Faith and Its Meaning – Lesson 16

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] wrote the laws on the wall, right? And whoever wrote the laws on the wall is ultimately also responsible for how the factory functions. So the fact that you have some explanation in terms of laws of nature is not competing on the right playing field with the physico-theological proof, because very often, when people present the physico-theological proof—at least in older presentations—they present it as an argument within the laws. According to our laws of nature, something complex cannot come into being on its own; they even bring in the second law of thermodynamics. Okay, within the laws, the argument is not all that strong, because within the laws, evolution shows that it actually is possible within the framework of the laws of nature. I’m claiming that the physico-theological proof needs to be based on the argument from the laws, not an argument within the laws. The question is: who is responsible for the fact that there are laws? Right? I think I brought this example—the monkeys dancing on the keyboard and out comes the string “to be or not to be.” Did I bring that? Let me say it briefly because it’s nice. A lot of times, on atheist websites, you can see examples they bring to show what believers don’t understand, okay? What creationists don’t understand, what believers don’t understand. One very common example—it was even an experiment published in Nature or in Science, I don’t remember which one—someone did an experiment and had a computer randomly generate fourteen letters. What are the odds that the fourteen letters it generates will be exactly “to be or not to be,” let’s say without spaces to keep it simple. Okay, what are the odds it generates exactly that string? Essentially zero, right? If you look at a computer—certainly in the period when the experiment was done—it would take thousands of years before exactly that string came out by random generation. There are twenty-two to the fourteenth power possibilities; that’s an absurd number of possibilities. Now they say, okay, but let’s do a different experiment. Right? This is all from that article. Let’s do a different experiment. We’ll randomize the first letter, and as soon as an L comes out we freeze it, then move on to randomize the second letter. If an H comes out we freeze that, then move on to randomize the third letter—“to be or not to be,” right? Fourteen letters. You understand that we’ll get there much faster this way. Right? Much faster. And what they’re basically claiming is that the development of life in our world parallels the second experiment, not the first. Because in practice there are laws of nature that help these random processes move in the right direction, produce the complex result, and it’s not just random generation of various products in a vacuum. What are the odds of getting a living human being? Completely inconceivable, zero probability. Okay? But if you say there are laws of nature helping this whole business, steering it, channeling it to this place—specifically to this place—then fine, the probability is no longer so close to zero, and if you give it enough time, it’ll happen. That’s basically the claim. But of course the example they bring there not only doesn’t refute the physico-theological proof—it’s exactly what the physico-theological proof is based on. They are illustrating the physico-theological proof, not refuting it. Why? Because what are they really saying? That in order for this string to be produced, you can’t just randomize in a vacuum. Randomizing in a vacuum has no chance of making this happen. So how will it happen? If there is a programmer who makes sure the randomization is done in this way: do a random draw among twenty-two letters for the first letter; when L comes out, freeze it; move to randomize the second letter; when H comes out, freeze it. Well? So whoever runs this process, whoever wrote the program and freezes things and says what to randomize and what to do, is the one responsible for the fact that the string was created, right? Or in other words, you’ve shown me very well—for anyone who even needs to be shown—that if such a string is created, then some factor was involved here that caused it. Even if he did it through laws that he embedded into the program and didn’t do it with his own hands, that doesn’t matter; he did it through the program he wrote. But bottom line, there has to be some intellect, some intelligent factor, that made sure this string came out. And therefore this experiment does indeed contend with the argument within the laws, but it itself—not only does it not refute the argument from the laws, it is the argument from the laws. This article is the article I would have written as a proof for the existence of God; they wrote it as a refutation and it came out the opposite. An absolutely total affirmation of the creationist thesis. This article is the physico-theological proof—simply an excellent formulation of the physico-theological proof. It’s amazing how intelligent people fall for nonsense at such truly ridiculous levels. I’ll give you another example—maybe, I don’t remember if I brought this one too. I think Stephen Gould brought this example, about the drunk coming out of a pub and onto the sidewalk—did I bring this? There’s a wall on one side, a ditch on the other, and he’s staggering completely randomly, and at some point he’s in the ditch. Right? He can’t go through the wall, and at some point he’s in the ditch. So what—do they really think he intended to get to the ditch? The drunk didn’t; it’s a completely random walk. But the circumstances take him to the ditch. Well, and that’s exactly what I’m claiming. A completely random process won’t produce life. So how did life come out? Apparently someone arranged a wall on one side and a ditch on the other side of the sidewalk, and did so in order to make sure that in the end the drunk would be in the ditch. That’s exactly what the physico-theological proof says, what the physico-theological argument says. In other words, all the arguments brought against the physico-theological argument are nothing but sophisticated formulations of the argument itself. They attack the argument within the laws, but within that attack they show why the argument from the laws is a very strong argument. You don’t even need this; these are just illustrations, not really proofs—everyone understands this on their own anyway. But I don’t know, they like illustrations. If anything, this illustrates why there has to be a God in the background. So that’s the transition to the proof from the laws. Now I want to anchor this a bit in the issue of evolution. The claim basically—actually, you know what, I’ll read you a passage from Sefer Ha-Ikkarim, article three, chapter one. Forget it, I won’t do the screen because it’s just one passage, so listen. “When we sought to understand the forms found in matter, in material substances, and all the lowly beings that come to be”—the things in our world—“we found them all proceeding in a path of perfection, from some to others. That is to say, the later form is more honored than those before it. And it is as though matter always moves toward receiving forms from the level of deficiency to the level of perfection.” So, he’s basically saying we see in the world that the world advances, improves, and becomes more and more complete. The forms of things become more and more perfected. Literally evolution. “For first it receives the lower form, and afterward the more honored form, and it rises level after level to the more complete. And just as in a single moving thing each part is for the sake of the part that follows it, so it appears that this is the case among the lowly generated beings, that each part is for the sake of the part that follows it.” Right, each one is the basis for the next stage created after it. “And coming-into-being rises level after level until in the end it is elevated to the human form.” Literally evolution, right? It progresses until the human being is formed. “And what shows that matter always moves from deficient existence to complete existence, according to the increasing refinement of composition, is what we find in coral, which is like an intermediate between the inanimate and the plant. And we find the sea sponge, which has only the sense of feeling, and is like an intermediate between the plant and the animal”—right, coral. “And we find the ape, which is like an intermediate between the species of animals and the species of man.” This passage is pretty amazing. I’ve seen people quote it as, there, you see, Sefer Ha-Ikkarim already knew evolution. Now, of course he didn’t know evolution; evolution isn’t written here. You can see that clearly, right? But the examples he brings really are fascinating. All the arguments about intermediate stages, if you know the evolution debate—he’s speaking exactly to that. In other words, all the claims of the creationists who say: where are the intermediate stages? If this story is really progressing on its own, you’d expect there to be intermediate stages. If there are no intermediate stages, that means someone caused leaps in the evolutionary process. So coral is between plant and animal, and the ape is between animals and man—it really, really sounds like evolution. But here’s the point. I mentioned this once before, that there was a conference on the Pnei Yehoshua, and I brought examples to show Brisker-style analytic thinking in the Pnei Yehoshua. Right? We’re talking, of course, about 150 years earlier or something like that, 200 years earlier. And before I brought those examples, I prefaced it by saying that the history of—intellectual history, the history of ideas—is a very tricky field. Because once someone formulates a certain idea, you will always find it in earlier texts. No one invents ideas ex nihilo, completely from nothing. You’ll always find the idea in some raw form or another in earlier texts. Always. So in that sense, no