On Double Causality – A Logical and Theological Perspective (Column 297)

Wow, what a knockout! Let him kiss his lips!

You're fast. Have you already read it all?

In light of what you wrote here, Rabbi, about whether God intervenes or not, I would be glad to know: how does the Rabbi define God?

Yes. I already broke my head over “that which is present” and “true and not certain” on causality. Simply wonderful!

By the way, it seems to me that you also devoted an article to this, back in the day. The name escapes me right now. Maybe it came as an appendix to your article on interpretations and parallel planes of explanation.

What’s wrong with the ontological definition? The most complete being there is (and He chooses not to intervene).

You wrote: "The whole of this deceptive thesis is meant to distance the testimony that there is no double causality, and to sweep the Holy One, blessed be He, deep under the rug so that we won’t see Him and the fact that He replaces the physics rather than acting alongside it." Indeed—and there is reason to distance the testimony, because the Holy One, blessed be He, handed His world over to the laws, and He conceals Himself when He intervenes in them. It’s like a good play. You can end it with the slash of a sword, with the help of a ‘deus ex machina’ mechanism [in the old Greek plays, the plot would get tangled up and at the end one of those elevators (machines) would descend, and the gods would emerge from it and set things right: kill the wicked and save the righteous], and you can run it elegantly—one thing leading to another, cause driving result—and in the end everything works out beautifully.

Beautiful and enlightening words.
I didn’t completely understand your rejection of the claim that both factors caused the apple to fall together (the physical and the theological).
Can one not argue that the physiological explanation assumes an explanation for every event, but not for the differences and changes between those events? That is, why in that case did the apple fall and in another not? Why did a strong person who was in an accident die, while a weak person who took several bullets in the chest remained alive?
Let me ask it this way: in your view, are there no gray areas in physiology? Not just that we haven’t found explanations for them, but that there really are no explanations?
That is exactly where we could say that God determines when each thing will happen and what will happen where. And this is not the claim of sporadic intervention; rather, this is an argument that this is truly how the world operates, with divine intervention integrated into physiological processes. That is how I understood Moshe Ratt’s view.

I don’t understand the connection. Is God defined, in your view, as one who intervenes? That’s a claim, not a definition.

In my view this is not an explanation. You assume that He intervenes even though in the world there is not the slightest hint of it. Now I wonder why we don’t see it, and you answer that He hides Himself. I ask why He would hide Himself, and you answer because He wants to hide Himself. Is that an explanation? It’s a defense of begging the question. Really Russell’s celestial teapot. I go to Russell and tell him there is a small teapot around the planet Jupiter. He asks why we don’t see it, and I answer that it is small. And then of course he asks: how do I know this information? I have no answer.
I remind you that information whose source is tradition is not meaningful to me, because those who held it also have no information that I don’t have—just like in the case of the teapot.
But all this takes us into realms that are not the subject of the post. I focused the discussion on the question of double causality, which Rabbi Ratt challenged, and you are taking us into the realm of sporadic intervention (the theological question).

You are mistaken. When the circumstances are the same, exactly the same thing happens. If exactly the same thing did not happen, that means the circumstances were not identical. If one person dies from the illness and another does not, that means the illness was not identical or their bodies were not identical (one was more immune than the other). That is exactly the claim about there being no gaps in physics.
And if Rabbi Ratt’s claim was this, then there is no logical question here at all. The claim is that theology is not an explanation, and physics is not an explanation either, but only the combination of them. And I explained there why that is patently implausible (because it comes out that sometimes the event happens without the physical circumstances).

I understand that your method now is to try to wear the readers down by writing long and tedious explanations that aren’t really connected to the subject, so that they get tired halfway through and assume you are right? I went through all this unnecessarily long verbiage, and I found in it no relevant refutation of my words.

The last lines made it clear that although I have repeated them many times, you did not understand them. You wrote: "Rabbi Ratt has repeated several times in the past that he opposes my claim that every divine intervention is a miracle (a deviation from the laws of nature)." The opposite is true—I have repeated several times that I agree with the claim that every divine intervention is a miracle, except that there is no difficulty in believing in “Your miracles that are with us every day” and that God indeed performs miracles every day. That is exactly what I wrote in this post: the system of nature is not closed and deterministic as you claim, but open to divine intervention. In this respect it is like a car, a gun, or any other machine, whose operation can be described in causal-mechanical terms, which does not contradict describing its operation in mental-teleological terms, because these complement each other. The person driving the car or using the gun intervenes in the system at a certain stage in the chain of causes and bends it to his will. The same is true regarding nature. The Holy One, blessed be He, can intervene in it at any stage of the chain of causes, perform a miracle, and bend it to His will. Therefore, as in the example of the gun that I brought, there is no contradiction between a natural cause and a theological cause.

Accordingly, your talk about how "the whole of this deceptive thesis is meant to distance the testimony that there is no double causality, and to sweep the Holy One, blessed be He, deep under the rug so that we won’t see Him and the fact that He replaces the physics rather than acting alongside it"—misses the point. Indeed, when the Holy One, blessed be He, causes the apple’s attachment to loosen, He intervenes in the regular laws of physics and performs a local miracle—just like a case where a person gives the apple a small knock and causes it to fall. Where exactly did I try to hide that? On the contrary, that is exactly what I came to say: just as a person can intervene in the system, so can the Holy One, blessed be He.

This is precisely the sporadic intervention that you yourself wrote there is no principled obstacle to accepting. Accordingly, the existence of this possibility shows that there is no logical difficulty in assuming that events have natural causes, alongside theological causes that preceded them along the chain of causes. The two do not have to exist in parallel in the same link in the chain. It is enough that they exist as separate links along it. And that is what I came to say in the post—which, if you notice, does not contain the words "double causality" at all, and not by accident.

Bottom line: I showed that there is no logical difficulty in claiming that the same event has both a physical cause and a theological cause (in different links), and accordingly there is no logical difficulty in accepting the existence of divine (sporadic) intervention in reality.

Let’s leave aside the question of wearing people down. Do you have a logical argument against what I am saying? Not about sporadic intervention, which you are again mixing up here with the claim of a combined cause (those are two completely different claims).
There is nothing in your words here that was not already answered in my remarks. I truly see no point in slogging through this again and again.

Fine, I’ll leave the logic to experts greater than I am, and wait for the day when my beloved celestial teapot finds its proper place in modern Hebrew literature. Perhaps in poetry. Who knows.

Another theological suggestion: indeed, Newton committed a sin, and Newton’s arriving there at that exact moment was timed to coincide with the strengthening of the force of gravity on the apple’s bond to the tree.

Also, there is the metaphysical point, namely: everything that is a necessary and sufficient condition is unique, that is because we have existing physiological rules. But if we change the laws, then both the necessary and the sufficient can change as well. Theology’s claim is that the laws exist with the regular rules only so long as the One who determines the rules (the metaphysical = God) still wants them, and therefore He controls them at every moment, and at every moment they are also subject to change!

(I haven’t finished reading yet… Hope you didn’t address this later on.)

Then finish.

My post was directed against your claim that it is logically impossible for the fall of an apple to have two causes, and that the physical cause excludes the divine cause. I showed that there is no logical difficulty in this possibility. That was my goal, and you have not refuted it in any way. What difference does it make to me whether the causes occurred in parallel or one after the other?

