Torah and Science, Lecture 1

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On the way toward the discussion of Torah and science, last time we dealt with the status of reasoning, and I tried to show that you can’t just take the problem off the table by saying, okay, reasoning has no status, faith is above who-knows-what, above intellect, and therefore we’re not supposed to be bothered by problems vis-à-vis external fields, vis-à-vis reasoning. I called it that in general terms, but it doesn’t matter, all kinds of external fields. That’s a very easy way to solve all the problems—or not to address them at all—because it exempts us from having to engage with them. But it seems to me that this is not a serious option. So that was the goal of last time. Now, meanwhile, this was in the framework of putting the tools on the table. Meaning, on one side there is reasoning, science—we’ll move toward science in a moment—and on the other side there is Torah. So I said that as part of laying out the tools on the table, I’m starting with reasoning and with science, then we’ll say a few words about Torah, although I think there things are a bit clearer, and after that we’ll get into the questions or the conflicts. Okay, if we now want to move from reasoning to science, there was some comment here, I think from you last time, that science is some very, very specific type of method or discipline; you can’t simply identify it with reasoning, and therefore the question is whether I really did put the tools on the table. Meaning, when I talk about reasoning, did I really place the concept of science on the table? Today I want to argue that I did, and in order to argue that I want to begin with a bit of a general introduction to this concept called science, because I think that in the end, even though this will involve some history, the history and the issues that arise in that history accompany science and our attitude toward science to this day. There are even people who use this in order to resolve the conflicts. I think not justifiably, but to explain that I need some preliminaries. Okay, so in the ancient period—and again, of course, these are all generalizations, there are always exceptions and unusual cases, all true, this is a description in broad brushstrokes, okay?—in the ancient period, science and philosophy were basically one field. Aristotle did not distinguish between them. Philosophy, literally translated, is the love of wisdom, and wisdom includes many fields. There was no sharp distinction between science and philosophy, and as I’ll explain later, if one makes such a distinction, it has to rely on the concept of observation, which characterizes science more and appears less in philosophy. Since the concept of observation was not all that significant in the ancient period, science too was basically a branch of philosophy. Meaning, there was no distinct discipline like that, because in truth there really was no difference in method. Meaning, in the end, the famous example that today seems so stupid—the claim of Newton, of Aristotle, not Newton, Aristotle—that bodies fall toward the earth at a speed or acceleration proportional to their mass. Meaning, a heavy body falls faster, a light body falls more slowly. To test that this is false, you didn’t need a particle accelerator. To test that this is false, you needed to climb onto the roof of a house, or some high place, take a heavy stone and a light stone, drop them, and see that they fall at the same speed. So for that you don’t need a particle accelerator. So how did Aristotle fail? How did Aristotle not understand that there is really no difference between heavy and light stones, or between heavy and light bodies? The answer is that apparently he didn’t bother doing the experiment. He didn’t bother doing the experiment because it seemed obviously true to him on the basis of his reasoning, so why do I need Scripture if I have reasoning? I have good reasoning—why do I need to do experiments? And this is an indication that in that period the importance of experiment was not very significant. It certainly was not a touchstone for scientific determination—whether it stands up to an observational test, an experimental test, or not. To say as a generalization that they didn’t do experiments at all would be wrong. Aristotle also did experiments here and there; he also drew on observations. Meaning, even the classifications he made of animals and so on are the result of observation. You can’t classify animals without observations. So you can’t present this too grotesquely. So one has to be a bit careful with that anachronism. But I think it is correct to say that observation was not what defined scientific inquiry. Science was not obligated to test every matter using rigid observational tools, or as precise as possible, or as unambiguous as possible. Reasoning mixed into the scientific world very, very freely, and therefore these areas—science and philosophy—were not completely distinct. Now, the Aristotelian outlook, as is known, dominated thought—we’ll speak now only about the West, because science can ultimately be said to belong to the West, to Western thought. This outlook was dominant until the end of the Middle Ages, yes, until the sixteenth century, let’s say, something like that. Until then Aristotle was, as is known, one step below prophecy, and everything he said was sacred in the Church. Whoever went against Aristotle was considered, at least in some cases, a heretic. Meaning, Aristotle was perceived as some kind of divine truth; he had uncovered absolute truth. Whoever didn’t believe this was undermining religious principles. True, the Christians took it further, but Jewish scholasticism also related to it in overall fairly similar fashion. Maimonides too saw statements of Aristotle as truths that cannot be disputed. Meaning, this was not unique only to Christian thought. They also burned people over it. Meaning, whoever didn’t accept Aristotle, it wasn’t just that he didn’t study a few chapters of the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah; he also didn’t study anything after that either—they simply killed him. So in that sense there may be a difference, but the attitude at the principled level is an attitude as though we are dealing here with things that are absolute truths, and that is binding. And this despite—or perhaps because of, and I’ll comment on this later—the fact that this was not the result of observation. Meaning, it wasn’t, at least some of it wasn’t, the result of observation; it was the result of philosophical considerations. And therefore this picture basically continues from the Greek period until the end of the Middle Ages.