one really deserves copyright on any idea. So how do we nevertheless deal with this? The answer, I think, is that the person who conceptualizes the idea and puts his finger on it and understands it, describes it to himself—he’s the one who deserves the credit. Afterward you’ll find it in others, and they weren’t even aware they were making use of that idea, but they did use it—they mentioned it. But only that one person who pointed to the pattern, conceptualized it, and defined it, is really the person who deserves copyright on the idea. The nicest example of this is Aristotle. In the Organon, Aristotle is considered the founder of logic. That’s Aristotle’s book of logic, the Organon. Okay? Did Aristotle invent logic? Before Aristotle, if I had said to people: look, all lecterns are made of wood, this thing is a lectern, therefore it is made of wood—would they have stared at me blankly, not understanding what I’m saying? Of course not. Everyone would have understood that it’s correct, it makes sense. So what did Aristotle do? People knew logic before him. That’s one of Aristotle’s syllogisms. So what did he do? What was his role? His role was to show that such a structure of argument is a fixed pattern that appears in many, many contexts. It could be about lecterns made of wood, it could be about telephones with black screens, it could be—I don’t know—various objects with mass attracting one another, all sorts of things like that. In all of them the same argument pattern appears: if every X is Y, and A is X, then A is Y. Now put into A, X, and Y whatever you want, and you get a valid argument. But the one who first noticed that there is here some universal pattern that appears in many places, and put his finger on that pattern—that was Aristotle. And therefore Aristotle is the father of logic. Even though people used logic before him. They just didn’t know they were using logic. They used it because it was common sense, it was obvious, but they didn’t conceptualize for themselves: I’m using a certain logical schema here that can be described in such-and-such a way. And by the way, this is such a good example because without Aristotle we wouldn’t have computers. Unless someone else had taken Aristotle’s place at some point—but if Aristotle’s step had never been made throughout history, we wouldn’t have computers. Even though Aristotle didn’t really innovate anything. Everything Aristotle discovered there was known before him. But he was the one who understood that there are fixed schemas of thought here, and that I can show you that in all fields it works the same way. And that if the premises are of this pattern and the conclusion is of that pattern, then the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. The very concept of following, the concept of argument validity, premises and conclusion—all that is Aristotle. Before him everyone used premises, conclusions, arguments, everything. They used all of it. But they didn’t know that they were using it. And Aristotle conceptualized those concepts. And in that sense he really does own the copyright. In that same sense, you could say that there are embryonic ideas of evolution, say, in Sefer Ha-Ikkarim. But obviously Darwin created the theory of evolution, not Rabbi Yosef Albo. Okay? Not only that: Darwin also gave it a pattern, he also explained it. In total, he noticed a phenomenon and described it factually—complex creatures arise from less complex creatures. How exactly he noticed this is not clear, because it’s not clear what came from what. In that period they didn’t know that things arose from other things. They just knew there were things at different levels of complexity: inanimate, animal, plant, speaking being. And no one thought that the speaking being arose from the animal, the animal from the plant, and the plant from the inanimate. That’s a modern insight. It wasn’t there in the days of Sefer Ha-Ikkarim. So it’s interesting that he even seems to understand that one thing comes out of the previous thing. Not just that there’s a hierarchy of things, but also a chronology—that the complex arises from the simple. It seems to me he noticed that too, at least that’s what his language suggests. But still, Darwin also showed the logic behind it. I’ll describe that in a moment. That wasn’t in Sefer Ha-Ikkarim. More than that: Sefer Ha-Ikkarim—I don’t even know the context, I don’t remember the context in which he uses this—could have used this as a proof for the existence of God. Because if things are generated from the simple to the complex, then you see there is basically someone directing this process. By contrast, evolution created all the huge uproar in the nineteenth century—The Origin of Species came out in 1870—created all that uproar because it was seen as a refutation of belief in God. Why? Because Darwin, unlike Rabbi Yosef Albo, also showed the logic behind this process. He explained how it happens. Whereas Sefer Ha-Ikkarim stands astonished before the process. How did this happen? Apparently there is a God. But Darwin goes in the opposite direction: no, you don’t need to conclude that there is a God—although he himself was a believer—you don’t need to conclude that there is a God, because I can offer you a natural explanation of how this happens. In other words, he brings the facts that there is an evolutionary process; from his perspective that is a proof of the existence of God. Now, by a nice irony, the one who was right here was Rabbi Yosef Albo and not Darwin. Darwin again—I don’t think Darwin himself really took part in this—but those who make use of Darwin’s theory, right? Because they are talking within the laws, while Rabbi Yosef Albo is talking outside the laws, about the very existence of the laws. But in fact his argument is an argument from the laws. Okay, so that is of course an interesting anecdote, like after my first book Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon came out, I met all sorts of people. One told me it’s all already in Rabbi Tzadok, another said it’s all in Rabbi Kook, the third said it’s all in Rabbi Nachman, it’s all in the Maharal, who knows—each one depending on whom he was a devotee of. Now some of that is true. In other words, the ideas really are found in various places. Those people weren’t lying. But I think—and here I’m defending my copyright, though I’m not bringing this for that reason, I’m bringing it to illustrate the principle—that whoever conceptualizes the thing and shows the structure itself, puts his finger on it, and places it at the disposal of the public, turning it into a tool we can use in our thinking about various subjects, is really the father of that idea. Once the idea has been conceptualized, go back and you’ll find it everywhere. Of course. Good. So for that reason I’m not particularly impressed when people find relativity in Sefer Yetzirah and evolution in Sefer Ha-Ikkarim and gravity somewhere else. It doesn’t impress me very much, because there is nothing scientific in those sources. There is an idea there that may perhaps look somewhat similar to one scientific theory or another, but what distinguishes a scientific theory is not what it describes, but the explanation it offers for what it describes. And that you will not find in all those sources. Okay, in Sefer Yetzirah there is what is there—a mishnah in the first chapter, I think—that says “ten depths of nothingness,” I think, or something like that. Depth of right and depth of left, depth of front and depth of back, depth of above and depth of below, depth of past and future—I don’t remember exactly how it’s phrased there—past and future, depth of good and depth of evil. Ten depths, in other words five axes and each axis has two ends. Now that’s really relativity. Right, Rabbi Shem Tov Gefen already writes this. That this mishnah in Sefer Yetzirah actually anticipates relativity, because there you have space-time, a four-dimensional space-time continuum, and it adds a fifth dimension, the evaluative dimension of good and evil. Everything that happens in space and time must also be tagged as good or evil. Right—but you understand that this has nothing to do with relativity in any way. It’s just an amusing anecdote. Okay, so now I want to explain a bit more what this is about. So how does evolution actually work? Evolution works as a chain of links, each link composed of three components: the formation of mutations, natural selection, and genetics. The formation of mutations—we’re talking about a protein chain, never mind, a chain of various proteins, of some length, say 300, that’s maybe a medium-short length—and such a protein chain is the genome of some living creature. That’s called the genotype. Now this genome is responsible for the formation of what’s called the phenotype. The phenotype is the body, how it actually appears in the world. So embedded in the genome is information, and that information goes from potential to actuality—or if you prefer, the plan goes from potential to actuality—in the phenotype. Okay? Now once I have some protein chain, it undergoes mutations for all sorts of reasons: temperature or various disturbances, all kinds of things. It undergoes mutations, and then something changes in the structure of the chain; some protein is removed, something else enters in its place, whatever—various defects, deformations of the chain. You’ll get a creature with a different phenotype. It’ll have only one ear because something shifted in its genome, or it’ll have a different skin color, or it’ll have—doesn’t matter—even different character traits. Not important. All sorts of things of this kind. Okay, so that is the living creature, the object we’re talking about. Now what does evolution say? Evolution says that once you have a protein chain of a living creature, that chain undergoes mutations. The mutations create all sorts of imperfect copies of the original creature. Various creatures that differ from one another a little, generally. In the DNA, yes. Now, that’s the formation of