Faith and Its Meaning – Lesson 15

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so what’s the explanation? I mean, how can that be? What’s special about it? What’s the difference? Suppose you run a lottery. Each time, one person out of ten billion people ends up at that lake in Canada; they zap him there. They pick a person and drop him there. Okay? Independent lotteries. The first time, someone from Jerusalem shows up; the second time, again someone from Jerusalem. Now I’m from New York, I’m not… Jerusalem-Tokyo. Okay? Tokyo is a big place, doesn’t matter, or a city of roughly the same size. Fine? So why really, why really is there a difference? There’s something tricky here that on the face of it seems to be in the eye of the beholder, but there is still something objective here. Now, I’m not sure I know how to explain it completely, but it seems to me the explanation is this. If I look at the situation and, in my eyes, a thousand sixes is something special, what’s the probability that something will happen which is special in my eyes? Tiny. Right? It’s true that it’s special in my eyes, but when I look at the situation, what’s the probability that the thing that is special in my eyes will happen? And that is already an objective question, not a matter of perspective. You follow? In other words, the definition of specialness is subjective. But once I’ve defined this thing as special and everything else as just everything else — one big basket of everything else — then I ask: suddenly this happens, and then this happens again, even though these really are exactly the things that are special to me. What’s the probability that exactly the special thing will happen? Now true, its specialness exists only because of me, but still the question is: why is it specifically the thing that is special in my eyes that happened here in the world? And that requires explanation on the objective level, not the subjective level. Even though the specialness is in the eye of the beholder, once we’ve defined specialness, I’m now asking an objective question. Namely: what’s the probability that this special thing will happen again and again? And that’s already a completely objective statistical question. Even a resident of New York who looks at this is supposed to ask exactly the same question.

So it’s very, very tricky. And so many debates about the physico-theological proof revolve around this point, so it was important for me to clarify it. Meaning, when you look at dice and you throw them and get a thousand sixes, come on, there’s no such thing — that die is not fair, don’t feed me nonsense. And if instead you get one, two, one, six, four, whatever, some other sequence of a thousand rolls, then someone else may come along and if in his eyes that is really something special, he’ll say: don’t feed me nonsense, obviously this die isn’t fair — it came out exactly as my special sequence, the Fibonacci sequence, I don’t know what, modulo six. So what’s the probability of that happening? Basically zero, right? So every sequence is like that. Everything else depends on who the observer is. True, but who the observer is becomes an objective question. Once I’m the observer, and now I ask myself, then the definition of specialness is already set because I’m the observer. Specialness — what counts as special in my eyes — is defined. And now the statistical question is: what’s the probability that something special will happen? Negligible. It doesn’t matter that the definition of specialness is because of me — so what? If I had marked something else as special — say, if someone had told me in advance…

For example, many times an event that could receive a natural explanation — if it’s predicted in advance, it becomes something I’m no longer willing to accept a natural explanation for. If someone tells me beforehand, for example, that the sequence of die throws will be one, two, five, four, six, six, three, four, six, one, two — whatever sequence of a thousand results — and that is exactly what comes out, that’s the same as a thousand sixes, maybe even worse. Right? Why? The probability is the same probability. True, but the definition of specialness is different. Because once I told you in advance that this is what will come out, that sequence becomes special in contrast to all the rest — all the rest except six-six-six, that is, all the non-special ones. And now if that thing comes out, it requires explanation. But if nobody told me in advance that this sequence would come out, then there’s nothing special about it and there’s nothing in it that surprises me. With six-six-six, you don’t need to tell me in advance. Six-six-six is special simply by virtue of the way I look at things. Every one of us, when he looks at that, understands that it’s special. Once you understand that it’s special — and it doesn’t matter that maybe somebody exists whose mind is wired differently and he won’t perceive six-six-six as special; for him only one, two, five, four, six and so on is the special thing — then he’ll look at six-six-six and it won’t say anything to him. But if his special thing comes out, then he’ll ask himself: wait a second, something here isn’t logical, because it’s like setting something in advance.

And that’s like fulfilled prophecies. Very often there are all kinds of discussions about prophecies from the Torah, say from the Torah or the prophets, doesn’t matter, that predict something and then it comes true. Is that evidence of something? It’s not so simple. Because the fulfillment of those things can also happen naturally, by chance. But if they said in advance that this thing would happen, then that makes the thing special. Now if it happened — even though the probability that it would happen is the same probability whether they said it in advance or not — because if it was said in advance that this thing would happen, then it is already special. For example, suppose the Torah predicts that the Jewish people will return to the Land of Israel, okay? Ingathering of the exiles. Fine. Now the Jewish people return to the Land of Israel. Now if I didn’t know there had been a prophecy in the Torah, okay, different peoples have all kinds of histories, sometimes they return, sometimes they don’t return, they have sentiments toward the Land of Israel, you can explain it in various ways, and they returned — what does that prove? It proves nothing. But if the Torah or the prophets — doesn’t matter — say in advance that this thing will happen, and somehow the people that returned to its homeland after thousands of years is exactly the Jewish people that was being talked about, and not some other people, then that means that the Jewish people in this context is our six-six-six-six-six. Because we marked the Jewish people in advance as the special people. If it had happened to one of the peoples, fine — there’s a chance that one out of five hundred peoples would have that happen. There are five hundred peoples in the world, so one of them would have it happen. But if they mark for me in advance: no, no, this will happen to the Jewish people — then it becomes six-six-six-six-six. Right? Marking it in advance means: this event has become special in contrast to all the other possibilities, and if it happened, that calls for explanation.

The fact that something is marked as special can be subjective. That doesn’t matter at all. The whole question — what are the chances that a special thing will happen? — is asked only after something has been marked as special. Obviously, of course, if we mark it as special after it happened, just in order to prove something, then of course that’s a fallacy. Right? That’s ad hoc. Okay? Someone says: one, two, four, seven came out, I don’t know what, and then I find it in equidistant letter skips in the Torah. Right? You find it in letter skips in the Torah because you looked for exactly that combination. I could find it in gibberish too. Fine. Because you searched for it after it happened. After it happened you can always find something that supposedly predicts the matter. Okay? So therefore it’s obvious that if I know the prophecy in advance, then the prophecy marks this event as a special event, and now if it happened, then it really does call for explanation. And it’s not that you can’t quantify this in probabilities. Because after I marked this event as a special event, then now, when I ask what its probability is, it’s six to the minus thousand. And what’s the alternative? That any one of the other events will happen — not each other event separately, whose probability is one… one minus almost nothing. Right? Correct? I said before, every such thousand-sequence has probability six to the minus thousand. So one isn’t more special than another, right? If I mark one as special, it isn’t special relative to each one of the others, but relative to all the others. So my two alternatives are: either the special thing happens, or something else happens — any one of all the other things. The probability that one of all the other things will happen is one. The probability that this special thing will happen is six to the minus thousand. Okay? Because once an event becomes something I isolate and mark as special, then you can also use probability as a measure of deviation. In other words, the connection between probability and abnormality is a real connection. But the question is: probability of what? When you mark something as the thing whose probability you want to examine, then you need to examine its probability against all the rest, not against each of the rest individually. Okay? And therefore in the end you can translate this into probabilities as well.

