Debate: Is There a God and Is There a Torah? Rabbi Dr. Michael Avraham vs. Dr. Jeremy Fogel

Editor’s note: Speaker identification was corrected based on context and argumentative sequence, without full voice verification. The wording itself was preserved from the original automatic transcript. Short interventions that were merged into a paragraph may still require checking against the recording.

[Tamir DorTel] Hello and welcome to the “On Meaning” podcast. I have the privilege of hosting two people: Rabbi Mikhi, Michael Abraham, hello.

Hello, hello.

And Dr. Jeremy Vogel, author of the book “Philosophy Against God.” Do you want a plug for anything else? What can you do? Do you want a plug for anything else?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] You know, I myself am the commodity. Hello everyone.

[Tamir DorTel] Okay, so a major, major intellectual figure. Why don’t you open, because I think that’ll be a good opening. We’re going to argue about God, about Jewish law, about Torah, commandments, secularism, values, and more, right?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Yes, yes. God, God, God, God, God. God, the Holy One, blessed be He. Look, I want to start by blessing you, Tamir. Tamir DorTel, if that’s your real name, and it’s great to be here again. And I’m very glad Tamir is here, because I’ve had the privilege—you know I love the Rabbi, I know the Rabbi, I appreciate the Rabbi, I even admire the Rabbi a little. And I’ve already had the chance to speak—and your son who’s here with us—and I’ve had the chance to speak with the Rabbi several, several, several times, and I was always also wearing the interviewer’s hat, which tied my hands a bit in a certain way, because you, better than anyone, know that this time, this format, how much time is left. Now I’m glad I get to enter an open discussion under—

[Tamir DorTel] Eternity, like just to accumulate, just to get hit with clubs on the head.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Right. So with respect to Rabbi Mikhi Abraham, whom I really love personally, we get along great, but I also love him as a phenomenon. Even though he’s a little taller than I am, which is unforgivable. But I love your philosophical passion, Rabbi Mikhi, I love the depth of your thinking, the originality, the daring, the erudition. That said, to say the end at the beginning, David Hume—whom I regard as the greatest philosopher against God—ultimately persuades me more than you do, and I think in general as well. And I say that with all due respect. Now I want to say it this way. I basically begin “Philosophy Against God” with that man because I think David Hume is not only one of the greatest philosophers, period—he is probably, in my view at least, the greatest philosopher against God. Why? Because David Hume attacked, with wondrous sharpness, the two main pillars on which people usually rely in order to ground their belief in God—people in general, but especially Rabbi Mikhi Abraham in particular. And those are: first, the possibility of inferring God from nature, and second, the possibility of inferring God on the basis of testimony about miraculous events. Now, since I’ve already had the chance to talk with the Rabbi, and we’ll surely get into the arguments themselves later in our conversation today, I already want to begin with what I currently remember and what I heard in preparation for our conversation today—namely, the conclusions of your arguments, Rabbi. From the possibility of inferring God from nature, you go to an argument that is fascinating—the fine-tuning argument, or the theologico-physical argument—which basically talks about the way the basic constants of the universe could have been all kinds of slightly different ways, and then nothing that is happening here at this moment could have happened. And basically you set out on a journey that I think we have to admit is very, very, very speculative. You basically go to the edge of human consciousness, to the edge of the possibility of human cognitive thought; in my opinion you also go beyond it in many ways. But that’s an argument that’s a little less critical for me today, and I’ll tell you why. Because in the end, what you come back from that trip in the fog with is something—but really just something. An unmoved mover, self-caused, you call it God, suit yourself. You can call it God or Spinoza’s nature; you can also just call it something. And honestly, in the end you can’t establish much beyond its being something, some sort of something from which the universe emerged or that is connected to the beginning of the universe. Again, it’s very speculative, it’s in the fog. And to tell you the truth, I also believe in something. I think there is something. Something. There is something. David Hume believed there is something. Something. The much more problematic thing—and if I may, I’ll call it a philosophical scandal, nothing less—a philosophical scandal, is the very acrobatic leap you make from some sort of something at the beginning of being, at the beginning of the universe, to the Jewish God. And of course you do that through the revelation at Mount Sinai, around belief in testimony about the revelation at Mount Sinai. Now I call it—

[Tamir DorTel] Will you forgive me if I ask for a full stop so he can respond?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But, but—

[Tamir DorTel] But the listeners doing the dishes don’t have the same memory.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Your listeners do. You’re underestimating the holy audience. And in general you keep them very tightly controlled in the comments, which, I don’t know if that’s because you’re very severe. Never mind. Okay, we’ll talk about it later. The argumentative scandal of Sinai, which in my view is simply—I have to say—grotesque arguments, completely circular, completely circular. I have to state the obvious—again, we’ll get into the details later—there isn’t the slightest hint of any empirical historical proof for a supernatural event happening at Sinai fifteen hundred years before the Common Era or somewhere around there. The arguments are completely circular, completely circular. Because what do we say? We must believe because there were six hundred thousand people there. How do you know there were six hundred thousand people there? It’s written in the text. How do you know the text is reliable? Because it talks about six hundred thousand. How do you know there were six hundred thousand? Because there’s a text. How do you know? Circle. Now, the Rabbi’s circle is a little more sophisticated. The Hebrew Bible is reliable because it reflects a broad tradition. How do I know there’s a broad tradition? From the Hebrew Bible. How do I know the Hebrew Bible? From the broad tradition. We’re in another circle. We’re basically dealing with two circular arguments, two arguments worth zero; zero plus zero is zero. This thing is plainly unconvincing. And so—and here we come to the point of this dramatic opening, I prepared a dramatic opening.

[Tamir DorTel] We didn’t see in the Torah a text that says we must obey it.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Right, right, right, right. But given the wisdom of this man, the tremendous knowledge—because he has a doctorate in physics, here I am dust beneath his feet. Real science. Science. A doctorate in physics, a rabbi, and a philosopher—given all this knowledge and impressive erudition and this supreme sophistication of this man, somehow more interesting than the argument is the huge gap, the abyss, between the philosophical sophistication of Rabbi Michael Abraham and the obvious weakness of the arguments he allows himself to believe in in order to ground his belief in God. And here, really, as someone who listened again to all our conversations, there is an enormous difference between a rational argument for the existence of God—which there isn’t—and a rationalization of belief in God, at which you excel; you are the greatest of the generation. You are amazing at rationally justifying your belief in God. The reverse doesn’t work. Meaning there is begging the question here in a fundamental way, alongside other things. Now—and here I’ll finish—what I want today, because I have the chance to hear the Rabbi and really enter into a real discussion with him and not an interview, I’d be happy to be convinced. I’d be happy to be convinced.

[Tamir DorTel] You’re saying that today you’re ready to put on—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Yes. I’m leaving with this kippah. I’m ending this discussion with this kippah and even covering my bald spot with it; I’ve got an interest.

[Tamir DorTel] There are advantages. Really. And then you’ll also be part of a full-on right-wing governing bloc.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Totally, and I’ll lose all my conscience and moral traces. There are many advantages. The thing is, for that to happen—and I really do want it, because who doesn’t want a God who arranges a little justice and morality and maybe promises the possibility of meeting Grandma Rivka and Mitzi in the world to come, and so on and so on.

[Tamir DorTel] Mitzi won’t be in the world to come. Who knows.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Now the thing is this: in order—Rabbi is aware of this—he was born into a certain cultural framework, so was I, all of us. That can’t color our arguments. Everyone, including scientists, sees the world from a certain point of view. But in order nevertheless to universalize—and in order not to beg the question as I just claimed—I propose the Chinese test. The Chinese test means this: for many years, back when people still visited the country, I would speak to groups of Chinese people interested in Jewish culture for various somewhat strange reasons related to our economic and scientific success. I would lecture them. And I would lecture intelligent people who know Chinese culture—Confucius, Laozi, and so on—who had heard nothing about Judaism. They know there’s a people that gets a lot of Nobel Prizes, and that interests them. And I say: let’s keep trying to imagine an argument that the Rabbi advances, and I’m saying it to a Chinese person or a Peruvian or a Polynesian, who is intelligent, educated, knows his culture—and let’s see how persuasive it ought to be for him as a kind of litmus test that we’re not just talking from our own position. To sum up: the Rabbi’s arguments are very smart. Wait, what?

[Tamir DorTel] What do the Polynesians and Chinese answer you?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Oh, no, let’s see, let’s say the two of us—I already talked to them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I already talked to them, they don’t have to answer him; he wants me to talk to them.

[Tamir DorTel] I didn’t understand.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Because I’m not trying to convince them that the Torah is true and that Sinai really happened. I present it as just another mythology, like the mythologies they have.

[Tamir DorTel] So what’s the Chinese test? And what would happen hypothetically if the Rabbi talked to them?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Exactly. The Rabbi’s argument should have universal validity. That’s what he claims, after all. The Rabbi claims—he has arguments that have a quasi-scientific basis, meaning that just as the Chinese accepted the theory of evolution, they ought to accept the Rabbi’s arguments for the truth of Mount Sinai. Okay. I claim—and again, I’d be happy to be surprised, I have no problem becoming religious right now, today, as we said—up to now, in the conversations we’ve had, they haven’t convinced me. I think they certainly wouldn’t convince my Chinese or Indian friend. I think they’re unconvincing, and I also want to speak to your audience, which I know is a very active audience that responds a lot, and most of them are believers.

[Tamir DorTel] That’s your camera, address it.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I ask you to watch this conversation with a mirror. I see that people attack a lot and will get angry at many of the things I’m going to say, and so on. I understand that people don’t struggle over these beliefs for nothing; these are beliefs with enormous existential weight, with amazing comfort for those who hold them. They also have, as we joked earlier—but it’s not funny—enormous weight in current Israeli geopolitics. And I say: I understand this is a very sensitive topic. Look at it with the understanding that this thing activates you in a certain way, and whoever is willing to seek the truth—as the Rabbi claims to do and I claim to do—should come with as open a mind as possible. Come with a Chinese mind. That’s how I wanted to open.

[Tamir DorTel] Thus far the doctor’s remarks.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, the truth is I’m looking for some sentence I agree with that I can start from, and I’m not really finding one. Even the things you put in my mouth I don’t agree with—that is, certainly not the things you said. Wait, I have quotations. Okay. One second. Yes, yes, sorry.

[Tamir DorTel] You’re the rebellious son here. It’s all right.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, no, last time—it’s not like with us where it’s forbidden, you’re right.

[Tamir DorTel] Last time you talked for ten minutes, so here, let’s check. Twelve minutes, however long you want.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Everything’s fine. Okay. Maybe I’ll start with what you started with. I do not enter any fog. As a matter of principle, I oppose entering fog. So I didn’t go into fog and I didn’t come back from it. I always stay within the illuminated zone. I am indeed aware that around the illuminated zone there is fog, but I don’t enter it as a matter of principle. All sorts of people, mainly in the religious world, tend to do that—to go into the fog and somehow come out with something they managed to extract from there—and I keep insisting that from fog you can’t extract anything.

[Tamir DorTel] I am interrupting because I didn’t understand a thing. What is the illuminated zone? What is the fog?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying, in this parable, the illuminated zone is rational thinking, things accessible to our cognition and our thought. The fog is what lies beyond. Certain kinds of things you don’t know how to define—God is usually ascribed to those regions. No, I don’t go there. My conception of God is fed only by the illuminated condition, the illuminated zone. Meaning: if I reach the conclusion that there is fog, then I’ll claim that there is fog; I won’t claim anything about what’s inside the fog. That’s an important point. I may come back to it. A second point connected to this—again, something you somehow put in my mouth and I don’t agree with—is that you would be very happy to have someone arrange for you the world to come and a meeting with Mitzi and all sorts of things like that, and manage the world for you. So I can’t provide you with that, because I also don’t believe in that. Therefore I don’t arrive at belief in God from those directions. It’s not that I know there isn’t such a thing, but as I said, I don’t go into the fog. And these areas—what is there after life, where Mitzi is, whether I’ll meet her or not meet her, or who runs this world—those are questions that belong to the domain of fog. And as a matter of principle I am careful not to express a position on them, and therefore I have no position about what is going to happen after our lives, no position about whom we’re going to meet there, what it even means to meet in such conditions. There are certain traditions that have come down to us—world to come, this world—I am very skeptical of those traditions. Not so popular in the rabbinic world, but I am very skeptical of those traditions, because really, if their source were Sinai then I’d accept them, but I don’t see it.

[Tamir DorTel] Which texts do we have from Sinai according to your view? The Torah.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Only. More or less, together with some Oral Torah that accompanies it a little—hermeneutic principles, some interpretations of—

[Tamir DorTel] But not the whole body of Oral Torah texts from the sages. Obviously not. Meaning not the whole Talmud, the whole Mishnah, the whole Tosefta, all the baraitot.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nothing from there comes from Sinai. Almost nothing. Those are things that developed throughout history as interpretation of what we received at Sinai, and therefore they join the body that is binding on me. Binding, to the point that I argue—I feel part of the same world. I sit with them at the table and I also argue with them, but for me that whole body is Torah, and in order to be committed to it I do not need the claim of authenticity—that the whole thing really came from Sinai. And innocent people with childish thinking, I would even say, in order to ground their commitment to all these details that came down to us, all of which everyone understands have not the faintest connection to what was at Sinai, invented this legend that every tiny thing we received came from Sinai. Anyone who knows a little Talmud sees that’s not true. Therefore—but that doesn’t mean I’m not committed. I am committed to it. I’m committed not because it came from Sinai, but because it is an interpretation that joined what we received from Sinai. But that really doesn’t touch your opening remarks, so here I’m just saying it in one sentence. Now—so that’s regarding the framework of the discussion. I want, as I said before, I’m in exactly the same place you are. I don’t go into the fog; I want to talk about what is here. And our argument is rooted here, not in any fog. I want to see what is happening here. And on that plane, you said there are basically two basic pillars you want to talk about. The first pillar is proof of the existence of God, and the second pillar is tradition, yes, Hume’s witness argument, about which we’ve already argued once, both in writing and orally. Those are basically the two pillars you want to discuss. Now, it’s hard to give lectures on this, but I’ll briefly give my view, and if you want afterward we can go into it more. Regarding proof of the existence of God, as you said earlier, say we take the fine-tuning argument, what’s called the fine-tuning argument—meaning there are values of constants, but again, the constants are only an illustration for our purposes; there are very, very special laws, laws of nature. And in my view it is not reasonable that these laws exist here without someone being responsible for their existence. Their structure is too special. Now, one can argue about this, and we can argue about it later if you want, I just want to come back and show through this argument what I meant when I said I don’t go into the fog. If you ask me what is the nature of that one who legislated these laws, you won’t hear an answer from me. I have no idea. All I know is that there is probably someone who legislated these laws. That’s my conclusion. That conclusion comes from looking at the laws, from the illuminated zone. I don’t go into any fog. Maybe I’ll give an example: when you’re in Winnie-the-Pooh, you walk along the seashore, you see footprints, and in the end it turns out to be himself. But you see footprints and you assume that, I don’t know, a wild boar walked here, okay? Now, I have no idea what a wild boar is, I’ve never seen a wild boar, but I know that if there are footprints, then apparently someone who left those footprints walked here. Or something.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Something, exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So in that sense this is an argument that does not require saying anything about who that something is, okay? That’s all. Meaning, that is all I’m saying. Now, that’s regarding the argument for the existence of God. Therefore, if there is a debate between us about the first pillar, this pillar, it is a debate that should be conducted here. Meaning the question is whether such a system of laws needs something or someone standing behind it, meaning responsible for its being thus and not otherwise.

[Tamir DorTel] But apparently on that you agree. What? Apparently on that you agree.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so Jeremy said earlier that maybe he agrees, we’ll hear in a moment.

[Tamir DorTel] Right, so then there’s nothing to discuss there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, if we don’t discuss it, then we’ll agree, everything’s fine. The fringes we’ll put in later; that’s between—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, we are very far from the fringes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sorry. So that’s the first pillar. The second pillar, the witness argument, which you said is circular—so as I think I already said once.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I’ll just say that maybe we should argue about it a bit again because not everyone knows it.