mutations. So now I have a variety of creatures. Suppose we started with one creature, and I now get a variety of creatures, say, I don’t know, a hundred. Okay, a hundred creatures. These creatures each look different, they have different genomes, but now what matters is actually the phenotype, not the genotype. Because in the struggle for survival, what struggles is the phenotype, not the genotype. In other words, if you have nothing to drink, you die. If you have nothing to drink or eat, or if you can’t deal with a fire that breaks out, or high temperature, or I don’t know what, predators, or whatever—then you die. Okay, so these are the struggles involved in natural selection. Natural selection—the circumstances in which you operate or to which you need to adapt—those circumstances wipe out some of the creatures created here, and they leave the creature that knows how to cope best with those circumstances. Okay, that’s called natural selection. So there is the formation of mutations, that’s the first component. Then natural selection, which leaves only the successful mutations, some of them—just one, doesn’t matter how many it eliminates and how many it leaves. And the third component is genetics. What do I mean? Think, for example, about houses on the seashore. All sorts of houses are built in all sorts of shapes. Now a tsunami comes along. The strong houses remain; the weak houses fall apart. Okay, so there you are: you have the formation of mutations—different houses. You have natural selection—the circumstances are basically the tsunami. The houses that did not survive were not resilient and didn’t survive; the house that did survive was the resilient one, or the houses that survived were the resilient houses. But the third component isn’t there: genetics. Houses do not produce children that are houses resembling them. And therefore this is not an evolutionary process. Because in the next stage those houses too will be wiped out, and there won’t be any houses at all. It’s not something that continues. If those houses gave birth to child houses in their image and likeness, and produced those houses, then indeed the new houses would withstand the tsunami—but then maybe some heat wave would come, a fire, a strong wind, whatever, requiring different traits in order to endure. So then mutations would once again arise, more mutations would be eliminated, and another stage of improvement would take place. Then there would be houses resistant both to tsunamis and to fire or to wind or whatever. Now sometimes this conflicts. The houses that remain won’t withstand tsunamis, but over time it’s likely that what will remain in the end is what withstands the whole chain of conditions up till now. And that, basically, is how evolution describes the process by which life, living creatures, become more sophisticated. So there are three components. Those three components describe one link in the evolutionary process. There is a protein chain, many mutations are created, there are struggles of natural selection and survival, the resilient mutations remain, they produce offspring like themselves, and the whole new generation is resilient to the conditions that existed. We are always preparing for the last war. We never prepare for the war that will come. Right? Nature is like that too. Except for the immune system, which is one of the great mysteries. But nature too prepares for wars that have already happened. So whoever remains is resilient to the conditions that already prevailed, but as for the next conditions, it may be wiped out. Therefore resilience to certain conditions is not something objective. Under other conditions, that very trait may actually be harmful. Say someone is very strong, so predators can’t overcome him—but maybe because he is so strong he isn’t fast. He won’t be able to flee from fire or something like that, and he’ll be wiped out. A trait that is good against certain conditions will be less good against other conditions. And therefore the process of improvement constantly continues; evolution never rests for a moment. It keeps going all the time, going through the three stages: formation of mutations, natural selection, genetics. Again: mutations, natural selection, genetics; mutations, natural selection, genetics. And that is how creatures are formed that are more and more sophisticated, or really more and more adaptive to more and more environments, or to more and more evolutionary threats, let’s call it that. Okay? That, in short, is a description of the evolutionary process. And now the claim—this is Darwin’s brilliant idea, really a brilliant idea—his idea basically says that if there is no guiding hand involved, then precisely in that case more and more sophisticated creatures will emerge from simple ones. Because if there is no guiding hand, then there is no one to protect the simple creatures; they will be wiped out, they won’t be able to hold out under the conditions. And the one that remains will be precisely the more sophisticated creature, the smarter one, the more resilient one—it doesn’t matter, you can call it many things—precisely that one will remain. And therefore, the laws of nature do indeed lead to the improvement of living creatures precisely when there is no guiding hand involved. And if so, then the physico-theological proof has fallen, right? That is basically the claim. First of all, I have to say—and this always annoys neo-Darwinians; I wrote a book about this, so by now I know what annoys them—that the theory of evolution, or more precisely natural selection, is a logical tautology. It is not a scientific theory. It is not a scientific theory. They take this as contempt. Not a scientific theory—so it’s faith, right? It’s often presented that way, and it really is faith. Neo-Darwinism is a religion in every respect. Regardless of whether it’s true; the Jewish faith is also true and is a religion in every respect. But this is a religion in every respect. There are laws of heresy there, there’s everything. There are things you’re not allowed to say, there is information they will hide if it threatens, God forbid, the contemporary articles of faith over there. And this is said by people from within the church itself, the neo-Darwinian church. Stephen Gould himself once wrote, I think, about the policy of concealing information lest creationists, God forbid, use it to attack evolution. In other words, there are occasionally honest people even within churches, and they reveal the ugly secrets. In any event, these people are deeply offended when you tell them it’s not a scientific theory. By the way, that is one of the articles of faith. In other words, if you say that, you’re a heretic, and your sentence is burning in the town square. I’m telling you this from experience, because I tried it, and indeed I was burned in the town square—the town square of Ynet. In any case, the claim is that when you talk about natural selection—again, the formation of mutations is a natural phenomenon, not something you can derive a priori. Genetics too is not; it is a fact that our biology creates genetic processes—there are laws that produce genetic processes, or heredity if you prefer, not genetics, heredity. But natural selection is a logical tautology. Because what does the principle of natural selection say? It basically says: the survivor survives. Right? The strongest survives. Now, who is the strong one? You can’t know who the strong one is, because it depends on what circumstances there will be around him. Strong for these circumstances is not strong for other circumstances. And therefore the strong one is the one who survived. That’s the strong one. So when you say the strong survives, or the resilient survives, you are basically saying the survivor survives. Because the strong one is the one who survived—that’s the strong one. So the one who survived survives. Do you understand that this is a logical tautology? As Malcolm once said—the well-known analytic philosopher—this is a tautology, but an illuminating one. It’s a brilliant tautology. All of mathematics is made of such tautologies, and no one would say it’s worthless or unintelligent. But the point is, it is not falsifiable. No one can falsify in the laboratory the claim that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. That’s a theorem in mathematics; it’s not a scientific theorem. Right? And no one will be able to falsify natural selection either. No one. Because if you show me that something didn’t survive, then the conclusion is simply that it wasn’t strong, it wasn’t a survivor, and therefore it didn’t survive. Because if it had been a survivor, it would have survived, right? Therefore by definition, if you have refuted something, you have not refuted the evolutionary thesis as such—you have refuted the assumption that such a creature is in fact a survivor, in fact strong. Okay? But the evolutionary thesis as such can never be refuted. The nicest example of this is a principle of Amotz Zahavi, an Israeli evolution researcher—what does he call it? Just a second, I forgot the name, it’s slipping my mind. Wait, I can’t spare you this gem. The handicap principle. What is the handicap principle? Take, for example, a male turkey—well, a peacock. A peacock, right. Not a turkey. A peacock with beautiful colors, spreading them out in public. Now this is a clearly anti-evolutionary thing, right? He stands out so much and so obviously invites predators to catch him. Be quiet, hide, camouflage yourself. Don’t stand out with all your colors and your feathers spread out like some local tough guy. Sit quietly and hide behind the bush and be the color of the bush, that’s it. Evolutionarily, we seemingly would not expect such a thing. So there, we have refuted the theory of evolution, right? So what does Amotz Zahavi say? No—there is the handicap principle. What is the handicap principle? It says this: when the peacock is colorful and spreads his feathers like that, he shows you he doesn’t give a damn about you. He shows you that you’d better not mess with him, because he has such self-confidence that he hides from no one. He’s such a big bully that everyone will be afraid to start with him. And therefore that is what gives him survivability, therefore he survives. That’s how peacocks were formed and how peacocks come into the world, as they tell children. If you want to tell children how peacocks come into the world, this is the story. Okay? Now first of all, it may very well be true. I don’t know. But you understand that with this line of thought you will never find any phenomenon that refutes evolution. Because every time you find something that seems not to fit how it survived, yet it did survive, there will be some explanation to tell you why it survived—or in other words, why it has traits that really are survivable, and it’s not true that they aren’t survivable. In other words, you were mistaken in your assumption that these traits are not survivable—but you will never be mistaken about the fact that only the survivor survives. In other words, that’s obvious; it’s a tautology. So it is clear that natural selection is not a scientific thesis. And don’t say this outside the boundaries of this room, because you are risking your life. And it is not a scientific thesis. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true, by the way. It is entirely true. It is true the way mathematics is true. So this is not contempt for that thesis. I am only saying it is not scientific; it is a logical tautology. And Darwin was a genius because he noticed that such a simple and entirely logical explanation can explain an entire world of diverse and fascinating phenomena that challenged people all the way up to his time. The explanation he offered is a logical tautology; you can’t argue with it, it’s obviously true. But it was still genius to come up with it. Okay? So I’m not saying this as contempt for evolution or for Darwin—on the contrary. But yes, one must understand: this is not a scientific thesis, it is a logical, non-scientific thesis. Now, okay, that is basically the evolutionary description. And now they basically tell us: if that’s the case, then we see that the claim that the formation of life requires the involvement of some supernatural being, some intelligent being, is not true. Here—take the natural process itself; it necessarily produces more and more sophisticated creatures, just as we see. There’s—I once read a book, actually I have it—it’s called The Beak of the Finch. It was a big worldwide hit, by a pair of American researchers, husband and wife, both evolution researchers. They went to the Galápagos, those same islands that Darwin visited on his ship, and they followed the beaks of a bird called the finch on one of the islands for, I think, twenty years. All right? And they saw that the beaks were undergoing an evolutionary process, and it was incredibly short on an evolutionary scale. Twenty years is an evolutionary second, right? When you can see an evolutionary process over the course of twenty years, that’s a world sensation. Now what exactly was the process they documented? It was amazing. I wrote about this in my book too, because in the end you discover there was nothing to discover. It was obvious. I could have told you in advance that this is what would happen; you don’t need observation at all. What they discovered was a mathematical phenomenon, not a biological one. What do I mean? There were finches living there with all sorts of beak lengths and strengths, okay? At some point a drought came. The drought wiped out the plants that were the finches’ food, and left only plants that were very dry, with large hard seeds that were resilient. So only finches with longer and stronger beaks remained—and we’re talking here about millimeters, but they measured averages, doesn’t matter—and the beak was longer and stronger. And of course genetics did its thing; the next generation already had such a beak, and it had something to eat, and everything was fine until the next problem came—not drought but a flood, I don’t know exactly what—and then once again some process took place, and they saw it in the beaks of the finches. They would come there once a year or something like that, measure the dimensions of the beaks, the different parameters of the beaks, and document it, and track the weather there or the winds in order to give explanations for everything too. And it came out as a book—you can read The Beak of the Finch—in which they show you, before the astonished eyes of all the miserable and stupid creationists, that there, you see, we even have twenty years, not fourteen billion years: in twenty years we can show you, illustrate for you, an evolutionary process happening before your eyes. Again, twenty years is one second on evolutionary timescales. Okay? Now when I read this book, I don’t know, I just scratched my head and didn’t understand what they wanted from me. I didn’t understand. Any child—if you tell him: listen, there are finches with such-and-such beaks, and they eat such-and-such plants, and those plants died out, and only the hard seeds remained, and only finches with such-and-such beaks can cope with that hard seed, while the others can’t—then the others will die of hunger, these will remain, their offspring through genetics will also come out, roughly, with strong beaks, and so next year you’ll discover finches with stronger beaks. Do you need scientific research for this? This is a theorem in mathematics, second-grade mathematics. But still, it’s mathematics. In other words, there’s nothing here—you didn’t discover any natural phenomenon, you discovered mathematics, that is, logic. There’s nothing here. Give me the data and I’ll tell you the result. So what did this study show? Nothing—it taught us nothing. All it did was illustrate Darwin’s idea. Illustrations do have value, at least didactic value. Okay, I’m not belittling that. I’m just saying that all the tremendous excitement over this—what exactly were you trying to prove? Is there any normal creationist who would argue with this? Who would say, no, no, they have weak beaks but they’ll survive anyway even though the drought wiped out their food? Is there any creationist who would dispute that when there is a plague, people die and those immune to the plague remain? Isn’t that obvious? Why do I need studies for that? It’s bizarre. Now this is part of the interreligious polemic, of course. Religious fanatics always operate in these fanatical ways, and so the neo-Darwinian church sees this as part of its sacred writings, The Beak of the Finch. And again, not because it isn’t true—on the contrary, because it is so obvious and true that no one can argue with it. And anyone who does argue with it is an idiot. You need to write books to deal with him. You can argue about the question whether new species are formed—there are debates about that. Some claim there are indications for it, but there it’s no longer so simple. There are jumps, yes, gaps in the middle of the evolutionary process; there are debates about that too. About that maybe one can argue. But that study, which really showed in airtight fashion how every millimeter, every detail happens with an exact explanation—everything there is clear, there’s no… I know drought destroys plants, I know someone with a weak beak can’t crack a plant with a hard seed, I know that whoever doesn’t eat dies. Take all these pieces of knowledge that I had before the study, and I’ll tell you what the study is going to yield—in other words, it added no piece of knowledge beyond those I already had before. Gather all the knowledge I had before, and I’ll tell you exactly what the results of the study will be. This is research in mathematics, not biology. You need to derive the conclusion logically from the data you already know—that’s all. Now I think I talked about the God of the gaps in this context, right? I said that often in the religious, creationist, fundamentalist world, every time science fails it’s a festival day—they declare a holiday. I have a friend who once saw a book by Rabbi Wolf from the Wolf Seminary in Tel Aviv, a fanatical German Jew, and it opened with “science is false and our Torah is true,” or something like that. Right, yes. Or every time the weather forecaster gets his forecast wrong, Yated Ne’eman comes out with a colorful festive headline. The point is that you cannot base faith on gaps in scientific knowledge—what is called God of the gaps. What do I mean? I say: I don’t understand something on the scientific level, therefore there is a God, because there is no scientific explanation. Then the neo-Darwinians come and say: here, we do have a scientific explanation, therefore there is no God. Do you see that both sides here are falling into the same pit? They are both talking about God of the gaps. In other words, both agree that gaps are the proof for the existence of God, and if I closed the gaps, the proof collapses. Okay? Now this failure, in the discourse around evolution, is called the God of the gaps fallacy. And what does it basically say? It says that when you do not understand something on the scientific plane, that does not mean there is a God. It means you need to continue the research until you understand it. They say: five hundred years ago there was much more God than there is today, right? Back then they didn’t know any of what we know today. They didn’t know electromagnetism, they didn’t know gravity, certainly not relativity and quantum theory and all the other things. So back then there was lots of God, yes. Then research advanced and we know more. So now there is no God? No, there still is, because there are still things we don’t understand. Fine, the things we don’t understand today, maybe in another hundred years they’ll be understood. At least maybe. Don’t base proof of God’s existence on gaps in scientific knowledge. That is basically the claim. Okay? Now, the more sober neo-Darwinians—not the fanatics; the fanatics are like the fanatical