Good. I want to move to another claim. I talked about this in the previous lecture. There are claims that say yes, we arrive at the conclusion that there is a God, because without someone who created the world, our complex universe would not have come into being on its own. Right? That’s the physico-theological argument. So people say: yes, but God is not an explanation. God is not an explanation — you invent something that you can’t say anything about, can’t understand anything about, and now suddenly everything is clear. Now I know. Why? Because the one who created the world is abracadabra. And what is abracadabra? It’s just another way of saying “I don’t know.” Well, I also don’t know. What does the addition of God contribute, when in the end you can’t say anything about Him? How is that different from someone saying: I don’t know who or how the world was created, or how the world came into being? Okay?

So I said about this that it’s like the tracks of Winnie-the-Pooh. Winnie-the-Pooh sees tracks in the sand and follows them and in the end discovers that they’re his own tracks, of course. But when you see footprints in the sand, that’s evidence that someone passed there and left those footprints there. Imprinted those footprints there. Even if I can’t say anything at all about that person — nothing, except that his footprints look like this. Fine. The same with God: I know that the world He created looks like this. The world that we know. That’s not really called saying something about Him, right? You want to say something about Him, you want to say something that is independent of the world, something like His fingerprints, the practical expression from which you infer Him. But it’s exactly the same with footprints. Does anyone doubt that if there are footprints in the sand, that proves someone passed there? Just because I can’t say anything about the person who passed there? Of course not. I’m not coming to offer explanations; I’m coming to prove that someone was there who passed by and left footprints in the sand. And the proof is a good proof. Is that an explanation? Maybe not. Who cares. Call it an explanation, don’t call it an explanation — what difference does it make? I’m not coming to explain; I’m coming to prove. When I prove the existence of God, I’m not looking for explanations. I’m proving that there has to be something, because without that something, something so complex would not have come into being spontaneously, by itself. Okay? Therefore the question of whether what I’ve produced here is an explanation or not is irrelevant. This argument is not meant to provide an explanation; this argument is meant to prove a claim.

I want to discuss a somewhat different version of the same claim, which appears in an article by Eliezer Leibowitz, Yeshayahu’s son, the physicist in Tel Aviv, a militant atheist. And he says this: the main weakness of the idea of intelligent design is that it cannot be seen as any kind of explanation of the phenomenon it claims to explain. Right — basically what I said before, but look, he spells it out: the central argument on which it is based can be presented as follows: no rational person would think that the wondrous paintings Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel were created as a result of random processes, without intention and without intelligence. Likewise with an F-16 fighter jet. All the more so, such an explanation is required for biological systems in the world, whose complexity is incomparably greater. Right, Paley’s watch and all the things we talked about. However, this achievement is based on a ridiculous a fortiori argument. The assumption that an intelligent creature designed the F-16 does indeed constitute a satisfactory explanation for the existence of this complex system, because we know of the existence of aeronautical engineers independently of our knowledge of the plane itself. The thought that an intelligent human hand painted the Sistine Chapel explains the paintings only because we have prior knowledge of the existence of beings who can plan and execute such paintings. Regarding the natural world and the universe, we have no prior knowledge of the existence of an intelligence capable of designing it. Inferring from the existence of the complex and wondrous world to the existence of an intelligent designer is not an explanation of the phenomenon but a psychological consequence of it.

Right, basically: it doesn’t provide an explanation. Now look — if I… think about the examples he gives. Suppose I see a plane or Michelangelo’s paintings, okay? He says: fine, there was some painter who painted this, so I’ve produced an explanation. Why have I produced an explanation? Because I know there are painters in the world. So now I encounter a painting. It’s not clear how a painting was created; I’m facing a question mark. I have an explanation. What’s the explanation? A painter painted it. And I already know of the existence of painters in the world. Basically I took something unfamiliar and grounded it in claims that are familiar to me, namely that there are painters in the world. And therefore I explained it, right? To explain something means to take something not understood and to clarify it — I’m saying “clarify” instead of “explain” so as not to be circular — on the basis of principles that I do understand. That’s called explaining, offering an explanation, right?

Now he says: to explain the world in terms of there being a God who created it — that is not an explanation. You do not know a priori of the existence of gods who create worlds. It’s not like painters or aeronautical engineers, and therefore you really haven’t offered me any explanation. So I answered that earlier: I said that the physico-theological proof is not looking for an explanation. It simply proves the existence of some entity. For example, if someone in Africa were to see a plane. A Boeing 747, okay? I don’t know which Boeing, a plane, any plane, fine, flying in the air; he gets on it, he flies in it — incredible. In his life he never heard of aeronautics. Okay? Would he assume that this plane grows on a tree? That there is a plane tree? Called Lockheed Martin? Of course not. Why not? Because it is a very complex thing. You can also see that it’s artificial, by the way, but never mind, that’s another issue. It’s a very complex thing and it’s obvious that someone made it. I didn’t know until now of the existence of aeronautical engineers; now I’ve learned of their existence. I see that there are people who know how to produce such things. Nice to meet you — they’re called aeronautical engineers. Okay? It’s simply nonsense to say that if I hadn’t known of the existence of aeronautical engineers, I would think the plane came into existence by itself. Nonsense. Okay? Same thing with the paintings. If I saw very beautiful, special paintings on the wall — the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — I would ask myself: how was this created? Nobody would accept that it was created by itself, even if you knew nothing at all about the existence of painters. You don’t need to know they exist.

True, maybe you can say that in such a situation this conclusion does not constitute an explanation, because explanation means using something familiar to me in order to explain something I do not understand. Okay? And here I didn’t use something familiar to me; rather I reached the conclusion that there is something I was not familiar with before. Now I know it as a result of this reasoning. Okay? So maybe it’s not an explanation. But the proof still stands. Maybe it isn’t right to call the conclusion of this proof an explanation, but it is indeed a conclusion that follows from this argument. The conclusion is a correct conclusion. Okay? Therefore the search for an explanation here is misguided.

But I’ll say more than that: Eli Leibowitz is making an even cruder mistake — Eliezer, Elia, I don’t know. He assumes that explanations are grounding things in what is familiar. Right? If you want to explain, as I said before, you want to explain something, you look for a way to describe how it came into being by means of principles familiar to you. For example, a plane crashes. An investigative committee is formed to examine what happened, why it happened. They find a crack in the wing, okay? And the wing really did break; they found some kind of crack there or something like that. Fine. They write the report, and now we understand why the plane crashed. What did we do here, actually? We took principles we know — the committee members are experts in aeronautics, in stresses on materials and things like that in the wing — they take material that is familiar to them, that they know, and use it to explain the event that until that moment we didn’t understand. Why did the plane crash? So we used principles we understand in order to explain an event that wasn’t understood to us. That’s the ordinary concept of explanation. Okay?

