Faith – Lesson 26

Table of Contents

• Dual description in optics: Fermat’s principle and Snell’s law
• Classical mechanics: Newton versus Lagrange and minimum descriptions
• Aristotle and the return of teleology to modern physics
• Teleology, belief in God, and Kafka as a metaphor for blind causality
• Philosophical equivalence and the impossibility of experimental decision
• Modern physics: quantum theory and field theory as purely teleological description
• The physico-theological proof: optimum, purpose, and laws of nature as a conclusion pointing to a guiding hand
• Questions about force, understanding, and Kant: what is “understood” in physics
• Critique of the “church of science” and atheist apologetics
• Multiverse versus many stars: the question of the fine-tuning of the laws of physics
• Primary intuitions, dogmatism, and Thomas Kuhn versus Popper
• “Judge every person favorably,” Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, and Maimonides and Rabbeinu Yonah
• “A judge has only what his eyes can see” and coping with bias and education
• The relation between the physico-theological proof and science: a scientific process without a falsifiable conclusion
• Moving on to the fourth conversation and revelation: the Kuzari, mass testimony, and the lecture schedule

Summary

General overview

The lecture sums up the physico-theological proof through the tension between causal description and teleological description in physics, arguing that teleology is not just an “anecdote” but the real description, while causality is an alternative and equivalent formulation. The claim is presented that in areas of modern physics such as quantum theory and field theory, what actually appears is only a teleological description, and this, in the lecturer’s view, strengthens the indication of a “guiding hand” and the existence of God. The discussion expands into a critique of dogmatism and apologetics, especially on the part of self-identified atheists, and into clarifying the relation between a physico-theological argument and scientific method, where the conclusion “there is a God” is not falsifiable, but the path of inference resembles the way a scientific theory is constructed.

Dual description in optics: Fermat’s principle and Snell’s law

The lecturer presents Fermat’s principle in geometric optics as a principle that unifies the laws, according to which a ray of light “chooses” the path that minimizes time/distance to its destination, and shows its mathematical equivalence to the laws of geometric optics. The example of a lifeguard who runs more on land and swims less in water in order to minimize time is described as a structure parallel to refraction and Snell’s law, so that the optimal path creates a change in angle in accordance with the different speed in different media. The lecturer emphasizes that standard physical discourse presents such formulations as no more than metaphor, because light and inanimate bodies do not “choose.”

Classical mechanics: Newton versus Lagrange and minimum descriptions

The lecturer presents the equivalence between describing dynamics according to Newton’s laws, forces, and acceleration, and describing them according to minimum principles in Lagrangian mechanics, where one defines a quantity such as the Lagrangian/Hamiltonian and the path is obtained as an optimum. He adds the example of a body falling from a mountaintop, which can be described both as the effect of gravitational force and as a striving toward minimum potential energy, and he emphasizes that these formulations sound teleological because they are phrased in terms of “in order to” rather than “because of.” He argues that the prevailing approach sees teleological description as a useful mathematical anecdote but not as a description of reality, because of the assumption that inanimate bodies have no will.

Aristotle and the return of teleology to modern physics

The lecturer describes Aristotelian teleology through the four elements, in which bodies “strive” toward their natural place, like stones striving toward earth and fire striving upward. He notes that modern physics in the early modern period was presented as abandoning teleology in favor of causality, but argues that after hundreds of years teleology returned to physics in the form of optimum principles. He ties the debate to an ideological question, because teleology can imply evidence of goals set in advance and therefore of a directing hand, while causality is perceived as blind.

Teleology, belief in God, and Kafka as a metaphor for blind causality

The lecturer argues that mocking teleology as if “the stone chooses” is a straw man, because teleology can be formulated so that it is not the stone that chooses, but the one who created it who chooses on its behalf, or who established laws that lead to an optimum. He distinguishes between a causal description that evokes the sense of a “blind” world and a teleological description that hints at an organizing factor, and he brings in Kafka as a description of a life in which causes toss a person around without purpose, thereby creating frustration. He draws a distinction between determinism/causality and libertarianism/free choice as a pair of concepts connected to the sense of a guiding hand versus randomness.

Philosophical equivalence and the impossibility of experimental decision

The lecturer states that when two descriptions are mathematically equivalent, there is no experiment that can decide which one is “correct,” and therefore the decision is philosophical rather than scientific. He presents his personal position that teleology is the true description and causality is the anecdote, because reality proceeds toward goals in an optimal way in accordance with what the Holy One, blessed be He, sets before it. He explains that preferring causality alone seems to him like insistence without empirical basis when equivalence exists.

Modern physics: quantum theory and field theory as purely teleological description

The lecturer argues that in modern fields such as quantum theory and field theory there is no causal description at all, only purposive description, and that in quantum theory the concept of force “does not exist,” while potential appears in the Schrödinger equation. He presents this as a distinction between “force” as a causal description and “potential” as a purposive description, and mentions an article by Feynman dealing with this. He rejects the claim that scientific progress resulted from abandoning teleology, and argues that the progress came from empiricism, and that one could have advanced just as well through Lagrangian formulations instead of Newtonian ones.

The physico-theological proof: optimum, purpose, and laws of nature as a conclusion pointing to a guiding hand

The lecturer defines teleology as a combination of striving toward a purpose and carrying out that striving in an optimal way through minimization/maximization of a quantity. He presents the laws of nature as a structure that leads paths optimally toward outcomes that were set in place, and concludes that it is plausible that there is someone who set the goals and determined the ways to reach them. He calls this a significant indication rather than a conclusive proof, and argues that preferring the possibility of a directing factor is, in his view, more rational, while insisting on causality alone seems like an apologetic stance meant to defend the atheist option.

Questions about force, understanding, and Kant: what is “understood” in physics

A debate develops with a student who raises the wonder in the concept of “one body attracting another body,” and points out that both causality and teleology use words that do not really explain “how” the thing works. The lecturer replies that he understands very well what force is as a natural tendency that appears through its effects, and that the inability to “touch” force does not make it metaphysical. He mentions Kant in order to say that even tangible bodies are perceived through their effects, and compares this to questions about the soul, where asking about color/weight is simply not the right parameter for describing it.

Critique of the “church of science” and atheist apologetics

The lecturer argues that the self-identified atheist side sometimes displays a high level of intellectual fanaticism, and compares it to a “church” that digs in behind its positions and ties itself in knots in order to defend atheism. He gives an example from responses to columns he wrote on Ynet Science after the book God Plays Dice, and argues that the responses there reflected closed-mindedness and an unwillingness to listen. He also brings an example from a communist book called Lenin and the New Physics by Omelyanovsky as a parable for ideological apologetics that bends physics to fit Lenin’s writings.

