Free Will and Choice – Lesson 3

Table of Contents

• The libertarian and determinist pictures of the world
• Practical implications, fatalism, and moral judgment
• The difficulty of deciding a debate with no practical implications and no scientific tools
• The theological argument: knowledge and free choice in Maimonides
• Prayer and a decree of judgment: Tosafot in Sabbath and the Talmud in Rosh Hashanah
• The three components of the contradiction and three ways of dealing with it
• Hasdai Crescas and “giving up free choice”
• The timeline solution and the critique of it
• “Osmo’s library” and the claim that the very existence of information cancels free choice
• Or HaChayim, the Shelah, and the solution of “gaps in the information”
• Omnipotence, logical contradictions, and what “cannot be known”
• “Everything is in the hands of Heaven except fear of Heaven” and “He calls the generations from the beginning”
• Prayer for peace, the ingathering of exiles, and repentance
• Particular prophecies and Nineveh
• A renewed reading of Maimonides and the provisional conclusion

Summary

General overview

The text sets the determinist picture of the world against the libertarian one, and sharpens the point that even if both can explain the very same behavior in practice, they give completely different meanings to moral judgment, condemnation, and appreciation. Determinism is presented as a picture that empties the normative dimension of content and turns rights and values into “programmed responses,” whereas libertarianism allows us to see the human being as someone influenced by many forces but not determined by them. From the understanding that the debate can hardly be settled through practical implications, the text moves to the next stage of the series and tries to decide the dispute by means of arguments, the first of which is a theological argument arising from the problem of divine foreknowledge and free choice. The proposed conclusion is that the only solution that preserves free will is to say that there are “gaps in the information” regarding future acts of choice, and therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know the choices themselves in advance.

The libertarian and determinist pictures of the world

The human being is described, in the libertarian view, as acting within a kind of “topographic outline” of environmental, educational, psychological, genetic, and neural influences, but not being determined by them, and as able to decide whether to yield to impulses or stop them. The determinist is described as identifying the person with that outline itself, so that there is nothing beyond the totality of influences, and human conduct is like a little ball or a stream of water whose path is fixed by the terrain. The libertarian argues that even if the world is not deterministic, statistics and psychological explanations can still work, because they describe forces and influences rather than absolute necessity.

Practical implications, fatalism, and moral judgment

The text presents fatalism and moral judgment as seeming at first not to be practical differences between the two pictures, because each side can explain every phenomenon. The determinist can say that a person is “compelled to judge” just as he is compelled in every other action, and so judgment itself is also explained deterministically. Still, it is argued that the meaning of judgment changes completely: in a deterministic world, condemnation and appreciation lose their normative content and become ingrained reactions rather than a real determination that an act is “worthy” of praise or blame. Determinism is presented as erasing the gap between facts and norms to the point of claiming that there really are no norms, using the example of Yuval Noah Harari, who writes that human beings have rights in the same sense that grasshoppers have rights.

The difficulty of deciding a debate with no practical implications and no scientific tools

The text says that the next step is an attempt to decide the dispute, but points to a problem: an ordinary philosophical decision usually rests on practical implications, and if there are none, it is hard to decide. At the same time, it is argued that the very attempt to decide the matter with scientific tools assumes that there are practical implications, because otherwise it is unclear what one would measure in order to decide. Later it is promised that “five or six arguments” will be presented for both sides, and the text opens with arguments in favor of determinism.

The theological argument: knowledge and free choice in Maimonides

The text presents it as surprising that a strong argument for determinism actually arises from religion, through the question of divine foreknowledge and free choice that appears in Maimonides, Laws of Repentance, chapter 5, halakhah 5. Maimonides asks: if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance whether a person will be righteous or wicked, then if He knew that he would be righteous, “it is impossible that he not be righteous,” and if it is possible that he be wicked, then “He did not know the matter fully.” Maimonides answers that the response to this question is “longer than the earth and broader than the sea,” and emphasizes that the Holy One, blessed be He, “and His knowledge are one,” and that human knowledge cannot grasp this. But “we know without any doubt that a person’s actions are in his own hands, and the Holy One, blessed be He, does not pull him or decree that he do thus,” and he even adds, “not only because this is accepted by religion,” but also “through clear proofs from the words of wisdom.”

Prayer and a decree of judgment: Tosafot in Sabbath and the Talmud in Rosh Hashanah

The text brings the dispute in Rosh Hashanah 16 about the time of judgment and sealing, and the statement of Rav Yosef, “According to whom do we pray nowadays for the sick and the ill?” which is presented as a formulation that limits the effectiveness of prayer to the view of Rabbi Yosei, who says that a person is judged every day. On that basis, Tosafot in tractate Sabbath 12b is cited in the name of Rabbenu Tam, who asks, “What good is prayer according to Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehudah?” and concludes from the first version that “it implies that according to Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehudah, prayer is of no help.” He suggests that this refers to the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, or resolves it based on the second version: “Crying out is good for a person both before the decree of judgment and after the decree of judgment.” These examples are used to sharpen the sense that there is a theological basis for a deterministic picture in which “everything is already fixed.”

The three components of the contradiction and three ways of dealing with it

The text formulates the problem of foreknowledge and free choice as a contradiction dependent on three components: divine knowledge, free will, and the time element in which the knowledge precedes the choice. Accordingly, three ways of dealing with it are presented: giving up free will, dealing with the timeline, or dealing with the very assumption of divine knowledge of the details of future choices. The text argues that the contradiction arises only when the knowledge is beforehand, not when the knowledge comes after the choice.

Hasdai Crescas and “giving up free choice”

The text describes the deterministic direction that gives up freedom of the will, and presents it as rare in the Jewish world, though connected in the Protestant world with Calvin and Luther. Rabbi Hasdai Crescas, in Or Hashem, is brought as someone who in one place writes that there is no free choice and bases this also on scientific causality, and then is forced to explain the meaning of the commandments. He suggests that moral measurement is not about the act itself but about the inner attitude toward what was done, such as someone who desecrates the Sabbath under compulsion but regards it as a sin, as opposed to someone who regards it as perfectly fine. The text attacks this proposal as not solving the problem, because the attitude too is “an event in the world” with a neural basis, and therefore foreknowledge or causality would apply to it as well.

The timeline solution and the critique of it

The text presents solutions based on the idea that the Holy One, blessed be He, is “above time,” and gives as an example the Raavad in his gloss on Maimonides, who criticizes Maimonides for raising difficulties “and leaving the matter as a difficulty.” The Raavad is cited as suggesting that the Creator’s knowledge is not a decree but rather “like the knowledge of astrologers,” and in addition he describes the influence of “the constellations” as against the capacity of the intellect “to emerge from under the constellation.” The text argues that the first part is similar to the parable of watching a future movie, but criticizes this by saying that it answers only the question of how the information is obtained, not the main question: if the information already exists and is true, how can there still be a possibility of choosing otherwise?

“Osmo’s library” and the claim that the very existence of information cancels free choice

The text returns to Richard Taylor’s example of Osmo, who finds a book that describes his past and future with complete accuracy, and distinguishes between fatalism and determinism. It states that for determinism it makes no difference whether Osmo read the book or not; the very existence of the book in the library already contradicts the possibility of acting differently in the future, because acting differently would make the information false. From here a general critique is derived: it does not matter who knows the information, but whether the information exists in advance.

