Responses to Zvi Yanai's Response to the Faith and Science Series on ynet

Zvi Yanai has an advantage that the other respondents to my claims do not. Whereas they write on the basis of reading (usually rather superficial and quite partial) of my series of articles on YNET Science, he read my book thoroughly (before a filmed debate we held at the Safari. See the 'Orot' channel on YNET).
And yet, I am surprised to discover that he did not grasp my main arguments, and he errs in interpreting them (and also in some of his replies), despite the explanations I provided him.

Below are Zvi Yanai's remarks, with my comments following each section (4 sections in all):

6 on the Dawkins scale
Belief in God is a legitimate intellectual choice, but it is no more scientific or rational for that. Proponents of intelligent design claim that the complexity found in nature is nothing but the work of God's hand, 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 action in the world, or how He determines man's fate"

Yeshayahu Leibowitz ("I Wanted to Ask You, Prof. Leibowitz")

One cannot expect from Michael Abraham polished pronouncements of the sort: "The Holy One, blessed be He, created everything ready-made; the trees were created as fully formed trees, all beasts, wild animals, and birds were created fully grown, whereas the mosquito was not born but was created from excrement" (former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Mordechai Eliyahu).

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

As for science, Michael Abraham maintains that the empirical approach is irrelevant to the question of faith, because there is no possibility of observing God through the senses or by means of measuring instruments. According to him, every scientific explanation of the development of the world is given to us within a system of natural laws, and these are irrelevant to theological discussion.

On the face of it, then, there are no large practical gaps between Michael Abraham's conception of evolution and the atheistic conception, in Richard Dawkins's formulation (Michael Abraham's nemesis), in his book "The God Delusion" (p. 29):

"An atheist… is a person who believes that there is nothing beyond the natural, material world, no supernatural intelligence lurking secretly 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".

Rabbi Michael Abraham is of course not to be suspected of atheism, and indeed, after his emphatic stand in favor of a separation of powers between science and theology, God is pulled out of the closet under cover of the physico-theological claim: "There is some entity that created or runs the world, and nothing more".

And what is the nature of this entity? The author provides a clarification that, aside from the concluding clause in parentheses, would likely have won the approval of the late Professor Leibowitz, but it is doubtful that it would be received with applause in the Haredi community, in the Religious Zionist camp, or even in the traditionalist community[m1] :

"It does not say what its name is, or that it is one entity, and certainly not that it expects us to put on tefillin (phylacteries), honor parents, or even that it revealed itself at all to anyone in this world (whether at Mount Sinai or on the waters of the Sea of Galilee). It does not even say that this entity acts rationally, or not. At most there is here a definition of its abilities (it is supposed to be able to create a world and run it)".

Michael Abraham confirms that "the physico-theological conclusion does not belong to science, if only because it gives us no predictions, and therefore cannot be scientifically confirmed or refuted", and therefore "it itself does not belong to the scientific sphere".

In his book he says explicitly (p. 21) that "the claim that God exists cannot be tested in the laboratory". Moreover (p. 225), even if we succeed in bringing about the spontaneous creation of life in the laboratory, this would not undermine the physico-theological argument, "since that too would be interpreted as a product of intelligent design (that is, as the work of God's hands)".

The same applies to the scientific view that evolution proceeds without guidance, by force of the basic Darwinian principles (the inheritance of random mutations and natural selection). Michael Abraham writes in his book (p. 166): "The laws of nature are merely God's way of directing this 'random' process, and of ensuring that it reaches its goal".

Interesting, but scientific?

At this point I begin to lose contact with the rationale of Dr. Abraham's thinking. If all he intended in the 500 pages of his book and in his series of articles was to show that science has no power (or better: no intention) to refute or confirm the existence of God and His involvement in the formation of the world and the development of life, then his objective was already achieved in the paragraphs above.

Why continue to lavish so many words on the matter? By the same token one could say that a green demon runs the world from some hiding place, or perhaps the demon Ketev Meriri, who, according to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, operates mainly during the Three Weeks, and "whoever sees him falls down and dies". We shall return to Ketev Meriri in order to consider the difference between him and Bertrand Russell's teapot[m2] . But first let us ask where Michael Abraham's remarks are actually aimed.

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 another formulation of his: "it is the more plausible rational interpretation of the facts known to us in the realm of evolution and in general"), that is a completely different matter.

An option of faith and intellect, no doubt, but scientific[m3] ? How do these positions fit with his claim that divine existence cannot be tested in the laboratory, that no empirically confirmable or refutable predictions can be derived from faith in it? 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 of intelligent design and a guiding hand in evolution is empty of content (scientific, one must add, and then everything becomes clear), because it contains no information about the modes of action of intelligent design and the guiding hand?

The question, then, is where exactly Dr. Abraham stands. Does he believe that God's involvement in the universe begins and ends with the establishment of the laws of nature in primordial times, and that since then He has left the world to proceed according to the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and Darwinian evolution? Or does Rabbi Abraham believe in God's continuing involvement at every given moment, as seems to follow from his conception of the role of randomness in evolution: "The laws of nature are merely God's way of directing this 'random' process, and ensuring that it reaches its goal[m4] ".

"What do you believe in? In an old man sitting in heaven and pulling the strings of the world from there? Such belief has no religious value". Yeshayahu Leibowitz ("I Wanted to Ask You, Prof. Leibowitz")

In rough outline one may count four conceptions 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 establishing the laws of nature and onward, as a means of attaining a predetermined purpose; the physico-theological approach, which upgrades intelligent design by means of a philosophical-rational argument on the issue of infinite regress (how and when the primordial something came into being from nothing[m5] ); and a full separation between religion and science, as expressed in the words of the astronomer Professor Zvi Mazeh: "I accept the authority of the Sages to set moral norms and criteria of preference in social and moral questions, but for information about the world I turn to the telescope[m6] ".

On the face of it these are four different conceptions, although it seems that the first three differ from one another only in sophistication, while sharing the same goal: grounding belief in divine involvement in the world.

These three versions converge on the issue of biological complexity that is allegedly not reducible by evolution and therefore can be explained only by intervention of the divine hand. In Michael Abraham's formulation: "The world around us is complex, sophisticated, and coordinated, and there is no complex thing without an assembler; from this it follows that our world has an assembler/creator[m7] ".