[Tamir DorTel] There are another six minutes.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, no, I’m saying in general, on the meta-level—not interrupting—I’m saying in general that let’s not assume prior knowledge on the part of the audience—

[Tamir DorTel] We’re not assuming any prior knowledge. No, I’m the judge, I didn’t listen to the previous conversations. Sorry, that wasn’t—and I think that if there is a point of agreement, there’s no need to discuss it by force because we have enough points of disagreement.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. Now, regarding the circularity of this argument, as I believe I said before, I do not rely on the book of the Torah, not even with respect to the revelation at Mount Sinai. I rely on some tradition that came down to me—that’s one side of the coin—and the other side is that conclusion I spoke about earlier, about that something that created the laws, created the world, and so on. For me, the tradition that told me someone revealed Himself to us, and the philosophical conclusion that there is such a transcendent being, yes, who is responsible for the world, who created the world—the combination of those two together leads me to the conclusion that there was a revelation at Mount Sinai. Again, not a certain conclusion. I have certainty about nothing, but it is reasonable, sufficiently reasonable for me that I build on it. As for the text itself, it is simply part of the tradition. Meaning when I say there were six hundred thousand people at the revelation at Mount Sinai—by the way I’m not even sure of that, that there were six hundred thousand; maybe it’s a typological number, much ink has already been spilled on that—but the book for me is simply part of the tradition that was transmitted to me. Therefore the book does not ground the tradition, and the tradition does not ground the book. What comes down to me is a tradition about the revelation at Mount Sinai. That tradition carries with it a book, and that tradition keeps saying in every generation that what is written in the book records what we received from the tradition. That’s all. There is no circularity here. I don’t see any, at the logical level. You can argue about the witness argument, and we’ll argue about it if you want, but I don’t understand where you got circularity from. There is no circularity here in the logical sense. That’s regarding the witness argument. Now as for the issue itself—well, here we really need to get into it more. If you want, maybe present Hume’s arguments against the witness argument, and then we’ll debate that, but that’s really perhaps a separate discussion. I think I’ll stop here. That’s enough for me at the first stage.

[Tamir DorTel] Guy, but yes, do touch on it a bit, give an introduction to the witness argument, so he doesn’t put words in your mouth, and then say: wait, no, let him begin with what Hume says in your view, and what the witness argument means in your view. Fine, you’ve got another four minutes freely.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Since I’m on Hume’s side, if you want I can do it and then he—

[Tamir DorTel] can—no, no, I actually want you to present it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The witness argument as such, independent of Hume—the witness argument as such—some people bring it in the name of the Kuzari or something like that, namely that there is some continuous tradition passed down to us. So we assume that this continuity is at least over the period of say the last 2,500 years, 2,000 to 2,500 years, which are documented. Meaning on that I think we can agree: it is continuous. Meaning from there another thousand years back, say, another thousand years back or something like that, that is less documented. Okay. But those 2,500 years are documented, and the claim is that this tradition reaching me essentially conveys to me the fact that there was a revelation at Mount Sinai. Now Hume speaks generally against miracles, but let’s focus on this miracle of the revelation at Mount Sinai, okay? Meaning the question is whether one can believe a tradition that conveys to me a supernatural event, a miraculous event, or something like that—that’s basically the claim. Now I’ll say, before I get into that claim and the answers I have to it, I’ll make one more remark. Those who rely on the Kuzari, and many others as well even without relying on the Kuzari, see the witness argument as something decisive. Meaning, a father doesn’t lie to his son; it passes on across a broad front, therefore if it reached us it must probably have happened. Okay. In my view, not strong enough. Meaning, that argument is not an argument that stands on its own, but it is also not weightless. It has some weight. Any tradition that comes down to me, my simple assumption is: that is probably what happened. There are challenges—we can discuss them, maybe yes, maybe no—but that by itself doesn’t really hold water, it’s not decisive, but it isn’t weightless either.

[Tamir DorTel] Okay, so it holds some amount of water.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. However, as I said earlier, there is a kind of two-way move here, top-down and bottom-up. Meaning if I reached the philosophical conclusion that there exists some entity that created the world, and presumably did so for some purpose—that is a reasonable assumption, meaning it has some sort of goal—then because of that I expect it to tell me something about that purpose, meaning I have some task I’m supposed to perform. I’m focusing on humanity—again, this is all much longer, I’m trying to summarize—but I’m focusing on people and humanity because we have choice. Meaning the other creatures in the world do not agonize over the question of what their task is, because their agonizing has no meaning; they have no choice. So with us, we’re supposed to know what to decide, and in order to decide we need to know what to decide. And because of that I expect it to convey this task to me in some way, or the reason it placed me here. Now one could say that this task is simply to behave morally, to be a good person; it has nothing to do with religious commandments and so on. I am skeptical about that as a reasonable solution, because morality, in my view, is a means to create a proper society, but it cannot explain why the society exists. If the society did not exist, it would not need to be proper. Meaning the condition that society be proper can enable it to carry out what is truly incumbent upon it, but it cannot be that the proper functioning of society is the purpose for which society was created—or at least it is not reasonable that this is the purpose for which society was created. Therefore the conclusion, in the end, is that there ought to be some message that passes from Him to me. That message is not just morality but something. Beyond that, let’s call it a religious message for now, but never mind, something else. That’s from the top-down, sorry, from the top-down. Meaning from God there ought to be some revelation. From the bottom-up, there came to us a tradition that such an event indeed occurred, a tradition like that. So I say: fine, if I already expect such a revelation in advance, and a tradition like that really did come to me, then my simple assumption is: why not? Okay?

[Tamir DorTel] What’s the connection between the physical laws that you discovered are so amazing and fit harmoniously with one another, and—wait—from physical laws I infer God, and then from God I infer some kind of will that there should be some kind of society with choice, where people need to choose what to do? There’s some disconnect here.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, so I’ll say two things about that. First, fine-tuning—or the physico-theological argument—is only one layer in this whole move. Already here you can see some of it, because if fine-tuning’s characteristics include that it ultimately makes possible the emergence of life, or the emergence of human beings beyond life, that means that something in the intention of this creation probably aimed to reach human beings at the end of the process. So that already in itself can say that it actually created them with choice, so it intended us to be. Why? Because it wants something from us.

[Tamir DorTel] Do you want to prove choice?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I assume we have choice. If you want we can argue about that, but I assume we have choice. Second, I have an additional argument, the argument from morality. The argument from morality says there cannot be valid morality without God essentially legislating it or obligating us to it, and that already takes us one step further, because it basically says He really does expect things of us. Morality is no longer a neutral fact, right? That’s the ought, not the is. It’s what we’re supposed to do, not what in fact exists. And perhaps one last point in this context, and then we can come to Hume’s challenge, which I haven’t even mentioned yet, and answers and so on. But one last point that’s important for me to mention: there is something very—exactly that question you asked, Tamir, this transition from a philosophical God to a religious God. Meaning how did I jump from fine-tuning to—

[Tamir DorTel] Yes, that’s exactly what Vogel ended with.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, so I’m saying that that jump is not as big a jump as people tend to think. Why? Because if someone comes to me—this is Bertrand Russell’s teapot argument, right? If Bertrand Russell says to me that someone comes to me and tells me there is a God and He commanded me, I don’t know, to turn the other cheek or eat the holy bread or I don’t know exactly what, I’ll say to him: yes, and Tinker Bell came to me and told me to stand on one foot three times every morning. That’s not plausible. To give a parable: around the planet Jupiter, someone comes to me and says around the planet Jupiter there is some small transparent teapot orbiting. Now he asks me, what do you think about that? Seemingly I have no information, fifty-fifty, either yes or no, I have no information. Bertrand Russell says: absolutely not. That’s not fifty-fifty, that’s not true. Because I have no reason in the world to assume there is such a teapot. Not everything I have no information about remains fifty-fifty. That’s basically the claim. Now, everything is very telegraphic, but I hope it’s clear. And from that I want to come back to us. I’m basically saying: if I reached the conclusion that there is a philosophical God, then I already know I’m not in a vacuum with no information. There is already some transcendent entity that created the world. I got to that through philosophical arguments, okay? It even wants something from me—I also reached that through philosophical arguments from morality, okay? Now a tradition comes to me and says: this is how He revealed Himself, and this is what He wants. Now one can argue with that tradition, but it is no longer a celestial teapot. Meaning, it’s not—if someone had come to me, say, during Obama’s time, and told me: look, in the United States there is a black president who passed Obamacare, the health law in America. And he had told me that in the 1990s, I’d have institutionalized him on the spot. Right? But if he tells me after I already know there is a black president of the United States, after I know there is a black president of the United States, and then he says: yes, his name is Barack Obama and he passed Obamacare. Okay, so I already know there is such a person, because in the 1990s to think there would be a black president of the United States was simply bizarre. Okay, but after ten years it suddenly turns out that that’s reality.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Not to mention saying Donald Trump would be president, okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And after I know that, when someone comes and tells me yes, and he passed Obamacare and that’s his name—okay, maybe yes, maybe no, but that’s no longer a celestial teapot. After there is God, now someone comes and tells me: look, He revealed Himself and gave commandments. That’s not the same as someone relying on the witness argument alone like those who rely on the Kuzari.

[Tamir DorTel] I gave you about seventeen minutes, which is five more than Jeremy. No, but we’ll use this instrument just so you know objectively we don’t think it’s working right. One second, one second, you’re right. So. One second. That’s the amount of sand that passed while Rabbi Mikhi was speaking. Now we’ll flip it over, and you have the same amount of sand unless you want to waive it.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Do I have to waive it? We’re only just starting to enjoy ourselves here. Do I have to? I have to, I have to—I’ll start from the end and go back to the beginning. Notice that you’re comparing an event where really, if you had told me in the 1990s that a man named Barack Hussein Obama would pass Obamacare in 2010 or whenever it was—that would have been very unusual, and then you’d tell me Donald Trump would come afterward. But you’re comparing events that can entirely happen within the framework of the laws of nature as we understand them, however unusual they may be, to an event that completely shatters the natural framework that all our reason and experience so far show us as possible. And as Carl Sagan said: extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence. Categorically that is a very different thing. With all due respect, the plagues in Sinai, the splitting of the sea, and the supernatural giving of the Torah at the revelation at Mount Sinai—that’s not exactly an unexpected president doing something somewhat less than what you would politically expect. No, but that’s the analogy you gave. You said—you compared this thing to that thing, and I’m saying—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Barack Obama parallels the existence of the Holy One, blessed be He; Obamacare parallels the miraculous events. Fine, so you reached the conclusion there is a supernatural, abstract Holy One from a supernatural event.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Obamacare and the revelation at Mount Sinai—between us, if we’re going to do a probability ranking of what is more likely to happen—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Obviously in favor of Obamacare.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] What do you mean obviously? In a blatant and grotesque way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the same difference exists between the starting points.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Excuse me, Rabbi, I understand rabbis have bigger and bigger advantages in this country. Just kidding, all in good fun. No, but that’s unfair from you—he does it, okay, we’re friends, but why do you stop me and not him? I mean, I’m just trying to leave here—

[Tamir DorTel] with faith, so I’m helping him. Okay, note that although it’s not clear to me that faith will actually be built from him.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Now I do want to seriously get to the heart of the matter. First of all I want to clarify why probably it wasn’t clear enough why I say fog. The fog is not that, Heaven forbid, you’re the kind of person who advances what’s called the God of the Gaps. I know you, that’s not your direction. God of the Gaps is too easy an argument for a thinker of the Rabbi’s level, where you identify a lack of understanding and say: I have no way to explain this, boom, I stick God onto it, I explained something I couldn’t explain before. That’s begging the question in the obvious sense—you go to what you understand because of the non-understanding, because you don’t understand the thing itself. I understand that that’s not where you are. I said fog because this journey to the edges of the universe—and whether we want it or not, fine-tuning does take us there—takes us to a level I call fog because it is full of uncertainty, and every argumentative step is a very, very, very speculative step. That’s why I say what you come back from that adventure with has to be something very thin: something. Not even purpose, not even intention, not even personality, not even will. Those are already very heavy additions relative to what you can allow yourself to come back with. And here I’ll quickly go through what David Hume says. Hume basically says—and he himself believed there is something, there is something—but why can’t you say much beyond that? First, because if these are Winnie-the-Pooh footprints or a watch, right, the watchmaker argument: I’m walking in the desert, I find a watch, I won’t assume it just happened randomly with winds bringing particles together; I’ll assume there is a watchmaker. I look at the universe, there is more magnificent and divine order in the universe than in the watch, so I must assume there is a watchmaker of the universe. What can the watchmaker of the universe be? The Holy One, blessed be He, God, right. Now Hume comes and says: this is based on an analogy. An analogy is strong only if the two things you compare are similar enough that you can say something meaningful. For example, I argued a moment ago that the difference between Obamacare and a miraculous event at Sinai is so great that you can’t really argue something about Obamacare that has meaningful bearing on Sinai. Apples and oranges? Here it’s apples and my grandmother—things that are categorically different. Now what are you saying?

[Tamir DorTel] That the revelation at Mount Sinai is less probable than—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] But in a way that—

[Tamir DorTel] I understood. One second, this is just reflecting, yes yes.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] And I’m saying the main thing is that in order for us to learn something meaningful from a watch—

[Tamir DorTel] He didn’t make the watch argument.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, but I want to emphasize the fogginess of the area we’re in when we make the fine-tuning argument. Okay? So in order for me to say something meaningful about a watch or footprints on the beach regarding the universe, the things must be similar. There is no connection between a watch and the universe. A watch is an object human beings make for a particular purpose; a universe is the very possibility for the existence of all objects whatsoever. That’s categorically something entirely different. Two: this is an argument based on experience. We have lots of experience with watches or footprints on the beach. We have no experience with universes; we only know this universe. Three—and this is an argument I really love—if you compare the universe wildly to watches or footprints on the beach, then you can also compare it to a tiger or a tree. We have experience of order without an orderer. There’s mother and father tiger, boom, out comes a little tiger, or a tree grows from the previous tree. Maybe the universe is not like a watch but more like a tiger or a tree. Maybe father universe and mother universe, boom, universe. Or this universe emerged from the previous universe. You can’t say whether it’s this or that or that, because everything is in that fog at the limits of the possibility of human philosophical and scientific knowledge. Four: a creator God doesn’t really explain anything. Because once I say creator God as the explanation, that really is ultimately a little bit God of the Gaps, because I say creator God, and then I want to ask: wait, but what created God? Where did this God come from? How do I put it? Most rabbis—not him—but most rabbis will say, “Ah, that you’re not allowed to ask. That’s not a question one asks. It’s not done.” Now you say: how is creator God a more satisfactory explanation than “the universe starts with a Big Bang and before that I don’t know”? Because the truth is I don’t know. And above all, even if you can infer God from this universe, nobody says it’s your God. It could be many gods, it could be a god who is not personal, not conscious, and above all it could also be Spinoza’s God. Meaning the assumption you keep returning to when you do this salto mortale, this leap from the god-something you infer from the universe to the God of Sinai—I call it a salto mortale because that’s what Jacobi said to Lessing, in the Pantheism controversy, he says to Lessing, “Listen, if you go with rationality you’ll get to Spinoza; you need to make a leap of faith,” right, what you oppose, because that’s Kierkegaard and leaping out of the absurd, and Lessing answered him, “Listen, at this stage of the Pantheism controversy, I’m not jumping anywhere anymore, I’m a Spinozist.” Rabbi has more strength in his loins, he still jumps, but it’s a jump you keep explaining with “there is purpose.” Now Spinoza, for example, who ultimately agrees with you, with me, with Hume, that there is some kind of something—he calls it substance or self-caused cause—says explicitly: “The eternal and infinite being we call by the name God or Nature acts by the same necessity by which it exists, and just as it acts for no end or purpose, so it acts from no end or purpose; its existence and action are equally devoid of purpose.” No purpose. The fact that you ascribe to it will, purpose—which you need in order to make this leap, to justify it—is something you didn’t really bring back philosophically from your journey in that fogginess of fine-tuning. I want to finish and say two more things about fine-tuning. I bring these things in the book; I’ll say them quickly. First, I had—I don’t agree with my friend Anselm’s argument from undergrad, but it has stayed with me all these years. What was his name? Anselm. Today he’s a police detective in London, but Anselm the teacher explained in class the argument from fine-tuning. He said the odds that the constants of this universe would be exactly as they are so that we can live in it are like winning the lottery day after day after day after day for years, say. That’s utterly improbable. Clearly you assume something is happening here. And Anselm said: “You’re assuming in advance that the fact we’re here talking, and having fun or not having fun, having human experiences—that that’s a good thing. Better, say, than a universe that is only crystals or a universe that is only water or a universe that is only atoms that do not combine into any form.” And Anselm, who was a very pessimistic person about human life, says, “I don’t think that’s good. Why is that good? I mean, like winning the lottery?” I don’t agree. I think something amazing is happening here. But fine. More importantly against this I throw in the anthropic argument, namely: of course there will be conditions that allow us to exist, because we are here to observe them. Right? A simple example: if I’m really amazed—wow, what a thing that my parents met, because my father happened to be selling paintings in a mall in Ohio, and then he met my mother who was born in Ashdod and happened to be there. So of course the odds are very, very, very great, and of course it happened, because otherwise you wouldn’t be. If dad had turned left and hit on the lady in the ice cream shop, or mom had kept dating the yoga teacher, then other people would wonder how they met, because you wouldn’t exist—or whoever did exist would wonder. Meaning there is some circularity here. And above all there are many other options. First of all, what science today hints is happening: that there are many parallel universes, or that there is a multiverse, or that just as there are many galaxies there are many universes. Then there are universes like this and like that and like that, and what is happening here is just that we are simply in the universe where this happens, period. One way or another, I agree there is something. I think the area—the point for me today—the area of philosophical uncertainty, not only scientific, philosophical, at that level, is so great—that’s why I called it fog—and what you can come out of there with is something. Now, and this is critical: if this something—you say, okay, there’s something—you gave it will, you gave it purpose. Unjustified. And now you say I’m going to connect this to Sinai. Here I want to go right into the depths of this issue of Sinai. Sinai, Sinai, Sinai, Sinai, Sinai, Sinai, Sinai, Sinai. Let me state Hume’s argument so it’s in the air. Two of the—in the book—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s also not a good idea to split the discussions.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, because I’ll tell you—the first thing is less important. I want to focus on Sinai today. I’ll tell you, if you want we can also return to fine-tuning, but Sinai—there, there—that’s where I want to challenge you, because there I think, to be fair, there is philosophical weakness.