Or HaChayim, the Shelah, and the solution of “gaps in the information”

The text cites Or HaChayim on “for I regret that I have made them,” and asks how “regret” is possible if the Holy One, blessed be He, knew in advance, and presents an answer that speaks of withholding knowledge in order to allow free choice. The text rejects the possibility that the information exists and the Holy One, blessed be He, simply “closes His eyes,” and argues in principle that the only solution is that the information about future choices does not exist at all until the person chooses. The Raavad is presented as arriving, in part of his words, at the idea that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows the “framework” and the forces and the person’s capacity to cope, but does not know in advance what the actual decision will be, and the Shelah, in Beit HaBechirah, is cited as saying explicitly that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know in advance what depends on free choice.

Omnipotence, logical contradictions, and what “cannot be known”

The text deals with the claim that “no foreknowledge” harms omnipotence, and answers that the Almighty cannot perform logical contradictions such as a “round triangle” or “a stone He cannot lift.” Examples are brought such as a wall that stops every shell versus a shell that penetrates every wall, and the question of the stone, as well as the parable of “Puss in Boots,” in order to show that the ability to turn necessity into something existing that can later be destroyed is a self-contradictory concept. From this it is argued that “knowing information that does not exist” is an oxymoron, and therefore there is no damage to omnipotence here; when information about a future free decision does not exist, even the Holy One, blessed be He, does not “have the ability to know” it, in the sense that there is nothing there to know.

“Everything is in the hands of Heaven except fear of Heaven” and “He calls the generations from the beginning”

The text proposes a far-reaching interpretation of “Everything is in the hands of Heaven except fear of Heaven,” according to which not only does the Holy One, blessed be He, not decide value-laden choices, but there is also no prior knowledge of the details of those decisions. Regarding the question of “He calls the generations from the beginning,” it is said that the Holy One, blessed be He, can know general or statistical processes, and in the example of the Covenant Between the Pieces it is argued that this can be understood as general knowledge that does not negate the free choice of each Egyptian individually, similar to what Maimonides writes in chapter 6 of Laws of Repentance. The Shelah is cited as explaining that prophecies are “by way of possibility” and depend on people not choosing otherwise.

Prayer for peace, the ingathering of exiles, and repentance

In response to the question of why we pray about things that depend on human choice, the text rejects the understanding that prayer asks the Holy One, blessed be He, to “do the work in our place.” It interprets “Our Father, our King, bring us back in complete repentance before You” as a request that our repentance be accepted, not that it be performed for us, and suggests that requests such as “He who makes peace for us” and “gather our dispersed ones” are requests for conditions that will enable success if we decide to act, not that the decision itself be made for us. Later, the idea of “the law of large numbers” is also raised as a way to tilt general conditions without canceling individual free choice.

Particular prophecies and Nineveh

In response to the question about particular prophecies, it is said that there are two possibilities: either prophecy is “by way of possibility,” as a conditional forecast unless the person chooses otherwise, or there are situations in which the Holy One, blessed be He, “takes the reins,” and then free choice really is removed so that the matter will come to pass. The example of Nineveh is brought as proof that prophecies of doom can be canceled through repentance, together with the point that the prophets themselves act on the assumption that change is possible.