One of the prominent representatives of this conception is Michael Behe, one of the leaders of the creationist camp, mentioned in Richard Dawkins's book ("The God Delusion", p. 192). Behe brings to center stage the flagellated bacterium as a clear example of a kind of complexity that cannot be reduced evolutionarily. Indeed, this is an interesting bacterium, which moves forward by an unusual rotary movement of its tail, like the propeller of a motorboat.

"The key to proving irreducible complexity," Dawkins explains the position of intelligent design advocates, "lies in the possibility of showing that no part of the organ can be of any use on its own". In other words, "all the parts must be in place before even one of them can provide a benefit".

Dawkins offers plausible explanations for the development of such a tail-like appendage, but Michael Abraham rejects them. "A bacterium without a flagellum would not have survived," he argues in his book (p. 200), because it would not have reached the food particle[m8] .

A somewhat puzzling claim, since there are countless bacteria that survive very successfully without tail-like appendages. It is also reasonable to assume that a random mutation producing an initial protrusion on the bacterium's body could give it a slight locomotor advantage over bacteria without a protrusion, all the more so when a second mutation occurs in one of the tens of billions of descendants of that bacterium, lengthening the original protrusion.

The controversy over the eye

A similar debate surrounds the eye, a controversy that began in the nineteenth century, in the days of the clergyman William Paley. The central claim of the creationists and intelligent design advocates is that an organ as complex as the eye could not have developed through a long and slow process of accumulating tiny and random changes, for two main reasons: the location and function of each of those changes depends on knowledge of the eye's final structure; each change on its own brings no benefit and is therefore doomed to be eliminated by natural selection. In other words: "Half an eye does not enable vision at all, and therefore it is unlikely that there was an intermediate stage that survived long enough."

This claim works well enough for watches and telescopes, but it is entirely baseless with regard to the biological-evolutionary process. In a telescope, cloudiness in a lens or improper optical focus renders it useless. Not so with the eye.

In the Cambrian period an eye structure developed that still serves insects, crustaceans, and spiders to this day. This is an eye built from hundreds of lenses, each of which concentrates light onto a single sensor. Such a structure is good for seeing a complete image, but at low resolution and therefore poor at distinguishing details.

Such a lens serves small creatures well, but it is not suitable for larger animals that require focused and sharp vision. Accordingly, as larger creatures developed, an evolutionary pressure arose to change the structure of the eye, in which all the light receptors share a lens that focuses the light.

These mutations in visual organs, spread over tens of millions of years, created in parallel tens of thousands of different eye structures—in accordance with environmental conditions and with the pressures of natural selection—which served their possessors at one level or another and therefore survived.

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

Moreover, in many cases evolution uses shortcuts. For example, small mutations in the embryo, in the switching region of genes, can bring about dramatic structural changes (such as the transition from an alligator's snout to a bird's beak), thereby leading to a major evolutionary transformation[m9] .

Nature teaches otherwise

Another interesting example of its ability to skip over a long and complex process of accumulating mutations is provided by the Mexican cavefish Astyanax mexicanus. This fish, which lives in bodies of water trapped in underground caves, has no eyes. More precisely, its eyes became covered by a membrane of skin over the extraordinarily short evolutionary span of ten thousand years.

This became clear from a sighted form of a closely related fish, which lives in surface waters and has normal eyes. It was found that increased activity of only two genes in the embryos of cavefish causes the death of the lens cells, and as a result their blindness.

A similar case occurred with the blind mole rat that lives in underground burrows. Its eyes are covered with external skin, but a faint glimmer of light seeping through the membrane is enough to let it register the length of the day and even to signal when to mate.

These examples are enough to show that for animals in nature, aside from the human being, there is no destiny of perfecting themselves, and no internal or external necessity to change. In the absence of environmental pressures, an animal may preserve its original condition for millions of years.

An extreme example of this is a marine clam that has undergone no phenotypic change in the last 400 million years. Its ultra-conservative existence has no "purpose" other than to be a clam. If its descendants ever change, it will be because of a lucky (or unlucky) encounter between an extreme environmental change in its niche and blind mutations.

Moreover, the origin of an evolutionary process does not necessarily testify to its end. A characteristic example of a reversal of function is provided by the hemoglobin of a parasitic worm (Ascaris lumbricoides) that dwells in our intestines.

Studies have shown that the original role of this hemoglobin was the breakdown and removal of nitric oxide molecules from the bodies of bacteria and other anaerobic organisms. Following the transition from the primordial atmosphere, which contained 98 percent carbon dioxide and two percent nitrogen, to today's atmosphere (78 percent nitrogen, 0.03 percent carbon dioxide, and 21 percent oxygen), the hemoglobin's "destiny" was reversed. In its present function it carries oxygen and nitric oxide to the tissues of the body.

To sum up, contrary to the teleological world of the mysterious mystical designer, the Darwinian world is full to overflowing with watches without watchmakers and inventions without inventors. Moreover, if God directs the random process of evolution in order to ensure that it reaches its goal, in Rabbi Michael Abraham's words, then He is involved up to His ears not only in determining the fundamental laws and physical constants, but also in the tiniest details of everyday biological life, such as growing the bacterium's tail. For, according to the proponents of intelligent design, without the guidance of intelligent design its rotary mechanism could not have developed[m10] .

But if God's hand is in everything, then He is also responsible for the development of the AIDS virus and smallpox—including the parasites of swamp fever—three diseases that have killed hundreds of millions of human beings over the course of history. Which raises the question: for what purpose were these lethal organisms created? Darwinian evolution is exempt from providing an answer, because it has no purpose and no intentions, but the question sticks like a bone in the throat of believers in the teleological process of evolution[m11] . More on that in the next part.

 [m1]There is a mistake here. Apart from the Haredi camp, I do not think anyone disputes my claims. I am not saying that God did not command us to put on tefillin, but that evolution cannot deal with the religious God (who commands us to put on tefillin), only with God at the philosophical level.

This is not a different God, but a different level of dealing with that very same being.

 [m2]Indeed, my claim is that there is some factor that does this. Whether its name is 'God' or 'Ketev Meriri' is unimportant to the philosophical argument. Let me repeat: I am dealing with a philosophical God, not the religious one, and therefore the question whether one should identify it with the God of the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish God, the Christian God, or any other, is not discussed here. So as far as I am concerned one may call it Ketev Meriri. As long as we agree that there is such a factor, that is all I wanted to claim.

