class that remains, we make subdivisions into different kinds of intelligence.

Yet the feeling that often remains after this process is that what we have here is a rather nice attempt to comfort unintelligent people by telling them that they too possess intelligence, and the whole thing smells like a semantic trick. This feeling stems from the fact that the concept of intelligence is a unique entity, one that is very familiar to us in an immediate way. We can identify an intelligent person even without intelligence tests, which are intended for quantitative classification of intelligences in their classical sense. The scientific definition has peeled the familiar concept by referring to the properties that characterize it, in fact only some of them, rather than to the concept as such, and in this way has succeeded in generalizing it so that it applies to a broader group of abilities.

In our formulation, what this feeling means is that the concept intelligence in its scientific sense is degenerate. It does not describe what we have until now called intelligence, but a degenerate concept that resembles it in several respects, perhaps even in all the relevant respects we are able to think of, and yet it is still not the concept intelligence itself.²⁴ The degenerate concept, like every degeneration, refers to a broader class of concepts and not only to intelligence in its classical sense.

The attempt to say that this scientific generalization has “proved” that a person possessing classical intellectual intelligence has no advantage over an outstanding athlete is nothing but empty demagoguery. One who thinks thus may perhaps be right, but this generalization cannot do the work for him. There is no scientific proof here, and probably there cannot be one. This is merely a process of redefining a known concept. A definition cannot alter an essence.

Semantic tricks of this sort serve many fields, chiefly in order to grant legitimacy, or comfort, to groups of people who are not esteemed in one domain or another. This is a prominent characteristic of the postmodern age, in which words take the place of essences. This is a distinctly analytic aspect of the postmodern age, once again pointing to the connection between these two positions, the analytic and the postmodern. Put differently, what we have here is conceptual conventionalism. According to the analytic approach, as we saw, the concept is nothing more than the collection of its characteristics, that is, a purely linguistic definition. It is analyticity that makes possible the unconvincing generalization of the concept intelligence, and similar concepts. It harnesses science to the service of the politically correct.²⁵

It is important to emphasize that I do not mean to claim that this is an irrelevant mode of thought. It is certainly important, and as noted above, only in this way can one make progress on the scientific plane. But regarding it as the exclusive substitute for ordinary and essentialist modes of reference reflects an unjustified analytic stance, namely postmodernism. This is an external aspect of reality, with respect to which scientific definitions can indeed be used. One must not substitute the concept itself with its definition. This substitution is legitimate within science, but it is important to keep in mind that this is a degenerate concept, stripped of its essence, and therefore one must not draw hasty conclusions from it about reality.

Incidentally, even with respect to the very definition of the domain of science, one can discern processes of this type. In a way very similar to what was described above, additional fields enter under the heading science and enjoy the aura that empirical natural science possesses. Fields such as psychology, alternative medicine, various “social sciences,” history, the study of literature and art, and the like, have entered under the honorable heading of “science” in exactly these ways, as we saw in chapter 6 of the second gate. There too, the feeling accompanying this process is that the definitions of science do not reflect science itself, but some degenerate concept that resembles it in certain parameters. As we have seen, one cannot get from definitions to the concept as such, because definitions always refer to characteristics, and therefore they will always allow additional entities to be brought under the same heading. As stated, this is the strength of science, and also its weakness. The next two notes will provide two more examples of extra-scientific planes of reference, or of the degeneration inherent in scientific reference.

Note 39: Continuity of Identity

In this note I would like to present another aspect, one that certainly exists in our everyday mode of reference and yet seems plainly to lie outside the domain of science.

Let us begin, perhaps, with the somewhat eccentric proposal of Adi Tzemach,²⁶ who suggested grounding moral obligation on the following consideration. Premise A: I, at the next moment, am an entirely different person, who merely happens to have a consciousness similar to mine and a memory shared with mine. Premise B: I ordinarily care about that “other” person. Conclusion: it is reasonable that I should care to the same extent about some completely other person as well.

The argument is childish to a considerable degree,²⁷ and its root lies in a common analytic desire to ground an obvious obligation on more general principles in a formal way, somewhat analogous to the deductive-nomological explanation. I do not wish to discuss the argument itself, but only to cite it as an example of the feeling that there is no such thing as continuity of identity. One of its premises is that each of us, at every moment, is a different person. There is no continuity of personality over time.

In quantum physics we find a very similar situation, and see also note 5 in the first book. When discussing many-particle systems, quantum physics maintains that there is no distinction among them. There is no possibility of “riding” on one of them, or marking it, and continuing to track its path. The state in which particle A is at point X and particle B is at point Y is entirely equivalent to the state in which particle A is at Y and particle B is at X.²⁸

This is expressed both in quantum statistical mechanics, where it is called Gibbs’s paradox, and in quantum field theories, where the movement of a particle from point X to point Y is described by its disappearance at point X at a certain time and its re-creation at point Y at a later time. In these theories it is of no importance that this be the same particle moving continuously from the first place to the second.