Multiverse versus many stars: the question of the fine-tuning of the laws of physics

A student asks why it is not enough that there are billions of stars to explain the appearance of life on one planet, and the lecturer replies that the question is about the rarity of the system of laws that allows life, not about a random realization within that same system of laws. He emphasizes that many stars exist under one system of physical laws, whereas multiverse refers to many systems of laws. He argues that talk about complex creatures arising under any circumstances is not observationally supported, and points out that we do not find complex creatures elsewhere despite our observational capabilities.

Primary intuitions, dogmatism, and Thomas Kuhn versus Popper

The lecturer explains that all thought rests on primary intuitions and assumptions, and the question is how aware a person is of them and how high a price he is willing to pay in order to hold onto them. He rejects the postmodern conclusion that dispute proves there is no truth, and argues that dispute shows that at least one side is mistaken. He cites Popper on falsification and Thomas Kuhn, who argued that science in practice does not abandon a theory because of one isolated difficulty, but only in a paradigm crisis, and from this he justifies a certain conservatism and somewhat strained explanations up to a reasonable boundary, depending on how well established the theory is.

“Judge every person favorably,” Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, and Maimonides and Rabbeinu Yonah

The lecturer quotes a saying in the name of Rabbi Chaim of Brisk about a “crooked mind” that was created in order to judge others favorably, and immediately notes that in the commentators on the Mishnah in Avot, Maimonides and Rabbeinu Yonah do not say to use a crooked mind, but a straight mind against the evil inclination. He gives the example that a murderer chasing someone with a gun does not deserve the interpretation that he “isn’t a murderer,” but one can still judge the person favorably according to his circumstances without denying the act. He emphasizes that judging favorably means fitting the interpretation to the person and the circumstances in a reasonable way, not distorting reality.

“A judge has only what his eyes can see” and coping with bias and education

A student raises the hypothetical claim that the lecturer might have been on the opposite side had he been born into a different family, and the lecturer says he has no ability to answer such hypotheticals beyond trying to do his best in examining himself and examining opposing positions. He rejects postmodern despair and presents an ideal of sincere effort to reduce dogmatism, while recognizing that one can make mistakes. He argues that “education” can explain both religious intuitions and atheist intuitions equally well, and therefore the real measure is the degree of strain and the price a person is willing to pay in order to maintain his assumptions.

The relation between the physico-theological proof and science: a scientific process without a falsifiable conclusion

The lecturer explains that a scientific claim is accepted as one that can be subjected to a test of falsification, and therefore the conclusion “there is a God” is not a scientific claim because there is no experiment that could falsify it. He argues that the path from facts to the theory that explains them is scientific in its structure, similar to the construction of theories like gravitation or electromagnetism, and he mentions abduction as a form of inference. He adds that science strengthens confidence in the inferential tools themselves, because in fields that are testable it turns out that these tools “work pretty well,” and therefore he is willing to use them also for an inference that is not falsifiable.

Moving on to the fourth conversation and revelation: the Kuzari, mass testimony, and the lecture schedule

The lecturer concludes that the physico-theological proof has been completed, and he moves on to the “fourth conversation” in the book as the next stage in the paths to faith, while morality is only one section within “revealing arguments.” A student asks about proof of revelation, such as the giving of the Torah at Sinai according to the Kuzari, and the lecturer says he will get to that later and notes that tradition and revelation are not free of problems and require discussion. It is explained that the structure of the lectures alternates with Rabbi Elgazi, and the lecture ends with the blessing of a kosher and joyful Passover and setting the continuation for after Passover.

Okay, today we’re finishing the physico-theological proof, and maybe we’ll even start the next stage. Let me just remind you where we were at the end of last time. I started describing two ways of relating to physical occurrences. A good example of this is what’s called Fermat’s principle, or the discussion in geometrical optics. When I look at a straight light ray moving along, and let’s say at some point it passes from air into water, then the direction of the ray changes. That’s what’s called refraction. There’s a refraction in the direction of the ray’s motion, and Snell’s law… sorry, that’s not connected to this, but wait… Snell’s law describes the relation between the directions of motion, right? It’s the sines of the angles, doesn’t matter. The difference between the two media, the first medium and the second medium, air and water, basically determines the degree of refraction, the new angle at which the ray will continue.

I said that there is a parallel description of the phenomena of geometrical optics, and it basically includes all of geometrical optics in one principle. And the principle is that the light ray always chooses the shortest path to the target. It turns out that if you take that formulation, it is completely equivalent to the laws of geometrical optics. Meaning, you can formulate it this way, or you can formulate it as a collection of laws, and it gives the same result.

The example that is always given for this is when there is a lifeguard standing on the shore and someone is drowning in the sea, and the lifeguard wants to reach him as quickly as possible. Here we’re talking about the shortest time, not the shortest path, because what matters here is time. So it’s not correct that the lifeguard should run in a straight line and then continue in that same straight line by rowing or swimming in the water. It’s more efficient for him to go at such an angle that gives him more distance on land and less distance in the sea. Meaning, he has to run a bit farther on land, a bit more in that direction, and then break a bit in the water, because on land he moves faster than in water. Therefore, in order to minimize the time, to bring the time to a minimum, it’s worthwhile for the path to be constructed so that it has more components on land than in water. Then he will reach the drowning person the fastest. Obviously, there’s no point in going far away and then coming back through the water; that makes no sense. So you can do some calculation and show that there is an optimal path, which is the path the lifeguard should choose.

This example—if you look at it from above—the lifeguard runs along the shore and then starts swimming in the water, and you’ll see a difference in his angle of motion. That is exactly Snell’s law. That’s the refraction a light ray makes in order to minimize the time it takes to reach the target.

Now, these two descriptions are usually regarded in physics as an anecdote. Meaning, when I say that light chooses the shortest path, that’s a metaphor. Light doesn’t choose anything. Light is light; it’s inanimate. So it isn’t supposed to choose anything or want anything or decide anything. Therefore, this is usually taken as some kind of literary, metaphorical, whatever-you-want-to-call-it description of the laws of optics. But in truth it is Snell’s law. Meaning, Fermat’s principle is the anecdote. In other words, one can show mathematically that the description given by Fermat’s principle is equivalent to the description given by the laws of optics. But that’s just an interesting mathematical phenomenon.

The same thing also exists with respect to phenomena in mechanics. Lagrangian mechanics basically built all of Newtonian mechanics through principles of minimization. Meaning, through… you construct some quantity. In the case of Fermat’s principle, that quantity is time. You minimize the time taken by the path. In other contexts you construct a different quantity, called the Lagrangian or the Hamiltonian, doesn’t matter. You construct some quantity, and the body chooses the path so that this quantity will be minimal. And all of mechanics can be described this way. It’s even a more efficient, more compact description in certain respects. It doesn’t always make the calculations easier, but it’s more compact.