Rabbi Moshe, allow me to point out a fundamental point here that is bothering me, because I am really beginning to get angry.
All you are claiming, according to your clarification here, is that God does sometimes intervene and then the laws of nature are violated. That’s it, nothing more. For this you spun us around with all the talk about double causality and all the irrelevant examples of the firing squad and so on?
And you still claim that I am the one using the technique of exhausting the reader with lengthiness without saying anything new?
I have another novelty for you. When one explains, defines concepts, and is precise, that is not a tactic for exhausting the reader. It is the responsible way to present arguments. You might want to consider it yourself once in a while.
What I presented here is a well-ordered doctrine, built to perfection on the logical plane, showing all your sharp but glaringly imprecise statements to be empty vessels. And now you explain that I didn’t understand you and that what you really meant was sporadic intervention. And on that basis you explained that my words amount to simple logical mistakes that only people lacking philosophical education swallow.
Is there no limit to the dishonesty and demagoguery? I am astonished! Even despair and inability to answer substantively do not justify such a warped and dishonest way of responding. It is possible, and proper, simply to admit a mistake. That is all.

Is the lack of gaps in physics an established fact, or an accepted argument in science?
There are dozens of medical cases that have not been fully deciphered. Is your claim that in the end there must be a physiological explanation for every case? Where does that necessity come from?
(From reading what Ratt wrote below, I tend to think that this is actually what he is claiming…)

Let me get this straight: you are the one who builds piles upon piles of criticism about the concept of double causality, even though I did not mention it in my words at all; you are the one who attributes to me the exact opposite of what I have said many times—and I am the one who needs to admit my mistake?

Unlike your exhausting prolixity, I wrote my words briefly and clearly. From your words it emerged that there is no logical possibility for the same event to have both a physical cause and a theological cause. I showed simply how such a possibility very much does exist, through divine intervention at an early stage in the chain. It seems to me that this point in my words was clear. If somehow you failed to understand what I wrote, unlike the rest of the readers and commenters, and accordingly completely missed the target in your criticism—I do not see where there is any "dishonesty and demagoguery" on my part.

You call this sporadic intervention, and you argue that the burden of proof is on the one making the claim.
A few things: you still have not reached metaphysical inquiry; more accurately, you also will not be able to reach it, because the reason still remains missing—what causes the laws of physics to work? They need a starter.

This means that there is someone pulling the strings all the time. The burden of proof is on you: you need to prove that physics works without any intervention. I don’t think there is any way to do that, so long as you lack the reasons why physics works this way. And here the theological assumption comes in: what is hidden from you—the metaphysics—is the divine intervention!

And I still haven’t finished, but I want a substantive response to the arguments themselves, because I saw that others who did finish touched on points like these, and your answer was not substantive.

An easy proof that He intervenes in everything: in order to perform a miracle that is outside the regular laws of physics, in a way about which there is no dispute, like the splitting of the sea, He must constantly track what is happening. Without such tracking there is no place for intervention, for then He would not be aware of what is happening. And why do you assume that close tracking is not intervention? At any moment that He decides to intervene, He will intervene. Wouldn’t it be a shame for Him to miss places now and then where He would have liked to intervene, and too bad that He wasn’t tracking them, otherwise He would have intervened?!…

And simply put, divine tracking without missing anything is by actual intervention in every sinew and every atom here in the world.

Not an argument, and not a proof, but definitely an intuition that supports the above proof.
I have personally witnessed several times dreams that came true (not déjà vu). For example, I personally know someone close to me (a family relation) who dreamed in Elul several times that there would be something that would topple and disrupt the world. And that it would be during the month of Adar. He shared it with me and several other people already on the first of Elul!! Another dream was of a friend who knew of so-and-so’s engagement through a dream. I was a witness to this, even though he had no way at all to know about it.

"I understand that your method now is to try to wear the readers down by writing long and tedious explanations that aren’t really connected to the subject, so that they get tired halfway through and assume you are right? I went through all this unnecessarily long verbiage, and I found in it no relevant refutation of my words."

Is this how you address a rabbi who said something against your words? It is very disrespectful to belittle him like that.
Maybe change your approach and read it again.

Yosef.
I think what he means is that if you have not figured out the reason, that does not mean it does not exist—and especially since you don’t change a winning horse. Just as they usually found a reason for the result, so too when they have not found the reason, the assumption is that the effect still has one.

I don’t think there is anything belittling here, certainly not compared to Rabbi Michi’s usual style.

Moshe, I think the main source of the Rabbi’s anger at you is that it comes out from your words that there are times when He intervenes and times when He does not intervene—and that is what he disputes on the basis of his arguments. Is that indeed what you are claiming? Or is it only through the exceptions that things are revealed, though they are not really exceptions? I didn’t quite manage to understand. By the way, I’d be glad if you would go over my comments above—whether they are your arguments.
Thanks in advance.

Indeed there are times when God intervenes and times when He does not, whereas Rabbi Michi argues that God most likely never intervenes, perhaps only in rare cases. But that is not what he is angry about; rather, apparently it is that I did not clarify my words sufficiently to his liking.

Moshe, I think that if your claim is that God does not always intervene, then indeed his claims against you are justified, to the extent that I have grasped the end of your view and his.
In my opinion, if He intervenes then He intervenes always, and if not then He never intervenes. And Ramban already, in his famous comment on Parashat Bo, argued that the intervention is constant, only habit is what causes us not to notice it. I would be glad if you would look over my arguments brought above, where briefly and without exhausting the reader I tried, insofar as brevity can reach, to offer my wares.

From Wikipedia on double causality:

It seems that the solution to this contradiction is that in biblical narrative God directs events, but His involvement is expressed in the fact that He arranges the circumstances in which a person must choose his path. Divine intervention stops before the human beings make their decision. God leaves the person a space for free action, so that he may decide for himself which path to choose.

This conception is found in all the traditions in the Bible. The relation between the degree of divine involvement and the space of free action left to the human being varies from tradition to tradition and from event to event. In the story of God’s revelation to Moses at the bush (Ex. 3), God created the circumstances of the revelation, but Moses must consent to accept the mission being presented to him. It seems that God presses him to accept the mission because without his agreement Moses will not fulfill the role God designated for him.

This pattern of involvement is especially prominent in the wisdom tradition. God’s intervention in the Joseph story is hidden[10]. God creates the circumstances of the meeting between Joseph and his brothers at Dothan. Joseph could have returned home after not finding them. God arranges for him again circumstances in which he—not God—must decide whether to continue looking for them (Gen. 37:17). In the Book of Esther, which was also shaped according to the wisdom tradition[11], even God’s name is not mentioned, and the heroes of the scroll decide for themselves what course of action to take. Esther’s arrival at Ahasuerus’s palace and the discovery of the information about Haman’s plot are circumstances created by God, but Esther must decide for herself whether she will risk presenting herself before Ahasuerus without having been summoned, and there she must act wisely in order to succeed in her mission (Est. 4:16). She could have succumbed to her fears and avoided the risk.

In the Deuteronomistic tradition, God manages and directs events up to the stage where a person is given room to decide for himself how to proceed. In the story of Saul’s anointing as king, God apparently caused the donkeys of Kish, Saul’s father, to be lost so that Saul would come to Samuel, but the final decision whether to accept the kingship was in Saul’s hands, and he chose to accept it (1 Sam. 9–10:9)[12]. In other circumstances, in the story of the war with Amalek, Saul chose not to fulfill all of God’s instructions as conveyed by Samuel (ibid., 15:5–9). In the Book of Ruth it appears that the scope of action available to its heroes is greater than in other biblical stories. Elimelech chose to leave Bethlehem for Moab, and Naomi’s return was her free choice in light of the circumstances God created: "I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty" (Ruth 1:21). Almost all the events that occur in the story are the result of decisions by the heroes of the plot[13].