creationists, it’s a war of churches—but the fanatics tell you: there, you see, there’s a scientific explanation, therefore there is no God. And the creationists say: there is no scientific explanation, therefore there is a God. But the more sober neo-Darwinians say: no, since there is a scientific explanation, and you tried to build the existence of God on the absence of a scientific explanation, draw the lesson. Even if there is something now that we don’t understand, it may be that if we wait another fifty, one hundred, two hundred, five hundred years, we will understand it. Don’t build belief in God on things we don’t understand—and that really is a correct claim of the neo-Darwinians. In other words, building a proof for the existence of God on something we don’t understand is a problematic proof. It’s problematic because, okay, once we understood nothing, today we understand more, and in the future we will probably understand still more. Again, not sure we’ll understand everything, but even if we don’t understand, that still does not mean there is a God. It only means we don’t understand. We still have work to do in scientific research, that’s all. How exactly do you get from that to God? If you had used God to close scientific gaps—say the first human being encountered a scientific problem, he doesn’t understand something. Fine, that means there is a God; everything is fine; he can sit quietly; everything is excellent. Our science today would look like the science of the first human being. There would be no reason to investigate, because every time there is some problem, God is the solution, the joker card. He answers all the questions and problems. Right—he solves all the problems, so there is no point in doing research. We would still be at the level of the science of the first human being. Therefore God is harmful to the scientific process. He is harmful to the scientific process because when one uses him as an explanation for problems, it means we won’t do research in order to understand those problems scientifically, because God—everything’s fine. And on the other hand, of course, if we do research and understand it, then whoops, there is no God, which means we were mistaken. Okay, so this God-of-the-gaps fallacy, I think, really is a valid fallacy. In other words, one should be careful not to build belief in God on gaps in scientific knowledge. Now the question is what this means for the physico-theological proof. Seemingly, the physico-theological proof—if I’m talking about the proof within the laws, meaning not likely, second law of thermodynamics and so on, not likely that something complex arises spontaneously without some intelligent being involved. What does that mean? I am basically building on scientific ignorance, right? I am basically saying: I don’t understand this scientifically, therefore there is God. Then Darwin comes and says: here, I do understand it scientifically. I have evolution. Ah, so then there is no God, because we explained it. That is all a feature of explanation within the laws. And so as a result I moved to an explanation from the laws—an explanation outside the laws. Okay? Now, is the explanation from the laws not vulnerable to this same attack? Isn’t that also God of the gaps? Why? Because I am basically saying: who caused the laws to be as they are, right? Within them the evolutionary process takes place. What do you mean? Research more and you’ll discover who caused the laws to be that way. There too it’s a gap. So there too you can’t build the existence of God on it; that too is God of the gaps. And what I’m saying is—seemingly this argument too falls into the God of the gaps fallacy. Because they are basically telling me: you are building belief in God on some lack of understanding on your part. You don’t understand how the laws are as they are. Research more, understand more, and that’s it; don’t build God for me on scientific problems you have. Scientific problems advance over time; we can solve them. And even if not, that just means we aren’t smart enough, not that there is a God. Okay? So is there also a God-of-the-gaps problem here? I argue no. I don’t remember whether I said this or not, but I argue no. Why not? Because in the end, suppose we investigate why the laws are as they are, and we find a scientific explanation. What would that scientific explanation look like? There would be some meta-laws, more fundamental laws, from which we could derive the laws familiar to us today. Then we’ll ask about those meta-laws too. We will continue researching them too, and there will be still more meta-laws explaining them. In short, you understand that we arrive at an infinite regress, right? How can this process stop? One of two ways; there is no third option. One possibility: I have a collection of laws, or even one law, doesn’t matter, that is fundamental; it has no explanation, it is the first law. Okay? And then of course I’ll ask: but why is it as it is? And I’ll arrive at the conclusion of God. And this is no longer God of the gaps. Why? Because this is a gap that scientific research can no longer close. That’s it—we have reached the final law. This is the end. At the very end, after scientific research is finished, we have all scientific knowledge. Unified field theory—the dream of Einstein, apparently—we found one equation that describes all the laws of nature. Fine. Okay, but who caused that equation to be the basic law? Here we no longer have anywhere to advance with scientific tools. Right? Therefore this is not God of the gaps. Further scientific research won’t take us forward here. It may be that one can find another equation that underlies that equation—okay, then we’ll talk about the last one. But in an infinite chain, we have removed that from the set of possibilities, right? There is no infinite regress. The only option left to the defending atheist is to say that the basic law underlying all the laws is not a law of nature at all—it is a mathematical law. It is a mathematical identity. You don’t need observation to see it. If we understand all the way through, properly, we’ll understand why masses must attract one another; it simply follows from their nature. It’s not some law we discovered through observations. There won’t be a number—say, the numbers in what is called fine-tuning, the numbers of the constants in physics. There are various constants in physics: the speed of light, the gravitational constant, Coulomb’s constant, the dielectric constant, never mind, all sorts of such constants. These constants are various numbers that are responsible for how our laws of nature look. And the question is: why are the numbers as they are? Because if the numbers had been a little different, nothing would exist—not chemistry, not biology, not human beings, not animals, nothing. There is very great sensitivity to the values of the constants of physics. This is called the fine-tuning argument. So people say: there, you see, there is a God, because in fact the values of the constants are exactly those that allow for the formation of chemistry, biology, life, psychology, sociology—whatever you want. So I say: fine, suppose scientific research advances and we discover one basic law of nature, the most fundamental there is, and it has, say, one constant in it, and the value of that constant is 0.543. All right? Now the question is: why is it that and not 0.547, in which case there would have been no physics, no chemistry, nothing at all? Then there is still God; it changes nothing. Right? The only possibility is to say that this value, 0.547, is like pi or e—numbers that are not the result of measurement. I can get to them mathematically. The ratio between the diameter of a circle and its circumference—that’s pi, right? That ratio is not the outcome of some law of nature. It is a mathematical property of circles. So you don’t really need observation to discover that there is a fixed ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle. You can discover it by observation, but observation is not necessary. Mathematical calculation will also show it to you. It can be proved mathematically. Okay? Now if all the numbers in the laws of physics are basically like pi or e, or whatever, all these special numbers, then the question does not arise as to how pi is exactly pi and not something slightly different. It cannot be something slightly different. That is the nature of a circle. Okay? So there is no question; you cannot prove the existence of God from the fact that the value of pi is 3.141. Its value could not have been anything else. That is a mathematical result; it is not the result of an observation that could have been otherwise, and we see that it is specifically 3.141. Okay? Now if all the constants in physics—or one fundamental constant, if there is one, I don’t know—are really constants like pi, then again we have no proof for the existence of God. The physico-theological proof has fallen. You can’t ask why their value is exactly this. It is exactly this because it is a mathematical property, it is not—it’s not the result of—it was not possible to make a world with a different value of this number. The value of this number is its value. But if that really is the escape route of the defending atheist, then one has to understand the price attached to it. It is a possible escape route. But the price attached to it is that basically there is no such thing as science. All the sciences are branches of mathematics. You do not really need observations in order to know the world. We use observations because we are stupid, but in principle observations are unnecessary. It is enough to be sharp logically and mathematically, to do the calculations, and you’ll discover that the speed of light is this, and the gravitational constant is this, and the dielectric coefficient is this. You’ll discover everything from mathematical calculations; you don’t need any observation. Now if that is true, then there is no physico-theological proof for the existence