Faith and Its Meaning – Lesson 11
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- The place of the physico-theological proof relative to the ontological and cosmological proofs
- Complexity as an objective property and the argument against “in the eye of the beholder”
- Entropy, the second law, and statistical mechanics as a definition of order
- Gas in a container, asymmetry in time, and reinforcement of the objectivity of order
- The second law is not a scientific proof of God, and the creationist–neo-Darwinist debate
- A guiding hand as a philosophical claim within the thermodynamic constraint
- Demon imagery: “Desolation destroys the gate,” Maxwell’s demon, and the total system
- Challenges to the argument: the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the scope of the conclusion
- The challenge that “the laws of nature created it” and the distinction between a law as description and as force/entity
- The principle of causality, those who do not accept it, and the argument as one conditional on assumptions
- The eternity of the world, the principle of sufficient reason, and a supplement to the cosmological argument
- Quantum theory and coming into being “from the vacuum” as a test of the assumption that “things do not arise by themselves”
- Logical dichotomy, the law of the excluded middle, and probabilistic claims against “God is less likely”
- “God is not an explanation,” Winnie-the-Pooh’s footprints, and the distinction between proof and explanation
- Yeshayahu Leibowitz against “intelligent design” and the response through types of explanation and paradigms
Summary
General Overview
The text places the discussion within the framework of three proofs for the existence of God and presents the physico-theological proof as the claim that complexity and order are objective facts that require a designing cause. It defines complexity through concepts from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, emphasizes that the second law is a constraint rather than a scientific proof of God, and argues that even when science is entirely correct, it is still more reasonable to assume a guiding hand than sheer accident. It then rejects objections such as “complexity is in the eye of the beholder,” “the Flying Spaghetti Monster,” “the laws of nature created it,” and various probabilistic arguments, and proposes a distinction between law as description and force/entity as generator. Finally, it deals with criticism in the style of Yeshayahu Leibowitz against “intelligent design” by distinguishing between explanation as reduction to the familiar and explanation as reduction to the unfamiliar, similar to the emergence of scientific paradigms in Thomas Kuhn.
The place of the physico-theological proof relative to the ontological and cosmological proofs
The ontological proof claims to reach the conclusion that God exists through conceptual analysis and without assumptions, while the cosmological proof assumes that something exists and from that infers that there must be something that caused its existence. The physico-theological proof assumes a more complex factual premise: that there exists something with special characteristics of complexity, coordination, and design, and from this infers that such a complex thing did not arise by itself and therefore requires a cause that made it. The ontological proof defines God as “the perfect being,” the cosmological proof defines Him as the entity responsible for the existence of the universe, and the physico-theological proof defines Him as “the engineer” responsible for complexity and order.
Complexity as an objective property and the argument against “in the eye of the beholder”
The opposing claim says that complexity is subjective, and therefore one cannot build an objective argument on an impression of complexity. The text argues that complexity is an objective property, and that failing to identify complexity is a failure of ability rather than “a different definition,” similar to someone who says “there is no table here” and is considered blind. It also raises a “cousin” of this claim, according to which in any world there will always be complex creatures, so there is nothing special about our world that requires explanation, and indicates that it will return to that later through a definition of complexity.
Entropy, the second law, and statistical mechanics as a definition of order
The text uses the second law of thermodynamics in a colloquial formulation according to which, in a closed system, entropy cannot decrease and order cannot increase by itself, illustrating this with a flowerpot that falls and shatters and does not reassemble without an external cause. It explains that statistical mechanics accounts for macroscopic properties in terms of the micro-level, presents weak emergence as collective properties derived from calculation based on the properties of the parts, and gives examples of collective properties such as liquidity and democracy. It defines order as a state with relatively few equivalent microscopic states, as opposed to disorder as a state with many equivalent microscopic states, and illustrates this with three balls in ten cells, so that the state “all in one cell” is more ordered than a scattered state because it has fewer equivalent combinations. It connects this to probability and argues that ordered states are improbable in a random draw, and on a large scale the probability of an ordered state is “ridiculous.”
Gas in a container, asymmetry in time, and reinforcement of the objectivity of order
The text illustrates a gas concentrated in a corner that spreads out after opening a bag, and argues that from a dispersed state one does not arrive at a concentrated state as a stable condition. From this it concludes that there is an asymmetry in time, which raises a philosophical puzzle in relation to the time symmetry of the basic laws of physics. It uses the example to argue that if order were subjective, there could not be a physical law describing transition from ordered to disordered, because the laws of physics are the same for all observers. It adds that there are calculations according to which life has low entropy and is therefore “highly ordered,” and applies this to a room with people and tables, arguing that mixing particles would not produce an orderly classroom.
The second law is not a scientific proof of God, and the creationist–neo-Darwinist debate
The text presents a common view that identifies the second law with a “scientific proof” of God and from it concludes that the world could not have arisen naturally and therefore science is wrong. Opposed to that it presents neo-Darwinists, who infer from the success of science that there is no God or no evidence for Him. It argues that both sides are mistaken, because science works and the formation of the world does not violate the second law; if it did violate it, that would imply the law is incorrect despite all its engineering applications. It explains that the law allows the formation of “islands” of low entropy at the cost of increasing entropy in the surroundings, so that the total entropy is preserved, and illustrates this through constructing a building and cleaning a room, both of which occur through energy consumption and the creation of disorder elsewhere.
A guiding hand as a philosophical claim within the thermodynamic constraint
The text emphasizes that the second law is a constraint rather than a determination, and that within the range of possibilities it leaves open one may still ask what is more likely and what is less likely. It argues that even if the formation of local order does not contradict the law, it is still philosophically implausible that “very strong gradients of order” and islands of “crazy” order would arise without a guiding hand. Therefore the argument is not scientific but philosophical. It warns against “God of the gaps” in the sense of relying on temporary holes in science, and presents the position that the option “science is correct and God also exists” is available and will even gain support, while stressing that here the second law serves to provide an objective definition of order, not to prove God.
Demon imagery: “Desolation destroys the gate,” Maxwell’s demon, and the total system
The text brings the Talmud in Bava Kamma on “Desolation destroys the gate” as an amusing image likening a demon to decay in abandoned houses, and argues that physics describes decay without assuming demons, while building and cleaning do not happen without a cause. It presents “Maxwell’s demon” as a device/demon that sorts molecules by speed and creates a temperature difference that seems to lower entropy in a closed system, and then explains that the machine and its operation carry an “entropic price” in the context of the total system, so that in a steady state the total entropy does not decrease. From this it returns to the point that the second law is a constraint and that one must examine the plausibility of scenarios within its limits.
Challenges to the argument: the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the scope of the conclusion
The text presents the claim of the “Flying Spaghetti Monster” as an atheist argument that tries to say the proof establishes at most “something” and not “God” in a way that obligates religion. It replies that the argument is meant to prove the existence of an entity that is not part of the world and is responsible for complexity, and not at this stage to infer commandments, relationship, or religious theism. It says that the question of moving from this to religious obligation will be discussed toward the end of the year. It argues that within this framework it does not matter what the entity is called or what its nature is beyond being the generator of complexity.
The challenge that “the laws of nature created it” and the distinction between a law as description and as force/entity
The text discusses the possibility that the laws of nature themselves “created” the world and argues that this depends on whether laws are entities. It says that if the laws are entities, then that is effectively God in the sense required by the argument, and if the laws are only descriptions of patterns of behavior, then they do not answer the question “who causes” but only the question “what happens.” It illustrates this through the law of gravitation as description versus gravitational force/field as cause, and notes that most physicists assume there is something producing the effect even if it is not measured directly, such as gravitons. It connects this to the principle of causality and to the rejection of “action at a distance” as a scientific stance that seeks a mediating entity, and concludes that appealing to laws as an alternative does not solve the question of the generator unless it simply calls the generator itself a “law.”
The principle of causality, those who do not accept it, and the argument as one conditional on assumptions
The text states that someone who asks “why do I need an answer?” does not have to accept one, but he does have to believe there is an answer if the argument is to persuade him. Someone who does not accept the principle of causality will not find the argument relevant. It argues that scientists usually do accept causality and tend to abandon it only in debates about God. It formulates this as part of the general principle that every argument rests on basic assumptions, and if someone does not accept them there is no point in addressing him with that argument.
The eternity of the world, the principle of sufficient reason, and a supplement to the cosmological argument
The text raises the Aristotelian possibility that the world always existed and argues that physically the world is “fourteen-something billion years old.” It adds that even if the world were eternal, one would still need a “reason” according to the principle of sufficient reason for why the world is as it is and not otherwise, when it is special, even if there is no “cause” in the sense of coming into being in time. It concludes that in this sense the physico-theological argument supplements the cosmological argument, because the claim of eternity does not remove the need for a reason for the order and for the special laws that allow life.
Quantum theory and coming into being “from the vacuum” as a test of the assumption that “things do not arise by themselves”
The text deals with the claim that quantum theory shows that things arise without a guiding hand, and emphasizes that particles “burst forth” according to conserving patterns such as pair creation and charge conservation, so this is not structureless randomness. It argues that “vacuum” is a term for a ground state and not absolute nothingness, and that the very fact that these formations are governed by laws indicates a structure that directs the possibilities. It concludes that this does not undermine the need for a generator, but only changes the language of description.