This recalls the cursor on a computer screen. That point on the screen appears to move from place to place, but in fact it is extinguished at one point and relit at the adjacent point without the eye noticing, and thus it appears as though it “moves” rapidly from place to place. Is the point at the final location the same point that was at the starting position? That question is of no importance in the context of using the computer, and the computer engineers were quite right to build it in this manner.

Likewise in science there is no importance to the continuity of identity, and therefore motion can be described in terms of jumps, extinction and creation, rather than continuous movement, without any difference being felt in the scientific aspects. Just as in science it does not matter that a cause is productive and not merely temporally prior. For science, the formal description by means of the necessary characteristics of the phenomenon is sufficient. As we saw in the Anaximander example, science also does not care about being as such. Only its properties matter.

By contrast, in the real world it is entirely clear that there is continuity of identity for objects, as well as for human beings. This is an aspect of the real world that is not covered by the scientific picture, and it does not claim to cover it. It is clear that one cannot infer from this that there is no such thing as continuity of identity for objects. At least as far as is presently known, this does not affect their physical behavior, and therefore it is not a relevant parameter for physics. This matter lies outside the domain of science. In our terminology, then, enduring existence is a degenerate concept in the scientific context. This is connected to the fact we already observed, that essence is systematically degenerated in all scientific contexts.

Let us note that we saw a similar point in the first book, in the discussion of processes in note 7 of the second gate. There we saw that a continuous process is not truly grasped in simple mathematical cognition, but only approximately. That is why, for us as well, the description of motion, which is a continuous process, is given in static terms.

In the article referred to there in the footnote,²⁹ I also discussed the implications of this point for the dispute between Bergson and Einstein over the nature of time. Bergson faithfully represents the approach that repeatedly points to the distortions contained within the scientific conception if one tries to draw philosophical conclusions from it about our overall worldview. Continuity has a coherent mathematical, and therefore physical, description, but it is only partial. For mathematical and scientific purposes it is indeed sufficient. But one may not infer from this that it is a correct description of continuity in the real world. Mathematical science is only a particular and partial, that is, degenerate, representation of the real world.³⁰

Note 40: The Principle of Sufficient Reason: The Concept of Emanation

Another aspect in which one can see the difference between the planes with which science deals and other planes concerns the very nature of explanatory concepts.

Richard Taylor, in the tenth chapter of his book Metaphysics,³¹ discusses the principle known as the principle of sufficient reason. He explains that there is a principle accepted by most human beings, perhaps by all of them, namely that everything that exists in the world has a reason. If we were walking in a forest and encountered a large transparent sphere there, he writes, we would immediately ask ourselves: for what reason is it there? This question is relevant even for ordinary objects, and it also does not depend on the surrounding environment. Even if the forest disappeared and only the sphere remained, we would still ask the same question. Even if everything disappeared and the sphere constituted the entire world, we would still ask what reason there was for its being there. Therefore, we are not exempt from the need to find some reason for the existence of the whole creation as well.

Taylor then explains that this question does not concern the characteristics of the object, but only its very existence. Likewise, the age of the object is irrelevant to this question. If we say that the object has been in the forest only since yesterday, that gives no answer to the question of the reason for its existence. Taylor adds that even if the object’s age were infinite, and it had been there from all eternity, that would still provide no answer to the question of the reason for its existence.

Taylor explains that the point is not that everything must have a purpose. A large portion of our explanations are not teleological, that is, purpose-oriented. But there must be some reason, sufficient to explain the existence of the object.

Taylor notes there that this principle cannot be explained, and certainly not proved, but very few people would say that they do not in fact think and act according to it.

Thus, Taylor continues, the fact that a world exists also requires a reason. This reason must be something outside creation itself, for otherwise it too would require a reason to the same degree. Likewise, the claim that the world has existed from all eternity does not answer the question of why it exists. That is not a sufficient reason. Even a world that has existed forever requires a reason for its existence.

People tend to think that creation by God describes creation at some point in time. Hence, if the world was never created but has existed forever, they suppose that there is no need for the thesis of creation and a Creator. But as Taylor says there, creation means primarily dependence. The world depends on something that gives a sufficient reason for its existence. Even an eternal world, which has existed from all eternity, must depend on something that gives us the sufficient reason for its existence, and does so constantly.

Taylor gives an example from the dependence of light on a flame. Even a flame that has existed from all eternity requires a reason for its existence. The flame does not depend on the light, but the light depends on it. This does not mean that the flame created the light at some point in time. Even if both had existed from all eternity, the light would still depend on the flame.