 [m3]Where does it say in my writings 'scientific'? Even in the sentences Yanai himself quotes, the word 'scientific' does not appear. I repeatedly emphasize throughout the book that belief in God is not a scientific conclusion, but a philosophical one. It is simply the philosophical conclusion called for by the findings of science.

Yanai is confusing here (and not only here) rationality with scientificity. I do indeed argue that this is the rational conclusion called for, but I absolutely insist that it is not a scientific conclusion (because it gives no predictions and is not susceptible to empirical observation).

This is simply a failure of reading comprehension.

Zvi Yanai, true to his method, identifies the rational with the scientific. He is in effect abolishing the status of philosophical consideration. But as David Hume already showed (with Kant's kindly assistance), observation alone does not yield even a single scientific law. A priori philosophical thinking is always involved here as well. Those afflicted with the religion of 'scientism' ignore the demonstrations of Kant and Hume for the simple reason that they do not know them at all. For according to their view 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 entirely legitimate. But anyone who wishes to make philosophical claims must know the method and the relevant material.

Yanai unfolds here scientific claims in abundance, with most or all of which I agree. But his aim is philosophical, and here he falls into the same pits into which Dawkins fell, apparently for the same reason: lack of philosophical skill and philosophical knowledge.

 [m4]In the book I repeatedly explain that this guidance is through the establishment of the laws of nature, not by doing it anew at every moment. I really do not understand what is unclear in my words.

 [m5]This is an incorrect description of the physico-theological proof. It is close to the cosmological proof, but even regarding that proof the description is not precise.

 [m6]So do I.

 [m7]My book is devoted to a double battle: against the neo-Darwinian interpretation of evolution, which leads to atheism; and against the fundamentalist creationism of Michael Behe and his colleagues, who build faith in God on gaps in the theory.

The atheists insist on classifying every position into one of these two categories, and I refuse to play their game. My position is a third one: if there are no gaps in evolution, then it constitutes marvelous evidence for the existence of God. Not on the scientific plane, not in order to explain gaps, but on the meta-scientific plane (who created the laws of science). The more perfect and harmonious the laws are and the more they explain everything, the stronger becomes the question of who created them. A world that is not explained by laws is a chaotic world, and therefore there is no necessity that it was created and run by God. A world that proceeds precisely according to laws that explain everything is a world that was probably created by some intelligent factor.

The limitation of the atheists' understanding surprises me anew every time. They fight against demons that exist in their imagination, instead of against the arguments actually raised before them.

 [m8]At our meeting at the Safari I explained to Yanai that he is quoting here a creationist position that I reject (see the previous note). Here he returns and puts it in my mouth, and throughout the rest of the article he goes on attacking it. Limitation, limitation…

 [m9]The claim here is mistaken in two respects: 1. I argue that the evolutionary explanation may be correct, and precisely then there is a need to posit a planning and guiding factor. 2. This process is speculation that has not been proved in any way. It is a possibility raised by the neo-Darwinians, and from their standpoint merely raising a possibility is enough to negate the creationist claim. The creationists are accused of lacking an empirical basis, whereas the neo-Darwinians can raise speculative hypotheses as they please, without a trace of empirical evidence.

But as stated, this is a marginal note; the main point is that here again there is a failure of reading comprehension.

 [m10]Again, a mistake. The laws of nature created the bacterium's tail, and God controlled this through creating the laws of nature. My claim is not that God acts instead of nature, but that He brings about nature and its laws.

 [m11]Again, a claim beside the point. If God is responsible for the emergence of AIDS, the conclusion is that one should hate Him and not worship Him. But the question whether He exists or not is unrelated to that. If law-governed conduct indicates His existence, the question of His moral conduct is irrelevant to the question of His existence. This is again a common mistake (or misdirection) on the part of atheists.

—————————————————-

Does evolution have a direction?
Is there a God who is not apprehended by the senses or by scientific methods and yet is fully and truly real? Possibly—but what is the meaning of a God whose existence can neither be confirmed nor refuted? Zvi Yanai responds to Michael Abraham. Part Two

"Only an idolater has an opinion or knowledge about his God", Yeshayahu Leibowitz ("I Wanted to Ask You, Prof. Leibowitz")

The previous article ended with the question: if God's hand is in everything whatsoever, for what purpose were lethal organisms created, such as the AIDS virus and smallpox? Darwinian evolution is exempt from this question, because it has no purposes or intentions, but it does require an answer from believers in the teleological process of evolution[m1] .

This question returns us 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 determines their fate—who to survival and who to extinction—according to their degree of adaptation to the environment and the quality of their contribution to the Darwinian fitness of the organism. In this way evolution is given a direction.

However—and here lies the great difference between Darwinian evolution and intelligent design—this directionality is determined after the fact and not in advance. That is, as against metaphysical teleology striving toward a defined and predetermined goal, Darwinian evolution presents teleonomy.

This term, coined by the late Professor Shneor Lipson, denotes the development of structures and mechanisms that are useful to the individual and that arise from natural selection rather than from the foresight of some 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 purpose, but because of what and how.

A teapot in space
This distinction finds expression in the comparison between Russell's teapot and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's demon Ketev Meriri. Russell used the teapot parable to illustrate the absurdity of the religious demand that skeptics provide proof for God's non-existence rather than the other way around.

It is like the claim, says Russell, that somewhere between Earth and Mars there floats a china teapot. Since the teapot is too small to be seen even by the most powerful telescopes, the claim about the teapot cannot be refuted and therefore cannot be doubted.

Such a claim, says Russell, would rightly be treated as nonsense. But if that teapot "were supported in ancient books, taught as a sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school", then my skepticism would be seen as abnormal behavior and I would be referred for psychiatric treatment.

So much for Russell. It seems that the parable does not entirely correspond to the thing signified, namely God. The fact that Russell's teapot cannot be discovered by today's telescopes does not make its existence incapable of refutation in the future, since a denser network of space telescopes, or innovative radar devices, may someday confirm or deny the presence of the teapot in the space between Earth and Mars. Stranger things have happened.

For more than two thousand years students learned of the existence of a mysterious material medium saturating the expanses of the universe: the ether (the breath of the gods). Aristotle already used this hidden element to deny the possibility of a vacuum in space, but when the Michelson-Morley experiment at the end of the nineteenth century showed that the ether had no effect whatsoever, that imaginary element vanished from the world with the faintest whisper.

