Faith – Lesson 24

Table of Contents

• Reformulating the proof from laws
• Quantum theory’s challenge to the principle of causality and four responses
• Epistemic probability versus ontic probability, with examples
• The unintelligibility of quantum theory and causal intuition
• Evolution, macroscopic scales, and chaos
• Mutations and possible quantum effects
• Randomness within rigid laws and the drunkard parable
• Is quantum theory random? Interpretations and hidden variables
• The argument that makes the whole discussion unnecessary: even “something from nothing” happens within a lawful framework
• Science as strengthening the proof: a system of laws that leads from the Big Bang to a safari
• The plasticine in the sealed room parable
• What is complexity, entropy, and the claim that “there’s nothing special at all”
• Cellular automata and the gap between them and the world
• The rarity of life-level complexity in our universe
• The stability of complexity and thermodynamic directionality
• The SETI project as a test case for inferring intentional design
• The anthropic principle: religious origin and atheist reversal
• A more sophisticated version: many trials, uniqueness of outcome, and the multiverse
• Conclusion and postponing the response

Summary

General Overview

The text updates the physico-theological proof from an argument based on the complexity of the world to an argument based on the complexity and specialness of the laws that make such a world possible, and presents the claim that the quantum challenge to the principle of causality does not collapse the proof, because even quantum “randomness” takes place within a system of laws that itself requires explanation. The text distinguishes between epistemic probability, which arises from lack of information, and ontic probability, in which reality itself is open-ended, and argues that in evolution and in macroscopic processes the randomness is mainly of the first kind. The text adds that even if quantum theory is truly random, and even if evolution is influenced by quantum phenomena, the central question still remains: “Who determined the laws,” and in particular the “quantum character” that allows something from nothing and charge conservation. The text argues that scientific explanations actually strengthen the proof, because a system of laws set fourteen billion years ago leads, without any local guiding hand, from almost nothing to the safari of the world, and then turns to the question of complexity, to claims of the cellular-automata type, and to a sophisticated version of the anthropic principle and the multiverse as a challenge aimed also against the argument from laws.

Reformulating the proof from laws

The text shifts the proof from “look what a complex world this is, surely someone created it” to “look what complex laws there are, and the question is who created them.” The text assumes that complexity and specialness are the same for our purposes, and therefore the complexity of the world reflects the specialness of the laws that produce such a specific and particular world. The text states that the evolutionary-scientific response, which explains how the world came into being within the laws, does not answer the question of who determined the laws themselves.

Quantum theory’s challenge to the principle of causality and four responses

The text presents the challenge according to which, in quantum theory, random formations of “something from nothing” occur out of the vacuum, and therefore the principle of causality is not necessarily true, and the assumption that everything complex must have a cause is undermined. The text presents four claims against this challenge: evolution is not quantum, and therefore quantum theory is not an alternative explanation of the evolutionary process; even if evolution were random, that would not damage the argument; it is not clear that quantum theory itself is random; and even if all the random conditions are granted, the argument from laws is still unaffected. The text states that it is not enough just to “wave around quantum theory” in order to undermine the proof.

Epistemic probability versus ontic probability, with examples

The text distinguishes between ordinary probabilistic usage, in which there is no randomness in reality but only a lack of information on our part, and usage in which reality itself is not determined and there are genuinely open options. The text illustrates epistemic probability by means of a coin toss and argues that the system is completely deterministic but chaotic, and therefore one calculates probability instead of performing the full calculation. The text states that the ontic usage exists in practice only in quantum theory, and illustrates this with Schrödinger’s cat and with the wave function, where the absolute value squared gives a probability distribution density. The text brings a halakhic example of “one who betroths one of two daughters” and argues that in such a situation there is no definite fact as to who is betrothed, so that even if “the Holy One, blessed be He” were asked, He would have nothing to answer, because the information does not exist.

The unintelligibility of quantum theory and causal intuition

The text argues that the confusion and abundance of interpretations in quantum theory show just how hard to grasp and intuitively implausible a state of ontic indeterminacy is. The text attributes to Feynman the statement that in relativity everyone understands, but “quantum theory—there isn’t a single person who understands it,” people just get used to it, and concludes from this that causal intuition remains powerful. The text argues that people seek causal explanations even in quantum theory, at the expense of locality or other properties, and therefore to say that quantum theory offers an equally reasonable non-causal alternative is problematic.

Evolution, macroscopic scales, and chaos

The text argues that evolution is not “really quantum,” because quantum theory operates on the scale of individual atoms, whereas evolution deals with weather, environmental conditions, and tigers and monkeys. The text compares meteorology to a deterministic macroscopic system that is treated probabilistically because of complexity and chaos, and mentions that Lorenz arrived at chaos through climate calculations. The text argues that the circumstances of evolution are not random in reality, but only appear random because of lack of information.

Mutations and possible quantum effects

The text says that the question of mutations is more complicated, and that the speaker is not an expert. The text estimates that mutations involve molecules on scales too large for quantum phenomena, but notes that there are studies trying to identify quantum effects in biology and “quantum fingerprints.” The text argues that the law of large numbers wipes out quantum effects, and therefore their appearance in biology is not to be expected, but concludes that basically the randomness in evolution is a computational tool, not genuine randomness.

Randomness within rigid laws and the drunkard parable

The text argues that even if evolution is random, this does not damage the argument, because the randomness occurs within a rigid framework of laws. The text cites the parable of the drunkard swaying between a wall and a ditch and eventually ending up in the ditch, and argues that the result is dictated by the circumstances, not by the random staggering. The text adds that neo-Darwinians use the parable to argue the opposite, calls this a foolish argument, and sees it as an expression of tendentiousness.

Is quantum theory random? Interpretations and hidden variables

The text argues that to this day it is not clear that quantum theory is really random, and mentions disputes from Einstein through Bohm and approaches involving hidden variables. The text notes that Bell’s inequality and experimental work rule out quite a few hidden-variable possibilities, but argues that the option still exists, as far as the speaker knows. The text concludes that quantum theory does not necessarily require giving up causality, and that perhaps what is given up instead is locality or other intuitions.