[Speaker B] On the other hand, Maimonides argued with him pretty sharply.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, there were things they argued about. I think—and again, I’m not sufficiently expert in ancient philosophy—I’m sure there were others too who argued with Aristotle here and there.

[Speaker B] I mean things that are substantial, like the eternity of the world.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, the eternity of the world is not science. The eternity of the world—even today I don’t know whether that’s science. I mean philosophical foundations, fine. Aristotle’s concept of divinity also wasn’t accepted by Maimonides. Obviously. I don’t mean that Maimonides was Aristotle. I mean that Aristotle’s scientific determinations were often perceived as something binding. Now, you can say there are exceptions and unusual cases—all true. I don’t think it was only among Jews; elsewhere too there were exceptions. This is a broad-strokes description. What happens toward the end of the Middle Ages? Toward the end of the Middle Ages, all kinds of doubts about Aristotelian hegemony begin to arise—but not only in the sense of the contents of the Aristotelian view, also in the sense of method. Meaning, doubts began to arise that placed on the table the debate not on the plane of whether Aristotle was right or wrong, on the scientific plane whether Aristotle was right or not—and yes, Galileo was perhaps a prominent example, because he was the one who found that bodies do in fact fall regardless of their mass; he simply did the experiment. But it’s precisely that—that he did the experiment. Meaning, not only his substantive claim, which was non-Aristotelian, but the method with which he approached these matters was actually an even deeper disagreement than the substantive disagreement. Now, Galileo didn’t start this. This is a phenomenon that had already begun in the fifteenth century, toward the end of the fifteenth century, when the first stirrings of, on the one hand, perhaps skepticism, and on the other hand, the importance of observation began to emerge. And once the basis of the scientific outlook is shaken, people look for an alternative. What can be the alternative to reasoning, to a priori thought, thought that precedes observation? And the natural candidate was observation. Meaning, people said: okay, let’s test things, let’s try to build something on the basis of observations. This begins at the end of the fifteenth century, continues deep into the seventeenth century and even afterward. In the seventeenth century the next stage already begins, but I’ll get to that in a moment. Basically, when we present things this way, then this is not a debate over what science says, but a debate over what science is. And in today’s language, or in somewhat later language, one could call this a confrontation between rationalism and empiricism. Meaning, rationalism as distinct from rationality. Rationality means being logical, okay? Rationalism is a view that advocates reason; it is not the same thing. Maybe I’ll bring an example not entirely related to the issue itself, but to later stages of it. When I was in yeshiva, there was someone, I think a year or two above me, who had hepatitis for a very long time. I was in Gush. And he had hepatitis for a very long time and it just wouldn’t go away. He was hospitalized, came out and went back, for about half a year I think—he wasn’t in the yeshiva for a huge amount of time, I don’t remember exactly how long. At some point a friend comes to me, who was also there, and says, listen, some magician came there, some sort of believer type, put pigeons on his stomach, and within a few days he came back to the yeshiva. Okay, that was really amazing. The guy had seen it, meaning he was there, this was eyewitness testimony, I couldn’t deny it. I went home and told my parents this story. Look, something amazing happened with pigeons and all that, and he came back to the yeshiva. My parents threw up their hands. What are they doing to me in that yeshiva? What a benighted place, filling my head with all kinds of esoteric, mystical, unfounded ideas, and so on, and they called on me to return a bit to rational thinking. So I was a little embarrassed and I asked them what they thought rational thinking meant. If someone comes and tells me, listen, I saw with my own eyes that they put pigeons on the person’s stomach and after a few days he came back to the yeshiva—he’d been sick for half a year—then as a rational person, am I supposed to accept that or not accept that? And I think the answer is that as a rational person I should accept it with suspicion, meaning investigate—but overall, if there is testimony, okay. If we never accepted anything that doesn’t fit our current conceptions, how would we ever progress? We always