Logical dichotomy, the law of the excluded middle, and probabilistic claims against “God is less likely”
The text argues that there are only two possibilities: either there is an explanation for the world or there is not, and calls this a logical dichotomy under the law of the excluded middle. It rejects claims of the form “maybe there is a third possibility we haven’t thought of” as a logical mistake, and argues that claims like “the probability of God is lower than the probability of chance” cannot be given independently, because the sum of the probabilities of the two options is one. It presents a formulation according to which if the probability of chance is tiny, the probability of explanation/God is “one minus” that tiny amount, and from this concludes that preferring to remain in “it requires further analysis” or “wonder” is not a third option, but wording that in his view is equivalent to choosing that there is an explanation.
“God is not an explanation,” Winnie-the-Pooh’s footprints, and the distinction between proof and explanation
The text returns to the claim that “God is not an explanation” and distinguishes between providing understanding and proving the existence of a generating entity. It illustrates this through the footprints that Winnie-the-Pooh sees in the sand, which justify inferring that someone passed there even without knowing anything about him. It argues that the physico-theological argument seeks to prove the existence of a generator of complexity and does not necessarily add an intelligible mechanism for how the creation occurred.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz against “intelligent design” and the response through types of explanation and paradigms
The text quotes Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who argues that the idea of intelligent design explains nothing, because in cases like Michelangelo or an F-16 we have independent knowledge of the existence of painters and engineers, whereas regarding the universe we have no prior knowledge of an intelligence capable of designing and realizing it, and the inference is merely a “psychological result.” It replies that the argument does not have to be “reduction to the familiar,” and that even without prior knowledge of painters, the painting itself testifies to the existence of an appropriate generator. It presents a distinction between explanation as reduction to the familiar within a paradigm and explanation as reduction to the unfamiliar in situations of “paradigm crisis,” and explains this through Thomas Kuhn and the way a scientific community holds onto a theory despite anomalies until problems accumulate. It uses Newton as an example of an explanation that proposes a new and unfamiliar principle, gravitational force, which unifies familiar phenomena such as falling, planetary orbits, and tides, and argues that this shows explanations can also move from the familiar to the unfamiliar when there is no other explanation.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, first of all, let’s locate where we are. So, as I said, I just want to place us within the overall flow. We saw the ontological proof, which is based on conceptual analysis and basically claims to present an argument without assumptions, yes, an argument that reaches the conclusion that God exists without relying on any assumption. The cosmological proof is based on a simple, basic assumption: that something exists, there is a universe, doesn’t matter, something exists, and from that it reaches the conclusion that there must be something or someone that created this thing that exists. And the third type of proof, which is where we are now, is the physico-theological proof. It also assumes something, a factual assumption. The assumption is more complex, less basic than the cosmological proof. It is the proof that there exists something with special characteristics—complex, coordinated, designed. There are various formulations of this proof, but broadly speaking, in Kant’s classification, all of these are the physico-theological proof because they begin from the assumption that a complex thing exists. And a complex thing, yes, requires an explanation or a cause, yes, that created it—that’s basically the claim. Okay, so in the end we arrive at the following formulation: a special complex thing exists; such a thing does not create itself, it does not arise spontaneously; some kind of guiding hand is needed to create it; and therefore the conclusion is that there was someone or something that created this complexity. I talked about the fact that God has to be defined per argument, meaning every argument talks about God as defined differently. The ontological proof speaks about God as the perfect being. The cosmological proof speaks about Him as the being responsible for the existence of what exists, yes, of the universe. The physico-theological proof speaks about the engineer. That is, the one who planned the matter and is responsible for its complexity—not for its very existence, maybe that too, but here the focus is on God’s responsibility for the complexity of the thing. And therefore, if the cosmological proof speaks about an all-powerful God who can create something from nothing—or I don’t know, all-powerful, but at least able to create something from nothing—the physico-theological proof speaks about a wise God, yes, a wise God or one with capacities who can produce complex and special things. Good. Here I talked about a series of objections that parallel the objections raised regarding the cosmological proof, and I said that overall they are rejected in fairly similar ways, so I won’t repeat that here, yes—who created God, and God is not an explanation, and all sorts of things of that kind. But I do want to get into an important point that is actually unique to this proof. There is some argument that comes up in various forms against this argument, and at its root is basically the idea that complexity is in the eye of the beholder. In other words, you think that life, or the universe we live in, is something complex. Unique. Therefore it requires explanation—so who created it? Then people say: complexity is in the eye of the beholder. It looks complex to you; to someone else it doesn’t look complex. It’s subjective. You can’t build objective arguments—arguments that claim something about the world—on the basis of your subjective impressions or your subjective concepts. And therefore the claim is that one cannot really say this; it undermines the assumption that the world really is a complex thing. And this also comes up in other formulations. For example, there is a claim—that’s the cousin of this claim—according to which every world of any kind will always contain complex creatures. There is nothing special about this world; it’s just that the complex creatures in this world are of the type we know, like living creatures. In other worlds, other universes with other laws, there too there would be complex creatures, just complex creatures of other kinds. And therefore there isn’t really anything special here despite the complexity; there isn’t really anything special here that requires explanation. That’s the cousin of this claim; we’ll get to it later. There are other uses of this way of thinking, but for me at the moment all this is just explaining why I want to devote some time to defining complexity. In other words, what is complexity? So here the basic claim I want to make is that complexity is not in the eye of the beholder. Complexity is an objective property. And whether the eyes of the beholder detect complexity or fail to detect it is not a matter of subjective opinion but of ability. Meaning, if someone doesn’t see that there is complexity here, he’s simply blind, not defining complexity differently. Simply blind. It’s like someone who says there’s no table here—I’m not going to say, well, whether there’s a table here is in the eye of the beholder. Whoever sees a table has a table, whoever doesn’t, doesn’t. No—someone who doesn’t see a table is blind. There’s a table here. Okay? So I’m claiming that the point about complexity is basically the same thing. Now, in order to show that, I need to define the concept of complexity. To define this concept I’ll use a little physics, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics if you like—not at a professional level, just enough to understand the concept. The second law of thermodynamics basically says that a closed system cannot become more ordered—I’m using everyday formulations. Okay? Entropy cannot decrease. Entropy is a measure of order, and low entropy means high order. Low entropy is more ordered; high entropy is less ordered. The claim is that a closed system—that is, one with no external factor involved—cannot increase in order. Because order does not increase by itself. If order increases, someone has to arrange it. Right? Meaning, if a flowerpot falls off a roof—yes, that was the example our thermodynamics lecturer gave us in first year—if a flowerpot falls from the roof, it shatters into pieces. Okay? We do not know of any process in nature in which a flowerpot shattered into pieces undergoes some process and turns into a whole flowerpot. That does not happen. In other words, a system—unless someone sits over those pieces and glues them together. Meaning, if there is an external factor involved in the system and arranging it, then it can increase the amount of order in the system, or decrease the entropy. But if there is no such external factor, if we are talking about the laws of nature, things that happen spontaneously, then the level of order can only go down, or remain the same, or go down. Never rise. Therefore, if no one takes care of the world, it will become more and more disorderly. Okay? Until in the end we get some kind of world in which there is nothing—meaning, nothing but one big mess. Okay? That is basically what is supposed to happen if there is no external involvement. Now where does this come from? So to understand that—it is a law in thermodynamics. And there is a field called statistical mechanics that basically gives thermodynamics its meaning. In other words, it shows, or gives a microscopic theory from which the laws of thermodynamics can be derived. When I studied that course, I just stood there open-mouthed, because it’s unbelievable. They simply showed on the board various laws of thermodynamics—you have no idea where they come from or what they mean, and what entropy and enthalpy are, and all sorts of things nobody knows what they mean, I didn’t know what they meant—and suddenly he shows it to you on the board. To learn that. Anyway, what is going on there basically? The claim is—the basic claim is—that the laws of thermodynamics deal with various quantities called macroscopic quantities. Properties of the system as a whole. Okay? Statistical mechanics tries to build those macroscopic properties from what happens to the microscopic particulars that make up the larger system. If I know what happens to every particle in the gas—its speed, its position, and so on—I can assign some property to the gas itself. What happens to the gas as such? Altogether, it’s just a combination of the properties of the individual particles that make up the gas. That is basically the claim. Now, this is not a trivial point. I think I even talked about it in the previous lecture or the one before that. I talked about liquidity and John Searle, didn’t I? Did I talk about liquidity as an emergent property? I didn’t? The courses are getting mixed up in my head; I don’t remember. Yes? Okay. So the claim basically is that there are properties that are properties of the macro, of the collective, that exist only at the level of the collective, not at the level of the individual parts. Okay? For example, when you talk about liquidity, liquidity is a property that characterizes a cluster of molecules. Water, for example. Okay? But a single molecule is not liquid. It’s not that it’s not liquid because it’s solid. None of the states of matter are relevant to a single molecule. A state of matter describes relations between molecules when there is a collection of molecules. Therefore there are certain properties that are properties of collective objects, of collective entities, and they do not characterize—they are not properties of the individual parts that generate those characteristics. Yes, democracy is a property of a state. An individual person who makes up the society in the state is not democratic. There is no democracy at the level of one individual. Right? But a state can be democratic, it can be non-democratic. That is a property that belongs to the whole. But the standard assumption is—and that’s what I discussed in the previous lecture—that this overall property