The argument that makes the whole discussion unnecessary: even “something from nothing” happens within a lawful framework

The text seeks to argue that even if there is genuine quantum randomness and wave-function collapse without a cause, still the coming-into-being out of “vacuum” is possible only because quantum theory and its laws are “imposed” on the vacuum. The text emphasizes that the proof is “from the laws,” and therefore the question remains who created the quantum character of the world that allows something to arise from nothing. The text argues that particles “are created by something” in the sense of causation between law and result, even if not in the sense of event-causing-event. The text adds that conservation laws require that when a particle is created, an antiparticle must also be created in order to preserve charge, and asks, “Who takes care of that balance?” concluding that this is not “absolute vacuum” but rather “a vacuum with laws.”

Science as strengthening the proof: a system of laws that leads from the Big Bang to a safari

The text argues that not only do evolution and scientific explanations fail to refute the physico-theological proof, they actually strengthen it. The text presents a picture of someone who, fourteen billion years ago, “set up a system of laws” that takes things from a singular point of matter in the Big Bang to human beings, language, cars, spacecraft to the moon, and animals and symbiosis. The text asks, “Do you have a greater guiding hand than that?” and concludes that whoever set up such a system “saw fourteen billion years ahead,” and therefore a “super-intelligence” is required.

The plasticine in the sealed room parable

The text describes a sealed room with no windows and no air, containing only “a lump of plasticine,” and then returning fourteen billion years later to find the Russian invasion of Ukraine, spacecraft to the moon, and plants and animals in the savanna, presenting this as an allegory for a system of laws capable of transforming simple matter into a complex world. The text asks who could produce such a system of laws, and argues that there is no chance of randomly generating systems of laws that would bring about such a result. The text concludes from this that scientific explanations intensify the proof rather than weaken it.

What is complexity, entropy, and the claim that “there’s nothing special at all”

The text presents a claim by challengers according to which there is nothing at all special about our world, because any system of laws, if you wait long enough, will create beings or phenomena that are complex and special. The text mentions that it has already dealt with the concept of entropy as an objective measure of complexity, and therefore complexity is not merely “in the eye of the beholder,” but is reflected in the laws of nature themselves. The text reformulates the challenge as an attack on the argument from laws: in every system of laws there will appear phenomena with low entropy, and therefore our laws too are not special.

Cellular automata and the gap between them and the world

The text describes experiments with cellular automata in which one defines a set of dynamic rules and initial conditions, and runs processes on a computer that produce surprising patterns. The text gives the example of a checkerboard in which a rule such as “if there are two black neighbors, the square also turns black” produces an evolving dynamic. The text argues that the inference from this—that every system of laws will create “complexity”—is not valid for our world, and presents “three fundamental problems” in the analogy.

The rarity of life-level complexity in our universe

The text argues that complexity on the level of life is very rare and does not always happen, even if there are systems that produce interesting patterns. The text proposes an empirical test within our own universe: if every place with laws were to produce “complex beings of another kind,” then one would expect to find on other stars inanimate structures of low entropy approaching life. The text states that no such “beings” are known, and that what is found in the inanimate realm does not come close to the entropy level of life, and therefore the challenge does not hold up factually.

The stability of complexity and thermodynamic directionality

The text argues that complexity has to be stable, not just a momentary pattern that appears and disappears. The text uses the example of gas dispersing in a box and explains that spontaneous concentration in one corner can happen for a moment, but is not a stable state, whereas dispersion is stable, and connects this to irreversibility and the direction of time in thermodynamics. The text compares this to shaking a box of marbles, where for a moment an equilateral triangle might form, which needs no explanation, but argues that in our world there appears a pattern that is preserved over time and even becomes more sophisticated. The text argues that cellular automata do not produce this unless one puts in by hand laws of heredity and preservation of stability, and that fourteen billion years are not “just a moment” relative to the microscopic rates of physics, chemistry, and biology.

The SETI project as a test case for inferring intentional design

The text brings an example from the SETI project, which scans electromagnetic signals from space and looks for non-random structures as evidence of intelligent life. The text attributes to a Christian theologian the claim that a neo-Darwinian ought to say that even if a complex structure were found in the signals, one should not infer intelligence, because random processes can produce complexity. The text argues that in practice the scientific world assumes that if a sufficiently clear non-random structure is discovered, that points to an intelligent agent that created and sent a message. The text concludes that the world itself is “a SETI project,” and that its special structure and low entropy point to “a guiding hand.”

The anthropic principle: religious origin and atheist reversal

The text presents the anthropic principle in its original form as an argument of believers, in the spirit of Duties of the Heart, according to which the fit between the conditions of the world and life points to a guiding hand. The text presents the atheist challenge: if the conditions had not been suitable, you would not be here to ask, so there is no miracle here. The text criticizes this formulation as foolish and brings Hawking’s example of a firing squad that misses, arguing that even if you would not be asking, the vanishingly small probability still requires explanation.

A more sophisticated version: many trials, uniqueness of outcome, and the multiverse

The text presents a more “intelligent” formulation in which there are many trials, and therefore the fact that one trial is found in which the conditions are met is not surprising, because “someone has to be in the successful trial.” The text analyzes probabilities through the example of rolling a die a hundred times and distinguishes between a rare result that is not special in advance and a result special in advance, such as “a hundred sixes,” which would lead to calling the police even though its probability is identical to that of any other specific vector. The text gives the example of meeting Jerusalemites in Canada to show that uniqueness derives from the observer’s context, but still a sequence of “Jerusalemites” is perceived as distinguished relative to all the other sequences. The text states that the anthropic principle in its strong form rests on the assumption of very many systems of laws or universes, such that one of them will be suitable for life, and from this there follows a challenge aimed “primarily” against the argument from laws, because it shifts the question to the mechanism that produces many systems of laws.

Conclusion and postponing the response

The text states that the response to the anthropic-multiverse challenge will come “next time,” and leaves the listeners with food for thought. The text ends with “Until next week, Sabbath peace,” and then corrects it to “in two weeks.”

Last time I began—maybe, yes, let me first put us in context. I moved from formulating the physico-theological proof from the complexity of the world, to saying that this is a proof within the laws, to a proof from the laws. Meaning, not the complexity of the world, but the complexity of the laws that produced such a complex world. And the assumption seems reasonable to me, namely that the complexity of the laws is expressed by—or that the complexity of the world reflects—some kind of specialness, because for our purposes complexity and specialness are the same thing. The specialness of the laws. Meaning, laws of the sort that produce such a particular, special, specific world are themselves apparently specific, or are themselves special laws. So the argument basically shifts from “look what a complex world, obviously someone created it,” and to that people answer, “what do you mean, there are laws, evolution, there are processes that show you how this thing came into being,” so from there I move to the question, “okay, look at what complex laws there are, and the question is who created them.” Okay? That’s basically the updated formulation of the proof. We’ve gone a long way, never mind that now, I’m jumping to the end.

