Responses to Zvi Yanai's response to the Faith and Science series on Ynet

Zvi Yanai has an advantage that the other commenters on my claims do not have. While they write from a (usually superficial and rather partial) reading of my series of articles in YNET Science, he read my book about Borio (before a filmed debate we had on Safari. See the 'Orot' channel on YNET).
Still, I am surprised to discover that he did not address my main claims, and he is mistaken in his interpretation of them (and in some of his answers) despite the explanations I provided him.

Below are Zvi Yanai's words, with my comments after each part (4 parts in total):

6 on the Dawkins scale
Belief in God is a legitimate intellectual choice, but it is not scientific or rational. Intelligent designers claim that the complexity found in nature is nothing more than the handiwork of God, but Zvi Yanai shows that fish, worms, and clams teach us otherwise. Part 1

"Faith does not mean that a person knows anything about God and his actions in the world and how he determines the fate of man."

Yeshayahu Leibovitz ("I wanted to ask you, Prof. Leibovitz")

One should not expect from Michael Avraham such grandiose statements as: "God created everything ready-made, the trees were created as complete trees, all animals, living creatures, and birds were created in their full size, while the mosquito was not born but was created from feces" (former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Mordechai Eliyahu).

Even a staunch neo-Darwinist would have no difficulty agreeing with Rabbi Avraham that "evolution does not prove that there is no God, nor does it prove that He exists." Furthermore, that "it does not deal with Him at all." For "evolution is a scientific field, and its concern is with physical-biological reality."

As for science, Michael Abraham holds that the empirical approach is irrelevant to the question of faith, because it is not possible to observe God through the senses, or through measuring instruments. According to him, every scientific explanation for the development of the world is given to us within the framework of a system of natural laws, and these are irrelevant to theological discussion.

According to these words, there are seemingly no major gaps in practice between Michael Abraham's perception of evolution and the atheistic perception, as formulated by Richard Dawkins (Michael Abraham's nemesis), in his book "Is There a God?" (p. 29):

"An atheist… is a person who believes that there is nothing beyond the natural, material world, no supernatural intelligence lurking in the shadows behind the observable universe, no soul that continues to exist after the death of the body, and no miracles – except in the sense of natural phenomena that we do not yet understand."

Of course, Rabbi Michael Avraham should not be suspected of atheism, and indeed, after his firm stance in favor of the separation of powers between science and theology, God was brought out of the closet under the cover of the physico-theological claim: "There is some entity that created or governs the world, and nothing more."

And what is the nature of this entity? The author provides a clarification that, except for the ending in parentheses, would have been approved by the late Professor Leibowitz, but it is doubtful whether it would be received with applause in the Haredi community and the national-religious camp, or even in the traditional community[m1]:

"She doesn't say what her name is, or that she is a single entity, and certainly not that she expects us to put on tefillin, honor parents, or even that she even revealed herself to anyone in this world (be it on Mount Sinai, or on the waters of the Sea of Galilee). She doesn't even say that this entity acts logically, or not. At most, there is a definition of her abilities here (she is supposed to be able to create a world and manage it)."

Michael Abraham confirms that "the physico-theological conclusion does not belong to science, if only because it does not give us predictions (predictions), and therefore cannot be scientifically confirmed or refuted," and therefore "it itself does not belong to the scientific sphere."

In his book, he explicitly states (p. 21) that "the claim that there is a God cannot be tested in the laboratory." Furthermore (p. 225), even if we succeed in bringing about the spontaneous creation of life in the laboratory, this will not undermine the physico-theological argument, "since it too will be interpreted as a product of intelligent design (i.e., as the handiwork of God)."

The same is true of the scientific view, which holds that evolution proceeds without purpose, by virtue of basic Darwinian principles (the inheritance of random mutations and natural selection). Michael Abraham writes in his book (p. 166): "The laws of nature are nothing more than God's way of directing this 'random' process, and ensuring that it reaches its destination."

Interesting, but scientific?

At this point I begin to lose touch with Dr. Avraham's rational thinking. If his entire intention in the 500 pages of his book and in his series of articles is to show that science has no power (or rather, it has no intention) to refute or confirm the existence of God and his involvement in the creation of the world and the development of life, then what he wanted has already been achieved in the paragraphs above.

Why continue to use so many words? After all, one could just as justifiably say that a green demon rules the world from its hiding place, or perhaps the demon is a bitter pole, which, according to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, operates mainly during the inter-Egyptian period, and "whoever sees it falls and dies." We will return to the bitter pole to distinguish it from Bertrand Russell's teapot[m2]. But first, let us ask where Michael Abraham's words are directed.

If the purpose of his book ("God Plays Dice", p. 15) is to show "that faith is a possible intellectual and rational option, at least as much as atheism, and even more so" (in his other wording: "it is the more plausible rational interpretation of the facts known to us in the field of evolution and in general"), that is a completely different matter.

A faith-based and intellectual option, no doubt, but a scientific one[m3]? How do these positions reconcile with his claim that the existence of God cannot be tested in a laboratory, that empirical predictions that can be confirmed or refuted cannot be derived from belief in Him? How is it scientific? In what way is it more rational? In whose eyes is it "more reasonable to believe in God than to hold an atheistic position"? Does he not understand that the claim about intelligent design and a guiding hand in evolution is empty of content (scientific, one should add, and then everything is understandable), because it contains no information about the methods of operation of intelligent design and a guiding hand?

The question is, then, where exactly does Dr. Avraham stand? Does he believe that God's involvement in the universe begins and ends with the establishment of the laws of nature in the beginning of time, and since then has allowed the world to proceed according to the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and Darwinian evolution, or does Rabbi Avraham believe in God's ongoing involvement, at any given moment in time, as implied by his understanding of the random factor in evolution: "The laws of nature are nothing more than God's way of directing this 'random' process, and ensuring that it reaches its destination[m4]."

"What do you believe in? In an old man who sits in the sky and pulls the strings of the world from there? Such a belief is devoid of religious value." Yeshayahu Leibowitz ("I wanted to ask you, Prof. Leibowitz")

In a rough generalization, one can list four concepts of divine involvement in the world: simplistic creationism, which believes in the creation of the world in six days – as written in the Book of Genesis; intelligent design, which believes in divine involvement in determining the laws of nature and beyond, as a means to achieve a predetermined purpose; physico-theological, which upgrades intelligent design through a philosophical-rational argument on the issue of infinite regression (how and when did the initial being come into being from nothing[m5]); a complete separation between religion and science, as expressed in the words of astronomer Prof. Zvi Maza: "I accept the authority of the sages to determine moral laws and criteria of preferences in social and moral questions, but for information about the world I turn to the telescope[m6]."

Seemingly four different concepts, although the first three seem to differ from each other in levels of sophistication, have the same goal: establishing belief in divine involvement in the world.

