Learning from Experience – Lesson 11

This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.

🔗 Link to the original lecture

🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This is where our agreement stopped. You made a jump here. Because you assume that anything about which we have an intuition is morality. You’re saying: the moment we have an intuition, how can you say it’s not morality? We have an intuition, and yet the area is not a moral area. I’ll give you an example that I think I’ve brought before: the Briskers, yes, live within an ethos of “we don’t ask why, only what.” That is, we don’t explain, we only analyze. What do the data say? Which of course is nonsense. But that’s their ethos. Now, if that were so, then of course any set of data could be explained in lots of ways. How do you choose the correct way? And they too choose what seems reasonable. By the way, as a result of this ethos, in my opinion at least, that’s the reason the Briskers are very fond of the areas of sacrificial law and purity law. They deal a lot with sacrificial law and purity law. Why? Because in areas like civil law, we have intuitions: what counts as good evidence, what counts as bad evidence, “the burden of proof is on the one seeking to extract from another”; there are reasonings there. And they’re looking for areas—they like these areas—where we don’t bring in reasonings from home, where we don’t have intuitions. Here we can supposedly just ask what and completely ignore why. But in fact, you can look at the words of Rabbi Chaim, or whoever, all the Briskers, on sacrificial law and purity law—and it’s packed with reasonings and intuitions: this is reasonable and that isn’t reasonable, this is right and that isn’t right. Where does that come from? After all, these areas are not connected to the moral world, not to civil law, not to any field connected to our lives where we’re supposed to have intuitions about it. And the fact is that we do, we do. We can see that this is a plausible explanation in sacrificial law and that is a less plausible explanation in sacrificial law. What—how do you know what’s plausible and what’s not plausible? Sacrificial law is a field that’s totally—or purity law—these are fields that are not connected to our lives at all, so what does plausible or implausible even mean there? By what standard are you deciding? Is it just hallucination? No, it’s not hallucination. We have intuitions even in those areas that we don’t really understand, and that brings us back again to Karl Semmelweis, what I said earlier. When they investigated childbed fever—yes, that’s Semmelweis—when he checked what causes childbed fever, he didn’t have the faintest idea. But the fact that he had intuitions about what to check and what not to check—eventually he found it. Which means that even in something where you have no idea what the final theory will be, you still have intuitions that guide you toward it. And therefore my claim is that our intuitions exist also in areas that are not like morality, areas that seem to us somehow more understandable, more connected to us, where we know more or less what is right and wrong about them. Even in areas like sacrificial law and purity law, which are not connected to morality and not connected to anything, I would have expected that there we’d be completely in the dark, right? No—you could tell me any theory you want, and I should have no way to know what’s right and what’s wrong. As long as it passes the test of the facts, then it’s right—or equally right. No. There too we do elimination and decide what is more plausible and what is less plausible. Every little piece of Rabbi Chaim does this in sacrificial law and purity law. He tried to escape to sacrificial law and purity law so as not to do that, and even there he does it. Right? It reminds one of Maimonides’ introduction, yes? Where he says: I’ll write for you the Mishneh Torah so that you won’t have to occupy yourselves with the discussions of Abaye and Rava; you’ll be able to occupy yourselves with the really important things, like philosophy and knowledge of God and things like that—and not the minor matter, the discussions of Abaye and Rava; the great matter is the Account of Creation and the Account of the Chariot. Right? For Maimonides that’s physics and metaphysics. So what happens now? Of course, he wrote the Mishneh Torah, and now all our halakhic pilpulim we do on the Mishneh Torah. You can’t escape. Meaning, you try to escape, you try to reinvent the wheel or invent a new universe—it won’t help. That universe will be painted in the same colors that we bring with us. Maimonides tried to escape Jewish law and only deepened the level of pilpul and scholarly analysis in Jewish law—pilpul not in a negative sense in my view, but scholarship, yes? And the same thing with the Briskers: they flee to sacrificial law and purity law to escape intuition, and what they do is apply intuitions to sacrificial law and purity law. You can’t escape intuition. We have intuitions in other fields too, not only in morality, and therefore this is not connected to my distinction between Jewish law and morality. The fact that we have intuitions doesn’t mean we’re dealing with morality; we have intuitions also in fields that aren’t connected to morality. So I return to our topic: basically the claim is that our intuition is involved in building the theory through abduction. When we do abduction, right—build the theory from the facts, whether scientific facts or halakhic facts—I said it’s done in exactly the same ways; there is no principled difference between these fields in the logic. In both these fields, abduction is always done on the basis of reasonings, on the basis of thought. And therefore this illusion that we extract the theory from the facts is exactly the same thing as here. Seemingly, according to this illusion, we extract the scholarly theory from the halakhic facts. The Torah gives us the facts, and we build the conceptual analysis from the facts, yes? This is halakhic empiricism. And here I’m showing you that this is not true. Here, look: I built for you a collection of facts—now derive the theory for me. Here: fringes, mezuzah, doorpost, garment—derive the theory for me. You would derive alpha, two alphas, two alpha-alpha, and you’d fill in a one here, right? But no. Almost any reasonable person would tell you: no, of course not. You don’t fill in a one there, and it’s unrelated. Why? Because the facts by themselves do not bring me to the theory. Reasoning