[Tamir DorTel] There there is disagreement.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Yes, yes. There’s also some disagreement regarding the attributes of the something he finds in the physico-teleological argument.

[Tamir DorTel] What you said about cause.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Yes. I say something and he says a bit more, and I think that bit more—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And what do you say about the something, if I may ask?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] About the unmoved mover.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On what basis?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Thought.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On what basis? What argument leads you to the existence of something?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] In the end I accept the thought that being exists necessarily. That’s a thought Kant had before he became critical, in דער איינציג מוגליכה בעווייזגרונד צור איינר דמונסטראציון דעס דאזיינס גוטעס, “The Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of the Existence of God.” Being is. I think that’s necessary. I think there is something. Beyond that it’s very hard for me to say.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And this argument is less speculative and more grounded than mine? That’s my argument.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Rabbi Mikhi, I don’t live by that assumption. This is a belief.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s say only if you believe in this—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I believe, believe! But no, you know, maybe there isn’t. You know what, if you don’t want—I believe. No, no, that’s an important point. I know that I believe it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But either there’s agreement or there isn’t.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, but I’m very—I’m in the fog. I’m aware that I’m in the fog. And I have no problem saying what Socrates says—though by the way he never says “I only know that I don’t know,” but he says “I have no wisdom, neither great nor small.” On this matter I have no wisdom, neither great nor small. Maybe my inclination from what I’ve read, from what I’ve heard from you and many others, is that I think there is something. Beyond that I don’t say, and I think I shouldn’t. This something doesn’t want anything from me, didn’t give me Torah? I don’t know! Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe yes, maybe no. What is grotesque to me philosophically is Sinai, and that’s why I want to focus on it for a moment. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ladies and gentlemen. Also a book that really annoyed me. I don’t know what that means.

[Tamir DorTel] It means that’s what you have left.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Ah, okay, so that’s the nineteen minutes.

[Tamir DorTel] That’s Rabbi Mikhi’s nineteen minutes.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Very good, thank you. Thank you, you’re doing well, why are you angry? Don’t be angry. Not angry. Just sarcastic. Okay, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Hume’s argument—it’s just a very beautiful argument. We’ve already spoken about it twice, but I’m just putting it here because in the end I want to attack specifically what you said today, and Hume—I want it in the room.

[Tamir DorTel] You want Sinai—when does Sinai arrive?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Sinai, Sinai, Sinai, Sinai, Sinai. David Hume says the following. Broadly speaking, two chapters on miracles. In chapter 1 he sets a test, the test of the greater miracle. He says if a person comes and tells you about a miracle, you as a rational person have to do something very simple: weigh the possibility that the miracle indeed happened against the possibility that he is lying, hallucinating, insane, or confused. And you reject the greater miracle. You say: which of these is less probable, and that is what you reject. That is the rational move, right? You reject the greater miracle. Then in the second part he explains why miracles as described specifically in the sacred writings—he’s not talking about every strange or weird or unexpected event—he’s talking specifically about the miracles of the Jewish-Christian tradition—why they are less probable than the possibility that the testimony is distorted or confused or whatever. And here he has his famous and beautiful arguments: first, there simply were not enough such witnesses, right? There were not enough witnesses; there is no miracle based on enough witnesses. Here the issue of the six hundred thousand always comes in. I always say that if I found at Sinai six hundred thousand diaries, in each of which it said “day, what happened yesterday at Sinai, wow,” and another one saying “wow, yesterday Sinai, wow,” and another and another and another, then I’d change my mind. There is one text or one tradition talking about this story, there isn’t the slightest hint of reliable testimony beyond that. Two: people enjoy talking about miracles, it’s fun for them, just as people enjoy gossip. If in some kibbutz a boy kisses a girl, by the end of the evening they’ve had sex and a million other things, because people are bored and like a stir and they like gossip. Same with miracles. Especially since there are many holy men—not you—but there are many holy men for whom it matters that you believe in miracles because that’s the tomatoes they’re selling, right? They want more believers, more followers, so it matters to them to talk about miracles and have you believe in miracles; there’s also an agenda here. Reports of miracles, he says, are especially common among peoples who are barbaric and ignorant. There’s a bit of an ugly anti-Semitic moment there—shame on you, Hume—but yes, it is true that by and large reports of miracles come more from very ancient periods and much less from cultures of a more scientific, more rational character. And as I always like to say: ever since there have been smartphones and everyone can testify to supernatural events, suddenly God is very shy, He doesn’t show Himself, strange. There is also the problem—and this is what I’m going to focus on in a moment—of the multiplicity of miracles corresponding to the multiplicity of religious systems. Meaning once I say I believe in miracles, I believe in miracles because of tradition, because tradition is reliable, and I make that bridge, the next problem is: why believe this miracle of Sinai and not Christian or Chinese or Greek or Muslim miracles, and so on and so on and so on. And here is the big platter. If the story of Sinai is reliable by virtue of being part of an ancient tradition that a father told his son, then the question I want to put here, and the challenge I want to set before the Rabbi, is a comparative exercise for a moment. And I did my homework. I brought a dazzling supernatural event from a book called the שי-ג’י, Records of the Grand Historian, an ancient book from the first century before or after the Common Era—I forget—in China, a book about the history of the various dynasties. Much of what it writes has received some sort of external archaeological support. Meaning it looks like a reliable testimony. And I want to read you something about the first figure described in the book, their Moses if you will, the Yellow Emperor. A foundational figure in that culture, and here we have a public event that exists and is celebrated in Chinese tradition. “The Yellow Emperor gathered copper from Mount Shou, melted it, and cast from it a great ritual cauldron at the foot of Mount Jing. When the casting of the cauldron was completed, a dragon descended from heaven, with the whiskers of its beard hanging down from its chin, to take the emperor with it. The Yellow Emperor climbed onto the dragon’s back, and after him climbed his ministers and the women of the palace, more than seventy people in all. After all of them had climbed on, the dragon rose from the earth and flew away. The lesser ministers who were unable to climb onto the dragon’s back grabbed hold of its whiskers in an attempt to hang on, until the whiskers were torn out and fell to the ground together with the Yellow Emperor’s bow. The common people all raised their eyes to the heavens and watched the Yellow Emperor until he reached the sky. Afterward they seized the whiskers and the bow and burst into bitter tears.” Therefore the place where the event happened was later called Cauldron Lake, and the bow was given the name “Cry of Grief.” Here is an ancient event in an ancient tradition, seen by many people—I’m almost done—and passed down. Reliable to the same degree as Sinai. I’ve also brought Homer; one can read a public event that happens in the Iliad. And by the way the Iliad, with Heinrich Schliemann finding Troy, received much stronger archaeological corroboration than the revelation at Mount Sinai. And if someone wants something from the twentieth century, there is the miracle of the sun, the miracle of Fatima, October 13, 1917. Something between fifty and seventy thousand Portuguese witness the dancing sun. Three children meet Mother Mary, she tells them that on such-and-such a date she will appear in order to deliver a message of peace. Seventy thousand people come because of the prophecy, and indeed the sun moves, and even Pope Pius XII in Rome also witnessed the miracle. So this is a miracle, and a mass revelation witnessed by many people, and so on. So what I’m saying is that the broad theoretical front and the tradition argument basically establish nothing. Every people has its own mythologies, every people has its own stories. I can get into later the issue of this argument that father doesn’t lie, lie or no lie, I can talk about that later. In short, the leap of faith has the smell of begging the question. It’s not two-directional. We don’t have enough in the beginning to get close. You want the leap to be less dramatic, so you try to move closer. We can’t move closer. It may be that there is purpose; it may be that there is no purpose. It may be that this something has will; it may be that it has no will. It may be conscious; it may be not conscious. All kinds of things are possible. There is something—we’re at something. That is very far from Sinai. And Sinai in itself is no more convincing than dragons in China, Apollo descending to the Greek soldiers at Troy, or Mother Mary making the sun dance on October 13, 1917 in Fatima.

[Tamir DorTel] That’s the launch. One second.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, that’s a report that I’m a bit unsure is being conducted properly because it’s just too many topics.

[Tamir DorTel] It’s impossible to take all these discussions in parallel. So I take responsibility for that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] All these discussions in parallel.

[Tamir DorTel] No, because it also doesn’t work and it won’t descend. Here you spoke twelve, here you spoke nineteen, then he spoke seven, then he spoke twenty-one, say.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no problem with time.

[Tamir DorTel] No, so I think—no, I took that account, no, but I’m saying—we can stay here until dawn, but in my opinion it needs to be clear to the listener: claim, response, counter-response.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s why I’m saying it would have been more correct to split the discussions.

[Tamir DorTel] I agree too. So maybe try answering only one thing, and then—I don’t know, I really don’t know where to continue from, just from one thing.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Look, in general we really can have a kind of meta-discussion for a second about how we’re doing this, but because we always have these two pillars, these two ways of inferring Him from nature and the possibility of deriving—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because even that is more than two pillars; within each pillar you raise—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] But I have to say that’s also fine.

[Tamir DorTel] As a viewer from the side who isn’t all that expert in these discussions, to tell the truth—in the philosophical discussions about the existence of God and the revelation at Mount Sinai, to tell the truth—it’s pretty clear to me what’s going on. I’m the non-average listener, but supposedly a lay listener in this field, and it’s pretty clear to me what’s happening.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what’s pretty clear to you that’s happening?

[Tamir DorTel] Jeremy’s claims are pretty clear to me, and your answers are pretty clear to me. I’m managing to stay focused on—let’s say—many, many questions at once.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not talking about clarity. I’m talking about whether we are focusing the discussion on one topic or conducting—

[Tamir DorTel] Seems to me next time we’ll focus on one topic.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, I’m still going to broaden out, because you raised a great many issues and I don’t want to leave loose ends. I’ll try to do it briefly. I’ll begin with the first pillar. The first pillar is basically based on a causal assumption, on the assumption of the principle of causality. David Hume himself, on whom you rely, pointed out that the principle of causality is not learned from experience. He even challenged the possibility of learning from experience at all, not just the principle of causality, but the principle of causality specifically receives a status—of certainty.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Only I said certainty. Okay, it receives—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] high probability.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] High probability, yes, that can happen.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It receives—no, regarding the principle of causality, it cannot be learned from experience at all, not with certainty.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Yes, but—no no no no no—one second—

[Tamir DorTel] Write it down, you love to write—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] There’s no microphone anymore, that’s it.

[Tamir DorTel] Don’t go crazy, do me a favor.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The point is that my assumption that things must have a cause is not an assumption that is the result of experience. I claim it as an a priori principle. Now, since it is an a priori principle and I am speaking of an efficient cause, an acting cause, not just a relation or correlation between events—which maybe one can learn from experience if we accept the principle of induction—but the principle of causality contains something more than induction. Meaning it also speaks of there being actual production between the cause and the effect. There can be no empirical proof of that and there cannot be, because we cannot observe a relation of production between one event and another. What we can see is that first there was this and afterward there is that, or that first there is always this and afterward there is that.

[Tamir DorTel] You lost me, I’d be happy if you explained again.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Once, you see someone kicking a ball and the ball flies, okay? We usually assume the kick was the cause of the ball’s flying. Right.

[Tamir DorTel] Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] David Hume says: all you can know is that after someone kicks the ball, it flies. In this case.

[Tamir DorTel] Yes, in this case.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now the principle of induction says that if you saw this several times, maybe you can continue it onward. He challenged the principle of induction too, but let’s leave that aside for the moment.

[Tamir DorTel] So what do you say in relation to Hume’s challenge?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Even before that, even before. David Hume said something else, that the causal relation contains in it, beyond the connection, what we perceive as a causal relation, beyond the connection or correlation between the events, there is another claim here: event A caused B, not just preceded it and always precedes it, but also caused it. Now you cannot derive this production empirically from anything, because in no observation can you see that event A caused event B. All you can see is that first there was this and after that there is this.

[Tamir DorTel] One second, that means it cannot be derived, meaning it cannot be proved?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It cannot be extracted from observation, derived from observation. And you can’t prove anything in science. I also say you can’t.

[Tamir DorTel] Ah, so right now you’re just presenting David Hume?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m saying that according to David Hume himself—and this is a claim of his that I agree with—I’m basically saying this: you have two options as a result. One option is to deny the existence of a causal dimension; all there is are correlations, event A comes before event B. Right.

[Tamir DorTel] Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The second option, which I think most human beings assume even if some of them don’t admit it, is that we do accept a causal relation, but it is an a priori principle. It is not a result of observation. That’s how we see things and we understand there is a causal relation. I tend to think that in some abstract sense we even see it—intellectual seeing, not sensory seeing. Fine, that doesn’t matter. We have some intuition.

[Tamir DorTel] So you choose the second option. What? You choose the second option. Meaning I choose, as a result of reality or as a result of what, to believe in causality?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. There is causality. Good. Now my claim is that if so, the principle of causality is not limited specifically to events from our everyday experience. Meaning Jeremy’s claim, or Hume’s, which says: you infer conclusions from the causal relation we observe in events around us, and from that infer conclusions about the formation of the world. That’s something completely different. I say: no, it’s not something completely different. True, it could also have not been there; there is no certainty in anything, that’s clear. My starting assumption is that everything must have a cause unless proven otherwise. And this principle applies not only to things in experience. We assume it; we do not draw it from experience, we bring it to experience. Didn’t you want him to interrupt?

[Tamir DorTel] No, no. That’s the price of Donald and Bernard together.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] You’re right, you’re right.

[Tamir DorTel] He didn’t interrupt you once, he didn’t cut you off.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Okay. Fine, he’s allowed to interrupt, he interrupted once.

[Tamir DorTel] I’ll just say—okay, but you’ve already interrupted for the fourth time.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, and this is my joker, this is the joker. I just want to say one little thing. You bring in the issue of causality and so on, where I agree with you that Kant is much more persuasive than Hume and so on and so on, but all the arguments I gave, Hume’s arguments against the possibility of coming away with something richer than just something-about-which-nothing-can-be-said from the fine-tuning argument—you’re not addressing that. You’re introducing a new argument on which we both agree.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Come on, I’m introducing something—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] What matters to me, if you’ll allow me, is Sinai. Fine, fine. It’s not Sinai—even if you’re there, if we’re dealing with fine-tuning, maybe a physico-theology, then show me why you get to purpose, will, and things beyond something.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One second, let me answer him, he’s not there yet.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] One stage at a time. That was my joker card. Okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So first of all, this is how one gets to something. And in that sense, it seems to me that you also say you tend to agree. There is certainty in nothing—same for me, no certainty, that’s fine. But it’s a reasonable assumption. Okay, that’s the first point. The second point, which continues the first, relates to the comment you opened with, the gap between Obama and Obamacare and the world, the creation of the world—that is, the existence of God and the creation of the world. Here there is a logical mistake. Simply a logical mistake. You made the analogy incorrectly. What I’m talking about is the gap between the premise and the conclusion, not about the premise and not about the conclusion. I don’t care how speculative the premise is and how speculative the conclusion is—those are irrelevant arguments. Because I am only talking about the gap. And what I am saying is that after I know there is a black president in the United States—now they tell me that this is very strange, but I have concluded that it is true—from there, now for someone to tell me he passed Obamacare, that gap is very small. Had they told me that without the initial premise I would not have accepted such a thing. With the initial premise, the gap shrinks. Now I move to the analogy. And the analogy is exactly the same. There is no logical gap between them. The analogy regarding the creation of the world says this: I’ve reached the conclusion there is something, okay? This something created the world. Fine, I know nothing about it. Now this something created the world. Once I know that there already exists a transcendent entity that created the world, then when someone comes and tells me, look, it revealed itself, that gap is not large—or at least much smaller than if I didn’t already know the premise that there is such a thing. And in that sense, in my humble opinion, it is a perfect analogy to Obama. Therefore the fact that I use this analogy to ground a miraculous event, divine revelation and so forth, is irrelevant, because I am not talking about the conclusion at all, I’m talking about the gap between the premise and the conclusion. Now the premise too is a non-natural event, and this something, yes, is entirely in the fog. You also talk about it. Meaning we have already reached the conclusion that there is something that made that leap—that leap beyond what is familiar to us here. Okay? So we’ve already made that leap. Now all I’m saying to you is that this something also revealed itself. What’s the difference between that and the earlier claim: first I know there is a black president in the United States, now he also passed Obamacare? That’s all.