These three versions converge on the issue of biological complexity, which is seemingly not amenable to evolutionary reduction, and therefore cannot be explained except by the intervention of the divine hand. In Michael Avraham's words: "The world around us is complex, sophisticated, and coordinated, and nothing is complex without a component, hence our world has a component/creator[m7]."

One of the most prominent representatives of this view is Michael Behe, one of the leaders of the creationist camp, mentioned in Richard Dawkins' book ("Is There a God?", p. 192). Behe brings up the bacterium spp. as a clear example of a type of complexity that cannot be reduced to evolutionary reduction. It is indeed an interesting bacterium, which moves forward with the help of an unusual rotational movement of its tail, similar to the propeller of a motorboat.

"The key to proving irreducible complexity," Dawkins explains the position of intelligent design proponents, "lies in being able to show that no part of the organ can be useful on its own." In other words, "all the parts have to be in place before any benefit can arise from even one of them."

Dawkins offers plausible explanations for the evolution of such a tail, but they are rejected by Michael Abraham. "A bacterium without a flagellum would not survive," he claims in his book (p. 200), because it would not reach the food crumb[m8].

A somewhat puzzling claim, since there are countless bacteria that exist very successfully without tails. It is also reasonable to assume that a random mutation that grows an initial protrusion on the body of the bacterium could give it a slight locomotor advantage over bacteria lacking protrusions, especially when a second mutation occurs in one of the tens of millions of descendants of this bacterium that lengthens the original protrusion.

The Eye Controversy

A similar debate rages over the eye, a controversy that dates back to the 19th century, to the time of the Reverend William Paley. The central argument of creationists and intelligent design proponents is that an organ as complex as the eye could not have evolved through a long, slow process of accumulating tiny, random changes, for two main reasons: the location and function of each of these changes is contingent on knowledge of the final structure of the eye; each change in itself is of no benefit and is therefore doomed to extinction by natural selection. In other words: "Half an eye does not allow vision at all, and therefore it is unlikely that there was an intermediate stage that survived long enough."

This argument is fine for watches and telescopes, but it lacks any basis in the biological-evolutionary process. In a telescope, cloudiness of a lens or incorrect optical focus makes it a useless tool. This is not the case with the eye.

During the Cambrian period, an eye structure evolved that is still used by insects, crustaceans, and spiders today. It is an eye made up of hundreds of lenses, each of which focuses light onto a single sensor. This structure is good for seeing the whole picture, but has low resolution, and is therefore poor at identifying details.

Such a lens serves small creatures well, but is not suitable for large animals that need sharp, focused vision. Therefore, as larger creatures evolved, evolutionary pressure was created to change the structure of the eye, in which all light receptors share a light-focusing lens.

These mutations in the organs of vision, which spread over tens of millions of years, simultaneously created tens of thousands of different eye structures – according to environmental conditions and in accordance with the pressures of natural selection – which served their owners to one degree or another and therefore survived.

This process is completely different from the evolutionary process that Michael Avraham describes in his book (p. 170), which is based on "a consistent path of combinations, one after another, each of which is more successful than the previous one, without this process being interrupted in the middle by a 'dead' combination along the way, and this is when each such jump occurs with minimal probability."

Furthermore, evolution often takes shortcuts. For example, small mutations in the embryo, in the region of gene switching, can cause dramatic structural changes (such as the transition from an alligator's snout to a bird's beak), thus leading to major evolutionary change[m9].

Nature teaches otherwise.

Another interesting example of its ability to skip a long and complex process of mutation accumulation is provided by the Mexican cave fish Astyanax mexicanus. This fish, which lives in water bodies trapped in underground caves, is eyeless. More precisely, its eyes were covered with a skin membrane in a short evolutionary period of ten thousand years.

This fact was revealed by a clever demonstration by a closely related fish, which lives in surface waters and has normal eyes. It was found that increased activity of just two genes in cave fish embryos causes the death of the lens cells, and consequently their blindness.

A similar case occurred with the blind rat that lives in underground burrows. Its eyes are covered by an outer skin, but a pale glimmer of light shining through the membrane is enough to allow it to tell the time of day and even tell it when to mate.

These examples are enough to show that animals in nature, with the exception of humans, have no destiny of perfection and are not subject to any internal or external necessity to change. In the absence of environmental pressures, an animal may remain in its original state for millions of years.

An extreme example of this is a marine clam that has not undergone any phenotypic change in the last 400 million years. Its arch-conservative existence has no other "purpose" than to be a clam. If its descendants ever change, it will be because of a fortunate (or unfortunate) encounter between an extreme environmental shift in its niche and blind mutations.

Moreover, the origin of the evolutionary process does not necessarily indicate its end. A typical example of a functional reversal is the hemoglobin supply of a parasitic worm (Ascaris lumbriocoides) that lives in our intestines.

Studies have shown that the original function of this hemoglobin was to break down and remove nitrogen monoxide molecules from the bodies of bacteria and other anaerobic organisms. Following the transition from the ancient atmosphere, which contained 98 percent carbon dioxide and two percent nitrogen, to the present-day atmosphere (78 percent nitrogen, 0.03 percent carbon dioxide, and 21 percent oxygen), the "purpose" of hemoglobin was reversed. In its current role, it carries oxygen and nitrogen monoxide to the body's tissues.

In short, in contrast to the teleological world of the unknown mystical designer, the Darwinian world is full of clocks without clocks and inventions without inventors. Moreover, if God directs the random process of evolution to ensure that it reaches its destination, as Rabbi Michael Avraham says, then He is deeply involved not only in determining the fundamental laws and physical constants, but also in the smallest details of everyday biology, such as the growth of a bacterium's tail. After all, according to intelligent designists, without the guidance of intelligent design, its rotating mechanism could not have evolved[m10].

But, if God has a hand in everything, then he is also responsible for the development of the AIDS and smallpox viruses – including the malaria parasites – three diseases that have killed hundreds of millions of people throughout history. Which raises the question: for what purpose were these deadly organisms created? Darwinian evolution is exempt from providing an answer, because it has no purpose or intentions, but the question is stuck like a bone in the throat of believers in the teleological process of evolution[m11]. More on that in the next section.

 [m1]There is a mistake here. With the exception of the ultra-Orthodox camp, I don't think anyone argues with my arguments. I'm not saying that God didn't command us to wear tefillin, but that evolution cannot deal with the religious God (who is commanded to wear tefillin), but only with God on a philosophical level.

It is not a different God, but a different level of engagement with the same Being Himself.

 [m2] Indeed, my claim is that there is a factor that does this. His designation as 'God' or 'Bitter Pole' is not important to the philosophical argument. I will mention again, I am dealing with a philosophical God and not a religious one, and therefore the question of whether he should be identified with the God of the Bible, the Judeo-Christian God or some other, is not discussed here. So from my point of view, we can call him a bitter pole. As long as we agree that there is such a factor, that is what I wanted to argue.