progress when we encounter something that doesn’t fit our current conceptions and then nevertheless try to integrate it into our conceptions, and in that way improve—yes, perceive better. What was the outlook represented by what they were saying? It wasn’t rationality, it was rationalism, and that’s why I’m bringing this story. Rationalism means clinging to intellect, not using intellect. Using intellect is rationality—meaning yes, one should use intellect—but seeing intellect as the sole criterion, that is rationalism, not rationality. That’s what I mean: I stick to what seems logical to me and the facts don’t interest me. That’s exactly Aristotle, right? That’s why Aristotle was a rationalist. He was also rational relative to his time, but he was also a rationalist, and the dispute that arose against Aristotelianism was not about rationality but about rationalism. Meaning, the claim was that we are not supposed to cling to our own reasoning, to our own thought, in every case; we need to put it to the test of experience. We are basically supposed to learn from observation, and that is how empiricism begins to arise. Empiricism, again, is not just that there is empirical content and there is empiricism. Empiricism, exactly like rationalism, is a view that is by nature extreme. Meaning, empiricism means we cling only to observation, just as rationalism means we cling only to thought, to ratio; empiricism means clinging only to observation, where here too there is a kind of extremism, because we are unwilling to speak about anything that does not arise from observation. This approach—I’m already jumping far ahead—this approach reached an extreme in the early to mid-twentieth century in logical positivism. Logical positivism is a certain view that says we are not prepared to talk about anything that is not the result of observation, or proven on the basis of observations, whether direct observation or something proven on the basis of observations. This is known from Wittgenstein. The early Wittgenstein ends his book with: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” So anything that one cannot speak of—of course in his terms then, the early Wittgenstein, and he recovered a bit afterward—in his terms then this meant something that is not the result of direct observation or not proven in some very clear, fully defined logical way. Metaphysics, in short. Now Wittgenstein was actually gentler, because he said one must be silent about it; he didn’t say it doesn’t exist. The real positivists said one must be silent because there is nothing there to talk about, not just because one must be silent. Wittgenstein wasn’t there in that sense; this is a somewhat softer approach. But still, it is an expression of positivism, and I think here this really is a kind of maturation of the empiricism that began in the fourteenth-fifteenth century, because basically we cling only to things we see before our eyes, things fully defined on the basis of what we see before our eyes, and therefore this is in effect perhaps the peak of empiricism in a certain sense. So this empiricism begins to attack the rationalism that had ruled the roost and gradually pushes it aside. One of the most heroic efforts to save rationalism at the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth was the effort of Descartes. Descartes’ project was to try to ground all the truths we know about the world and about ourselves in general on a basis that is not observational. Meaning, Descartes was a pronounced rationalist. He was basically the last one. You know how Rabbi Elchanan says in the name of Rabbi Chaim, in the name of the Chafetz Chaim, sorry, that in the process of the decline of the generations there are always peaks—that there’s decline, and at the end there is some peak, then decline again and again a peak. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi is the peak at the end of the Tannaitic period, Rav Ashi is the peak at the end of the Amoraic period, afterward there is I think Maimonides, maybe the Shulchan Arukh—I don’t remember the rest. He claimed that the Chafetz Chaim too was some kind of peak; Rabbi Elchanan wrote that. In any case, Descartes was the peak at the end of rationalism’s decline of the generations. Meaning, with his remaining strength he basically tried to save rationalism from all the attacks. Those attacks, at their root, were: look, friends, rationalism cannot teach us about the world. It’s a certain kind of skepticism, because rationalism is the product of what we think. Now why does the world owe us anything? Does the fact that we think in a certain way mean that the world also has to behave that way? Why? Where does the assumption come from that there is some correlation between how we think and how the world behaves? If we want to learn about the world, how can it