[Tamir DorTel] I think Jeremy’s claim is: why did it reveal itself specifically to you? I mean there are many others here.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s another claim. We need to break apart the claims. Meaning I was responding at the moment to his first claim about the analogy. That’s Hume’s claim.

[Tamir DorTel] No, that’s clear.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. That’s the second point. Now regarding fine-tuning, you raised more objections. You basically went through the whole standard series of objections to the fine-tuning argument. I answer all of them in a very orderly way in the book.

[Tamir DorTel] But wait, let’s at least say the name of the book so someone who wants to read it can.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “The First Existent,” that’s the name of the book.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] He does play the game, he—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He does play the game. Okay, he said he doesn’t play the game.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Yeah, no, in the book yes, that’s it, I get it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now, the claim—wait, I lost my train of thought. Yes, the claim of your friend, Anselm from the 120—Ablash, yes, not from the 112—his claim that life is not such a good thing, so why does that require some God to take care of it? That is a mistake. It is a mistake because I am not basing myself at all on the goodness of the world. I am basing myself on its complexity. Those are two completely different things. Meaning once I speak about the goodness of the world, then you’re right, who says the world is good? Both the school of Shammai and the school of Hillel counted and concluded that it would have been better for a human being not to have been created than to have been created. I am not talking at all about the goodness of the world, and therefore I also do not derive from this the goodness of God. I derive from this the existence of God. Why? Because the world is complex, not because it is good. And once it is complex, I claim that requires a complexifier, like with the watch. Therefore your refutation of the watch argument on the grounds that the world is not good is simply irrelevant. You can say perhaps the world is not special; that’s another argument that often comes up—you didn’t make it—but it’s also an argument that often comes up. It’s simply not true. There are objective mathematical measures for the specialness of the world, and those measures basically assess complexity in terms of entropy. And in those terms there is no doubt we are dealing with a super-special world. Now we move to additional arguments you raised, for example the existence of different worlds, the anthropic principle. I never managed to understand that argument; it’s very common.

[Tamir DorTel] Wait, what is the anthropic principle?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The anthropic principle says you should not be surprised that there are laws here that allow your existence, because if they weren’t those laws, you wouldn’t be here to be surprised. Meaning you are here thanks to the fact that the laws allow your existence.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] So naturally there are such laws.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, so the question is why are there specifically those laws that allow me to exist? Now that is a big mistake. Hawking himself writes this in his book—just a logical mistake in my opinion. He himself brings this example, by the way, which is just absurd. Say you take a firing squad of ten skilled shooters—they execute someone from twenty meters away. They don’t miss at that distance; they’re skilled. Ten shooters, all missed. He stays alive. Fine? The man says, wow, unbelievable, God did me a miracle, something happened here that I don’t understand, it requires explanation. So Hawking says that requires no explanation. If they hadn’t missed, you wouldn’t be here to ask the question. That’s the example he himself brings for the anthropic principle. Now why is that nonsense? It’s nonsense because the fact that ten skilled shooters miss from twenty meters is a puzzling fact whether I am here to ask about it or not. And the fact that I am here as a result of that mistake is just a bonus, but it has nothing to do with the issue. I ask this question—meaning if he weren’t asking this question, I as an outside observer would ask this question. And to me you cannot say, “You are here thanks to the fact that they missed.” What kind of nonsense is that? At most you can say the following, and this is the more correct anthropic argument, and very few people understand this is the relevant argument. This argument basically says: if there really had been ten thousand attempts by those ten skilled shooters, then once in ten thousand even ten skilled shooters miss. Now the fact that you were that one out of ten thousand who was saved—that really requires no explanation, because there is a one in ten thousand chance that they miss. Right? That argument is logically sound; the previous argument is simply a logical mistake. Now in order to make that argument, you really do need one additional assumption, and this is another argument Jeremy presented here—the possibility of multiple worlds. Meaning you are basically saying: look, in effect there were ten thousand firing attempts by these firing squads. What do you mean? There could have been many, many universes created, each with different laws. In our world there are special laws that allow life, or allow the emergence of complex creatures, and therefore we should not be surprised that we are in this world. What is my problem with that argument? On the logical level the argument holds, unlike the previous one, but it still does not convince me. Why not? First, we have no indications of the existence of other worlds. It’s just—the Mad Hatter’s tea party, I call it—you are describing all kinds of hocus-pocus and miracles and wonders for which we have no empirical indication at all. You do that in order to attack the claim of someone who says there is a God, because after all we’ve never seen such a thing. But the alternative you are proposing—the rational alternative, yes—is the existence of countless universes with all kinds of strange and different creatures. In some of those universes there is probably even God, because after all every universe allows different and strange creatures, right? We don’t know, anything could be. Now is that a simpler theory as an alternative to the theory that there is a God? In my opinion no. And therefore I claim that this challenge, even the more sophisticated anthropic argument I presented at the end—that you’re one out of ten thousand—doesn’t hold water. I’ll say more: if all kinds of such universes are created and each has different laws, who is the generator creating these universes? Again, God. Meaning you still need—it’s the same argument—that if things are created, there is the principle of causality. And the principle of causality says: if they are created, something or someone creates them. So you do not escape this argument in any way. Meaning this argument does not help in any way; it only offers a much less probable alternative in order to show that it isn’t necessary. I know it isn’t necessary, but it is much more probable. Therefore this alternative is really not a competitor on this field, in my opinion. It is much less probable than the alternative that there is a God. Another final point in this matter concerns the transition you mentioned at the end, this something you say you agree on, though in the end you retreated a little. But I deliberately pressed you on it, because the fact that you did say you believe in the existence of this something—not with certainty, same for me, not with certainty; that’s not the issue—means that you also accept this argument. You also accept some speculative argument in the fog—though in my opinion it is much more speculative—that being is necessarily being and all that. If you compare that to the assumption that things need a cause, and you ask me which assumption is more plausible—yes, also outside the world, which may be a bit speculative—it sounds to me unequivocal that the causal argument is much more plausible, much more sensible, more rational. Now that’s regarding this something. How do I make the leap to saying it also wants something from me? That was another remark you made. The leap to saying it wants something from me, as I said before, is made on two planes. I explained it before; I’ll just repeat briefly. One plane is this: if you create something, by what I’ll call the principle of purposiveness, or if you like the principle of sufficient reason—if you create something, you probably want something from it. Again, I don’t know; nothing is certain. But if you ask me what the simpler assumption is, or on whom the burden of proof lies, the burden of proof lies on the one who says it wants nothing. That it did this even though it wants nothing. Maybe that’s true, maybe I’m anthropomorphizing it. Fine, maybe. Because overall I am claiming that for any being of any sort, my assumption is that if it does something, it probably does it for some reason or some purpose. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe not. But in my opinion the burden of proof is on the one who says there exists a being that does something for no reason. So. Therefore I say certainty is not the issue. I am not talking about certainty. I am talking about what is more probable or less improbable. That is on the one hand. On the other hand I am talking about the argument from morality, which one can also debate, and we have already debated it, but in my view the argument from morality does bring us even closer to the idea that He really does want something from us or expects some sort of conduct from us. And the third thing is the tradition that came to me, and that leads me to the second pillar. Meaning the tradition that came down to me confirms my a priori assumption that He probably ought to reveal Himself. Here indeed a tradition came that He really did reveal Himself. So now when those two things come together, in my view that completes the puzzle in a much more plausible way than its opposite. Again I am speaking very cautiously—truly, not tactically. That is really all I’m saying, that it is much more plausible.

[Tamir DorTel] Nothing is proved. Answer Sagan for a moment, the whole story with—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the dragon, which brings me to the second pillar. Now I move there. The second pillar is tradition, Hume’s arguments against tradition. Those arguments, on the face of it, seem very persuasive, and you can read on Wikipedia the enormous enthusiasm in atheist circles that after Hume had his say, all religious believers simply are not up to date if they still believe. It’s simply nonsense to think otherwise. Now in my opinion that is empty talk, for many reasons. I devoted a column to it following the podcast we did with Jeremy, and I explained there—but I had already explained it earlier in the book “The First Existent,” I already explained it there. Let me tell you why, for several reasons. And again, I begin with Hume himself. Hume himself, who essentially argues that even the conclusion regarding the laws of nature, the generalizations, the inductions we make, is itself basically some kind of mode of our thought—after he presents that, he suddenly brings what appears to be a completely opposite position. He suddenly says: wait a second, if you tell me something happened not according to the laws of nature, that simply cannot be. That’s a miracle. Now I say: you yourself were the father of the undermining of this trust we place in the laws of nature—or certainly in absolute trust, but in my opinion even in non-absolute trust—that we place in the laws of nature. And therefore, indeed, in your wake many philosophers moved in the direction that the laws of nature describe how we see the world and not the world itself, okay? Now certainly if you go in that direction—and in my opinion that is Hume’s required conclusion, because Kant disagrees with Hume in his conception—then I do not understand his claim. After you reached the speculative conclusion that I see the world as governed by some laws, now someone tells me that something happened not according to the laws—how can that be? It cannot be, I’m not willing to accept such a claim. Why? You yourself told me the laws are merely our way of viewing the world. So what’s the problem? There are situations where that doesn’t work. What happened? That’s one thing. Second, Hume’s challenge effectively locks the door against any report of an improbable event. Not only a miracle, but any improbable event. Since his argument is a statistical one, and the statistical argument basically says this: you have two alternatives—either accept the report of the miracle and assume there was a miracle, or assume that there was some distortion in the report, whether deliberately or accidentally, doesn’t matter, there was a distortion in the report. Now his claim is that the probability that there was a distortion in the report is greater than the probability that a miracle occurred. The probability that a miracle occurred is zero. A kind of a priori assumption. Yes, but he says maybe from experience—it doesn’t matter, he himself says the laws are not exactly from experience, but even suppose from experience. Then the claim is basically that we are making a probabilistic calculation. If so, then in effect, let us broaden Hume’s argument. Any report that reaches me about an improbable event, I am basically supposed not to accept, because the chance that there was an error or lie or mistake in the report is greater than the chance that the event happened. For example, if I receive a report from an experimental physicist that he ran an experiment and discovered, say, that some particle occasionally goes faster than the speed of light—every now and then such a report comes out—I don’t even listen to him. Why? Because the chance that this—it contradicts the laws of nature, those we know today, right? And according to Hume, only the laws we know today matter, because we don’t know the real laws. So this contradicts the laws of nature, and therefore I don’t even look for explanations. It contradicts the laws of nature, period.

[Tamir DorTel] Meaning if I now saw four hundred million listens to this episode, I’d say that’s impossible, there aren’t four hundred million Hebrew speakers, I simply don’t look for an explanation for why it happened, it’s simply either an error in the reporting—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] or—

[Tamir DorTel] an error in YouTube, I don’t care.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On that I also agree. But if there comes to you a reliable report that there were four hundred thousand people—

[Tamir DorTel] Four hundred million.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Four hundred million—then you are already in a dilemma. Because if it is very reliable, then—

[Tamir DorTel] Four hundred million, four hundred million—then you need to assess—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the reliability of the report against the reliability of the rule that there aren’t four hundred million Hebrew speakers.

[Tamir DorTel] I don’t even engage it, it doesn’t interest me. Someone says: look, YouTube shows four hundred million listens. I say: I’m not interested in weird reports like that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not entirely sure you’d be right, because if you had a sufficiently reliable report, maybe the YouTube display itself doesn’t seem reliable enough to you, but if you had a sufficiently reliable report you’d search for explanations under the earth. Maybe this episode was translated into Chinese, or I don’t know into what, and you didn’t see it, you don’t know, and therefore they watched.

[Tamir DorTel] Right, maybe specifically this episode, because it’s so universal and talks about God and so on, maybe YouTube’s dubbing, maybe—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I don’t know, I’m just throwing things out. I’m saying, according to Hume you always need to weigh the probabilities of the two alternatives. It is always a choice between hypotheses, like in statistics h0 and h1. You need to decide what the probability says—h0 or h1. Now by that logic we are not supposed to accept any report of an improbable event. Therefore science today should more or less be the science of Adam, because any scientific innovation that contradicts the existing paradigm we would not be supposed to accept. It is much more probable that an error occurred in the experiment than that it contradicts the laws of nature we know—the quantum theory, or relativity, or all those bizarre things discovered by twentieth-century physics. Okay. Now I’ll bring an example from a friend of mine that I wrote about in the book when I explained why Hume’s argument is wrong. This example: I have a good friend who once, in the Midwest in the United States, was invited by some town—he runs some company for systems thinking—and they invited him to mediate social conflicts there in that town. And in the town—and he gathered people there of all genders and kinds and races and I don’t know what, there were many people and there were conflicts among them, and they sat for a two-day seminar under his leadership. On the first day, they talked, each one, everything was fine. On the second day, he tells me—he wrote this afterward—he says: on the second day they began: each person had to stand, say something about what had happened yesterday, and invite someone else to speak in his place, sit down, and someone else would speak. When the round was done, my friend would continue the session. Okay? They finished speaking, one invited another, and so on. They finished the round and it ended. Now he stood up and continued his session. A black woman stood up and said: wait, did you notice that everyone who stood here—there wasn’t a single black person? You didn’t invite the black people. There were, I don’t know, six black people out of sixteen, or I don’t remember the numbers anymore, something like that. Ten stood up and you decided it was all over, and not one of the black people was invited. Six out of sixteen. In an assembly whose whole point was to bring all the differences together and bridge all the gaps—meaning the goal was to include everyone and equalize everyone and so on. He says: it was bizarre. And he tells me—he’s a guy very sensitive to those values and to equality and things like that—I said to him: look, I have two options. He’s a secular guy, we’ve had long-standing arguments around things like this. I said to him: look, I have two options. This story is very improbable. One option is that you’re imagining it, another option—

[Tamir DorTel] that it was a dream, that you’re lying.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? Because it serves you. It’s a great example of illustrating the discrimination we practice unconsciously, the blind spots we have toward races that aren’t like us. Okay? Doesn’t matter, for all those reasons. The other option is to take your report seriously and assume it really happened despite being improbable. Now, by Hume’s calculation, I think I’d choose the option that you’re lying or inventing. Because the event is so improbable, I wouldn’t accept it. Now it doesn’t matter right now—you can argue about the degree of probability—but I’m giving this as a real-life example. Okay? And I say: despite the fact that that is my calculation, I do accept your report. Why? Because I know you and I know you are a trustworthy person. You don’t invent, you don’t fantasize, even about things that benefit you. I know him—we’re childhood friends. Okay? Meaning this is a trustworthy report. Once the report is trustworthy, the whole probabilistic calculation is no longer relevant. Because the probabilistic calculation begins with the question of how much trust you place in the report; it doesn’t end there, it begins there.

[Tamir DorTel] Wait, but you don’t know your great-great-great-grandfather, you don’t know that person.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know him, but each person knew the generation before him. There is some tradition here on a broad front, and that’s worth discussing.

[Tamir DorTel] So the fathers are okay?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, they generally transmitted it to us. Again, nothing is certain. But when I say the event was transmitted to me, I know there is already an entity, something.

[Tamir DorTel] Maybe try to close on China? This story of the dragon shook me.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, right, so now I’ll come to that. Again, in a concluding sentence on this part, all I want to say is that what is missing in Hume’s calculation is: where does the level of credibility you attribute to the report enter the calculation? And the level of credibility you attribute to the report is very important, because when I trust the scientist who reports to me the results of an experiment, I will accept it even though it contradicts all my current paradigms. And to contradict the laws of nature and to contradict all current paradigms is the same thing, there is no difference. Because the laws of nature I am talking about are the laws of nature I know today. It may be that divine revelation does not contradict the actual laws of nature; it contradicts the laws of nature we know.