And the claim I was in the middle of discussing is that the assumption of this argument, which says that everything needs a cause—certainly a complex thing needs a cause—is challenged by quantum theory. In quantum theory we know of random formations, something from nothing, out of the vacuum, and therefore this undermines the basic assumption on which the physico-theological argument rests. Quantum theory tells us no, the principle of causality is not necessarily true; there are things that come into being from nothing, in a random way, without someone actually making them, and therefore the assumption on which the argument rests is not necessarily correct.

What I argued, basically—and I’m summarizing what I didn’t summarize last time just so the framework will be clear—I’m basically making four claims against this challenge. First claim: evolution contains no quantum components, and therefore quantum theory will not explain the evolutionary process. It does not offer an alternative explanation of the evolutionary process. Second claim: I argue that even if evolution did proceed randomly, that would not really harm our argument. Third claim: whether quantum theory itself is random is still not entirely clear even today. And fourth claim: even if everything held true, even if evolution were proceeding in a random quantum way and so on, and quantum theory were random as well, the argument still would not be damaged. So that basically means that for this challenge to really be a challenge, it has to go a very long distance; it’s not enough to wave around quantum theory.

So the first two sections, without calling them that, I already did. The claim that in evolution, although there are certain components considered random components, in plain terms there really isn’t randomness there. I talked about the formation of mutations, or even natural selection, the circumstances that arise in some random process and you find yourself within given circumstances, and that selects certain phenotypes that will survive and other phenotypes that will go extinct. Or the formation of mutations as well, a process seen as random. I said that both of these things are not really random, and for that purpose I distinguished between two situations in which we use probability or statistics.

One situation—and this is the usual situation, really the ordinary situation familiar to us, in fact the only one familiar to us—is a situation in which there is nothing random in the world itself, but rather there is missing information on my side. Meaning, it’s epistemic, not ontic. It belongs to knowledge, not to reality itself. Yes? I toss a coin, and I ask what the chance is that it will land heads or tails. There is nothing random here; once I toss the coin, that’s Newton’s laws. Tell me the initial velocity, the initial force, the physical data around it, and I’ll tell you how the coin will fall. There is nothing random there. Even the movement of my hand is not random, because it is the result of processes happening inside me; you can go back and back from effect to cause, from effect to cause, and in the end everything is deterministic. There is nothing random there.

So what is it? Because the connection between the result and the cause is very, very complex—which is what characterizes chaotic situations—meaning when you toss a coin, a very, very small difference in the angle or in the force of the hit completely changes the result; meaning it’s not connected at all to what happened before, the correlation is negligible, and that is what characterizes, as I said, chaotic states, we talked about that. And therefore, instead of doing the calculation, which is very, very complicated and requires precision in the initial conditions and in the circumstances prevailing there, instead of that we do a probabilistic calculation. But the probabilistic calculation here comes to cover for incomplete information that exists on my side. In reality itself there is nothing random and nothing that is not completely deterministic. Tossing dice, tossing a coin—basically every use of probability that we know is like this. Every use. There is no other use.

The other use that exists in principle, although it is not familiar to us, is a situation in which in reality itself there is something not fixed, not deterministic, something open. There are several options in reality itself, not that I don’t know which of the options in reality is correct, but in reality itself there are several options and reality itself is undecided. That is another use of probability, and as I said before, it is not really familiar to us. We talk about it hypothetically, but it is not really familiar to us. All the uses we know are of the first kind.

The only place where we use the second kind is quantum theory. Because quantum theory speaks about a situation in which in reality itself there are several options, like Schrödinger’s cat, which is either alive or dead, and not that we do not know whether it is alive or dead, but it itself is in a composite state, what is called a superposition, a state made up of two states: a state in which it is alive and a state in which it is dead. And either of these two states can eventually turn out to be the correct one, sort of like a Talmudic selection more or less, and in such a state one also uses probabilistic tools. Anyone somewhat familiar with quantum theory knows that the wave function—its absolute value squared is basically the probability distribution density for finding the cat alive or dead, or the particle in this hole or that hole, and so on.

I brought another example for this from Jewish law: if someone betroths one of two daughters, gives the father a coin and says, “One of your two daughters is betrothed to me,” without specifying which one. Then in such a case it’s not that one woman is betrothed and I just don’t know which one she is. No—there is no specific woman who is betrothed. I simply defined that one of these two is betrothed to me without specifying which. In such a case, even if I were to ask the Holy One, blessed be He, “Tell me, which of the two is my wife?” He could not answer me, because there is no one definite woman who is my wife.

In every situation that is absence of information, then before Heaven it is revealed, so the Holy One, blessed be He, can tell me that information. I don’t know it because I’m a human being. But in the situation of what I called ontic probability, not epistemic, not cognitive but real, there even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot know who my wife is, because there is no such thing. Not that He cannot know, but rather that there is nothing there to know. That information does not exist. There is no one who is specifically my wife and not the other; it is not a lack of information on my part, but an ambiguity in reality itself. That is basically the situation that occurs in quantum theory.

And the very confusion and the awful, hair-splitting interpretive attempts in quantum theory, and the entanglement and incomprehensibility of quantum theory, point to just how ungraspable such a state is, how illogical it is, how implausible it is. And therefore the claim that by virtue of quantum theory one can say that the evolutionary process does not require explanation because things can also happen without a cause—first of all, it is very… well, I’ll say later, it is very problematic, because even in quantum theory itself we are not really inclined to accept that.

I think I mentioned Feynman. Arthur Eddington once said—I think I mentioned this—that they once told Arthur Eddington there are only three people who understand relativity, so he asked, “Who is the third?” Besides Einstein and himself, of course. But when Feynman heard that story, Feynman said, forget it, everyone understands relativity. It’s simple. Quantum theory—not one person understands it. We just get used to it. We’ve only gotten used to it. Meaning, what does that mean? It means that to this day, despite quantum theory, the causal intuition still exists. So it has not really undermined the causal intuition, and people look for all kinds of causal explanations even within quantum theory, at the expense of locality or at the expense of other properties, in order to preserve the issue of causality. Therefore to say that quantum theory offers an alternative is not a simple statement at all. It is true that there is something there that could give rise to an alternative, but to say that we are prepared to accept as no less reasonable a non-causal explanation than a causal explanation—that is a very problematic claim. But I’ll get to that more later.