be that we do it with our eyes closed? Meaning, we simply think, and that result is what we know about the world. And what if we are built incorrectly? What if our way of thinking doesn’t fit the way the world behaves? How do we know? How do we verify this? By observation, right? We need to check what happens in the world, simply see. Okay, so that skepticism was basically the main basis for the destabilization of rationalism at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era. And then again there was Descartes’ effort, and that effort is described in great detail in his books. His books are written very clearly, and it is very easy to see the motivations—where he is coming from and where he wants to get to. He wants to ground everything in thought without observation. And Descartes was also a scientist, a logician, a mathematician, so it’s interesting that precisely he makes this effort. In any case, the peak of Descartes’ effort was what is called the cogito principle: cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. The claim was that suppose, methodically, I cast doubt on everything—methodic doubt. He didn’t really doubt, but let’s say I doubt everything and see what remains. What remains is basically something grounded in intellect alone, with no observations at all. Now what remained for him in the end was his very existence. I can cast doubt on everything; I cannot cast doubt on my own existence, because if I am doubting, who is the one casting doubt? I am. Meaning, either way I exist. If I am not doubting, then I exist; if I am doubting, then who is casting the doubt? Also me. So either way I exist. I explained this in a certain way; there are some nuances here, but broadly speaking I’m just trying to illustrate Descartes’ goal. His goal was to ground all our knowledge on a consideration that is purely thought, not observation. Why? Why do such a thing? Because on the one hand he already felt—and in that sense he was a bit ahead of his time, and I’ll speak more about this later—that if we go with observation, it will never be certain. Anything that comes from observation is never certain. I’ll speak about that later. Meaning, the alternative that was beginning to emerge in his day, the empiricist alternative, he already understood there would not provide a real alternative. After all, the conception then was that knowledge means certainty. There is no doubtful knowledge. Meaning, Aristotle is certain; what intellect says is certain. So Descartes tried to save that. In other words, he was saying: you empiricists who are trying to offer the alternative of observation don’t understand—you’ll eventually break. Because I can already see now that when you ground everything in observation, an opposite skepticism will arise. Right now skepticism attacks rationalism, but a skepticism will arise that attacks empiricism. Meaning, experience itself will suddenly come under attack, which is indeed what happened a hundred or a bit more years later by David Hume. So he tried somehow to find an anchor, a rock on which he could stand, something not subject to doubt, something above all doubt. And even if one agrees that he succeeded in finding that rock—and even about that there are some disputes, because it’s not a simple question—can I make a claim, a claim about the world, a certain claim about the world, purely by the power of thought alone? That is the rationalist view. It’s hard to accept such a thing a priori. I might be willing to accept such claims if they are not certain, but certain claims, apart from tautologies of course. A tautology one can always say—every thing is either yes or no, okay, because that’s not a claim about the world. But when I make a claim about the world, a claim that says something about the world, something that has an opposite, in order to say it I don’t understand how thought alone can suffice. So much literature was written around Descartes’ cogito to see whether he succeeded or not. But it seems to me that one thing is very clear: he did not manage to continue. Meaning, even if he found the rock, he did not manage to build the house on it. Anyone who examines what follows sees that he now tries to move from that rock to God, and to science, and to our perception of reality, and to all the classifications we make in nature, and so on—there already we find steps that really cannot be based on thought alone. And therefore it seems to me that overall his project failed. Meaning, even if we don’t dispute the cogito—which is a question I’m still not completely settled on—but even if we accept it, it is clear that it stops there. From there onward one cannot proceed in a purely rationalist way, in the mode of thought without observation. Okay, and then after this last casuistry of the death throes—doesn’t reason require observation?