 [m3]Where does it say 'scientific'? Even in the sentences Shinai himself quotes, the word 'scientific' does not appear. I repeat and emphasize throughout the book that belief in God is not a scientific conclusion, but a philosophical conclusion. But this is the philosophical conclusion that is required by the findings of science.

Yanai here (and not only here) mixes rationality with scientificity. I do argue that this is the logical conclusion, but I definitely insist that it is not a scientific conclusion (because it does not make predictions and cannot be empirically observed).

This is simply a lack of reading comprehension.

Zvi Yanai, in his method, identifies rational with scientific. Here he essentially eliminates the status of philosophical consideration. But as David Hume has already shown (with the kind help of Kant), observation alone does not give us even a single scientific law. A priori philosophical thinking is always involved here. Those who are obsessed with the religion of 'science' ignore the proofs of Kant and Hume for the simple reason that they are not familiar with them at all. After all, according to their method, there is no point in engaging in philosophy, only in observations.

If someone chooses a scientific rather than philosophical field of interest, that is of course completely legitimate. But anyone who wants to make philosophical claims needs to be familiar with the method and the relevant material.

Yanai makes a lot of scientific claims here, most of which I agree with. But his goal is philosophical, and here he falls into the same ignorance that Dawkins fell into, and probably for the same reason: a lack of philosophical skill and knowledge.

 [m4]In the book I repeatedly explain that this intention is through the establishment of natural laws and not every moment anew. I don't really understand what is unclear in my words?

 [m5]This is an incorrect description of the physico-theological view. It is close to the cosmological view, but the description is also inaccurate for that view.

 [m6]Me too.

 [m7]My book is dedicated to a double war: against the neo-Darwinian interpretation of evolution, which leads to atheism. And against the fundamentalist creationism of Michael Behe and his friends, who base belief in God on gaps in the theory.

Atheists insist on classifying every position into one of these two categories, and I refuse to play their game. My position is a third: If there are no gaps in evolution, then it constitutes wonderful evidence for the existence of God. Not on the scientific level, not to explain gaps. But on the metascientific level (who created the laws of science). The more perfect and harmonious the laws are and explain everything, the stronger the question of who created them. A world that is not explained by laws is a chaotic world, and therefore it is not necessary that it was created and managed by God. A world that is precisely governed by laws that explain everything is a world that was probably created by some intelligent being.

The limited understanding of atheists surprises me every time. They fight against demons that exist in their imagination, instead of against the claims that are made against them.

 [m8]In our meeting on the safari, I explained to Linnaeus that he was citing a creationist position that I reject (see previous comment). Here he puts it in my mouth again, and throughout the rest of the article he attacks it again and again. The limitations, the limitations…

 [m9]The claim here is wrong in two respects: 1. I claim that the evolutionary explanation can be correct, and precisely then it is necessary to assume a planning and deliberate agent. 2. This process is speculation that has not been proven in any way. This is a possibility raised by neo-Darwinists, and for them, raising a possibility is enough to rule out the creationist claim. Creationists are accused of not being empirically based, while neo-Darwinists can raise speculative hypotheses at will, without a shred of empirical evidence.

But as mentioned, this is a marginal comment, the main thing is that there is again a lack of reading comprehension.

 [m10]Another mistake. The laws of nature created the bacterium's tail, and God controlled it through the creation of the laws of nature. My claim is not that God acts in place of nature, but that He creates nature and its laws.

 [m11] Again, an irrelevant argument. If God is responsible for the creation of AIDS, the conclusion is that he should be hated, not worshipped. But the question of whether he exists or not is irrelevant. If conduct according to laws indicates his existence, the question of his moral behavior is irrelevant to the question of his existence. This is again a common mistake (or deception) of atheists.

—————————————————-

Does evolution have a direction?
Is there a God who is not perceived by the senses or by scientific methods and yet is real and exists? Possibly, but what does it mean for a God whose existence cannot be confirmed or disproved? Zvi Yanai answers Michael Avraham. Part Two

"Only an idolater has an opinion or knowledge about his God," Isaiah Leibowitz ("I wanted to ask you, Prof. Leibowitz")

The previous article ended with the question: If God's hand is in everything, why were deadly organisms created, such as the AIDS and smallpox viruses? Darwinian evolution is exempt from this question, because it has no purposes or intentions, but it does demand an answer from those who believe in the teleological process of evolution[m1].

This question brings us back to one of the central principles of evolution, the one and only one that gives it direction: natural selection. Mutations are indeed random, blind, and purposeless, and it is natural selection that decides their fate – which ones survive and which ones go extinct – according to their degree of adaptation to the environment and the quality of their contribution to the Darwinian fitness of the animal. This sets a direction for evolution.

However – and this is the major difference between Darwinian evolution and intelligent design – this directionality is determined retrospectively and not in advance. That is, against metaphysical teleology that strives for a defined and predetermined goal, Darwinian evolution presents teleonomy.

This term, coined by the late Prof. Schnauer Lipson, refers to the development of structures and mechanisms that are beneficial to the individual, resulting from natural selection rather than from the foresight of a higher power. Lipson compared the distinction between teleonomy and teleology to the difference between astronomy and astrology. Science, says Lipson, does not ask for what, but for what and how.

Teapot in space
This distinction is expressed in the comparison between Russell's teapot and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's bitter demon. Russell used the parable of the teapot to illustrate the folly of the religious demand that skeptics provide evidence for the non-existence of God and not vice versa.

This is similar, says Russell, to the claim that there is a porcelain teapot floating between Earth and Mars. Since the teapot is too small to be seen in the most powerful telescopes, the claim about the teapot is irrefutable and therefore cannot be doubted.

Such a claim, says Russell, would rightly be regarded as nonsense. But if this jug "were to be found in ancient books, taught as a sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children in school," my skepticism would be considered abnormal behavior and I would be referred for psychiatric treatment.

So much for Russell. It seems that the parable does not entirely coincide with the parable, i.e. God. The fact that Russell's teapot cannot be detected by modern telescopes does not make its existence irrefutable in the future, since a denser network of space telescopes, or innovative radar devices, may one day confirm or deny the presence of the teapot in the space between Earth and Mars. Things have happened before.

For more than two thousand years, students have been taught about the existence of a mysterious material medium that pervades the vastness of the universe: the aether (the breath of the gods). Aristotle had already used this unknown element to rule out the possibility of a vacuum in space, but when Michelson and Morley's experiment in the late 19th century showed that the aether had no effect, this imaginary element vanished from the world in a whisper.

Not so with God. He too cannot be discovered by the senses or measuring instruments, but unlike the teapot, no future technology will be able to confirm or disprove his existence. He is like the bitter demon Qutb.

The claim for the existence of a God incomprehensible to the senses and scientific methods, says Russell, is not even worthy of a skeptical-agnostic approach. Instead, he proposes an unequivocal atheistic position. If it were not for Russell, I would say of his position: The words of the living God[m2].

This brings us to the three basic premises of Michael Abraham's physico-theological argument:

A) The world is complex.

b) No factor known to him could create such a world.