But what Eli Leibowitz ignores, or is unaware of, is that science progresses, by definition, always through explanations of the opposite kind: grounding in the unfamiliar, not grounding in the familiar. I take a familiar thing and ground it in unfamiliar principles. As opposed to what the plane-investigation committee does. Take an example: Newton’s law of gravitation. We all know there are tides; that was known long ago. We all know that the stars revolve around the earth. We all know that objects with mass, when we let go of them, fall downward. Right? We all know these phenomena. Nobody imagined that there was any connection between them. Then Newton came and said: look, all these phenomena, and many others, I can explain them by means of one principle. It’s called the law of gravitation. Fine? The force of gravity, the law of gravity, doesn’t matter right now. Now, the law of gravity was unknown before Newton. The phenomena were very familiar to us. In fact, before Newton no one even asked why it happens. That’s just the nature of the world, so why ask why it happens? Why are there trees in the world? There are trees. Why are there tides? Because there are tides — that’s how the business works. What’s there to ask? And very often the brilliant scientist is exactly the one who asks a question at a point where everyone else just walks past it. You know, Einstein once said that the reason he was able to rethink the concepts of time and space, which led to relativity, was that he matured late. And we mature early. When we encounter the concepts of time and place, we’re already adults; we don’t ask, it’s part of the world, it’s obvious, what’s the problem. But he — his intellectual maturity preceded his emotional maturity. So he was still enough of a child to ask questions at a stage when he already had the tools to answer them. And he was smart enough to answer them, but childlike enough to ask the questions. We, by the time we have the tools to answer the questions, no longer ask them. We’ve already gotten used to all these phenomena. We don’t ask things like: who says time is universal? Who says everyone experiences the flow of time at the same rate? Einstein asked questions there that nobody had even thought to ask. I’m not talking about the answers he gave at all, but about the questions. Right?

The same thing here: we often get used to a huge number of phenomena, and they seem to us: yes, that’s just the way the world is, what is there for me to ask? Until someone comes and says: wait, wait — what do you mean, that’s just the way the world is? There ought to be a reason why the world is this way. So Newton, for example, took a collection of phenomena that on the face of it seem to have no connection to one another. He said: all these phenomena have a common explanation, called the law of gravitation or the force of gravity. Okay? Now what did he do here? He took phenomena that are entirely familiar to all of us, and in order to “explain” them he used a principle that he had just invented — the law of gravitation, an unfamiliar principle. So in what sense is this an explanation? What is explanation? Explanation is always taking something unfamiliar and explaining it by means of familiar principles, right? Like the plane investigation committee. But here we take events that are familiar — known to us, familiar to us — and explain them in terms of something we have just now invented, discovered, however you want to put it.

[Speaker B] He combines all the things that weren’t familiar to you — he combines them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, they were familiar. They were familiar.

[Speaker B] The things that were familiar to you, but you didn’t think they belonged together — he combines them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He combines the familiar things, not the unfamiliar things. In other words, this is an explanation that takes the familiar and grounds it in the unfamiliar. The opposite of what we would normally think of as an explanation. Usually explanation means taking something not understood — the crash of a plane — and trying to explain it through the laws of aerodynamics or aeronautics, okay? Which we know; whoever is an expert knows them. Okay? That is the ordinary kind of explanation: grounding in the familiar. Explanations of the kind of the law of gravitation work in the opposite logic: they take things that are familiar to us and explain them by means of a principle or principles that are unfamiliar. So in what sense is this an explanation? Why is it an explanation? Normally, explanation is supposed to turn something not understood into something understood. Here you take something that is understood and turn it into something not understood. Why is that an explanation?

And the answer lies in the theory of a philosopher and sociologist of science named Thomas Kuhn. Thomas Kuhn — the fact that I’m saying sociologist or philosopher of science is because he locates scientific methodology, the way science progresses, within a sociological framework, not a philosophical or logical one. And he basically says this. Karl Popper argued that the definition of a scientific theory is a theory that can be put to a falsification test. Right? He basically said that contrary to what people think, a scientific theory is not a theory that has been proven. We have no way of proving a scientific theory. A scientific theory is a theory that has not yet been refuted. That’s what a scientific theory is. For example, the theory that all ravens are black: we have no way to prove that theory. You can’t observe all ravens; you can’t know that you’ve observed all ravens. How would you know? Maybe there are ravens you haven’t seen. Okay? Therefore that theory is not one that can be proven. So what can we do? I have a hypothesis that all ravens are black. Now I perform experiments, I check: I look at one raven — wow, black. Another raven — also black. Another one — also black. I say, okay, if there are several ravens in different places, doesn’t matter, variety in the evidence and things like that, and they’re all black, that supports the claim that all ravens are black. To prove the claim is impossible. To support it — that’s already not exactly Popper, but others, never mind — to support it, yes. Popper argued you can’t prove it; he also ignored the issue of confirmation, and he argued: but you can refute it. What does that mean? If I bring one raven that is pink, I have refuted the theory, right? Such a theory can’t be proven but it can be refuted. Of course I didn’t say that every scientific theory is a theory that has been refuted. Not that. Rather, it is a theory that can be refuted — meaning, there exists an experiment by which we can test the theory and see whether there is a result that, if obtained, would refute the theory. Now if I performed the experiment and the refuting result was not obtained, then the theory remains supported, or remains standing, however you want to put it, but has not yet been refuted. That was Popper’s thesis.

Thomas Kuhn says to him: that’s very nice, wonderful theory. I think Pauli said this about Fermi or vice versa, I no longer remember, that his theory of elementary particles was a theory of how to catch elephants. Why? If you put it on a sign next to the spring, write your theory there, the elephant will come to drink at the spring, look at the theory, be hypnotized by it, and then you can catch it. In other words, that’s how you catch elephants. Thomas Kuhn says to him: that’s a theory for catching elephants; in practice science doesn’t work like that. According to Popper, if there is a scientific theory, I perform an experiment and it refutes the theory, I’m supposed to throw out the theory and look for another one. That’s not what happens. If I have a good theory, you can put it through tests of falsification — one, two, three, ten — and it doesn’t pass them. Okay, it requires further study, but we move on to the next Tosafot, so to speak. We don’t throw out the theory.