A renewed reading of Maimonides and the provisional conclusion

The text argues that it is possible to understand even Maimonides himself as meaning that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not have “our kind of knowledge” of future choices, and that talk of divine knowledge refers to a different concept, not identical with human knowledge, and therefore it does not introduce the contradiction. According to this reading, Maimonides’ words, “human knowledge cannot grasp this matter,” are not an evasion but an indication that the human concept of foreknowledge regarding choices does not apply to the Creator. The summary up to this point states that the theological argument is the first argument in favor of determinism, and that in order to preserve freedom of the will there is no escape from accepting that information about future free decisions does not exist in advance, and therefore even the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Last time we finished—meaning, up to last time we finished—laying out the two pictures of the world, the deterministic and the libertarian, one against the other. And I tried to present it, at least the libertarian picture, not in the trivial way it’s usually presented, as though a person acts in a vacuum, but rather that there is a whole range of influences that of course affect a person, and the libertarian doesn’t deny that. The claim is only that a person is influenced by them, not determined by them. And therefore he has some degree of freedom. I described it through a kind of topographical outline, a sort of parable of a topographical map that the person basically walks on, conducts himself on top of, and the terrain wants to take him downward—say, to pull him with the force of gravity—but the person can of course decide that he is דווקא climbing upward, up the mountain. And that is really a good parable, I think, for showing the sober libertarian picture, not the naive one in which a person acts in a vacuum, with no influences on him—no genetics, no environment, nothing of the kind. Of course there are such influences. The claim is just that those influences are not the full picture. The determinist claims that the person is the topographical terrain, period. There is nothing beyond that. At most there may be some little ball rolling on that terrain, but the terrain determines where the ball will go, or a stream of water or something like that. By contrast, the libertarian claims that there is the same terrain, and I explained that all the statistics, psychology, and everything else can still work even if the world is not deterministic. It’s just that on top of that terrain there walks a person, not a little ball rolling around. And the person, as I said, is not necessarily determined by the terrain as to where he will go. The terrain exerts forces on him, restraining him or pushing him in one direction or another, but the person can still decide whether to yield to those drives or impulses, or to stop them. And that terrain is a collection of very many influences—environmental influences, educational influences, various psychological influences, genetics, the brain, whatever you want. In other words, all the influences together can somehow be weighed and produce some sort of terrain within which a person acts. Okay? So that terrain includes all the influences, both external and internal. At the beginning of this series I emphasized at length that it really makes no difference whether the influences come from inside or from outside. If those influences determine what I do, then that’s determinism. It makes no difference at all whether it comes from within or from without. Last time I ended with the question: what practical difference does it make? Meaning, assuming these are the two pictures, where do we see the implication? Why is it important to know whether we live in this picture or in that one? So I talked about two things: first, fatalism, and second, moral judgment. And I tried to show that although it’s not as trivial as it’s usually presented, ostensibly even these two are not really practical differences—they are not truly affected, these two phenomena are not truly affected, by the two pictures. In the end there is an effect, because you can’t judge another person if you think that basically we are all some kind of deterministic robots. Of course the determinists will say: correct, you can’t judge—you are compelled to judge. Meaning, you don’t really decide to judge; rather, just like everything else in the world, that too is necessitated by the circumstances, and you are compelled to judge just as you are compelled to do anything else. And therefore, in practice, it is possible to propose an explanation for every phenomenon both in the deterministic picture and in the libertarian one. But the meaning of things changes completely. Because now, as someone who is aware that I am merely driven to judge someone, it seems to me that at least I know clearly that I shouldn’t take that judgment seriously. Meaning, if that’s the case, then it isn’t really judgment. And the connotation that accompanies judgment—yes, that condemnation you feel toward a person when you judge him as a bad person or as someone who acted badly, or conversely the appreciation you feel toward a person who acted well—those lose their meaning in a deterministic world. They become, once again, just some reactions embedded in me because that’s how I am programmed. Meaning, there is no reason to relate to it in any different way. Yes, by the same token one could come and say: okay, so basically man has no advantage over the beast, or over a rock, a stone, and therefore there is really no point in relating to him with a special moral attitude, some kind of treatment he deserves—rights, values, and the like. The determinist will say: it’s not a question of point or no point; we are simply built in such a way that we do relate to human beings differently, and that’s it. It’s not a question of justification, it’s a question of fact. And in fact the determinist does not accept what… I don’t think this was in this series, but I’ve talked about it many times in the past—the naturalistic fallacy. The determinist does not accept this gap between facts and norms, because from his perspective the facts determine the norms. The moment I am built in a certain way—that is a fact; I was born this way, this is my genetics—that dictates the norms, what is permitted and forbidden and fitting. Because the feelings of what is permitted and forbidden and obligatory are feelings that are merely the result of how I am built. So the gap involved in the naturalistic fallacy is erased. There is no—but it is erased much more deeply. It’s not only that there is no gap between facts and norms; there are no norms. There is no such thing as norms in a deterministic world. Yes, it seems to me Yuval Noah Harari writes somewhere in one of his books that human beings have rights just as grasshoppers have rights. What are rights? It’s simply that we are wired to behave in one way or another, but all these pathetic speeches about rights and values and the image of man and all sorts of things of that kind—those are just things that were somehow programmed into us; they have no real content. So okay, ostensibly he goes on speaking that language, he goes on relating in that way, he is just aware, in some reflective sense, that this whole thing is merely the result of software that was inserted into him, implanted in him, and not really the whole moral meaning that accompanies these things. So therefore the implications of the debate between the libertarian and the determinist are really not so much in practice—how I behave—and not even in the question of how I relate, but in the question of what the meaning of these things is. It’s basically a philosophical gap. It doesn’t really have much impact on life—at least that’s how it seems. So we’ll still see later on whether that is really accurate or not, but that’s the picture we’ve arrived at so far. Now, up to this point I have set the two pictures against each other and tried to point to implications. The next link in the chain, in this whole series of discussion, is to try to decide this debate. And the question is how one can decide this debate, especially in light of what I just said—that there is no practical difference. How do you decide a debate? Usually you try to examine the practical consequences and see through them which side is right. But if there is no practical difference, then you can’t decide the debate. So this is going to accompany us from here to the end, really, because this is true both for philosophical decision and for scientific decision—and I said that there are those who try to decide this debate with scientific tools. And the moment you try to decide it with scientific tools, then it is completely clear that this debate has practical consequences. Because if it didn’t, then what exactly are you supposed to measure in order to decide it? So it turns out that at least the people who try to decide the debate think it has practical implications. And now let’s try to see what arguments come up pro and con in order to decide this debate. So I’ll begin with the… let’s say, I’ll give five or six arguments on both sides, in favor of the libertarians and in favor of the determinists. I’ll start with arguments in favor of determinism. The obvious argument to begin with is the theological argument. Actually, people usually tend to think that the debate between determinists and libertarians correlates—not necessarily perfectly, but strongly—with religious versus secular people. Religious people tend to be libertarians. And secular people tend to be determinists, or secular philosophers. Of course there are quite a few exceptions, mainly on the secular side of the map, but there is such a correlation. This debate is often conducted as though it were some debate between religious people with worldviews detached from science—they believe in free will—versus people attached to scientific thought who understand that there is no free will, no freedom of the will, determinism rules the roost. But surprisingly, one of the strongest arguments raised in favor of determinism is actually a religious argument. And this is of course something all of you know—the question raised by the medieval authorities (Rishonim), also by Maimonides, regarding God’s knowledge. I brought this Maimonides here. Yes, chapter 5, law 5 in the Laws of Repentance. Lest you say—after he speaks about the importance of choice and its central significance—so in law 5 he says: “Lest you say: does not the Holy One, blessed be He, know all that will be before it comes to be? Did He know that this person would be righteous or wicked, or did He not know? If He knew that he would be righteous, it is impossible that he not be righteous. And if you say that He knew he would be righteous and it is nevertheless possible that he be wicked, then He did not know the matter clearly.” Right? So it turns out that the Holy One, blessed be He, didn’t really know in advance. So in short, this is the question of divine foreknowledge and choice: if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance, then how can it be that we have free will to choose? So Maimonides says: “Know that the answer to this question is longer than the measure of the earth and broader than the sea, and many great principles and lofty mountains hang upon it. But you must know and understand this thing that I say. We have already explained in chapter 2 of the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know with a knowledge external to Him, as human beings do, for they and their knowledge are two. Rather He, may His name be exalted, and His knowledge are one. That is, He and His knowledge are not two things but one and the same. And the knowledge of man cannot grasp this matter clearly. And just as man has no power to grasp and discover the truth of the Creator, as it says, ‘For no man shall see Me and live,’ so too man has no power to grasp and discover the knowledge of the Creator. As the prophet says: ‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways.’ And since this is so, we have no power to know how the Holy One, blessed be He, knows all creatures and deeds. But let us know without doubt that a person’s deed is in the person’s own hand, and the Holy One, blessed be He, does not pull him nor decree upon him to do so. And this matter is known not only from the acceptance of religion, but by clear proofs from words of wisdom.” Yes, at that time they thought there were clear proofs in favor of free will. “And because of this it is said in prophecy that a person is judged for his deeds according to his deeds, whether good or bad. And this is the principle upon which all the words of prophecy depend.” So this is Maimonides’ question and answer. Basically he asks: if we think that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance, including what we are going to do, then we basically have no free will to choose what to do. Because if, say, the Holy One, blessed be He, knows that I am about to be righteous, to choose the good, then either way—what are the possibilities? If I am forced to choose the good, then I have no choice. If I am not forced to choose the good—that is, I also have the possibility of choosing evil—then should I in fact choose evil, it would turn out that God’s knowledge was wrong, because He knew I would be righteous and I chose evil. Therefore you can’t hold both sides of this coin at once. You cannot both assume that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance and also assume that we have free will, the possibility of choosing freely. This is the famous question, and many dealt with it. I perhaps want only to sharpen the question a bit more, and this is something someone sent me some time ago—I didn’t even remember or know this Tosafot. I’m showing here Tosafot in tractate Shabbat 12b. So Tosafot says as follows: “Rabbi Yehuda says, ‘May the Omnipresent have mercy on you.’” Maybe first let’s look at the Talmud in Rosh Hashanah 16. There is a dispute among the tanna’im here about exactly how a person is judged: is he judged and sealed on Rosh Hashanah, judged on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur? That is Rabbi Meir. Rabbi Yehuda says: all are judged on Rosh Hashanah and their decree—this is the top line I’m reading, yes?—and their decree is sealed, each one in his own time: on Passover for grain, and so on and so forth. Later in the Talmud, the Talmud says this: “Rav Yosef said: according to whom do we pray nowadays for the weak and the sick?” Right? On what basis do we pray for weak, sick people and the like—for people’s recovery? According to whom? The Talmud says: according to Rabbi Yosi, because Rabbi Yosi says that a person is judged every day. That is one side in the tannaitic dispute we saw above. But according to the one who says that a person is judged on Rosh Hashanah, or judged on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur, then there is no point in praying for the sick, because the judgment concerning the sick has already been fixed in advance. “And if you wish, say: really it is according to the rabbis,” even those who disagree with Rabbi Yosi—it is still possible to pray even according to them, “and in accordance with Rabbi Yitzhak, for Rabbi Yitzhak said: crying out is good for a person both before the decree and after the decree.” Meaning, there are two versions in the Talmud there. According to the first version, there is no point in praying except during the Ten Days of Repentance—during those ten days, or approaching Rosh Hashanah and during the Ten Days of Repentance, to pray about the future. There is no point in praying about something happening now after Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, because it has already been sealed. That is the first version. “And if you wish, say”: even though it was sealed, prayer can still tear up the decree. That is the second version. So that’s the Talmud in Rosh Hashanah. Based on that Talmud, I return to Tosafot in tractate Shabbat. Look what Tosafot writes. “Rabbi Yehuda says, ‘May the Omnipresent have mercy on you,’ etc.” Rabbeinu Tam finds this difficult—the upper Tosafot. Rabbeinu Tam finds it difficult: what help is prayer according to Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehuda? For in the first chapter of Rosh Hashanah it says: “All are judged on Rosh Hashanah and their decree is sealed on Yom Kippur,” the words of Rabbi Meir. Rabbi Yehuda says: “All are judged on Rosh Hashanah and the decree of each individual is sealed in his own time—on Passover for the grain, and man on Yom Kippur.” Rabbi Yosi says: “A person is judged every day,” etc. And it says there: Rav Yosef said, according to whom do we pray nowadays for the weak and sick—the sick people, what we just saw? According to Rabbi Yosi. This implies—and this is of course according to the first version there, he doesn’t bring the second—that according to Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehuda, prayer is of no benefit. According to Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehuda there is no point in praying; prayer does not help. “And one may say that here we are speaking about the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.” Meaning, really, the whole matter that we say on the Sabbath, “May the Omnipresent have mercy on you,” applies only to a Sabbath that falls between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. All other Sabbaths there is no point in praying for someone, because in the end his decree was already sealed from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and there is no point in praying. Then he brings the second version: “And according to what it answers there, ‘And if you wish, say: in accordance with Rabbi Yitzhak, for Rabbi Yitzhak said: crying out is good for a person from before the decree,’ etc., then it works out well here.” In short, Tosafot sharpens even more what emerges from the Talmud there. According to the first version there, there is no point in praying. Prayer is of no use. Only, again, around the High Holy Days you can try to determine the decree, but after the decree, it’s gone. I bring this because it sharpens much more what I said earlier, that ostensibly there is some theological basis here for a deterministic conception. Meaning, if the Holy One, blessed be He, determines or knows everything in advance—and in that case we’re not talking about advance knowledge but about determination on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—then there is really no point in praying, maybe no possibility of choosing otherwise either, according to Maimonides here. There it’s not about choice, but the idea is the same idea, and therefore basically everything is already fixed. Meaning, there is no significance to our choice, our actions, our prayer, because basically everything is fixed in advance. Now here I want to preface this with a few preliminaries. First, there are three components in this question. One component is divine knowledge—that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything, including what a person chooses and will choose. The second component is free will—that a person has free choice. Because without that, again, there is no contradiction. The contradiction requires both the first component and the second one. The third component is time. Because if we had free will and the Holy One, blessed be He, also knew everything, that still wouldn’t be contradictory if He knew it after we chose. Then of course there is no contradiction at all. The contradiction is born only because of the time component: the assumption is that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows it in advance and not only after it happened. And that indeed creates the contradiction. Why am I saying this? Because the ways of dealing with this contradiction also divide into three. There are those who choose the deterministic route: they basically give up the second assumption, that a person has free will. I said the first assumption is that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows; the second assumption is that a person has free will; the third assumption is that there is a temporal relation between them—the knowledge precedes the free choice. So the first approach gives up the second assumption, that we have free will, and then it says that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance, but there is no problem because we have no free will; everything is dictated in advance. And in fact this is a rather rare opinion, at least in the Jewish world. In the Protestant world, as I already mentioned, this is the most basic conception. There the fundamental conception is deterministic—Calvin and Luther, basically. It starts with them. But in the Jewish world it is rare. You find it in Rabbi Hasdai Crescas in Or Hashem, and there too there is some contradiction. I once saw Ravitzky write that the book was written in two phases. That is, the first part was written, and then after a lapse of time the second part was written, and therefore sometimes he changed his mind and there are contradictions between the first part and the second. In any event, there are indeed statements there in both directions in Or Hashem by Rabbi Crescas, but in one place he writes that in fact we do not have free will. Because the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance and also because of reasons of scientific causality—he argues it in a number of ways—and his conclusion is that we have no free will. So what about the demand? As Maimonides writes, this is the great principle on which all the words of prophecy and Torah and commandments depend. Meaning, if we have no free will, then what is the meaning of the commandments? What are we commanded? We do what we are programmed to do. Of course one can always say that the commandments are part of the programming. That is, we were commanded, and in us was implanted the program of responding to commandments, and the Holy One, blessed be He, is basically playing us like marionettes, but in practice the whole thing is a fixed game. But Rabbi Hasdai Crescas apparently doesn’t accept that, and therefore he asks: what then is the meaning of the commandments? So he claims that one thing is indeed demanded of us—and it is not to do something, because what happens in the world is deterministic—but rather how we relate to what happens. What happens will happen one way or another; it does not depend on us. But what does depend on us is the question of how we relate to what happens, and we must relate in the proper way to what happens, and on that basis we are measured as righteous or wicked. If I desecrate the