When one says that the world was created by God, this does not necessarily mean that God created it at a particular moment in time, but that the world depends on Him, and that God provides the sufficient reason for the world’s existence. He is the answer to the question why, or for what reason, the world exists, and that answer, as noted, must lie outside the created world itself.

Now Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason,³² points out that there are only three kinds of considerations that can constitute a proof of the existence of God:

A proof based on certain empirical data. He calls this the physico-theological proof.
A proof based on the mere fact that something exists, and not on any specific empirical datum. He calls this the cosmological proof.
A proof based solely on considerations of pure reason. He calls this the ontological proof.

The ontological proof does not concern us here, though see briefly the first book, second gate, pages 64-66. What does concern us is the difference between the other two. The cosmological proof begins from the mere fact that something exists, and in that sense it seeks a sufficient reason for existence itself, and not for any particular phenomenon. It deals with the “matter” of things and not with any particular properties. The physico-theological proof seeks a reason for certain phenomena, and it can also be called the argument from order, namely, the claim that the fact that the world reflects a complex order proves that there is someone who arranged it, or the argument from design, namely, the fact that the world is built in a purposive way, seemingly directed toward something, points to the existence of an arranger. It deals with the “form” of things.

The difference between these two types of argument is the difference between seeking a cause and seeking a sufficient reason. The answer to the physico-theological question will be a causal description of the coming into being of order or design. The answer to the cosmological question will not be satisfied with a causal explanation, or with creation at some moment in time. The second proof is based on the search for a sufficient reason, since it concerns existence itself.

It seems to me that in Kabbalistic terms this is the difference between emanation and creation. The world is emanated from its emanator. The meaning of this statement is that it depends on Him and comes forth from Him. In fact, it describes something more radical, as though the world were not made by the Creator as an object is made by an artisan, but were made, as it were, out of the Creator Himself, like light from a flame. The point is that the Creator not only produced it in time but also constitutes the sufficient reason for its existence.

As for the “proof” of the existence of God from the principle of sufficient reason, it seems that the matter is not necessary, as Kant already wrote there. There is no evident reason to insist on seeking a reason for the existence of something that has existed from all eternity. Personally, I tend to agree that there ought to be such a reason, though I do not see here the kind of necessity that could entitle the argument to the title “proof.” In any event, for our purposes the important thing is the distinction itself between an emanator and a creator. Even if this is not a strict proof, if we assume the existence of God it is important to distinguish between these two functions of His. The first, as the cause of the world, the one that created it, is a cause on the scientific plane. The second is the reason for the world, and this lies outside the domain of scientific inquiry, since we have seen that science deals with properties and not with essences. Thus this too is another demonstration of the degeneration of the concepts with which science deals. Its concept of creation is degenerate, that is, it is identical with the concept of an efficient cause. But the concept of reason is broader, and science does not deal with it at all. That is the task of myth and religion.

Once again we see that myth and religion complete the scientific treatment by referring to parameters that were peeled away from objects and concepts in scientific treatment.

Chapter Three: A General Retrospective — Science and God

Science: Between Description and Explanation

As we have seen, science does explain and not merely describe, contrary to what the analytic thinkers suggest, but the explanations it gives concern degenerate objects and concepts. Therefore, at least in a certain sense, the distinction we cited in note 31 in the name of Berkeley is correct: science deals only with the question of what happens, and not with the question of why it happens. As we have seen, there are cases in which we will relate to science as describing, that is, dealing with syntax, and not as explaining, that is, dealing with semantics, even from a synthetic point of view.

In light of what we have seen in the present gate, the primary reason for this is that science deals with the form of concepts and not with their essence, with their very existence. As we illustrated in the examples above, this mode of inquiry entails that scientific explanation has the character of description and cannot constitute a full explanation. Principles of common sense cannot be replaced by scientific principles. These are two domains that complement one another, despite a certain overlap between them. For example, we saw that our unwillingness to accept the spontaneous formation of the complex from the simple does not derive from the second law of thermodynamics; rather, it is what underlies it. The second law of thermodynamics is a degenerate formulation of a more basic principle, namely a principle of common sense. The same applies to the law of conservation of energy and matter in the Anaximander context. The same is true of physical conservation laws in general. We saw with respect to them that the quantities they deal with are quantitative characterizations of abstract concepts, mass and charge, and these as such are not themselves the subject matter of scientific inquiry, as we saw in the example of Anaximander with the conservation of charge as a concept and of mass as a concept.

The same can be said of the other conservation laws. They do not underlie our intuitions regarding the emergence of being out of nothing; rather, our intuition is what grounds them. For this reason, scientific explanation is not a substitute for mythical or other explanations that deal with the additional layers. Both exist in parallel.