[Speaker C] What? Doesn’t reason require observation?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One could say yes, yes. Meaning, in order to know something about the world you need to look at it.

[Speaker C] And I’m saying that part of thought is observation.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, part of this is that it requires observation—that’s a different statement from being certain of the content of the observation you received. Meaning, those are two different planes.

[Speaker D] Right, but observation after thought—thought and then observation—gives a different picture if you decide.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To us today it’s very clear, but apparently once it wasn’t clear, and it seems to me that even today, for someone who thinks about it, it’s not so simple. I’ll get to that in a moment, but let me continue this historical description. Now empiricism gradually takes over, especially British empiricism—Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and all the philosophers of the century or two afterward, after Descartes. They somehow establish observation as the basis for the alternative, the alternative to rationality—or to rationalism, sorry. Meaning, instead of thought comes observation. Parallel to this—and this is the foundational philosophical move—but parallel to this, and of course, modern science is born, which is a parallel process, not exactly the same process, but philosophy obviously provides some backing here for the development of the scientific field—yes, Galileo and those after him begin experiments, mechanics is created, the Copernican model, afterward of course Newton somewhat later, and so on. Meaning, mechanics and modern physics and modern science are basically born then, and they are of course a result of observation. And the philosophical backing for this is that same revolution that shifted human thought from empiricism to rationalism. Although it takes place in the philosophical world, not in the practical scientific world. What? It seems to me—

[Speaker B] The other way around.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I switched the terms. Okay, from rationalism to empiricism, yes. Now what happens with David Hume? David Hume—we are now in the eighteenth century—creates the next crisis and raises several questions that greatly trouble the empiricists. Meaning, he basically undermines the empiricist alternative because he raises several questions, but one can summarize a considerable part of them—I don’t know if all of them, but a considerable part—in two concepts: causality and induction. Meaning, he undermines the concept of causality, which is very essential to the modern scientific outlook, and the concept of induction, of generalization. And he basically says that the fact that we arrive at a general scientific law is something that places the validity of that law in great doubt. Because after all, what have we seen? We have seen only specific examples. We observed one—ten objects, it doesn’t matter how many phenomena—and from that we infer a conclusion that is a general law. And the question is, what justifies doing that? That is the question of induction. Or alternatively, if the sun has risen every morning until today, who says it will rise tomorrow morning too? Yes, that is induction along the time axis; it doesn’t matter, it’s the same principle. The question is basically: how do you know there is a general law that every morning the sun rises? Unless, of course, you define morning as the rising of the sun, in which case it’s a tautology. If the sun does not rise, there will be no morning. But if we assume there is such a thing as “and there was evening and there was morning” even before the luminaries were hung, as is known, then we can still talk about it. Twenty-four hours? Yes. In any case, you can define the hours according to the movement of the sun and work backward. The clock will keep running—but maybe the clock will malfunction? We see that the hours in the heavens don’t keep going. Okay, in any case, that is the problem of induction, yes? How can we trust the generalizations we make on the basis of several cases and derive from them a general law? And one has to remember that science always deals in general laws. Meaning, science deals in general laws, and therefore this is an essential attack on science. If our science dealt only with things we observed directly, then all we would know—you know, it’s like all the generals preparing for yesterday’s war. Meaning, all we would know is only what has happened. We would never be able to say anything about what will happen. We know what happened—we know—but that is not science. Depends—

[Speaker F] Let’s say, for example, there is Newton’s law, and then Einstein came and said that everything was not exactly right—maybe Einstein isn’t right either. Okay, all the laws—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not talking about whether the generalizations we currently have are correct, but what the basis is for our initial belief in generalizations at all. No one claims that our generalizations are certain. We already said we gave that up. Meaning, we gave up the demand for certainty when we moved from rationalism to empiricism. Enlightened empiricists know that the information they have is not certain. But what Hume asked was: why do you have any confidence in this science at all, in this result? Meaning, why do you think that what happened until now will also happen from now on? Meaning, not certainty, but there is a probability—