And so in mechanics too we basically have two forms of relating to the paths of bodies, to the dynamics of bodies, where these two forms of description are equivalent. You can prove mathematically that these two forms of description are completely equivalent. The description by Newton’s laws—there is a force that creates acceleration and so on—and the description by Lagrange, which speaks about a minimization of some quantity. And again, the accepted attitude is that this is just an anecdote. Meaning, it’s obvious that Newton’s laws are the real description of reality. Lagrange’s description is an interesting mathematical anecdote. It’s interesting that we find another mathematical description equivalent to the real description, but it certainly isn’t the real description. Why not? Because there too we are talking about the stone or the ball or whatever physical body choosing a path that will make some quantity minimal. But inanimate physical bodies don’t choose anything. Therefore that description is generally regarded by physicists or philosophers as an incorrect description. It doesn’t describe reality itself. But it’s an anecdote, and sometimes it can help with calculations. But it’s just an anecdote; it’s not really the true description.

Or the last example I gave was from mechanics, which I think most if not all of you should know, in ordinary mechanics—forget Lagrange for a moment—Newtonian mechanics. We know that you can describe the dynamics of a body through Newton’s second law: there are forces acting on the body and it develops acceleration. And you can describe it through principles of minimizing potential. When there’s a little ball rolling on some surface, with some surface conditions, and it’s standing, say, on the top of a mountain—why does it fall down? You can describe it as gravitational force pulling it downward, and you can say that it strives to reach the place with minimal potential energy, meaning the lowest place. So once again, you hear: it strives, or it decides, or it chooses a certain path in order to get there. This is always a teleological description. It is a description based not on “because” but on “in order to.” Not cause but purpose.

And therefore these descriptions are usually regarded as anecdotes, not as a description that is correct in itself of reality. It’s a mathematical anecdote that can also help us in calculations now and then and so on, but it’s a mathematical anecdote. There’s nothing here—it’s completely equivalent.

The teleological description began with Aristotle. When Aristotle described, for instance, the falling of bodies to the earth, he basically said that stones or inanimate bodies contain a lot of the element of earth. He divided the beings in the world into different mixtures of the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. Bodies with mass have the earth component more dominant than the other components, and therefore they strive to return to their source, to return to the earth from which they were taken. Fire, by contrast, strives upward because it has the component of fire, and so on. Wind strives to move, and so forth. So the properties of bodies in Aristotle are described through different mixtures of the four elements, but among other things these elements tell us what each body strives, in quotation marks, to do—where it wants to get. So the stone wants to return to the earth because it came from there; it is earth.

So the Aristotelian description is basically a teleological one. It is a description in terms of ends, not in terms of causes. That is one of the differences usually drawn between Aristotelian physics and modern physics, the physics of the modern era. But as I said before, it turns out that two or three hundred years after the arrival of the new physics, after Galileo, teleology suddenly comes back into physics. Physical processes can be described teleologically, just as Aristotle did.

Now, why did this become some philosophical and ideological point of dispute and not just, if you want, look at it this way, if you want, look at it that way? Because there is some sense that teleology is connected in some way to belief in God. Why? On the face of it, it is only a form of description. What difference does it make whether it is causal or teleological? It’s physics, and the question is how it operates. Why does one link this to God more than the other?

The answer is that Aristotle too certainly did not think that the stone wants in the same sense that human beings want to return to the earth. The stone doesn’t want anything. I assume Aristotle knew that too. So what does a teleological description of physics mean? Who is this one that wants, or chooses the paths, or established physics in such a way that it proceeds toward goals? So apparently there is some external factor—God, in our context, let’s call Him that—who sets goals before the objects in the world and chooses paths for them, and therefore they move along those paths. Therefore, a teleological description is one that one can definitely see as reflecting the existence of a guiding or directing hand, an organizing hand if you like. A causal description looks like a blind description.

Kafka—basically all of Kafka’s work is to show that our lives are causal and not purposive. This causes us enormous frustration, because reality plays with us and we do not decide what we do. That bureaucrat sends us over there, and then suddenly some natural disaster comes from here, and we’re thrown from place to place, and nothing is in our hands. Causes take us to all sorts of places and do with us whatever they want. A person’s autonomous feeling is that he is responsible for his fate; he decides, he chooses for himself what to do, where to go, what to think, and so on. Therefore determinism in the philosophical context, or causality in the scientific context, gets associated with some sort of blind process without a guiding hand. By contrast, teleology and libertarianism—free choice rather than determinism—are associated in some way with the existence of a responsible factor, an organizing factor, an organizing hand.

Because if reality really operates in such a way that an optimal path is always chosen in order to reach some goal, then it is very natural to think that there is some factor that chooses those paths, that established physics so that every body will choose a certain path that brings a certain result to optimum. So someone set that result, someone causes us to choose those paths purposively, meaning in a goal-directed way, not through causes that simply push us along.

So beyond the feeling that a stone doesn’t choose—a stone doesn’t choose, therefore obviously the teleological description is an anecdote—I’m saying: that a stone doesn’t choose is obvious, and Aristotle understood that too. But there is another alternative that says maybe the teleological description is meaningful and not just an anecdote. Not that the stone chooses, but that the one who created it chooses. That too is an option. But philosophers and scientists also tend not to accept this option. They prefer to ignore that option too and say that the causal description is really the true one. And here you can no longer say it is because the stone doesn’t choose. I also agree that the stone doesn’t choose. The question is whether there isn’t someone who chooses for it. And that is basically the philosophical discussion around teleology.

After all, this is not a question that can be decided scientifically, since the teleological description and the causal description are equivalent. There is no experiment that will decide which of the two descriptions is correct. Both are correct because they are equivalent. Whatever one gives, the other gives as well, and vice versa. The difference between them is a philosophical difference, not a scientific one. Therefore you cannot decide by experiment which of the two descriptions is correct.

And what is the philosophical dispute about? Not the question—they always mock it: well yes, the stone chooses, the stone decides. That’s the mockery that the causalists always direct at the teleologists. But of course that is an attack on a straw man. Nobody claims that the stone chooses. Believers, those who attribute this to God, claim that God chooses the optimal path for the stone. Or that He established the laws in such a way that the stone will always go along the optimal path, if you prefer to formulate it that way. Then it seems that someone set the goal and someone causes these things to proceed toward it optimally.

And therefore I think this dispute definitely has meaning, but I do not agree that the causalists are the ones who are right. On the contrary, I think teleology is the true description and causality is the anecdote. It is the anecdote. The Holy One, blessed be He, runs this whole business in such a way that it reaches the goals He set in an optimal way, and it turns out that this can also be described causally. And that really is an interesting anecdote.

Now, the indication for this—and I think I mentioned this last time—the indication is that there are areas in physics, modern physics, quantum theory, field theory, and so on, where there is no causal description at all; there is only a purposive description. Meaning, whereas in ordinary mechanics, classical mechanics, or in optics, we have two equivalent forms of description, both complete and each can give me all the information and they are equivalent to each other, with no way to decide—in the world of quantum theory and field theory as modern physics, there is no causal description at all. There is only a teleological description. Quantum theory is entirely teleological. In quantum theory, the concept of force does not exist. In quantum theory there is only potential. The concept of force does not exist; potential appears in the Schrödinger equation. Force is not a concept that exists in the quantum world. Now, force is the causal description and potential is the teleological description. Okay? There is an article by Feynman that deals with this.