[Tamir DorTel] I think that issue is clear.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now regarding the Chinese tradition. Here indeed each such case has to be examined on its own merits, and things have already been written about all these cases, including Fatima and all the others. I’ll just say briefly: most of these things are cases where a story tells of an event that happened publicly. That’s obvious. There are many books that tell of a mass event. There are also movies depicting battles of thousands of soldiers against thousands of extras, yes, against thousands of other soldiers. So what does that prove? The question is whether this story is accompanied—and this brings us back to the point where we opened—by a tradition that insists this really happened and was created. And if from every generation to the next this story is transmitted—this really happened. If so, I—

[— Part 2/2 —]

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If not—but I’m saying, that probably isn’t the case in the Chinese tradition. Okay, so we’ll check. And if it is, I accept it. Fine, accepted. Therefore I say this is very important. On the one hand, people always assume that if there is some tradition that does not fit my religious world, then of course I won’t accept it. Aha, you caught me being dishonest. No—I would accept a tradition that comes from another culture as well.

[Tamir DorTel] Jeremy, could it be that God speaks in two languages? That He says to the Jewish people: this is your tradition?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s my next sentence. My next sentence is that Rabbi Kook basically talks about this in לנבוכי הדור. I don’t count myself as being from his school, but he was a wise man and certainly wrote many interesting things. In לנבוכי הדור he says it is definitely possible in principle that the Christian or Muslim descriptions are descriptions of things that happened. It may be that God also revealed Himself to them in some format—I don’t know which one He chose—and conveyed to them a tradition relevant to them. Therefore this exclusive conception that says only to us was there revelation and everyone else is talking nonsense—that is not true, not necessary. I will examine each tradition on its own merits. If it really inspires trust in me, I am prepared to accept it. And I’ll say more than that: all this exclusive discourse that says we are right and everyone else will be fried in hell—that is internal-use discourse, in my view. If I had been born in a Polish village and in good faith did what my priest told me God expected of me, it is hard for me to believe that when I arrive at the heavenly court, the Holy One, blessed be He, immediately sends me to fry in hell.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Amen. I love what you’re saying.

[Tamir DorTel] By the way, you just spoke for half an hour. I’m just saying, I have no problem with that.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Seriously? We’re at half an hour, half an hour—where?

[Tamir DorTel] And another half hour chunk. So assuming that’s right—yes, it looks right. One second. I want to propose, off the record, a discussion format. First of all, you can respond only to part of his arguments, and then we’ll go argument by argument. Meaning you’ll respond only to one thing, he’ll have a right of reply, and then you can respond to the next thing. Since it’s all written down for you and Jeremy has a terrific memory, this can work. Is that acceptable to you? Good.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] But I have—

[Tamir DorTel] Thank you. But I want to continue and say one more sentence after you say yes or no. Yes, does that work or not?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Actually, because I feel like—yes, because I think some of the things we can already leave to the audience to decide. Because there’s a back and forth there.

[Tamir DorTel] Okay, fine. So I’m just doing a sponsorship here, because after all we do need to pay salaries.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Wait, then let me also—I want to say that everyone who—are we really doing sponsorships here?

[Tamir DorTel] We really do sponsorships here, yes. Ah, nice. Okay, now I’m asking you: I have here in my hand six ounces of pure gold. Okay? Here, hold it.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Why am I—but I don’t get paid for the sponsorship? Why do I have to be part of the ad?

[Tamir DorTel] You get a platform here and video editing hours and all that. And let’s tell the listeners: if you want this thing to continue, for this podcast to continue—there’s no—anti-Semitic satire where in the end—right, that—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Anti-Semitic satire where only I should get the coins.

[Tamir DorTel] Without flour there is no Torah, and therefore if you don’t donate so this podcast can continue, it can’t continue. Okay, so how much do you think this thing in your hand is worth? Same question to both of you, one ounce of gold.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no earthly idea. Actually you told me yesterday.

[Tamir DorTel] Guess. You start. You’re older. Roughly. How much is it worth? 32 grams of gold.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] 5,000 shekels.

[Tamir DorTel] 5,000 shekels.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] And you—I think you told me and it was a lot. I don’t remember exactly what—

[Tamir DorTel] No, no, there wasn’t that segment before—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No—but I think you showed me this last time.

[Tamir DorTel] No, no, there wasn’t.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I say 10,000, come on.

[Tamir DorTel] 10,000. Nice, you’re closer, Jeremy. It’s 15,000 shekels almost exactly, and everything here is worth 80,000. Meaning this and this and this and this together.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] So I’m already—

[Tamir DorTel] Okay, but we don’t pay nearly that much to people who are here on the podcast, and it’s not mine anyway so I can’t give it to you. We’re just recommending that you diversify your investment portfolio also with something physical and not only with something that is a digital asset. So it’s good to have something like this that you can flee with in a suitcase abroad.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Absolutely—Shoah things.

[Tamir DorTel] Right. In the Shoah my grandfather arrived in Auschwitz with a gold chain.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Really?

[Tamir DorTel] Yes, they took it from him. Wow. In the showers. Which were only showers and not gas chambers like your family.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I want—well, first of all, I also want to tell the audience: I want to contribute to the effort and say to the audience that whoever enjoys the content you make should support it. They should support it, even though you’re very short with your responses to the comments. Very short.

[Tamir DorTel] I get 50,000—50,000 a month—no, seriously, there’s also a weekly gathering.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I love it, I love it. You don’t—you keep them on a short leash, the flock, the babies of the flock.

[Tamir DorTel] I wish I had a flock.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I wish. And also the holy audience. And I also love the comments. At some point I need to come, and I want to read all the comments attacking me and I want to answer them. Great. Great. So I want to say the following. There are things we could keep going with, and these are discussions of many years. What’s the agreement? Let’s talk about the agreement. Okay, no—I want to clear myself of part of what you said about my argument, and then I want to focus on this issue of witness and tradition and the dragons in China. Okay. In the fine-tuning, physico-theological discussion, I think you attribute too much to me when I say something. I literally mean just something. Something. I’m not personifying the something, I’m not claiming to know anything, I understand it is completely speculative. It just seems more reasonable to me that there is a first cause. I’m with you completely. It seems more reasonable that there is something self-caused; it even makes sense to me to want to say the very fact of being. Being is. I believe in being itself very much. Being is, non-being is not. I’m with Parmenides, with that fragment. I’m not much beyond that. I’m really not much beyond that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The problem is that this itself is something so—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Right, but I’m there, in some speculation, my heart is there. I’m on the Geula beach with being itself, I love it, I’m there. Okay. Now, anything beyond that I didn’t say, and I wouldn’t say. And even the little bit that I do say, I say in complete speculation in a world where I in no way claim any kind of certainty. The problem then is not the existence of something, because I really do just mean something. Now many people agree that something exists. I always say that I’m going to summarize all of human philosophy now that we’re reaching artificial intelligence, and I think pretty much everyone ultimately agrees there is, that something exists. Our disagreement is not about something but about the nature of that something. Right? I say being is, and then you—it’s clear to me in advance.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I asked how you got to that something.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] You know, I’m with you on the first cause or the unmoved mover. I’m there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But in the fog, that serves the two of us.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Right, I’m in the fog. Now I say I’m in the fog and maybe I’m wrong, and I don’t live by—let’s say I wouldn’t get on a plane, and that’s the issue, because you are on the plane. I’m not on the plane. I wouldn’t get on a plane whose technology was built at the level of probability of the something. You are on the plane, because you live all day by that belief; I don’t. So I say, fine.

[Tamir DorTel] No, the question is how much he loses, because he’s not about to crash, he’s only about to—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Pascal’s wager.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] First, that’s Pascal. Second, I know that in today’s Israeli geopolitical world we actually are crashing.

[Tamir DorTel] One second, but he’s not part of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, of course, but I’m not attacking him for that. I’m saying that in general—

[Tamir DorTel] One second, no—but one second, let’s attack him only for what he is and not for his kippah reminding me of Smotrich. One second, one second. You know what, why am I interrupting so much? Speak.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] You know. Here, comments. Why does he only want Jeremy?

[Tamir DorTel] Why is he only attacking Jeremy?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] And then he says, and if you want—

[Tamir DorTel] You know, one of the regular debaters here, Rabbi GlaLop, told me: you always intervene in favor of the weaker side.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Wow, now they’ll say why is he going after Jeremy and not the Rabbi.

[Tamir DorTel] In general I do have a tendency to help the weaker side, just so you know.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] So wait, so basically—

[Tamir DorTel] Listen, his IQ is insane.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Obviously, I’m not belittling the man, I respect the man, but if you attack me then you’re helping him? That’s not a compliment. Okay, I don’t know. The point is this. Let’s be serious. Well, no, let’s not be serious, what’s serious, what’s not—but the point is this: we are in a speculative zone, and I’m with you in the fog. I just admit it’s fog, and I don’t live according to the conclusions I come back with from the fog. I only wanted to say one more thing. Rabbi, multiverse—again, you know physics much better than I do. I do hear from my physicist friends that this is one of the working assumptions of physics nowadays; meaning in that sense the thought that there are many universes in which all kinds of things happen is much more plausible.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Suddenly? There is no scientific indication for that at all—on the contrary, it comes up as a speculation in order to rule out God.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Not true, it’s a derivative of string theory and a thought—

[Tamir DorTel] I lost both of you. If you go out for Rabbi Mikhi, I won’t be able anymore—okay, fine. So, fine.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I’m in favor of Jeremy speaking now. I said my piece.

[Tamir DorTel] You believe in something and not in God-something.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Exactly. Great, that. And then I want to say that—and then I’ll give two examples, with my late grandmother, a woman like my sister, that—the whole thing with the ten shooters and so on. I think a better example is any Shoah survivor—you or many Shoah survivors, not all but many—and you hear their stories and you say, what are the odds?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What are the odds you survived? It’s like one in ten thousand.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] And you say, wow, it’s insane how this one survived. And naturally every story feels miraculous because the odds of surviving are very small, and those who survived, survived. So that’s more similar than ten people shooting at once.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s similar to one in ten thousand, where I explicitly said the argument is correct.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Okay, fine. But from all this I want to say that I leave with something, and that in my view is somehow still legitimate, though very, very speculative. And the Rabbi comes back—we both come back hand in hand from the fog, I say something and the Rabbi says far too much. He says something with will, with purpose. There is no reason to assume that. There is already begging the question and anthropomorphism. And the reason for that, by the way—I think why sometimes even a very smart person like you, who knows that in this disastrous period one ought to invest in gold coins in order to survive the apocalypse, sometimes gets lost—is that I think part of the way the amazing cognitive enterprise of the Rabbi works is something I call distinction-ization. Philosophers always love making distinctions, and distinctions, and distinctions, and distinctions. It allows tactical victories and the loss of sight of the final question, where in the end, with all the very smart things you say, you cannot allow yourself to come back from your trip into the physico-theological zone with more than something about which there is nothing more to say. The proof is that even Spinoza holds our hand and comes back without purpose. Purpose is your addition, and you didn’t justify it at all. But now the main issue really is Sinai. First, regarding Hume—and we’re not in a discussion of Hume interpretation, although you and I tend to fall into that sometimes—but I have to say: you are wrong regarding Hume, and wrong explicitly, or at least not precise explicitly. First, Hume doesn’t really say—this tension between “you yourself said causality is not certain, not necessary, we cannot infer it from experience and we are limited to experience within your doctrine.” I’m with you, by the way, that Kant was more convincing there, but you say Hume contradicts himself because suddenly you rely on causality to rule out the possibility of miracles. First, Hume’s whole point—and one must remember his general agenda—is to attack certainty. In that sense he and you actually agree a lot. He attacks certainty, and then we are left in a world that has lots of probabilities. And Hume explicitly says: even if according to my own doctrine I cannot know with certainty that every time I put my finger in fire it will burn, maybe at some point I’ll put it in and it will be cold, or I’ll drop a pen and instead of a noise there will be Beethoven’s Ninth—even if theoretically that possibility exists, right? I still am not going to go out through the window. He says that explicitly. Of course I act according to probabilities. His argument is just subtler: there’s no certainty. That was what mattered to him to claim, as part of his political agenda actually, out of the understanding that religious fundamentalism relies on certainty, and if I attack certainty then maybe I’ll also solve the problem of religious fundamentalism, which as a man of the Enlightenment mattered to him. And second, he explicitly in the chapter on miracles speaks of the possibility of an unusual event that one should indeed treat as real. I’m going to read to you from page 148—

[Tamir DorTel] in the book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Magnes edition.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] “Suppose, for example, that all historians in all languages agree that on January 1 in the year 1600, there was total darkness over the whole earth for eight days. Suppose that the tradition dealing with this extraordinary event is still alive and widespread among the various nations; that all travelers returning from foreign countries report to us the same tradition without the slightest variation or contradiction. It is clear and manifest that our present philosophers, instead of doubting that fact, ought to receive it as certain and turn to search for the causes from which it might have arisen.” Nice. So he’s less problematic than you make him out to be in that respect.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but then Hume says exactly the same here.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Now why not the same? What conditions does he set? That’s the heart of the discussion, the heart of the discussion. He says: different and unusual observations, all nations, travelers—that is, people whose profession this is. He gives all kinds of conditions and qualifications here that in no way exist around the Sinai tradition.

[Tamir DorTel] A small question: Hume’s words in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding—are they sacred? You’re reading it like a text whose conditions have to be read precisely.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, no, no, that’s just internal, because it’s not important. Well, my brother, according to you Hume is not Torah from Sinai; for me Torah from Sinai is not Torah from Sinai, certainly Hume is not Torah from Sinai. Okay, Hume was right sometimes and wrong sometimes, and I think Kant is more convincing on causality than Hume. I appreciate him greatly. He was also anti-Semitic and also insisted on adding some footnote—there are many problems with him—but these are arguments I think are persuasive. I’m not devout, I’m not a disciple of Hume.

[Tamir DorTel] Clearly the argument is much more valid if the whole world says this happened that day, and people traveled, and people with—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Now what Sinai doesn’t have, and what he says he would accept about 1600 and not about other examples—and he explicitly talks about Sinai and other things. At Sinai we are talking about one tradition, a tradition of one people. Now we know with certainty in the empirical sense, or at a very very high degree of probability—because maybe we’re in the Matrix, you know, if we don’t want to be certain à la Hume—but we know at a very high degree of probability that every people has myths explaining how the world came forth and how the culture in which you exist came into the world. Romulus and Remus in Rome, and the stories in Hesiod’s Theogony in Greece, and these stories in China that I want to come back to in a second. So in that sense there is nothing unusual about the Sinai testimony if you look at the biblical text, or if you look at the so-called broad front of a people’s tradition. There was a broad front that believed—I didn’t read from the Iliad today, but there’s a beautiful moment where Apollo descends—and also and also and also and also, then it starts to get crowded. Yes, we really are already risking polytheism. I want to say two things about this, and with this I’ll sum up and shorten. Again, a story about my grandmother, because one argument the Rabbi didn’t say, but I think in some way you do ultimately have to rely on it to justify your belief in tradition because it’s on a broad front, and that is that a father doesn’t lie. A father doesn’t lie to his son, right? You always hear this. You hear it a lot, right? It’s a common argument. A father doesn’t—why would a father lie to his son? That’s how mythology—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The more we can save, the more I agree with you.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] But no, I still want to say it because—

[Tamir DorTel] What, a father does lie?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, a father can tell stories. That argument is weak.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] So I want to say this: first, the very beautiful story about the beginning of Epicurus’s philosophical path is that he wasn’t convinced by his father’s stories about chaos. He asked his father: what is chaos, the primordial void in Hesiod’s Theogony, that is, the Greek “Bible”? From that, Mother Earth, Gaia, emerged and gave birth to Uranus the sky, and so on and so on. Something there didn’t seem right to him. His father couldn’t satisfy the little boy Epicurus’s critical philosophical curiosity, and from there he set out on his path. Meaning this matter of parents telling mythological stories is part of all cultures, including our own. It doesn’t give you any genuine philosophical authority for grounding the argument. Second, I want to give an actually personal story. My grandmother was a Shoah survivor, and she was in Terezín. And she was a woman—and as we said, the quality of the witness—I can really say, first, she was like a sister to me, a woman I was very, very close to, and I also greatly appreciated the fact that when she didn’t know or didn’t remember, she would always say: I don’t want to say, I don’t want to say because I won’t be precise. She was a very, very reliable woman in what she said. It mattered a lot to her—see, I didn’t lie to you. And I remember that when we got to Terezín, to the camp, and found in the records there the names of her and her sisters, she actually cried and said: you see I wasn’t lying, you see I wasn’t just telling stories. And I remember I got very emotional too, because I said: who even thought you were lying about that? Right? But the reliability of her testimony mattered to her. Now, despite the importance of the reliability of her testimony, she would always tell me a story that the King of Denmark came to Terezín in order to get his Jews out. Now, since I live in a period where it is very easy to investigate things and check things, I found that that is not true. The King of Denmark—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] His representatives came there.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Exactly. Now, the King of Denmark—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There was even a movie recently.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] in person, though he didn’t answer Hitler when Hitler sent him a happy birthday telegram, and he threatened to put on the yellow badge himself, and he saved the Jews to Sweden—he was a hero. And I said to her: you know, this story is an exaggerated story. And on that she insisted: no, it happened. And what I saw in her at that moment was an eight-year-old girl who needed that story. She had to believe that there was some Danish king who came and saved—and I stopped the discussion, because I said, what am I going to start now—so traditions, if in another period over a few generations the King of Denmark can become Moses, right? Do a game of telephone, and after a few generations he’s Moses.