[Speaker B] How do you find those probabilities? Statistics. What? So what? Meaning, you know the distribution.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In order to predict something you need to know the distribution. You know the distribution? Maybe the law is simply that it happened until—

[Speaker B] now, and from now on it won’t happen. Suppose a person is sitting on a mountain, thinking about masses of people who jumped off the mountain and died. Okay, I know that it will happen to everyone. How many people, how many people will it take to—none.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And the question is why. The question is not whether you will take the risk. No one recommended not making generalizations. This is a philosophical question: what is the basis for our confidence in generalizations? Why do you really think that if you jump, what happened to them will happen to you too? Why? Statistics is not an explanation. It isn’t. Statistics cannot explain such a thing. There is no connection whatsoever between the events that were and the events that will be. Unless you want to make a different claim. And that claim is that the events that happened did not happen just like that. There was a mechanism that caused them to happen. Meaning, the sun rises every morning because we know the earth rotates. Fine, so therefore the sun rises every morning. Or we fall down from the mountain and are smashed because there is a force of gravity. Therefore we are smashed. And now perhaps we can begin talking this way. Meaning, now perhaps one can say: okay, if there is a force of gravity, then why shouldn’t this happen tomorrow as well? Of course one can ask who said gravity won’t run out today. Fine. But perhaps one can begin speaking in those terms when one moves from induction to causality. And that is the connection between the two questions. But when you speak about causality, you are basically saying: what brought about these events was some cause. And if that cause exists, why would the same thing not happen tomorrow? Or the next time I check? So causality can, of course, ground our confidence in induction. But then we ask: where do we know the principle of causality from? As good skeptics, after all, we cannot just stop at some point and that’s it. Meaning, where do we know the principle of causality from? And here comes another challenge of David Hume. He basically says that if you see one event and then another event, and you connect them by some causal relation, you are doing that entirely on your own account. There is no indication whatsoever that there is truly a causal connection between those two events. Suppose I kick a ball and the ball flies. Usually we are accustomed to thinking that the kick is the cause of the ball’s flying. Right? Who says? True, we kicked and afterward the ball flew. How do you know there is a relation of causation? Now I can offer several alternatives—not only that, I mean I can also simply remain with maybe there is nothing there and that’s it. But I can also offer alternatives that actually say something, that are alternatives to the causal relation. For example, there is a book by a Jewish-American logician named Raymond Smullyan. He used to do logical stand-up comedy. I think he’s a hundred years old already, maybe he’s already passed away, he was very old. In any case, in one of his books he writes that he wants to defend astrology. He says that what happens in the stars gives us indications of what happens here. Now physicists often attack astrology on a physical basis. They say that information from the stars to here would take—it cannot travel faster than the speed of light, and therefore it is impossible that you can somehow simultaneously cause an influence from that distance to Earth. I think that argument is incorrect, but never mind, because if we see the stars that means the information has already traveled, after all, since we do this on the basis of what we see, not on the basis of what is happening now. What we see is what happened a long time ago. But no matter, let’s say that question is valid. If that question is valid, says Raymond Smullyan, it still doesn’t mean astrology is false. Why? Because it could be that there is a third factor that programmed both processes, on earth and in the heavens, so that they would run in some parallel fashion. And if I look at the heavens, that gives me an indication of what will happen down here—not because the heavens influence what happens down here, but because there is synchronization. Once there is synchronization—this is Leibniz’s parable of the clocks. You see two clocks running together, so does that mean one causes the other? No. It means they have the same mechanism, there is some matching between the mechanisms, and every time this one shows a certain hour, that one will show the same hour, right? So the fact that we see a correlation between two things does not necessarily mean there is a causal relation between them. Same thing when I see that every time I kick a ball, the ball flies. I don’t know—maybe it’s terribly afraid of the kick and therefore decides to run fast, who knows? How do you know that the kick is always the cause and the ball’s flight is the effect? Meaning, the causal relation, says David Hume, is not an object of observation. You cannot see with your eyes that event A is the cause of event B. You can see that event A comes before event B—that you do see. But you cannot see that this is the cause, that this is what brings about event B. That is your conclusion. But if so, then one cannot save the principle of induction through the principle of causality, because the principle of causality also requires explanation or justification. Okay? So we have here a knot that cannot be untangled, and ironically, once again, we have before us two ways of dealing with it. One way is a rationalist way, and one way is an empiricist way. We have no additional toolboxes, right? Either to think or to look. Meaning, either observation or thought. Now either way, what can we do? If we use thought, then the question will arise how thought can tell me anything about the world. After all, all of empiricism is built on the claim that you cannot draw conclusions about the world from—so what shall we do, draw conclusions by empiricist means? But then the empiricist means themselves will be exposed to the same problems we came to solve. Because after all, what are we going to do? For example, there were such proposals. It sounds very funny, but there were such proposals. We learn inductively that induction works. Since in previous cases when we made a generalization it worked, so now too it works. Now you understand that when I present it that way it really is strange, and it can’t be that induction establishes itself. But understand that there is no other way out. There is no other way out. Because how can you justify the problems in the empiricist conception without being exposed to those same problems? Or in other words, neither empiricism nor rationalism gives us an answer. Rationalism gives us no answer because why assume the world fits the way I think? And empiricism gives us no answer because it has no basis. So if I see something, does that mean the conclusions I infer are therefore correct? Again, I am basically thinking. If you look at it this way, what is generalization? What is generalization? Generalization is a process of thought. It is not a process of observation. So if I see several objects falling to the earth, I generalize and say: every body with mass falls to the earth. That process of generalization is a thought process, not an observational process. Right? That’s thought. The observation is only the bodies I saw. How do I know all bodies fall? I make a generalization. But the generalization is a process of thought. So that means the empiricist once again needs thought. It’s again like another tactic.