C) A complex world did not create itself.

Well, the first assumption is universally agreed upon, the world is indeed complex. The second assumption lacks the words "known to me at present," which are key words in science.[m3] Newton was similarly puzzled by the unknown force of gravity:

"It is inconceivable that gross and inert matter should act upon and influence other matter without the mediation of something else, which is not matter – without mutual contact… The possibility that gravity is an innate, internal, and essential thing to matter, so that one body can act at a distance upon another through empty space, without the mediation of something else, by which the force and action are transmitted from one to the other, is to me such an absurdity that I do not believe that a person with reasonable thinking in philosophical matters could fail to accept it."

Therefore, Newton, who was a religious man, did not seek the answer in science. He preferred to attribute the origin of gravity and its mysterious action from afar to God.

In the late 1920s, physics faced a serious crisis. The energy generated by radioactive decay in the beta process, a process in which a neutron in the atomic nucleus turns into a proton (by emitting an electron and a neutrino), was less than predicted.

The shock was so great that Niels Bohr made an astonishing proposal: to exempt this specific case from the laws of conservation of energy and momentum. Wolfgang Pauli rejected the proposal, but also refrained from calling on God to save physics[m4].

To restore the energy balance to normal, he conceived in his fertile imagination a new particle (the neutrino), devoid of mass and electric charge – and therefore undetectable by instruments. In a letter to one of his friends, he wrote: “I have done a terrible thing. I have invented a particle that cannot be detected.” 26 years later, physicists Raines and Cowan identified traces of the elusive particle in a nuclear reactor in South Carolina.

"Faith is a voluntary value decision and is not a conclusion that is required from what a person knows – or thinks he knows – about natural or historical reality." Yeshayahu Leibowitz ("I Wanted to Ask You, Prof. Leibowitz")

The history of science is littered with phenomena that had no explanation at the time. Even today, physicists are faced with two mysteries: "dark matter" and "dark energy." Together, they account for 96% of the mass of the universe.

What makes the mystery of dark energy even more difficult is that, according to theoretical calculations, its strength should be 10 to the 120th power of the energy required for the observed expansion of the universe. It is not without reason that this huge gap has been called “the most serious contradiction in the history of physics.” Some doubt the existence of dark energy (and dark matter), but no physicist proposes to resolve the contradiction by means of God.[m5]

Jaundice-curing pigeons
The third assumption, that a complex and seemingly designed world "is unlikely to have been created by itself," leads Michael Avraham to the conclusion that "there must be someone who created it," and he suggests: "Let us call him 'God.'" And why is that? Because "no force or factor among those known to me can cause these phenomena."

As if this puzzling reasoning were not enough, in the face of countless currently unexplained phenomena, Michael Avraham comes out against those people who "are unwilling to accept metaphysical explanations in the form of faith in God, and they prefer to say that they do not understand." As for Dido, such an approach is irrational. To illustrate his words, he cites an example from life:

In the yeshiva he studied, there was a young man who fell ill with jaundice. After about six months of hospitalization for a short time, they brought him a 'sorcerer' who placed pigeons on his umbilical cord. They died immediately, "and behold, it was a miracle, after a few days he returned to the yeshiva healthy." When Michael told his parents about this, "they ridiculed the mysticism of yeshiva students, and strongly advised me not to abandon rationality. Indeed, to this day, their recommendation is a candle to my feet, except in this case they were wrong."

Wrong? Michael Avraham explains: "A rational person is supposed to accept claims that have a reasonable factual basis, even if he doesn't understand them theoretically. If I'm convinced that reasonable people who aren't liars have seen the phenomenon with their own eyes, I guess I should accept their claim. Then I'll look for an explanation for it (why the pigeons die, and how, if at all, they cure jaundice)."

Here I am completely confused. What does Michael Avraham mean by "reasonable factual basis" for healing by pigeons? And which claim should he accept – the fact of the yeshiva student's recovery or the esoteric claim that the pigeons cured him of jaundice?

Let me give you an example from my own experience: I saw with my own eyes a man on stage, causing a hypnotized person to float in the air. To convince the skeptical audience that this was not just a magic trick, the man showed that there was no hidden lever beneath the floating body, nor a hidden cable pulling it from the ceiling.

According to Michael Abraham's logic, I should accept the levitation as a simple fact, since I am a rational person and not a liar, and since the show had no less "reasonable factual basis" than the cure for jaundice by pigeons. Nevertheless, I refuse to accept the "fact" as a fact, just as I refuse to believe that Uri Geller is a mind reader. Why so much? Because the man's levitation in the air violates the laws of physics, and therefore has no scientific basis[m6].

Escher's famous painting of a waterfall flowing in a channel against gravity illustrates my point well. Despite the wonderful optical illusion that the bottom of the waterfall and the water flowing over it are on the same plane, it is clear to me that this pictorial reality is impossible in the real world. Therefore, although my eyes are convinced of what they see, I know that they have been deceived.

"The rationalist," Michael Avraham lashes out at those who deny "facts," is unwilling "to accept facts that do not fit his paradigm... This is metaphysics, he claims, or the stance on the unknown. He is unwilling to accept metaphysical explanations even where they are requested, even though he has no other explanation."

A nice formulation, although according to this line of thought we must accept the revival of dead spirits in spiritualist seances, believe in the existence of a dinosaur in the depths of Loch Ness, and embrace the "devil circles" that appeared out of nowhere in the cornfields of England[m7].

Michael Abraham in his book: "If Newton or Einstein were such rationalists, instead of being rational, we would never have discovered new scientific worlds. We would always demand explanations of the position on the familiar, and persist in the existing paradigm without being willing to deviate from it." The position on the unfamiliar, he reiterates, "is the lifeblood of science," because it is what allows science to advance "from the familiar to the unfamiliar."

Indeed, Einstein deviated from the paradigms of his time when he set an upper limit for the speed of light of 300 thousand kilometers per second[m8], thereby abolishing the absolute status of time and space. Or when he demonstrated that matter dictates to space how to curve, while space determines to matter how to move. But at no stage in the development of his revolutionary ideas did it occur to him to invoke metaphysical forces[m9] or to attribute the laws of his two theories of relativity to the divine hand, as Newton did time and again.

On the contrary, in his long struggle with the conclusions of quantum mechanics, he devised (1935) a brilliant thought experiment[m10] (in retrospect, failed), in order to show that the quantum entanglement between two particles far apart does not belong to physics, but to metaphysics.

In other words, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Lavoisier, Pasteur, Hubble, Wegener, and many others revolutionized thought because they based their new theories on the unknown, but their unknown was built on scientific foundations and not on metaphysical chicken legs. As evidence, the metaphysical passages in Kepler and Newton were eventually thrown into the dustbin of science[m11]. In the next section, we will deal with randomness and clocks.