can be explained or grounded in the properties of the individual parts that make up the system. True, the parts do not have the collective property, but from the properties they do have I can show the existence of the collective property. For example, from the properties of a single water molecule I can show why a collection of molecules at a certain pressure and temperature will be liquid. Or gas. Or solid. Okay? Even though liquid, gas, and solid are not properties of the individual molecule. They are properties of the aggregate. But the property of the aggregate can be grounded in the properties of the parts that make it up. And the claim I discussed last time was whether there can be emergence—emergence—of collective properties that cannot be grounded in the properties of the parts that make up the collective. All right? That’s what I discussed there. Now I’m returning to weak emergence. Weak emergence is emergence that says there is a property that characterizes the collective, but I can calculate it or derive it from the properties of the parts that make up the collective. Okay? That’s the phenomenon of emergence. That is basically the foundation of all statistical mechanics. Statistical mechanics tries to show that macroscopic properties emerge from properties of the micro-level. Now one of the macroscopic properties is entropy. Entropy, as I said, is a measure of order. Now a single individual particle is neither ordered nor disordered. It’s one. Right? Order can exist when we have various elements and the question is what relations obtain among them. If they are all arranged in a circle, that looks ordered to us. If they are scattered randomly in space, that is not ordered. In other words, order too is a collective property; it is not an individual property. But this order can be built, or at least tried to be built, from individual properties in a certain way. For example, imagine a situation where you have three identical balls, say. And you have a row of ten cells. A straight row of ten cells, let’s label them one through ten. Now I describe states of the entire row, where the three balls are distributed among those cells. Think of one state, for example, where all three balls are in cell number one. Okay? One state. A second state… all three balls are in cells one, two, and three. Another state: the three balls are in cells two, three, and nine. And so on, okay? Or all of them in cell ten, or two in cell eight and one in cell five. Okay, different distributions of the balls in space. I can define the order of the entire system—again, not of an individual particle—in terms of the positions of the individual particles. This is just a simple example to explain the concepts. If all the balls are arranged in one cell, all in cell number one, that is an ordered state. By contrast, if they are in cells one, two, and seven, that is a less ordered state. How do I define order in this case? I ask myself how many different arrangements can correspond to the same macroscopic state. How many different arrangements can correspond to the state one-two-seven? Six. I can put particle number one in any of the three cells, particle number two in one of the two remaining cells, and the third particle in the remaining cell. Six different states which, at the macroscopic level, will look exactly the same to me. Right? Because I do not distinguish—the balls are identical. I don’t distinguish between the different balls, so basically I have six microscopic states all equivalent to one defined macroscopic state. By contrast, when all three balls are in cell number one, I have only one microscopic state equivalent to that, right? I have no other state that looks the same at the macroscopic level, therefore it is a more ordered state. What does that actually mean? That if I were to randomly assign the positions of the balls to the cells, what is my probability of getting an ordered state versus the probability of getting a disordered one? Suppose I sample randomly, okay? They all fall independently into any of the ten cells, and even into a cell that is already occupied, yes? Each one can fall with equal probability into any of the ten cells and there is no connection between the balls. Then clearly the probability of getting a disordered state is higher, right? Because I have six such arrangements. By contrast, the probability of getting an ordered state is low. Okay? So that basically means that if I act randomly, the result will be a disordered state. To produce an ordered state, it seems likely that I did not sample randomly but rather directed things so that all the balls would fall into cell number one. Otherwise it is not likely that this would happen. Now again, one versus six is not so terrible. But when we’re talking about ten thousand balls in a chain of one hundred thousand places, there is no chance in the world of getting all ten thousand balls in cell number one. No chance in the world. The probability is simply ridiculous; there is just no chance that it will happen. Now we are talking about a situation in which the complexity is much greater than ten thousand balls in a million cells. We are talking about a complexity that doesn’t even notice this ridiculous problem next to it—in our world, I mean the order of our world. And therefore the claim that the order in our world is on such a level that it cannot have been formed spontaneously—that is basically the claim. Let me maybe give you a real-life example so you can see how this connects to the model I described earlier with the cells and the balls. Think of a container with gas inside it. Okay? If all the gas is concentrated inside a plastic bag in the upper right corner of the container. Okay? Now I open the bag—what will happen to the gas? It will spread throughout the whole space, right? By contrast, if I start with gas spread throughout the entire volume of the container, will there come a time when all the gas is concentrated in the upper right corner? No. Maybe it will happen for one instant, but that is not the state you arrive at, right? As you pass through all the chaos you may also, for a fraction of a second, pass through such a state. But the state in which the gas is dispersed in the container is a stationary state, a stable state. It does not happen for a moment and then disperse back again; that is the state in which it remains. So there is really an asymmetry in time here, and this is one of the great philosophical riddles in thermodynamics: how, from physics whose basic laws are all time-symmetric—there is no difference between going forward and going backward—you get to thermodynamics, where there is a direction to the time axis and the process is not reversible. From concentrated gas we get dispersed gas; from dispersed gas we do not get concentrated gas. Even though every molecule of the gas, or every particle in this gas, behaves according to physical laws that are completely reversible. Just as it can flow from here to there, it can flow from there to here. There is no difference in direction. Okay? That is less important for our purposes. What I want to demonstrate through this is that these claims—that gas moves from a concentrated state to a dispersed one, but not the other way around—are actually claims that reflect a relation between these two states. The claim that when gas is dispersed in the container that is a disordered state, and when the gas is in one corner that is an ordered state. And the system, spontaneously, if there is nothing arranging it, moves from an ordered state to a disordered state, and not the reverse. If I want the system to be in an ordered state and remain in that state, I need to put all the gas into a bag—and once again, I am an external factor, this doesn’t happen naturally. I do it with my own hands. I put it in a bag, place the bag in the upper right corner of the container, and now this is an ordered state. How did it happen? It didn’t happen spontaneously. It happened because I created that state with my own hands. In other words, I am an external factor to the system of gas in the container, and I had to be involved in order for an ordered state to arise. If I am not involved and the whole thing runs on its own, it will reach the least ordered state. In the end, it will be found in the least ordered state.
[Speaker D] Doesn’t it depend
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] on the geometry of the vessel at all.
[Speaker D] If I have some kind of, say, curve at the top and the gas is compressed, it doesn’t happen,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t depend on the geometry of the vessel. It will be spread throughout the whole space of the vessel. No, it won’t accumulate anywhere. Unless there’s some blocked-off place that you don’t let it reach—that’s something else. But in the space accessible to it, it will spread out completely uniformly. It doesn’t depend on the geometry of the vessel. So what does that mean? In the long run, yes? Give it enough time. What does that actually mean? Understand that if complexity were in the eye of the beholder, then there couldn’t be a law in physics that says you move from an ordered state to a less ordered state and not the other way around. Because it would be in the eye of the beholder. Do you understand? Someone else, another observer, could say that the state in which the gas is dispersed throughout the whole container is actually, in his eyes, a much more ordered state than the state where the gas is in one corner. So what then? From his perspective the laws of physics would look different? The laws of physics look the same to all of us. The laws of physics are objective, right? So if the laws of physics assume a certain concept of order, that means the concept is not subjective. It’s not in the eye of the beholder. It has an objective definition. Its measure is entropy. Entropy is the measure that gauges the level of order, and that measure is objective. Someone who doesn’t see that is blind—or intellectually blind—or just doesn’t understand what order means. It’s not that he thinks something else is orderly; he simply doesn’t understand. And someone who thinks life is not an ordered thing—it’s exactly the same. It’s like saying: I think all the particles that are in cell number one—that’s not an ordered state; actually, when they’re spread out, that’s the ordered state. It’s simply blindness. There are calculations that say life is something with very, very low entropy. Meaning, life is something very ordered, very special. Okay, ordered, special—there are some concepts here that overlap a bit. Why is all this important? Because now when I look at the world as a whole and ask myself: is this world special, complex, ordered? Of course it is. Right? There’s something here that isn’t just chaos. There are people here, there’s a lecture, there are tables. The whole story here is very, very ordered. If you took all the particles in this room, mixed them up, and let them behave however they wanted, there is no chance in the world that you’d get here a classroom with people and tables, air conditioning, lights, and so on. You’d get a collection of particles moving around in space randomly. Okay? So the physico-theological argument is really based on the assumption of an objective definition of the concept of order. And anyone who says order is in the eye of the beholder is mistaken. Not true. Okay? Simply not true. He simply doesn’t understand. It’s a bit reminiscent of—I think I mentioned last time—Paley’s argument, right? The priest, who says that if we found a watch on the ground and asked ourselves how the watch came into being, then one possibility would be to say, well, just by chance particles accumulated somehow and formed the watch. What would a reasonable person say? That apparently someone made that watch. Why? Now I’m translating that: because a watch is something with low entropy, a system that works like—a machine, a watch, yes? A mechanical system, doesn’t matter. It’s a system that is ordered; you can recognize a guiding hand in it. That doesn’t just happen in a spontaneous process, a natural process. Okay? So that’s really the translation of Paley’s argument—it’s basically a translation of what I described here. Okay. A watch is just an example of an ordered system. That’s all. And our world is far more ordered than a watch, so the claim that it could not have come into being spontaneously is a much stronger claim than the watch—the watch argument. Now I want to clarify one more point. There are people who present the physico-theological argument on the basis of the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics says there is a God, in simple translation. Yes, that’s basically the claim. Since an ordered thing must