The phenomenon of divine intervention in the Bible sometimes takes unique forms. When a person does not know what to choose, he asks for a sign from God:[14] the Israelites, who need to believe Moses the messenger and his mission (Ex. 4:8–9); Abraham’s servant when he comes to Haran (Gen. 24:12–20); Gideon when he is called to save Israel (Judg. 6:17; ibid., 36–40). But then the person does not really decide the issue, since the sign received is a direct message from God; only a few merit the revelation of such a sign.

Another unique form of God’s intervention is revealed in a situation where the person is not behaving according to God’s will. Then God creates special circumstances that lead the person to the ‘desired’ behavior[15]. In these cases God applies an ‘educational’ process to bring the person to the ‘correct’ conclusions while leaving him freedom of decision. Thus God ‘educated’ Jonah and Balaam so that they would agree to accept the divine mission, and also Joseph, who was transformed from a man of egocentric character into one who, under God’s guidance, saved his family from famine.

With God’s help, 18 Iyar 5780

To Tam—Greetings,

Why do you assume the situation is an ‘either-or’: either God intervenes at every moment, or God does not intervene at all?

God planned His world to operate according to laws of nature, as Jeremiah says: “If not for My covenant day and night, I would not have established the laws of heaven and earth,” from which it follows that there are indeed ‘laws of heaven and earth.’ And they are divine law.

On the other hand, Jeremiah testifies: “Whose eyes are open upon all the ways of the children of men, to give every man according to his ways and according to the fruit of his deeds.” Just as there are laws of nature, so there are laws of recompense; there is recompense, for good and for bad, for all human deeds,

but one of the principles of the laws of recompense is that God is slow to anger, and therefore He often gives and gives a person a span of time to correct his ways and come to the good by his own choice.

An analogy: a father supervises his children at play. His eye must always be open so that, God forbid, no disaster occur if he turns his gaze away for a moment, but the father exercises educational judgment whether to remark and intervene at every moment, or to let the children try to cope with the problems on their own.

So too with God’s providence: the ‘monitoring’ is constant, and at every moment the educational judgment is exercised by Him—whether to remark and intervene at every moment or to wait.

Regards, Shatz

Regarding providence, see also Guide of the Perplexed III, chapters 17–19.

From what I managed to understand from the Rabbi, since there is no double causality, and we see and know how to measure that everything has a physical explanation, then divine intervention in nature is at best sporadic, in situations that we do not see (correct me if I’m wrong).

The Rabbi also comes to the conclusion that in the chain of the apple’s fall, God entered at one of the links and acted in its place. But then the Rabbi wrote: "I do not see what advantage there is in distancing our testimony to some hidden place somewhere at the beginning of the chain. Why not assume that this was done at the apple’s connection to the tree?"
Now, why can’t one say that indeed there is an advantage in moving it to some hidden place in the chain? Then one could say that there is a possibility that God intervenes throughout nature by intervening precisely at those points. Just as according to chaos theory even the simplest situations have infinitely many causes, which can be vanishingly small and not measurable at all, and it is precisely at those points that God intervenes.

So first of all, there is no logical necessity here.
But if Rabbi Michi also claims that there was once divine intervention in the universe, why is the burden of proof not on him? After all, there are thousands of unexplained cases, and even when there are explanations, sometimes they are weak ones.

Paragraph 3, line 2
… just as there are laws of nature, so there are…

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But one of the principles of the laws of recompense…

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… but the father exercises educational judgment…

Every person, by his choice, changes the system of electrical signals from the brain that activate the body’s actions.

The human capacity for choice is what necessitates the existence of divine providence over him (as explained in Guide of the Perplexed III:17, to which I referred).

And just as a person’s choice generally takes place on the limited plane of the ‘point of choice’ at which the person stands, and usually there are no drastic changes in a person’s choice,

so too the divine ‘point of intervention’ is on the limited plane close to nature, and there are no major changes relative to natural happenstance; a small change is enough to achieve the result—unless a person has done some great deed and has raised his ‘point of choice’ in a ‘leap’—then it is possible that God too will ‘raise’ for his sake the ‘point of intervention,’ and it will appear that there was a deviation from nature.

Regards, Shatz

Correction—I now see that these matters are being discussed between you and Rabbi Moshe at this very moment, so I’ll leave you to it…
Still, I’d be glad if you would answer this point, because I haven’t seen you write about it before.

Now I see that these matters are being discussed between you and Rabbi Moshe at this very moment, so I’ll leave you to it…

Rabbi Moshe, you have not answered here exactly on which point you disagree with Rabbi Michi’s words. Do you agree with the assumption that there is no gap in physiology, or not? Do you think that everything has a physical explanation? Because if the answer is no—just say so… and that is where your dispute will end. And if the answer is yes, what do you answer him? After all, he argues quite correctly that in order to assume there is divine intervention in what happens in the universe, one must find some kind of "gap" where the physiological conditions do not exist or are not sufficient to explain a certain scenario and case that occurred. He too agrees that in the end what stands behind everything is God. In order to assume divine intervention, one must find a case where the physiological laws are not enough; otherwise, how exactly does this cooperation work?

I agree with you regarding your claim about Rabbi Michi’s view of intervention in the past, that the burden of proof is on him to show that it has ended.
But the core of your argument concerns matters that can be attributed to not yet reaching an understanding of physics, and from this one cannot prove the existence of God.

Hello Rabbi Michi,
In your conception of providence, are you going with the most reasonable explanation, or did you try to reconcile it with the plain meaning of the verses and the words of the Sages, and even so you see no way out except your own conception?
That is to say: one could explain [by way of a kind of pilpul] that part of God’s hiddenness is that He intervenes many times in concealed ways, each time at a different place in the physical mechanism, and so forth.
This really interests me.

That is exactly what he is answering; this is his "proof" for the end of divine intervention in the world: since everything has a physical explanation and no place has been found where there is divine intervention. And to this I again argue that the burden of proof is on him. Because if the starting point is that there is a God and there was intervention in the past (and even today there is no denial of sporadic intervention),
then the burden of proof returns to him, to assume that for all the things for which we do not find an explanation, there really is an explanation and there is no dimension of intervention there. (And incidentally, it is only natural that divine intervention would be in these "gaps," in places where no natural explanation is found; that is not mere evasiveness but quite a well-grounded conjecture, assuming such intervention does indeed exist.)

It seems you simply agree on the fundamental point, and from there each one turns in a different direction.
You agree that in principle one cannot rule out the intervention of the Holy One, blessed be He.
Rabbi Moshe Ratt adopts this approach and goes several districts further with it.
Because Rabbi Rott holds a religious view according to which it is impossible to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, has no connection with man and no involvement in creation even today (and to this, as I understand it, all his blog posts are devoted), he is angry and outraged at the attempt to say that it is God who does not intervene in His world, because from his point of view this empties all religious content from our lives and leaves faith shallow. (This is not a psychological analysis; rather, from all the polemics between you and wandering through both your sites, that is the picture that emerges.)
Therefore any argument between you—whether it is a dispute about providence or a dispute about resurrection of the dead—will be dragged into the same abyss that is showing up here.

And this is quite a natural thing to happen when your approach is a faith based almost solely on reason, combined with a certain intuition, and one that does not even completely rule out the possibility that maybe you are wrong and the atheists are right in the end (certainty cannot be reached), whereas opposite it stands Rott’s approach, which includes absolute certainty in God’s existence and also reliance on all kinds of spiritualism—channeling, near-death experiences, and the like.