[Speaker B] So how to do it? I think here it’s built on probability. I make a theory about gravity. And maybe it’s not correct, but now we’ll go to the lab and I’ll make another hypothesis, yes, and I verify the hypothesis. Who says it has to hold on the moon or somewhere else or with two bodies? I’ll do all kinds of experiments and I see that each time it gives me a higher degree of certainty. This case and this case and this case. But I think in practice this is how we work. And in practice philosophers aren’t interested in that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s obvious how we work. I’m asking what the justification is for how we work. After all, that’s a philosopher’s question. What is the justification for what every person does—and he too does what every person does. What is the justification for that? In the end I can offer you, for every set of observations you bring me, infinitely many explanations. Why assume דווקא that this explanation is the correct one? Think of a graph—we’ll talk about this at some point later—think of some graph with several measured points. You can fit it in many ways. Not only with a straight line, right? Why assume the straight line is the correct one? Because that’s how we work. Okay, but what is the justification for the fact that this is how we work? And therefore there is here some knot that in Hume’s time scientific and philosophical thought basically got stuck in. And this is really a knot with no way out. It’s a knot with no way out because Hume placed on the table the inherent problematic nature of the way we infer conclusions about the world. About the world—not only the scientific world, but the world in general. On the one hand, observation alone will not give us general conclusions, because you need generalizations, you need to assume causal connections, and all of these are processes of thought, not processes of observation. On the other hand, thought—why assume thought fits what happens in the world? Against the basic attack through which empiricism was created. So there is here essentially a crossroads with no exit. And now the question is what to do. There was a crisis—among the philosophers there was a crisis. Scientists work like you—they keep working because that’s how it seems to them and that’s that; let the philosophers rack their brains.

[Speaker B] Yes, here if observation moves from being an observational hypothesis to absolute observation—meaning, the hand under the microscope—then you already see the things happening.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, but you see a particular case. I am always speaking about general laws. Because after observing a particular thing, you create a generalization. You never see the generalization. You see the cases. You can check another case if you want, another two. But you don’t see the general law. How do you know it is a general law?

[Speaker B] The general law cannot be observed.