have something external that created it. There has to be outside involvement. It’s not a closed system. A closed system does not organize itself into an ordered state. Here there’s a subtle point, and it’s very, very, very important to sharpen it. That is not the claim I was making. I am not claiming that there is scientific proof that there is a God. Because if there were scientific proof that there is a God—at least in this context—that would mean that science basically doesn’t work. Right? Because it would mean a world was created here and I can’t explain it on the basis of the laws of nature. Because the spontaneous formation of such a world contradicts the laws of nature, and therefore you need someone from outside to intervene in nature and create the world. Okay? That’s basically the claim. And so very often the debate between creationists—yes, those who believe in creation—and neo-Darwinians, people who believe in science, and also believe in it in the religious sense, I mean—that debate often revolves around the question of whether science is right or not. And creationists tend to argue that evolution is not correct, the Big Bang is not correct—they deny the laws of nature. Why? Because their feeling is that if there is a natural explanation, then there is no physico-theological evidence. In other words, the second law of thermodynamics proves the existence of God, which means that natural processes could not have produced such a world. The world’s coming into being was a miracle. It has no explanation according to the laws of nature. And therefore people who claim that we have a natural explanation for how the world came into being—the Big Bang, evolution, and so on—are simply mistaken. Science cannot be right. That is basically the claim that comes out of this. And likewise the other way around. The neo-Darwinians, who claim that science is in fact right, are arguing against the creationists; they are basically saying there cannot be a God, because science is in fact right. Because I have an explanation. There cannot be a God, or there is no evidence for the existence of God, because I have a scientific explanation that solves the problem. The second law of thermodynamics can explain to me how the world was formed without the involvement of a guiding hand. That’s the debate in a nutshell. Now why is this debate a mistake on both sides? Because I, for example, think science works, and I think I can—the coming into being of the world does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics. If it did contradict it, that would mean the second law of thermodynamics is not correct. There are scientific facts that contradict it. The world is a scientific fact. Okay. So the law doesn’t work. So how can I use it? After all, I use it at every step. I build refrigerators from the second law of thermodynamics. Or air conditioners. How can I use it if it’s not a correct law, if it is constantly contradicted by facts, by the existence of the world, by the development of the world if you like, evolution, and so on. Therefore I claim that the second law of thermodynamics is correct, and I can—that is, the coming into being of the world does not contradict the laws of nature. It does not violate the second law of thermodynamics. How? Why doesn’t it violate it? After all, how can something complex and special come into being spontaneously? So here a lot of ink has been spilled. I’ll say briefly: basically what this law says is only that the total entropy in the system is conserved. But that doesn’t mean that islands of low entropy can’t arise within the system at the expense of the rest of the space, where the entropy will be higher, so that overall it is conserved. Right? Think of entropy as some quantity that is also distributed in space, so you can say: okay, here there is some island with lower entropy, more ordered. This is how they usually explain the emergence of life, the emergence of things. When I build a building, I create something very special here, right? How do I create something very special? Before there was disorder, and now suddenly some structure appears here, or a machine if I create one, or something like that. The answer is that it is created at the expense of disorder in the surroundings. I mine stones from quarries, I cut down trees, I create disorder in various places and concentrate the order in one place. So I take this island and turn it into something ordered with low entropy, at the expense of destruction in the surroundings, which necessarily raises the entropy level of the surroundings. The total entropy in the universe has not increased—it has not decreased, sorry. That’s basically the claim. It’s not exact, because you have to include me too, not just the universe. The universe and I together are the whole system, but never mind, include me too. Okay? So am I also part of the mess?
[Speaker E] I cleaned it. Where did the entropy go down?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Say that again?
[Speaker E] Where did it go down? I had a messy room and I cleaned it, I arranged it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes—in your effort, you ate something, for example. You ate something. They manufactured the broom so that you could clean. You ate so you’d have the strength to clean. You slept. You burned a lot of things in the course of this whole story. You breathe all the time. Lots of things are being burned so that you can do that work. You’re expending energy there. And the moment you expend energy, that energy has to come from somewhere. Wherever it came from, that’s where you sowed destruction. Meaning, all you can do is transfer the disorder, sweep the dust under the rug—you can’t make the dust disappear. Do you understand?
[Speaker F] So in the end all I want is just to create mess on top of mess?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. Disorder can arise spontaneously; order cannot. Now notice: all these are constraints. Disorder can arise spontaneously—that doesn’t mean disorder will always arise. Okay? But the emergence of disorder does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics; the emergence of order does. And that’s a very important point, because the second law of thermodynamics is a constraint; it doesn’t determine. Why is that important? Because apparently, according to what I’ve described until now, the argument falls apart. So we have a natural explanation for the emergence of life or for the emergence of the order we have here in the world. So what’s the problem? It comes at the expense of disorder elsewhere. So what’s the problem? Then why do you need to assume the involvement of a guiding hand? I want to claim that in fact the second law of thermodynamics is not the basis of the argument. The second law is not necessarily violated. And the second law is only a constraint. It says order cannot spontaneously increase. But it does—order can organize itself in certain regions at the expense of disorder in other regions. Now I ask—not because of the second law of thermodynamics—is it reasonable that some island of crazy order should arise, drawing into itself a huge amount of order from the surroundings and leaving all the surroundings in disorder? Is it reasonable that very strong gradients of order should arise—yes, very large differences in order between different regions of space? And my answer is no, even though this does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics. But that answer is a philosophical answer. I’m saying it’s not reasonable for such a thing to happen on the philosophical level. I don’t know of any law of nature that this thing, as I presented it earlier, contradicts. And therefore I do not build the physico-theological argument on the second law of thermodynamics. But on the other hand, the second law of thermodynamics is only a constraint. It tells me what cannot be. But among the things that can be, you can still ask yourself what is more likely and what is less likely. And I say that it’s true that the second law of thermodynamics is not violated when life emerges, because life emerges on the basis of—at the expense of—the great destruction we sow all around us, but still, even something like that is not likely to have happened by chance, without a guiding hand. Because otherwise the disorder would have remained somehow spread out in space. Why would islands with a huge, huge, huge amount of disord—huge, huge amount of order, sorry, arise at the expense of the surrounding disorder? Why would all the order drain into very specific places at the expense of other things? Here I see a guiding hand, but that is not a scientific argument. I am not claiming that otherwise the second law of thermodynamics would be violated here. I am not proving the existence of God on the basis of the laws of science. All right? That’s an important point. Because whoever does do that is basically taking us back to an idea we already discussed. It’s called God of the gaps. Meaning, yes—the proof of God’s existence on the basis that science is not precise, not correct, has holes in it, has gaps, there are things I don’t know or science doesn’t explain or something like that, and therefore there is a God. Not for nothing does Yated Ne’eman always rejoice when the weather forecaster was wrong. If the forecaster was wrong—he said it would rain and it didn’t rain, or vice versa—Yated Ne’eman declares a holiday over it, says Hallel. Usually. Okay. The bigger novelty is that even though science is right, there is a God—and then you don’t need to conclude there isn’t one. Okay. In other words, this oppositional view, which I’ll get to later, this oppositional view that creates all the bloody battles between believers in evolution and science and believers in God, stems from the fact that people think this is a scientific question. Science proves there is a God, or science is wrong—those are the two options. Okay? So these say science is right and those say science is wrong, but in fact there is a third option that very often both sides do not take into account. Some do; I’m talking about the militants on both sides. They do not take it into account, and that option is that science is right and there is also a God. Two things. I’ll go even further than that: not only is science right and there is also a God, but the correctness of science is the evidence for the existence of God. It is evidence—not only does it not contradict it. But that we’ll talk about later, further on. So basically the point I wanted to draw from all this is, first, to define the concept of order objectively, and for that I used the second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy. But don’t make a mistake: I am not using the second law of thermodynamics to prove the existence of God, only to explain how the concept of order is defined objectively. That’s all. I use the concept of entropy. I do not use the assumption of the second law that an ordered thing cannot arise spontaneously—not true, it can arise, if it happens at the expense of the surroundings, where the level of order decreases. Okay? So I am not using that. I do claim that such islands of very, very high order at the expense of the surroundings themselves point to the existence of a guiding hand. When I see a building standing here in all its grandeur, it has sown a huge amount of disorder around it, right? People ate while building it, and they destroyed things and quarried stones and cut down trees and machinery and air pollution and fuel—don’t ask what kind of disorder the construction of one single building in the world sows. It’s unbelievable how much disorder that creates. Okay? So what does that mean? That basically you don’t need to assume there were people here who designed the building, who built the building, because after all the order of the building is at the expense of the disorder around it. So the total level of order didn’t rise. No problem, everything is fine. The second law of thermodynamics was not violated. Not true. The answer is: not true. The second law indeed was not violated, and still the erection of a building means there was someone here who concentrated all the order into the building at the expense of the disorder he sowed around it. The total amount of order did not increase. The second law was not violated. This is not a scientific claim, but within the constraint of the second law—which is only a constraint, meaning that what lies outside it is scientifically impossible—within it there are still various options. And among those options I claim that the existence of a guiding hand is much more plausible. Okay? Is that clear? Because it’s a subtle point, and many, many people miss it in arguments around this issue. Is destruction too a guiding hand?