of God. But the claim that this is true is not accepted by any creature who has passed second grade, as far as I know. And if it is, then his teacher should be hospitalized. No one believes that science doesn’t need observations, that all the sciences are branches of mathematics. Now if you want to claim that in order to say there is no God—dayenu. In other words, then I’ve done my part. I rest my case, as they say. If in order to reject the existence of God you have to reach such absurd claims, then forget it—let’s adopt the existence of God; it is surely not more absurd than that. Okay? You are basically driven to that because it seems to you that the existence of God is something terribly absurd, and so you try to find another way out—but the way out is so absurd that the existence of God is a far preferable option by any standard, however absurd it may be. You know Sherlock Holmes’ The Sign of Four? He says there that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is probably the truth. Here are two possibilities: one is patently improbable and one is very improbable—apparently the very improbable one is the correct one. There are only two possibilities, and the other one is impossible. Right? The fact that something seems improbable to you is not an argument. You need to check the probability of the alternative, and if the alternative is even less probable, then you will still have to take this option. Don’t ask me how the sum of the probabilities here doesn’t add up to one—it’s conditional probability, you need Bayes’ theorem here. Okay, so it isn’t God of the gaps then. Therefore my claim is that the argument from the laws basically says this: the evolutionary process is usually presented as a blind, random process. A plain random lottery, right? Something completely random. And therefore it serves as an alternative to the thesis of God as the one causing this process. Okay? But if you really look at the evolutionary process, there is nothing random in it. What are the random components in the evolutionary process as I described it earlier? One is the formation of mutations. All sorts of defects in the protein chain produce various mutations, and that’s random; you can’t know in advance what will happen there. And the second random process is natural selection. Natural selection—who knows whether there will be a drought here, or a lion, or a tsunami, or I don’t know what, high heat or fire? You can’t know, and these accidental circumstances are what dictate what survives. Okay? So that too is a random element in the evolutionary process. But none of those elements is really random in the simple sense. Why? In order to understand this, one has to understand that when we use the term randomness, we use it in two different senses. One meaning is like with a die, rolling a die. You roll a die; it can land on one, two, three up to six, and that is random. Let’s say it’s a fair die, so it’s random, equal chance for each face. Is this process a random process—the process of rolling a die? Of course not. There is nothing random there; it’s Newton’s laws. Newtonian mechanics. Just do the calculations—they’re very complicated—and they’ll tell you exactly which face the die will land on. There is nothing random there at all; it’s mechanics.

[Speaker B] Also how I chose,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That too. Tell me the selection process, how you chose with your hand, and I’ll tell you at what angle—it doesn’t matter, I don’t care. So still, in the end, there’s nothing random here at all. That’s the point. So basically, why do we use probability in this kind of problem, like rolling a die or flipping a coin or something like that? Because the calculation itself is complicated. There’s very high sensitivity to initial conditions—that’s what characterizes chaos—and therefore we prefer probabilistic tools. We say: each face has a one-in-six chance, even though this isn’t a random process at all; it’s a completely mechanical process. Each face has a one-in-six chance, okay? Then you say: what’s the chance of getting an even number? Half. What’s the chance of getting a number greater than or equal to four? Half. What’s the chance of getting a number strictly greater than four? One-third, right? Two outcomes. And so on. You can do probabilistic calculations even though there’s nothing random here. You do probabilistic calculations because you don’t know how to perform the detailed mechanical calculation, because it’s terribly complicated and terribly sensitive to initial conditions. Okay? That’s one kind of randomness, and it’s really the only kind of randomness we know from our world. A truly random process—not just one that’s complicated so I can’t calculate it, but one for which there is no calculation—that would be a genuinely random process. There is no such process, at least none that we know of. There are claims that in quantum theory there is such a process. That’s the special complexity of quantum theory; it’s the only place in nature that we know of where there may be genuine randomness, not what we usually call randomness. What we usually call randomness is really just computational complexity. We use probability because we don’t know how to do the calculation, that’s all. You could call it ambiguity instead of randomness. Randomness is something for which there is no calculation, not something whose calculation is difficult. Even if I had the biggest supercomputer, even the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself couldn’t perform the calculation, because there is no calculation. Yes, even the Holy One, blessed be He, in His full glory, could not know what the result of a die roll would be if it were a truly random process. It’s not a random process, because someone who knows exactly at what angle it comes out and with what force I throw it, and knows Newton’s laws and everything, knows exactly which face it will land on. So the Holy One, blessed be He, can tell me which face it will land on. But He cannot tell me the result of a process that is genuinely random. Why? Because there is no such calculation, not because the calculation is difficult. I’ll give you an example. There’s an example of this in the Talmud, the topic of betrothal that is not fit for intercourse. Someone goes to a father who has two daughters, gives him a perutah, and says, “One of your two daughters is betrothed to me,” without saying which one. Okay? So there’s a doubt whether it’s Rachel or Leah. We don’t know. A doubt, right? Seemingly a Torah-level doubt treated stringently. What does that mean? If you want to have relations with Leah, you can’t, because maybe Rachel is your wife and then Leah is your wife’s sister, which is a forbidden sexual relationship. You also can’t have relations with Rachel, because maybe Leah is your wife and then Rachel is your wife’s sister. So because of the doubt you can’t have relations with either of them, right? And therefore the Talmud says that such a thing is called betrothal not fit for intercourse. Okay? There’s a dispute between Abaye and Rava whether this counts as betrothal or not. In any case, a bill of divorce has to be given, because he can’t have relations with them—but the question is whether a bill of divorce is required, or whether there was never any betrothal here and no bill of divorce is needed. Now the question is: according to Maimonides, for example, a Torah-level doubt is ruled leniently by Torah law; only rabbinically is it treated stringently, but by Torah law it is lenient. According to Maimonides, is this betrothal fit for intercourse? Each one is in doubt whether she is my wife’s sister; and doubt is treated leniently, so I can have relations with them. Then it is fit for intercourse. So this topic is difficult for Maimonides. How can Maimonides say that a Torah-level doubt is treated leniently, while there is such a thing as betrothal not fit for intercourse? According to Maimonides it is fit for intercourse. The answer is: no, that’s not true. Even according to Maimonides you’re forbidden to have relations with either of them. Why? Because this isn’t a doubt. A doubt is a situation where there is one truth, only I don’t know it; I’m missing information, so I’m in doubt whether the truth is A or the truth is B. For example, I sent an agent to betroth for me either Rachel or Leah. The agent betrothed one of them and died. I don’t know which one it was—Rachel or Leah. That’s a doubt. Why? Because the truth is that only one is betrothed to me; I just don’t know which one. So I’m in doubt; here the laws of doubt apply. But in the case of betrothal not fit for intercourse, even the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t know which of them is betrothed to me, because I never designated either one of them as the one to be betrothed to me. I said, “One of your two daughters,” I didn’t say which. So what comes out is that this is actually a quantum state. There, the Sages also knew quantum theory, if we were talking about that earlier. Right? This is basically a quantum state. Both women are betrothed to me, but with a kind of quantum betrothal, tenuous betrothal, call it what you like. This is not a state of doubt. It’s certain. A doubt is a state where I’m missing information. Before Heaven all is revealed; the Holy One, blessed be He, knows all the information. So if I sent an agent to betroth one of the women for me, that’s a doubt. Why? Because there is one woman who is betrothed to me, only I don’t know which one, but the Holy One, blessed be He, does know which one. Before Heaven all is revealed. That is called a state of doubt. In contrast, a state in which even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot tell me which woman is betrothed to me—that is not a state of doubt. I’m not missing any information. I have all the information that the Holy One, blessed be He, has. The state itself is ambiguous. It is an undefined state at the legal or halakhic level. But there is no doubt here. Both