In another moment—I want here to point to the first point. I return to the four points I wanted to make here. The first point is that evolution is not really quantum, because quantum theory, even if it contains real ontic randomness, speaks about scales at the level of individual atoms. In evolution those scales are not in play. In evolution we are talking about weather, we are talking about tigers and monkeys and animals and all kinds of things. Those are the environmental conditions at play in the evolutionary field. And those conditions, like meteorology—we treat meteorology as some kind of random thing handled by probabilistic tools. But that is of course incorrect; meteorology is macroscopic physics and everything there is deterministic. The whole notion of chaos was born, basically, from Lorenz’s climate calculations. Because climate is a deterministic physical phenomenon, but very, very complex. And therefore instead of doing the calculation, we handle it with probabilistic tools. But the circumstances that cause natural selection in evolution are things of an order of magnitude much larger than individual atoms. Therefore there is no real randomness there. We use probability because it is complicated. How should you know what the weather will be in a certain place at a certain time? That’s hard. But not because reality itself is not fixed; rather, it is my lack of information. Therefore there is no genuine randomness there.

As for mutations, that is a more complex question. I’m not an expert in that field. As far as I understood, mutations too basically involve molecules at levels, on scales, much larger than those of quantum theory. But I know that there is some work being done to look for quantum effects on the formation of mutations in biology. Meaning, to look for fingerprints of quantum theory in biology is something a physicist would not even imagine. The scale makes no sense. It should not appear there. The larger scales—the law of large numbers erases all the quantum effects. So maybe it exists, maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know. I’m certainly not at the state of the art. But I’m saying that basically, the components we are used to treating as probabilistic, as random, are handled by probabilistic tools, but they are not random in evolution. That is the first claim.

But as I’ll say later, it also isn’t all that important to me, because the fourth claim will pull the rug out from under this whole story. The second claim—that was the first claim, that evolution is not quantum. The second claim: even if it were quantum or random, that would not damage my argument. Why would that not damage my argument? So for that I mentioned—it was the end of last time, I think. The claim was that the randomness takes place within a framework of rigid laws. I brought the example of the drunk with a ditch on one side and a wall on the other. The drunk staggers in a completely random way from side to side, but in the end he will be in the ditch. So what does it mean to say that this process is random? Of course not. When there is a wall on one side and a ditch on the other, the drunk can maneuver between them in a completely random way, but in the end he will be in the ditch. And what determines that he will be in the ditch is not his random gait, but the circumstances within which he acts, and those circumstances are not random.

And in the analogue for us—by the way, the drunk parable is used by neo-Darwinians to explain why it is random, which I simply cannot understand, how intelligent people arrive at arguments so foolish. To me that is an expression of the tendentiousness of the discussion. In the analogue, evolution—even if it contains components… those random components operate within a framework of laws, let’s say the four fundamental laws of physics, the four fundamental physical forces, and there is nothing random in them. These are clear laws: physics, chemistry, biology—all these are laws with nothing random in them. Within those laws, processes occur that, let us say for the sake of discussion, are random. So it’s like the drunk walking between the wall and the ditch. In the end, the result you get is one dictated by the circumstances. Therefore what do I care if within them you are proceeding randomly? That was the second claim, and therefore even if there are random components in evolution, that does not really explain or really offer an alternative to the claim that there is a guiding hand here.

The third argument is a question whether quantum theory really is random at all. And as I said, I mentioned this earlier in passing, there are disputes about these things; this is not yet agreed upon. Some propose various interpretations. This started with Einstein, of course, who refused to accept the accepted interpretations of quantum theory—or quantum theory itself, really. And then Bohm and various other people who talk about hidden variables, which basically means that this randomness is an expression of deterministic variables that are not measurable, not exposed to us, but are there inside and drive these processes. As far as I know, this option has still not entirely been removed from the table, although there are some theoretical works—Bell’s inequality, for those familiar with it—or experimental works that rule out quite a few of the hidden-variable options. But as far as I know the option still exists. Again, I’m not up to date as of today, but recently at any rate, as far as I understood, it still had not been entirely ruled out. This option exists, and therefore quantum theory too does not really necessarily tell us that the principle of causality is false, that things can occur without a cause. It may be that we give up locality, it may be that we give up other feelings or intuitions, but not necessarily causality. And since our causal intuition is very strong, then you need reasons—notice, you need good reasons—in order to give it up. Okay? And it is not certain that quantum theory has already given us, or gives us, sufficiently good reasons.

But leave all those arguments aside. I want to talk about something that makes the whole discussion unnecessary. In the end, the claim I want to make is the following. Suppose that there really is creation out of nothing in quantum theory, and collapses of wave functions where everything is done randomly and without causes. Random, meaning without a cause. That is, there is, let’s call it, ontic ambiguity—not lack of information, but in reality itself there really are open options. It can go this way, it can go that way, and in reality itself there are no causal processes underlying the selection among these options.

Let’s think for a moment about formation—yes, this is basically ex nihilo—about the formation in quantum theory of particles out of the vacuum. Then the world can also be formed that way, mutations can also be formed that way, evolution can also happen that way, and you do not need a guiding hand for that. In a world where there is an absolute vacuum, I don’t think anyone would imagine that there would be creation from nothing. Creation from nothing occurs because quantum theory exists in that empty world. Meaning, what makes that creation possible, or what causes that creation, is quantum theory, the quantum character of the world. The quantum character of the world basically says that out of a vacuum state, all kinds of things can come into being.

By the way, even a state of vacuum does not necessarily mean vacuum in the ontic sense we are usually accustomed to. The identification between concepts in physics and philosophy is always problematic, but I’ll leave those subtle points aside. What does this actually mean? It means that even when you speak in quantum theory about a vacuum, it is not really a vacuum. It is a vacuum over which the laws of quantum theory are imposed. And now things can come into being there from nothing. If so, I remind you that the argument I am talking about is the argument from the laws, not an argument within the laws. And if so, I return and ask: who created the quantum character of the world, which allows creations from nothing? Or in other words, I can say: those particles that are created out of the vacuum are created by something. They are not created for no reason. What is that something? What is the cause of it? Quantum theory. So there is a cause.

It is not true that… true, it is not a causal factor in the same sense that if I kick a ball then the ball flies. That one event caused another event or brought about another event. Here I am speaking about a different kind of causation, causation that speaks about the connection between a force or between a law and its result. Okay, but still. Meaning, there is something here underlying this occurrence; it does not just happen. And I will still ask: who is the guiding hand that determined the quantum character of the world?