Still, as we have seen, without generalization we cannot make progress in understanding reality. When ancient scientists tried to understand the behavior of objects in a complete way, they could make no progress at all. Science began to advance only when it decided that it had to give up the pretension of understanding completely and settle for generalizations, that is, for descriptions rather than understandings, or for an understanding relevant only to degenerate concepts. The attempt to deal with the object and the non-degenerate concept as such is not scientific, and it apparently cannot lead to progress in scientific understanding of the world.

An excellent example of this is Godel’s theorem, which was described in the first book and mentioned again in this book. This progress was achieved only because of the transition from semantics to syntax. That transition is a relinquishing of the desire to deal with meaning. In our terminology, it is a process of degeneration of number theory, reflecting a transition from understanding to purely formal treatment. Only when number theory was used as a description of a collection of mechanical processes, of which number theory is only a model in the mathematical sense, was it possible to advance and prove the theorem. This is an excellent example of the achievements that can be reached by means of formalization of problems, that is, by dealing with syntax and giving up semantics. The example of the MIU system that we saw above illustrates this very well.

Another example is a dilemma that troubled anthropologists at the beginning of the twentieth century. The prevailing anthropological approach held that the researcher must live within a tribe of natives, and thus come to understand them and their culture “from within.” By contrast, there were those who argued that anthropology should not be drawn into such a method, because it is not a scientific method. According to them, the anthropologist should sit on the hill overlooking, from above, or from outside, the world of the natives he studies, and try to characterize them from the outside by means of external features.

The first mode of operation cannot lead to general anthropological insights at all, because although the researcher will understand the tribe under study well, it will be a singular understanding, one that cannot compare with other tribes and cannot lead to a general classification of anthropological phenomena among natives. In anthropology too, the decision is to relinquish understanding from within, which deals with the individual tribe and with semantics, in order to make progress on the scientific plane, which by nature deals with description, or syntax.³³

There is a kind of insight that we cannot gain about ourselves. To achieve it, we must observe ourselves precisely from outside. Someone external will grasp these aspects better. These are generalizing external descriptions that involve comparison with other phenomena. In other words, this is a treatment of properties and characterizations, or of “form,” that is, a treatment of classes and of comparison among them, and not of understanding the unique particular. On the other hand, it is obvious that the researcher can never truly understand the connotations and meanings within which the life of the world he studies from the outside is conducted. That may perhaps be achieved only through dealing with “matter,” or with life itself.

Therefore, the success of science must not mislead us into believing that it describes the whole. As we have already noted, it is precisely the relinquishing of the pretension to describe and understand everything that lies at the basis of scientific progress.

One can say even more than this. We saw above that the relation between semantics and syntax is relative. A certain plane of reference can function as syntax with respect to one plane, and as semantics with respect to another. As we saw, scientific progress involves dealing with syntax. Once a certain syntactic plane has been understood by peeling away the true, real object of research, one can try to understand the results, that is, to move to semantics. After that another step of removing degeneration can take place, in which the new plane once again becomes semantics, and the researcher moves to a new semantic plane. Scientific progress, then, proceeds by successive steps of degeneration, but once those steps have been made one can remove the degeneration and try to understand, layer after layer.

Science attempts to advance from one syntactic layer to another by means of generalizations. Afterwards it specifies these generalizations again through sorting and classification within them. In this way science tries to make more specific statements, relating to more specific domains.

As we have seen, a plane that is syntactic with respect to another plane can simultaneously constitute semantics with respect to a third plane. Science tries to spread out the whole picture, but only on the plane of formal explanations. It will probably never be able to cross the final line between form and essence, that is, matter. It can, however, give us more refined tools that grasp form as fully as possible, so that we may try to infer better conclusions about essence.

A conception of science as a comprehensive and total description is comparable to saying that the man in the Chinese Room truly understands and speaks Chinese. Syntax can help the person in the Chinese Room learn the language very well, but without semantics we cannot say that he understands and speaks Chinese.

Physics, which is the most fundamental science, speaks of four fundamental forces that spread out everything. Einstein dreamed of discovering the unified field theory, that is, finding a formulation of a single force from which all the forces, and therefore all natural phenomena, at least of inanimate reality, would be derived. From such general principles one could proceed to an increasingly full description of reality. Yet even if one could reach such a full description, it would still be only a description of the form of reality. The world as such is reached through eidetic vision, or through auditory logic. As we have already seen, this is a way of creating interaction with the world itself without the ordinary senses, which relate only to the appearance of the world before us, the phenomena.