Not so with God. He too cannot be detected by the senses or by measuring instruments, but unlike the teapot no future technology will be able to confirm or refute His existence. His case is that of the demon Ketev Meriri.

The claim of the existence of a God who cannot be grasped by the senses or by scientific methods, says Russell, is not even worthy of agnostic-skeptical consideration. In its place he proposes an unequivocal atheistic stance. Had it not been Russell, I would say of his position: these are 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) None of the factors known to him can create such a world.

C) A complex world does not create itself.

Well then, the first premise is agreed on by everyone: the world really is complex. In the second premise the words "known to me for the time being" are missing, and these are key words in science[m3] . Newton wondered in a similar way in the face of the force of gravitational attraction, unknown to him:

"It is inconceivable that brute and inanimate matter should act upon other matter and affect it without the mediation of something else which is not matter—without mutual contact… The possibility that gravity is innate, internal, and essential to matter, such that one body can act at a distance upon another body through empty space, without the mediation of anything else by which the force and action pass from one to the other, is in my eyes so great an absurdity that I do not believe any man with a competent faculty of thinking in philosophical matters could fall into it."

Since this was so, Newton, who was a religious man, did not seek the answer in science. He preferred to attribute the source of attraction and its mysterious action at a distance to God.

At the end of the 1920s physics fell into a severe crisis. The energy created by radioactive decay in beta decay, a process in which the neutron in the atom's nucleus turns into a proton (through the emission of an electron and a neutrino), was smaller than predicted.

The shock was so great that Niels Bohr raised an astonishing proposal: to exempt this specific case from obedience to the laws of conservation of energy and momentum. Wolfgang Pauli rejected the proposal, but he too refrained from summoning God to rescue physics[m4] .

To restore the energy balance he conceived in his fertile imagination a new particle (the neutrino), without mass or electric charge—and therefore beyond the grasp of 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". Twenty-six years later the physicists Reines 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 compelled by 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 crisscrossed with phenomena that had no explanation in their time. Even today physicists stand before two mysteries: "dark matter" and "dark energy". Together they make up 96% of the mass of the universe.

What aggravates the riddle of dark energy is that according to the theoretical calculation its power ought to be greater by a factor of 10 to the 120th power than the energy required for the observed expansion of the universe. Not for nothing has this enormous gap earned the title "the most severe contradiction in the history of physics". There are those who doubt the existence of dark energy (and dark matter as well), but no one among physicists proposes resolving the contradiction by means of God[m5] .

Pigeons that cure jaundice
The third premise, that a complex and apparently designed world is one that "is unlikely to have created itself," brings Michael Abraham to the conclusion that "there must be someone who created it," and he proposes: "Let us call him 'God'." And why is that? Because "no power or factor among those known to me can bring about these phenomena".

As if this puzzling reasoning were not enough, in the face of the countless phenomena that at their time remained unexplained, Michael Abraham goes on the attack against those people who "are not prepared to accept metaphysical explanations of the form of belief in God, and prefer to say that they do not understand". In his view, such an approach is not rational. To illustrate his words he brings an example from life:

In the yeshiva where he studied there was a young man who fell ill with jaundice. After about half a year of intermittent hospitalization, they brought him a 'sorcerer' who placed pigeons on his navel. They died immediately, "and lo and behold, after a few days he returned to the yeshiva healthy". When Michael told his parents about it, "they mocked the mysticism of yeshiva boys, and strongly recommended that I not abandon rationality. Indeed, to this day that recommendation of theirs is a guiding light for me, except that in this case they were mistaken".

Mistaken? Michael Abraham explains: "A rational person is supposed to accept claims that have a reasonable factual basis, even if he does not understand them theoretically. If I am convinced that sensible people who are not liars saw the phenomenon with their own eyes, I ought to accept their claim. Afterwards I will look for an explanation (why the pigeons die, and how, if at all, they cure jaundice)".

Here I come away completely confused. What does Michael Abraham mean by a "reasonable factual basis"—healing by pigeons? And which claim is he obliged to accept: the fact of the yeshiva student's recovery, or the esoteric claim that the pigeons cured him of jaundice?

I shall bring an example of my own: 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 a mere magician's trick, the man showed that there was no hidden lever under the floating body and no concealed cable pulling it from the ceiling.

According to Michael Abraham's logic I ought to accept the levitation literally, since I am a sensible person and not a liar, and since the performance had a "reasonable factual basis" no less than the curing of jaundice by pigeons. Nevertheless I refuse to accept the "fact" as a fact, just as I refuse to believe Uri Geller that he reads minds. Why is this so? Because the man's levitation in the air contradicts the laws of physics, and therefore has no scientific basis[m6] .

Escher's famous drawing, showing a waterfall whose waters flow through a channel against gravity, nicely illustrates my intention. Despite the wonderful optical illusion, according to which the bottom of the waterfall and the water flowing to its top lie 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 by what they see, I know that they have been deceived.

"The rationalist," Michael Abraham hurls at those who deny the "facts," is unwilling "to accept facts that do not fit his paradigm… This is metaphysics, he claims, or positing the unknown. He is not prepared to accept metaphysical explanations even where they are called for, although he has no other explanation."

A fine formulation, although according to this line of thought we ought to accept the reviving of the spirits of the dead in spiritualist séances, believe in the existence of a dinosaur in the depths of Loch Ness, and embrace the "devil's circles," which appeared from nowhere in England's grain fields[m7] .

Michael Abraham persists: "If Newton or Einstein had been such rationalists, instead of being rational, we would never have discovered new scientific worlds. We would always have demanded explanations in terms of reduction to the known, and would have persisted in the existing paradigm without willingness to depart from it." Positing the unknown, he repeatedly emphasizes, "is the lifeblood of science", because that is what enables science to advance "from the known to the unknown".

Indeed, Einstein departed from the paradigms of his time when he assigned to the speed of light an upper limit of 300,000 kilometers per second[m8] , thereby abolishing the absolute status of time and space. Or when he proved that matter tells space how to curve, while space tells matter how to move. But at no stage in developing his revolutionary ideas did it occur to him to invoke metaphysical forces[m9]  or to hang the laws of his two theories of relativity on the divine hand, as Newton did time and again.

On the contrary, in his prolonged struggle against the conclusions of quantum mechanics he devised (1935) a brilliant thought experiment[m10]  (retrospectively, a failed one), in order to show that quantum entanglement between two distant particles belongs not to physics but to metaphysics.