When do we throw it out? First of all, factually — what the justification is, that needs discussion — but factually that’s how things are conducted. And Kuhn is right, even though he’s a sociologist. So then when do you throw it out? When it passes some threshold or certain dosage of results — too many results that the theory can no longer explain. In that situation, Thomas Kuhn says, there is a paradigmatic crisis. We live within a given paradigm, right? A given scientific theory. There are results, many results, that it explains. Suddenly there’s a result that it doesn’t explain. Okay, warning sign. We continue: another result it explains; another result it doesn’t explain. Gradually there accumulates — not theory, phenomenon — gradually there accumulate more and more phenomena that the theory does not explain. At some point a paradigmatic crisis is created. Right, it’s a crisis where the scientific community — and again this is sociological, because we have no line that says how many cases the theory doesn’t explain is what determines that the theory is wrong. There’s no way to determine: from 17 cases onward, right? But there is a certain feeling in the scientific community that says: something is rotten in the kingdom of Denmark. We need to replace the paradigm. And then they look for a new theory, a new paradigm. A paradigm is a conceptual framework within which that science operates.

In short, the history of science proceeds — and Kuhn is certainly right about this — in two kinds of periods. There is the period in which we work within the paradigm. There is a theory, there is a paradigm; within it we conduct experiments. Some succeed, some don’t succeed, but we work within that paradigm and we have confidence that this is the correct paradigm. At some point too many facts accumulate that the existing paradigm fails to explain. Then the scientific community says: okay, here there is a paradigmatic crisis; the paradigm doesn’t work, we need to look for something else. In the meantime we still don’t know — we don’t yet have something else. So this is a stage of crisis; we don’t know what to do. At some point someone proposes: I have a new paradigm that will explain these facts that were previously unexplained. Okay, good, there’s a new paradigm; the crisis process has been gone through, and people move to working within the new paradigm. Until enough evidence against the new paradigm accumulates, and then once again a crisis and once again another paradigm, and so on. The history of science is always: work within a paradigm, paradigmatic crisis, paradigm replacement, work within the new paradigm, crisis, replacement, work within, and so on. That’s how it works. That’s how science advances. Okay.

So what happens when working within the paradigm? Say, work within a paradigm — usually, anyone who has ever done a little research knows what it means to work within a paradigm. Almost no scientist works outside paradigms. There is quantum theory, Schrödinger’s equation, whatever it may be; you solve Schrödinger’s equation for this case, for that case, various such cases, interesting cases, you find interesting phenomena. But the conceptual framework is clear and known, and you don’t put it on trial. The conceptual framework is clear. Schrödinger’s equation has solutions; this is how one does it, this is how one solves it, this is what it means, this is how one relates to the results, this is energy, this is momentum, this is that — all these things, everything is known. Everything is known. Each time it’s a different problem: one time this kind of potential well, another time a circle, another time a cylinder, multiple particles, one particle, various problems — but it’s all within the same conceptual framework. Right? The conceptual framework is known. And therefore each time you solve problems by means of the known conceptual framework, which basically means grounding in the familiar. Right? You encounter a result in an experiment, say, and you don’t understand it; then you solve Schrödinger’s equation and show that the solution really does behave that way. So you explained the unfamiliar thing on the basis of the familiar thing. That is explanation of the type of grounding in the familiar.

Okay? What happens when there are too many results that the paradigm cannot explain? Suddenly this paradigm apparently isn’t correct; it has to be discarded. You need to replace the paradigm. What do we do now? Now we have all the results we don’t understand, okay? But we measured them, we know they’re correct. Okay? And we are looking for a new paradigm that is unfamiliar to us and not understood by us, whose advantage will be that it offers an explanation for all those cases. When we find such a paradigm, we are actually carrying out a process of grounding in the unfamiliar, not grounding in the familiar. Because we take all the cases we already know — we measured them, we know this is the correct result — and explain these cases, which is what a theoretician does, by means of something we have just invented. It was not previously known to us. Some new theory. So in stages of crisis or stages of paradigm replacement, the explanations are explanations by grounding in the unfamiliar. In work within the paradigm, the explanations are grounding in the familiar. Okay?

Now when does science advance? Science advances when I learn a new theory. The existing theory is apparently not correct, and now I understand that a new theory is needed. I found the new theory — boom, I’ve advanced; I learned something new that I didn’t know before. Working within the paradigm, grounding in the familiar, is not really scientific progress. Real scientific progress is not produced that way, does not happen that way. Right? Because the theory is known. At most, you can explain more and more facts by means of that known theory, and you do not learn something scientifically new. That’s more technology than science. You use the existing theory to explain more cases. Okay? Explanations at the stage of paradigm replacement are explanations of grounding in the unfamiliar. Right — when Newton found the law of gravitation, he basically found a new paradigm. We now have a new theory, the theory of gravitation, by means of which we can explain many phenomena. From then until the beginning of the twentieth century, everything was conducted within Newton’s paradigm. There were 250 years, I don’t know how long it was — maybe about 150 years, roughly 150 years — of work within the paradigm. Everybody solved equations in Newtonian terms. Okay? No one thought to challenge Newton’s law of gravitation until Einstein came and said: no, this law is not correct. It is correct for small masses, low velocities, things of that sort; it is not correct for large masses, high velocities, high mass densities, and so on. It is not correct. What did he do, basically? He replaced the paradigm. Relativity came in place of Newtonian mechanics. That was a paradigm replacement. And relativity also doesn’t stand up to certain tests. There are problems with quantum theory and so now people look for strings. It’s a new theory, a new paradigm, that will be even more general. Usually, by the way, the earlier theories remain correct in a certain domain. You expand things, because it isn’t really fully correct, but in a certain domain it is an approximation, a good enough approximation, okay? And then you create an expansion. Usually paradigm replacement, at least in modern physics, is mainly expansion. You don’t throw the previous theory into the trash. You just understand that it is correct only in a certain domain — low velocities or large masses or high temperatures or something like that.

[Speaker B] Take also paradigms that are within the framework of something physical, for example. You have a living person and a dead person. How do you explain those things? In other words, you basically see that the mechanics works. I can build such a human being, but to bring him to life so that afterward he will do something — you’re talking about a completely different vector.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t understand how that relates to what I said.

[Speaker B] Within the paradigm you can prove whatever you want, with Einstein’s laws, but then you move to a different opera, you replace the paradigm.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If there are phenomena you cannot explain in terms of the existing paradigm, you need to replace the paradigm, move to another paradigm that will succeed in explaining also the questions the previous paradigm couldn’t handle. Fine. You can claim that there are questions that no scientific paradigm will ever succeed in dealing with — our soul, our free choice, maybe, doesn’t matter — but that doesn’t matter, it’s not relevant in principle to what I’m talking about here. Fine, maybe yes, maybe no. Let’s say at least regarding our thinking, it seems to me that the new AI has already put us in different proportions from what we thought until three or four years ago.