 [m1]In the last comment to the previous article I explained why this argument is wrong. The question of whether there is a God should be examined through philosophical criteria (did a complex thing, or coordinated laws, come into being by chance?). The question of God's goodness, or his purposes, is a completely different question, and I don't think anyone has an answer to it. Furthermore, it is certainly possible that the existence of such viruses is a necessary consequence of the laws, meaning that life could not have arisen without it, and therefore there is no question here about the thesis of belief in God, or perhaps not even about his goodness. But as mentioned, in any case this is a different question that I am not dealing with, and mixing it with the physico-theological consideration is a common philosophical error.

 [m2]In my book I explained why it is atheism that posits unobservable teapots in huge numbers, and therefore these accusations are tantamount to the disqualification of Momo.

 [m3]In science, yes, but not in philosophy. There is no way that science can explain how the laws were created, since every scientific explanation assumes the laws and formulates its arguments within them. And as I explained in my articles on YNET at length, an explanation using scientific laws will not answer the philosophical difficulty.

But Yanai ignores these explanations, and I see no reason or justification for this disregard in my words.

 [m4]And well done. Throughout my book I repeat and explain that God should not be enlisted to solve scientific problems.

But Yanai continues to ignore what I write and put things in my mouth.

 [m5]And he does well who does not seek an explanation through God.

 [m6]If so, you are indeed an irrational person. Ignoring facts is not a proven path to progress. If you are convinced that there is a real phenomenon here, you must not reject it but must seek an explanation for it. What would we do if Newton had ignored gravity because he did not understand it, and had attributed it to a magician and turned a blind eye? This is a clear example of the irrationality of atheism. On the one hand, believers are required to provide evidence for their belief, and on the other hand, any evidence that is provided is rejected because they do not understand it, so it must be true.

So how can a believer provide evidence for his claims? Here atheism presents a position that cannot be refuted, that is, it does not meet the most basic scientific criteria. All this while accusing believers of making irrefutable claims (teapots).

 [m7] Indeed, if we are convinced that there is no deception here and that such phenomena do indeed exist (I personally am not convinced yet). Yannai assumes the desired, since he assumes that there are no such occurrences, then in any case anyone who observes them is a deceiver. Now go prove to Yannai that he is wrong and that there are such occurrences.

It is true that unfamiliar phenomena should be treated with caution and suspicion, both within and outside of science. This is the basis for the conservatism of science, which is very necessary for its progress. But the stagnation that Jannaeus suggests (not accepting anything that is not understood) would have sentenced science to death.

 [m8]This upper limit was known even before him. Einstein only relied on this assumption to develop the special theory of relativity.

 [m9]In my book I explain at length that the definition 'metaphysical' is nothing more than a derogatory term, but it is devoid of any real content.

In what sense are quantum phenomena not metaphysics? They are no less esoteric. The question is whether I accept them or not.

 [m10]It is worth noting: A thought experiment! I used to think that only observations constituted a proper scientific basis.

 [m11]If Yannai had bothered to read a little philosophical literature, he would have realized that science makes many assumptions that have no real basis. Such as the principle of causality, induction, and more.

Their unknown is not built on scientific foundations, as there is no generalization in the world that is based solely on observation.

The metaphysical ideas of various thinkers are not in the trash can of science, since they are not in the right room at all. Metaphysical ideas are the business of people who deal with metaphysics, and at most they can be thrown into the trash can there.

Scientists, and believers in the religion of 'science' who think that everything is science and who identify rationality with science, of course see science as the face of everything. Therefore, when they do not see God under a microscope, he does not exist, and it is irrational in their eyes to assume his existence.

—————————————————-

Millions of watches without a watchmaker
If God is the cause of all existence, what is the point of studying the Big Bang? Zvi Yanai believes that a person with his faith will live, but warns that beliefs can lead to mental fixations and freeze scientific thinking for long periods. Part Three

"A scientist does not believe, but knows or does not know." Yeshayahu Leibowitz ("I wanted to ask you, Professor Leibowitz")

We have already said that the Darwinian world is full of clocks without clocks and inventions without inventors. This is thanks to three components: random mutations, natural selection, and the time scale of billions of years of evolution.

The cardinal fact is that mutations do not occur sequentially and cumulatively in a particular individual and its descendants, but rather simultaneously, and over a vast and vast number of individuals, and therefore only a few individuals out of this large set of descendants of descendants randomly acquire the full sequence.

Michael Abraham repeatedly aims his arrows at the randomness factor in evolution, in order to establish the third assumption in the physico-theological argument, that complexity cannot arise on its own, that is, without prior planning.

 To this end, he relied on the well-known refinement of Fred Hoyle (the leading proponent of the "stable world" model, as an alternative to the "big bang" model), according to which the chance of life forming by chance is no greater than the chance that a hurricane passing over a junkyard will assemble a Boeing 747.

 Nice, but a far cry from the parable. First, a hurricane passes over a junkyard in the blink of an eye. Therefore, there is no chance that a Boeing 747 will be built from the scrap metal flying everywhere. Evolution, on the other hand, operates on time scales of hundreds of millions of years. It took evolution 2.4 billion years to develop the first living cell, another billion years to incorporate a nucleus into it, and another 700 million years to create the first multicellular organism.

Second, and most importantly, mutations are as random as flying debris in a storm, but natural selection gives them direction, by preserving those with beneficial mutations. This means that it is not God who "throws the evolutionary dice in a very specific direction," as Michael Abraham claims, but nature itself. And it does this not only in the biological world, through random mutations, but also in the material world, through the immanent randomness of quantum mechanics[m1].

To be or not to be – that is not the question
"The believing Jew does not believe in what he does not understand, but believes in his duty to worship God, that is, to keep the commandments." Yeshayahu Leibowitz ("I wanted to ask you, Prof. Leibowitz")

The effectiveness of natural selection's contribution to the creation of meaningful structures is reflected in an article about computer software published in the scientific journal Scientific American. The article examined how long it took the computer software to reach Hamlet's famous sentence TOBEORNOTTOBE (without spaces between the words) by blindly typing the letters of the alphabet, at a rate of one sentence of 13 letters per second.

The experiment was described by Michael Avraham in a mocking and inaccurate tone: the article was published in July 2002, not "in the 1980s" (Richard Hardison's computer program was written in the 1980s); the author of the article was John Rennie, the editor-in-chief of this respected journal for 15 years (until 2009) and not just any "anonymous person" whose "mentioning his name entails the prohibition of slander," in the words of Rabbi Avraham.

The sentence itself is 13 connected letters (TOBEORNOTTOBE) and not 14. According to Hardison's calculations, blind typing of the letters of the alphabet, at a rate of one sentence per second, would require 78,800 years (not 200,000) to reach the desired combination. In contrast, the computer program that generated random 13-letter sentences, while preserving the letters that appear in Hamlet's immortal sentence and their positions therein, finished reconstructing the entire sentence in less than 90 seconds.