God and Science

At the root, in the sense of emanation, of all this structure there is only one force, namely God. But He does not belong to the causal chain with which physics deals. He is the emanator of reality, but not necessarily the first physical cause within it. Laplace said that he had no need of the God hypothesis, because science can explain everything. One may agree with him, but only in the scientific context. The redundancy of the concept of God exists only on the plane of scientific explanation. Beyond that, on metascientific planes that deal with the world and with concepts themselves, and not only with their degenerate forms, the world cannot be understood rationally without God. When we ask ourselves how matter was created from nothing, or how the concepts of mass and charge arose, there is no scientific answer to this. These questions lie outside the domain of science. Yet it remains clear that they oblige us to seek answers.

Scientific generalizations are supposed to culminate in one simple principle from which everything is derived. But in order to reach the one who stands at its root, we must use non-scientific tools. The reason is that the move from the plane of scientific principles to the ontological plane, that is, to the entities that activate them and cause them, is beyond the power of science. This is not a simple degeneration that moves from principles to more basic principles, and from concepts to more degenerate and more general concepts, but rather a stripping away of all form and a leaving of essence alone. It is a move from description to understanding, or from syntax to the deepest semantics.

Scientific description, the more refined it is, is an important tool for essential explanation. As we saw, only after we know the laws of nature more fully do we arrive at the question of who activates them, that is, at the divine being. Science strengthens the need for additional parallel planes of explanation, such as those of religion and myth. Only all these planes together provide a full explanation and description of reality. Beyond that, the trust we place in the a priori structures of meaning that underlie science strengthens the claim that one may place trust in such structures even when they underlie different systems and planes, such as religion or myth.

Note 41: Wonder at Creation

In this note I would like to discuss the question of wonder at nature. Above we saw a kind of physico-theological argument for the existence of the Creator, the first type brought by Kant. A common version of this argument is based on the complexity of creation, whose coming into being by chance seems improbable.

After the advance of science, we understand that this whole complex structure is derived from a small set of basic physical laws, and all the rest is merely their development and branching out. The question is whether such an understanding should increase our wonder at creation, or rather qualify it.

At first glance, the existence of a single law, even if it branches into several very different contexts, arouses less wonder, because it is much less impressive than a combination of several principles working together. The smaller the number of principles, the simpler and less complex the structure. On the other hand, the very fact that the entire complex whole of nature can be derived from one single principle points to a wondrous and unified order at the basis of creation, and therefore may arouse even greater wonder. Chaos and disorder do not impress us, because we tend to regard them as something trivial that could also have arisen randomly. It is specifically an ordered whole that usually arouses more wonder in us.³⁴

It follows that scientific explanation actually increases our wonder at the order in creation. If so, scientific understanding does not weaken the force of the physico-theological argument, but actually strengthens it.

The tendency to regard science as an alternative that renders the concept of God unnecessary, as in the statement of Laplace mentioned above, ignores this element. Without doubt, this phenomenon stems from analytic positions. In the analytic perspective, according to which science only describes and does not explain, scientific achievements have no significance. They are merely a refined description of complex reality, while reality as such is not derived from these principles and may in fact consist of a combination of very many principles. According to the analytic position, only the description is refined in the course of scientific progress, but we do not draw closer in any way to a true or comprehensive understanding of the world. Even a law of the unified field, if such a law were ever found, would be only a refined description, and not a single cause that causally unfolds all the complexity of creation, and therefore there would be no place for wonder.

Let us note that the concept of wonder is decidedly subjective. The fact that we are not impressed by events and phenomena to which we have grown accustomed does not necessarily mean that they are unworthy of wonder, or that we understand them better. We have simply grown used to them.

Many probabilistic paradoxes have their basis in the subjectivity of the concept of wonder. For example, imagine an Israeli who arrives at a lake in Australia and finds it completely deserted. After some time he hears the approach of another person, and another Israeli appears before him. He is very surprised to discover that the second person is also Israeli. When the latter hears of his surprise at this striking coincidence, he remarks that any person arriving at the lake could have come from any country, and Israel is no different from any other country. If we had asked in advance what the probability was that the only two human beings at that lake would both be Israeli, the probability would have been low. But after one Israeli is already there, and we ask from where the second will come, the probability that he too will be Israeli is similar to the probability that he will come from any other country.

This is exactly the fallacy in the well-known military principle that during an artillery bombardment one should hide in the crater of a shell that has already landed there, because the probability that another shell will fall in the same place is very low. Here too there is a fallacy. Once one particular shell has already landed there, the probability that the next shell will land there is the same as its probability of landing anywhere else.