Sabbath, then I am compelled to desecrate the Sabbath, so that isn’t the issue. The question is whether I relate to it as a sin—I don’t like it—or whether for me it is perfectly fine. And I am measured as righteous or wicked only on that plane, only on the plane of how I relate to events and not on the plane of what I actually do, because the deeds, the events themselves… Well, that’s a very strange claim, and I’m using a very large understatement here, because our relation to things—certainly today we know this—our relation to things is also an event in the world. It too is something that happens in the world. When I relate, that is a mental event in this case, and if you like it also has a physiological basis. A mental event has to do with things going on in the brain. If I relate positively or negatively, that will look different in the electrical currents of the brain. So there is both a physical occurrence and a mental occurrence here. And now the question is: how is it that the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t know that in advance as well? Meaning, Rabbi Hasdai Crescas says that everything that happens—since the Holy One, blessed be He, knows, and since there is physical causality—then there’s nothing to be done, it is basically deterministic. But if so, then these things too are occurrences that happen in the world, so the Holy One, blessed be He, should know them in advance as well, and once again the question returns to its place. You haven’t solved the problem; the problem remains on that plane too. That retreat didn’t help you in any way. It seems to me that if you read him carefully, then really the main thrust of his argument is an argument from scientific causality and not from divine knowledge. Meaning, he reaches the conclusion that the world is deterministic not because the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance, but because there are laws of nature that determine what will happen. And therefore Rabbi Hasdai Crescas really can allow himself to say that what happens in the physical world is determined by laws of nature, and therefore there there is no possibility that anything else could happen. But in the mental world, which is a spiritual matter, there are no laws of nature, no laws of physics, and therefore there is room there for free will, room for conduct that is not fixed in advance. And so he says therefore the mental matters—my attitude toward events—are indeed in my hands. But today we know that even our attitudes toward events are basically reflections of physical events, currents in the brain. Currents in the brain are electrical currents; that is a physical event in every sense. And therefore Rabbi Hasdai Crescas, certainly in light of the information we have today, collapses—meaning, his distinction doesn’t hold water. One should note that if the claim is not a claim from scientific causality, the laws of nature, but from the knowledge of the Holy One, blessed be He, then of course there is no room at all for his distinction. Because just as the Holy One, blessed be He, knows what will happen in the physical, natural world, there is no reason to assume that He does not know what happens in the mental world, in how I will relate. Because in the end, if He knows everything, then He knows that too. So I’m saying: either way, Rabbi Hasdai Crescas’ direction collapses. Meaning, it cannot be. If you use only the causal anchor, physical causality, to reach a deterministic conclusion, then as I said, in light of what we know today in neuroscience, his distinction collapses, because mental processes too have physical expressions in the brain. And we’ll talk later about what it means that they have expressions, what the relation is between the two things. If the basis on which you build determinism is divine knowledge, then there too there is no room to distinguish again between mental events and physical events, because if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance, then He knows both this and that. So once again this distinction falls into the pit. In short, there is no way to make such a claim. So basically the second component in the puzzle—I remind you that the first component is divine knowledge, the second component is freedom of the will, and the third component is the axis of time—so freedom of the will, in short, probably cannot be given up. The second possibility is to deal with the axis of time. And here there are a number of writers who claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, since He is above time or things of that sort, can obtain information about the future even before it happens, and therefore there is no contradiction between what the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance and our choosing freely. The example here is probably the words of the Raavad in his gloss on Maimonides. I’ve marked it. “And since this is so, we have no power to know how the Holy One, blessed be He, knows all creatures and their deeds.” Abraham said: “This author did not act in the manner of the sages”—Maimonides, yes?—“He did not act wisely in this law, for a person should not begin a matter if he does not know how to complete it.” He starts something and doesn’t know how to finish it. “And he began with questions and difficulties, and left the matter as a difficulty, and returned it to faith.” Meaning, he has no philosophical explanation; he leaves it to faith, some postulate, a religious dogma. If you are a philosopher, then give a philosophical solution. And if you are not a philosopher, then why are you presenting the philosophical difficulties here if you have no philosophical answer for them? “And it would have been better for him to leave the matter in the simple faith of the simple, and not to awaken their hearts and leave their minds in doubt. And perhaps one day a thought will enter their hearts about this. And although there is no decisive answer to this, it is good to lean on it with a partial answer.” The Raavad says: okay, but Maimonides has already presented the question and already confused those who are prone to confusion. I have no choice; I have to try and offer some philosophical answer, even though he himself is very hesitant about the value of this answer. But he says: if the question has already been raised, I’ll give the best I can on this matter—a partial answer. “And he says,” so this is the answer he offers, “If a person’s righteousness or wickedness depended on the decree of the Creator, blessed be He, then we would say that His knowledge is His decree, and our question would be very difficult. But now that the Creator has removed this dominion from His hand and placed it in the hand of the person himself, His knowledge is not a decree, but rather like the knowledge of astrologers, who know through another power what the ways of this person will be. And it is known that every occurrence in a person’s life, small and great, the Creator has delivered to the power of the constellations, except that He gave him intellect to strengthen him to emerge from under the constellation; and that is the power given to a person to be good or evil. And the Creator knows the power of the constellation and its moments, whether the intellect has power to extract him from its hand or not. And this knowledge is not a decree. And all this is not equivalent.” Meaning, he says: there is some sort of explanation here, but he is very hesitant about it. He wouldn’t have said it had Maimonides not raised the question and then failed to answer it, leaving us with this confusion. What is he saying here? There is really more than one nuance in this answer. The first nuance is what he said at the beginning: that His knowledge is not a decree. Meaning, He knows, but His knowledge does not determine what we will do. Like the knowledge of astrologers—those who know what will happen in the future—they do not purport to determine what I will do in the future. But they somehow know, through other forces; they have some alternative channels of information that give them the ability to know what will happen without determining it. The parable often used for this is when someone watches a movie. If I watch a movie, and in that movie a person is described doing various things, then obviously I have no effect on what he will do, but I know perfectly well what he will do. Now let’s assume I’m watching a movie about something that will happen in the future. There is some being that has the ability to see future movies too; it is above the axis of time. Okay? In that situation there is no problem at all. The person in the movie acts completely freely; he is not affected, he decides whatever he wants, but I have the ability to see the movie, and therefore in advance I know what he will do. So that knowledge, although it is in advance, is not a decree. That is basically the Raavad’s claim. After that he moves into the matter—which is the first part—and then he says, “And it is known,” this second part of his words, which I think goes in a different direction. He presents it continuously, but really it is a different direction: “that every occurrence in a person’s life, small and great, the Creator has delivered to the power of the constellations”—to the topographical terrain. We basically have certain natural forces that take us to do or not do certain things, “except that He gave him intellect to strengthen him to emerge from under the constellation”—Israel is above the stars. So therefore he says: basically there is a person walking on the topographical terrain, and the person is not a little ball. The topographical terrain wants to take him to all sorts of places—that’s the constellations, the forces of nature—but the person has the ability not to go with those forces, but to decide to go up the mountain or not descend into the valley. “And that is the power given to man to be good or evil.” Fine. And then what? That is the libertarian picture I’ve been describing up to now. “And the Creator knows the power of the constellation and its moments”—that is, unlike human psychologists, the Holy One, blessed be He, is a perfect psychologist. Meaning, He knows our topographical terrain in complete detail, the whole topographical terrain all the way down. “And whether the intellect has power to extract him from it or not”—meaning, He also knows whether I have enough strength to deal with this topographical terrain and overcome it or not. That too the Holy One, blessed be He, knows. “And this knowledge is not a decree.” What does that mean—that this knowledge is not a decree? He knows that I have the power to cope, but He does not know whether I will decide to use it to cope, because if He knows in advance that I will also use it, then what has this whole model he set up here accomplished? Basically what he wants to say is this: the Holy One, blessed be He, knows that there is a topographical terrain and He knows the whole terrain that operates on me, all the educational, genetic, environmental influences—whatever you like. He also knows whether this lies above or below my window of choice—we talked about this—whether it is in my hands, whether I can deal with this dilemma and climb the mountain, not surrender and roll into the valley. That too He knows. But there is one thing He does not know: whether I will use that power, what I will decide in the end. He knows I can make a decision, but He does not know