This shortcut, which evokes Rabbi Michael's eloquence, is not a miracle, but a close textual analogy to the principles of natural selection. That is, the computer program preserves the letters that make up Hamlet's sentence during typing cycles, just as natural selection preserves those mutations in the sequence of letters in DNA that improve the functioning of the gene, or create different versions of it that change the content of the gene's code and therefore its function.

These letter changes, called SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms), are like changes in a single letter in a written word, completely changing its meaning, for example: sagin-sadin, rahifa-harifa, yafa-kafe. The letters SNPs play a central role in evolution.

Among other things, they are responsible for differences in height and skin color in humans and for a number of well-known diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, Huntington's, and muscular dystrophy, as well as for differences in susceptibility to certain diseases and our different responses to medications[m2].

The question that must be posed to intelligent design proponents is this: What benefit to understanding the world and life would arise from accepting God's alleged involvement in the world? Michael Abraham provides a convincing answer in his book (p. 128): "Posing God as a solution to scientific problems would paralyze science."

It is difficult to understand how this statement is consistent with his words (p. 204), that "the intelligent design thesis is intended to present a scientific alternative to neo-Darwinism," since if intelligent design is a scientific alternative, its adherents would be happy to present its methods of operation in the creation of the bacterial rotary motor[m3].

In the absence of a mechanism of action, the existence of the Supreme Planner was and is a matter of faith. Indeed, Michael Avraham explicitly states this (in the first of his series of articles), that in the Jewish world, scientific views and concepts are determined by scientific tools, but "there are several limitations on this freedom (the principles of faith also deal with several facts: that God created the world, that He gave the Torah, that He oversees what happens, and so on), but these are only a few very fundamental and general assertions, and certainly not specific details."

"A few limitations" may sound like something minor. However, in the world of science, "a few limitations" and "a few facts" are neither limitations nor facts, but - at most - beliefs, or at best assumptions and hypotheses that require predictions and confirmations, experiments and refutations[m4].

Michael Avraham explains himself further: "For me, faith is a claim of fact. When I say that I believe in God, I mean to claim a claim of fact: 'There is a God.' If this is indeed a true claim in my eyes, then of course the simple logical conclusion follows, that the claim 'There is no God' is false."

Michael Avraham's "There is a God" factual claim is reminiscent in its clear logic of the poet David Avidan's statement: "A painting is something that I determine to be a painting after I paint it as a painting or as not a painting, but present it as a painting. And now you will redefine what a painting is." In more philosophical language, perhaps less amusing, Descartes stated: God is a perfect being, therefore he also includes reality within himself. Hence: God created the world - meaning he exists.

In a similar arbitrary manner, Michael Abraham states (p. 95) that the meaning of the name God "within the framework of the cosmological view is: the entity that does not need a prior cause in order to exist, or the entity that is the cause of all existence and all that exists." And elsewhere (p. 219): "No one created God, for he has existed from all eternity. Therefore, there is no question of whence he was created, and who created him." With this arbitrary statement, Michael Abraham closes the door on the issue of infinite regression, through which he attacks the various cosmological theories.[m5]

Questions without answers
There are quite a few questions that science has no answer to. For example, where did the first Big Bang in the multiverse come from? Or where did the vacuum energy that caused the Big Bang come from? Or what was before the 10 to the minus 43rd power of the first second, which marks the beginning of time in our universe.

These questions should not bother Rabbi Michael Avraham, for according to his statement, God is an entity that does not need a prior cause and that He is the cause of all existence and all that exists. Of such people it is said that the righteous will live by their faith, but what about these arbitrary determinations and a factual and meaningful statement about the world[m6]?

Of course, no one denies Michael Abraham's right to make axiomatic assertions. After all, a person is entitled to believe what he wants to believe, even in a bitter polar bear, but this is not physics or biology but theology[m7].

Science does not, of course, rule out beliefs, although in many cases they lead to mental fixations that freeze scientific thinking for long periods, as happened with Aristotle's geocentric belief and the Platonic doctrine of the necessity of the circular motion of the planets.

A similar case from modern times happened to Einstein. His belief in the static model of the world, even though his equations indicated a dynamic universe, led him to add a mathematical element to his equations (the cosmological constant), which was supposed to represent negative energy that neutralizes the expansion of the universe. Einstein acted in this way like any believer – secular or religious – who adheres to his faith. However, at this point the parallel between secular scientific faith and religious faith ends.

In 1932, following his meeting with Edwin Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory, Einstein became convinced of the dynamism of the universe. He regretfully admitted that introducing the cosmological constant into his equations was the biggest mistake of his life.

He did not imagine that in the late 1990s he would be accused of a double error: the first when he incorporated the cosmological constant into his equations; the second when he removed it. For observations of distant supernovae indicated that the universe was expanding at a great acceleration, in the spirit of the cosmological constant that Einstein had conceived eighty years earlier.

Could similar or different evidence undermine Michael Abraham's belief in the existence of a Creator? I doubt it, since he explicitly stated in his book that even the spontaneous formation of life in the laboratory would be interpreted as the work of God.[m8]

This is undoubtedly a perfect defense technique for believers in the involvement of higher powers in the past, present, and future. Because, as Dawkins says (p. 196), “If you don’t understand how something works, you say God made it.” The divine hand has thus become the default whenever and wherever science has no proven explanation.[m9]

 [m1]There are several errors here:

Nature is the laws of nature. My question is who created them? This is similar to stating that the factory runs on its own because there are laws that describe how it operates. The question is who wrote the laws and makes sure that they are always applied. The randomness of evolution (or natural selection) operates within a rigid system of laws of physics, and whoever created these laws determined the results of the evolutionary process.
An example is the throwing of a die. The result is seemingly random, but it is clearly dictated by the laws of mechanics that completely govern this process. There is nothing random about it.
2. Quantum randomness is apparently not related to evolutionary processes at all, since there is no quantum randomness in the macroscopic world.

3. The time scale is irrelevant. I'm asking what the chances are of a plane repeatedly flying over a junkyard, assembling a Boeing from it. For the sake of discussion, let's talk about passes lasting 13.5 billion years.

4. Quantum theory is not just randomness either. There are very clear laws within which it occurs. Science is not willing to accept randomness at face value, but rather within a conceptual framework of natural laws that dictate and control it.

 [m2]That's what I said: What the software shows is the 'brilliant' conclusion that when there are laws that govern natural selection and dictate its direction, it does indeed create wonderful creatures. The question is who determined these laws? Who decided on the laws of physics within which natural selection occurs that direct this 'random' process directly to the sentence 'to be or not to be'.

This silly example is used by atheists over and over again to demonstrate their position, and they fail to realize that it demonstrates exactly the creationist position: a process that is truly random, without laws directing it, gets nowhere.

 [m3]Yannay repeatedly repeats his fundamental problem in understanding my book: I present the intelligent design thesis but do not support it. Over and over again he quotes this position from my descriptions and then asks why I am not consistent with it. The answer is simple: because I disagree with it.