And still, despite all this, it is natural that we should be impressed by such cases, whether two shells fall in the same place or the only two people who come to the lake both turn out to be Israeli. Wonder is subjective, not necessarily objective.³⁵

If we continue with the lake example, our wonder at the fact that the second person is Israeli stems from the fact that on the other side of the “equation” we place Israel against the rest of the world. The probability that an Israeli will arrive, as against the probability that someone will come from the rest of the world, is very low. But when someone arrives from Indonesia, the probability is similar to the probability that he will arrive from Israel, except that Indonesia is not defined in our mind as a special event. We will treat that case as though someone had arrived from “the rest of the world,” although he must always come from some specific concrete country. Thus it is our way of framing the matter that determines our wonder at the coincidence, not some objective datum. An Indonesian would be impressed specifically by another Indonesian visitor and not by an Israeli. It must be stressed that neither of them would be making a probabilistic mistake. The very same probability may arouse justified wonder in one person and not in another. Wonder is not based only on mathematical measures, but also on subjective components.

If we return to the question of the physico-theological argument, here too we must examine both the objective components, such as the probability that so sophisticated an entity as the whole world would arise by chance, and the subjective planes. Only the combination of both will lead us to wonder, and perhaps also to a conclusion.

Incidentally, Maimonides speaks in his work not of wonder as a proof that there is a Creator, but of wonder that arises once one already knows of His existence and can then form some connection to Him through contemplation of His wondrous works. This is his language in Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, chapter 2:

This glorious and awe-inspiring God has commanded us to love Him and fear Him, as it is said: “You shall love the Lord your God,” and it is said: “The Lord your God you shall fear.”

And what is the way to love Him and fear Him? When a person contemplates His great and wondrous works and creatures, and sees in them His wisdom, which has no measure and no end, he immediately loves, praises, glorifies, and longs with a great longing to know the great Name.

And in chapter 4 there, halakha 12:

When a person reflects on these matters and comes to know all creatures, from angel and sphere to human being and the like, and sees the wisdom of the Holy One, blessed be He, in all beings and all creatures, he adds love for the Omnipresent, and his soul thirsts and his flesh yearns to love the Omnipresent, blessed be He…

Closing Remarks

This, in effect, concludes the general course of the book’s discussion. In the next gate we will examine concrete examples and try to demonstrate various applications of what has been said here to problems called “contradictions between Torah and science.” The value of that discussion will not lie only in its content, but also in its method. It will sharpen and illustrate the implications of everything that has been said thus far.

Summary of the Discussion in This Gate

In this gate we described scientific generalization from a different angle: generalization is the treatment of degenerate concepts. We saw that the objects of scientific treatment are not real entities, but abstract concepts and objects that do not exist in concrete reality.

This sharpens the fact that science deals only with the properties of reality and not with its essence, or only with classes of objects and not with the individual object. Singular understanding is not scientific, by virtue of the limitation science has imposed on itself. That limitation is indeed what made scientific progress possible, but it is also what dictates its limits.

We encountered several domains and several kinds of questions that do not lie within the domain of science, questions that concern the individual and not the class, essence and not characteristics.

In these gaps within understanding one can see the relevance of belief in God. On the scientific plane He cannot take part, because the limitation that science imposes on itself excludes Him from the “game.” He is not a legitimate explanatory tool for scientific questions. But in those gaps where science does not operate, one may encounter the idea of God and its cognitive value.

In the next gate we will demonstrate the techniques and principles presented thus far in the domain where faith supposedly collides with science. We will try to show that these collisions are usually illusory, mainly because of the delimitation described here.

Footnotes

It should be emphasized that these remarks do not necessarily mean that these are approximate and inaccurate laws. The laws may be perfectly exact, but they deal with a theoretical world, a world of point masses without friction. There they are exact. The aim of this description is to reconstruct complex reality out of those simple laws, and thereby to arrive at an ever more precise understanding of the real world. We discussed this above in the second gate.

Indeed, the midrash in Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, on which Nahmanides relies, is brought in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, part 2, chapter 26, as the most wondrous and astonishing midrash he encountered in the words of the Sages. The reason is that it stands in opposition to belief in creation ex nihilo.

In a footnote below we will continue discussing Nahmanides’ remarks.

In light of what we have said here, it seems reasonable to say that Nahmanides means that the world was indeed created ex nihilo, but that, in Plato’s view, the matter familiar to us today was created from primordial matter because of a law of conservation of being. Within the process of creation, the laws of nature and reason are no longer violated, and therefore at that stage creation must be explained in Platonic fashion. If so, it seems that in fact there is no contradiction in his words: the world was created from primordial matter, but that primordial matter itself was also created ex nihilo.

This sort of solution sounds forced. It may seem to solve the scientific problem, but it does nothing to relieve the distress of common sense. Such a claim in effect says that when we are dealing with human beings, no such conservation law exists, just as no physical determinism exists when we are dealing with human beings. We should not allow ourselves to be captivated by the scientific or quantitative formulation.