[Tamir DorTel] But what’s the difference between an envoy and the king himself?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] There’s no huge difference, but you know, there’s still something about the king—

[Tamir DorTel] Maybe even nowadays people say “the government did it,” okay? But you imagine Netanyahu doing it.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Fine. But you know what the difference is? Let me ask you this: perhaps—perhaps there is some historical basis at Sinai involving a successful slave revolt, or even according to pagan historians who somewhat mock the Jews—they have an agenda, but they say it’s some kind of Donald Trump throwing out the—right? I think that’s what Diodorus and Tacitus say.

[Tamir DorTel] Pharaoh threw out these rebels.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, the illegals. He threw out all kinds of foreigners, undocumented immigrants and famine refugees, like Americans are doing now—

[Tamir DorTel] One second, but who cares? That’s not the normative part of Torah. What exactly happened historically in the story—what matters is what he said we ought to do. It’s like the—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Okay, that’s another question, because there I too can very much agree with the moral principles of prophecy, for example. I’m very sorry that the religious public today disregards that, but it matters to me. Okay. But I want to say the following: once you focus on trying to save Sinai from the arguments that I think somewhere you yourself are obliged to accept as such a sharp philosopher, then why save Sinai and not, for example, the idea that the world is 5,786 years old? Why not, for example—I really love the story about the forty-two bears that attacked Elisha, sorry, the forty-two she-bears or bears that attacked—why not Jonah in the fish’s belly, right? Meaning the Hebrew Bible explicitly is not a text with reliable historical testimony, and the traditions—and if you don’t want Hebrew Bible, you want tradition—the stories some farmer in Gamla or in the Judean hills told in the Second Temple period were stories that most likely had a thousand and one things in them that neither you nor I believe in. Now the point here really is this plane business. If you want to believe it, believe it. But if we’re being honest, then we recognize that this is completely speculative. There is not only no certainty in it—it is much, much, much, much, much less plausible than the scientific empirical-historical alternative. And surely it is not something on the basis of which—this philosophical structure is so shaky that it is not honest to say that on the basis of these arguments I determine how I am going to live my life. You would not get on a plane that was as probable as “there is some sort of story they used to tell in the Judean hills in the sixth century before the Common Era.” And that’s understandable. And then I want to finish with China. What matters here is not that specific story of the Yellow Emperor—that really is from one text. What there is in Chinese culture again and again and again and again and again and again and again is the existence of dragons. The specific story is from a text presenting itself as a historical text, but I’m not an expert in Chinese culture, so I can’t tell you whether this specific story appears in more texts—I assume it does—but what definitely appears in many texts in ancient China is the dragons themselves, the dragons themselves.

[Tamir DorTel] Not what dragons did, but whether dragons exist.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I’m prepared to sign off if we end this event with Rabbi Michael Abraham telling me that the existence of dragons is as plausible as miraculous revelation at Sinai. And if that’s the case, then okay, I say: I’m not going to live by the assumption that there are dragons, and I’m not going to live by the assumption that there was miraculous revelation at Sinai.

[Tamir DorTel] Okay, nice, that’s the shortened assumption, and I feel there are fewer objections to it, am I right? Yes, yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Good. I have one supplement to the first pillar and then I’ll go to your arguments now. The supplement is one further point I didn’t address in your arguments against the first pillar from the previous session, not the last. You said that maybe the complexity here is like a cheetah and not a watch. Right? And a watch is an artificial thing, made by human beings, but a cheetah is formed naturally even though it is very complex. Therefore you cannot decide that the formation of the world is like a watch and not like a cheetah. And once again there is a logical mistake here. And the logical mistake is that the formation of a cheetah too requires exactly the same explanation as the watch. However, the formation of the cheetah is governed by the laws of nature. The laws of nature produce cheetahs for us from a pair of cheetahs—a little cheetah is produced, okay? Now the laws of nature themselves are exactly what I’m talking about in the fine-tuning argument. Meaning I claim that the reason you do not ask the question “why was there a little cheetah?” is simply because you take the laws of nature as something you needn’t ask about. But that’s what we’re discussing. I claim that the laws of nature, because they are special—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] But you’re the one comparing the laws of nature to a watch or to that, so I’m saying if you want a watch, take a cheetah.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I’ll take a cheetah, no problem. Fine. And therefore I say—and I’ll make a distinction for you here—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] By the way let’s say tiger, same thing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The tiger and the watch are exactly the same thing for me. That’s exactly the point. Let me say it from a slightly different angle. People often present evolution as an alternative to the existence of God. On this both the creationists and the neo-Darwinians agree; each picks the opposite side, but they agree the two don’t go together. That there are two alternatives here, and you need to choose one and abandon the other. So the creationists usually choose the existence of God, creation, and abandon evolution. And the neo-Darwinians choose evolution and abandon God. And you? I don’t. I claim both—I adopt—

[Tamir DorTel] both, meaning that God created the rules that make evolution possible.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but I’m saying more than that. It’s obvious that’s a possibility, and I’m saying more: evolution strengthens the physico-theological proof. Not only does it not weaken it, not only does it leave the question open—it strengthens it. Why? Because evolution is basically an explanation within the laws. Given this set of laws, within it there is an evolutionary process through which life emerges, cheetahs or human beings emerge in some spontaneous way, without a guiding hand accompanying the process. Okay? About that very thing I ask: how can there be such a special set of laws, one that allows the spontaneous emergence of human beings, who are super-complex creatures and super-rare, I would say, or unexpected—how is it that the set of laws is exactly such? And I claim that requires a lawgiver, or creator, or maker of those laws. I’m only saying—again, on this we already argued—but I’m only claiming that the cheetah question is irrelevant, because the same question I ask about a watch I ask about the cheetah. Exactly the same question. Meaning I claim that the fact we’ve gotten used to natural things not requiring explanation is just habit. Natural things require the same explanation as artificial things, and they have the same explanation. Just as artificial things that are complex need a maker, natural things that are complex also need a maker. It’s just that the maker works through a system of laws, that’s all. But now I’m asking who made the system of laws, not what happens within the system of laws. That question has no scientific explanation, nor can it have one, and therefore this is not God of the Gaps. Because God of the Gaps always says: wait, we can’t understand this, so there’s God. As you said, I don’t accept God of the Gaps. But this I do accept. Why? Because there cannot be a scientific explanation for the system of laws. Because even if there were such an explanation, it would be based on another system of laws that generated these laws, and then I would ask about those. In the end you will remain with the first state, not turtles all the way down. You’ll remain with the first state, not a first turtle to the side, and you ask yourself who made it. And this thing is not a gap because it is a gap that science cannot bridge. A gap is something—wait for more scientific research and the gap may close. Here, no. By its very nature science cannot close this gap. But it’s still a gap. No, it’s a gap, exactly. Fine, but that kind of God of the Gaps I do accept. God of—within science I don’t accept.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] And then you embrace the philosophical distortions.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, in my view I embrace philosophical truths; you may call them distortions, but—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Look, we can move to something that is more—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s regarding the first pillar.

[Tamir DorTel] No, wait, regarding the first pillar.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now regarding tradition and dragons and so on. There is, it seems to me, a very basic difference between our tradition and other traditions. I don’t know the details, so it’s definitely worth checking. But if everything I’m about to say also exists there, I am definitely willing to consider believing in dragons. Wow. It seems to me it doesn’t exist there, but one needs to check. The question is how such a tradition passes from generation to generation while every generation takes pains to explain explicitly—not by implication, explicitly—that what I’m passing on to you is not a myth but a fact. Do you see what I’m saying? In the Torah itself it already says, “Has any nation heard God speaking out of the midst of the fire?”—

[Tamir DorTel] And this isn’t a folktale, it’s the story of the people.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but if—but that’s just a slogan. What do you mean the story of the people? I’m saying there is a difference between transmitting a myth—and every people has myths.

[Tamir DorTel] Sorry, this isn’t a folktale, it’s the people’s fact. It’s not—I’m not telling you the family story we tell at home.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m telling you what happened, and I’m telling you: note that I’m not telling you a story, I’m telling you this is a fact, it happened. I may be lying, it may not be true, but that is the difference from all the other traditions. Because in this tradition—and they insist on it throughout all of recorded history at least, it’s in writing—they insist on it: this story happened. That’s a core principle. Anyone who does not believe it happened, but sees it as a story, is not with us, not in our department. And that is also the difference between Elisha’s bears and the case of—well, the children who mocked Elisha—and Sinai. About Elisha’s bears no one tells you that you have to believe it happened. They pass on a story to you. There are all kinds of stories in the Hebrew Bible; there are parables and all kinds of such things. You can interpret it as having happened, you can interpret it as not having happened, and nothing depends on it anyway. No one insists on it. No one insists on telling you: look, the bears happened in such-and-such a way, and know that this happened, and you have to believe it happened. No. Now, if this exists among the dragons in China, I don’t know, because I don’t know, then I’ll consider believing in dragons. Yes. I suspect it doesn’t exist there. Okay? And therefore this is a very essential difference between these two things. Because if you don’t accept even that, then in my opinion, fine, maybe everything is inventions, fabrications, for one reason or another. But in my opinion the burden of proof is on the one who says that, not on the one who does accept it. And therefore I say again: whether to get on the plane or not can be debated. But first of all—and here I come back to this something—you do reach this something, meaning you presented it as though I am making impossible inferences and so on. But then you said: no, I make them too, I just treat them a bit more cautiously than you do. Okay, so now that’s already a quantitative dispute. I see it as more grounded, you as less grounded. But that is no longer a rejection of dealing with the fog. There is a disagreement here about how trustworthy and clear it is. If the argument looked more trustworthy to me, or more trustworthy to you, then you would also treat it more seriously. But you do not categorically rule out the existence of such arguments into the fog, as you called it. So in that sense—that is why I pressed you on this something. Clearly, this something you do not believe has will and purposes and goals and I don’t know what.

[Tamir DorTel] One condition, one condition—wait—one condition is that every generation believes it is fact.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Part of the tradition being passed on is not only the story, but also the statement that this story—you also have to believe it happened.

[Tamir DorTel] So those are the conditions?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Those are the conditions? I don’t have a set of conditions. I haven’t collected a set of conditions. But this is one of the very strong characteristics.

[Tamir DorTel] Now Jeremy, go through whether in every generation—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No no. Hume’s conditions are not relevant in my view.

[Tamir DorTel] Regarding China, regarding China. Yes. If my friends in China believe it is a fact in the tradition passed down to them, that it is the people’s story told among our people—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. So I’m saying, if that exists, I’ll definitely examine it. And if I examine it, I’ll consider accepting it. I’d like to say this point briefly. When every generation transmitting it to you also, as you say, demands that you get on the plane as a result of that belief. Right? Meaning the dragons didn’t demand that you get on any plane. They only told you there were dragons. Ah, wait, no.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] That’s not true.

[Tamir DorTel] No. Let’s say if that story ended with “and therefore we Chinese,” or “and therefore the Chinese are commanded,” or “and therefore humanity is commanded to observe eight principal forms of labor every Wednesday.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No no. Actually yes, because these are imperial enthronement rituals. In enthronement rituals, when heaven endorses it, the dragons appear. And that has significance.

[Tamir DorTel] But they don’t require the Chinese to implement it personally, let’s say.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] So that’s exactly what I want to answer. Okay, you’re done, right? I want to answer, and I already feel I’m nearing the end and I’m stressed about the ten minutes only for subscribers. No, don’t be stressed. I want to say I’m going to attack him. I’m going to attack him and that’s only for subscribers. I’m going to attack you during the subscribers-only stage. But it matters to me that what I’m saying now still be for the general audience. Okay.

[Tamir DorTel] You want to attack me before we move to the plus section?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, the plus. I think anyone who wants to see me attack him physically—punches, Chinese martial arts—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s some special section only for subscribers?

[Tamir DorTel] Right. The podcast is a general podcast for everyone, because I don’t have the heart to put this only behind a subscription wall—to trouble you from far away and you from Tel Aviv. I don’t have the heart not to expose this to the wider public.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what, there’s a section at the end—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] It matters to me that what I’m saying now still be in the public one. Okay, never mind. I just want—we, I’m already prepared to leave it to the holy and wise and educated audience to weigh your argument and my argument, and let each person come to his own conclusion regarding fine-tuning and regarding—which of course is the post-Darwinian refuge for those who loved the arguments from nature. We almost agree. It’s just that your language, even though it conceptually reflects begging the question, you say “created,” you say “maker,” you say “who.” There’s no reason. There’s no reason. We want to accept a first cause, that’s it. That’s where the difference lies. That’s why I struggle with the fatter something you ascribe to it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s our disagreement. I’m only saying—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I’m saying it is something much thinner. Don’t say maker.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Never mind, did.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Even “did” is worse.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Never mind. This something, though—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] That from which it flowed. Fine. Okay, flowed. That is the beginning, that is the cause. Fine. It’s something much more abstract. And most likely something that at the moment is completely beyond the human capacity to understand.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But again, if you want to talk about this transition, there is a lot to say about this transition. This transition basically says, as I said before, the principle of causality or purposiveness basically says that if something did something, created—whatever verb you choose—then presumably it has some purpose in the matter.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] And that’s exactly what’s not so. Here I stand firmly with Spinoza and with what happened in science since Galileo, where we no longer think in terms of final causes. Okay, but—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We didn’t stop at all; that’s a common mistake.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] So I think we did.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Final cause has returned in a big way. You’re mistaken. When did it come back? Not enough. What do you mean I lost you? What is a final cause?

[Tamir DorTel] No really, wait, stop. What is a final cause?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Aristotle explained natural phenomena in teleological terms, in terms of purpose. Meaning the stone strives to return to its place of origin. It is not pulled, which is a causal explanation, but rather this is a consequential explanation. Meaning it strives, its face is toward the future, not driven from the past. It does this in order to, not because of. Okay? That is a teleological explanation. Now it is commonly thought that modern science abandoned teleological explanation in favor of causal explanation.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, but—and sometimes mistakenly preserves it, but that’s a mistake. That’s what I’m saying.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not true.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] That’s what I think. But you know what, I—wait, so what? Then explain to me. One second, I’m—okay fine.