[Speaker G] Huh?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, destruction is—there’s “Shaya yukat sha’ar,” you know, familiar with the Talmud in tractate Bava Kamma, “Shaya yukat sha’ar”? A demon called Shaya, shin-aleph-yod-heh, that dwells in uninhabited houses, places where no one lives, and crumbles them, and that’s how you find dust in an abandoned house. Okay? That’s what the Talmud says. Yes, that’s the demon responsible for the second law of thermodynamics, that things fall apart. They fall apart on their own; you don’t need a guiding hand to crumble the house, you don’t need demons. Maybe there are demons, I don’t know. But physics describes this crumbling without assuming the existence of demons. Things just decay over time. But a building does not get built—it does not get cleaned over time unless someone lives there and cleans it. Okay? So the someone who lives there causes there not to be dust, not because he drives away the demon but because he removes the dust—he simply cleans the dust, that’s all. Okay? So good. This demon of the second law even has a name.
[Speaker H] Maxwell’s demon? What? There’s something called “Maxwell’s demon” in the… yes, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maxwell’s demon is a puzzle Maxwell posed to the second law of thermodynamics. He says: imagine a container, a container with gas molecules inside it, okay? And in the middle of the container I put a partition, and in the partition there sits a demon, and the demon… this demon allows all the particles coming above a certain speed to pass to the other side of the partition, yes, to pass from the right side of the container to the left. Particles coming at low speed he does not allow to pass. Fine? After some amount of time, all the high-speed particles, or many of them, will be concentrated on the left side, and the slow ones will be concentrated on the right. So the temperature on the left will not be equal to the temperature on the right. Now think about the system of the demon plus the container plus the gas: how can it be that the order there increased? Yes, order increased, because here it’s hot and here it’s cold, not everything is mixed together. So that’s like with the particles on one side of the container, right? Order increased even though the system here is closed. Of course this demon could also be a machine. It doesn’t have to be a demon in a mystical sense. Some machine, some semi-permeable door like that, where if someone arrives with high speed he bursts through it, and if he doesn’t arrive with high speed—a semi-permeable membrane or something like that—then he can’t break through it. Okay? So you see that entropy decreased—yes, that’s the paradox of Maxwell’s demon. Yes, we see a closed system in which order increases. But the accepted explanation for this is that the creation of this machine itself was a creation by people who invested entropy in it. Both the design and the construction—yes, you created this machine, it didn’t just happen there by itself. And that creation is the entropic price of the gain I had inside the container system.
[Speaker I] There’s a connection here, but it’s very far from one-to-one. If there’s a tiny little demon that you built in five minutes and now it works for me on a thousand-liter gas container, or another demon that works on a billion-liter gas container and it’s the same…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But if it works for that long, then presumably in some sense it consumes something from the environment, because at some point every system ultimately collapses. But yes, it could be more time or less time. How much time—that’s already a limitation of the system. Yes. In the end, I’m saying the second law is only a constraint—that’s exactly the point. And it will keep going and going and going and create more and more order, up to the point where it is more or less equal to the destruction you sowed when you created the little demon. That’s probably what will happen here. Meaning, overall, in the static state that eventually forms, in the stable state that eventually forms, the entropy level did not decrease. All right? That’s the claim—if the system is really closed. The system that is me plus the demon plus the container plus—yes, plus everything. So that is basically the… that is basically the definition of complexity and the sharpening of the character of the argument. Now let’s talk about some objections to this argument. We’ll start with one of the favorite creatures of our atheist cousins, and that is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Yes, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is basically the atheists’ god. So what do they say? You say: okay, you’ve got a wonderful argument. The world is complex. A complex thing is not formed spontaneously. There was someone outside the system who was involved, and he is the one who created the order, the complexity, that we find in our world, in our system. But who says that’s God? Maybe it’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster. There’s something, okay, and you claim you want to prove the existence of God, not the existence of something. Maybe that something is not God but a spaghetti monster.
[Speaker J] What difference does it make, what difference does it make. Huh? What difference does it make, what difference does it make.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not something you worship, and it doesn’t command you to keep the Sabbath and not eat pork. It could command you to eat pork, for example. Huh? You forgot. Oh. Right—there’s a mistake here in understanding the goal of the argument, not in understanding the argument. What is the argument trying to prove? The argument is trying to prove the existence of some entity that is not part of the complex world that we encounter. That’s all. What is the nature of that entity, what are its characteristics, does it communicate with us, does it want something from us, does it not want something from us—let it be the Flying Spaghetti Monster, what do I care?
[Speaker J] They also believe in an entity that something… huh? The atheists…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They don’t believe in it. They say that according to your approach there has to be some external something, so who says that’s God—maybe it’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster? They themselves don’t believe in either one. Yes, this is of course a reductio ad absurdum claim; it’s not a real alternative they are presenting here because they want to worship the spaghetti monster. But as I said earlier, it’s a misunderstanding. I talked about this before: you have to understand what the argument is actually trying to prove. Don’t take me to Mount Sinai and putting on tefillin. This argument is only trying to prove the existence of some entity that is responsible for the complexity we encounter here in the world. That’s all. What it’s called, what it looks like, what it wants, whether it wants anything at all—that has nothing to do with this. That’s a completely different discussion. How you get from here to religious obligation and to God in the theistic sense—we’ll talk about that at the end of the… toward the end of the year. Okay, another objection. There are people who want to argue: fine, so there has to be some entity that created the world. But maybe it’s the laws of nature themselves? The laws of nature—we said the coming into being of the world, after all, does not contradict the laws of nature, so maybe the laws of nature themselves are what created the world? There’s no need to assume the existence of another entity external to the world; rather, the laws of nature, which in any case govern all the events that happen here, they too did this all along—they are what created this thing. So here there’s a subtle point. Why is this story… well, just a moment. The question is this: if the laws of nature are entities, I have no problem—then that’s God. It’s like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I am only claiming that there exists some entity or entities, doesn’t matter, that created what I see here. It could be that this entity is the laws of nature, if they are entities. But usually when we talk about the laws of nature, we are not talking about entities. We are talking about descriptions of modes of operation. The law of gravitation. The law of gravitation is not an entity. The law of gravitation says that if there are two masses, they attract one another with a certain acceleration. Okay? But who causes that? The question of who causes it is not answered by the law of gravitation at all—not that it answers it incorrectly; it simply does not answer that question at all. The law of gravitation describes what happens here, and when I ask the question why, not the question what—what happens here—the law of gravitation is irrelevant. What might be relevant is the force of gravitation, not the law of gravitation. The force of gravitation is a kind of entity. There is some kind of entity in the world, the force of gravitation, which pulls those masses and is what causes their motion. Here that already really is an explanation—it is causation. It is not just a description. The law of gravitation only describes. The force of gravitation is an explanation. Okay? Important point. In principle I could state the law of gravitation without assuming the existence of a gravitational force. For example, if I don’t think everything needs to have a cause. There is a law of gravitation that describes how bodies behave in the world. It describes it correctly. It is not trying to explain why this happens. Maybe the question why is not even legitimate because I don’t accept the principle of causality, so why should there be such a why? There is no why. That’s just how it is. Okay? Therefore I can assume the existence of a law of gravitation without assuming the existence of a force of gravitation. Let me add another point, maybe one more remark. Almost any scientist you ask, any physicist, will tell you that not only is the law of gravitation correct, but there is also a force of gravitation. Why does he say that? No one has ever seen the force of gravitation. By the way, there are attempts to see it. So far, not possible. There are attempts. When people quantize this force, then there are what are called gravitons. Gravitons are the particles that carry the gravitational force, just as photons carry the electromagnetic field. Okay? But so far at least, our measuring instruments are too weak and cannot measure gravitons. You need instruments with resolutions we still don’t have, and therefore there is not really currently a measurement that shows the existence of gravitons. I don’t think there is a physicist on earth who disputes that gravitons exist. No one has seen them. Why? Because it is obvious to everyone that if there is attraction between two bodies, there is something that causes it. If there is a law of gravitation, there is probably also a force of gravitation. Because the law of gravitation is not an explanation, it is not a cause of what happens; it describes what happens. But if I assume the principle of causality, that every such thing must have a cause, then I also assume the existence of a force of gravitation, not just the law of gravitation. Again—whether we quantize it or not, and whether there will be gravitons or something else—you can argue about that, but clearly there is something there. By the way, this is another assumption that science adopts even though, of course, there is no empirical reason to do so: namely, the rejection of action at a distance. If two bodies that are distant from one another exert a force, as in gravitation or electric force—if you have two electrically charged bodies—then they exert force on each other, or gravitational force on the basis of their masses. The assumption is that the forces do not act at a distance. Meaning, if this body pulls that body, then something has to travel from this body to that body and inform it: hey, you have to be pulled toward me. That force is called—the thing is called—the force of gravitation, or the gravitational field if you prefer more modern terminology. Okay, but there has to be something there in between. And again this is basically an expression of the fact that we are great believers in the principle of causality. It is obvious to us that if something happens, there is a reason it happened. It does not happen without a cause. And therefore no one accepts the existence of a law of gravitation without accepting the existence of a force of gravitation. That is a pastime of philosophers of science. There is no scientist on earth who thinks that way. I’m not saying… but I think the intuition of people who work in these fields is a very powerful intuition. And if I come back to us: when you tell me that the law of gravitation caused the attraction, that’s roughly like saying the laws of nature created the world. The laws of nature describe the formation of the world at most, assuming the laws are correct and everything is fine. But who is the entity that carried out what those laws describe? Who is the force of gravitation, not who is the law of gravitation. What is the entity that caused—or acts in the manner those laws describe? That is God. So if you tell me the laws are an entity, then they are God. They are not describing—rather they themselves are the entity. So the law of gravitation is basically the force of gravitation. You called it the force of gravitation? Fine, that’s God. If you tell me the laws are not an entity—because after all you want not to assume the existence of an additional entity, but to make do only with the entities we know here, in the physical world—then from your perspective the laws are not entities. They are only descriptions. Then you haven’t solved the question: so who brings all this about? You only described the process. But when I ask who brings about this process, that you have not answered. Therefore the laws of nature are not an alternative to the physico-theological argument. The laws of nature are not an alternative option. Unless they are entities—and then it is not an alternative option; it is exactly the thing I am talking about. Okay? Yes.