Perhaps the only one who can get something out of this discussion is Sh. Tz., who will come and explain to us what the root of the two approaches is and how to connect them.

I read everything!
And I still think you are doing terrible injustice by presenting data that are missing from the equation!!

True, a necessary and sufficient condition must be unique, but all this is only on condition that we have not introduced a new player into the equation. The theological claim is that the new player is actually an old player, who has been hiding all along, and you did not take him into account, and therefore you drew your conclusion on the basis of an equation with many missing elements.

And it is also true that A ↔ B, but if there is an unknown in the equation, then it may be that my conclusion is not correct, and therefore it is also possible that the result will be different. So this is not considered unique, because I simply have a mistake in my first assumption. (Here the unknown is God, or metaphysics, the name doesn’t matter.)
And accordingly it is indeed possible that there are two different necessary and sufficient conditions for the same event, because my initial assumption is mistaken! And this definitely proves that the cause is not a necessary and sufficient condition but only a sufficient condition.
Of course the proof is only retrospective, after you have seen that indeed your assumption that A ↔ B is mistaken by force of the reality that C↔B ↔A, and therefore you are forced to admit your mistake: that the cause is not a necessary and sufficient condition but only a sufficient condition.

The same applies to Newton’s apple.
Your assumption is: A ↔ B, and suddenly C arrived in the form of the splitting of the sea and the like, and reveals to you that you have a fundamental mistake!!

Your argument to Steinitz proves my point.
Namely, to change the structure that he introduced into the equation, and then the result becomes possible. And that is exactly what I am claiming: you close off the structure and therefore see in it double causality, and this is looking at a single link in the chain, as you said. And the result of this mistaken way of looking is that only A is the cause of B. Therefore physics is the only factor in the apple’s falling on the criminal Newton.
But if we say that C exists and you are simply not aware of it, then you drew your conclusion on the basis of a serious mistake in the equation; and instead of retracting when you saw C appear in the example of the plague of blood, by way of analogy, and understanding your bitter error, you insist on hanging this on the tossing around of baseless slogans.
Perhaps the definition is that C in relation to B, and so on, are links in that chain, and they are a partial cause; and as such, even if it is necessary and sufficient, it is not necessarily unique.

And as for what you claimed—that there is no possibility of saying that He intervenes in this chain unless we cut the chain at some link and replace it with the Holy One, blessed be He—why not simply assume that He is the hidden cause behind the physics?! After all, you have a huge unknown, and the plausible thing is to say that there is something not part of the laws that operates physics (just as you believe there is someone who created it). How do you know that He is not always standing by the wheel?! And sometimes He “activates” the laws to which we are accustomed, and sometimes He causes the “activation” of another means?! If the rare means that was activated when needed were activated routinely, you would see it as nature, or a physical law.

Therefore your claim that there is no possibility except to say that somewhere along the chain of physical causality there was one link that was frozen, and the Holy One, blessed be He, entered and acted in its place—this is working with a mistaken equation that caused you to conclude that you are dealing here only with A and B, and therefore your conclusion is A ↔ B. Consequently, the theologian who disagrees with you and introduces C into the equation has not shattered the thesis of double causality; it does not exist except in your head, which is mistaken about the equation and the pull on the result.
Therefore an event that occurs at that point has a physical explanation on the basis of the theological explanation, which reveals the equation hidden from your mistaken eyes, (c). And now you can also call it whatever you want, including by the physical name that you introduced into the overall equation because that is what you managed to see with your eyes in routine cases.

By the way! According to the above, one need not reach the conclusion that somewhere the Holy One, blessed be He, intervenes and replaces the laws of nature. It is entirely possible to assume that the Holy One, blessed be He, directly causes C Himself. And to assume that this was done in the apple’s very attachment to the tree.
But it is also certainly possible to assume that the Holy One, blessed be He, is A that “causes” physical B, which causes C. For in truth, causing B, which causes C, means that the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself directly causes C.
After all, you still have not reached metaphysical inquiry; more accurately, with the physical toolbox you cannot reach it. Because there still remains the question of what causes the laws of physics to work—they need a starter. The mover is A; if it disappeared, there would be no B and of course no consequences for C.

My words are not based on the claim of sporadic intervention (somewhere or other), but on an unknown in logical physics that has been proven by the exceptions, such as the splitting of the sea and the like. Indeed, on the logical level there is no such creature as double causality, but there are other creatures called holes in the equation. And around them the main dispute revolves—at least mine with you.

Dear Shatz, see my comment below at length. If you still have something to say, I will try to respond substantively.

Dear Yosef,
Again, in order to prove something logically, you cannot rely on the other person’s failure to prove his point. You need to explain why the fact that He was involved proves that, or at least why it inclines us to think that He necessarily intervenes today as well. The black holes are a place for anyone to throw in his claims and speculations, and therefore, to the best of my understanding, Michi is not eager for the presence of such things.

I will note: with your conclusion I agree, and I wrote about this at length in a long comment later on—you are welcome to look. In my opinion Michi’s basic assumption is mistaken: he puts into the equation only what in his opinion exists, and as for the possibility that he missed introducing an important datum into the equation—he definitely missed one, in my understanding—and therefore his entire doctrine collapses. What is painful is that he goes very far, and his conclusions have terrible implications for all his believers, and I do not know how he takes such a risk on the basis of assumptions not founded on empirical science but on impressive theses, impressive as they may be. In the end there is a great distance between a question that can be asked and a conclusion with implications against countless sages before you who disagreed with you.

After all, he himself argues forcefully that there is the notion of a mother tongue—that the closer you are to the giving of the Torah, your Torah is in the category of a mother tongue and you do not need to explain too much, while the distant person indeed learns the language and perhaps reaches insights in the language as to why things are so, with definitions that the native speaker cannot define; but one thing is certain: the native speaker has the correct intuition. And all the generations back of Orthodox believers held that indeed the Holy One, blessed be He, intervenes in each and every thing in the world. I would not take upon myself such far-reaching responsibility.

Dear Shatz, I will attach the famous words of Ramban as an anchor for my faith.

Ramban, Exodus 13:16

“And from the great and public miracles a person acknowledges the hidden miracles, which are the foundation of the whole Torah. For a person has no share in the Torah of Moses our teacher until we believe that in all our affairs and all our happenings they are all miracles; there is no nature or ordinary course of the world in them, whether for the community or the individual, but rather if one performs the commandments—his reward will grant him success, and if he transgresses them—his punishment will cut him off. Everything is by the decree of the Most High, as I have already mentioned (Genesis 17:1, and Exodus 6:2).

“And the hidden miracles become public in the case of the community when the fulfillments of the Torah’s promises concerning blessings and curses come to pass, as Scripture says (Deut. 29:23): ‘And all the nations shall say, Why has the Lord done thus to this land?…’ And they shall say: ‘Because they forsook the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers,’ so that the matter becomes public to all the nations, that it is from the Lord in punishing them. And with regard to fulfillment He said: ‘And all the peoples of the earth shall see that the name of the Lord is called upon you, and they shall fear you.’”

(Rabbi Eliyahu Lopian used to say that it is fitting to study these words of Ramban once a month.)

Dear A., your arguments drip with extraordinary wisdom. I would be glad if you would help me sue him, and I would be glad if you would help me cope with the truth you have now hurled at me. It is not easy to discover like this that you were mistaken and all your life was in error. Oh, what a pity that I did not meet a sage like you at the beginning of my life.

Well said indeed. Ah, a sublime pleasure to read your enlightening words.