is involved even in a supposedly empiricist inference; even in an inference from facts, reasoning is involved. That’s exactly the point you see here. So that’s one important point, and this matter of mistakes in abduction, or the involvement of logic in abduction—to that I’ll devote the next series; that’s no longer this series, but never mind, that’s the next session. And therefore, in practice, these are ways in which we arrive at hasty abductions or mistaken abductions. Seemingly you’re drawing conclusions from facts, as though it were pure empiricism, but the fact that people reach mistaken conclusions—why, after all? It’s only facts, that’s all; there’s nothing here except facts. No. Besides facts, there’s also our logic, our intuition, and therefore it can sometimes mislead. We can sometimes make mistakes. And so these mistakes are tied at the navel to the fact that we took the correct set of facts, but in trying to explain them we used the wrong theory; we didn’t choose the correct theory; we erred in our abduction. Yes, I’ll give you an example, a simple example. An example of spurious correlations, or directions of correlation, which I’ve spoken about more than once in the past. There was a letter by some professor from the Technion, a letter to the newspaper, in which he wrote that it would be worthwhile for the State of Israel to increase investment in higher education, because around the world countries with greater investment in higher education have higher output. Where is the mistake? The mistake is of course in the question—in his abduction, basically. He assumes a certain theory, but there is another theory, no less good, that can explain the facts and undermine the conclusion. He assumes that increasing investment in higher education is what brings about an increase in GDP. But it could just as well be that because GDP is larger, those countries invest more in higher education—they simply have more money. Now if that’s the direction, then increasing investment in higher education will not increase GDP. That’s the practical difference. Here the missing square we’ll fill with zero, not one—or we won’t fill anything in. That’s exactly what I’m talking about here; it’s the same logic. You’re basically taking facts that are correct facts—I accept the facts that in the world, countries that invest more in higher education have higher output; let’s assume those facts are correct. Okay. But to reach the conclusion that it’s worthwhile to invest more in higher education, the facts are not enough. You need to decide what the theory is that explains the facts. Now, he assumed that investment in higher education increases GDP, but one could just as well assume the opposite theory: that a high GDP leads to high investment in higher education. Whoever has more money invests more in higher education. Now if the second theory is correct, then increasing investment in higher education won’t help; it won’t change GDP. Therefore people very often think—and here I’m talking about a professor from the Technion; I assume he’s knowledgeable in drawing scientific conclusions—and he says foolish things when he of course strays a bit beyond his own field, his professional field. This is common in many places; you can see it in many people. And the point is that people skip the stage of abduction. That is, they don’t notice that the conclusion they reach assumes a certain kind of explanation of the facts, or a theory underlying the facts. But sometimes there can be other additional theories, maybe better ones, maybe equally good ones, and therefore your proof collapses—it doesn’t hold water. And that’s exactly because you’re skipping abduction. You’re doing the induction—or in this case not induction but projection, inference—and you don’t notice that you’re assuming a very, very specific theory, and you’re not checking whether this is really the necessary theory, or the simplest one, or the most plausible one, or whether maybe there are other theories. Yes, I think I’ve talked about various medical theses as well: people who smoke get cancer more often—does that mean it’s not worthwhile to smoke, at least for someone who doesn’t want to die? The answer is no, of course; it doesn’t mean that. Why? Because it could be that people who have cancer have a greater tendency to smoke; somehow cancer causes people to feel a need to smoke, and then among cancer patients you’ll find more smokers. So there is a correlation between smoking and cancer, and still it’s not true that reducing smoking will reduce your chance of getting cancer. In order to show what the correct abduction is, what theory underlies this correlation, this connection, you need to do regressions. That is, you need to do these eliminations, you need to vary things. Say, for example, tell people to stop smoking and see whether that changes the cancer rate—that is, try to make it have a direction, test the direction of the influence: is it from cancer to smoking, or from smoking to cancer? So there are ways to do that, but very often people don’t make sure to do it, and they draw hasty conclusions because they don’t notice that at the base of induction there must stand an abduction. Without an abduction in the background, your induction is worth nothing. And sometimes people have such a strong feeling that obviously you can make the generalization and learn from it to the cases I want to learn about, and they forget to give themselves an accounting of what abduction stands behind the whole thing. That is: what theory am I assuming exists that explains these facts? Because I am always assuming some theory. Without assuming a theory, it’s impossible to infer the conclusion. The facts in themselves, the naked facts, say nothing until you’ve interpreted them and given them a theoretical explanation. And all this, by the way, is a result of that same point: naive empiricism, empiricism that thinks observation is enough and reason has nothing to contribute to the empirical process, to the scientific process; rather, we just cling to observations. Nonsense. And this mistake of people who think—and it starts with Hume—people who think, and with the empiricists, not only Hume, all the British empiricists, who think that you can cling to the facts and detach from our biases, from our intuitions, from our reasonings—that is utter nonsense. What they call sticking to the facts is saturated with assumptions of their own reason, with a priori assumptions. And those assumptions are not always correct.