In any case, what I want to say, getting back to Eli Leibowitz, is that he assumes that explanation is always grounding in the familiar. And if you ground something in the unfamiliar, that is not explanation. Every paradigm replacement in the history of science is grounding in the unfamiliar. So what he says is simply nonsense. Quite apart from what I said earlier — that I’m not looking for explanations at all; check whether my proof is good, leave me alone about whether it’s an explanation or not. But he is wrong on more than that. He is also wrong in his understanding of the concept of explanation. It is simply not true. It is not true that the concept of explanation is always grounding in the familiar. Grounding in the familiar is explanation when there is an existing paradigm — that’s true.

I just remembered — I think once there was a guy in our yeshiva who was sick with jaundice for half a year. I mentioned this, right? And there too, his parents… I came to them and told them that doves came and sucked out his… huh?

[Speaker E] Wasn’t that not here in this forum?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Was that not here? I don’t remember. Okay. He was sick with jaundice for about half a year, a well-known figure today, never mind. We have a mutual friend; he was there with him in the hospital. He wasn’t getting out of it, half a year with jaundice. They brought some witch-like woman with doves, put them on his bellybutton, the doves died, and within a few days the guy came back to the yeshiva. It took him a bit of time to get fully back to himself, but that was it, it was over, he returned to the yeshiva. Hard to believe, but that’s what happened. So I came home and told my parents about it. For my parents, Ponevezh and Gush Etzion are the same thing. Meaning: those benighted yeshiva people there in Gush Etzion are filling your head with nonsense — where are you getting these dark, primitive ideas from? So I told them: look, a rational person is not someone who refuses to accept any phenomenon that he doesn’t know how to explain in terms of the principles he already knows. That’s basically what my parents were doing, right? It doesn’t fit the principles we know, so it can’t be true. A rational person is someone who says: fine, if I have reliable evidence, then it’s probably true. It doesn’t fit my existing paradigm — then I need to replace the paradigm, I need to look for another theory that will explain these facts. If we remain like Eli Leibowitz, it’s like my parents. Right? What is he basically saying? I will accept no explanation that is not grounding in the familiar. Or in other words: you can remain with the physics of Adam, because anything that doesn’t fit the physics Adam was born with — not Adam in adulthood, the physics he was born with — anything that doesn’t fit Adam’s physics is simply not true.

That’s like public discourse today. Right? If there’s an argument in which Bibi comes out righteous, it can’t be true, because after all Bibi comes out righteous. And on the other side it’s the same thing: if there are facts showing that Bibi is corrupt, impossible, obviously it’s biased, because Bibi can’t be corrupt. We are basically unwilling to accept any fact or argument that contradicts our existing assumptions. And that’s how we become stuck. We don’t manage — or don’t want — to replace paradigms, and that’s how we remain with the physics of Adam. That is really what we look like — not in the physical world, but in our social and ideological world. More or less on the level of Adam, with all due respect to him, because maybe he was in fact a very great sage, I don’t know.

Anyway, to our matter: the claim, in short, when I say that God is not an explanation — the mistake is double. First, He does not need to be an explanation. This is a proof of existence, not an attempt to explain the world. And second, God is in fact an explanation. In other words, if the existence of the world cannot be explained by the principles you know, then you need to replace the paradigm. Or expand it, or whatever — you need to look for another paradigm that can offer you an explanation. So if the coming-into-being of a complex world cannot be explained without resorting to the existence of some transcendent entity, then apparently one should assume that such an entity really does exist. And not be stuck in the view that only if I know there are painters am I willing to accept that the Sistine Chapel was painted by a painter. And if I don’t know there are painters, then it came into being by itself. You realize that in such a situation you would also never know there are painters. Because every painting you see, you’ll say: who painted it? Apparently it came into being by itself, because after all I don’t know there are painters. So what would convince you that there are painters? Maybe if you actually saw them painting, possibly — but nothing short of that. Okay?

[Speaker B] There’s the opposite case too, like what you’re saying about painters. In Thailand there are elephants that paint amazing paintings. So are those painters?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Painters — but not painters. Painters? Painters. No, maybe painters don’t have to be human beings. That’s an interesting question. Within the paradigm of painters, we encounter new facts. So we say: okay, then painters aren’t only human beings, they’re elephants too.

[Speaker E] We talked about this in the past, but the argument against this would say: listen, it’s not that I refuse to accept that there are painters at all; it’s just that statistically I’m more willing to accept a very low probability than to believe there are painters. We talked about this with the Rabbi regarding all the miracle stories about the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the Baba Sali and the like. The Rabbi told me that basically a lot of people just get the statistics wrong. So I’ll come and say: no, that’s not true, the Rabbi simply isn’t willing to expand the paradigm that there are miracles we don’t know how to explain. So where do you draw the line when saying?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but there it’s not the same thing, because there I have an explanation for why it happened. Or I could have an explanation for why it happened.