In other words, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Lavoisier, Pasteur, Hubble, Wegener, and many others wrought revolutions in thought because they grounded their new theories on the unknown, but their unknown was built on scientific foundations and not on the flimsy legs of metaphysics. As evidence, the metaphysical passages in Kepler and Newton were eventually thrown into the dustbin of science[m11] . In the next part we shall discuss randomness and watches.

 [m1]In the last note to the previous article I explained why this argument is mistaken. The question whether there is a God ought to be examined through philosophical criteria (does a complex thing, or coordinated laws, arise by chance?). The question of God's goodness, or His purposes, is an entirely different question, and I do not think anyone has an answer to it. Moreover, it is certainly possible that the existence of such viruses is a necessary result of the laws, that is, that the formation of life cannot occur without this, and therefore there is no difficulty here for the thesis of faith in God, and perhaps not even for His goodness. But as stated, in any case this is a different question with which I am not dealing, and confusing it with the physico-theological consideration is a common philosophical mistake.

 [m2]In my book I explained why atheism is precisely what posits teapots that cannot be observed in vast numbers, and therefore these accusations are really a case of projection.

 [m3]Indeed in science, but not in philosophy. There is no chance that science can explain how the laws came into being, for every scientific explanation presupposes the laws and formulates its arguments within them. And as I explained at length in my YNET articles, an explanation through scientific laws will not answer the philosophical difficulty.

But Yanai ignores these explanations, and I see in his remarks no reason or justification for that disregard.

 [m4]And wisely so. Throughout my book I repeatedly explain that God is not to be recruited to solve scientific problems.

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

 [m5]And it is a good thing that he does not seek an explanation by means of God.

 [m6]If so, then you are indeed an irrational person. Ignoring facts is not a tried-and-tested way to make progress. If you have become convinced that a real phenomenon is involved here, you must not dismiss it, but rather seek an explanation for it. What would we do if Newton had ignored gravitation because he did not understand it, and had attributed it to a magician and trickster? This is a classic example of the irrationality of atheism. On the one hand, atheists demand that believers bring evidence for their faith, and on the other hand every piece of evidence that is brought is rejected because they do not understand it, so presumably it is not correct.

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

 [m7]Indeed, if we were convinced that there is no fraud here and that such phenomena really do occur (I personally have not been convinced of this yet). Yanai begs the question, since he assumes that such events do not occur, and therefore anyone who observes them is a fraud. Now go prove to Yanai that he is wrong and that such occurrences do exist.

It is true that one should treat unfamiliar phenomena with caution and suspicion, in science and outside it alike. This is the basis of science's conservatism, which is very necessary for its progress. But the paralysis that Yanai proposes (accepting nothing that is not understood) would have sentenced science to death.

 [m8]That upper limit was known even before him. Einstein merely relied on that assumption in order to develop special relativity.

 [m9]In my book I explain at length that the definition 'metaphysical' is nothing more than a pejorative label, 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 noticing: a thought experiment! I had innocently thought that only observations constitute a proper scientific basis.

 [m11]If Yanai had bothered to read a little philosophical literature, he would have seen that science assumes a great many premises that have no real grounding at all—such as the principle of causality, induction, and more.

Their unknown was not built on scientific foundations, since no generalization in the world is based on observation alone.

The metaphysical ideas of various thinkers are not in the dustbin of science, because they are not even in the right room. Metaphysical ideas are the concern of people who deal in metaphysics, and at most they can be thrown into the dustbin there.

Scientists, and believers in the religion of 'scientism' who think everything is science and identify rationality with science, naturally see science as the whole picture. Therefore, if they do not see God under a microscope, He does not exist, and in their eyes it is not rational to posit His existence.

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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 holds that every person may live by his faith, but warns that beliefs can lead to mental rigidity and freeze scientific thought for long periods. Part Three

"A scientist does not believe, but either knows or does not know". Yeshayahu Leibowitz ("I Wanted to Ask You, Prof. Leibowitz")

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

The cardinal fact is that mutations do not occur sequentially and cumulatively in a particular individual and in its descendants, but in parallel and across an enormous number of individuals. Therefore, only a few individuals out of this great totality of descendants of descendants randomly attain the full sequence.

Michael Abraham repeatedly directs his arrows at the factor of randomness in evolution, with the aim of grounding the third premise in the physico-theological argument, namely that complexity cannot come into being by itself, that is, without prior design.

 To that end he clings to Fred Hoyle's well-known quip (head of the supporters of the "steady state universe" model, as an alternative to the "Big Bang" model), according to which the probability of the accidental formation of life is no greater than the probability that a hurricane passing over a junkyard would assemble from it a Boeing 747.

 Charming, but light-years away from the point. First, a hurricane passes over the junkyard in the blink of an eye. Therefore there is no chance that a Boeing 747 will be built from the debris flying in all directions. Evolution, by contrast, operates on timescales of hundreds of millions of years. Evolution required 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 more importantly, mutations are indeed random like debris flung about in a storm, but natural selection gives them direction by preserving organisms with beneficial mutations. From this it follows that it is not God who "throws the evolutionary die 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 world of matter, 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 serve God—that is, to observe the commandments". Yeshayahu Leibowitz ("I Wanted to Ask You, Prof. Leibowitz")

The effectiveness of natural selection's contribution to the creation of meaningful structures finds expression in an article about a computer program that appeared in the scientific journal Scientific American. The article examined how long it would take the computer program, blindly typing the letters of the alphabet at the rate of one 13-letter sentence per second, to arrive at Hamlet's famous phrase TOBEORNOTTOBE (without spaces between the words).

Michael Abraham described the experiment in a mocking and inaccurate tone: the article was published in July 2002, not "in the 1980s" (it was Richard Hardison's computer program that was written in the 1980s); the author of the article was John Rennie, editor in chief of this distinguished journal for 15 years (until 2009), and not just some "anonymous fellow" whose "name must not be mentioned for fear of violating the prohibition of slander", in Rabbi Abraham's wording.

The phrase itself consists of 13 connected letters (TOBEORNOTTOBE), not 14. According to Hardison's calculations, blind typing of the letters of the alphabet at the rate of one sentence per second would require 78,800 years (and not 200,000) to arrive at the desired combination. By contrast, the computer program that produced random 13-letter strings while preserving the letters that appear in Hamlet's immortal sentence and their positions within it completed the reconstruction of the full sentence in less than 90 seconds.