You already asked me this, and I already answered. There are no gaps in physics. In quantum theory there are claims of a gap, but I have explained more than once why even that is not relevant here.

Your whole post was devoted to criticizing my claim about causality. You don’t have to mention double causality for that. Look back at the end of your own comments and see what everyone understood. The demagoguery is that you present a false impression as though you have a critique of my theory of causality and of the logic of my argument about it, when in fact you are simply repeating for the tenth time the claim we have already argued about ad nauseam—that sometimes the Holy One, blessed be He, does intervene. It turns out that with my logic you completely agree (that there is no double causality). You should update the Greek chorus over there.

I have already clarified more than once that I have no problem at all with belittling in general, nor did I see any special belittling in Rabbi Moshe’s words here. My problem is only with the content of the arguments and their relevance, and with the demagogic way they are presented—not with the style or the belittling. Therefore my usual style is also irrelevant to the discussion here.

Summary: Rabbi Michi and Rabbi Ratt disagree over whether God intervenes in creation on a regular basis or only on the rarest of occasions. That’s all… I’ve been following these posts they write about each other for quite a while now, and I don’t understand why it took so long to identify the root of the disagreement… The matter is simple.

Rational,
Indeed we do have a disagreement over the degree of the Holy One’s involvement, and I have already explained that I cannot rule it out categorically. But in this post a different dispute was presented, as I explained well in the post itself. Here the discussion is only about the logical point: can there be a double cause for the same event or not? Rabbi Moshe claims yes, and I claim no. Now read and think whether what he said can be maintained.

I explained this in the post itself. If you accept the intervention thesis, then why not apply it to the fall of the apple itself? Why hide it behind the loose connection to the tree? After all, when we look at Newton’s apple, we do not examine what exactly caused its fall. You can already say there that the Holy One, blessed be He, caused it, and that’s it. All this instead of circling around the plainly absurd idea of double causality.

See posts 280–1, 262, and especially post 243, which deals with this directly.

From all the verbiage I understood nothing. Take one example and analyze it. Not in words. Explain exactly where I am wrong. You will very quickly realize that you are mistaken.

Ariel, you took the words right out of my mouth.
The problem is that Rabbi Moshe keeps presenting arguments that are supposedly different, and I keep showing him that he is repeating exactly the same thing each time, only in different words. And then, naturally, he accuses me of using the technique of lengthiness whose purpose is to exhaust the reader.

A.
As I already remarked here to Binyamin, the purpose of the site is not to blow off steam but to raise arguments and questions. You keep repeating your claims again and again. True, you do this with marvelous assertiveness, but assertiveness is not argumentation. So please, focus on arguments and questions, not declarations. Especially not declarations of this sort, which we have already heard from you dozens of times.

Hello Rabbi Ratt,
I just wanted to comment on your manner of expression. I enjoy reading your words and also Rabbi Michi’s, and I enjoy the discussion between you, but I think you express yourself too sharply and dismissively. Even if one disagrees with someone, one can speak to him respectfully—especially when מדובר in a person who is a Torah scholar and also a person of good character, who answers patiently and substantively. It is possible to conduct the discussion in a pleasant and comfortable way, and it is a shame to present it in such a jarring manner…
I hope my words will be taken to heart. Have a pleasant rest of the week.

Rabbi Michi, I know that you answered, and I do appreciate it. In any case, I asked whether this is an established fact (and you answered that too). I don’t understand the source of the evident impatience in the answers on the site (something that, in my impression, does not exist at all with you face to face).

Tam, you explain to me at length why Rabbi Michi is right, and then you explain that you disagree with him and that he is wrong….
If you think that every physical event does indeed have an acceptable natural/physiological explanation, where does divine intervention come into expression? Very nice that you wrote an article about it, but you explained nothing. Very nice that there is a tradition about it, but that certainly does not prevent one from thinking logically.

Rabbi Moshe, if you did not mention double causality in your words at all, why did you write this sentence:
"Rabbi Michi’s claim that there is no place for double causality assumes in advance that there is no intervention in nature."
That sentence proves:
1. That you did in fact address double causality. (If that’s not enough, why did you bring the firing squad shooting all at once, as you emphasized? What has that to do with the chain of events?)
2. That you presented Rabbi Michi’s words incorrectly, since he has already noted countless times that sporadic intervention is possible (I’d be happy to provide you with any such quotation—one that is proven that you read—for 10 shekels a quotation).

Yosef.
First of all, I too will join in the great puzzlement at the short-tempered tone on the site.

On the main issue, all I did was explain his argument: that one should not infer from the unknown, especially if the main basis for the claim is not a positive reason but mere conjectures, because a physical explanation is more appealing to him. So he prefers to attribute unknowns to failure to reach the hidden physiological conclusion. And all this on the basis of other physical facts that did compel the result.

I do indeed disagree with him, but not on the plane of the unknown. Rather, I claim that so long as he has no explanation for the metaphysical—or more precisely, he will never be able to reach an explanation of metaphysics from within physics—then he has a huge unknown in the equation, and his whole equation is irrelevant!!

For some reason he decided to address all the comments, and not the substantive comment that dealt with the core of his arguments, and I am truly puzzled by that. Admittedly he explained that the commenter was long and unclear, but my heart tells me other things. Perhaps someone like you can judge.

To Rabbi Moshe,
If what your soul desired was to calm your followers who feel they are losing their faith, you could have written them things much simpler, for example:
"Rabbi Michi himself admits that God knows what is happening in the world.
Rabbi Michi admits that God can intervene in what happens in the world.
Rabbi Michi admits that God intervened in the world in the past.
Rabbi Michi merely thinks that God chooses not to intervene.
If someone’s intuition is that God intervenes more, let him believe that."
What does all this have to do with firing squads, apples, double causality, and logical contradictions?

Rani.

According to your words, does Rabbi Michi also admit that God cracks sunflower seeds and watches us as a film on the great stage of suffering in His universe?

And do not question my words: according to the Sages, God has a body. He also puts on tefillin.

I think it is impossible to explain better the source of the impatience in my reply. You asked the same question in the past, and now you repeat it as if nothing happened. Don’t you remember the answer? In addition to all my other occupations, I have taken upon myself writing posts and answering very many questions in all media every day, meetings with people, journalism, public struggles, and more and more. It seems to me really inconsiderate to send me questions that simply repeat themselves for no reason, or questions that people do not bother to formulate (and that is the answer to Tam), and expect me to answer everything patiently. The impatience is partly real and partly educational.
Tam, as I wrote to you by email, when I see a question I will think of an answer. You do not bother to formulate and focus, and you expect me to read all these miles and answer. So I read and was led to see that I had nothing to answer. One of the things sorely lacking in yeshiva education is the ability to focus the question precisely and define it well. I wrote to you that you need to take one of my arguments, formulate it (first of all for yourself), and then formulate a question. You did not do that, but you expect me to do it for you—both formulate the question and the answer. Well, no. I will not answer until I see a question that you too took two minutes to formulate. And no, length is not what determines it. Mark Twain once wrote after sending a very long letter: sorry, but I didn’t have time to make it shorter.

Since in the previous comment there were several typing errors, and the Rabbi also claimed that I was not clear, I tried to formulate in a clear and substantive way where the error in the Rabbi’s conclusion lies.

I will begin with Newton’s apple as an analogy, and explain.
Your assumption is: A ↔ B, and suddenly C arrives in the form of the splitting of the sea and the like, and reveals to you that you have a fundamental mistake in the equation; and therefore the result, which apparently contradicts uniqueness, is because you had an error in the formula.