[Speaker E] Right, it’s a very low probability statistically, more than an explanation like that. Yes, the world was created complex.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the question is whether you have that kind of explanation. Is that kind of statistic really an explanation? No, I don’t think so. Because if the Lubavitcher Rebbe consistently really reached those results in a completely consistent way, significantly against the statistics, I would accept it. The question is whether that’s the case. The question is whether you didn’t pick three cases you happened to encounter out of a hundred others where he failed. Then you say he’s a prophet, here, I have wonderful examples of it. There’s a thriller by John Verdon, Think of a Number. Know it? He says—the thriller opens like this, I think it opens like this. He says: you get a letter in an envelope, and inside the letter there’s another small envelope. In the letter it says this: look, I have superhuman abilities. The writer tells me—I’m the one reading the letter—that he has superhuman abilities. You choose a number between one and a thousand, and I’ll guess the number you chose. If I guess correctly the number you chose, then you understand that I have superhuman abilities, right? Send me ten thousand dollars, I’ll make you a millionaire. I have abilities, we’ll make a deal. Choose a number between one and a thousand. Chosen? Open the small envelope. Inside it, your number will be written. In short, I choose seven hundred twenty-five. Okay? I open the small envelope—seven hundred twenty-five. Unbelievable. I immediately send him ten thousand dollars. What am I thinking? The guy will make me a millionaire just like that. Such superhuman powers. Okay? What turns out at the end of the thriller? He sent out ten thousand such letters. You choose a number between one and a thousand—that means that for ten people out of those ten thousand, he’ll hit the number they chose. Those ten people don’t know there are another ten thousand who got such a letter. You’re sure that you got such a letter and he nailed exactly the number you chose. So you send him ten thousand dollars. Ten people times ten thousand dollars—that’s a nice income, a hundred thousand dollars. Very nice income. Minus postage and envelope expenses. Okay? On the bottom line, he made a nice profit. Now, in my opinion, a large part—if not all—of the miracle stories we’re fed are built on this. All the alternative medicine and all that bullshit—when people explain to me, “My grandmother is a medical miracle.” Meaning, the doctors had given up on her, but she took some stone, I don’t know what, stood on one leg, said cock-a-doodle-doo, put the stone on her head, and the next morning she came back like Eli Ohana. She recovered completely—what soccer! She was the central striker of the Israeli national team. So I say, did you check another thousand grandmothers who did the same thing, and how many of them did it work for? Because certain grandmothers recover spontaneously. In medical research we know that when you run an experiment, it has to be double-blind and controlled. Right? To neutralize placebo and spontaneous recovery. Right? You need to take a group of a thousand people who stand on one leg, say cock-a-doodle-doo, and put a stone on their heads; and another group of a thousand people who don’t do that; all of them sick with the same illness; and then see how many of these people recover versus how many of those recover. There you’ve neutralized spontaneous recovery, but you still haven’t neutralized the placebo effect, right? Why? Because placebo could mean that the very belief you have in the stone with the cock-a-doodle-doo is what causes your healing. So what do they do for that? In the second group they tell them, drink water and say cock-a-doodle-doo, that also does the job. Fine? So they too have faith in the nonsense they’re being fed. Now the faith already exists in both groups, and now let’s see—after subtracting the placebo and the spontaneity—whether there are significant results. After you’ve done an experiment like that, I’m willing to put a stone on my head with cock-a-doodle-doo. But nobody has done such an experiment. How do I know? Because if they had done such an experiment, that would be conventional medicine, not alternative medicine. It works. If it worked, doctors would use it. In other words, alternative medicine is a synonym for medicine that doesn’t work. That’s the basic principle. So regarding the pigeons—I’ve told this story—the pigeons apparently don’t work. In the end it turned out that the pigeons apparently don’t work. There was a period—there was a period when even at Meir Hospital, I heard, they were putting pigeons on jaundice patients. Because people—as I said—if it works, it’s conventional medicine. So what if I don’t understand it? If it works, let’s go with it. Okay? But at some point it became clear that apparently it doesn’t. I remember seeing an article that Rabbi Tau from Har Hamor did an experiment on this issue, and he claimed that pigeons have something in their breathing—they also need some opening in the back, not just the mouth. When you put the pigeon on the navel and press it to the navel so that supposedly they’ll suck out the bilirubin, you simply block their rear opening and they suffocate, they die. Because these pigeons died one after another and then supposedly the person got better. Okay? That’s the basic idea. He says the pigeons die because you suffocated them. So why did he recover? He recovered because sometimes people recover from jaundice. Okay? There’s spontaneous healing too; it happens. People recover from jaundice, right? So that’s how he recovered. Therefore, statistical illusions are what Daniel Kahneman—who just made headlines, because it was reported that he went to Switzerland to die—called the law of small numbers. The law of large numbers is correct statistics; the law of small numbers is incorrect statistics. In other words, bogus statistics always uses the law of small numbers. Once I wrote a column about Breaking the Silence. Because some of the people in Breaking the Silence don’t seem to me like frauds or people who want to screw over the State of Israel and so on. On the other hand, when I was in the army, I didn’t see everything they saw. Fine, there are screwups, there are things, true, but I didn’t see what they saw. People sitting there and just shooting into a civilian population for no reason, because they feel like practicing with the machine gun. There are stories like that too, Hebron and so on, and I didn’t see things like that. So where did it come from? And they portray it as though this is fixed army policy, meaning it’s described as though it’s not some crazy person who once did it. No, this is supposedly how things are run. So I said I think it’s the law of small numbers. A person saw a situation like that—it’s traumatic to see such a thing, it’s hard to see such a thing. You see a person simply murdering people for no reason, shooting into them, and from his perspective the whole army becomes the Wehrmacht, a Nazi army, because he saw one case like that. And another person also saw one case like that, and you gather ten people who either saw one such case or imagined one such case, and now it becomes a general phenomenon. So it could be that some of this is simply the law of small numbers. There are tons of examples of this; it’s wonderful. For example, Bill Gates’s foundation. He has a huge foundation supporting all kinds of things in education. So this foundation did research and found that among schools, the schools that achieved the highest matriculation results were small schools. Therefore it said: apparently a big school is a factory, so you need a small school for students to reach better achievements. They invested a huge amount of money in splitting large schools into small schools, because that gives personal attention; there are even explanations like that—personal, individual attention and so on—therefore it’s much more successful. It didn’t work. Why didn’t it work? Do you know why? Because the schools that achieved the lowest results were also small schools. The distribution of achievement is Gaussian. Right? The large schools are in the center of the Gaussian curve—their results are average, because they have a lot of students. The schools in the tails of the Gaussian are always small schools. A small school can have ten students. Think about a school that has one student, just to sharpen the point. A school with one student in it. Let’s say I have a hundred schools and each has one student. In one of them there’ll be a genius. So think: when we check among all the schools which school has the best achievement, it’ll be the school with the one student who happens to be a genius. Or ten students who happen to produce a very high group profile. Ten students is not a large number. It could be that ten very good students happened to accumulate in one school. By the same token, ten very weak students could be in another small school. And in fact when they checked it afterward, they saw that they had invested billions of dollars there, and nothing helped. On the contrary—the conclusion, by the way, is that a bigger school is better. A bigger school is better because it offers more options. You can look for more friends, socially and academically. There are more tracks, say. In a small school you can’t offer lots of track options, right? If you have ten students, you can’t do that. Today they try to solve this with the internet and so on, but at that time no. In fact, a big school turned out in the end to be more successful. There, that’s an example of the law of small numbers. With small numbers you can reach any result you want. With small numbers the distribution is far from the center; it’s not at the average. The extreme results will always be there. Another example he brings there—and this is a more important