which decision, and whether I will make that decision—He does not know that, and therefore this knowledge is not a decree. The knowledge of the Holy One, blessed be He, in advance is not a decree, meaning it does not predetermine what I will do, and why not? Because what I will actually do—He really does not know. He does not know. He knows the whole framework, He knows the topographical terrain, He knows whether I have the power or don’t have the power, but whether I will use the power, what my decision will be—meaning He knows that I can make a decision, but He does not know which decision, and whether I will make the decision, He does not know that, and therefore the knowledge is not a decree. You understand that this answer basically says that the Holy One, blessed be He, has no foreknowledge. He is basically the ultimate psychologist. If there were a psychologist with all the psychological information on earth, all research completed, we know all psychology—I talked about this last time—that ultimate psychologist would know exactly what the Holy One, blessed be He, knows, and even he would not be able to predict in advance what I would do, because I can always decide to go against the forces of that terrain that the psychologist knows. And I can decide no—even though there is a mountain here, I’m climbing in this direction despite the difficulty; or even though there is a valley here, I’m not going down despite the fact that that would be expected, yes, it pulls me downward—you can’t know that. Or in other words, the first explanation that appears in the Raavad is an explanation that wants to hang on the axis of time. It wants to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance what I will do, like in a movie, but that does not dictate what I will do. The second explanation says: no, the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know in advance, and therefore I have free will. That is, the first explanation of the Raavad deals with the third component of the dilemma, with the time axis: the Holy One, blessed be He, is above time, He can obtain information about the future, watch movies about the future, and therefore it does not dictate. The second explanation of the Raavad deals with the first component of the dilemma, the knowledge of the Holy One, blessed be He, and basically what it says is that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know. By the way, the same thing is said by the Shelah in the introduction to the book Shnei Luchot HaBerit. The Shelah has ten sections. In one of them, called Beit HaBechirah, he deals with this question of choice, and he says there that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know in advance, because if He knew in advance then we would have no free will, and therefore one must assume that those things connected to our choice are not known by the Holy One, blessed be He. Everything else—physics—He can do all the calculations and tell us what will come out until the end of all generations. But what depends on human choices—there the Holy One, blessed be He, does not have the knowledge. In my opinion, that is also what is written here in the Raavad, although people don’t notice it, because the Raavad begins differently. But I think that is what the last part of his words says. Now I want to examine these points a bit more. Anyone who speaks about the axis of time, in my opinion, simply isn’t answering the right question. Many people say: yes, the Holy One, blessed be He, is above time, therefore He can know things that will happen in the future, everything is fine. In my opinion, that is simply confusion. Because there are really two questions one can ask here, and Maimonides himself, by the way, poses both of them. One question is: if I have free will, how can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows what I will do? After all, it hasn’t happened yet, so how can He know in advance what I will do when I myself haven’t yet decided what I will do—sorry. That is a question of how the Holy One, blessed be He, obtains the information. The second question—let’s say the Raavad answers the first one in his first part—is that He can obtain the information, He is above time, He stretches a long hand into the future, pulls the movie toward Him, rents it from the future Blockbuster, takes the movie and watches it. He knows how to watch movies even about future events. So He is above time. Let’s say I accept that for the sake of discussion. The big question is: after He obtained the movie, do I still have free will? Because if He knows in advance what I will do, then as Maimonides says, what are my options? If in the end I don’t do it, if I can choose otherwise, then it will turn out that what He saw—the movie He saw—was simply the wrong movie. And therefore that can’t be. So bottom line, true, you can explain to me by means of the time axis how the Holy One, blessed be He, can obtain information from the future, but you have only explained to me how He obtains future information. I am asking the opposite question: assuming the future information is in His possession, how can it be that I still have the possibility of doing otherwise in the future? That is the question of foreknowledge and choice, and this answer does not address it at all. Because even if the Holy One, blessed be He, can obtain future information, okay, now He has obtained it—so now that He has it, how can it be that I can decide to do the opposite? That is the question of foreknowledge and choice, and this answer does not address it at all. Therefore, the axis of time is not relevant, in my opinion, to this discussion, although many people talk about how He is above time and therefore one cannot ask about Him. In my opinion, all that is empty verbiage. It does not answer the right question. And then basically what remains in our hands—we’ll still see later on, maybe… actually I’ll say one more word about this now. In the previous lesson I spoke about the example Richard Taylor brings from the story of Ozzmo, that teacher in the American Midwest, in a town in the Midwest, who enters a library and sees on one of the shelves a book entitled The Story of Ozzmo. He opens the story, starts leafing through it, and sees an exact description of the course of his life from birth until the moment he entered the library, took out the book—he gets to that point—and of course in the following pages too it says what he will do in the future. So never mind, I won’t go into all that now; I brought it in the context of fatalism. But here I want to talk about it in the context of determinism, not fatalism. Notice what is going on here. Let’s say there is such a book in the library, but Ozzmo does not enter there. He did not see the book, he did not read the book. Does that solve this paradox—how can Ozzmo have free choice if a book in the library has already written down everything he will do? Of course the answer is no. The fact that Ozzmo read the book is of course a nice illustration of fatalism—how you fail to escape your fate even after reading the book and trying to run from it; the attempt to run is itself what generates the events that this fatalistic destiny predetermined, like with the Appointment in Samarra that we saw. That is fatalism. But with respect to determinism, it makes absolutely no difference whether you read the book or not. Once we have reached the conclusion that there is such a book in the library, then even if nobody read it, the problem of knowledge and choice exists. Because if that information exists in advance, then it cannot be that I will do something else that contradicts that information, because then it would turn out that the information is simply incorrect. And if the assumption is that the information is correct—and God’s information is supposed to be correct—then the very existence of the information contradicts the possibility of free will. And this is what I said about the attempts to solve it through the axis of time. Through the time axis you tell me: since the Holy One, blessed be He, can obtain the information from the future, there is no problem. Not true—there is certainly a problem. The moment He obtains the information, the information now exists. I don’t care how it got here, and even if nobody knows it. The information exists. And if the information exists, then I have no free will tomorrow. It does not matter how this information exists today, how it came into existence or into anyone’s knowledge today. Once the information exists, the book in the library exists, the problem of free will remains in place. And therefore this reaching across the axis of time, or against the direction of time, does not solve the problem here. In this context it may be worth bringing the Or HaChaim. On Genesis chapter 6, regarding “for I regret that I made them”—what the Torah says, sorry, that the Torah says that the Holy One, blessed be He, regretted that He created man, because man sins and is only evil all day. So the Or HaChaim asks: how can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, regretted it? Didn’t He know this in advance? After all, He knows what we are going to do in advance. So what does it mean that now He suddenly regretted what He did? At the time He did it, He already knew this is what would come from His handiwork. So he answers there that the Holy One, blessed be He, basically withheld the knowledge from Himself in order to allow us freedom of choice. Meaning, He closes His eyes. The movie is playing before Him, the movie of the future, but He closes His eyes; He doesn’t look. Does that constitute an answer to the question? Of course not. Obviously not. It is just a mistake. Because even if the Holy One, blessed be He, closes His eyes, if the movie exists, if the book in the library exists even if He Himself has not seen it, then I have no free will. Because if I did have free will, I could do something that would show that this information is mistaken information. So what do I care whether the Holy One, blessed be He, knows it or doesn’t know it? The information is mistaken. The question whether the Holy One, blessed be He, knows the information or doesn’t know the information is not really essential. What contradicts free will is the assumption that the information exists now. And it doesn’t matter at all how—whether because the Holy One, blessed be He, pulls it from the future, or even if the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know it but the information is stored in some library and He closes His eyes, He does not know it. So what? As long as this information exists now, it contradicts my ability to act freely in the future, regardless of whether anyone knows it. Therefore this answer is of course incorrect. In short, the only thing left is to deal with the third component of the dilemma—what in my ordering is the first—which is the knowledge of the Holy One, blessed be He. And that is also what is written in the Raavad in the highlighted passage before you, what I read earlier. In my opinion that is what is written there: that in fact the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know. Things that depend on human choice, those points at which a person exercises judgment and makes a decision—regarding those, the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know what will happen. Because if He knew, that would contradict our free will. That is what the