[Speaker D] Rabbi, Rabbi, can we ignore here the factor of desire? After all, it’s obvious that our intuitions are influenced dramatically, maybe almost completely, by what we want. We see it all the time. No, I’m saying it’s not only a matter of reason and rationality; there’s a lot of desire here. The Rabbi didn’t mention this concept.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In what sense—

[Speaker D] Desires. Basically you’re ultimately—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re basically just saying that you’re proposing one of the explanations—there are other explanations—one of the explanations for mistakes in abduction: that someone adopts a mistaken or hasty abduction because he has some interest in that direction. Fine with me; I have no problem with that. I didn’t even get into the question of the psychological causes of error. I’m just pointing out that our thinking is involved. Now all the things that affect errors in thinking will of course affect this too. One of them is personal bias, yes, interests.

[Speaker D] No, but Rabbi, after all we can’t always do research and show—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What, he—

[Speaker D] can he prove, supposedly in a scientific way, why the rationality—why the a fortiori inference from fringes and mezuzah is wrong? Why are those two connected topics? I don’t know if you can prove it. But it’s something embedded in the intellect—what?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What did you hear from me? You’re quoting a sentence of mine that you didn’t hear from me. I never said that you can always do research; I never said such a thing. I said it’s always appropriate to do research, but it’s not always possible; sometimes we’ll make mistakes. True.

[Speaker D] Good, so I’m saying that therefore, since I think that in very many cases you can’t prove the matter rationally, it follows that we come with intuition and with desire. I’m not presenting this only as interest. Desire. We have lots of desires; you can present it as interest, you can present it as value and ideal.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But that influences—

[Speaker D] dramatically, in the end, what we say.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that’s a mistake similar to your previous one. The fact that we can be biased—that’s true. But from that you jump to the conclusion that we are always biased. Not true. True, sometimes we make mistakes, certainly. Therefore we can never be certain, and of course there are no proofs. But the fact that there are no proofs does not mean that we’re always fifty-fifty and always in the dark. There is common sense. True, sometimes it misleads us—what can you do? But that’s what we have. “A judge has only what his eyes can see.” And we use it while adding a warning label that we need to be modest in relation to our conclusions, right? That’s always true. We have no better tool than this; nothing will help. This is what we have. I’m aware of all the limitations; I just don’t think it’s right to say that because there are limitations, therefore we should throw this tool away because it’s worth nothing. It’s not that it’s worth nothing; it’s not certain. Fine. But it is worth something. With the necessary caution. The required caution.

[Speaker D] For example, when I study a bit of medieval science, of the medieval authorities (Rishonim), and of Saadia Gaon and of Maimonides, and you say, how did they arrive—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] At Aristotle—things that are simply detached from reality.

[Speaker D] I certainly didn’t mean it’s worth nothing; I meant to say that in my opinion this is part of it—you can’t avoid it. Part of life in this world is knowing that we think according to what we are.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That I completely agree with. Completely agree. But what am I supposed to do with that comment? All I said myself was that there is no certainty here. Correct—among other things because of what you’re saying, that we have personal biases, interests, desire, whatever you want to call it. True. But that doesn’t mean that because of this we won’t use these tools. We use these tools and write ourselves a warning note on the side that these tools must be used carefully. Here, I’m giving examples—that’s exactly what these examples are. I’m showing you how people reach incorrect conclusions, and I assume intelligent people, certainly not a professor at the Technion—I don’t assume he’s a complete fool at least—and he reaches an incorrect conclusion. Why? How does that happen? Because he doesn’t notice that there is this theory and an alternative theory. Now, I did notice it, so will I always reach the correct conclusion? Also no. But at least I’ll have a higher chance of reaching the correct conclusion than he will. True, I too can make mistakes. The mistake can be that I also won’t notice that this theory is better, or that I missed one of the possible theories, or that we simply have no access to the correct theory because we’re too stupid; there can be a million reasons. That’s obvious. Anyone who says otherwise is mistaken and misleading; that’s absolutely clear. But still, I don’t think it’s right to conclude from this that we shouldn’t use these tools. We absolutely should—with caution and humility.