women are betrothed to me, each of them with a tenuous kind of betrothal. It’s not a doubt whether this one is fully betrothed to me or that one is fully betrothed to me; rather, it is certain that this one is doubtfully betrothed to me and that one is doubtfully betrothed to me. In yeshiva language they call this a certain doubt and not a doubtful certainty. A doubtful certainty is the ordinary kind of doubt. Here it’s a certain doubt—or a doubtful certainty. If there is certainly one woman betrothed to me, only I’m in doubt which one she is, that’s a doubtful certainty. But if I know with certainty that each of the two women is doubtfully betrothed to me, that’s a certain doubt. Okay? Now that is a state of genuine randomness. Because here there isn’t—therefore here too the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot know which is the woman who is betrothed to me. Because there isn’t a woman who really is betrothed to me and I just don’t know who she is. No. They are both betrothed to me to the same degree, with some sort of tenuous betrothal—yes, it’s truly a quantum superposition. So in our context, what we know from the laws of nature in the natural world around us is only randomness of the first type, like the die. In our experience there is nothing that is randomness of the second type. Essential randomness, like in quantum theory. Only in quantum theory, and even there not everyone agrees—that’s a matter of interpretation—not everyone agrees that it is truly random, but if so, then only there. Now when we look at processes of evolution, evolution doesn’t usually happen on quantum scales. Evolution is animals, things, at the very least large molecules if you look at DNA or something like that. Those are not scales at which you can see quantum effects. And therefore even if we’re talking about random components in the evolutionary process, that randomness is like a die. It is not randomness like quantum theory. Think about the tiger or the beak of the finch, okay? There was a drought there, and therefore all the shrubs, those food shrubs of the birds, dried out, and only the shrubs with the hard berries remained. Okay? So you say: that’s random; there could have been a drought, there could have been a flood, there could have been all kinds of things. And what caused the drought? A drought is also a natural process. There is also some reason why that drought happened there. You can go back further and further. In the end, we are talking about natural processes that have cause-and-effect relations, and therefore there is nothing random there. But because we don’t know how to do the calculation—because climate is the wildest thing there is, there is no way to do calculations on climate in this life, Yated Ne’eman—so therefore we use probabilistic tools to describe those processes. We say: it’s a random process. We say: what’s the probability there will be a drought, what’s the probability a lion will come, what’s the probability there will be a fire—and based on that we can make different models for how evolution will develop. But that is only because we don’t know. If we knew all the information about the whole universe the way the Holy One, blessed be He, knows it, then I could tell you exactly what kinds of beaks the finches would have at every stage of their lives and thousands of years ahead. Because I know exactly: there will be a drought, there will be a flood, there will be fire, which plants will go extinct, which plants will survive, what sort of beaks are needed to crack those berries and those berries. We human beings don’t know how to do that calculation. We say: random processes are happening here, so we’ll use probabilistic calculations. But that is only because we don’t know the information properly. In principle there is nothing random here. It is a completely deterministic process. What this actually means is that there are no random components in the evolutionary process. By the way, there is some work on the formation of mutations, where perhaps in the formation of mutations there may indeed be quantum aspects. Let’s leave that aside for now, because in my opinion it still wouldn’t change the picture. What I basically want to say is this. You have to understand that if you want to provide an alternative to the existence of God, to the physico-theological argument, you need to offer me an explanation based on genuine randomness. You need to show me that there is no guiding hand and nothing of the sort, and nevertheless this whole story happens. If that’s so, then there is no proof for the existence of God. But if you bring me evolutionary explanations, those explanations are not random; they are completely deterministic explanations. Even though they contain components that are very complicated and we use probabilistic tools for them, really, in principle, there is some completely deterministic calculation from the Big Bang until today. That calculation could have told you, already at the stage of the Big Bang, what word I would say in another five minutes. At the stage of the Big Bang one could have done a calculation—with a supercomputer, infinite information, and everything—and the Holy One, blessed be He, could have told you what word would come out of my mouth in another hour, ten minutes, and thirty-two seconds. The fact that I don’t know how to do the calculation is only because I don’t have enough computational power, I don’t have sufficiently precise information, it’s hard for me to do the calculation, so I say: okay, it’s random, it could be like this, it could be like that, it depends on what happens here. Yes, but what happens here is also the result of a calculation. And therefore the evolutionary process is just a fig leaf for a system of deterministic laws that governs everything happening here. And everything is deterministic. Now understand that if this is really so, what is happening here is actually something amazing. They say the evolutionary process refutes the physico-theological proof, so I’ve shown that it doesn’t refute it. Because it talks about the proof within the laws, and the proof from the laws has nothing to do with evolution at all, right? Because I’m asking: what are the laws responsible for the fact that an evolutionary process took place here? If the values of the constants—such as the fine-tuning in physics—had been a bit different, there would have been no chemistry, no biology, and of course no evolution either. Therefore the argument from the laws is an argument based on the question: where did the laws come from? Not how things happened within the system of laws, but where the laws themselves came from. Now I want to make a stronger claim: evolution strengthens the physico-theological proof. Not only does it not refute it and leave it neutral—no, it strengthens it. Why? Think now that basically everything happening in the world is the result of four fundamental laws of physics, of four fundamental forces of physics, okay? And everything is deterministic. True, we don’t know how to do that calculation, so we use probabilistic tools and all that, but basically, let’s say from the point of view of the Holy One, blessed be He—someone who had some supercomputer with infinite computational power and complete, absolute information could carry out the calculation to the end and tell me everything that will happen at every stage from the Big Bang until the coming of the Messiah and beyond. So if that really is the case, then it turns out that we have the following process: the Holy One, blessed be He, created a world that has four laws of physics with certain values of the constants. That world runs for 14 billion years, and in the end we are sitting here in class, I’m talking, you’re listening, commenting, everything we see around us. And all of this was planned from the moment of the Big Bang. That means the laws of nature were created in such a way that within them there unfolds all this terrible chaos that we don’t know how to get control of, which we call evolution or the neo-Darwinian picture, but in fact it is simply the deterministic operation of the four laws of physics that leads us from a singular material point in the Big Bang to the entire zoo we know around us. So if that doesn’t mean there is a God, I don’t know what does mean there is a God. In other words, the evolutionary description not only does not refute the physico-theological proof, it strengthens it. It says that there are basically four laws here. I’ll give you an assignment: produce four laws, determine yourselves the form of the laws and the values of the constants in such a way that in another 14 and a half billion years human beings will come into existence. Right now you have only a point of matter, devoid of properties and of anything at all, yes, the singular point of the Big Bang. Okay? And determine the laws in such a way that in another 14 billion years animals, human beings, and so on will come into being. There is no chance you will succeed. One less animal—even that. There is no chance you will succeed. So how were the values of the constants determined? How were these laws determined? Clearly there was some kind of higher intelligence here, or whatever you want to call it, that determined the laws that yield the evolutionary explanation. The moment the evolutionary explanation shows me how life developed, it strengthens the need for the existence of God, it doesn’t weaken it. Because it means there is a system of four laws here, and there was no other way around it: someone sufficiently wise could already 14 billion years ago have known that in the end human beings would come into existence here. Think, for example, of a situation where I leave—suppose I have a sealed room with no windows, no doors, nothing. I leave a lump of plasticine in the corner of the room. Now I determine the laws: what happens to every bit of plasticine, what happens at every stage, and I determine the laws of nature in that room. And I need to determine them in such