[Speaker G] From the pit of an avocado comes an avocado tree. So I can say, okay, laws of causality are operating here, laws of purpose. Who created it? There is no answer to that question, and I can remain with the feeling that I don’t know. Why do I have to have an answer to that question?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You don’t have to give an answer; you have to believe there is an answer. If not, then this argument won’t persuade you. You don’t have to do anything, but if you don’t accept the principle of causality, then this argument is not relevant to you. This argument is relevant to someone who does accept the principle of causality. My claim is that I think generally rational people in the world, certainly scientists, accept the principle of causality. Except when they enter a debate about God—then suddenly they stop accepting it. Okay? But usually they do accept it. And whoever doesn’t accept it—fine, I can’t say anything to him. So okay, then this argument really is not relevant for him. Okay? I already said that every argument—not only for the existence of God, but any argument at all—assumes basic premises. Someone who does not accept the premises, there is no point addressing this argument to him. Okay, that’s clear. Another point, which I think I spoke about last time: maybe the world always existed? Then there’s no need to assume someone created it. Aristotle’s eternal world. I think I talked about that, right? I said that first of all we know physically that this is not true. The world is fourteen-something billion years old, so it did not always exist. Meaning, it was indeed created at some point. Another thing: I said there is the principle of sufficient reason, as distinct from the principle of causality, which says that even if something always existed, if it is special, it still requires an explanation or reason—why is it as it is? Why is it specifically like this and not otherwise? True, it was never created, it always existed—always potentially, yes? Not always concretely. Always potentially. But still—why is it as it is and not otherwise? If it is special, I say. If it’s not special, then nothing. Therefore, with respect to the cosmological argument, if someone said the world is eternal and needs no cause, then my claims would be stopped in their tracks. I only know that this is not true. The world is not eternal. But if this alternative had stood, then indeed the cosmological argument would collapse. And that is why I said that the physico-theological argument complements the cosmological argument in a certain sense. Because in the physico-theological argument, you cannot get out of it by claiming that the world always existed. Even if it always existed, if it has very special laws that produce life, a very special character, you still ask yourself: so why is the character of the world specifically like this and not something simpler or something ordinary? And therefore it still requires a reason, even if not a cause. Not a cause, because a cause creates the thing—but it requires a reason. Why was it always like that?
[Speaker D] It’s a result that someone needs to create, but what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right, same thing. It’s the same claim as what I said earlier. Meaning, if the laws are entities, then everything is fine. If the laws describe occurrences, then you ask yourself: okay, and who brings about those occurrences? Yes, so I’m saying this objection does not knock down the physico-theological argument. Okay. Maybe you mean something a little different. You want to say that even if the law only describes what some entity does, there still has to be a lawgiver who legislated the law. There has to be a lawgiver who legislated the law, not just someone who performs the actions the law describes. The law itself is the result of a lawgiver, so that is a claim I think is correct, and we’ll get to it later. There are additional claims. I think this also came up in the cosmological context. For example, quantum theory shows us that things can come into being even without a guiding hand, yes, even without external involvement. Particles pop out of the vacuum, and there isn’t really something that created the process or brings about the process. Then the question is whether this assumption—that things don’t come into being by themselves without a guiding hand—still holds water, which is the assumption we are placing at the foundation of the argument. So here too, I think I spoke about this. I’ll say two things. First, even when particles pop out of the vacuum, for some reason they always pop out in pairs that balance one another. That’s part of the laws of physics. Meaning, if an electron pops out, there will be a corresponding anti-electron that has negative mass, has positive charge—that is, all charges are preserved. The law of conservation of charge is not violated. Okay, who makes sure of that? If it just pops out of the vacuum and nothing is taking care of it, then why does it always happen according to fixed patterns that preserve the conserved quantities? That means it does not happen just like that. A thing can come into being, but the fact that there are laws governing how it comes into being and what can come into being means that there is indeed something here that is responsible, or directing, or regulating that emergence. And it doesn’t really come out of the vacuum. Vacuum is a word. In quantum theory, the vacuum state is the ground state from which the particles pop out—it’s a word. But in the end, this vacuum probably isn’t really empty, because if it were empty and in principle anything could come out, then why would things come out only according to very specific laws and preserve the conserved quantities? Okay. Therefore, therefore, the claim is that there exists—there exists something in the world that sees to this. What is that something? In this case, for example, it is the laws of physics or the laws of quantum theory. The fact that they allow particles to pop out does not mean—because there is a system of laws here. Our world is a world with a quantum nature. There could have been a world with a different nature. In a world with a different nature, nothing would have been created just like that, and certainly not according to certain conservation laws. Therefore there is something in the world—the world is not empty. There is something in the nature of the world, something in the structure of the world, that is responsible for these emergences. Even though in conventional terminology people call it emergence from the vacuum, the truth is that it does not really emerge from nothingness. It emerges from something that has some structure, some something—I don’t know exactly what—that is responsible for these emergences. And therefore I think that from here too there really is no—there really is no objection. Same thing when people say yes, maybe there is something else, not God, that created this—then it’s like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, right? Meaning, my claim is that there exists… if someone says, okay, maybe there is another explanation we’re not thinking of, that too is a misunderstanding. Because there are two possibilities: either there is an explanation or there isn’t, right? There are no more possibilities. If there is an explanation, then the explanation is what I call God. Whatever you call the explanation, doesn’t matter—the spaghetti monster, whatever you want. And if there is no explanation, then there is no explanation. Now decide: there are only two possibilities, there isn’t something else. It’s dichotomous, the law of the excluded middle. Either there is an explanation or there isn’t. If there is an explanation, then there is God; if there is no explanation, then there isn’t. Now decide which of those two possibilities it is. Don’t tell me, but maybe there’s a third possibility we haven’t thought of. That’s logic, not physics. Either there is an explanation or there isn’t an explanation—there is no third possibility we haven’t thought of. Right? That’s the law of the excluded middle in logic. And therefore all these arguments are strange arguments. There are those who want to argue: yes, but the probability that there is a God is so low that I still prefer the probability of a world that created itself. Okay? This is a very common claim in debates like these; I have quite a bit of experience. A very common claim in such debates. Because always, whenever you examine two alternatives—you know, Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four says: after you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is probably the truth. Because if one alternative is impossible, then apparently that’s the right thing. So very often this is a valid argument. That is, often when you show that one option is improbable, that still does not mean the second option is correct. The second option may be even less probable. And in fact many atheists will tell you: okay, it really is improbable that this world came into being by chance, but it is even less probable that there is a God. And therefore, between these two possibilities, I still prefer the claim that there is no God and that the world came into being by chance. Okay? What do you say to that? Huh? Meaning the same thing, exactly. Because after all, you have no way to calculate the probability that there is a God, right? You say it’s very improbable. The probability of that—I said there are two possibilities. Either the world came into being by chance or the world was created by something, right? Those are the two possibilities, there are no more. That’s logic. The sum of the probabilities of those two cases is one. Right? Now I do have a way to calculate the probability that the world came into being by chance—or at least bounds. The probability is tiny. Okay? So the probability that there is a God who created the world is one minus that tiny probability. You have no independent way to present a calculation of the probability that there is a God, so that you can tell me it’s so improbable, it’s less probable than the other option. You have no such way. That’s simply begging the question. The only way to calculate it is one minus the second probability—which we also cannot really calculate, but we do have bounds for. What?
[Speaker D] He’s asking about the second possibility—one minus the second.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. In other words, the possibility that rules out the second possibility—its probability is one minus the probability of the second possibility. Okay? Therefore you can’t assume that the probability of God’s existence is low and therefore there is no God. You can say there is no God and therefore there is no God—that’s just saying the same thing. It’s simply begging the question. But if you tell me: look, let’s examine it independently. I don’t know whether there is or isn’t a God, let’s do a probabilistic calculation and see. Since there are two possibilities, one has some probability—I don’t know what—ten to the minus one thousand. Just as an example. It’s even less than that, but let’s say. Okay? And the other is one minus that. That’s it. So what? There’s no third option here. Therefore the claim, once again, when I speak about God only in this sense of something responsible for the emergence of all this complexity here—not God in any specific sense of one religion or another, or one philosophical conception or another, but simply the fact that there exists something responsible for this whole mess. Okay? That’s all. And in that sense, this is simply a foolish argument. Yes, a lot of people say, “I prefer to remain puzzled about how the world came into being.” It’s the same thing; these are all formulations of the same thing. I’ve heard all of them many times. “I prefer to remain puzzled.” Right—very unlikely that it came into being on its own, it requires further investigation—like Rabbi Akiva Eiger, you know the joke. Someone comes to a rabbi and asks him an enormous difficulty. The rabbi says, “Look in Rabbi Akiva Eiger on this tractate, on that page.” He goes there and sees no connection at all. What connection is there between what Rabbi Akiva Eiger comments there and the question I asked the rabbi? He comes back to the rabbi. The rabbi says, “You didn’t see Rabbi Akiva Eiger? There’s a Rabbi Akiva Eiger on that Tosafot and a Rabbi Akiva Eiger on the next Tosafot. He remained with a ‘requires further investigation’ on this Tosafot and moved on to the next Tosafot.” So fine, sometimes you stay with a “requires further investigation” and move on. In other words, that’s really the claim being made here: okay, I remain with a “requires further investigation.” It really isn’t likely that this world came about by chance, but it requires further investigation, so maybe I don’t understand—but I still don’t conclude that there is a God. It’s the same thing I said before. The moment you remain with a “requires further investigation,” you’ve reached the conclusion that there is a God. There is no third possibility. In other words, if it didn’t happen by chance, then there is a God. That’s all. These are formulations—formulations of the same thing, of the same misunderstanding, the same mistake.