[Speaker D] Let’s say, for example, in disputes—when we see disputes, for example disputes of Tannaim, of Amoraim, ordinary disputes—so after the inquiries and examinations and theories of each side, you ask yourself: if both sides are logical, and both sides also know the other side, and we’re talking about serious people, then what are they disputing? How can it be that one is one hundred percent sure that it’s this way, or one hundred percent believes with all his heart that it’s this way, in human terms, and the other thinks the opposite? Clearly in the very end there is here—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] something—

[Speaker D] that is beyond rationality, a lot of desire. Desire. I’m not saying it’s some kind of bias; I call it living in this world.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does that have to do with it? That is bias. Desire doesn’t determine the facts. The moment you go with desire, that’s bias. That’s all. It doesn’t matter whether the bias is lowly or lofty. I may have a value-laden desire; even a value-laden desire is bias. A value-laden desire in the sense of a positive value is exactly like a negative interest; both are bias. “Do not favor the poor in his dispute,” the Torah says. The desire to benefit the poor litigant against the rich one is a positive desire, but it leads to a distortion of justice. Because in judgment you need to determine who is right, not who needs the money more. Therefore even desire in a sense that is not a lowly interest is still bias. When you want to know what the facts are, or what the Jewish law is, or whatever—something that is supposedly factual—then anything other than logic and facts is bias. That’s just how it is.

[Speaker D] So here we arrive again at that same point of dispute in the postmodern view—that reality does not exist objectively, but rather we create it with our desires, so that is reality, that’s reality. If we really, really want to see an opposite reality, we’ll see it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Whoever makes that claim—good for him. I don’t think anyone on earth actually believes it, but many people say it. Fine, okay. That’s regarding the involvement of reasoning or intuition in inference from facts. I’ll present another aspect of this matter. I’m returning to a fortiori inference. Let’s go back here. Now let’s say—I’ll take something else, because there it’s easier for me to explain. There is an a fortiori inference in tractate Kiddushin 5a. Whoever knows the first book in the Talmudic Logic series knows that’s the topic on which we built the idea. There the question is: what effects betrothal?

[Speaker B] So there is money and canopy and marriage and betrothal.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That horrible handwriting—but I’m too primitive. Okay, so this is an a fortiori inference: money, which does not effect marriage, does effect betrothal; a canopy, which does effect marriage, all the more so should effect betrothal. And then intercourse is brought in here—I’m not following the whole passage now because I’m not going to go into the details; I just want to explain a certain idea. Here is intercourse, which is also some kind of… what is it doing here? Okay. Now intercourse effects marriage and effects betrothal. Intercourse does both. Fine? Canopy, in the final conclusion, actually does not effect betrothal. Rabbi Huna thinks it does, but the Jewish law rules that it does not. So for the moment I’ll mark the correct answer, the conclusion. This is the Jewish law. Okay? Money effects betrothal but not marriage; canopy effects marriage but not betrothal; and intercourse effects both. By the way, a document also does—document. The passage there advances bit by bit and the table keeps growing all the time. So that’s two columns. Here there’s also, say, redemption of second tithe; money does that and all the others don’t do that. The table keeps growing in the passage there—not important right now. I just want to explain a certain principle. Look: I know that money and intercourse both effect betrothal. Fine? And canopy does not effect betrothal. I’ll ignore the document for the convenience of the explanation. Okay? So suppose I have this table. Now suppose I found some explanation here, where here there’s alpha, here alpha and beta, and here beta, let’s say. Doesn’t matter right now; let’s just say. I’m not doing the exact calculation now. I found this explanation. Now this is my theory. Say marriage requires beta and betrothal requires alpha. I think that’s an explanation of this table, okay? In my opinion there also cannot be a simpler explanation. With one parameter it can’t be, because you can see that these two columns are independent. And therefore there must be—so this is actually the correct explanation, even though I just threw it out there. So now look at this explanation. Notice: money and intercourse both have alpha. And intercourse has one more thing, which canopy also has. Now, in the inferential process I don’t identify the parameters alpha and beta, right? I simply choose the simplest theory, where “simplest” means minimum parameters, and that’s my theory. At no stage did I identify what alpha is and what beta is. But now let’s go one step further. Up to here I did this from a purely logical calculation; I arrived at these alphas and betas from logical calculation. Now I want to identify the parameters. So look: I say, both money and intercourse have alpha, and canopy does not have alpha. Does anyone have an idea what alpha could be?