lesson than all the proofs for… There, for example, they did statistics on life expectancy by place, and it turned out that the places with the highest life expectancy were places in the American Midwest, towns in the American Midwest, Republican voters, farming types. And then the explanation, of course—and by the way, whenever there’s an explanation you have to be very careful. When there’s a plausible explanation, it takes us captive immediately. Like with the small schools, it’s very appealing to say that a small school gives personal attention; it sounds very successful. Explanations are very tempting; you have to be careful with explanations. If something is very logical, be careful with it. Same here. They tell you about life expectancy, so they find small towns in the American Midwest, Republican voters, redneck types, whatever, simple people like that. Fine, so they started asking: maybe rural life, a calmer life, without the neurosis of the city, gives longer life. Until they expanded the statistics and found that the towns with the lowest life expectancy were also in the American Midwest, Republican voters, and so on. Why? Because in that region there are simply many small towns, that’s all. In the Midwest there are many small towns. So in small towns you’ll find both this extreme and that extreme. Because large towns are always around the average; more or less life expectancy is around the average. Okay, so for our purposes—we spoke about explanations. This is an important lesson in what an explanation is and why to be careful with explanations. Be careful with explanations. Another important point regarding explanations. We find two kinds of explanations, both in the scientific world and generally: there is a phenomenological explanation, an explanation of description, and an explanation of essence. What do I mean? Let’s take Newton, for example. He found the law of gravitation. The law of gravitation describes what happens to two bodies with mass that interact. But that’s a description, not an explanation. It says what happens: whenever there are two bodies with mass, they attract each other with a certain force, and the resulting acceleration is such-and-such, and so on. But I can speak not about the law of gravitation but about the force of gravitation. What’s the difference between them? The law of gravitation is only the law that describes what happens. The force of gravitation is a claim about something that exists in reality and causes the attraction between the bodies. There is a force—it’s something in reality itself that causes the bodies to attract one another. The law of gravitation describes the way the force of gravitation operates. That’s really the claim. Now when I look for an explanation, then in the scientific context a phenomenological explanation is the explanation of the law of gravitation. The law of gravitation only explains in the sense that it gives a general framework to understand all the phenomena. It’s still a kind of explanation because you’re giving some framework that unites a great many phenomena. The force of gravitation is already an essential explanation, meaning it tells you what the agent of this phenomenon is. Scientific observations can bring us only to phenomenological explanations—to the law of gravitation. No one has ever seen the force of gravitation. There is no way to see the force of gravitation. We see what it does. We see some pulling, the bodies are attracted to one another, but no one has seen the force of gravitation, right? We assume that a force of gravitation exists because if something happens, then there is probably something that causes it to happen—the principle of causality. Why is this important? Because, apropos explanations, like we were talking before about explanations—when I say that God created the world, I really mean an explanation in the sense of the force of gravitation. That is the entity that brings about what is happening here, that created the world. If someone tells me, look, the explanation for what happens in the world is the laws of nature. The laws of nature are an alternative explanation. The laws of nature explain how this world was formed, how life developed, evolution and the like. That’s also an explanation, right? Why is that not a substitute explanation for the explanation of God? Because explanation through the laws of nature is a phenomenological explanation. The laws of nature are not entities. The laws of nature describe what happens in nature, right? There are certain laws that describe the way nature behaves, okay? But description is not explanation. So if you tell me—I ask you how such a complex world was created—and you say, what’s the problem, the laws of nature explain how such a complex world was created. By the way, that is an excellent explanation, a phenomenological explanation. Why is it an explanation? Like I said before with the law of gravitation, because it takes a collection of many, many facts, between which on the face of it we don’t see any connection, and it shows you that by means of a very small set of laws you can understand all those facts. So it has explanatory power; it’s a kind of explanation, okay? Can it serve as a cause? Because the physico-theological argument is looking for a cause, not an explanation. What is the cause of the world’s having been created? Apparently there is God, who is the cause of the world’s having been created. That’s not an explanation; it’s a cause, okay? Science gives you explanations. The physico-theological argument looks for causes, and that’s not the same thing. Science in fact assumes the existence of causes, but what it finds are explanations. In other words, science can say that there is a law of gravitation; science cannot say that there is a force of gravitation. No one has seen the force of gravitation. It’s just that there is an assumption in science that there is no action at a distance. There cannot be action from a distance. If there are two bodies far from each other, it can’t be that this one simply pulls that one. For it to pull it, it somehow has to reach it and affect it from zero distance. There cannot be influence from a great distance. So I assume there is some entity, called the force of gravitation, that somehow passes from this body to that body and pulls it. Field theory even describes this more concretely, yes? The force of gravitation itself. Fine? But that’s based on the assumption that there is no action at a distance. The law of gravitation in itself describes all this behavior without assuming the existence of a force of gravitation. Force of gravitation is something else. Fine? Even to this day, at least, there are no indications of the existence of a force of gravitation. If they find gravitons, that will start to get closer, but in the meantime there aren’t any. We still can’t measure gravitons; we don’t have the technology. It’s too weak to measure. Okay? In electromagnetic fields, for example, we know there is an electromagnetic field, like a gravitational field, because the light we see is photons, and photons are field particles of the electromagnetic field. The parallel in the gravitational field does not exist. Doesn’t exist meaning: we haven’t measured it yet. They claim it exists, but we haven’t measured it yet. In other words, that is not a scientific result; it is a scientific hypothesis that such a thing exists. Science can say there is a law of gravitation; it cannot say there is a force of gravitation. Now I use this distinction between these two kinds of explanation—or explanation and cause—to return to the physico-theological argument. Because another claim or refutation raised against the argument is: why do you assume that God created the world? The laws of nature provide a good explanation of how the world came to be. Evolution explains to you how life was created; everything is fine; you don’t need the involvement of any external factor, okay? And I say: the explanation through evolution is very similar to the explanation through the law of gravitation, and God is similar to the force of gravitation. When you ask who brings about evolution, it’s not the laws of nature. The laws of nature don’t bring about anything. The laws of nature are only a description of what happens in nature. I ask who brings about what the laws describe, or who created these laws that govern the world as it behaves. And to that I answer: God. Therefore, this is not even competing on the same plane—the question of explanation through laws and the claim that there is a God. I call it the argument within the laws and the argument outside the laws. And when I raise an argument within the laws, I say: something like this could not have come into being without a guiding hand. No, no—within the laws, it could have. Here, I’ll show you: evolution explains it. Okay? Fine, but evolution itself assumes a collection of laws—physics and biology and chemistry and yes, all the laws, genetics—all the laws whose totality together produces the evolutionary process. So evolution assumes a whole set of many laws. Assuming those are the laws, evolution can show you how life arises. Okay? Now I ask: fine, and who created these laws? These laws merely describe the way the world operates, but who created that mode of operation? Who brings about the phenomena? The laws are a description of the phenomena. Now who brings about the phenomena? To the question of who brings about the phenomena, the laws are not an answer. The laws merely describe its mode of operation—but whose? And God enters here. Therefore again, all these claims that come up in these discussions around the physico-theological proof—that the laws of nature are an explanation and therefore there is no need for God—are incorrect, because the laws of nature are merely a description; they are not an explanation. The question of who created the laws of nature, or who causes the laws of nature to operate as they do, has