It should also be noted that this distinction is important in the discussion of postmodernism generally. In many cases the postmodern erasure of criteria stems from moral motivations. When there are no criteria for the questions of what is good and what is bad, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is true and what is false, the result is that everyone is right, beautiful, and good to the same degree. That erases all discrimination on any basis whatever. But even in the general discussion it is important to distinguish between moral motivations and the logical examination of the arguments themselves.

This is a theoretical description. We saw there that even those who hold analytic positions do not in fact conceive concepts in this way. This conception only serves them in the polemic against those who hold “dogmatic,” that is, synthetic, positions. ↩
We did not address this issue in the first book. In philosophical terminology, following Descartes and Locke, some would call this division primary and secondary qualities. ↩
A student remarked to me that it may be that expressing emotion toward someone relates to his essence and not to his characteristics. When I love someone, it appears that this is directed toward his essence and not toward his qualities. Love of a person’s qualities does not seem to exhaust the feeling of love toward him. In the third book we will discuss this more broadly. ↩
In note 3 of the first book we in fact carried out a substantial degeneration of the concept of kinyan (legal acquisition). We “peeled away” from it the characteristic of conferring rights of use. ↩
The significance of this is that saying of someone that he is a prime minister gives us less information than saying that he is the prime minister of the State of Israel. More information can be obtained if we also say during what period he serves as prime minister. At that stage, the information in our possession is sufficient to pin down the person described absolutely, that is, it is sufficient information to identify him with certainty. Of course, as we have seen, this is not necessarily the end of the process of degeneration, for one can continue to give further kinds of information about the same person. ↩
In the second gate of the first book we pointed out that even when we arrive at so detailed a definition that only one individual fits it, we still have not reached the matter of the concept. Description, by its very nature, deals with form and not with matter. This is the peeling away of the concept, or the object, from its matter, a peeling that leaves us with the totality of its properties, that is, a collection of properties defining only one object, but still without the concept or object itself. ↩
As we already noted above, usually we “close in” on the object already halfway through the process. ↩
See on this the first book, in the introduction to the second unit. ↩
Interesting in this context is Nahmanides’ expression in his commentary on Song of Songs 3:9, which seems at first glance to contradict the principle of faith in creation ex nihilo. He explains there that according to Plato, creation ex nihilo is impossible, and therefore one must assume the existence of primordial matter prior to creation. ↩
Anaximander himself did not relate to conservation laws as modern physics does. For him, the opposite can be created later, in his words, “according to the order of time,” in order to pay for the injustice of the first. In the modern conception, that creation must be simultaneous in order to preserve the conservation laws. Here we are merely trying to reconstruct Anaximander’s theory for modern ears. ↩
Today modern physics speaks of antiparticles with opposite properties, and in fact the formulation given here largely parallels the modern solution to the problem of creation ex nihilo. ↩
On this matter see the first book, p. 371, note 77, where we made this point briefly. ↩
According to Kabbalah, the angels, which are separate forms, without matter in our sense, are found primarily in the world of Yetzirah. This is the world of forms, parallel to what in Platonic philosophy is called the world of ideas. ↩
In fact the process begins above the worlds of Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah mentioned above. It is well known that before the emanation of the worlds, all reality was filled with the light of Ein Sof, corresponding to Anaximander’s unlimited and undefined principle, and from it the worlds beneath were emanated. The beginning is the withdrawal of the light of Ein Sof and the formation of a split world of kav and tzimtzum, that is, a circular void into which a line of Ein Sof light penetrates. This is the beginning of opposites, duality, in the world, for the line is light and the contraction, that is, the void, is absence of light. This is a duality of being and absence, and therefore it can have a single foundation. We perceive it as a real duality, as the existence of two opposites. It is at this stage that Anaximander’s doctrine is concerned. ↩
We can now also understand a contradiction in Nahmanides’ words on this issue. As we saw in the footnote above, in his commentary on Song of Songs he writes that the world was created from primordial matter. On the other hand, in his commentary on Genesis 1:8 he apparently contradicts this and writes that the world was created ex nihilo, interpreting the aforementioned midrash from Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer allegorically. ↩