Posing God as a solution to scientific problems does indeed paralyze science. But I do not pose him as a solution to scientific problems, but rather the opposite: as a philosophical explanation for why scientific theories do work.

It's a bit difficult to repeat the same thing over and over again, and feel like there's a wall in front of you that doesn't understand what you're saying.

 [m4]Another mistake, and one he repeats over and over again: The scientific method is not the result of observations alone. Science is embedded with many assumptions, if you will: beliefs, that cannot be justified (induction and causality are just two of them).

And again to prevent mistakes. I accept these scientific assumptions, except that I am concerned that they are also based on faith. Without faith, it is impossible to justify science.

 [m5]I would love to see some alternative answer. You know, what: just an option for an answer without any proof.

One of the accepted ways to provide proof in logic is proof by negation: if you have a question and there is only one correct answer to it, then the reasonable assumption is that this is the correct answer, until another is discovered. And certainly if there is no apparent chance that one will be discovered.

According to Zvi Yanai's logic, I can say that adopting quantum theory is good, since it is possible that a classical answer will be discovered for all quantum phenomena.

What's wrong with this claim? That as long as there is no other answer, the more reasonable assumption is that this is probably the answer.

Therefore, I am still waiting for another proposal to stop the infinite regression.

 [m6]In the next article I will probably also be accused of murdering Arlozorov. I stated explicitly that scientific research is the way to clarify scientific reality, and I added that God is a non-scientific explanation for the very correctness of science, and therefore does not prevent continued research and the exposure of more and more steps in the chain.

None of this prevents Linnaeus from making it difficult for me: Why is science inferior, since God answers everything.

This is a serious reading comprehension disability, and I don't really understand it.

 [m7]Exactly. Finally, one sentence that faithfully represents my position. Oops, I missed it again: he intends to say that this is his position, thereby negating my position…???

 [m8]In contrast, Jannaeus, who assumes that such creation is not the work of God and therefore makes the assumption of his existence unnecessary, is probably claiming something that can be refuted. How? I would love to hear what scientific finding would unravel his fervent belief in atheism.

 [m9]It became like this with Yanai, not with me.

—————————————————-

The chance that there is some entity that created the world and determined the natural laws that govern it is smaller than the chance that a passing hurricane will be able to assemble a Boeing 747.
"The Torah did not come to give man knowledge about nature or man, but to demand from him to worship God." Yeshayahu Leibowitz ("I wanted to ask you, Professor Leibowitz")

The previous part of the article concluded with the assumption that there is no evidence, present or future, that can undermine Michael Abraham's belief in the existence of a Creator. This is a perfect defense technique, because it makes divine intervention the default option whenever and wherever science has no proven explanation.[m1]

If this is the case, where does the secular person stand on the issue of God's existence? Dawkins (p. 78) lists seven milestones for the probability of his existence, starting with full theism (Carl Jung: "I don't believe, I know") and ending with the avowed atheist: I know there is no God, with the same conviction that Jung knows that he exists.

I recommended to the secular person to adopt the sixth milestone on the Dawkins scale: "It is highly unlikely that there is a God, and I live my life assuming that he does not exist."

As a level six atheist on the Dawkins scale, I would like to hope that science would render the existence of God irrelevant, as it did with the ether, but reality has proven that there is no necessary connection between facts and beliefs.

Who believes?
A little consolation can be drawn from the scientific community. According to a 1995 Gallup poll of the American public (the poll is cited in Avraham's book), only 51% of the scientific community believe in creation and 55% believe in evolution without God. 55% is not a number to be proud of, even when compared to the corresponding number among the general public (10%), unless one takes into account that biologists do not constitute a majority in the scientific community.

Michael Abraham disputes Dawkins' claim, and in fact, against the anthropic principle: "If the laws of nature are so suitable for the formation of life, then this indicates that there is a deliberate and planning hand that created them for this purpose" (p. 157).

The laws of nature are indeed remarkably suited to the formation of life, and not only that. An impressive array of physical quantities precisely match the conditions necessary for the emergence of life on Earth.

For example, if the weak nuclear force were slightly weaker, the nuclear combustion processes in the Sun would be accelerated, and therefore it would be prevented from providing the Earth with the four billion years it needed to develop intelligent life; if it were slightly stronger, explosive stars (supernovae) would not be formed, which produce the heavy chemical elements of life.

The same is true for the other three forces. For example, the extreme weakness of gravity relative to the other forces allowed the Sun to accumulate a large enough mass of atoms to create the gravitational pressure necessary to ignite the nuclear fire, whose thermal radiation sustains life on Earth.

Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin calculated and found that the chance of arbitrarily reaching the existing values of the physical constants is one in 10 to the power of 229. This chance is so slim, so tiny, and so negligible that its realization raises the question that stands at the entrance to the anthropic principle, as formulated by Brandon Carter and Robert Dickey: How did it happen that the laws and physical constants that shape the universe are tuned with amazing precision to the demands of life?

The two men's esoteric conclusion, that the universe had to be constructed from the beginning in such a way – that at some point in its life the development of conscious observers would be possible – led to the splitting of the anthropic principle into two.

According to the strong anthropic principle, our universe was chosen from all other possible universes because only in it could there be life that could observe and understand it. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, called the strong anthropic principle eggnog.

Indeed, there is no binding connection between the laws of nature and our existence and the strong anthropic principle. The universe was "forced" to wait a long time for our appearance because ten billion years is approximately the time required for the formation of a second generation of stars. For the elements necessary for the creation of life are only created at the end of the first generation of stars, after they produce chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in their internal combustion processes and explosions.

What would have happened if?
The weak anthropic principle is more palatable: the universe must account for the fact of our existence, otherwise we wouldn't be here.

For us to be here, a number of conditions must be met. For example, the location of the solar system in a habitable zone in the Milky Way galaxy, 25,000 light-years from its core. Planets outside this friendly zone are in constant danger from supernova explosions and comet collisions.

And that's just the beginning: if Earth's orbit around the sun were one percent larger, we would be as frozen as Mars; if its orbit were five percent smaller, we would be as scorched as Venus; if the sun were thirty times more massive, it would not exist for more than ten million years, and life could not have evolved on Earth.

If our atmosphere were composed of 25 percent oxygen (instead of 21 percent), a single spark would be enough to set us all ablaze; if oxygen levels dropped below 15 percent, animals would suffocate and forests would decay under a thick mat of dead grass and leaves.

If so, what is the chance that all these prerequisites will be fulfilled by chance? Doesn't this indicate, as Michael Avraham puts it, "a deliberate and planning hand that created them for this purpose." Absolutely not.

Like winning the lottery
The amazing fit between so many physical and biological parameters as a condition for the formation of life on Earth would tend to zero if we were required at the moment of the "Big Bang" to predict how many galaxies would form, how many planets and comets there would be in each galaxy, and where and when life would appear on one (or more) of the billions and billions of planets.

But this impossible chance becomes trivial in retrospect. Such is the case with the Israel Lottery, where there is a winner every week, even though the chance of predicting the winner's name tends to be almost zero. And so it is with Darwinian evolution.