[Speaker E] Pleasure that goes to the woman or something like that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Pleasure? Right. Money and intercourse both involve pleasure; a woman who receives money or intercourse gets pleasure. When they do a canopy with her, that gives her no pleasure. So I think a very plausible suggestion would be to give meaning to these parameters by saying that alpha is pleasure. After that one can continue thinking about what beta would be. Beta is something that exists in intercourse and canopy but not in money. Okay? It could be that canopy and intercourse are both something related to personal status. Money belongs also in civil law and in other things. So maybe beta is something connected to interpersonal relations. Okay? Closeness between people. Canopy, after all, is a shared domain in which husband and wife are present, and intercourse is of course closeness between husband and wife. So beta, as a suggestion for example—I’m only trying to demonstrate, of course—is closeness. So an act that has pleasure is alpha; an act that has closeness is beta. Intercourse has both pleasure and closeness, so it effects both marriage—because marriage requires closeness—and betrothal, because betrothal requires pleasure. But canopy, which has only closeness and no pleasure, effects marriage but not betrothal. And suddenly you see that I’m taking halakhic facts—I only know what money does, what canopy does, what intercourse does. That’s it. I have no hint why this is so; what’s the idea? Why does the Torah say that money does this, intercourse does this, canopy doesn’t do this? You see that we actually have a way to arrive at the idea. We can in this way—yes, the yeshivah of the Jewish idea—we have a way to get from this table to the parameters, and then to try and see through intuition—and here again intuition comes in—what the meaning of the parameters could be. I simply look where parameter alpha appears, and based on that I can guess what it is. And then suddenly I discover a very interesting halakhic theory: betrothal can be effected only by something that contains pleasure. Right? That’s an interesting conclusion. We wouldn’t know that from a simple glance at the laws. And marriage, by contrast, what matters is closeness and not pleasure. It’s not exact, because if you add the document and so on, but I’m only trying to show the form of thinking. So you see this is really the scientific move. I take the facts; the facts are the table. I build a theory from these facts, and I can derive the conclusion from the theory, which is only parameters, even if they are not identified. In the next stage I can derive from this the rationale of the verse. We don’t usually expound the rationale of the verse, but here I am deriving the rationale of the verse in a systematic way. I can show you how I get from the facts to the theory to the reasons for which the Torah determines what does effect betrothal and what does effect marriage—canopy, money, intercourse, what the differences are between them. I have a full explanation for the whole halakhic picture. And this method is a very powerful and completely systematic way to get from the facts to the theory—and not only to the formal theory with alphas and betas, but to a substantive theory: pleasure, closeness, truly understanding what is going on here. When I identify the parameters, I begin to understand what really stands behind all these Torah laws. By the way, apropos the intuitions we have—look, here you see that this has nothing to do with morality at all, and I think the intuition that says alpha is pleasure and beta is closeness is an entirely healthy intuition. It has nothing to do with morality at all; it’s simply familiarity with these concepts—money, canopy, and intercourse—familiarity with human beings and what these things do to them. And I can suddenly, by such intuitive means, such intuitive interpretation, get to what stands behind the Torah’s laws. This is really a scientific move. And then I would have all kinds of predictions. For example, if they now invented some other kind of pleasure that didn’t exist in the time of the Sages, it could be that my conclusion would be that one could effect betrothal with that, even though there is no Talmudic text about it, because pleasure effects betrothal. You’ll tell me that we don’t expound the rationale of the verse, and maybe indeed I—this is a prediction about a future case. From this table I can now fill in a square with a question mark. What will happen now if I can betroth a woman through this new act, which also gives pleasure, some other kind? Okay? So this is indeed an interesting question, and it can be resolved with these techniques. Meaning that by means of intuition we can not only sift through—earlier I spoke about intuition selecting the most plausible theory from among many possible theories in relation to the facts. But there the theory was only the formal theory with alphas and betas—what structure of alphas and betas I choose. But reasoning can enter in another place too: to give meaning to what alpha and beta are, and then suddenly I begin really to understand what’s going on. This is a systematic and orderly method, not just gut speculation, but a systematic, logical, orderly way to arrive at the reasons of the Torah, to arrive at what in fact the Torah sees as generating such results or other results, and why it generates them, and all sorts of things of that kind. And I think this is a very powerful tool in Torah study, exactly as it serves in the scientific context. You can show this also regarding…

[Speaker C] So what, when you learn do you build tables like these?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? I don’t hear.

[Speaker C] When you learn, do you build tables like these?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not explicitly. I think many of us do this without actually doing it on paper; we simply think in that way and we’re not aware of it. But I do it only where the Talmudic text itself is built this way, as in the topic of canopy—that is, where it brings additional data and fills them in, and in my language it is basically building tables. So there I do it, yes.

[Speaker C] So then how can there in the end be a dispute between Rabbi Huna and another view there, if everything is pure logic and…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so that’s what I said: this isn’t pure logic. Intuition is involved here in two places—actually, in three places. I’ll summarize everything I’ve said up to now; it works like this. Intuition is involved in three places, in three stages of the inferential process. Let’s go back to that. The first stage where intuition is involved is the very fact that I construct a table. The very fact that I decided that marriage and betrothal belong in the same table, and that the same parameters are playing on this field for both of them—you remember what I talked about at the beginning. The second place where intuition enters is after I’ve built the table. There are many theories that explain the data in the table. How do I choose the most plausible theory, or the correct one? Occam’s razor—once again, intuition. Whatever seems to me the simplest, the most plausible, that’s the theory I’ll choose. Sometimes I’ll decide that the table itself isn’t justified, and that it’s just two columns that don’t belong in the same table at all—that too is intuition. And the third stage where intuition enters is the stage where I try to understand what this alpha, beta, and gamma and all those things are. That already gets into the explanation of what really lies behind all the laws of the Torah. So here you can see that this analysis really gives us a very orderly and concrete map—not some general statement that intuition is involved, but a very concrete map of where and how intuition needs to be used, and where it accompanies—what its role is alongside the role of, let’s call it, logic, the formal component. There’s a very delicate interplay here, a dance, that uses these two kinds of tools, and each one has to focus on the place appropriate for it, and not interfere—or not ignore it—and not interfere in places where it doesn’t belong.