The author of Leshem Shevo ve-Ahlamah, see for example in the section of explanations, discourses on circles and straightness, branch 2, letters 7 and 9 and elsewhere, proves on the basis of such a consideration, and additional textual considerations, the claim that in the light of Ein Sof, up to which the kabbalists had assumed that it possessed no properties at all, that is the meaning of the word Ein Sof: a being that has an end has a limit and a definition in some sense, not necessarily geometric, and therefore it can be defined through that quality; Ein Sof is conceived as undefined and therefore is called infinite, there were hidden latent sefirot. The sefirot in Kabbalah are the various qualities in their most primordial state. In the light of Ein Sof the qualities existed in a completely primordial condition, meaning that they were not yet qualities at all; only their concepts were hidden within it, similar to what we saw here. ↩
On the Threshold of the Jubilee, Yaakov Hasdai, Hed Artzi, Or Yehuda, 1998. ↩
For another interesting comparison between the two movements, see the book Myth and Memory, mentioned above in the third gate, in Michael Feige’s article on the relation of these two movements to movement martyrs. See also the first book, in the section beginning on p. 158. ↩
See the first book, p. 141, footnote 69, and the references there. ↩
Pahad Yitzhak, on Purim, Mossad Gur-Aryeh, New York, 1986. See on this also the first book, p. 141, footnote 69. ↩
Beyond that, he also degenerates the form of concepts, but that varies from one context to another. The peeling of the concept or object away from its essence is essential to all scientific contexts. ↩
This is one of the accepted definitions of the direction of the thermodynamic time axis: the direction in which entropy can increase. See, for example, Avshalom Elitzur’s book Time and Consciousness, University on the Air, Ministry of Defense, Tel Aviv, 1994. See there chapters 6-7. Chapters 6-11 there all bear on what we are discussing here. ↩
There are also proposals that attribute this to information present, or stored, and so forth, in the minds of the planners and builders, which is a kind of entropy. The lowering of the world’s entropy is possible at the cost of using information in human minds. This is a process similar to what in physical thought is called Maxwell’s demon. ↩
In the second gate of the first book we rejected Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles, according to which any two entities identical to one another in all their properties are one and the same object. ↩
One reason that such generalizations exert a magical charm on many people is that they are grounded in moral motivations with which it is very easy to identify. Who would not want to see all people as intelligent, and thereby grant everyone equal status? But moral motivations are not a guarantee of the logical validity of arguments. Unfortunately, this generalization is unconvincing on the logical plane. ↩
In the article that appears first in the book On the Just and the Unjust, Marcelo Dascal, ed., University Publishing Enterprises, 1977. ↩
Its basis lies in the impossible desire underlying moral philosophy, ethics, to find a philosophical justification for moral obligation. This subject will, God willing, receive detailed treatment in the next book. For a critique of this argument, see Yehuda Meltzer’s article, which is the second in the aforementioned book. ↩
See a description of this problem in Yoav Ben-Dov’s book Quantum Theory: Reality and Mystery, Dvir, Tel Aviv, 1998. The problem of self-identity is presented there at the end of part 1 and in chapter 20. ↩
“Zeno’s Arrow and Modern Physics,” Michael Avraham, Iyun 46, Jerusalem, 1998. ↩
See, for example, the appendix to the first book, note 31, which deals with the nature of time. ↩
Richard Taylor, Metaphysics, translated by Yael Cohen, Adam Publishers, Free University, Jerusalem, 1983. ↩
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, edition of Samuel Hugo Bergmann and Nathan Rotenstreich, Bialik Institute, Jerusalem, 1983, third edition. See there in the second division, second book, third section, especially chapters 3-6. ↩
As we saw in chapter 6 of the second gate, research in what is called the social sciences has in recent years tried to return to idiographic-particular research, that is, research based on living within a particular case, and not on “outside” statistics of many cases. This process has taken place after researchers saw that even when scientific methods similar to those of the natural sciences were adopted, they did not succeed in reaching precise results and a genuine level of scientific precision and reliability, that is, deductive-nomological explanations. They therefore retreated from the abandonment of understanding, since in light of this there is no place for such abandonment and no need for it. ↩
The field of scientific-mathematical chaos, for example, begins to impress and interest us precisely when we realize that at its base there is a system of principles of order. ↩
Maya Bar-Hillel, from the Department of Psychology at the Hebrew University, discusses in several articles the subjective phenomena of probability and statistics. ↩

← Gate Four: Parallel Planes of ExplanationContentsGate Six: Religion and Science, or Apologetics for Advanced →

Science and Concepts — Weaknesses and Strengths Inherent in the Scientific Approach

Introduction

Chapter One: Degeneration and Specification of Concepts

Preface: Matter and Form of Concepts

Degeneration and Specification of Concepts

Chapter Two: The Scientific Process as the Treatment of Degenerate Concepts

The Meaning of Generalization: Generalization and Degeneration

Degeneration as the Foundation of Scientific Progress

Example: Anaximander’s Theory of Creation ex Nihilo

Note 38: What Opposites Have in Common

Entropy and the Formation of Life: Common Sense and Science

Different Intelligences and Different Scientific Fields

Note 39: Continuity of Identity

Note 40: The Principle of Sufficient Reason: The Concept of Emanation

Chapter Three: A General Retrospective — Science and God

Science: Between Description and Explanation

God and Science

Note 41: Wonder at Creation

Closing Remarks

Summary of the Discussion in This Gate

Footnotes

שתף