You can explain that? I didn’t understand.

Can you elaborate, explain?

I can’t teach quantum theory here; I’m saying this as a fact. I’m talking about the principle. Do you hear? The principle. So I’m saying, the principle is that in quantum theory there is a basic equation, say the Schrödinger equation, that determines how bodies advance or behave, how they choose a path. In that equation one of the elements is the potential, the potential energy if you like, okay? And not the force. There is no force there. In Newtonian mechanics we know there is a force that acts, and the acceleration produced is force divided by mass. But that is a classical description. In the quantum description there is no force, only potential. So in the classical description there are two descriptions, two equivalent parallel descriptions. So the question there is a philosophical one: which of them is correct and which of them is the anecdote? I prefer the teleological description.

But does the Rabbi disagree with the claim that all scientific progress in the modern era came because we abandoned teleological thinking and chose causal thinking? I mean…

Yes, I disagree with that. That’s a big claim. Because modern thought is entirely teleological. So I disagree with it factually—we did not abandon it. That’s what I’m explaining now. All the latest scientific thinking—I’m saying, until the last stage both channels were open. We did not abandon it; rather, we advanced in both channels. At the last stage we reached a state where there is only a teleological description; there is no causal description. Now, it’s true that at the beginning of the modern era, when the new physics was created, everything was causal. But we progressed not because of causality, but because of empiricism. And if people had continued using purposive descriptions and had generated Lagrange’s laws instead of Newton’s laws, we would have progressed to the same extent. I don’t think the progress would have been any different. Newton just happened to precede Lagrange. There is no special advantage there.

So that’s exactly the point. This is part of the same discourse that tries to present the advantages of causal thinking and the primitiveness of teleological thinking, and I disagree with that. It’s not true. Not only is teleological thinking not primitive, but in the areas I just mentioned it is the only thing that exists. There is no causal thinking.

But teleological thinking is basically built on belief in God, so it’s not empirical.

No, it is not built on belief in God. It is built on what I see in the world. But it’s one of two things: either the stone wants, or the one who created it wants. I’m saying, listen to what I said. The physical law is the result of observing the facts; it has nothing to do with God. And I see that in fact this whole thing operates teleologically. Period. It stops there. There. Now I ask a question not as a physicist but as a philosopher: who is it that sets the goals and causes us to choose paths? To my mind it is natural to say that there is some God, some factor, who does this. But that is a philosophical conclusion from physics; it has nothing to do with physics itself. On the level of physics and correspondence to the empirical facts, I can conduct teleological and causal life on the scientific level entirely and test what works and what doesn’t. That’s all. After that I come and ask philosophical questions. And exactly this mixing of philosophy with science—I’ll comment on it in a moment. We’ll get to the church of science in a second.

So what I basically want to claim is that in the modern areas of physics there is only a teleological description and not a causal one. Therefore, there the dilemma doesn’t even exist—not that it should be decided only philosophically and not empirically. There is no dilemma. There is no causal description. There is only a purposive description. Now, one can come and say: fine, if we progress and wait another hundred or two hundred years, maybe they’ll also find a causal description in the quantum world. Maybe. I don’t know. I can’t rule that out, just as in classical mechanics it took time until the teleological description of Lagrange arrived. So in quantum theory it may be the reverse path, and in a while they may discover a causal description there too.

But if I ask myself, at least in light of the information we have today, which form of description is more correct, my answer is of course the teleological one, because right now we have no other form of description at all. When we find another form of description, then let’s deliberate. But at the moment it is clear that the teleological form of description has an advantage. And if I have to choose one of them as the correct one and the other as the anecdote, I would choose teleology and not causality.

And the significance of this is, once again, some kind of physico-theological proof. That is why I went into teleology, because basically this argument is a type or version of the physico-theological argument. I’m basically saying that the whole world operates teleologically. Teleology has two characteristics: first, striving toward a purpose; and second, that striving is done optimally. Meaning, I choose the path along which I proceed toward the purpose in a way that optimizes some quantity—or minimizes or maximizes, doesn’t matter, but brings some quantity to an optimum. And the natural conclusion is that there is someone who set those goals and determined for us the optimal ways of getting there, and that is what is called the laws of nature. And the one who created the laws of nature seems to be striving toward certain goals, if He set things up this way.

And therefore I think, again, this is not a conclusive proof, but it is certainly a significant indication. If I had to choose between the two options—there is a directing or organizing factor, or there is no directing or organizing factor—I would choose the first. The first is more rational, more sensible, and the second is stubbornness. Those who insist on the causal side as the correct side and teleology as the anecdote—that is stubbornness without any basis. It cannot be justified in any way.

If at the first stage, yes, before quantum theory, before the twentieth century, there were still two equivalent options and you could choose either one—and by the way, choosing one doesn’t mean which one, but at least you could choose whichever you wanted—even there, someone who insists on causality, I ask him: why? Because you decided not to believe in God? Or why are you choosing דווקא that one? He says, I don’t know, it seems more reasonable to me. Fine, so be it. But now that we are in a state where part of physics has no causal description at all, to insist and say no, no, no, only the causal description is correct and teleology is an anecdote—and what do we do with quantum theory? Fine, we’ll wait another two hundred years and find a causal description there too. Maybe, that could be.

But you understand that there is a kind of apologetics going on here. Religious apologetics, in a certain sense, I would say. You are defending the atheistic option just as happens in debates between believers and non-believers on the believers’ side, where they always get into strained defenses to protect their faith. And this really is the…

Can I ask one more little thing that bothers me?

Yes, yes.

I don’t know, after all, for example the most basic Newtonian law, right—one body attracts another body according to its mass. There is something hidden inside this simple sentence that we don’t really understand. What does it mean that one body attracts? What does “attracts because of mass” mean? We don’t really understand it. So really, if we say body A attracts body B according to Newton’s formula, we could equally say that the body being attracted strives to get closer to the larger body because… in both cases we are saying something we don’t understand. We don’t understand even Newton’s basic law. What does it mean that this body attracts? What does it mean that one force attracts another? How does it do that? What is that? Why should it…? What are we even expressing in that statement? In any case we are dealing with something we don’t really understand all that well. Not this and not that. Not the teleological and not the causal.

The only conclusion I can draw from what you’re saying is that even in the causal description I would attribute it to God. Maybe—but that’s something beyond our grasp; I’m not ruling it out. So it changes nothing; it only strengthens the argument, it doesn’t undermine it.

Right, I’m saying it is equally wondrous—that this supposedly…

No, I don’t think it is equally wondrous. I don’t think it is equally so. What do you mean? I understand perfectly well what it means that two bodies attract each other. What is the problem? There is something in their nature that causes them to attract one another.