I’ll formulate this another way, in a way we already saw in the previous proof, the cosmological one. If you remember Anaximander’s theory about the formation of opposites from the vacuum. The formation of particles from nothing in quantum theory also preserves the total charge. For example, if a particle is created, then together with it an antiparticle must be created so that the total charges remain zero, or remain the same. Okay? Now I ask: if this were an absolute vacuum and things happened without cause and without a guiding hand, then how does the random, casual formation of a particle also force the formation of an antiparticle? Who takes care of that, of that balance, that the conservation laws should always hold? You understand that this is not a vacuum. It is a vacuum with laws. There are laws there that determine what will happen inside that vacuum. So there is a vacuum in the sense of objects—that is, there are no objects in the vacuum state—but there are laws there, a very, very defined and intricate system of laws, only thanks to which that vacuum can turn into something. And therefore to say that there is no causality and no need for a guiding hand and things just happen like that is simply not to understand what quantum theory says.

And therefore all three of the previous steps I took are not really necessary, because from my point of view even if everything is true—even if quantum means randomness and evolution is quantum and everything—accept that it is all correct, it still does not make the argument from the laws unnecessary. It makes the argument within the laws unnecessary. And that again is an expression of this difference between the two formulations. When I ask, given the laws, what is the probability that a world would arise without a guiding hand, my answer is one. Obviously it will happen. And therefore my question is not what is the probability that a world will happen within the laws, but what is the probability that laws will happen within which such a world can indeed arise. And when I speak in the context of quantum theory, I ask about the laws of quantum theory. In that sense quantum theory changes nothing regarding our discussion.

And therefore I now want to make the following claim: since this process is a process that has scientific explanations, I now want to argue that not only do evolution and the scientific explanations not refute the physico-theological proof, but in my opinion they strengthen it. It simply becomes stronger. And why? Because if I really understand that throughout this process—now I’m using all the stages I went through, the four stages I went through, or most of them—if I assume that throughout this process things do not really happen randomly and everything is controlled by a system of rigid laws with nothing random in it, then what comes out here? What comes out is that there was someone fourteen billion years ago who established some system of laws, and that system takes us from a singular point of matter, like the Big Bang, to the whole safari we know around us. Human beings and classes and language and cars and spaceships to the moon and animals and all the crazy symbiosis we know in the world around us. And all this happened by itself without a guiding hand. Can you imagine a greater guiding hand than that?

The parable—I don’t remember if I already spoke about it—the parable, yes. There is a lump of plasticine in the corner of a room. A completely sealed room, no windows, nothing, no air. There is a lump of plasticine and that’s it. An absolute vacuum besides that. I closed the door and came back fourteen billion years later. And what I found there was that the Russians are invading Ukraine, spaceships are reaching the moon, animals are filling the savannah with plants in billions of crazy and complex species. And all of this inside that room out of the lump of plasticine. But how did it happen by itself? Apparently there was some system of laws there that created a dynamics in which a lump of plasticine turns into everything I know around me. Now, who can produce such a system of laws? Try randomly generating systems of laws—there is no chance, and I’ll get to that in a moment—there is no chance that they would take a lump of plasticine and produce from it all this madness. Therefore whoever established this system of laws saw fourteen billion years ahead what was going to happen here in a process with no guiding hand along the way. It seems to me that if that does not require a super-intelligence, then I don’t know what does.

And therefore in the end, after all these comments, it seems to me that the scientific explanations not only do not refute the physico-theological proof, but strengthen it. That is the summary regarding quantum theory.

Now I want to move in—we are getting, as I said, we’ll also get to the anthropic principle and all the things that came up last time, I’m getting to it shortly, I hope. I’ll start with another question, return to another question that I already dealt with from a certain angle, and that is the question of what complexity is. Because quite a few people challenge this argument with the claim that there is actually nothing special about our world. Any system of laws you take, wait long enough, and very, very complex and special creatures or phenomena will arise. And true, they will be different from the complex and special phenomena of our world, but they too will be no less special and complex. Therefore there is nothing special either in our phenomena or in the system of laws that created them, if I now return to the formulation from the laws.

This matter—I mentioned it at the beginning of the process when I spoke about the concept of entropy, and I said that the concept of entropy measures the phenomenon of complexity objectively. Therefore one cannot claim, “Look, complexity is in the eye of the beholder. You see it as complex because it seems special to you, but actually anything that would have been created you could have seen as complex.” So I said that’s not an argument. It is not an argument because complexity has a mathematical-physical measure called entropy. And if that measure takes part in the laws of nature, then it means that this measure does not reflect only my perspective, because otherwise it would not be expressed in the laws of nature. Rather there is something objective here in reality itself; there is something objectively complex here.

The formulation I am speaking about now is different. It does not challenge the measure of entropy; it only claims that in every system of laws—this attacks the argument from the laws—in every system of laws there will arise phenomena or creatures with low entropy if you wait long enough, or very special and complex creatures. Therefore they really will be special and complex, but in every system of laws such creatures will arise. This is another argument, and the question is what to do with it.

Now, regarding this, there are many attempts, some for scientific reasons, some for theological controversy, but still people do all sorts of experiments with what are called cellular automata. Meaning, various random processes where you define on a computer some set of laws, certain dynamics laws, and let it run. Right? For example, there is a well-known game that talks about, say, you have something like a chessboard but it has no colors, it is all white. Now you randomly choose, say, three places where the squares will be black. Now you say there is a rule: any square next to which there are two black squares also becomes black. If it has two nearest neighbors that are black, then it too becomes black. And so on; if it becomes black, now you have to check whether there are more squares with two black neighbors, they too will become black, and if not then it goes back to being white. In short, you can define certain dynamic laws, initial conditions, and run them.

And many such experiments have been done—this is called cellular automata, these kinds of dynamic games—and it turns out that in almost every system of dynamic laws you define, very surprising and special structures arise in this dynamic process at some stage. Therefore the claim is that in the system of laws prevailing here, the laws of nature, special structures with low entropy indeed arise. But then the argument from the laws does not really hold water, because every system of laws would have done this; there is nothing special about this particular system of laws.