[Tamir DorTel] But I didn’t understand the concept at all.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Fine, but it’s not critical. It’s not such a—well, it actually is a bit critical. But—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. It’s simply a mistake. Why is it a mistake? Because there is Lagrangian analytical mechanics. And in analytical mechanics, all the physical laws are teleological laws. Now there is an explanation—there is the causal description, the Newtonian description, and there is the teleological description, Lagrange’s description, and they are equivalent. There is a mathematical proof that the two descriptions are equivalent.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Yes, but I don’t see teleology, for example, in evolution. Many people speak of evolution in teleological terms, but wait—it’s my turn, and my point again is: I don’t want to go into endless distinctions and microscopic arguments where you’re right on that point and this one. The broad point still stands in my opinion, namely that from our trip into the cosmos and to the beginning of the cosmos we ought to come back with something that is just something, in my view. Not to say creator, not to say maker, and not to say who. Even “flows from” is already a choice that carries weight. Fine. Now I want to return to the witness argument, because that to me is the heart of the matter, and to how much there is begging the question and moving the goalposts. We said: people always say that six hundred thousand people saw and so on. You give examples—Fatima, dragons—also masses saw those things. No, but with us they insist on saying it is important that you begin living by it and that it really happened, and that’s why I believe in Sinai and not in Elisha’s bears and so on. Now you know, I’ll throw out quickly—yes, here we are. Apollo appears before the whole army, right? Tens of thousands of people according to the story, the Greek army at Troy. This happens after the Greeks angered Apollo because they desecrated his sanctuary. “He descended from Olympus’ peaks, his heart full of rage, his bow on his shoulder and his covered quiver; the arrows rattled on the shoulders of the murderous god in his wrath as he advanced.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We heard, we heard the story. The question is whether you’re adding something now.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] This isn’t just “we heard,” this is an example, it’s relevant. Socrates was executed. Executed for what? First, corrupting the youth; second, for not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in different and new divine things. Okay. If you execute a man for not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in different and new divine things, then presumably it matters very much to you that those beliefs or certain beliefs about the gods be regarded as true. So this criterion specifically also exists in other cultures, not only in our culture. In China the whole story with the dragons, by the way, is very similar to Sinai in the sense that it concerns enthronement rituals. In enthronement rituals, what confirms the emperor’s accepted status as ruler are supernatural signs that included dragons, meaning there was indeed political-theological significance to grounding an event involving dragons as real, exactly as there is political-theological significance to the supernaturalness of Sinai in order to ground Jewish law. So in that sense it does meet the standards. Now no, but then regarding what is supposedly lacking—look, I’m not going to—after all—

[Tamir DorTel] Wait, what’s lacking?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The tradition.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] But there is tradition. There’s no tradition.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is—of course there’s tradition. Tell me, is there even one place today where anyone still believes in the Greek gods?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Ah, no—but the fact that we—but the fact that we—wait, that the Greeks—most Greeks, by the way, there is now a return to pagan worship in Greece. The fact that most Greeks became secular does not make the stories they disenchanted themselves from less reliable. It may simply mean that the processes of secularization and enlightenment that I hope and pray will happen in Israel have been more successful in Greece than here for now. That does not justify those ancient beliefs. But I want to say the following. The moving of the goalposts. People—when I come with the story of Fatima or with the story from the Iliad or with the story from China, I’m basically making what’s called a counter-argument, right, an argument by example against, where you show that one can say the same thing and then do a reductio ad absurdum. Now you will always add more and more and more and more characteristics post hoc, after the fact, to the belief that is your belief, and say: yes, but there isn’t this, and there isn’t this, and it didn’t happen in the desert, and it wasn’t before six hundred thousand but before twenty thousand, and not this and not that. In that sense it’s like saying: I am a completely unique creature. Completely unique. Now you’ll say, Jeremy, you know, you’re a male Homo sapiens aged forty-five, and—no, but find me one more born in Belgium and living in Israel. Ah, look, there’s Eli and this and that—no, but find one whose father was such-and-such.

[Tamir DorTel] And who had the very reliable grandmother in Terezín. Okay.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] So in the end of course it’s unique, because everything is unique. Every single thing in the end—if you add enough criteria—becomes unique. That’s begging the question of difference, and maybe even Jewish chosenness. As Alejandro Jodorowsky once said: why are the Jews the chosen people? Because they wrote the book. The point is, in the end you are on the plane. It’s not as if you sat in an empty room and wondered whether or not to get on the plane based on the arguments you brought this evening and in general. You are on the plane. And from your place on that plane—and plane is not a good metaphor because it’s already flying—but you are there, you believe, and as a believer you excel, and with that I began, at offering rationalizations of a belief that already exists. You did not begin in some neutral objective space, none of us did, and on that basis choose to board the plane of Jewish law and so on and so on. And I think if we sum up the evening by saying that one can come out of the cosmos with something, about which we basically agree that it is very, very, very speculative and has very few qualities—it is at best some kind of Maimonidean something about which nothing can be said—and that on the other side, in the witness argument, we agree that the story of Sinai is not much better or worse than dragon stories from ancient China or the angry Apollo in the Iliad, then I feel this is not a strong enough basis for a person like me to become religious, and certainly not to convince my Chinese friend, whom we somewhat abandoned, but who listened to the whole episode, to say: wow, the Jews really are right about their specific myth, just as Pythagoras was right about his theorem or Darwin was right about his theory or as people were right about beliefs that, on the cognitive level as an honest person seeking truth, I am obligated to adopt.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, first of all, regarding this accusation of adding ad hoc claims, or moving the goalposts as you called it. Post hoc. Never mind, ad hoc additions—it’s like post hoc. That claim is not correct. It’s not correct because answers are always proposed when questions arise. Therefore answers are always ad hoc. By the way, in science too it is like that. When you save—there is an existing paradigm in science, now a difficulty arises, something in this experiment doesn’t fit. So often there are ad hoc rescue moves like: this is probably where it’s not right to apply this theory, or something. Thomas Kuhn already talked about this and said that when you are within a paradigmatic system, when you are already on the plane as you said, then when there are things that challenge a paradigm that in your eyes is strong, you will raise ad hoc claims. Right? Where there are very many ad hoc claims and you still insist—sorry, many problems and you still insist on solving all of them with ad hoc claims, that really is excessive conservatism. At that point one needs to replace paradigms. Okay? What I am claiming is two things. First: my ad hoc claims are claims that arise because I have good a priori reasons to assume this, and now questions arise and I answer them. An answer always appears after the question, therefore it will always be ad hoc. Second: one needs to examine the nature of the answer. Because where you find an answer within the existing paradigm, only you hadn’t noticed it fit the existing paradigm, and it explains the difficulty or the experiment that supposedly didn’t work with the existing paradigm, that is not an ad hoc answer. Now when I tell you the difference is this: with us a tradition is passed on and they constantly say, note, this tradition is not a story, it is real. Fine? Suppose for the sake of argument that this were unique to us, suppose. That’s another dispute; you opened a little door. In a moment. But suppose that is unique to us. You say: even then it is still an ad hoc claim. I say no, because this claim is a relevant claim. Meaning this claim was not invented just now to explain you away.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] But I objected to it with—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Socrates, not with the post hoc. Wait, no, one second. You made two objections. One: it’s not unique. Two: it’s ad hoc. You differentiate yourself from others ad hoc.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I didn’t say that specific one was post hoc. I said there are constantly more and more criteria being added.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Like what, for example, did I add? Give me an example.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, that I said in general regarding people I’ve heard here. About this specific one I said Socrates.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I understand, you said I add things ad hoc. What did I add?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] That it’s six hundred thousand and for others it’s not.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I didn’t say six hundred thousand or six hundred and one thousand; you said that. I didn’t mention that at all.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Yes, because I think there were there—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know. Those numbers could be typological numbers, by the way. Right. Therefore I didn’t bring it up at all. No, to be fair, that was a criticism of my own side and not of the Torah. All the uniqueness I added—and he even asked me whether it was only that, what else needs to hold, right? So I said yes, for me only that. What did I add? I added that alongside the tradition that is transmitted, there is also an insistence that it really happened. Now that is not an ad hoc claim. After all, if those characteristics exist—right—

[Tamir DorTel] He didn’t add the desert, he didn’t add six hundred and one thousand.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] But even if it isn’t ad hoc, it’s not convincing. No, fine, you can say it’s not convincing. Why? One second, let me just—I’m being precise. It’s always possible to say something isn’t convincing. Precisely. Why is the tradition true? Because they say it is true. And why do they say it is true? Because it is true. And why is the tradition true? And where are we? We’re in a circle. We’re in a circle. We’re in a circle.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Relativity is true because we found it in the laboratory. Why did we find it in the laboratory? Because it’s true. I mean, who doesn’t find something true in the laboratory? But the laboratory finding connects you to empirical reality. And this also connects—not, no, no, to empirical reality.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Of course that’s empirical reality.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] People are transmitting to me a tradition about something that happened, okay? I don’t believe them because it is true; I infer that it is true from the fact that I believe them. There is no circle here. You’re inventing circularity here.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] But that is exactly circular—you accept it because—

[Tamir DorTel] One second, no, I’m stopping you. He’ll answer.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s telling me, telling Simeon something, and Simeon accepts it. I ask you what time it is, you say 2:10. Okay, accepted. I understand it’s 2:10, I have such-and-such amount of time to reach my destination. Jeremy Vogel will come and say: that’s circular, why do you believe him? You have no indication. Because he seems trustworthy to me, right? You say that’s circular, so you believe in tradition because it seems trustworthy to you.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] You believe because you believe. You believe in tradition because it seems trustworthy to you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, fine, accept that. There is nothing circular here. Don’t argue whether it is—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I’m not even sure that forms a circle; that’s the point. It’s not even a circle.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Neither this nor that. I believe someone who told me something. There is nothing circular there. You can say you disagree with me, say he isn’t trustworthy, no problem.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] But the whole point is that it really isn’t trustworthy.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, all right, that’s another claim. But the claim that it is circular is simply mistaken.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] We’re getting close to the ten minutes. Enough. I’m going to attack you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Attack all you want.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] But only for subscribers. I’m going to attack you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One more thing regarding this. About certain details that join the history—like the six hundred thousand you keep returning to, and I’m deliberately not cooperating because I don’t accept all the pyrotechnics around it and all these details that happened here and there. I’m not sure. Some details were there, some details weren’t. The only thing I roughly accept as plausible is that there is a plane. There was an event, there was some encounter with God. The story about it may be a story to which embellishments were added, and it is even likely that embellishments were added, but this event yielded a set of instructions. That set of instructions was accepted together with the story as deriving from the story, and this has continued in a very systematic way for 2,500 years as far as we clearly know. In the previous thousand years nothing was written down, so it’s hard to know exactly what happened there, so I don’t know. But to compare this to something else—anything else I can think of—I just don’t see the comparison. One final remark that also touches on the something, because you came back to that too in this context: this something from which the world ultimately came. Came, did, I don’t know, all the expressions you used there. Now if this something is some mechanical, inanimate affair, I don’t know, something, I don’t know, non-personal, I don’t know how to call it, then it doesn’t solve my problem. It doesn’t solve my problem because a complex thing requires an entity that plans it as such, that executes it as such. Because if you tell me this is a machine that created a complex thing, then I’ll ask who created it. Meaning in the end there has to be some personal entity that planned the complex thing, and therefore I claim it is very plausible—again, only plausible, plausible but not certain—that this thing really is personal, that it has intention. So it isn’t only the something itself. But all I want to claim—you’re right, we probably won’t have time to argue over all these things—but just one point. My goal was not really to bring you to admit that this something has intention. The reason I pressed you on this something was to show you that you too enter into an argument of this sort. That’s all.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] While I admit they’re very speculative and not certain.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, fine, but still. One more remark I have to make regarding David Hume’s causality. Here I think you are mistaken in your interpretation. You are a much bigger expert on Hume than I am. But I think you are mistaken. Because regarding causality he cannot say it is just not certain. As an empiricist he ought to say there is no indication whatsoever that there is causality. Regarding induction I’m willing to accept your interpretation. Because induction says: it was, so it’s likely it will be, but not certain, maybe yes, maybe no. Causality, however—Hume claims—has no empirical source at all. So it’s not that causality is uncertain. There is no basis whatsoever, it’s all made up out of thin air. There is no basis for assuming it.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Wait, wait—

[Tamir DorTel] Just one second—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] The constant conjunction, the direction—it’s plausible it will return. Yes, yes, people talk about it, but regarding causality, right.

[Tamir DorTel] I didn’t understand anything you just said, I understood nothing in the whole causality and Hume thing.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I say let’s let that go—

[Tamir DorTel] because it’s too specific. But I want to understand, I’d like to, it’s my podcast, I also want to understand something here.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What I said earlier with kicking the ball, right? So there is the connection or the statistical correlation, the correlation that says after I kick, the ball flies.

[Tamir DorTel] In all the cases I checked, it always flies.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Does that prove causality? No. There is the problem of the generalization that says this will always happen. That really is doubtful according to Hume, but not certain. So what did you say just now?

[Tamir DorTel] Right now you sharpened the point.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But what I want to claim is that there is another component in the causal relation, and that component is that the kick caused the ball’s flying. Not just that it comes first and always comes first. Now David Hume says this does not come out of observation at all. There is no way to see this observationally. Therefore Jeremy is wrong that all Hume is saying is merely that it isn’t certain. No. Regarding causality, Hume is an empiricist. Regarding causality, Hume claims there cannot be any basis for assuming causality exists at all, not just that it isn’t certain. Okay.

[Tamir DorTel] And what did what you just said contribute to anything?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Since I say that if I apply the principle of causality to things that are not drawn from our experience—that was Jeremy’s claim earlier. God, creation of the world—that’s outside the world, outside experience, in the fog. What are you applying causality there for, if it belongs to the world of our experience? I claim the principle of causality is not at all a result of experience. It is not a result of observation. It is not an empirical principle.

[Tamir DorTel] Right. It’s an a priori principle.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. That’s what you said before.

[Tamir DorTel] No, I’m saying—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the point is that what he said, and what I attacked in Hume on Hume’s own terms: because Hume on his own terms says this is an a priori principle and not empirical. So I say, right, the productive dimension in causality—Hume says that’s an a priori principle and therefore it’s not true, it doesn’t exist. It’s just a form of our thought. Only the connection, only the—

[Tamir DorTel] not necessary.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not “not necessary”—that’s exactly the point. Induction is not necessary. Causality—there is no reason to assume it exists. That’s what I want to sharpen here. It’s not the same thing as induction. Now I say: if so, and I do accept the principle of causality, then the principle of causality is not drawn from observation—it is a priori, just as David Hume said—except that unlike him I claim it exists. I claim this principle exists, and Hume says no, only the connection exists, only the correlation exists, but not the production. Okay. Now, if it exists, there is no reason not to apply it also to things outside the world.

[Tamir DorTel] Yes, you said that an hour ago.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I just sharpened the point that here it is an a priori principle. Okay, goodbye.

[Tamir DorTel] You have the right of reply—what, point by point? No, really, because otherwise we’ll open another whole discussion.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Of course, of course. I’m setting future discussions with you, Rabbi. Open your calendar. Open your calendar. If we basically accept the a priori nature of causality in the Kantian sense, then how do we allow ourselves to make such noumenal arguments about the world as it is in itself, which part of the Kantian view closes off to us? But we won’t open that today. We won’t open it today. Really the issue is—and specifically regarding Hume—I think one has to understand that when he speaks about the probability that a constant conjunction will recur, and lives by that—right, he really says explicitly, I’m not now going—yes, I made my argument about causality but that doesn’t mean I’m going out through the window instead of through the door. Okay. Troy. Troy, Troy, Troy.

[Tamir DorTel] No, no, no.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] The tradition of Troy was transmitted, endured, was held.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No tradition at all was transmitted that this—

[Tamir DorTel] Let’s not open Troy, it’s just another example.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] It got archaeological confirmation. Dragons, dragons, dragons. Worship in India, in England at Stonehenge, in Greece where it’s coming back into fashion. And I’ll end with this and then I’ll attack you, but only for subscribers, I’ll attack you.

[Tamir DorTel] Okay, here we’ll stop.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I’ll tell you why I believe in Socrates. Do you believe in Socrates?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] That he existed? Oh. I believe he existed because human beings exist. Right? And there is no reason to think— I am less suspicious of an argument for the existence of a human being than of an argument for a supernatural event. So am I. There are several sources. There is Aristophanes, for example, who writes The Clouds.

[Tamir DorTel] Wait, why do I care whether Socrates existed?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Because it’s—I’m building an argument. Okay, I’m building one, building, building. Aristophanes mocks him in The Clouds while he is alive, and then Plato writes about him, and Xenophon writes about him, and there are sculptures made a short time after he dies, and Diogenes Laërtius writes about him. There is a multiplicity of testimonies about a phenomenon that is lovely, wonderful, very unique, but within the framework of what my reason and experience have shown is possible—and that is human beings who are geniuses exactly like you and exactly like other people. I leave here with the feeling that beyond setting up more and more criteria that arise out of the uniqueness of the Jewish story—which is unique exactly the way the Chinese story is unique, exactly the way the Indian story is unique, exactly the way every story is unique in its own way—I have no basis on reason alone to accept Sinai. And perhaps the critical thing, because in the end I think practical reason is more important than pure reason. That is, the question what ought I to do is more important than the question what can I know. We argued all evening about what can be known and how it can be known and whether it’s belief or knowledge, and that was fun. The question that to me is critical in this period in the history of the Jewish people and the Jewish-democratic project of the state is really the moral question. And the reason for that, the explicit agenda of my book, is to increase doubt and mental flexibility around belief, because I really do think we are under a real, clear, distinct threat of religious fundamentalism that threatens the very Jewish-democratic existence we have here, that threatens moral foundations, including prophetic and biblical ones—those celebrated in the Declaration of Independence—and which I think you and I can even agree on, even if we conceive the historical or non-historical event differently. And I want to say out loud that that is my agenda. I am not asking anyone in the audience who is watching—and I also say this when I tell people to become secular—I’m not saying stop believing or stop living by beliefs that benefit you. The power of doubt is also a moderating power. And I think this moderation is something I want to promote, and that is why I make my arguments. The fact that a person, for reasons—in my opinion, by the way, the point where I would toss this back to you, and I’m sure I’ll maybe write about it on the blog—is that Mendelssohn says in the book he writes after he grasped the Kantian revolution, he writes Morning Hours, and says: I understand that my arguments are already less convincing. Kant came along and, Mendelssohn says, I’m already old, what, should I now reinvent myself philosophically? It will take someone with the power of Kant to rebuild this philosophy that got lost. But he continues to believe in these things, and says: these are the arguments I make, and someone will come and validate them in another way. Meaning there is some awareness here that in the end his grip on the world of belief is not based only on arguments; it is also based on psychological and emotional and historical and sociological reasons that are justified, because after all we are not only rational creatures, we are also instinctual and cultural and social creatures. So I think there is a certain humility in Mendelssohn, a certain honesty, that I think you also have, in the sense that you insist on saying, no, if tomorrow I reach the purely intellectual conclusion that the dragons in China are as convincing as Sinai, then I really will believe in dragons or stop believing in Sinai. No, but that’s one of the things you did say, yes. I know what I’m going to attack you on, but only for subscribers. But I’m going to attack you. It’s going to be spectacular. I would subscribe just in order to attack you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, can I say a few sentences?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] But I’m basically done. It was fun living in this world in general and talking with the Rabbi in particular.