This shortcut, which arouses Rabbi Michael's derision, is no miracle but rather a rough textual analogue to the operating principles of natural selection. That is, over the course of the typing cycles, the computer program preserves the letters that make up Hamlet's sentence, just as natural selection preserves those mutations in the sequence of letters in DNA that improve the gene's functioning, or create different versions of it that change the content of the gene's code and therefore its function as well.

These letter changes, known as SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism), are like changing one letter in a written word, thereby altering its meaning entirely—for example: cat-cap, float-bloat, fine-pine. SNPs play a central role in evolution.

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

The question that should be put to proponents of intelligent design is this: what benefit to our understanding of the world and of life will arise from accepting God's supposed involvement in the world? Michael Abraham supplies a conclusive answer in his book (p. 128): "Positing God as a solution to scientific problems would paralyze science".

It is hard to understand how this statement fits with his words (p. 204), that "the intelligent design thesis is meant to present a scientific alternative to neo-Darwinism", for if intelligent design is a scientific alternative, then let its proponents kindly present its modes of action in creating the bacterium's rotary engine[m3] .

In the absence of a mechanism of action, the existence of the supreme designer has always been and remains a matter of faith. And indeed, Michael Abraham says this explicitly (in the first of his series of articles), that in the Jewish world scientific views and conceptions are determined by scientific tools, but "there are a few limitations on that freedom (the principles of faith also concern several facts: that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world, that He gave the Torah, that He watches over what happens, and the like), but these are only a few very basic and general determinations, and certainly not this or that detail".

"A few limitations" may sound like something minor. Yet in the world of science, "a few limitations" and "a few facts" are not limitations or facts at all, but—at most—beliefs, or in the best case assumptions and hypotheses that require predictions and confirmations, experiments and refutations[m4] .

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

Michael Abraham's factual claim "There is a God" recalls in its lucid logic the statement of the poet David Avidan: "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 redefine what a painting is." In more philosophical language, though perhaps less amusing, Descartes held that God is a perfect being, and therefore includes within Himself reality as well. Hence: God created the world—which means that He exists.

In similarly arbitrary fashion, Michael Abraham determines (p. 95) that the meaning of the name God "within the framework of the cosmological proof is: the being that does not require a cause prior to it in order to exist, or the being that is the cause of all existence and of everything that exists". And elsewhere (p. 219): "No one created God, since He has existed forever. Therefore there is no question of where He came from, and who created Him". By this arbitrary determination Michael Abraham closes the case on the issue of infinite regress, by means of which he attacks the various cosmological theories[m5] .

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

These questions ought not to trouble Rabbi Michael Abraham, for according to his determination God is a being that does not require a prior cause and that is the cause of all existence and everything that exists. Of such things it may be said that the righteous live by their faith, but what do these arbitrary determinations have to do with a factual and meaningful statement about the world[m6] ?

Of course, no one denies Michael Abraham the right to make axiomatic determinations. After all, a person may believe whatever he wishes, even in the demon Ketev Meriri, but this is not physics or biology; it is theology[m7] .

Science does not of course invalidate beliefs, although in many cases they lead to rigidities of thought that freeze scientific thinking for long periods, as happened with Aristotle's geocentric belief and the Platonic example of the supposed necessity of the circular motion of the planets.

A similar case from modern times occurred with Einstein. His belief in a static model of the world, although his equations pointed to a dynamic universe, led him to add a mathematical term to his equations (the cosmological constant), which was supposed to represent negative energy neutralizing the expansion of the universe. In this Einstein behaved like every believer—secular no less than religious—who clings to his belief. But at this point the parallel between secular scientific belief and religious belief comes to an end.

In 1932, following his meeting with Edwin Hubble at the Mount Wilson observatory, Einstein was persuaded of the dynamism of the universe. He admitted sorrowfully that introducing the cosmological constant into his equations had been the greatest mistake of his life.

He did not imagine that at the end of the 1990s he would be accused of a double mistake: the first when he installed the cosmological constant in his equations; the second when he removed it. For observations of distant supernovas testified to the accelerated expansion of the universe, in the spirit of the cosmological constant Einstein had conceived eighty years earlier.

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

This is without question a perfect defense technique for believers in the involvement of higher powers in the past, present, and future. For, as Dawkins says (p. 196), "If you don't understand how something works, say that God did it". The divine hand has thus become the default option whenever and wherever science lacks a proven specific explanation[m9] .

 [m1]There are a number of errors here:

Nature is the laws of nature. My question is: who created them? This is similar to saying that the factory runs by itself because there are laws that describe the way it operates. The question is who wrote those laws and who ensures that they will be applied all the time. The randomness of evolution (or of natural selection) operates within a rigid system of physical laws, and whoever created those laws thereby determined the outcomes of the evolutionary process.
An analogy would be the tossing of a die. Apparently the result is random, but it is clear that it is dictated by the laws of mechanics that completely govern that process. There is nothing random about it.
2. Quantum randomness apparently has no connection at all to evolutionary processes, since in the macroscopic world there is no quantum randomness.

3. The timescale is irrelevant. I ask what the probability is that a plane will fly again and again over a junkyard and assemble from it a Boeing aircraft. For the sake of discussion, let us talk about flights continuing for 13.5 billion years.

4. Quantum theory too is not mere randomness. There are very clear laws there within which it occurs. Science is unwilling to accept randomness in and of itself, only randomness within a conceptual framework of natural laws that dictate it and govern it.

 [m2]Exactly as I said: what the program shows is the 'brilliant' conclusion that when there are laws that govern natural selection and give it direction, it indeed creates wondrous creatures. The question is: who set those laws? Who decided upon laws of physics within which there occurs a natural selection that directs this 'random' process straight toward the sentence 'to be or not to be'.

This foolish example is used by atheists over and over again in order to illustrate their position, and they do not understand that it illustrates precisely the creationist position: a process that is truly random and lacks laws directing it gets nowhere.

 [m3]Yanai keeps returning to his fundamental problem in understanding my book: I present the intelligent design thesis, but I do not support it. Again and again he quotes that position from my descriptions and then asks why I am not consistent with it. The answer is simple: because I disagree with it.