Now, what I want to argue is that there are a few points that need to be taken into account regarding which cellular automata differ from our world. First, I’ll say that in this analogy there are three fundamental problems. One problem: this complexity—it is not true that it is not rare. Complexity at the level of life is very rare complexity. It can happen in other systems of laws, but it is very rare. It is not true that it always happens. Various surprising, interesting things happen, but not at a level of complexity like life, with all the crazy complexities we know from biology.

And to demonstrate this, let’s do a simple experiment. Let’s look at our own universe, forget other systems of laws. In our universe, according to this claim, there should really have been—after all, as far as we know for now at least, life exists only on Earth, right? They have not found life on other planets. That is one of the missions that most excites the imagination of science-fiction writers and also of real scientists: to look for life elsewhere. I ask: what other complex structures, not life, have they found on other planets? After all, if in every place where a system of laws prevails, complex structures of some kind will arise—not of the kind of life, then of some other kind—then I would expect that on every star we land on, or every place we go, there would be complex structures, only not necessarily biological structures, or not necessarily structures like human beings or animals or whatever, but something else. I do not know such structures. I don’t know them. There are very special inanimate structures everywhere. But they do not come close to the entropy level of life. The entropy level of life is far, far beyond anything we know in the inanimate world, with all the complexity of physics and chemistry. Therefore this argument does not hold water empirically, because according to this argument I would expect that on every star—okay, the conditions for the formation of life are not there, so life did not arise there. Fine. But those conditions should have created special structures of another kind, not the kind of life. Have we seen that? No. I do not know of any, at any rate. Therefore that is the first bug in the analogy to cellular automata: it is simply not true; complexity is indeed rare, contrary to what the objectors claim.

Another thing: I want to argue that the complexity has to be stable. Meaning, let’s return to the ideal gas example. I started with it in order to explain the concept of entropy. Think of a bag containing gas molecules that concentrates them in the upper-left corner of our box, okay? An empty box. I open the bag and the molecules spread throughout the whole space. Meaning, molecules that were gathered in one place spread throughout the whole space. We do not know of a phenomenon in which molecules that are spread throughout the whole space return and gather in the corner. This is one of the great puzzles of thermodynamics: where does this irreversibility come from? How can it be that there is a direction to time, where time dictates a direction for the physical process, when in fact there does not seem to be any advantage of this over that?

Now, the accepted answer to this is that it does happen. Gas dispersed throughout the whole space does indeed gather for a moment in a corner, but that happens for one moment and that’s it. Since all the gas molecules are freely moving through the space of the box, among other things there can be some moment when by chance they are all concentrated in one special corner of the box. And a second later it disperses again. This does not count—the state of concentration in one special place is a special state. Yes? That is our parable for a state of low entropy, an ordered and special state, okay? So the claim is that special states do indeed arise, even in the opposite direction, against the thermodynamic direction. But it happens for a moment and disappears; it is not a stable state.

There will not be a situation, say if I release that bag and the molecules spread through space, you will see that they remain dispersed through space over time. That is a stable state. You will not find a state where they return and gather in the corner and stay there over time as a stable state. That will not happen. And here lies the asymmetry. In the direction of dispersal, yes; in the direction of concentration, no. What does this actually mean? That the laws of thermodynamics, or the measures of entropy, measure stable states. States that continue to exist, not a state that forms for a moment and then disperses.

Understand that if you shake a box with many marbles inside it, then in the middle suddenly a state may arise in which all the marbles are arranged in an equilateral triangle. All together. It will happen for one second and disperse, like many other states. There is nothing special here and it requires no explanation. I entirely agree. But that is not what happens in our world. What happens in our world is that an equilateral triangle is formed and remains that way over time, and only improves. It began as an isosceles triangle and became equilateral. That does not happen in cellular automata. It will happen there if you put into the dynamics, of course, laws of heredity and laws that preserve stability. But then you put them in by hand. Because if you do not put them in, it will not happen. Therefore the arguments from these cellular automata processes, in my view, are really a profound misunderstanding.

We are talking in terms of fourteen billion—maybe really this is that one second. What? I didn’t understand. I’m saying, in terms of fourteen billion years, maybe our world too is just such a second? So for that we need to get more into the question of what determines the time scale. Say I am shaking such marbles—what determines the time scale for which the triangle needs to remain in its form before I say that something happened here, that entropy went down? And the answer is that it depends on the speed of the shaking, right, and it depends on the rates of the microscopic processes happening there. If on the scale of those rates it continues over time, then it is something stable.

It seems to me that in our case you cannot say that this business is proceeding randomly and by chance for fourteen billion years we are stuck on some special state that in another moment—moment in the sense of billions of years—will disperse. Because the processes are not processes of—the microscopic processes are not processes of billions of years; they are processes of physics, chemistry, and biology. Therefore there is a direction to this process. One cannot ignore the fact that there is some process here that has stability. I am not saying it cannot come apart in another hundred billion years; of course it can. But these are processes that have some kind of stability that requires explanation. It is not something that happens for a moment and disappears, like in cellular automata.

I’ll perhaps bring an example. There is, as you know, at the University of Berkeley a famous project called SETI. I saw this in some Christian theologian, I don’t even remember where I saw it, I once found this example in some article—a wonderful example in my view. There is the SETI project. What is SETI? They scan the electromagnetic signals reaching us from space and try to find messages indicating life somewhere in the universe. How do they do this? We look, after all—we do not know what language these living creatures speak in various places. What we do, of course, is try to look for structures in the information reaching us that are not random, okay? If there are some special structures there, non-random structures, that probably means that what sent them was not a random process, but a guiding hand, something that sent some message here that created some structure. That is the claim, and they are looking for it. So far they apparently haven’t really found it, but they are looking, and the claim is that the moment we discover a structure in the electromagnetic signal that is sufficiently clearly non-random, that means there are intelligent beings somewhere in space that created it.

Now I ask—or rather he asks, that theologian whose words I read—how does the atheist neo-Darwinian relate to this? After all, in the end every random process creates complex phenomena, that’s what you claim, right? So if we discover a complex phenomenon in those signals reaching us from space, the conclusion should not be that there is an intelligent being that sent us those signals, but rather that out of the infinite processes happening throughout the universe there was something that created a complex signal. Statistically that can happen. Our right triangle, yes? So why does the entire scientific world understand that the moment we discover a special structure there, with internal correlations that do not look random, that means there was some intelligence that created it and sent it? I think this is a wonderful example of the stupidity of this objection. To me this objection is really stupid.