[Tamir DorTel] Almost moving.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] First of all, I too am very troubled by religious fundamentalism. I have written books and articles against it. I really think it is very problematic. But I am no less troubled by secular and atheist fundamentalism, by right-wing and left-wing fundamentalism. I am troubled by fundamentalism as such. And I think it exists on all sides, and I don’t even know on which side it exists more. I have met many atheists whose fundamentalism, in my opinion, makes religious fundamentalism pale by comparison. You cannot discuss logical arguments with them in any way. Meaning you are speaking to a wall. Now, regardless, one can argue with my arguments, but the very possibility of discourse does not exist. So I entirely join your call against fundamentalism; I do not join your directing that call only at one side. I think that is wrong. Really wrong. Second, I truly think the identification between religiosity and the threat to our existence here—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] A certain kind of religiosity; here I do need to be precise because it matters.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. So I say that in exactly the same way—and yes, I’m doing what’s called “whataboutism,” one of those left-wing silencing words. So I’ll now do a whataboutism and say that there is a certain kind of secularism that threatens us no less. Secular fundamentalism threatens us no less. It threatens us no less for many reasons. One main reason is that the moral principles of secular fundamentalism, about which you spoke so enthusiastically, in my opinion many of them come from the gut. And the justification given for that is that not everyone is only reason and all the things you said before. And they are now leading us into disaster, and it is impossible to speak with people about the fact that their moral principles are wrong, or at least do not truly represent them.

[Tamir DorTel] Give one example.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] For example, do you want now to open the hostage deal issue? Do you want to open things like that? Okay. In my view it was impossible to have a conversation about that. Now one can argue: there are arguments for it, there are arguments against it. In principle I was against it.

[Tamir DorTel] But there are arguments for it, there are arguments against it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Against what? Against bringing back hostages in a deal? Any hostage deal, doesn’t matter now. We can argue about some deals. The point is, my feeling was: there was no one to talk to.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No one to talk to? You’re talking to a wall. And I had many conversations with people.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re talking to parents who desperately want their children back?

I’m not talking about the parents, come on, I’m not talking about the parents.

It’s impossible to talk. No, I’m not talking to you, I’m talking about people like you who hold your positions, not the parents. And you can’t talk to them. I can’t raise arguments. I can’t explain to them: look, there are considerations. I have these, I have those. And why? No—and why? It’s some kind of fundamentalism, and the worst thing is that it’s fundamentalism coming from the gut, from emotion. It’s a kind of devoutness in the face of Ben-Gvir.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Come on, friends, righteous souls. Here I’m attacking. By the way, you owe me a punishment book for misleading me, and I’m going to take a book here today as punishment for misleading me in the last debate about Ben-Gvir’s age at the time of Rabin’s murder.

[Tamir DorTel] He was nineteen. Nineteen, not fourteen.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Right. You hear that? At nineteen you can do things you are responsible for. Let’s say this: you cannot compare secular fundamentalism in Israel—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So you—so—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] you are really mistaken, and we are witnessing total chaos. At nineteen I supported the disengagement.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You are very mistaken, Jeremy, very mistaken. You can absolutely compare. Sometimes you can even compare in the opposite direction.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I’ll say more than that: do you realize—you watch the news? Do you watch the news?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] By the way, Adam was with us at fifteen when we left. We both watch the news, each from his own angle. The additional thing I wanted to say is that, as you said earlier—and once again for some reason directed it only to one side—people are not only intellect. And you were basically telling me: you present your Judaism or your faith as based only on intellect, but actually it comes from the fact that you are on the plane, and from the fact that you grew up in a particular bed of soil. Right, and that is equally true of secular people. We are all shaped by the landscape of our birthplace. We all form views from various angles and as a function of influences.

[Tamir DorTel] By the way, except for me and people who became religious or became secular.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, even they were influenced. You can’t know.

[Tamir DorTel] No, but someone who chose his path by himself—then either our culture shaped us to make a change. Meaning whatever dad is, I’ll do the opposite.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He was in the Working and Studying Youth movement altogether.

[Tamir DorTel] No, I was in the Scouts, don’t curse me.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Seriously, you weren’t in that youth movement?

[Tamir DorTel] No, Heaven forbid.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying, but even one who changes can be the result of influence. Every event, you know, I’ll end with a nice example—we may have talked about it once, I don’t remember anymore. Someone becomes religious, okay? So his secular friends say: what happened to him? He went through a crisis and this and that, broke up with his girlfriend, what crisis did he go through? Meaning they look for the explanation on the psychological level, right? His religious friends say: no, at last he discovered the light, he understood his nonsense. They’re philosophers, the religious ones, right? The secular ones are psychologists and the religious ones are philosophers. When someone becomes secular, the religious say: he wanted to permit forbidden sexual relations to himself. They’re psychologists. The secular say: oh, at last he understood the nonsense he was living in. They’re philosophers, right? Now who is correct? Everyone. Meaning every step we take, including a step of change—that’s why I mentioned it—even if you become religious or become secular, even a step of change can have psychological explanations and can have philosophical explanations. Both are true. Our bias comes out in which level we choose to focus on. Always on the level convenient for us. So if it suits us to be philosophers, we are philosophers. If it doesn’t suit us to be philosophers, we become psychologists. Therefore I say: we are all people moved both by psychology and by philosophy. But intellectual honesty requires us to discuss ideas only on the philosophical plane. Not because we are pure philosophers, but because everyone has psychology; there’s no point discussing that.

[Tamir DorTel] That’s it, good. By the way, you’re invited again. But let’s move to the subscribers-only section.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Goodbye, can we say goodbye to— I’m saying goodbye to the general audience. Goodbye, general audience.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s also an actor.

[Tamir DorTel] Now we’re alone? Yes, alone with a few more.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I’m attacking you.

[Tamir DorTel] No, what do you want?

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Now it turns out this is a fraud. I want to tell the subscribers: don’t tell the people in the general audience that there isn’t—no, did I mislead you? Wait, did I mislead you?

[Tamir DorTel] Not mislead, I made a mistake.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Forget it, but I thought of asking for a fine where I ceremonially steal a book.

[Tamir DorTel] No problem, I have that book twice.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] You do? Is it a good book though?

[Tamir DorTel] Not really, I didn’t like it.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I also have—

[Tamir DorTel] this one twice.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Take that book from him. “Thoughts

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] on Democracy in France” by Barak.

[Tamir DorTel] Sure.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Here, see, so I’m

[Tamir DorTel] taking—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] a book fine for Tamir’s mistake. Look, I want to say something about morality, following what you—you’re not talking to me at all?

[Tamir DorTel] No, and I’m attacking you too—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] and about your moral responsibility because listen, this thing you’re creating here—which again, every time I say how much I appreciate it and how inspiring it is and how much I admire the initiative and that you’re an entrepreneur and you came and built and you’re becoming, and you’ll see, one of the prominent figures, if not the prominent figure, in the digital sphere of the believing right-wing world. Blessed be God. And afterward I’d also love to talk to you about it. Not today. Here for subscribers. In that sense, whether you want to or not, what you do and the way you host have enormous moral weight, because you reach so many people, and you know—much power, much responsibility. Now, I agree there is fundamentalism at all the edges. People ask me why I didn’t write against the communists in my book. Then I say, excuse me, right now I don’t feel under an obvious, immediate, clear threat of communist fundamentalism. Right now, specifically in the cultural forces of our people, what has happened is that larger and larger parts are either in some kind of what’s called messianic extremism—I call it imperial thinking—focused on a hysterical idea of returning Temple worship and willing to risk a world war. We can’t manage to defeat Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, so let’s defeat all the Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. At the same time there is a very specific, fundamentalist version of Judaism in its different shades, one that completely ignores the morality of the prophets. Not for nothing did I mention the Declaration of Independence; on prophetic morality there can be very broad agreement among our people. The stranger, the orphan, the widow, the way this was interpreted in the Declaration. This fundamentalism is not some marginal threat now—the transgender issue in some—

[Tamir DorTel] Get to the argument, because I came with you.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I think when you bring someone like Ben-Gvir—there. And you see the—his insane way— I don’t know what to call it. You know, there’s a problem now in—

[Tamir DorTel] When I bring someone crazy like Avrum Burg—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Avrum Burg is currently a pensioner living somewhere in Tel Aviv. First of all. Ben-Gvir is currently the minister in charge of the police.

[Tamir DorTel] When I bring someone crazy like Ron Gerlitz—sorry, Ron Gerlitz.

[Tamir DorTel] Director—

[Tamir DorTel] director of the Accord Center at Hebrew University, who influences many—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, wait. First, first, attack those people.

[Tamir DorTel] But—but I’ve brought many—when I bring here some crazy woman who causes a lot of damage, like the CEO of Women of the Wall who just creates provocations—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] But how can you compare that to a person—a politician, and politician is too mild a word—a convicted criminal who raised his child—who at nineteen threatened Rabin, who afterward turned out to be a prominent figure leading to Rabin’s murder, who goes to his granddaughter and makes taunting noises at her, who raised his children under a picture of Goldstein, Baruch Goldstein, and who now runs the police in a grotesquely absurd way, to the point that if there’s a security problem in south Tel Aviv, we’ll send Mordechai David there. Did you hear that joke? It’s not a good joke. But then he comes here.

[Tamir DorTel] You have a responsibility—I know you’re not Channel 12,

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] but you have a responsibility to be more critical of people like that when you interview them. But you do have responsibility.

[Tamir DorTel] I’m going to continue being an easy interviewer for both sides, and I’m going to continue not attacking—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] You attack me more than you attack Ben-Gvir, why? I’m just saying, what nonsense.

[Tamir DorTel] I will continue to be a very easy interviewer and I will continue to let the other side express itself and bring itself out. Not through confrontation over the microphone—wait, now you answer me and all that. No. But rather through really trying to understand what the other side has to say. And the public at home knows very, very well how to judge who you are. I really trust the people at home. Yes, I trust you, but without this play-acting. I think the best way to interview—and that’s why I think my success is so great—is exactly to give room. And someone who gives even more room than I do, by the way, is Daniel Dushi. He really comes just to give room. He—whereas I have opinions. He really comes like that.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Yes, I was in the same vibe. You know, my podcast ended because we got locked out of the account.

[Tamir DorTel] How weird.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Yes, so we kind of decided that’s it. It’s—that’s a weird decision. If anyone knows someone who works at SoundCloud. But—but I speak with philosophers, with scientists—amazing. Always—

[Tamir DorTel] I also speak with policymakers.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We had a whole podcast about this, Jeremy.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Which by the way, regarding—I’ll just say—how many episodes did you do together? We’re on some kind of long friendship. By the way there’s one thing from that podcast I didn’t swallow, and that’s that in the end you did say that in Haredi education one should place more restrictions than in secular education, because it’s harder to get a Haredi person out than a secular one. And afterward I thought about it, that somehow it circles back under what you claimed there—but never mind. That’s between him and me.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m saying, I want to return to the point you were discussing. One of the problematic things—and this is mostly, by the way, on the left, though among religious people too, not necessarily right-wing but religious, it also exists—is the idea that some people need to be silenced.

[Tamir DorTel] How could you have given him a platform?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t say silence him. I said be more critical, not silence him. Not silence him. Wait, wait. You corrected that at the end, but I’ll tell you why I’m saying it. Because we already talked about this. We talked about Tzvi Sukkot, remember, following that problematic podcast? But the conclusion you reached at the end, after the hours with Tzvi Sukkot, was that you should not have invited him—not that you should not have challenged him. That was the conclusion you reached. Why are you saying that? Yes, because we argued about this. See that podcast and check. And in that podcast I told you that independently I also disagree with your evaluation of Tzvi Sukkot. But I’m saying: even if you’re right—and regarding Ben-Gvir I agree with you more than I do regarding Tzvi Sukkot, I think—this man represents a great many people in the public. And when you silence him, you’ll only lose from it.

[Tamir DorTel] But I’m not silencing him.

[Tamir DorTel] So no, I said be more critical. You know what, I’ll say something else, something I think will surprise both of you. Really surprise both of you. There is no politician, if I understand correctly—and I’ve had over a thousand episodes here, let’s say over—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] A thousand episodes? In how long?

[Tamir DorTel] Seven years. We now upload one episode a day. But there is no politician who came here and didn’t lose support among his electorate. With me? Yes, I’m with you. So, how about that? In my opinion, Ben-Gvir voters watched and said: I thought there was a little more depth here, more sophistication, more orderly and clear policy. I came away with the feeling that there was less. Now that doesn’t mean zero, it means less. I’m telling you: there is no politician who presents a really coherent, clear worldview. There are politicians who are wannabes, like Feiglin, who presents something very clear and orderly, but he hasn’t tried it in the real arena. Meaning there is such a huge and abysmal gap between the real arena of policy and what you signed onto in a platform, that it’s very hard to come out of a one-hour or hour-and-a-half or two-hour podcast saying: wow, I really talked here to a serious person.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] By the way, scandals—and this whole thing, you know, you burst out in Kikar HaShabbat with the Haredim, I saw that. Right.

[Tamir DorTel] What, how—you—

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Did that have ripple effects? Did you get—

[Tamir DorTel] Yes, a lot, but I’m used to ripple effects. What kind of ripple effects? “Well done,” “you showed them on their home court,” and so on and so forth. Mainly support. Yes. But it seems we—there was there—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Just,

[Tamir DorTel] I was invited to a program called “Black Kippahs,” maybe you were there too, where they talk politics with Haredim and so on.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] You came out very strongly against the belief that we can survive in the Middle East if they don’t enlist.

[Tamir DorTel] They basically said Torah protects and saves, more or less exclusively. No other effort is needed. So I said to them: then let’s abolish the IDF. Why should other people be sent to die for you? Come on, friends, we can also go into an Arab village with the Talmud open and start wandering around there and losing ourselves there—in Iran.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] No, that’s insane.

[Tamir DorTel] So I said to them—they said, wait, are you arguing against explicit Talmudic passages? I said no, the Talmudic passages have their honor in place, but what about a little human effort? A little something. Even when there’s illness, you don’t only pray.

[Tamir DorTel] In short, the usual and rather boring argument, I just said it

[Tamir DorTel] with a lot of emotion,

[Tamir DorTel] and that’s probably what made it go viral.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Did you also get hate responses in any form? No, nothing.

[Tamir DorTel] By the way, I have to say that following the podcast I only get positive responses.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] You have a Haredi audience too?

[Tamir DorTel] Certainly, something like a third.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] I also saw a lot of leftists commenting.

[Tamir DorTel] There’s everything, really. There are something like three million listens a month, not just secular people, not just Haredim, not just Religious Zionists. It’s just a huge number of people.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] By the way, I don’t know if Yair T. 101— I just saw his comment and it really stayed with me. I don’t know if he’s a subscriber, but he wrote: “Jeremy Vogel is just another cosmopolitan universalist Jew, he’s going to perdition together with the whole movement of his.” And I want to tell you, Yair T. 101, if you’re listening: I’m going to perdition. I’m going to perdition step by step. I think you are too, by the way. We’re all going to perdition. If you have a solution to propose, then write—

[Tamir DorTel] Maybe these podcasts will remain after we go to perdition, and our memory will remain in many people’s hearts.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] And in the end there is the end of the universe and everything turns into black holes.

[Tamir DorTel] Fine, that’s in the long term. Einstein’s prophecy. In the long term. Dear friends, thank you very much. It was really interesting. Jeremy Vogel, Rabbi Michael Abraham, Dr. Michael Vogel, Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham. Great.

[Dr. Jeremy Vogel] Two Jews, Reuven and Shimon.

[Tamir DorTel] Two Jews, as they say.

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