[Speaker M] Why doesn’t the God-of-the-gaps argument work here? What? The God-of-the-gaps argument here—after all, wait, I’m saying it requires further investigation; in another two or three years they’ll announce some discovery—that’s what I’m saying.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What would that discovery be? No, no—what could it be, not what will it be. What could it be? It can’t be. I have an argument that proves there can’t be such a discovery, because either way: if you discover there something that created the world, then you’ve discovered God. And if you don’t discover the something, then well. Right, you can’t. Therefore, unlike—I’ll get to why this is not God of the gaps—but in this case it’s an essential gap. In other words, it’s a gap that cannot be closed. To prove the existence of God from a gap that cannot be closed is simply a proof by negation. There’s no problem with that. The problem with God of the gaps is when you prove the existence of God on the basis of a temporary lack of understanding that might later be closed. But if I show you that this is an essential lack of understanding that will never be closed, then there’s no problem with God of the gaps.
[Speaker N] How much should it bother us to say, fine, so that’s God. The laws of nature—basically, fine. Kant, no? What? The laws of nature are God, fine.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What are the laws of nature? The laws of nature are entities. Fine, so there exists an entity that is basically the one that did everything.
[Speaker N] Not intelligent, not that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s a different lecture. I said—all those things come afterward. But as far as this goes, I’m saying: this is a strong argument. Now, what you infer from it—we’ll see later on. Maybe you won’t infer anything, maybe you will. Here I’m working in pulses, yes—step by step. And they understand that, which is why they already argue here. Okay, there are all kinds of strange objections that I’ll spare you. Here’s one argument, for example—I also spoke about it in the context of the physico-theological proof, the cosmological proof—that God is not an explanation. You explain something you don’t understand by means of something else you understand even less—an English-English dictionary. So you want to understand one word, and they explain it with ten other words that you understand even less. So how does that help me? So the claim here is that God is not an explanation. You have a world and you don’t understand how it came into being—ah, there is God and He created the world. And about God you can’t say anything; He is not understood—why is that an explanation? So my claim was that God is not meant to serve as an explanation. I prove the existence of God; I’m not explaining anything. I’m saying that if this world came into being, then apparently there is something that created it. That’s a claim, not an explanation. I’m proving His existence. It’s like the tracks Winnie-the-Pooh really does see in the sand. That was the example I gave: the tracks Winnie-the-Pooh sees in the sand, and he says, well, apparently someone passed by here and made these tracks. I can’t say anything about that someone. But it’s clear to me that there was someone like that, because otherwise there wouldn’t be tracks. So is it a problem that I can’t say anything about that someone? Does that mean that because of that I can’t infer that someone passed by here because there are tracks? It’s just a misunderstanding, okay? Now look at a slightly different nuance in an article by Eliezer Leibowitz—yes, the son of Uncle Yeshayahu the Third. He says as follows: “The main weakness of the idea of intelligent design is that it cannot be seen as any kind of explanation of the phenomenon it purports to explain. The central argument underlying it can be presented as follows: no sane person would think that the wondrous paintings Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel came into being as a result of random processes”—yes, remember Reverend Paley and his watch? Same thing—“without intention and without intelligence. And similarly with regard to the F-16 airplane.” Yes, that’s Fred Hoyle, who says that a typhoon passing over a junkyard does not produce an F-16. Right, chance doesn’t somehow gather the parts together and produce an F-16. “All the more so such an explanation is required for biological systems in the world, whose complexity is incomparably greater.” Fine, that’s basically the physico-theological argument. “However, this achievement is based on an absurd a fortiori inference. The assumption that an intelligent being designed the F-16 is indeed a satisfactory explanation for the existence of this complex system, because we know of the existence of aeronautical engineers independently of our acquaintance with the airplane itself.” Because we know that aeronautical engineers exist in the world, okay? “The thought that an intelligent human hand painted the Sistine Chapel explains the paintings only because we possess prior knowledge of the existence of beings capable of planning and executing such paintings. Regarding the natural world and the universe, we have no prior knowledge of the existence of an intelligence capable of planning it and also realizing it. Inferring from the existence of the complex and wondrous world to the reality of an intelligent designer is not an explanation of the phenomenon but a psychological result of it.” So therefore it’s not an explanation. He presents it more sharply, but that is basically the argument—the claim that this is not an explanation.
[Speaker D] But with an intelligent designer, the concept—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —that in Thailand there is an elephant, elephants, that paint amazing pictures. It makes three hundred dollars from every movement of its trunk. If only I had that kind of intelligence. No, why? It’s beautiful, why not? Anyway, the claim is—and I’ll get to this. I’ll get to it, because the question is, the question is what? There is something that caused these paintings. So it’s not the elephant; it’s the elephant’s structure, or its mode of thought or action. And then we have to ask ourselves: okay, and who created that? Fine, but I’ll get to that. Right now I want to make a few remarks about his formulation, about his wording. First of all, as I said before, this thing does not purport to be an explanation for the existence of the world. It is not an explanation in the sense of adding understanding for me. No, it doesn’t add understanding. It is a proof of the existence of God. A proof of the existence of something is not an explanation; it’s not the same thing, it does not fill the same function. Therefore, if I see an airplane and say there is an aeronautical engineer who created it, that really is also an explanation. Why? Because I know aeronautical engineers, I know that there is such a field that people studied, they know how to make airplanes. So now I also understand how the airplane came into being; in other words, it also adds understanding for me. In the case of the world, to say that there is a God who created it does not add understanding for me, because I don’t understand God, so how is that preferable in terms of understanding the world? Okay, but that still does not mean I have no good proof of His existence, as with Winnie-the-Pooh. I’m not trying to find an explanation, I’m trying to find proof of existence. What will you say? No, there’s no proof of His existence; maybe He doesn’t exist and this just came about on its own. But it isn’t likely that things like this came about on their own, right? Such wondrous things don’t create themselves. So what then? So maybe it’s someone else—not called God, his cousin, who also isn’t called God. Fine, so what—what more can you say? And in the end, you see there are lots and lots of formulations here, each with its own little magic charm, and people repeat them by the thousands and the multitudes, and the believers stand there with their mouths open and don’t know what to answer, when all these stories are just recycled versions of the same mistake, that’s all. Now, what is Elia Leibowitz confusing in this context? There is—when I talk about explanations too, we can talk about two kinds of explanation. Usually we’re used to thinking that an explanation is reducing something to the familiar. Reduction to something familiar—that is called explanation. For example, when I investigate a plane crash. A plane crashes, and a committee of experts goes and tries to determine why the plane crashed. What would count as a satisfactory finding by the committee? If they find some malfunction. There was a crack in the wing, the engine had something wrong with it, I don’t know, a missing bolt, something like that. Then they found the cause and they explained why the plane crashed, right? What does that mean? That we took an event we don’t understand—the crash of the plane—and explained it in terms of principles that we do understand or know. That’s called reducing to the familiar. Okay? For example, if I want to explain gyroscopic motion, the stabilization of a rotating body—a rotating body that tilts a bit returns back to the center and keeps rotating like that—I can explain it on the basis of Newton’s laws. Although at first glance it’s a surprising phenomenon—why doesn’t it fall? It leans to the side, why shouldn’t it fall? But no, you can explain it on the basis of Newton’s laws. Okay? What does that mean? That I took an unfamiliar phenomenon and reduced it to principles that are known and familiar to me. These are explanations of reducing to the familiar. Now let’s try to think about something else—or maybe I’ll preface it. There is a well-known philosopher of science named Thomas Kuhn, a sociologist of science, a philosopher of science. Sociology of science is a fascinating term, because many times scientists feel that they investigate everything around them, without taking into account that they themselves are also an object of study; in other words, they too can be studied. Because Western society, until not very long ago, did not understand that anthropological methods could be used to investigate it. Western society always investigated all kinds of peripheral societies, tribes here, tribes there. No one thought that we too are a kind of society that operates with anthropological patterns and that we too can be studied in exactly the same way. There’s a certain overlooking of the obvious. So in this context, Thomas Kuhn is basically investigating the conduct, the sociology, of the scientific community itself. And then he argues, against Popper, who says that a theory has to stand up to a test of falsification—that the moment I conduct an experiment that falsifies the theory, I throw out the theory and look for another one. That’s Popper’s claim, as an explanation of the scientific process. This is a naïve description, says Kuhn, and he’s right, obviously it’s not a correct description. Very often a good scientific theory can withstand various attempts that seemingly falsify it, and we still go on using it and don’t throw it out. For example, quantum theory and relativity theory are considered two well-established theories, but at present they don’t fit together with each other. All the strings and everything people are looking for now in the world is basically some kind of reconciliation of relativity theory with quantum theory. They don’t fit with each other, and still we continue to use both relativity and quantum theory to build devices and assume that these theories are true. Why? According to Popper we should