Raavad writes here. That is what the Shelah says in Beit HaBechirah. I think—using the principle of charity, you know there is an interpretive principle, Donald Davidson I think defined it—the principle of charity means that when you see some position, even if you argue with it, you should formulate it in the most generous way. Don’t catch the other person in a way that interprets him by setting up a straw man. Don’t interpret him badly and then attack him. Give him the best possible interpretation and then try to deal with it. That is, be charitable to him, because even in fighting him you have to be charitable. And why? Not because you have to be righteous; this isn’t interpersonal ethics. It is an intellectual instruction. Because otherwise you are not really dealing with his position; you are dealing with a straw man. If you want to conduct a proper discussion, then put before you the serious position and not some straw man that you invented just because you can burn it. And the same thing here. I think the Or HaChaim can perhaps be understood this way: if indeed foreknowledge, the very existence of the information in advance, does not allow us to choose freely later on, then the only way for the Holy One, blessed be He, to give us free will—and He did give us free will—is to establish or construct the world in such a way that the information is not present in it now. Until the person chooses, the information about what the outcome of that choice will be does not yet exist. That is how the world was created. So this is not what the Or HaChaim said, perhaps—but I’m saying it’s a charitable interpretation of what the Or HaChaim says. What the Or HaChaim says is not that the information exists and the Holy One, blessed be He, closes His eyes and doesn’t look at it—because if the information existed, I would have no free will. Rather, the Holy One, blessed be He, created the… He could have created a deterministic world and then known everything that would happen, had full control over everything that happens, and everything would be fine. What the Holy One, blessed be He, did was to give us free will. And what does that mean? By that He determined that there would be holes in current information. In current information there are certain gaps that do not exist. The information does not include them. Those gaps concern future events of choice. Regarding them, there is no information now, and therefore of course even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot know them. But it is not that the information exists and is merely out of sight; rather, He causes the information not to exist. How does He cause that? He doesn’t need to do anything—only give us freedom of choice. Once He gave us free will, by that He determined that information about our future actions would not exist now. And therefore it seems to me that this is the only reasonable solution to the question of foreknowledge and choice. And this really means that if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance, that is a strong attack on our free will. That was the first argument I wanted to bring here. And therefore there is no escape for anyone who maintains free will except to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know in advance what I will choose. And if I’m right—meaning, if I’m right about the Raavad—then that is what the Raavad writes here. You know, this sounds like terrible heresy, so I’m bringing a few sources. So the Raavad writes it here. The Shelah writes it explicitly in Beit HaBechirah. And the Or HaChaim—if you take the charitable interpretation, by the principle of charity—then it is written there too, because otherwise what is written there is nonsense. That is, this is a proof by elimination that this is what the Or HaChaim says. Anyway, there is one point I need to note about this solution. Because why does this solution trouble people? Because ostensibly it seems to contradict the omnipotence of the Holy One, blessed be He. If the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent, then He should know everything in advance. There shouldn’t be holes in His information. So how does this fit with God’s omnipotence? Well, where does God’s omnipotence come from? We won’t go into that here. I’m not sure there is a good basis for that assumption, at least from sources. It may be that from philosophical considerations it somehow seems natural not to stop at any particular level of power that you attribute to the Holy One, blessed be He. Why specifically fifteen thousand units of power, or thirty thousand, or ten? Probably infinity. There is some philosophical intuition like that—the most fundamental being has the greatest power. I don’t know. But let’s assume for the sake of discussion that He is omnipotent. So what then—how does that fit with the fact that He does not know future events? The answer is that even an omnipotent being cannot do things that are not doable. Omnipotence with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He, means among other things that He is not subject to the laws of nature. That is, something that does not accord with the laws of nature He can do—the splitting of the sea, or the bush that burns with fire and is not consumed. Because He created the laws of nature, so He can also suspend them or freeze them and arrange that things proceed precisely not according to the laws of nature. “Sun, stand still at Gibeon,” whatever you want—all the miracles we know. But the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot make a square circle. Because there is no such thing as a square circle. Since there is no such thing as a square circle, that is a contradictory concept, and therefore it cannot be realized in the world because it involves a logical contradiction. So the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do that is not an impairment of His omnipotence. It does not detract from His omnipotence. Someone omnipotent can do everything that can be done. There is nothing doable that He cannot do. But if there is something that cannot be done essentially, logically, and not because of one law of nature or another, then that is not among the things that can be done, so why assume this is an impairment of omnipotence? There just isn’t any such thing. Put differently: if you ask me whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can make a square circle, my answer is that you first explain to me what a square circle is, and then I’ll answer whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can make it or not. The concept “square circle” is a contradictory concept. There is no such concept. Therefore it is not precise to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot make a square circle; rather one should answer that there is no such thing as a square circle. And therefore of course the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do something that isn’t there, that doesn’t exist—the concept does not exist. Therefore this is not an impairment of His omnipotence. Take another example. Suppose the Holy One, blessed be He, can make a wall that stops every shell, and the Holy One, blessed be He, can make a shell that penetrates every wall. The question is whether He can make both. Obviously not. Because if that shell penetrates every wall, then there is no wall that can withstand it, so there is no wall that withstands every shell. So what, is that an impairment of God’s omnipotence? No, simply because there cannot be both such a shell and such a wall. It is like a square circle. Therefore the inability to do that is not a problem for the omnipotence of the Holy One, blessed be He. Yes? It’s the same thing with… if we say that some being is omnipotent, then the question is whether it can make a stone that it itself cannot lift. And either way, if it cannot do it then it isn’t omnipotent, and if it can do it then there is a stone it cannot lift, so it isn’t omnipotent. So what will you say? That He can make that stone and then also lift it afterward. Fine—but then that stone is not a stone that He cannot lift. The stone that He cannot lift—He cannot make. Okay, so you can’t get out of this. So where is the mistake here? Let’s say someone corners me. I say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent. Now my opponent comes and says: wait, can the Holy One, blessed be He, make a stone that He cannot lift? I say: look, when you attack me you need to attack me on my own view; you can’t attack me on yours. You have to show me that according to my premises I end up in contradiction. Okay? So now I ask: let’s go with my premises. I claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent; therefore I claim that there is no such stone that He cannot lift, right? Not just that there isn’t one in the world—conceptually there cannot be. A stone that the omnipotent one cannot lift is like a square circle. Because either He can lift it, or He isn’t omnipotent. That is, there is no stone that the omnipotent one cannot lift. It is like a square circle—it is saying the same thing, on my view, on my view that the concept of omnipotence exists, that the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent. So now why are you asking me whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can create a stone that He cannot lift? That is like asking me whether He can make a square circle. Explain to me what a stone that the omnipotent one cannot lift is, and then I’ll answer whether He can make it or not. You won’t be able to explain it to me, because it is a contradictory concept. Therefore your question has no meaning. The answer is not that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do it, but rather that there is no meaning to the ability to do it, because there is no such object. Okay, this always reminds me of the story in this context of Puss in Boots. Yes, Puss in Boots. The miller leaves all his property to his three sons; to one he leaves half the property, to the second the other half, and to the third, the youngest son, he leaves a cat, and that’s it. He is depressed—what can he do with that, he has no money. The cat says to him, don’t worry, I’ll take care of you. He goes to bathe in the river, folds his clothes and bathes in the river, this miller’s son. The cat sees that the king is passing there in his carriage. He hides the clothes under a stone and says: Your Majesty, look, the count bathing here in the river has lost his clothes. Maybe you can give him some of your own clothes, because it wouldn’t be proper for him to go around unclothed—it’s not respectable. The king says: of course, we won’t leave a count without clothes. He gives him royal clothes. And the cat says to the king: oh, I’m so happy that you helped my master the count. Maybe you can come visit the count’s castle? The king says: of course, I’d be delighted. Needless to say, the king’s beautiful daughter is sitting beside him, of course. The king goes after the cat, and the cat runs ahead and says: go there—the castle you see there is the castle of my master the count. The cat runs to the castle—it is of course the palace of the terrible sorcerer. The cat goes inside, the sorcerer turns himself into a lion, the cat is terrified and says: wait, wait, before you devour me, just a second. One last request, so to speak. Can you also turn yourself into small things and not only big things—say, a mouse? Can you turn yourself