In the end, what you are really trying to claim is that we cannot draw a conclusion from anything that has a low probability. And I think this is a claim that does not stand not only the test of logic, but you yourself do not act that way—you yourself as a neo-atheist do not act that way. You yourself assume that if there is a complex structure then apparently something created it and stands behind it, and therefore it serves as an indication that there is an intelligent factor that created it. So for me the world is the SETI project. The world is built in a very special way. It seems to me that if the information about our world were arriving at the receivers of the SETI project, it seems to me they would explode. The entropy would be so low they simply could not handle it. Here it is obvious that there is a guiding hand. It seems to me so—I don’t need scientific or mathematical arguments for this—it seems to me to be an extremely basic and simple intuition.

But here I come to the anthropic principle, because it really is what stands behind all these disputes. It is not quite as stupid as it sounds, although I still think it is not very plausible. What is the anthropic principle? It would say that this is a necessary but not sufficient condition. What? It would say about this that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition. What do you mean? That in order to hear those sounds and so on, it’s a threshold condition, to see that something is arriving, something complex, but still it really isn’t proof that someone— But what good would that do you? But a complex condition arrives, something complex arrives, and you say: okay, maybe it was created by something intelligent and maybe not, right? That is basically what you are saying. Okay, and then what is the conclusion? So maybe there is something intelligent and maybe not. You already know that conclusion today. And then it would be a reason to investigate. There is also a reason to investigate today. You know, they invested a lot of money in SETI. Even today I am in a situation where maybe there is some intelligent factor somewhere and maybe not, and after SETI discovers that signal I will remain in exactly the same situation. So that is why I invested the money? No, he says it’s a threshold condition. From there onward. But it isn’t a threshold condition at all. It means that from there onward it’s more worthwhile to investigate, I don’t know. But if you could already investigate more, they would already be doing it; you don’t need SETI for that. SETI itself is the further investigation. It doesn’t help at all. It is clear to everyone that it is not a threshold condition. If such a signal comes, that means there is an intelligent factor that sent it. You can read all the literature on this matter. That is the simple assumption that nobody even thinks to challenge. Only when these discussions come up in the theological context—elsewhere everyone takes this way of thinking as obvious.

Come, let’s look at the anthropic principle, because I think it sharpens this point from a somewhat sharper angle. The anthropic principle in its origin was actually a religious argument of believers, yes? What is found in Duties of the Heart, for example, is one version of it. It says: look, we are here, and this is amazing, there is exactly what we need in order to live. There is enough air here, enough water, food, and everything we need to exist, and the warmth of the sun and all those things. Because here, by chance, in the place where we are, there are exactly those things needed for us to exist. Does that not mean there is a guiding hand here taking care of us? Yes, that is the anthropic principle.

So the opponents, the atheists who object to this principle, say—and this is what is usually called today the anthropic principle, this is the objection to the anthropic principle of the creationists—and that basically means that the atheists’ anthropic principle says: if the conditions that allow you to live here were not here, you would not be here to ask why they are not here. Meaning, the fact that you are here is thanks to those very conditions. So there is nothing remarkable here, nothing wondrous. That is basically what is called the anthropic principle from the atheist side. Today when people say anthropic principle, they mean this, although originally it was the first principle.

Look, this formulation appears even in Hawking’s book, which really raises serious questions for me about his intelligence. He probably was an intelligent person, but I don’t know—when you are tendentious, it sounds like people really do become a little… He, for example, gives the following example. All right? Say you are sentenced to death. You stand before a firing squad of ten skilled shooters. Okay? Standing at a distance of, I don’t know, ten or twenty meters from you, aiming accurate rifles at you, ten people. They fire at you and all miss. And then you ask yourself, what a miracle, this is amazing, how can it be that when I am standing here with ten shooters, all ten missed and I remained alive? And the answer he offers is that if they had not missed, you would not be here to ask that question. Now, this is of course a foolish argument. Why? Because the chance that ten skilled shooters will miss from twenty meters away and leave me alive is still vanishingly small. Therefore here is an excellent point: this excuse that says that if they had not missed, you would not be here, is an infantile excuse.

But what lies behind it is a somewhat different claim. And notice: often the anthropic argument is raised in this formulation, which really is a foolish formulation. Yes, Richard Swinburne, a well-known theologian, says, yes, imagine that someone kidnaps me as a hostage, puts me in a room containing a hundred machines. Each one is designed to shuffle a deck of cards completely at random. You have to press the button that activates all the machines. If all hundred machines spit out red hearts—each machine—then you go free. If not, all the machines explode together with you. I press the button trembling, and a hundred red hearts come out. Right? You tell yourself, obviously—well what, there is no wonder here. If they had not come out, you would not be here to marvel at the miracle. Does that make sense? Surely it is obvious that something happened here that requires explanation. Something implausible, something of very low probability. So what if without it I would not exist? Does that make it understandable? If I were not here to ask this question, then the question would not exist? So I would not be here to ask it; then someone else should have asked it. But still the question… what difference does it make whether I am here or not? There is a question here that requires explanation.

Therefore it seems to me that in a somewhat more intelligent formulation—again, not everyone is stupid—the claim is different. The anthropic principle in this formulation is already an argument that requires attention. It is no longer a stupid claim of the firing-squad type and so on. Meaning, the firing-squad argument itself, if you apply the principle of charity and assume people are not complete idiots, then they probably mean to say that there were many such firing-squad attempts, and the fact that you were the successful case is not surprising. Somebody had to be in the successful case.

Yes? Just as if you throw a die a hundred times and some series of results comes out—say one, three, two, six, one—some sequence, a vector. What is the probability that exactly that vector comes out? Zero—six to the minus one hundred. No, sorry—one hundred to the minus six. Right? Yes, no, six to the minus one hundred. So that is an imaginary number, tiny, fantastically tiny. Right? No chance it will happen. But it happened. Does that require explanation? Obviously not. Why? Because in every such experiment some vector of a hundred results will come out, and every such vector has probability six to the minus one hundred. Therefore I know in advance that a very, very unlikely result will occur, but it is certain that one will occur. Which of the unlikely results will occur, I cannot say.