If we rewound the tape of evolution 600 million years ago, no intelligent creature would have been able to predict that all vertebrates in nature would evolve from the ancient Pikaia worm – including sharks, crocodiles, birds, tigers, elephants, monkeys and, of course, humans.

It is estimated that there are 4 to the 23rd power of planets in the observable universe, and if we assume that only one percent of them have planets, and only one percent of them can develop life, there is a theoretical possibility of the existence of the seeds of life on 400 billion billion planets[m2].

Statistically, it is not impossible that out of this astronomical number, at least one planet would have all the prerequisites for the emergence of life. In other words, our presence here is the result, not the cause, of these conditions. On all those planets where the necessary conditions were not met, life did not develop and intelligent beings capable of raising such questions did not arise.

"God is not a force but God, and the believer recognizes as the highest value in his life the work that he does to serve God." Isaiah Leibowitz ("I wanted to ask you, Prof. Leibowitz")

These statistical calculations also apply to Lee Smolin's assessment mentioned above: If the chance of arbitrarily arriving at the existing values of the physical constants in our world is one in 10 to the power of 229, how did this tiny chance come true? Here too, the answer lies in statistics.

According to the string theory model, which adopted the early calculations of physicist Andre Linde, there are 10 to the power of 500 parallel universes to ours (according to another calculation: 10 to the power of 1010,000,000). This is a truly astronomical number, inconceivable due to its size[m3].

For illustration only, the Sahara Desert, the largest of the world's sand deserts, contains only 10 to the 25th power of sand grains. String theory can therefore provide a statistical answer to Lee Smolin's puzzle, just as 400 billion-billion planets provide a possible answer to the question of the amazing coherence of the laws of nature for the emergence of life on Earth[m4].

It is true that the universes that populate the mega-universe will always be outside our observations, and therefore will remain a hypothesis, at least until an alternative theory is found – if at all. Indeed, if at all[m5] .

We must accept the idea that there may be things we will never be able to know. Xenophanes said it more than 2,500 years ago: There will never be a man who will know the true nature of things. Even if he were to touch the exact truth by chance, he would not know that he had touched it[m6].

More than one location?
When Richard Feynman was asked if he was looking for the ultimate laws of physics, he replied: I am looking to know more about the world. If I find the laws that explain everything – well and good. That would be nice. And if it turns out to be like an onion with a million layers, and we get tired and exhausted from looking at them, so be it. I am not afraid of what I do not know[m7].

Michael Abraham downplays the possibility of a multiverse ("the illusory thesis"), even though string theory rests on a solid mathematical foundation, consistent with the laws of physics.[m8] But if the hypothesis of the existence of 10 to the power of 500 universes parallel to ours seems illusory, how much more so is the likelihood of the existence of an eternal, omniscient, and omnipotent being, who is the cause of all existence and all that exists, present everywhere and nowhere, who enacted the laws of nature and to this day manages the ongoing affairs of the world - including all its flora and fauna.

An incomparably unknown entity, infinitely more mysterious than the parallel worlds, devoid of theoretical and empirical status, which, in a fraction of 10 to the minus 43rd power of the first second of the universe's formation, separated the force of gravity from the other three forces, and immediately thereafter activated the time clock[m9].

Then, in an incomprehensible fraction of time, between 10 to the minus 35th power and 10 to the minus 33rd power of that second, it launched the tiny universe into an accelerated journey of expansion, which inflated its dimensions 10 to the 50th power. But, as one with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, who does not shy away from small things, that same entity whose existence cannot be doubted took care, 13.7 billion years later, to also build the rotary engine of the bacterium.

Michael Avraham admits in his notes that his goal is "to convince the reader that it is more likely to believe in God than to hold an atheistic position." That is, "that there is some entity that created the world and established the natural laws that govern it." After reading his book and a series of his articles, I became convinced that the probability of the existence of such an entity is smaller than the chance of a hurricane passing over a junkyard assembling a Boeing 747.[m10]

 [m1]I will only mention my comment here: What is the experiment that will succeed in disproving Jannai's belief in atheism? I solemnly promise that against any experiment he proposes, I will propose an experiment that will disprove my belief.

[In parentheses, indeed, there is no experiment that will disprove my faith, and to the same extent there is no experiment that will disprove Jannaeus' faith. The reason is very simple: both atheism and religious faith are not scientific claims, and therefore they cannot be refuted. Jannaeus, due to a lack of skill in philosophy, identifies rationality with science, as I have already shown]

 [m2]This is a common disregard for the numbers. The chance of life forming randomly is such that the total number of stars is negligible in comparison. A rough calculation of this kind (suggested by de Rob) is in my book.

 [m3]Models are great. The question is what is the empirical basis for these numbers. There is none, of course.

 [m4] Indeed, exactly the same thing. Just as that one doesn't provide an answer, this one doesn't either.

 [m5]Welcome to Russell's magical world, where celestial teapots swirl around us and we have no way of knowing about them.

This, of course, does not stop anyone from accusing believers of making unempirically based hypotheses about teapots.

 [m6]Is Jannaeus using a hypothesis here that we can never know? That is, one that is not accessible to observation. I thought only believers did such things.

 [m7]Neither do I. What Shinai fears is precisely the knowledge. It seems that he recoils from any conclusions, and in fact insists on not knowing.

 [m8] A solid mathematical foundation, consistency with the laws of physics. I'm looking for the word 'observation', and for some reason I can't find it. Since when do you base a theory on a mathematical foundation? If I write a theory of God with a solid mathematical foundation, will Yannai accept it? Or will he want observations. It is consistent with the laws of physics, just like countless other theories, no less delusional. Consistency is not proof of anything.

 [m9]The small difference is that for such an entity there is no reason we could observe it. But universes that are created are supposed to be observable, and for some reason none of them have been observed so far.

 [m10]Only one word in this paragraph is incorrect: "after." The persuasion was not after the reading but long before it. It was probably intended to hinder your understanding of what I wrote.

———————————————-

End of the matter:

The bottom line is that the entire debate is irrelevant. Even if Jannai were right about everything (and he really isn't), the question of how the laws of nature that allow for all these calculations and probabilities were created remains unanswered. Even if we find a theory that explains the formation of multiple universes, the question remains: who created this theory itself? Infinite regression is always with us, and the only way to stop it is to assume the existence of some different initial factor. Of course, there is also the possibility of denying this, and staying alive.

Furthermore, universes that are constantly being created also require a cause. The fact that multitudes of universes were created is not an explanation, since it itself needs an explanation or a cause. Who created all these universes? Yanai doesn't know, and he's not afraid of not knowing either. Neither am I. But I don't understand what his series of articles achieves if his entire purpose is to say that what he doesn't know doesn't scare him?!

Since all of Yanai's claims have been answered in my book and series of articles, I will stop addressing his words here, and leave it to the reader to judge who is right.