no scientific answer. Now I want to make one more comment. I think I already mentioned this: many times people bring proofs for the existence of God from gaps in scientific understanding—what’s called the God of the gaps. Right? What do I mean? There’s something evolution can’t explain, and the next day there’s a celebratory article in Yated Ne’eman: there is a God. Why? Because evolution can’t explain something. Right? It’s like the celebrations in Yated Ne’eman when the weather forecaster is wrong. When the weather forecaster is wrong, they declare a holiday in Yated Ne’eman. Why? Because, as a friend of mine once told me, the book by Rabbi Wolf from the Haredi seminary in Tel Aviv—a fanatical Jew of that sort—his book opens with: science is false and our Torah is true. And it’s a kind of zero-sum game. Meaning, if you prove science false, then our Torah is true, and vice versa. Yes? In that sense he is exactly like the atheists. They also say that if you prove the Torah true, then science is false; if you prove science true, then the Torah is false. It’s just that he chooses Torah and they choose science, and both sides agree that there is some sort of game here where you have to choose—either science or Torah. And I think both sides here are mixing together the confusion I spoke about here. Because science deals with the description of how this business operates. And when I ask what or who brings about all these things that science describes, that is a completely different question; science has no answer to it. Now many times when creationists say, look, evolution can’t explain something, and therefore there is a God—yes? There is a gap in our scientific understanding, therefore there is a God. So the neo-Darwinians say to them: that’s God of the gaps. What do they mean? Fine, once we didn’t understand anything. Now we understand more, still not everything. We’ll do more research, we’ll close those gaps too; that is, we’ll understand what we don’t understand today. Don’t build anything on gaps in scientific knowledge. Gaps in scientific knowledge can be closed. Right? The neo-Darwinians say they will be closed. I’m not saying they will be closed; I’m saying they can be closed. The neo-Darwinians are also great believers—they believe in science—and they’re sure everything will be closed. I don’t know whether everything will be closed, but it can be closed. And since it can be closed, and we know from the past—yes?—I could have proved there is a God three hundred years ago much more easily, because we understood much less. Today we understand more, so there is already less God. Slowly we’ll understand even more, so there will be even less God. Therefore, basically, the claim is: don’t build on that. It is not a sufficient basis for proving the existence of God—not because it will be closed, but because it can be closed. Therefore don’t build on the existence of gaps in scientific understanding. That is called God of the gaps. The question is whether what I described earlier is not in fact itself a God-of-the-gaps argument. Explain to me how the laws of nature came into being—you don’t have an explanation—therefore there is a God. Wait, we’ll do more research and discover how the laws of nature came into being. So that too is basically God of the gaps. You don’t understand something, so there is a God. You don’t understand why the laws of nature are as they are, so there is a God. That too is God of the gaps. Why is this different? I claim it is essentially different. Why is it essentially different? Look, it’s a somewhat subtle argument. Let’s see. Suppose we find an explanation for why the laws of nature are as they are. People are constantly trying to make larger and larger unifications; partially they’ve already succeeded, but there are still several basic forces in physics that they haven’t succeeded in unifying. They’re looking for all kinds of things—there is some hope of finding a unified field, yes, something general. Now let’s assume such an explanation is found. What will the nature of that explanation be? One of two things. Before we’ve found it, but it seems to me there can only be one of two possibilities. Either that explanation itself will be a law of nature—one law of nature. Maybe it will contain only one constant, one specific value, and that’s it. From it one could derive all the laws of nature, all the constants, all the things we know today. I will still ask: who is responsible for the fact that the law of nature is precisely this one, and that the value of the constant is exactly that value that produces the physics and biology and chemistry and everything we know today? There is still some constant there on whose value everything depends. And the question is: who caused its value to be what it is? So you haven’t done anything—we still remain with the same question. Instead of asking who caused the value of ten constants in physics to be exactly what it is, I ask about one constant. What difference does it make? The question still remains: what is the probability that the constant would have exactly such a value suited to everything we see here? The probability is zero. Therefore there is a God. Another possibility is to say: no, we will have an explanation in which there are no values of constants at all. It’s possible that in the end we’ll reach a situation where, theoretically, we finally have a theory from which all the laws of nature we know follow necessarily. There are no constant values, there is nothing to explain. That basically means that all our physics, chemistry, and biology are branches of mathematics. You understand that that’s what it means. Because basically, observation is no longer needed. What does observation do? Observation tells us the constant has this value and not that one. And if there are no constant values, nothing at all—everything follows as a result of calculation, of analysis—then it’s all mathematics. In other words, I can derive all of physics, chemistry, and biology from mathematics. Okay? Think, for example, about the number pi. Okay? Pi is the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter, right? Now suppose someone asks: wait a second, why is pi exactly pi? So apparently the Holy One, blessed be He, made it that way. No—pi is exactly pi because it cannot be otherwise. In a circle there is a fixed ratio between the diameter and the circumference, and that ratio is pi. Not another one, not any other number. That does not need an explanation for why it is pi, right? It follows from mathematics, the fact that it is pi. It is not observation. I don’t need to observe the world; I don’t need physics for that; I need mathematics. Therefore, basically, in every world, theoretically—in every possible world—pi would come out with this value. The ratio between circumference and diameter would come out as pi in any imaginary world whatsoever. Therefore the claim would be that all the constants in physics are like pi. They are actually the result of a mathematical process, not a physical one. Or in other words, there is no science; it’s all mathematics. Our measuring and searching and all that is like someone in the past who didn’t know how to derive pi theoretically, so he had to measure the ratio between the diameter and the circumference and he found that it was pi. He found that the ratio was constant. Interesting! Then he asked, wait, why is it specifically pi? Ah, that’s God; He created the circles. Okay? No—it’s not God, because pi cannot be anything else. If pi could have been anything and it came out exactly pi, and pi created something special, then you’d say, okay, that’s God. If no other possibility exists, it simply follows from the mathematical calculation, then it’s not science, it’s mathematics, and that proves nothing. Of course that’s not entirely precise either, because the question is whether space is flat or not, Euclidean or non-Euclidean. Pi is a result of Euclidean space. The question of who caused the world to be Euclidean is a legitimate question. But let’s leave that aside—I only want to illustrate the point. So what am I basically saying? The only possible way to escape the question of who created the laws of nature as they are, and as a consequence all of us, is only if in the end we arrive at an explanation that is entirely mathematical. Nobody in the world today believes that will happen. It won’t happen. And this is not a gap that is supposed to close someday if we do more research. It simply will not happen. There is almost no scientist who thinks such a thing could eventually happen. Science is science; it is not a branch of mathematics. We are not engaged in science only because we are not good enough mathematicians, and that’s why we need observations. No—we engage in science because there are things you need observation to know. You will never be able to explain that to me. If you explain it to me, I’ll ask: okay, then the law that explains the laws of nature—why is it as it is? In the very end—and maybe there we’ll make progress—we’ll find two laws that explain everything; afterward we’ll find one law that explains the two; I don’t care. In the end, we advance, advance, and in the very end there is some basic law of nature. We’re done with all scientific research; we know everything. Okay. Now I ask: why is it as it is? And that is a question that by definition science cannot have an answer to—unless indeed there is no such thing as science and it is all mathematics. But again, that’s a far-fetched possibility. And if that’s what you build your atheism on, you won’t get very far. It’s possible, but it is extremely, extremely improbable. Okay? So it’s no better than the argument itself. The probability of that is no greater than the probability that a complex world would arise by chance. So you gain nothing by moving to that alternative. Okay? Well, it seems to me that next week we’ll already be on Passover break. So have a kosher and happy Passover.