Positing God as a solution to scientific problems does indeed paralyze science. But I do not posit Him as a solution to scientific problems; on the contrary, as a philosophical explanation of why scientific theories in fact work.

It is a little hard to say the same thing over and over and feel that you are facing a wall that does not understand what you are saying.

 [m4]Again a mistake, and again one that recurs in his remarks time and again: the scientific method is not the product of observations alone. Science contains a great many basic assumptions—if you like: beliefs—that cannot be justified (induction and causality are only two of them).

And again, in order to prevent mistakes: I accept those scientific assumptions, but I am aware that they too are based on faith. Without faith there is no possibility of justifying science.

 [m5]I would be happy to see some alternative answer. You know what? Even just one possible answer without any proof.

One of the accepted ways of bringing 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. Certainly so if there is no visible prospect that such an answer will be discovered.

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

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

I am therefore still waiting for another proposal for stopping the infinite regress.

 [m6]In the next article I will probably be accused of Arlosoroff's murder as well. I said explicitly that scientific research is the way to clarify scientific reality, and I also said that God is an extra-scientific explanation for the very correctness of science, and therefore does not prevent the continuation of research and the uncovering of more and more stages in the chain.

None of this prevents Yanai from challenging me: why study science at all, after all God answers everything.

This is a severe defect in reading comprehension, and I do not really understand it.

 [m7]Exactly so. At last, one sentence that faithfully represents my position. Oops, I missed again: he means to say that this is his position, and by that to reject mine…???

 [m8]By contrast, Yanai, who assumes that such a formation is not the work of God's hands and therefore makes the assumption of His existence unnecessary, apparently is indeed making a claim that can be refuted. How? I would be glad to hear what scientific finding would refute his burning faith in atheism.

 [m9]It became that for Yanai, not for me.

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The chance that some factor created the world and established the laws of nature that govern it is smaller than the chance that a passing hurricane will succeed in assembling a Boeing 747
"The Torah did not come to impart to man knowledge of nature or of man, but to demand of him that he serve God". Yeshayahu Leibowitz ("I Wanted to Ask You, Prof. Leibowitz")

The previous part of the article ended with the assumption that there is no present or future evidence that could undermine Michael Abraham's faith in the existence of a Creator of the world. This is a perfect defense technique, because it turns divine involvement into the default option whenever and wherever science lacks a proven specific explanation[m1] .

If that is the state of affairs, where does the secular person stand in the question of God's existence? Dawkins (p. 78) lists seven milestones in the probability of His existence, beginning with complete theism (Carl Jung: "I do not believe, I know") and ending with the convinced atheist: I know there is no God, with the same degree of certainty with which Jung knows that He exists.

My recommendation to the secular person was to adopt the sixth milestone on Dawkins's scale: "It is very unlikely that there is a God, and I live my life on the assumption that He does not exist".

As an atheist of degree six on Dawkins's scale, I would like to hope that science will make divine existence irrelevant, as it did with the ether, but reality has proved that there is no necessary connection between facts and beliefs.

Who believes?
Some slight consolation may be drawn from the community of scientists. According to a Gallup survey conducted in 1995 among the American public (the survey is cited in Abraham's book), only 5% within the scientific community believe in creation and 55% believe in evolution without God. Fifty-five percent is not a number one can boast about, even if one compares it to the parallel 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's claim, and in effect the anthropic principle itself: "If the laws of nature are so well suited to the emergence of life, this indicates that there is a guiding and planning hand that created them for that purpose" (p. 157).

The laws of nature are indeed remarkably suited to the emergence of life, and not only they. An impressive ensemble of physical magnitudes corresponds with great precision to the conditions required for the appearance of life on Earth.

For example, if the weak nuclear force had been a little weaker, the processes of nuclear burning in the sun would have accelerated, and it would therefore have been prevented from providing the Earth with the allotment of four billion years required for the development of intelligent life; if it had been slightly stronger, explosive stars (supernovas), which produce the heavy chemical elements of life, would not have been formed.

The same is true of the other three forces. For example, the extreme weakness of gravity relative to the other forces enabled the sun to accumulate a sufficiently great mass of atoms to create the gravitational pressure required to ignite nuclear burning, whose warm radiation sustains life on Earth.

The theoretical physicist Lee Smolin calculated and found that the chance of arriving arbitrarily at the existing values of the physical constants is one in 10 to the 229th power. This chance is so faint, so minute, and so negligible that its realization raises the question that stands at the doorway of the anthropic principle, in the formulation of Brandon Carter and Robert Dicke: how did it happen that the laws and physical constants that shape the universe are tuned with marvelous precision to the requirements of life.

The esoteric conclusion of the two, that the universe had to be built from the outset in such a way that at some point in its life the development of conscious observers would become possible, led to the anthropic principle splitting into two.

According to the strong anthropic principle, our universe was chosen from among all the other possible universes, because only in it could there be life capable of observing it and understanding it. Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize laureate in physics, called the strong anthropic principle utter nonsense.

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

What would have happened if?
The weak anthropic principle is more acceptable to the ear: the universe must fit the fact of our existence, for otherwise we would not be here.

In order for us to be here, a considerable number of conditions must be met. For example, the location of the solar system in a life-friendly zone in the Milky Way galaxy, at a distance of 25,000 light-years from its center. Planets outside that friendly zone are under constant threat from supernova explosions and collisions with comets.

And this is only the beginning: if the Earth's orbit around the sun were larger by one percent, we would be frozen like Mars; if its orbit were smaller by five percent, we would be scorched like Venus; if the sun were thirty times more massive, it would not survive more than ten million years, and life could not have developed 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 on fire; if the oxygen level were to drop below 15 percent, animals would die of suffocation and forests would degenerate beneath a thick carpet of grasses and dead leaves.

So then, what is the likelihood that all these preconditions would be fulfilled by chance? Does this not indicate, as Michael Abraham says, a "guiding and planning hand that created them for that purpose"? Absolutely not.

Like winning the lottery
The astonishing fit between so many physical and biological parameters as a condition for the emergence of life on Earth would have approached zero if, at the moment of the Big Bang, we had been required to predict how many galaxies would form, how many stars and planets there would be in each galaxy, and where and when life would appear on one (or more) of the billions upon billions of planets.

But this impossible probability becomes a trivial matter if one looks at it after the fact. So it is in the national lottery, where every week there is a winner, although the likelihood of predicting the winner's name approaches zero. And so too in Darwinian evolution.