But how does it do that? How? The sun has a certain mass and suddenly it attracts me to it—what do I have to do with it? Why should the electron attract the proton?

But that is in nature. It is the nature of two bodies with mass to attract.

But how? How? That’s a statement, a description. The Rabbi isn’t explaining why it is so.

You’re asking how a body generates force? That’s a question in physics.

What is force at all? What is force at all?

What do you mean? The proton attracts the electron. The electron says, leave me alone, I’m not bothering you, don’t bother me. No, it says, I’m attracting you. How do you do that? I radiate something at you that we fail to understand and it attracts it. How?

Who said we fail to understand? You keep deciding all the time that we fail to understand. I understand perfectly well. I understand what force is. One body attracts another because it exerts force on it. What is the problem?

But how? What is this force? What is the meaning of this force?

You can ask how it creates the force; that is a different question, a question in physics.

Not how it is created, but what is its meaning at all? What do you mean—is it a string, a rope pulling it? It isn’t a rope.

It isn’t a rope. It is a force.

But what is this force?

Force. What do you mean? What is an object?

No, mass… mass we feel. It’s true, not that we understand it any better than this, but at least it is something empirical, embedded within…

So you can say I understand nothing. I understand neither what an object is, nor what force is, nor anything else.

No, but the Rabbi understands that there is a difference between saying I am holding an apple, I feel the apple and I understand there is an apple, and saying the sun attracts the apple.

I don’t understand. It’s the same thing. I feel both. I feel that I am holding an apple and I feel that there is a force pulling me. What is the difference? There is no difference at all. I understand it. I don’t see what there is here not to understand. It’s a more abstract entity; you don’t see it with your eyes, so you perceive it through its phenomena. So what?

Yes, but we see its effects. But what is it in itself? We fail to grasp that.

Fine, so I see its effects. I also see the effects of the apple. How does it happen? How does the moon, three hundred thousand kilometers away, pull me? What do I have to do with it?

What do you mean? It exerts a force that pulls me. What do you mean, what do I have to do with it?

But what is that? It’s an expression, Rabbi, a formulation, right? It took humanity a long time to arrive at it. But before we formulated it and accepted it as something agreed upon, we understood that there was something wondrous here beyond our grasp. How does the moon pull…

I don’t know—don’t say “we,” not me. I understand. Everything is within our grasp. I understand that it exerts a force on me and that’s all. It pulls me.

But how do you describe this force?

I have a description: G m1 m2 divided by r squared.

No, not a description that measures it, but what it is essentially.

What do you mean? Are you asking what color it is?

No, what… how can you touch it, how can you feel it? What is it?

No, I can’t touch it. There are things you can’t touch. So what? Are they less existent than things you can touch?

So what are they? It is something supposedly metaphysical.

No, not at all. It is simply something for which I have no sense that captures it directly; rather I understand it through its implications. So what happened? What’s the problem? Kant taught us that even sensory bodies we understand only through their effects and not in themselves.

When you speak about a soul, you also say: I don’t know what a soul is, I only know its effects. It has choice, it has feelings, so we feel that there is something metaphysical here.

I don’t understand what it means to ask what the soul is. What is a soul? That’s an unclear question. Do you want an explanation of what a soul is in terms of what color it is, how much it weighs, and where it is located? Those are not the relevant characteristics for a soul. But apart from that, I understand very well what a soul is. A soul is the spiritual thing within me that I experience much more intimately than the table in front of me. Descartes’ cogito—we talked about that, I think—Descartes’ cogito proves the existence of a thinking substance, not the existence of the body. Meaning, my awareness and my understanding of the dimension of thought are much more intimate and immediate than my perception of my body.

But the confusion that arises comes from trying to describe abstract things in parameters that belong to tangible things. But those are not the right parameters for describing them. Obviously I won’t find for them a color, not their shape—just a different kind of form, that’s all. There may be no physical science that deals with souls, but with forces there is.

So I don’t accept those distinctions.

Okay, but let’s return to our topic. The point is that what I want to say is that very often the discussion—for example the teleological one, but also the physico-theological one and all these descriptions in general—often looks like a discussion in which the religious side is actually the side that does not believe, the atheistic side. That is very frustrating to me. Many times I’ve taken part in arguments and discussions on these topics, and you see the corners people are willing to back themselves into in order to defend their atheistic position. The usual religious apologetics pale in comparison to the speculative lengths people are willing to go to in order to defend their atheism.

And you know, you can see people giving up the principle of causality because the principle of causality is needed for the physico-theological proof, so they deny the principle of causality. The world was created just like that, without a cause. Or the laws are only a statement about us, not about the world. Or things like that: complexity arises just like that by itself, without a guiding hand. Something that contradicts all the rules of logic and rational thought. And people do this to defend the atheistic position. It seems to me that this is religious apologetics—not at its best, I would say, but at its worst—but it is really religious apologetics, much more than the apologetics of religious people when they are attacked by scientific issues. I always feel that the fanatical religious side in this argument is the atheistic side.

And try going into—I think I mentioned this—I wrote articles in Ynet Science years ago, after my book God Plays Dice came out, so they asked me for a series of columns in Ynet Science. Look at the talkbacks on the columns I wrote there. You’ll see a fanatical church unlike anything you’ve seen in your life.

I’ve seen it—it’s not something we haven’t seen before. Standard.

No, but that’s just it. I said it isn’t so standard in discourse. You’re not used to seeing it from the secular, atheistic side. Usually these extreme and fanatical defenses are presented as the believer’s response, the religious person’s response, and here you see it from the atheistic side. And in my view it is no less fanatical—in my view more fanatical, much more fanatical.

Okay. Those who know it know it, I’m saying; those who don’t…

Just one more little question that wasn’t clear to me, about parallel universes. You said that if there are lots of parallel universes, then one can assume there is one that will produce life, right?

Again, I didn’t understand.

You said that if there is such a multiverse, if there were many, many universes, then you could say okay, there is a case where one was created with life. But why, in our world with billions of stars, not say that one star somehow worked out so that it has life?

I said—the stars—I explained the difference between the argument from the laws, the multiverse, and the claim about the multiplicity of stars. The claim about many stars is entirely within one system of laws. The same system of laws governs all the stars, the whole universe: one system of the laws of physics. But one star happened to fall in a place where everything works out for it.

Right, but I’m saying that a system of laws that allows the formation of life is itself a special system. Even a system that would allow life to form on one out of a billion billion stars—even such a system is very, very rare. Therefore I ask the question about the system of laws that allows this, not about the star where it happened among many stars.