A necessary and sufficient condition must be unique, but all this is only on condition that we have not introduced a new player into the equation. The theological claim is that the new player did not suddenly appear in the middle; rather, he is an old player whom you did not take into account. (Here the unknown is God, or metaphysics—the name does not matter.)
Therefore the result can be as the result of a sufficient condition only.
Of course you will discover that you erred only retrospectively, after seeing that indeed your assumption that A ↔ B led to a result that C↔B ↔A. And that result is not unique; therefore you must admit your error—that the cause is not a necessary and sufficient condition but only a sufficient condition.

Indeed, when you lie in bed all day—the brains grow 🙂

Regards, Guy Shlufan

As proof of my main claim—that there is room to formulate the equation differently—there is your argument to Steinitz.
To change the structure that he introduced into the equation, and then the result becomes possible. And that is exactly what I am claiming: you close off the structure and therefore you see in it double causality, and this is looking at a single link in the chain, as you said. And the result of this mistaken way of looking is that only A is the cause of B. Therefore physics is the only factor in the apple’s falling on the criminal Newton.
But if we say that C exists and you are simply unaware of it, then you drew your conclusion on the basis of a serious mistake in the equation; and instead of retracting when you saw C appear in the example of the plague of blood or the splitting of the sea, and understanding your bitter error, you insist on hanging this on the tossing around of baseless slogans.
Perhaps the definition is that C, in relation to B and so forth, are links in that chain and are a partial cause, and as such, even if it is necessary and sufficient, it is not necessarily unique.
Therefore, regarding what you claimed—that there is no possibility of saying that He intervenes in this chain unless we cut the chain at some link and replace it with the Holy One, blessed be He—
why not simply assume that He is the hidden cause behind the physics?! After all, you have a huge unknown (metaphysics). And the plausible thing is to say that there is something not part of the laws that operates physics (just as you believe there is someone who created it). How do you know that He is not always standing by the wheel?! And sometimes He “activates” the laws to which we are accustomed, and sometimes He causes the “activation” of another means?!
If the rare means that was activated when necessary had been activated routinely, you would see it as nature or a physical law.
Moreover, in order to intervene occasionally, He must always be at the wheel, lest He miss something that He would want to intervene in. The only way to track what happens here is by operating the physics all the time, until the point arrives where it will be right to turn left from what appears to be a reasonable physical law.

Therefore your claim that there is no possibility except to say that somewhere along the chain of physical causality there was one link that was frozen, and the Holy One, blessed be He, entered and acted in its place, proves the error in the equation that led you to conclude that you are dealing here only with A and B, and therefore your conclusion is A ↔ B.
The theologian who disagrees with you and inserts C into the equation has therefore not shattered the thesis of double causality, because it simply does not exist except in your head, which is mistaken about the equation and projects that mistake onto the result.
And therefore an event that happens at that point has a physical explanation, one that you too would agree with if you were not ignoring it (c, God, metaphysics, or whatever you want to call it).
And now you can also call it whatever you want, including by the physical name you inserted into the whole equation because that is what you succeeded in seeing with your eyes in routine cases.

By the way! According to the above, one need not reach the conclusion that somewhere the Holy One, blessed be He, suddenly intervenes and replaces the laws of nature, which operate on their own after the Holy One fixed them in our world (as Moshe Ratt claims). It is entirely possible to assume that the Holy One, blessed be He, directly causes C Himself, and not A causing B causing C, by virtue of the fact that the Holy One fixed A.
Because He is always present in A, so He is also present in C; it is only to your limited eyes that this appears, of course, on the basis of your understanding of physics, without any understanding of metaphysics.

True, one can also assume that the Holy One, blessed be He, is A that “causes” physical B, which causes C.
But in effect, once B causes C according to the laws of physics, it turns out that there is a direct implication of the Holy One, blessed be He, for C through rules that we define as the laws of physics.
So long as you have not yet reached metaphysical inquiry—or more accurately, since you cannot reach it with the physical toolbox—
you will always still be missing the reason for what causes the laws of physics to work; after all, they need a starter. The mover is A. If it disappears, there will be no B, and of course no consequences for C.

My words are not based on the claim of sporadic intervention (somewhere or other), but on an unknown in logical physics that has been proven by the exceptions, such as the splitting of the sea and the like. Indeed, on the logical level there is no such creature as double causality, but there are other creatures called holes in the equation.

True, the one who believes in sporadicity is the one making that claim, but that does not mean the claim itself is sporadic. If you understand that in order to intervene now and then here in the world, you must track, and in order to track and intervene in the physics, you must already be involved in it from the outset—otherwise, as you claimed, you disrupt the chain.
But in my definition the chain exists only in your head, because the chain is correct only if the equation is correct and contains no metaphysical unknowns that you do not recognize and do not take into account.

Maybe not a troll, but behaving like quite a small child.
Even if you have certain experiences of anger from the religious or Haredi education you grew up in, that is no reason to lash out at every believing person. (Actually, I come back to thinking that lashing out and militancy on behalf of “the values of the Enlightenment” is something one can appreciate in people who have well-founded arguments; people who speak only from the gut and emotion in formulations like: “Your God is evil”—these are people who show that they do not really have arguments, only gut feelings and very strong emotions.)
When you think about it more deeply, you will see that the one compromising on truth here is actually not Michi and other religious people with complex thinking who are not afraid to formulate a worldview based both on rejecting things that seem illogical to them and on remaining with parts of faith that they find true (and not rabbis either who try to translate religious thought into modern language and take from the modern world things that seem right to them, like Rav Kook and Rabbi Hirsch, of blessed memory). Rather, it is you—an extreme version of unfounded fundamentalist belief repels you, so you move over to your own belief, a version of an extreme anti-theistic ideology in which of course the world is divided into the children of light and the children of darkness, the primitive religious people who lack morality and are hypocrites, with the minds of baboons, versus the secular enlightened children of light. (I actually enjoy reading and hearing articles by atheists and agnostics, even anti-religious ones, when they have arguments.) But in your case you have simply become a Haredi atheist (believing with blind faith in values you adopted for yourself without examining things deeply and without raising rational arguments)—like the equivalent of your brothers on the extreme side of the religious map.

For the sake of truth—may you enjoy yourself.

I received your remark, and especially the education. Apparently the yeshiva did indeed influence me. And apropos of Mark Twain, apparently I was mistaken in thinking that saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is nonsense. Put all your eggs in one basket, and keep an eye on the basket. And I put all the eggs in one basket and forgot to keep an eye on it; I went over my response and indeed found that there were quite a few typing errors (and I didn’t keep an eye on that). And this definitely caused the things to come out confused.
But!!
After the massive educational correction, I tried to put the eggs into several baskets and keep an eye on them, even if that is nonsense… as one who was burned by hot water… And therefore I would be glad for your substantive and pointed response to my main arguments.

My main arguments are like the question of the simpleton in the Haggadah: “What is this?”—I understand the data, just not the implications.
I think I understood your words, but I could not understand the bridge you make between the equations and the implications, at a time when the equations are missing the great unknown, which is the hidden basis of the laws of the equations. So long as you have not reached an understanding of how the thing operates, you cannot infer anything from it!!

From what I understood, the Rabbi is saying that God’s actions must create a kind of fingerprint in the logical process.
But why? It sounds like such a thing would happen only if the definition of God is as something that is not fully present in the world—in effect, that the world is not His “enclothing” (= revelation). In other words, what I am saying is: if God created a world ex nihilo, He must be present in it in order to sustain it, because if not—what reason would there be for something that once was nothing to continue being something? That is, we are not dealing with something from something, but with something from nothing (Maharal in his introduction to Tiferet Yisrael). And therefore, if one defines God דווקא as someone who has a direct connection with the world, and that the world itself is a revelation = a place where God is present, then I can say that not only is God the cause of A and of B, but He is in fact A and B and also the arrows in between…
I hope I managed to explain. I’d be glad for a response.