have thrown out at least one of them. Because there is a certain inertia in the sociology of science, an inertia that says that if there is a theory that is well established, that explains a great many facts, then even if there are a few facts it does not explain, whose existence seemingly falsifies it, I suspend judgment for the moment and say: well, this is too strong a theory; it’s not likely that it’s false. Let’s wait a bit; maybe we’ll find some solution that we aren’t thinking of right now. Maybe we’ll have to modify the theory a little, but it still remains correct, only with certain modifications. By the way, that is exactly what happens with Newtonian mechanics as against quantum theory or relativity. Newtonian mechanics is still correct, although it isn’t really correct, but it is correct because it serves us for almost every practical need. We add small corrections to it: at high speeds, that’s relativity; at very small scales, that’s quantum theory, where these additions start to become significant. In ordinary cases that we know, the additions are so small that Newtonian mechanics is still correct. Okay? So what that basically means is that Thomas Kuhn argues that it isn’t true that every contrary case falsifies the theory and sends it to the trash. That is what he basically calls a paradigm, which gets challenged by various cases. When do we replace paradigms? We replace paradigms at the point where we conclude that there are too many problems with the paradigm. It’s no longer one, two, or three cases; the number of problems in the paradigm no longer justifies holding onto it as against, say, the number of cases it does explain. There are too many problems here; something here cannot be right. That is what he calls a paradigmatic crisis. What happened? What? There is no sharp line. The scientific community—this is why he says it’s sociological. I say it’s not sociological, but there is no sharp line. Okay? Not everything that lacks a sharp line is sociological—that is, arbitrary. No, it’s not arbitrary. I don’t have a sharp description, but there is a line. There is a paradigmatic crisis that says: okay, we’ve reached the conclusion—the scientific community reaches the conclusion—that the existing theory has to be thrown out, and a replacement paradigm has to be sought. Then they go and search. And how do they search? I don’t know—creativity. There really aren’t good ways to describe how we search for the replacement paradigm, because it is almost a kind of creation ex nihilo. How did Einstein come up with relativity, or quantum theory, or all these things? I have no idea. These are such wild theories that it’s very hard to understand the line of thought that led people to these formulations. But a replacement theory is reached, and it turns out that sometimes that theory works, and it explains the cases we couldn’t explain before. And then it too will probably run into its own problems and we may have to replace it as well, or maybe not, but this process continues all the time. Okay? Now I want to focus for a moment on the paradigmatic crisis. I’ve reached the conclusion that there are lots of facts that contradict the existing paradigm and that the paradigm has to be replaced. An example of this—not exactly an example, but roughly—think about Newton. Newton knew various phenomena that everyone knew, right? That bodies with mass, if you let them go, fall toward the earth. He knew the paths of the stars—we knew that long before him, right? There are paths, elliptical, circular, of the stars relative to one another. He knew the phenomenon of the tides, right? Everyone knew that. What did Newton innovate? That all these phenomena can be explained on the basis of one principle: that every two masses attract one another with a gravitational force proportional to one over r squared, the distance between them. That was Newton’s innovation. And that suddenly showed that if I assume the existence of such a force, all these phenomena and others are explained by it—a great many phenomena. Okay? Now I ask: in what sense did Newton take a step here that explains the phenomena he set out to explain? Does he explain? After all, before him we didn’t know there was such a theory of gravitation, a gravitational force, and so on. We knew the phenomena—the tides, the orbits of the stars, falling. Falling to the earth—all this was very familiar to every person. What did Newton innovate? Newton took phenomena we know very well and supposedly understand, and created for them an explanation in terms of something we did not know: gravitational force and the law of gravitation and so on. An explanation of this sort can be called an explanation by reduction to the unfamiliar. It isn’t reduction—you take something familiar and understandable in our daily lives and offer it an explanation by means of a principle that is a new principle. We had never known it before, and even now it doesn’t really say anything to me—what is gravitational force? I can’t imagine what it is; in what sense does this explain anything? You see that this is like God. It explains the coming into being of the world. It is something abstract that no one ever saw, but there is a set of riddles like these, and the fact that that thing can stand at the basis of all these riddles is perceived by us as an explanation. What does that—
[Speaker L] mean? But there are formulas.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes—formulas, all right, everything is true, so what? The formulas are only a description; I’m asking what the explanation is. The explanation is that there is a gravitational force—that’s the explanation. And its formulas are the formulas Newton gave. Now I ask: in what sense is that an explanation? If explanation means reducing to the familiar, here we did not reduce to the familiar, we reduced to the unfamiliar. So why is it an explanation? And the feeling is that there is an explanation here.
[Speaker L] You can calculate from it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We can calculate—that gives us a useful tool—but in what sense is it an explanation? Why does it add understanding for me, taking something I don’t understand and can’t describe and have never seen, and with it you explain all kinds of things that I experience every day and understand and everything is fine with them? I’ve lived with them for thousands of years. Why is that called an explanation? So I say: there are two kinds of explanation in science and in general. There is explanation that is reduction to the familiar, and there is explanation that is reduction to the unfamiliar. What is the difference between them? I return to Kuhn. An explanation by reduction to the familiar is always an explanation within a given paradigm. You want to know whether the plane—how the plane crashed or why it crashed. You already know aeronautics, you know all the relevant rules, and now you ask: how can I understand the crash of the plane in terms of these rules? The moment I found the crack in the wing or the malfunction in the engine, then I have a way to reduce the unfamiliar thing, the crash, to the familiar principles. That is an explanation by reduction to the familiar. What happens if there are too many plane crashes that cannot be explained on the basis of the aerodynamics known to us? We will have to assume that this aerodynamics is probably not correct. It needs to be replaced. Right? That would be a paradigmatic crisis, and now we would seek an explanation by reduction to the unfamiliar. We would look for something unfamiliar that would count, in our eyes, as an explanation because it could serve as the basis for all the familiar phenomena we encounter, and its power lies in the fact that one explanation stitches together all these phenomena. Even though it is an unfamiliar explanation and I can’t even really say anything about it. In other words, when Leibowitz assumes that an explanation has to be reduction to the familiar—yes, like aeronautics and the Sistine Chapel and so on—he knows there are painters, therefore if there are paintings in the Sistine Chapel I assume there was a painter who painted them, Michelangelo. Why? Because I know there are painters. That is reduction to the familiar. I ask him: tell me, if you saw these paintings and you did not know that painters exist, what would you say? I would say: apparently there are painters. Even if I don’t know, even if I have never in my life heard of painters. That is an explanation by reduction to the unfamiliar. But I really would say that if I had no other explanation. Therefore what he writes here is not correct—that I adopt this explanation only because I already know there is a painter, I already know painters exist. No. The painting testifies to the existence of a painter even if I don’t know there are painters. Leave the elephants aside for the moment. I say: in high probability, there is a painter here. Right? I can’t say anything about him, I have no idea how there can even be a creature with the abilities to paint such paintings. All that is unfamiliar to me, unknown to me. But I see that there is a painting, and human beings or other things don’t explain the existence of the painting, so this is proof that there is something that apparently can produce such paintings. Even though this is—one second—even though this is reduction to the unfamiliar. Here I want to argue not only that this is proof of the existence of that something, but that in a certain sense we will also see this as an explanation. I’m going one step further. Earlier I said: okay, it’s not an explanation, but the proof of the existence of God still proves His existence, so what if it’s not an explanation. Here I want to argue more than that: there is also an explanatory dimension here. If a very, very strange phenomenon occurred, then I say: there was someone who had the ability to produce such a phenomenon, and he is the one who produced it. There is an explanatory dimension here. Even though I can’t say anything about that someone, and I’ve never encountered him, and I don’t know that such a someone exists—I know it only from this argument itself. And therefore this claim is disingenuous: that I say the complex world testifies to the existence of God, because I know of no other mechanism that can produce such complexity—and we talked about this earlier, that complexity does not arise by itself, that’s a logical principle. Therefore it is clear that there exists something that created this complexity. It is exactly like the painting of the Sistine Chapel. There is no difference whatsoever.
[Speaker K] It’s not exactly disingenuous; maybe he’s trying to signal something. What? It’s not exactly disingenuous the way you say—maybe he’s trying to signal something.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know what “signal something” means. No, I’m not getting into his psychology. It’s disingenuous only in this sense: I’m saying no, our explanations are only reduction to the familiar. That’s not true. Our explanations are often reduction to the unfamiliar. When? When we’re in a paradigmatic crisis. And that’s what I earlier called an essential gap. When there is an essential gap, it cannot be closed. I can’t say: okay, let’s wait a bit until the gap closes. That’s a non-essential gap. But when there is a gap and I’m already telling you now—there are excellent reasons to tell you—the gap cannot be closed, that is a paradigmatic crisis. It means that the paradigm has to be replaced and we have to look for a paradigm in which I can give an explanation for this gap. Okay? And therefore this argument too is a null argument. All right, let’s stop here.