Now I want to talk about one more aspect, which is really the end of this whole line of thought. And maybe I’ll start with some argument—not an argument I conducted directly, an argument I conducted but not in the presence of the person I was arguing with. Eli Leibovitz, Leibovitz’s son, is an astrophysicist, and he’s an active, militant atheist. And he has an article in which he talks about proofs for the existence of God, say, from the complexity of the world. So if the world is complex, then apparently there is a God who assembled it—a physico-theological proof, as Kant calls it. And he argues against this proof. He basically says that God cannot serve as an explanation for the complexity of the—because God is a concept we invented ad hoc for the sake of the explanation. So you take something familiar to us and explain it by means of something else that is unfamiliar to us. That’s the opposite of explanation. Explanation means taking something unfamiliar and explaining it by means of something familiar or understandable. Here you take something familiar to us and invent ad hoc something that supposedly explains it, but really says nothing.

He says: what is this comparable to? And he brings the following amusing parable—which he doesn’t actually write out, but it’s taken from Kishon. Kishon, in the book There Are No Such as Us, yes. The fox in the henhouse. So yes, there’s the—what was the name of the hero of the book? I’ve forgotten. Yes, one of those Kishon-like names of a Histadrut operator, who arrives at some village in the north called There Is No One Like Me. There Is No One Like Me, of course—everyone there is “just like me,” that’s the joke, There Is No One Like Me. And they accuse him of embezzling Histadrut funds. Investigators come to him—from the police, from the tax authority, I don’t remember exactly—and they say, listen, you built a luxury five-story villa here, with a lavish horse stable and a large swimming pool and so on. How do you do that on the salary of a Histadrut functionary? Obviously you embezzled money. So he says, gentlemen, I must confess, I have to tell you something—listen, there was something here you won’t believe. A year ago, Elijah the Prophet came to me in a dream. Yes, Kishon. Elijah the Prophet came to him in a dream and said to me: listen, go to a certain village in the north, stand at a certain point, walk two hundred steps east, another hundred steps south, and you’ll see a tree. To the right of the tree, if you say abracadabra shamabadra—I don’t know, say all kinds of things like that—dig under the place where you’re standing, and you’ll find a treasure. Now, I didn’t believe him, but I did everything he said. I dug, and sure enough, there was a treasure there. And from that treasure I built the villa and the stable and the pool and everything. So the investigators say to him: listen, that’s a really fantastic story. Do you have any proof that this story happened? Of course—look, otherwise how do I have the villa and the horses? Therefore it’s obvious that the story happened.

So Eli Leibovitz says, yes, he says, proofs for the existence of God are the same thing. I have proof for the existence of God—why? Look, the world is complex, and since the world is complex, obviously the assembler assembled it. What, you invent some imaginary entity that no one understands, and then you prove its existence from the complexity of the world? So do you have any proof for this fantastic theory? Of course—look at the world, it’s so complex. How could it be so complex if there weren’t a God who assembled it? So he says it’s the same thing.

This is, of course, nonsense. Why is it nonsense? Because it’s nonsense for many reasons. At first glance it sounds a bit surprising—as if you stop for a moment and think, apparently he’s right—but it’s wrong in so many respects that I won’t be able to list them all here. I’ll mention just a few.

First of all, when investigators come to—what was his name? I forgot—nobody remembers here? This is classic Kishon; those of us who are older probably know. Gedalia Podelholzer? No, that’s not the name, but it’s something like that, yes, some wonderfully Kishon-like name. Anyway, when the investigators come to this Histadrut operator, they expect an explanation. The claim that there is a God because of the complexity of the world—God is not serving here in the function of an explanation. I am not claiming that God explains the world; I am proving the existence of God. That’s a proof, not an explanation. It’s something entirely different. The complexity of the world is a proof that there was someone who assembled it, because without that, a complex world does not exist. When you ask me whether that makes me understand the world better—God is a being that is very unintelligible to me, so using Him to understand the world is perhaps indeed not correct. But I’m not looking for an explanation of the world; I’m using the world as evidence for the existence of God—the other way around. In other words, maybe the world explains God, not God the world. But the fact that there is a world proves the existence of God. That’s the first point.

The second point: he assumes that explanation is always built as a reduction to what is familiar. What does that mean? Let’s say a plane crashed. So a committee comes to investigate why the plane crashed, and they find a fracture in the wing. What are they really supposed to do, and what did they do? They take a phenomenon they don’t understand—the plane crashed—and try to explain it by means of rules or laws that are familiar to us, that we know. We know that if there’s a plane with a broken wing, it crashes. Okay? Once we found the fracture in the wing of this plane, then we have an explanation for why it crashed. The phenomenon of the crash was not understood by us; we used principles that are understood by us, familiar to us, in order to explain it. That’s called explanation of the type of reduction to the familiar. I take the unfamiliar and reduce it to the familiar; I explain it by means of the familiar.