In my humble opinion, this is a dispute that cannot really be decided.
True, from the perspective of simple or ordinary or natural reasoning—call it what you like—one cannot / has no good reason to assume that the discount I received when buying coffee and pastry from so-and-so exactly when I had run out of small change was caused by the Holy One, blessed be He.
But one can always go in a pantheistic direction, for example, and say that the world or nature operates in such a way that certain people receive a small reward in this world, and that the Holy One, blessed be He, embedded this in the laws of nature. (Or one can say that a certain person, a righteous person who is the foundation of the world, receives special individual providence that includes extraordinary longevity and many students, and even certain miraculous powers—but these are things that an average person cannot perceive, because he has no such connection with the Holy One, blessed be He.)

Not that I’m saying these are Rabbi Rott’s claims—but he is right on the fundamental point he raised: that one cannot rule out such claims. (One can of course say that there is no reason to believe such things, but that is of course material for another post.) And from here comes my claim that the root of the dispute here is far more emotional than the dispute over the specific issue itself. (And this also emerges from the discussions on the subject on his Facebook page.)

In fact, if I am more precise and use Kabbalistic terminology:
The Rabbi holds by sovev kol almin and nullifies memale kol almin, and therefore all the talk about how there cannot be two necessary and sufficient conditions stems from the definition that God is only the surrounding one.

I’m not new here, and that really makes no difference at all. I define a troll as someone who shifts to talking about people rather than about things, unlike the way the discourse here is usually conducted. Funny to hear contempt from someone who doesn’t even know me (you haven’t even encountered me here before), and so quickly draws conclusions about me… It only shows the level of seriousness with which one should relate to you.
What is a shame is that there is no block option here like on the regular platforms you use…

The point is, I did not ask the same question. In the course of your words you mentioned the matter of the physical gap, and on that I asked whether this is a scientific theory or an established fact, in order to understand whether your claim is merely an assumption open to refutation or not. (I still haven’t really understood, but now I’m afraid to ask…)
I truly do not want to steal your time, but if you are already spending the time here, then at the very least it should yield some benefit for the readers, who in many cases come away unsatisfied with the responses. So the whole purpose is missed.
I say again: face to face I have not encountered you responding like this (that is, even in video and the like). For some reason there is a sense of much deeper disdain in the approach of the comments on the site.

A few threads were deleted here because they descended to a level I am not willing for us to be at. I am announcing that if this continues, I will simply delete everything that is written.

And this is an example of the thesis: usually the “boss” doesn’t intervene, until people go too far, and then he starts intervening 🙂

🙂

Hi,
I didn’t understand the proof that a necessary and sufficient condition is also unique.
Why couldn’t there be a condition C different from A that is necessary and sufficient for A and for B? Then there is no situation in which A holds and C does not (as in the proof).
For example:
I eat ice cream if and only if I am hungry
and also
I take ice cream out of the refrigerator if and only if I am hungry.

If you are speaking about a chain, then that is what I explained. If you are speaking about two different conditions, that is impossible. Suppose A and B are both necessary and sufficient conditions for C. Think, for example, what happens when A exists and B does not. Will C happen or not? It must happen, because A is sufficient for it. But it cannot happen, because B is also necessary for it. I explained this in the post.
In your example this is simply a chain: I am hungry, therefore I take ice cream out of the refrigerator, and then I eat it. Everything must occur.

I didn’t understand a word. If you continue to abbreviate and not formulate exactly what you mean, I will not answer anymore. Write out exactly one of my arguments, and only one, and explain briefly and clearly exactly why you disagree. Not declarations. Point precisely to the place where I am missing something, in your opinion. Good luck.
And please—only one claim at a time, not in clusters.

I see that Shoel gets attention because he shortened it (apparently).

So I’ll try too.

Very briefly.

If I assume that: A ↔ B
But I do not fully understand what A is or what B is, is there not room to say that everything derived from my basic assumption is mistaken?
After all, even the conclusion A → B will in that case not be correct, because I am missing foundational understanding!

And the moral: so long as the Rabbi does not understand the metaphysics, he lacks a basic foundation stone in order to draw a conclusion based on what he does know from physics. And this is not an agnostic skeptical claim, because there is good reason to assume—if you believe in the miracles that departed from the physics known to us, such as the splitting of the sea—that this has a strong basis. And just as you have no explanation for physics as to what drives it, so the splitting of the sea is no greater novelty, as Ramban says in Parashat Bo about hidden miracles.

“I eat ice cream” and “I take ice cream out of the refrigerator” are not two different conditions? (Admittedly, they are necessary and sufficient for one another, but still different.)

Not at all. I explained to you that this is the chain I dealt with in the post. Did you read what I wrote there? Read it again.

I stopped after his example of the firing squad.
It is quite obvious that the writer (Rabbi Rott?) does not have much understanding of causes and effects.

The cause of death is not the firing squad. Rather, it is some internal biological matter in the person that caused the person to die. Not the firing squad.

Not necessarily. Sometimes one takes ice cream out of the refrigerator not because the one taking it out is hungry, but because one of his children or guests wants to eat ice cream.

Or for another reason, as happened to me during the search for leaven, when I opened the freezer in order to check and found in it ice cream that had melted during the defrosting a few days earlier, and I took it out in order to throw it in the trash 🙂

So we have learned about ‘double causality’ in taking ice creams out of refrigerators 🙂

Regards, the frozen man of halakhah

It seems to me that the missed point here is not on the philosophical plane at all. I don’t like going to the psychological level in such cases, but it seems to me unavoidable, and it can explain a number of things.
For Moshe Ratt, it is very important to prove faith in God and in providence, because these beliefs save his soul (not only his soul, but also that of many others). In the name of trying to save them, he goes overboard with bizarre claims, even ones that seem sophisticated to some readers.
Therefore one has to understand that the argument is not really on the side of logic and reason, but entirely on the emotional side.
I know quite a few people who are considered intelligent and talented in academic fields, whose understanding in philosophy and the humanities is no better than that of an onion seller in the market. So intelligence does not really play a role here, nor does academic training in the field. There is an emotional, experiential dimension here that no logical argument can defeat. I have nothing personal against Moshe Ratt, although he blocked me from Facebook because it was unpleasant for him to read things I wrote.

I am of course on Rabbi Michi’s side, but long before I read the second book. I researched these topics on my own and all the sources in Jewish thought, and gave classes on them, and I reached exactly the same conclusions (without having meanwhile read or been fed by the Rabbi on these topics). To my mind that is the beauty of universal thinking.

Rabbi Michi—unfortunately, I think you are “wasting” your time in this personal argument with Moshe. Of course, for the public good it is desirable to hold the discussion itself. Even when I came to the launch event for the books and listened to Moshe (and to the other speakers), there was not a single reasonable argument in his words—and I really looked for one.

Not because he shortened it, but because I understood what he was asking. With you I still don’t understand, because you did not bother to write what you are asking.
Although I didn’t understand what you are claiming, let’s try to move forward. I am talking about the fact that gravity (A) is a necessary and sufficient condition for the fall of the apple (B). Now what are you claiming? That it is only a sufficient condition (and not a necessary one)? Or are you claiming that even that is not true? And please, no examples and Ramban and so on. Focus on what you are claiming. One step at a time.