If we were to roll the film of evolution 600 million years backward, no intelligent creature would be able to predict that from the ancient Pikaia worm all the vertebrates in nature would develop—including sharks, crocodiles, birds, tigers, elephants, monkeys, and of course human beings.

It is estimated that there are 4 x 10 to the 23rd power stars in the observable universe, and if we assume that only one percent of them have planets, and that on only one percent of those life can develop, there remains a theoretical possibility of the existence of the beginnings of life on 400 billion-billion planets[m2] .

From a statistical point of view, it is not impossible that out of this astronomical number, all the preconditions for the appearance of life would be met on at least one planet. In other words, our presence here is the result, not the cause, of these conditions. On all those planets where the required conditions were not met, life did not develop and intelligent beings capable of raising questions of this kind did not come into existence.

"God is not a force but God, and the believing person recognizes as the supreme value in his life the service he renders to God" Yeshayahu Leibowitz ("I Wanted to Ask You, Prof. Leibowitz")

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

According to the model of string theory, which adopted the earlier calculations of the physicist Andrei Linde, there exist 10 to the 500th power universes parallel to ours (according to another calculation: 10 to the 1010,000,000). This is a truly astronomical number, inconceivable because of its magnitude[m3] .

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

True, the universes that populate the mega-universe will forever remain beyond our observations, and therefore will remain in the realm of hypothesis, at least until an alternative theory is found for them—if one is ever found. Indeed, if ever[m5] .

We must reconcile ourselves to the thought that there may be things we shall never be able to know. Xenophanes said this more than 2,500 years ago: there will never be a human being who knows the nature of things with certainty. Even if by chance he touched the exact truth, he would not know that he had touched it[m6] .

More than one universe?
When Richard Feynman was asked whether he was searching for the final laws of physics, he replied: I am trying to know more about the world. If I find the laws that explain everything—so much the better. That would be nice. And if it turns out to be like an onion with a million layers, and we grow tired and exhausted from looking at them, so be it. I am not afraid of not knowing[m7] .

Michael Abraham disparages the possibility of a multiverse ("a bizarre thesis"), even though string theory rests on a solid mathematical foundation that accords with the laws of physics[m8] . But if the hypothesis of the existence of 10 to the 500th power universes parallel to ours seems bizarre, then all the more so the plausibility of the existence of an eternal, all-knowing, omnipotent entity that is the cause of all existence and of everything that exists, present everywhere and nowhere, that inscribed the laws of nature and still manages the world's ongoing affairs to this day—all the living and growing things within it.

An entity more hidden than anything imaginable, immeasurably more so than the parallel worlds, lacking theoretical and empirical standing, which in the tiny fraction of 10 to the minus 43 of the first second of the universe's formation separated gravity from the other three forces, and immediately thereafter started the clock of time[m9] .

Then, in an inconceivably tiny fraction of time, between 10 to the minus 35 and 10 to the minus 33 of that same second, it sent the tiny universe on an accelerated journey of expansion that inflated its dimensions by a factor of 10 to the 50th power. But, with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and not disdaining small things, that same entity whose existence one must not doubt took care, 13.7 billion years later, to build also the rotary engine of the flagellated bacterium.

Michael Abraham admits in his writings that his aim is "to convince the reader that it is more reasonable to believe in God than to hold an atheistic position". That is, "that there is some factor that created the world and established the laws of nature that govern it." After reading his book and his series of articles, I became convinced that the probability of the existence of such a factor is smaller than the chance that a hurricane passing over a junkyard will assemble a Boeing 747[m10]

 [m1]Let me mention here only my comment: what experiment could succeed in refuting Yanai's faith in atheism? I solemnly promise that against any experiment he proposes, I will propose an experiment that would refute my faith.

[In parentheses, indeed there is no experiment that would undermine my faith, and by the same token there is no experiment that would undermine Yanai's faith. The reason is very simple: both atheism and religious faith are not scientific claims, and therefore they are not falsifiable. Yanai, because of his lack of philosophical skill, identifies rationality with scientificity, as I have already shown]

 [m2]This is a common evasion of the numbers. The probability of the random emergence of life is such that the total number of stars is negligible in comparison. A rough calculation of this kind (proposed by de Rub) appears in my book.

 [m3]Models are nice. The question is what empirical basis there is for those numbers. There is none, of course.

 [m4]Yes, exactly the same thing. Just as that one gives no answer, so too this one gives no answer.

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

This of course does not prevent anyone from accusing believers of making hypotheses about teapots that lack empirical basis.

 [m6]Is Yanai using here a hypothesis that we can never know? That is, one that is inaccessible to observation. I thought that only believers did such things.

 [m7]Neither am I. What Yanai is afraid of is, rather, knowledge. It seems that he shrinks from drawing any conclusions, and in effect insists on not knowing.

 [m8]A solid mathematical foundation, consistency with the laws of physics. I look for the word 'observation,' and for some reason I do not find it. Since when does one base a theory on a mathematical foundation? If I write a theory of God with a solid mathematical foundation, will Yanai accept it? Or will he want observations? It is consistent with the laws of physics, just like countless other theories, no less bizarre. Consistency proves nothing.

 [m9]The small difference is that with regard to such an entity there is no reason to think we could observe it. But universes that are formed ought to be observable, and for some reason not one of them has been observed thus far.

 [m10]Only one word in this paragraph is incorrect: "After". The persuasion did not come after the reading but long before it. That probably stood in your way in understanding what I wrote.

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Conclusion:

Bottom line: the entire debate throughout all these remarks is irrelevant. Even if Yanai were right about everything (and he certainly is not), the question of how laws of nature came into being that make all these calculations and probabilities possible still remains unanswered. Even if we find a theory that explains the formation of multitudes of universes, the question remains: who created that theory itself? Infinite regress accompanies us always, and the only way to stop it is to posit the existence of some different primary factor. One can of course also deny this and go on living.

Moreover, universes that are constantly being formed also require a cause. The fact that multitudes of universes were formed is not an explanation, since it itself requires an explanation or a cause. Who created all these universes? Yanai does not know, and he is also not afraid of not knowing. Nor am I. But I do not understand what his series of articles achieves if all his purpose is merely to say that what he does not know does not frighten him?!

Since all of Yanai's claims were answered in my book and in my series of articles, I stop here my response to his remarks and leave it to the reader to judge who is right.