But here’s the thing: in science, a large part of explanations are indeed reductions to the familiar. But the points at which science advances—those are precisely reductions to the unfamiliar. Yes, that’s what Thomas Kuhn—the philosopher and sociologist of science—describes when he talks about the progress of science. He divides it into two kinds of stages. There are stages in which there is a paradigm that works, there is a theory that works. Amit Dolniker—not Dolinker but Dolniker, right. Amit Dolniker. Yes, a wonderful Kishon-like name. Science—paradigmatic science—yes, there is a theory that works, it explains all the facts, everything is fine. Every new fact we discover, we try to use the theory to explain the fact. Those are the tranquil stages of science. But at some point there accumulate for us many examples—or a few examples—for which we have not found an explanation within the existing theory. Once the number of these examples is large enough, we understand that this is a crisis. And that is what he calls a phenomenon of scientific crisis. And this crisis essentially tells us that we need to replace the paradigm. We need to throw out the existing theory and find a new theory that explains all the previous facts as well as the facts that the previous theory could not explain. If we find such a theory, that will be the new theory we adopt in place of the previous one, which we discarded. That’s what is called a scientific revolution. Following a crisis comes a scientific revolution.

Now notice: when we discover a new theory in science, it’s always a revolution. We discover a new theory that previously we didn’t know. So we take facts that are, ostensibly, familiar to us, and we use a theory that is unfamiliar to us in order to explain those facts. Yes, think about Newton. Newton looks at tides, at falling to the earth, at the orbits of the stars—a collection of phenomena that we know, fine, we’re familiar with them, everything’s okay—and suddenly he says, wait, I have a theory: the law of gravitation, which explains them all. Now no one ever saw the force of gravitation, no one had ever heard that masses are supposed to attract one another. So in effect his theory is to invent something ad hoc that was not previously familiar to us in order to explain facts that actually were very familiar to us. But once that theory succeeds in explaining many diverse facts, we become convinced that it is true.

Now who explained whom? The theory the facts, or the facts the theory? The answer is: the facts prove that the theory is true. The theory explains the facts. The explanation goes from the theory to the facts. The proof goes from the facts to the theory. And that’s an important point, because proof is always a reduction to the unfamiliar and not a reduction to the familiar. I prove that the unfamiliar theory is true—why? Because it explains all the facts I know. Therefore, the steps in the tranquil stages of science are reductions to the familiar. I have a theory that works; every case that appears before me, I explain by means of that theory. That’s reduction to the familiar. In the stage of crisis, the familiar theory does not succeed in explaining the facts, or some of the facts. I need to look for an unfamiliar theory, and the facts will lead me to the unfamiliar theory—just as we did before, by the way, with betrothal and all that; in Jewish law too that’s how it works. And my indication that the theory is correct is that it explains the facts. What does it mean that it explains? Hempel calls this the deductive-nomological scheme: I find a law such that the cases are particular instances of the general law. If that law is such a law that all the cases—and all the natural events—are particular cases of it, then it’s a law that explains those cases, even though it is unfamiliar.

Therefore, the steps in which a person advances—when science discovers a new theory, when it advances—not when it works with an existing theory and explains facts, but when it discovers a new theory after a crisis—that is always a reduction to the unfamiliar. It is a reduction of the familiar to the unfamiliar. And therefore Eli Leibovitz is mistaken on this point too. Because yes, he says—the example he brings is the Sistine Chapel. I see paintings there in the Sistine Chapel, and I assume there was a painter who painted them—Michelangelo. So there was a painter who painted them. So he says: if I didn’t know that painters exist in the world, that would not be an explanation. Only because I know that there are painters in the world who paint pictures, and now I see the Sistine Chapel, do I assume that there was a painter who painted it. And therefore, with regard to the world, I do not know that there are gods who create worlds, and so to prove from the world that there is a God who created it is invalid. In the case of the Sistine Chapel, it is valid because it relies on our experience, but with worlds it is not valid.

And once again he makes the same mistakes I spoke about earlier, because in truth nothing comes only from our experience. In the end, our intuitions are always involved, and therefore there is always some dimension of reduction to the unfamiliar. And if I did not know that painters exist in the world and I saw the Sistine Chapel, I would arrive at the conclusion that there are painters in the world. That is far more plausible, even if I had never encountered a painter before, than assuming that those paintings came about by accident. And I think Eli Leibovitz too would have taken that route if this were not about God but about the Sistine Chapel—which in this case also happens to be connected to God, but never mind, that’s a different discussion. It’s crooked reasoning, biased reasoning. And I think the point is that he lives in a kind of illusion, in the illusion that experience alone brings us to scientific conclusions. And every time we introduce our intuitions or our conjectures, that’s biased, speculative, invalid, just wishful thinking—the things people here mentioned earlier. Wrong. That’s a mistake. Science doesn’t work that way either. Our intuitions are always entering the picture, and of course our intuitions are never absolute and never certain, but that is the tool we work with, and we have no other. That is true in science, and it is true in faith, and it is true everywhere in life.