And I brought examples for that. I said that people claim that in every system, in every set of circumstances, special creatures will arise. If not human beings, then life—or other complex creatures. So I asked: well, today we’ve already been to the moon, we have means of observation for other stars—what complex creatures do we find there? Nothing. Nothing at all. We do not find other complex creatures there that are not life but something else. No. Why not? Because what they’re selling us is not true—again the cult, the atheistic church, which explains to us every time utterly illogical things with complete certainty, as if it were obvious, simple truth. The religious fanaticism you find there is unbelievable. But it gets contradicted every time, gets slapped in the face again and again, and nothing helps. Nobody is convinced by it. It really is—as I say—they are not the only guilty side in this. Religious people act similarly. I’m only saying that both sides are equally guilty of dogmatism.

Anyway, for our purposes, what I want to say is: notice the levels of strain one has to enter into in order to defend the atheistic position. It’s a kind of church. I talked about this once—I think I mentioned it—I once saw, and I still have it, a book published by the workers’ publishing house in the “Workers in Struggle” series. The “Workers in Struggle” series was from Sifriyat Poalim, from the 1940s or ’50s, something like that—the communist wing of Sifriyat Poalim. And “Workers in Struggle” is communist literature, communist thought of all sorts. And the book is called Lenin and the New Physics. Someone named Omilnitsky, I think, wrote it. It’s translated from Russian: Lenin and the New Physics.

Now, when you see this, you die laughing. I mean, religious apologetics is a stale joke compared to what goes on there. They explain to you how Lenin foresaw everything, and basically all the new physics is already in his writings in skip-codes of seven, all sorts of things, and whatever doesn’t fit is simply either wrong or you didn’t understand Lenin correctly. The pilpul there is about what you would find in Har HaMor when they run into reality and still somehow try to force things to fit. I don’t think it falls short of that.

The point is that when someone has some kind of faith—dogmatic, not dogmatic, first of all faith, no matter for the moment how he got to it—he naturally tends to adapt the facts and the arguments he hears to his faith. And if that requires him to squeeze himself, he’ll squeeze himself. So people who believe in God and encounter questions that refute that—they’ll squeeze themselves in order to defend against those questions. People who don’t believe in God will squeeze themselves in order to defend against arguments in favor of the existence of God. So in fact both sides get pushed into various corners in order to defend their conceptions.

When the Rabbi says that this exists both in the supposedly religious part of the map and in the secular part of the map, isn’t that basically a classic postmodern statement—that we adapt reality to what we basically want?

No, absolutely not. It is the opposite of postmodernism, and I’ll explain why. Postmodernism draws conclusions from human facts, from the way we behave, about reality itself. For example, when people say there is an argument about a moral issue, they say: fine, that means there is no objective morality, because each society has its own morality. And I say: let us assume that each society has its own morality—it’s not true, but let’s assume it is. Does that mean there is no objective morality? It only means that one is right and one is wrong. The fact that there is an argument does not mean there is no truth; it means that not everyone is right. But that does not mean there is no truth.

And here too I say: the fact that both sides entrench themselves in some fanatical apologetics does not mean there is no truth, or that there is no correct way to behave. It only means that both sides can sometimes choose an incorrect way to behave. That’s all. What is incumbent upon me, or upon anyone I think, is to try and make the effort as much as he can not to be too biased or too dogmatic, but really to try to examine what the more reasonable conclusions are, and not to entrench oneself in what one was educated into or got used to or whatever.

Again, I’m the last one to deny the significance of primary intuitions. We’ll get to that in the next section; that’s where it really begins—our primary intuitions. Our primary intuitions are basically the foundational assumptions. We operate with them and analyze reality through them. But first, we need to be aware that we have primary intuitions; to be open to the possibility that maybe those intuitions are incorrect, meaning to relate to them critically as well; and to see what price it is right to pay for holding those intuitions, and not to hold on to them at any price. And that’s all. That’s what distinguishes a rational person from a dogmatic or biased person.

I’m not saying there are no primary intuitions. Without primary intuitions one cannot think. Without assumptions there is no argument. I am saying that holding on to them at any price—that is dogmatism, and I don’t think it is proper to adopt it. So in that sense, of course, one should take one’s intuition, but not as mere instinct and not as rational thought. More than that, the question is also where these intuitions come from. Sometimes it is the result of education. Very often they tell us: your religious intuitions are the result of education; the proof is that secular people do not have these primary intuitions. And I say: of course, the intuitions that there is no God are the result of education; the proof is that religious people do not have such intuitions. In other words, anything can be formulated in the same way—that you are biased, or the product of the landscape of your upbringing, yes, you are biased because of the place in which you were educated.

I think the difference between people is not whether they have basic assumptions. Everyone has basic assumptions. The question is how tightly you cling to them—whether you’re clinging to the horns of the altar to hold onto them—and what prices you’re willing to pay in order to hold onto them.

The Mishnah in Avot says: “Judge every person favorably.” They once asked Rabbi Chaim—Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, of course—why everything that exists in the world was created for a reason. The Holy One, blessed be He, created it for some reason. Why did He create a crooked mind? He answered: in order to judge favorably. Because often when you see a person doing something he should not do, you need very, very creative thinking in order to make him come out looking good, to give some positive interpretation. So a crooked mind was created in order to judge favorably.

But when you look at the commentators on that Mishnah—“Judge every person favorably”—you see that the commentators really do not say that. On the contrary: Maimonides and Rabbenu Yonah there write not to use a crooked mind, absolutely not—only a straight mind. To judge a person favorably is an instruction meant to resist the evil inclination to use crooked thinking in a negative way. You need to go with straight thinking. What does that mean? That if you see a consummate murderer chasing someone with a gun, do not judge him favorably. He is going to kill him. But if you see someone whose whole life is devoted to helping others, all his life devoted to helping others, chasing someone with a gun—there, find a creative interpretation; he is probably not going to kill him. In both of those cases this is not crooked thinking, it is straight thinking. It is the interpretation required by straight thinking.

The interpretation of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) perhaps somewhat contradicts the plain meaning of the text. It says, “Judge every person favorably.” It does not say, “Judge favorably a person who seems reasonable and whom straight thinking suggests is righteous or average.” It says, “Judge every person favorably.” So suddenly we choose…

I too say that every person should be judged favorably. Every person includes the murderer running with a knife—you can try to find in him some point of merit. That doesn’t mean you should not kill him as a pursuer, but to find some point of merit in him. If you made the effort—if he were your brother or your father or your son—you would find that favorable interpretation, and that is completely empirical. I also agree: every person should be judged favorably. The only question is what it means to judge favorably. To judge favorably means according to the person. Judge him favorably according to what he is. And that applies to every person, including a hired murderer. But when you judge him favorably, don’t decide that he isn’t a murderer. Rather, you can decide that there were circumstances in his childhood that caused him to murder. Fine—but don’t decide that he isn’t a murderer. In other words, to judge favorably means to use straight thinking and not crooked thinking.

At least aspire to have an ideal of seeking points of merit. You don’t always succeed. And that still uses straight thinking, not crooked thinking. That’s obvious. That’s what I’m talking about. So if that’s obvious, then we have no disagreement.