a way that in another 14 billion years there will be elephants in that room, human beings, mosquitoes, everything you know, chairs, air conditioners, and so on. There is no chance that you could do such a thing. So the fact that you have an explanation through laws only strengthens the need for there to be some intelligence responsible for this whole story. Who can perform a calculation and set the laws in such a way that four rigid laws will generate the entire crazy world around us in advance? We don’t even manage to understand the laws after the world is already given to us. So to foresee in advance that I can set laws such that a world of this kind will emerge—that’s insane. It certainly did not happen by a random lottery of laws. Now, that is the proof from the laws with evolution and this whole story. What remains for us is just to close a few final loose ends. What could there be, what could be raised against this argument? The argument from the laws. Here we come to what is called the anthropic principle. What is the anthropic principle? In its earlier versions, the anthropic principle is a pro-God or pro-faith principle. What does that mean? The principle says: look, in Duties of the Heart, for example, he writes: how can it be that there is so much air in the world and water in the world? The more we need something, the more it is found here. If we need a lot of air, we have as much air as we want; if we need a lot of water, we have as much water as we want. There is exactly what we need in order to survive, in the right quantities. What we need less of also exists in lesser quantity. What is most needed at every moment is fully accessible to us, exists in almost infinite quantities, and so on. That is the anthropic argument, meaning that the world is directed toward the existence of living beings within it. There is a guiding hand here—that is the claim, basically. Because otherwise, how is it that in a world where I need water, air, and so on, it is indeed full of water and air and so on? So of course all the atheists laugh at that and say: obviously, because if it didn’t have water and air in that way, you wouldn’t be here to notice it. It’s not a question: how is it that in a world in which I exist—and I need water and air—there is lots of water and air? Because if there weren’t water and air here, you wouldn’t be here to ask the question, how can it be that there is water and air here? Hawking in his book gives an example: suppose there is a skilled firing squad, and it is about to execute a man sentenced to death. Everyone aims their rifles from, I don’t know, thirty meters away. There’s no chance—they don’t miss in such a case, with ten shooters. They all missed, and he remained alive. He is stunned. He says: how can this be? It just can’t be; there must have been some guiding hand here, it can’t be. Hawking says: what are you talking about? If they hadn’t missed, you wouldn’t be here to marvel that they missed. Now that’s different from what I said earlier, notice? Because here he is talking nonsense. True, of course I wouldn’t be here—and the fact that I am here is the wonder. What, it isn’t surprising that ten skilled shooters miss a man from thirty meters away? So what if, if they hadn’t missed, I wouldn’t be here to realize it? Someone else standing on the side would have asked the question. What difference does it make? Is that an answer to the question? What kind of idiotic thing is that? So where is the point? The point is this. You can make a different claim. This is the atheistic anthropic argument—the one of Hawking, who is being foolish—and there is the non-foolish atheistic anthropic argument, which says that if there had been millions of executions, then let’s say the chance is, I don’t know, one in a million that ten skilled shooters miss from thirty meters. Then one person out of those million remains alive on average, right? Meaning, in every million people they hit them all—but one they don’t hit; that’s the probability. If that one person survives—wait, how is it possible that I survived? Ten skilled shooters missed from thirty meters. That is not a question. Because there were a million others who did not survive, and the one-in-a-million probability was realized—it happened to you. Okay? That isn’t a question. In other words, if I am the only person standing before this firing squad and all ten miss and that’s it, this is a miracle of miracles, and no one will tell me that it’s only because I remained alive that I’m asking the question. Nonsense. You can say, no, but there were a million other cases where they really did hit. You are the case that survived; someone had to survive. In this case it was you. If it had been someone else, he would be asking the question. What difference does it make? Then it’s no longer a wonder. Right? That is the anthropic argument in its more intelligent formulation. This argument basically says the following: true, when people talk about the emergence of life, I say that the emergence of life by chance out of inanimate matter is improbable. Yes, but there is an entire universe, full of many, many attempts to produce life; one of them can succeed. That is basically the argument against the physico-theological proof. But yes—there is an argument from the laws. What does the argument from the laws say? In our universe there prevail such laws of nature, such laws of physics, that allow chemistry and biology. If that were not possible, then nowhere in the universe would it happen. And these laws are very special laws, and they exist throughout the universe, so it doesn’t help me that the universe is large. These are the laws that govern the entire universe. So with regard to the laws, you can’t tell me that the universe is large and therefore somewhere it can happen despite the low probability. But then someone will come and say: yes, and there are many other universes in which there are different laws of nature, and you happen to be in the universe whose laws of nature allow the emergence of human beings. That is the physico-theological—this is the anthropic argument in its more intelligent formulation. Okay? That really could happen. And this is the only challenge that can truly be made against the argument from the laws. Because the argument from the laws basically says: look, these laws are very special; the fact is they allow life to emerge. Yes, but maybe there are millions of other universes in which there are all sorts of laws, and you are in this universe whose laws allow biology, evolution, life, and the like. That’s all. So then there is no wonder in it, it’s like the million executions where in one of them you survived. That is the anthropic argument we have to deal with. I’ll say briefly what I think the answer to this is. The answer is twofold. First, I haven’t seen all these universes. Why don’t I see any of them? You can always invent ad hoc theories. With the law of gravitation too—who said every two masses attract one another? Maybe whenever I’m not looking, two demons come and pull the two masses toward each other, and then they run away quickly when I look so that I won’t see them. Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot. Everybody laughs, but this is what the atheists are basically claiming in the context of God. That is exactly what they are claiming. All sorts of universes that exist, only nobody sees them—but they arrange the whole matter for us, because now everything is clear, even though the system is improbable and there are lots of other universes that nobody has ever seen, but over there they organize it statistically. And I’ll say more than that. Suppose there really are infinitely many such universes, and in each such universe different laws of nature prevail, right? Then first of all, who created those universes? What, is there some universe-generator that produces different laws of nature each time? So who created the generator? In the end, in the end, you won’t be able to escape that question. And I’ll say more than that. Suppose there is a generator and you don’t need God. The generator is God—it doesn’t matter to me—but fine, there’s no need, there is a generator, it happens in some way or other, ask them. Still, then we have infinitely many universes, each with different laws of nature, right? And in each such universe, where different and strange laws of nature prevail, there are also different and strange creatures, right? According to those laws of nature. For example, gods, say, or all sorts of things, right? All kinds of creatures. And this is the picture you are proposing as the simpler picture, as a simpler alternative to the picture that says: well, if there is a world, apparently there is a God who created it. There can’t be a being like God whom we have never seen—why assume He exists? Ah, so your alternative is infinitely many universes that are not God, which supposedly we also should have seen but haven’t, and in all those universes there exist very different and strange creatures that of course we also haven’t seen, and this whole giant mess—that is a much simpler proposal than the proposal of saying that there is a God who created the world. Fine. Now you decide which proposal sounds simpler. It sounds absurd. I called it in the book the Mad Hatter’s tea party. You know in Alice in Wonderland? Yes, where there are all those different crazy creatures. They invent a Mad Hatter’s tea party without there being any hatter, any tea, any party, or anything at all. Why? In order to deny the existence of a hatter who isn’t mad. Because we haven’t seen him. True, we haven’t seen him. But your alternative is a collection of billions of things—what billions, infinitely many things—that we also haven’t seen, and they may be even stranger than God in terms of how bizarre they are. That’s all. So what have you gained? Why is this an alternative that seems simpler? Or more plausible? Understand that this is absurd. Basically—well, I’ll stop here. Bye, bye,

[Speaker B] Thank you.