And what I really want to say is that this method of abduction, in its essence, is always a reduction to the unfamiliar. That is the meaning of the matter. Abduction in its essence is a reduction to the unfamiliar. Because abduction basically means: I derive a theory out of the facts. A new theory. When I fill in the a fortiori argument with the power of the theory I found, and I mark one thing there, that really will be a reduction to the familiar. I have a theory that works, and now I’m just filling in another law that I didn’t know; I explain it by means of the familiar theory. But going from the three given laws to the theory—that is a reduction to the unfamiliar. Because I’m constructing a theory that is unfamiliar to me, and certainly if it’s only alpha and beta then I don’t even identify the alpha and beta, so all the more so it’s not a theory familiar to me. I’m generating it now out of the facts. And still, that is how we work—in Jewish law, in science, in every field of life. That’s how we work. We take the facts, try to understand them by means of a theory, and then infer various conclusions.

Therefore, reduction to the unfamiliar is not a refuting argument. It is not an argument that attacks this claim. It is what we do. Reduction to the unfamiliar is a description of how science works. And a scientist like him should of course have known that.

All right. I’ll stop here. I’ve more or less finished the line of thought. Maybe I want to add one small supplement here about Popper, about the connection to Popper, and after that I’ll talk a bit about learning from experience in the Talmud—that is, about the status of experience in halakhic thinking—and with that we’ll finish the series. Then I’ll move on to a continuation series, but I’ll define it as a new series on statistical fallacies and hasty abductions. Okay, that’s it for now.

[Speaker E] Rabbi, may I—can I ask a question that isn’t related to the lesson?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Unless, of course, there’s first a question that is related to the lesson.

[Speaker F] It’s sort of half related to the lesson. What you explained about money and the wedding canopy—that the common parameter for intercourse and money is benefit—but from the Mishnah it appears… yes yes, I understood, but is there really some common parameter in the end?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Benefit does play a role, yes, but not by itself. But the table here gets to, I think, seven out of ten. You understand? So we need a lot more work before we take the next step here.

[Speaker B] Okay, okay, thank you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, a question, a question that wasn’t related.

[Speaker B] Can’t hear, you’re on mute. Can you hear?

[Speaker E] Yes. So first, before the question: this is the first time I’m speaking to you like this. I read a lot of your writings, and they’re very, very persuasive, and in general thank you very much, really—very persuasive writings. And I wanted to ask about your book The First Existent. I haven’t read all of it, admittedly, but regarding the area of abductive arguments, I thought maybe of two additional abductive arguments that perhaps one could suggest. The first abductive argument concerns free will. Someone who claims that the world is deterministic—actually, the other way around—someone who claims that there is no God, no divinity, no creation, must necessarily and implicitly assume that the world is deterministic. That’s the first abductive argument I wanted to suggest. Why? I think that when we see the stars revolving, or the forces at work, or cells reproducing—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right—and human beings? The laws of nature can also allow for free will. Just as you learn the law of gravitation from experience, you can also learn the law of free will from experience. The fact is that there is free will in the world—say, assuming that I think there is, yes? So that’s a fact just like the law of gravitation is a fact. I simply discover it observationally.

[Speaker E] But in what way are your cells actually different from any other cell, or from any other force that operates?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s biology that is complex in some particular way, and apparently that creates free will. In what way are certain chemical substances different from other chemical substances that have different properties? Different structures create different phenomena.

[Speaker E] But those structures depend on the same physical laws, don’t they?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, but part of the physical laws say that there is free will.

[Speaker E] Okay, fine, so maybe that also rules out—maybe this objection also rules out the second argument I wanted to suggest, regarding the very issue of self-awareness and consciousness, which are not really explained by evolution. That is, evolution can explain—self-awareness and consciousness? We need to formulate this more correctly, but I think everyone believes that there is, to some degree or another, such engagement in self-awareness, and I think here too one could say that evolution would not bring about consciousness or self-awareness—that’s what I wanted to argue.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I wrote something like that in the book, but more broadly. Self-awareness is just one particular case.

[Speaker E] Maybe phenomenology? Hm? About the senses.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] About the mental in general. The entire mental domain is basically unnecessary from an evolutionary perspective. Because in order to survive, it’s enough that I run away from the tiger; I don’t need to be afraid of it. If I run away from the tiger the moment I see it, not because fear makes me run away, but because of some biology that makes me run away, then I would survive just as well. That’s the argument of that American—what’s the name of that Christian philosopher? Plantinga? No, from Notre Dame—well, I forgot his name. A very well-known Christian philosopher. In any case, the claim is that our whole mental dimension cannot be explained by evolution. So self-awareness is only a special case. It has no evolutionary value, because evolutionary value belongs to behaviors. And all the psychological dimensions that cause behavior are unnecessary. If you produce the survival behavior, then I survive. Why do we need the whole mental apparatus from which the behaviors are derived?

[Speaker G] I understand, yes, right. Well, thank you very much.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re welcome. That’s it? Okay then, have a peaceful Sabbath, goodbye.

[Speaker G] Sabbath peace, thank you very much.