I claim that your gravity assumption is not complete because you do not understand the cause of gravity, and accordingly your further implications lack a foundation. By contrast, I think it has been proven in cases where the laws of nature did not operate, such as the splitting of the Red Sea, that there is someone pulling the strings—and that is what is called God, or in other words the metaphysical. And accordingly I must not draw conclusions so long as I am missing the basic point, namely the cause of the laws of physics. (To sharpen it: the very fact that you call the laws of physics “laws,” in my opinion, is mistaken so long as you have not understood the meta-cause behind them. The fact that they recur almost all the time does not prove that the one pulling the strings = “the laws” does not want things to appear as laws.)

So basically you are trying to claim that the laws of nature are not correct. There are other factors involved that we do not know. Fine—but it works beautifully in the meantime in everyday life. There is no reason to assume otherwise. There might also be packs of demons rampaging about (Night at the Museum), and only when we look do they hide. It may also be that they are meanwhile playing soccer with a troupe of fairies. In short, anything can be. But there is no reason whatsoever to assume there is anything besides nature. If you do not accept the laws of nature, don’t get on a plane (because who told you it won’t crash?), and don’t take medicine (because who told you it works?)

And if we analyze the reason for opening the refrigerator, we discover that there really is ‘double causality’ here. My hand received a nerve signal from the brain, and therefore it pulled the handle and brought about the opening of the refrigerator.

However, the nerve signal sent from the brain to the hand stems from a spiritual volitional event that took place in my soul, in which I decided to satisfy my hunger by eating the ice cream. And this was not at all a trivial decision, since I was torn over whether to satisfy my hunger with ice cream or with something more nutritious and healthy.

That is to say: the direct cause is physical, but behind it stands a volitional, free-choice decision that is not subject to physical-chemical determinism.

Regards, the tiny chooser

I addressed that. I think so because of miracles that deviated from the laws of physics, such as the splitting of the sea.
If I saw proof even once that the demons rampage when I am not in the room, I would definitely tend to think that this happens every time I’m not there.

“And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were split.”

As for the plane and the medicine: if we assume that I know with certainty that there is someone pulling the strings, and certainly at every given moment it is in His hand to shorten and in His hand to widen, still—if I see that He does not tend to change things and has a fixed pattern of operation, I will definitely rely on that with complete ease. After all, even one who believes only in the laws of physics does not dispute the possibility of the splitting of the sea, and accordingly he too has to take it into account. It is just that ordinarily one does not take into account the exceptions made by the Master of the house, even though they exist potentially.

There are no miracles in the Torah that departed from the way of nature.
There is an explicit mishnah about things created on the eve of the Sabbath at twilight. Meaning, even those miracles are by way of nature and were created in the creation of the world.

You are simply too simple and believe in miracles and sorcery and Harry Potter stories.

Your question implies that apparently one can also fly on a broomstick. After all, that is what it says in Harry Potter.

You saw proof. At the splitting of the Red Sea.
That’s it. I’m done.

So when yes and when no? When it’s convenient, yes, and when it’s inconvenient, no? Did you see any anomalies with Newton and the apples?

I read and understood. I’m focusing mainly on the proof at the beginning on the logical level.
I don’t understand how “I eat ice cream” and “I take ice cream out of the refrigerator” are not two different conditions.
After all, they are not the same thing.
I’d be glad if you would define identity and difference according to your method, because it seems unclear to me.

They are neither different nor equal. Together they constitute the necessary and sufficient condition for hunger (and vice versa). That is exactly what I explained in the chain of the paradox of initiation. As I told you, read there.

Honorable Rabbi,
I am not trying to provoke; I am simply trying to understand, and I still have not understood your answer. Why can’t one take from the exceptional cases, which could not have occurred under any physical condition or law (and obviously the timing is unrelated to physics), proof that there is someone pulling the strings all the time?
I don’t think the Rabbi addressed this.

As for the remark by “the last posek,” I did not come to argue about the facts. I am speaking on the side where you believe in the fact: whether that is a reason for my basic assumption or for his. And to that I also brought the Rabbi Michi’s example of the demons—that if and when I had a genuine indication that there were demons in my room and they vanished exactly when I entered, there would be fairly good reason to think that this is what happens all the time, or at least that this could happen all the time; and I would not rush to conclude that they are not there because I don’t see them when I enter!

I am indeed asking in all innocence: I understand the Rabbi’s equation, but I don’t understand the implication. For so long as there exists a fairly plausible option, on the basis of history, it is reasonable to assume—or at least one is obligated to take into account—that you have missed an unknown.

As for Newton: I did not say that necessarily the apple fell on him because he was being punished, but it certainly could be that the apple also fell on him because he was being punished, according to my unknown—that is, (C), the Holy One, blessed be He, whom you did not take into account as existing even within the daily laws of physics, and He is what drives them. It could be that the apple fell either through concealment by means of the ordinary laws and Newton’s being timed to be there in real time (even though there is intervention in his brain, it still appears natural, and there is a preference to carry out eliminations or punishments in a way that does not appear exceptional and different from what we are used to seeing as nature). Or it could be that there really was a deviation in the tree, or in gravity, from what you are used to seeing as the laws of nature. But in my conception there is no such thing as laws of nature; it only appears in your mind as laws of nature, and therefore the deviation is not a deviation that contradicts any chain!

I would be glad for an answer. I truly cannot understand, and to the best of my understanding so far I have not received an answer to the substance of the argument, but only that making assumptions not proven in what appears to be a natural law is not serious. And regarding that I wondered why—for aren’t a few exceptions enough to require us to project onto our overall way of seeing?

Let us set logic aside for a moment, although I have already noted elsewhere that your logical arguments seem weak and very unconvincing to me. Still, I make no professional pretensions in this field apart from one course I took with Professor Yael Cohen, of blessed memory, who stressed many times that logic has its honored place, but one must not place unlimited trust in it. (As the Gemara says in Bava Metzia 38b about the sages of Pumbedita: “they can push an elephant through the eye of a needle.”)

Even so, your argument is rather empty. For on the one hand you accept the miracles recounted in the Bible and in the words of the Sages, and on the other hand you also “allow” the Holy One, blessed be He, to intervene “sporadically,” “here and there” (the Holy One, blessed be He, really thanks you…). But clearly you mean hidden (sporadic) intervention—that is, such as apparently does not deviate from the laws of nature, for otherwise we would not need your permission. In other words, you admit that the Holy One, blessed be He, performed miracles (open and hidden) in the past, and admit that in principle He can do so now as well, except that “the policy has changed.” Yet in the meantime I managed to complete reading the second book in the trilogy, and I found that you base the claim of a policy change neither on logic nor on empiricism (the claim certainly does not stand up to the Popperian test of falsification that you are fond of), but only on an intuitive feeling. That’s all, nothing more! True, in your books you explain at length the importance of intuition in the face of “the emptiness of the analytic,” but in my innocence I thought you were speaking of a universal intuition (such as: between two points there passes only one straight line). Your intuition regarding a policy change and “sporadic” intervention is not universal at all. Many people, no less wise and logical than you, have a different intuition. Some feel intervention at every step, while others feel none at all—not even “sporadically” (and there are many intuitions along the continuum between these two). How can one sort out which intuition is the more “reliable”? And above all—how can one build an entire theology on the “intuitive revelation” of one person, however wise, righteous, holy, and pure he may be, and on that basis reject the intuitions and traditions of masses of sages and writers no less wise, etc.?

This strange argument sounds to me like an argument over the intuitions of blind-deaf-mute people in their sleep…