If, for example, someone were here and said, “Look, but the result one, three, two, six, five, one will come out,” giving me the vector, and that is exactly what came out—that would be something that requires explanation. Why? What is the difference? After all, some result has to happen. The difference is in the place where you single out the result. The result is special. Now if you say that specifically it came out and not the others, that requires explanation. For example, if the result is one hundred sixes. Now the probability of that coming out is exactly like the probability of the previous vector I described—there is no difference. Six to the minus one hundred. But if any other result comes out, nobody would bat an eye; but if one hundred sixes come out, they’ll call the police. This casino uses loaded dice. Why? The probability is six to the minus one hundred here and here. Some result has to happen. Our equilateral triangle from earlier—in this case a neat, ordered result came out, six six six six six six—so what? The probability of getting it is like the probability of getting any other result. So? The difference is that the result six six six six six is special to us. And once it is special to us, when we see that specifically it came out, that singles it out not against every other result, but against the set of all other results.

Every other result is different from all the other results, but one result has to come out. But there is no one result there that is special against all the others; meaning, they are all special in some sense, yes? “All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way,” as Anna Karenina says. So these results are each very special—six to the minus one hundred is the probability of getting them—but they are not different from every other result, whose probability is also six to the minus one hundred. But the result six six six has the same probability, six to the minus one hundred, yet it is measured against the set of all other results and not against each other result separately, because for us it is a result already defined in advance as a special result.

I’ll give you an example. My sister was once at a camp in Canada. She was a counselor there at some youth camp in Canada. She told me that on the Sabbath she went walking there—there was some lake near the camp—and she saw some guy there, someone from that place, and lo and behold, unbelievable, the guy was from Jerusalem. He apparently even lived not far from her. Somewhere in Canada, from the whole universe, it turned out that specifically a guy from Jerusalem got there. She asked me what the chance is of such a thing happening. I told her: the same chance as a guy from neighborhood number 17C in Tokyo showing up. From a neighborhood small enough to be comparable to Jerusalem, right? The same chance. A Jerusalemite is no less likely than any other place. So there is no reason to marvel at meeting someone from Jerusalem as opposed to someone from Indonesia, from Bali, or from I don’t know where, from Zimbabwe. Okay? He has to come from somewhere, doesn’t he?

Now why is it still surprising? Because she is from Jerusalem. If she were not from Jerusalem, then the chance of meeting someone from Jerusalem should not be surprising. It is like any other place in the world. But since she is from Jerusalem, Jerusalem is perceived as a special result against the rest of the world. Even though the probability is of course the same as any other place. Then you marvel—wait, how can it be that it would be they—suppose now she sees another person there far away by the lake, goes over there, unrelated to us, they don’t know each other, and it turns out he too is from Jerusalem. Then they see yet another person, elsewhere, and he too is from Jerusalem. Then of course this is something that you need to call the police about, right? It can’t be. But why can’t it be? What is different in this sequence from a sequence of Jerusalem, Tokyo, Zimbabwe, Amsterdam—say in population segments of, say, one hundred thousand people. Let’s divide the world into squares containing one hundred thousand inhabitants and ask ourselves what the probability of such a sequence is. The same probability as any other sequence. But no, there it is something special. Why? Because there is something special in this sequence against all the other sequences, and therefore it is surprising. Okay?

So what the anthropic principle basically claims—and let me just finish the difficulty, we’ll get to the answer later—is that if we now go to the analogue, then in our world special phenomena indeed arose. And true, you cannot just wave this away—it is not cellular automata and not anything of that sort. All these objections are incorrect. But of course if these results were not here, if the laws of nature were not as they are, we would not be here to marvel at their specialness. Because they are what make it possible for human beings to live and function here.

By itself, I said, that is a stupid argument. And they claim: no, but in the end there were a collection of formations, yes, of systems of laws, one of which is our system of laws, which indeed produces a special phenomenon. Then it is no longer surprising. Like with the firing squad. Assuming there were many, many formations, like a multiverse—whoever asked here, yes, Professor Turkin, you also asked about both the multiverse and the anthropic principle—these are two sides of the same coin. Once there are many, many attempts, in one of them a special system of laws came out, and I am its product. Then there is nothing to marvel at. Obviously if that system did not allow for me, I would not be here. Okay? And if I add to that the assumption that there really were many other attempts that failed, then that really is an alternative that requires explanation, or an objection that must be dealt with. Okay?

Now notice: this objection attacks not only the argument within the laws but also the argument from the laws, or mainly the argument from the laws. Because the argument from the laws basically says—the whole advantage of the argument from the laws over the argument within the laws, what is it? The argument within the laws is basically false. Why is it false? Because once the system of laws exists, I can tell you that I have a natural explanation of how complex creatures arise. That does not require the assumption that there is a guiding hand here. So I proposed: yes, but how do you explain the system of laws itself? Why specifically such a special system of laws? The answer: this system of laws too is actually a system within laws, meta-laws. What? There are many, many systems of laws being produced. There is some mechanism that produces many systems of laws. One of those systems of laws is the laws of our universe, and within it life arises. You ask what the probability is that such a special system of laws would be created, one that allows the formation of life. The answer is one. Why? Because there are many other attempts that failed. The probability that it succeeds is one in a billion, so there are a billion other universes, and our universe is the universe in which it did work. Like with the firing squad. Therefore there is no need to assume a guiding hand here. That is basically the claim of the anthropic principle and also of the multiverse, yes? If I say there are many universes and our universe is special, there are other universes that are not special, then there is a distribution here, there is a result here that fits the prior distribution, and therefore there is nothing surprising here. Even in the prior distribution I would have thought that one out of a billion billions of universes would be special. Okay, so this is our universe. How did it happen specifically here? That is not a question. It happened in the place where we can exist and realize that it happened. Fine? That is not the question why it happened specifically here. The “here” is defined as the place where it happened. And that is all. So this is an objection that requires…

But there is a difference with the multiverse—there is a bit of a difference with the multiverse. Infinite attempts, not like there is some number of attempts. Here there is no infinite… Infinite I don’t know, but large enough. I assume it is large enough as well. No, but there is a difference between many and infinite. If we say there is an infinite… if the probability is one in a billion, you need a billion attempts; that is enough for the physico-theological proof to fall. You do not need probability one. You need expected value one, or expected value of order one. The physico-theological argument is built on the idea that it is not plausible that such a thing arose without a guiding hand. And the answer is: it is plausible. Not certain, not probability one, but plausible. In any case, the argument falls. You do not need probability one for that.

All right, so let’s get to that next time. What do we do? What, you’re not going to leave us in suspense? You’ll have something to think about. Okay. Until next week—Sabbath peace. Sabbath peace. What, it’s another two weeks, not next week. Another two weeks? You have plenty of time to think. Sabbath peace. Sabbath peace. Hi netzach is that.