into a mouse too? He says, certainly. He turns himself into a mouse, and then the cat devours him and invites the king into the palace, and he marries the daughter, and they live happily ever after. What is the nice point here? The question is whether the sorcerer really can turn himself into a mouse in such a way that the cat will kill him, eat him. I argue no. There is a bug in this story—or in the analogue, because it’s a parable. In the analogue: can the Holy One, blessed be He, turn Himself into a man? He is omnipotent, no? He can turn Himself into a man. Ostensibly, if He is omnipotent, He can turn Himself into a man. The moment He turns Himself into a man, I will shoot Him in the head. Now a man who is shot in the head dies. So now there are two possibilities: either He won’t die, in which case He didn’t turn Himself into a man, because a man who is shot in the head dies. If He does die, then it turns out that I have eliminated the being that is necessary existence. That cannot be, of course—a necessary being cannot fail to exist. Okay? Therefore the conclusion is that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot turn Himself into a man or into a mouse; the terrible sorcerer cannot turn himself into a mouse. Why not? After all, he is omnipotent. And the answer is: because necessary existence turning into a man—and a man is obviously not necessary existence—is like a square circle; it is like an object that the omnipotent one cannot lift. All these are contradictory expressions that just confuse the mind. There are no such concepts, and therefore all these questions are meaningless questions, questions that fail logically. And what I want to claim is the same thing here. The same thing here as well. What the claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know things in advance really says is that knowing information that does not exist is like a stone that the omnipotent one cannot lift. It is a logical contradiction. How can one know nonexistent information? If the information does not exist, one cannot know it. If there is no book in the library, how will Ozzmo read the book? There can be a book in the library without Ozzmo having read it. There cannot be no book in the library and yet Ozzmo will read it—not even if he is omnipotent. Even the omnipotent cannot read a book that does not exist, because there is simply no such thing, there is nothing to read. That is not a defect in omnipotence. And therefore when I say that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know future events that depend on choice, that is not a defect in His omnipotence, because knowing in advance nonexistent information is an oxymoron, it is a contradictory concept. There is no such thing. Therefore of course even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot know this information—He cannot because there is no such information, not because He lacks ability. This is not a deficiency in omnipotence. He can do everything that is defined and conceivably possible. But He cannot do—when I ask whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can do blah blah blah and blah blah blah—you first explain to me what this blah blah blah is, and then I can answer whether He can do it or not. I cannot tell you that He cannot do blah blah blah; I simply don’t know what this blah blah blah is. Explain it, and I’ll answer. The same thing here: knowing in advance nonexistent information—I’m not saying the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do it; rather there is no such thing as knowing in advance information that does not exist. Therefore there is no problem at all with the omnipotence of the Holy One, blessed be He, assuming He does not know future acts of choice in advance. And perhaps this is what underlies the saying of the Sages: “Everything is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven.” Things that pertain to the fear of Heaven are the things that depend on our choice. Things that are not value dilemmas, that are not connected to fear of Heaven, are subject to laws of nature, and nature behaves according to those laws. Things connected to fear of Heaven depend on our choice—fear of Heaven in the broad sense, including moral issues, halakhic issues, all value dilemmas. Those depend on us, not on the laws of nature. Yes? That’s not the constellation, as the Raavad writes below. And since this is so, then as long as we haven’t decided, that information does not exist, and therefore of course one cannot watch the movie in advance because there is no such movie. And therefore “everything is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven” not only determines the boundaries of God’s control—what He does in the world and what we do in the world. He does in the world everything that is natural, and what concerns value choices—that’s us. That is the simple meaning of this saying. What I want to claim is that this saying means something more far-reaching. Not only that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not control what we do out of our choice; He does not even know in advance what will happen there. Not only does He not do it with His own hands—He does not even know in advance what we will do. He cannot know; it is impossible to know it in advance. I’ll maybe end by returning to Maimonides. In my opinion—I think at least—that this is also what is written in Maimonides. By the way, the Shelah also writes this. The Shelah claims that this too is what Maimonides intended to say: that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know in advance. What does that mean? Maimonides says, yes, “the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know with a knowledge external to Him.” God’s knowledge is something different from human knowledge, and therefore you cannot compare the two. That is ostensibly the excuse Maimonides gives for the question. To this the Raavad says: you raised a question and did not give an answer. Why did he not give an answer? Here he did give an answer. The answer is that the Holy One, blessed be He—His knowledge works differently from ours, and therefore you cannot ask this question about Him. So what is the problem, what is wrong with that answer? Why is the Raavad so angry at Maimonides for raising a question and not presenting an answer? The answer is that this really is not an answer. Why? Because if the Holy One, blessed be He, His knowledge does not work like ours—when we say He knows, that is not the same thing as saying that some human being knows—fine. So now I ask a new question: does the Holy One, blessed be He, have in advance the concept of knowledge as we define it with respect to human beings? Not the concept of knowledge attributed to Him, but the concept of knowledge that we have. If yes, then the question returns to its place. If no, then what do I care that He has some other kind of knowledge that is also called knowledge? What I call knowledge—He doesn’t have that. So when the Raavad read Maimonides, he understood Maimonides basically to be saying: I have no answer. The Holy One, blessed be He, has knowledge, but I have no answer—that is, he did not answer. But what I’m claiming is the second option. Maimonides did answer. Maimonides says: He does not have our kind of knowledge. He doesn’t. What we mean when we say that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything is another concept of knowledge; it is not the ordinary concept of knowledge that we attribute to human beings. It is another concept. He has that other concept, but it does not contradict choice—that’s not the issue. What we call knowing—that He does not have. That is what Maimonides says, and if so, then Maimonides too joins this distinguished group that says that the Holy One, blessed be He, has no foreknowledge of the things we do. And therefore he says: “But we know without doubt that the act of a person is in the hand of the person, and the Holy One, blessed be He, does not pull him nor decree upon him to do so”—and does not even know it in advance. That is what I want to claim. And then it could be that Maimonides says this too. And if so, then Maimonides did indeed give an answer, and the Raavad attacks him unjustly. The Raavad thinks he gave no answer, but Maimonides did give an answer, and the answer is very simple: the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know. And what we say that He knows—that is something else, complicated, metaphysical, no, something else. It is part of God Himself; it is not something we can speak about, akin to Maimonides’ doctrine of negative attributes. So therefore it seems to me that if I sum up until now, we have seen one argument in favor of determinism, and surprisingly it was a theological argument: because of the prior knowledge of the Holy One, blessed be He, there is a deterministic conclusion here. And I said that foreknowledge and choice, the contradiction between foreknowledge and free choice, involves three components: the component of knowledge, the component of freedom of will, and the component of time between them. One can give up freedom of will, like Hasdai Crescas—it doesn’t help, meaning it doesn’t really solve the problem because it leaves us with nothing. If you give up free will, you cannot leave anything in our control, including how we relate to things, as Hasdai Crescas proposed. So of course you can be a complete determinist, no problem, but then really what are the commandments, what is the meaning—the whole business loses its meaning. That is not an option. The option of the time axis, as I said, answers a different question from this one. It answers the question of how the Holy One, blessed be He, obtained the information. But after He obtained the information, the question still remains: how can it be that we can act otherwise, not according to this information? You haven’t solved that. Therefore the time axis too does not solve the problem. And the third route that remains is, in my view, the only route left: that in fact the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not know, and I think that is what the Raavad writes in his conclusion, that is what Maimonides writes, that is what the Shelah writes, the Or HaChaim—again, according to the principle of interpretive charity—I think perhaps he too can be placed within this framework. And even if no one had ever said it, in my opinion this is the only way to answer this question—so I say it. And therefore I think this is the only way out. Anyone who truly believes in free will, the price bound up with this idea, attached to this worldview, is that you create holes in God’s information—or in the information that exists, not necessarily God’s, and therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know it either. But there are holes in the information; there is future information that does not exist in our possession, and therefore no one can know it, not even the Holy One, blessed be He. And the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know what will happen in the future. That seems to me to be the only answer to this question. We’ll see this from more angles later on, but for our purposes this is enough. I’ll stop here, and now I’ll release the phones—just a second. I don’t read the chats, because in the middle of talking it just interferes with the flow. I’m releasing your microphones, and whoever wants to ask a question—put yourselves on mute.