No, the medieval authorities really do twist it, because they say that a wicked person should not be judged favorably; you’re exempt, just delete him.

No, they don’t say that. How does Maimonides explain that Mishnah? I explained: they say that a wicked person should not be judged favorably in his wickedness—meaning, according to what he is. You can judge him favorably in things that are relevant to him. Everything according to straight thinking. That’s what they say. Exactly that is what they say. The person, not the act. The person and not the act. Yes, but I’m saying: and according to the person, don’t work with crooked thinking. See who the person is and judge accordingly. Don’t judge the act favorably in every case. Judge the person favorably. Not the act in every case either. It depends—if there is a reasonable possibility to judge the act favorably, then do so; if not, don’t use crooked thinking. No—straight thinking, not crooked thinking.

Why am I saying this? I’m coming back to us, because when I believe in God—someone asked me not long ago on my website how I relate to the parallels between Mesopotamian writings and the Torah. So I said that many times there may be a third source that influenced both. The person asked me: but you wouldn’t say that if you didn’t believe in God. Then you would say, yes, one influenced the other. I said: true, but I do believe in God—or in the divinity of the Torah, not in God. And that definitely affects the interpretation I give, and that’s fine. The fact that a person goes with his basic assumptions is not a fault. That is how we work and how we think; it cannot be otherwise, and that’s perfectly fine. The only question is how far I go with it.

Meaning, if there were overwhelming evidence all along the way against my basic dogma, I would be supposed to abandon it and not start squeezing and squeezing and squeezing everything into some illogical corner just because I’m holding onto some dogma. That is dogmatism. But to defend positions, or to use straight thinking, which includes my basic assumptions as an interpretation of arguments—and sometimes to adopt a strained answer to an argument against my position—that is perfectly fine, so long as my position is a solid one.

I mentioned Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, who says against Popper: Popper says that a scientific theory is falsifiable, not provable. What does that mean? If I say all ravens are black, I can’t prove it, because however many ravens I have seen, I never know whether I have seen them all. So I cannot prove it scientifically. But I can refute it. If I find one raven that is pink, I have refuted the claim that all ravens are black. So Thomas Kuhn argues against Popper that science in practice does not work that way. It does not work that way. When there are difficulties with a scientific theory, you do not immediately throw it out. There has to be a certain threshold, or a certain level of difficulties, or a certain extent of difficulties, before one throws out an established scientific theory. And the more established the scientific theory is, the more difficulties I will need in order to decide that it is incorrect and to look for another. One difficulty is not enough.

Why not? Seemingly if there is one difficulty then it is incorrect. The answer is no, because if that theory is established, then I have great justification for holding it to be correct, and so I am willing to adopt strained answers to various difficulties. Until when? Until I see that the extent of the difficulties is such that it is no longer reasonable, and one has to give up the theory. And that is what Kuhn calls a paradigm crisis.

So even in the scientific world there is great importance to this conservatism, to my holding onto my basic assumptions and interpreting counter-arguments, sometimes even with strained interpretations, in order to preserve those basic assumptions. Which is perfectly fine, because to me those are reasonable assumptions. But the degree of reasonableness of the assumptions should correspond to the degree of strain in the interpretations I make to defend them. Once it becomes fanatical—meaning there is no connection between my level of confidence in the assumptions and the intensity of the strain I am willing to enter into—then I’m a fanatic. Then I’m a believer and not a rational person. Believer in the sense of non-rational, religious in the negative sense of the word, as I called it before.

In that sense I think that indeed both sides often behave in a religious way. And again, maybe because I am a believer, but in my eyes the atheistic side much more so. Much more so for two reasons. First, it is more fanatical. And second—I’m not talking about secular people, I’m talking about self-identified atheists—because in my view its basic assumption is such an unreasonable basic assumption. So in the name of an unreasonable basic assumption, to get into strained interpretations against counter-arguments, that is irrationality squared. Therefore I think the atheistic church is one of the more fanatical churches in our world—the atheistic ISIS. Of course they don’t murder people, at least usually, yes? I’m not claiming that their level of extremism is like religious extremism. I am claiming that their intellectual extremism is on the same level as religious intellectual extremism. One has to be careful—I’m not saying they physically crucify people, but they crucify them intellectually. They are not willing to listen, they are not willing… it is a very, very closed group, very, very fanatical, very, very hard to talk with.

But Rabbi, even that has to be explained. If after all we take the fact that there are billions of people who believe—not important now in which religion—and somehow they find ways to answer the questions that are difficult for them in light of their faith, and there are many billions of people who supposedly do not believe—I reject the expression “do not believe”—whether formal atheists or not, and they find ways to cope as the Rabbi described against those same questions, then doesn’t that flatten and make very accurate the point that our whole attempt supposedly to be objective and say I examine these questions rationally and assess them—the empirical fact, so to speak, in quotation marks, says that this isn’t so. Billions are like that. When the Rabbi attacks those fanatics—again, it’s not one or two people; it’s billions, and we are among those billions because we are simply on the other side.

No, no, it isn’t billions. So I’ll answer you on two levels. First, it isn’t billions. It is a very small group, a very, very small group, of self-identified atheists, not of secular people. A very small group. And I’m speaking about the intellectual part of it, let’s call it that. So it is definitely not billions.

Second, I wrote this on my website several times as well. The fact that on every side there are intelligent people, and on every side people make mistakes, and on every side people are dogmatic—that is true. Still, a judge has only what his eyes see. A person making a decision can only do the best he can in order to make the best decision. I have nothing better than that. And we presume of the Holy One, blessed be He, that He does not make unreasonable demands of His creatures. If I reach a conclusion that is not the correct conclusion, but that is my conclusion, then that is what I am supposed to do. I have no better tools than that. It is certainly possible that I too am dogmatic or mistaken. All true. And I too must take even that into account and examine myself again and again to see whether I am there. And still I may miss it. Fine. But how does the Rabbi deal with this difficulty? I’m really asking in order to understand.

If heaven forbid we had lost the Rabbi as a great Torah scholar—and I have no words to add regarding the Rabbi’s enormous contribution—and heaven forbid he had been born into an atheistic communist family, completely anti, then isn’t it likely that the Rabbi would have used all his intellectual talents in sharp and prominent arguments for the other side?

That is a hypothetical question that I don’t know how to answer, so what can I do with that question? All I can do is try to examine myself as I am and see whether I am doing my best. That’s it. I don’t know how to do better than that; I can’t. No human being can do better than that. That’s it. That’s the maximum I know.

All I can do—and this, I think, most people do not do—is really try seriously to examine the opposing positions and try not to be too dogmatic, or to try as openly as possible to see whether my position is justified or not. That’s what I can do. I can’t do more than that. There is no more than that that I can do, and therefore apparently it is not demanded of me either. We’ll get up there, if there is such an “up there,” and we’ll see who was right and who wasn’t. I have nothing else to answer.

But the conclusion I want to reject is the nihilistic or despairing conclusion that says: well, if that’s the case then there is no point in dealing with this, and nobody can arrive at the truth. That is basically the postmodern conclusion—the kind of despair. I don’t think that is correct. True, I may be mistaken, but I need to do my best to make sure that I am not mistaken. And I take comfort in the fact that the overwhelming majority of people do not do that. Therefore I perhaps have some basis to think that maybe I am closer to the truth. Because I do try to examine, at least in a meaningful way and as much as I can, counter-arguments too and think about them seriously, and that, I think, most people really do not do. Again, someone from outside can come and say: you’re fooling yourself, you don’t do it either. I don’t know. But at least I try. And in that sense, it seems to me that among those who hold opposing positions, few are those who do the work in this way and still arrive at opposing positions. That is what I think, but again, I have nothing better than that to say.

Okay, I just want to finish. I see I won’t have time here to get to the next chapter, so that’s fine, no matter. We’re going into Passover break. I just want to finish with one more remark on the path we’ve taken here in the physico-theological proof, and with that I’ll finish it. What is the relation between this and scientific thinking? Is the physico-theological proof a scientific argument?

My answer to that is complex. It’s not so simple, not one way and not the other. What do I mean? In a scientific argument, when we test a scientific theory, we have certain facts, we build a theory that explains those facts, and then we test the theory on the basis of predictions by putting it to an experimental test. It is customary to define a scientific claim as a claim that can be put to a test of falsification—Popper, whom I mentioned earlier. In that sense, the claim of the physico-theological argument, its conclusion, is not scientific. The conclusion that there is a God is not a scientific conclusion, because I cannot propose an experiment that would test it and put it to a falsification test. There is no experiment I can do such that if it turns out a certain way…

But the path I take—from the facts and data about the world, from my basic principles of thought, to the conclusion that there is a God—that is a scientific path. It is not scientific in the sense that the conclusion cannot be put to a falsification test, but it is not different from the path I take between facts and the theory of gravitation or electromagnetism or relativity, or any other scientific theory. I take facts and from those facts I produce a theory that constitutes some sort of generalization of the facts—I’ll talk about that more in the next chapter, what is called abduction—and explains those facts. And that way of going from the facts to the theory that explains them is the very heart of the scientific process. That is how scientific theories are formed. And in that sense it is exactly the same path we take when we go from the world to God.

That is the scientific theory—the non-scientific theory—that explains the world. But the way of getting to it is the same way I go when I move toward a scientific theory. Except that the theory itself cannot be put to a falsification test. When I choose the simplest and most sensible explanation for my collection of facts, that is how I create a scientific theory. That is what a scientist does when he creates a theory. Right? That is what I do here too. I choose the simplest theory that explains the facts: there is a complex world, there is morality, there is this, there is that, all the things we talked about. From that I reach the theoretical conclusion that apparently there exists a certain factor, God, who is responsible for this whole thing. That is my scientific theory, so to speak.

So the way, that part of the way, is completely parallel to the scientific conclusions I draw from data. I take the data and infer the most sensible conclusions, build the most sensible theory that explains the data. The difference is that there I can later put the theory to a falsification test—gravitation, or whatever it may be. Here I cannot. But the confidence I have in the path from the facts to the theory does rest on science. After all, a skeptic can come and say: look, you are constructing some theory; in your opinion it explains the facts best. Nonsense. That’s just your opinion. You are built that way. Who says you are right?

So I tell him: look, but I use those very same tools to build scientific theories. And scientific theories I can indeed test in the lab. And when I test them in the lab, many times I discover that it really works. It isn’t just a shot in the dark. I’m not always right, but I’m right in no small number of cases. That means my ability to draw conclusions is itself confirmed by the scientific process. The scientific process strengthens my confidence in the tools by which I draw conclusions from facts. Therefore now I can take that and say: okay, I arrive at the conclusion that there is a God from the facts. The conclusion itself I cannot put to a falsification test, but the path I traveled toward the conclusion, the rules I used in order to generalize and reach that theoretical conclusion—those are the same tools that serve me in science, and there I have tested them.

And in that sense I think science does give us some sort of support for this non-scientific conclusion that there is a God. And in that sense it is a scientific procedure—not in the sense that it is falsifiable, but in the sense that it uses the same tools. Exactly the same tools. I see many bodies falling to the earth, so I assume there is a force acting on all bodies with mass. How do I know? I saw some collection of cases. I generalize and say that this generalization is the simplest explanation for the examples I know. That is basically what I did here too. I took the simplest explanation for the features of the world that I know. And in that sense I made a scientific move.

That’s it. Here the similarity to science ends, because I cannot put the conclusion to a falsification test. But this step itself now I also cannot put to a test—neither confirmation nor falsification. So the conclusion is either correct or not. On what will that depend? After all, one cannot do an experiment. So what will it depend on? On my confidence in the very tools I used to reach the conclusion. And my confidence in those tools is the same confidence I have in scientific tools—it’s the same tools—and there they did receive confirmation in the scientific context. Therefore in that sense I think science can indeed give us some reinforcement against skeptical claims. Who told you your philosophies are correct? This is philosophy, not scientifically testable—how can you know that you are really right that there is a God? So I say: because in matters that are scientifically testable it turns out that my tools of generalization work not badly. So if that is the case, I am willing to use them also where scientific testing is not possible. So I have no choice but to rely on my tools and trust them, and I think those tools lead to this conclusion.

Okay, so we have finished the physico-theological argument. I am moving on to what is called the fourth talk in the book, which is basically the last path in our classification of the seven paths to God.

About morality?

Morality is only one of the sections. Exposing arguments—the moral one is one of them, but there are others.

Can I ask a question?

Yes.

I don’t know whether the Rabbi will get to this, or what the Rabbi thinks. I know it’s a very broad subject, but the proof of divine revelation in the sense of the giving of the Torah, testimony of millions as appears in the Kuzari…

Yes, I said—I mentioned that when I spoke about the ways of arriving at faith. I think I listed seven ways there, six or seven, I don’t remember anymore. Three of Kant’s, one from exposing arguments—that’s four—primary intuition, that’s five, revelation, that’s six. Okay?

So the Rabbi will get to it.

I’m not saying it is necessarily correct. Every such thing needs to be discussed, and revelation and the tradition that brings revelation to us are not free of problems. I’ll get to it after the booklet—after the fourth talk I’ll come back to that point.

Why is there a class every two weeks and not every week?

Because it alternates. Every two weeks Rabbi Elgazi gives it, and every other week it’s me, and every other week it’s him. It started as in-person classes in Ra’anana, so that’s how it is.

Okay. Okay. Well then, have a kosher and happy Passover, if possible both together, and with God’s help we’ll meet again after Passover. Thank you very much, happy holiday. More power to you. Shabbat shalom, happy holiday. Thank you, happy holiday.