Torah and Science, Lesson 6
This transcription was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- Paley’s watch and the proof of a creator
- Different conceptions of God and types of proofs
- Historical stages in the relationship between religion and science
- Parallel explanations and psychology-philosophy examples
- Illusory correlations and bundling positions together
- The limits of parallelism: causality and a sufficient condition
- The postmodern stage and criticism of it
- The synthetic stage: solving problems, checking assumptions, and ease
- Using modern tools within Torah study
- Fear, absolute declarations, and willingness to be tested
Summary
General Overview
The speaker wants to conclude the chapter on “Torah and science” and begins by completing a point from the previous lecture through “Paley’s watch” as a model for a physico-theological proof: complexity requires a creator even if the system does not look optimal to us, and comments like “why does it work this way and not another way” at most touch on the image of God as portrayed in different traditions, not on the very existence of a creator. He then presents, from a bird’s-eye view, a sequence of historical-essential approaches to the relationship between religion and science—confrontation, apologetics, parallelism, postmodernism, and finally a “synthetic” position that seeks to solve factual contradictions using tools of factual clarification, to reexamine traditional assumptions that created the conflict, and to live without a sense of threat, with a willingness to correct understandings on both the scientific and the traditional side.
Paley’s watch and the proof of a creator
The speaker presents Paley’s watch as the claim that designed complexity requires a watchmaker, unlike a rock about which one might say, “it was always here.” He argues that evolutionary questions of the type “if the Holy One, blessed be He, made it, then why isn’t it optimal and why are there so many stages and so much waste” do not undermine the claim that there is a creator, just as a watchmaker exists even if the watch is built inefficiently in the observer’s eyes. He says that evolution is not a “being” but a description of a process that produces complexity, and that the question still arises: who established the laws of that process? He distinguishes between proof of the creator of the world and proof of a “perfect being,” and emphasizes that this proof does not prove perfection, does not prove the giving of the Torah, and does not lead directly to putting on tefillin or reciting Hallel on Rosh Chodesh.
Different conceptions of God and types of proofs
The speaker says that every proof for the existence of God assumes a different “figure”: the creator of the world, the greatest sage, the source of the good, and other conceptions, though these are not different entities. He notes that the ontological proof tries to prove a “perfect being,” but he does not go into it and defines it as deep and subtle. He argues that from observing the world one cannot positively prove the perfection of the Holy One, blessed be He, because a person cannot identify perfection even if he encounters it.
Historical stages in the relationship between religion and science
The speaker describes a religious hegemony until the end of the Middle Ages, in which “the game hadn’t started yet,” and whoever contradicted the dogmas was considered simply mistaken, because “what doesn’t fit the dogmas is illegitimate.” He describes how, when science grew stronger in the 15th–16th centuries, a confrontational stance emerged, and in the Christian world they solved it by burning people, while in the Jewish world there was no such power, though Maimonides’ books were burned “in one way or another.” He describes an apologetic stage in the 16th–17th centuries in which one could no longer simply “burn,” so science was presented as fitting tradition through interpretation. He describes a “parallel” stage in which science and Torah live side by side without speaking to each other, with educational formulas like “science speaks about the what and Torah about the why,” and he gives Yeshayahu Leibowitz as a sharp example: as a man of science the world has existed ten or twenty billion years, and as a Jew it has existed six thousand years.
Parallel explanations and psychology-philosophy examples
The speaker asks how one can hold two contradictory things, and suggests that sometimes two different explanations are not contradictory but operate on different planes. He illustrates this through the cases of someone who becomes religious and someone who leaves religion, where one side tends toward a psychological explanation and the other toward an ideological-philosophical one, and he argues that both can be true together, because human actions are influenced both by mental state and environment and by value-based and rational justifications. He adds that people sometimes choose the explanation that is convenient for them so as not to deal with the other side’s arguments, but also explains that each side’s position has an internal logic in attributing rationality to someone who joins and psychological motives to someone who leaves.
Illusory correlations and bundling positions together
The speaker presents “illusory correlations” as a pattern in which independent questions get attached in public positions as though they were dependent. He gives an example from the period of Rabin’s second government concerning the discussion of returning the Golan, and argues that the question of whether it is right to do so and the question of whether Rabin has a moral-political “mandate” are two different questions that should produce four public positions, but in practice the public split mainly into two, through an unjustified bundling. He gives another example from the conversion controversy involving Rabbi Druckman, Rabbi Sherman, Rabbi Amsalem, and Rabbi Ronsky, and argues that the debate is made up of many independent questions, yet in public positions there appeared mainly two polarized packages, sometimes to the point of adjusting facts to fit the narrative.
The limits of parallelism: causality and a sufficient condition
The speaker argues that parallelism of “full explanations” cannot work in hardcore cases, because an explanation is supposed to provide a sufficient condition for the existence of the effect, and if it really is sufficient then there cannot also be another sufficient explanation alongside it that is independent of it. He illustrates this through the Newton-and-the-apple myth: if the laws of physics determine that an apple will fall under certain conditions, one cannot simultaneously say that the apple fell only because Adam sinned, unless one gives up the physical explanation as a cause. He accepts a distinction between a full cause and part-causes, and gives an example from genetics about carrier status and “probabilistic determinism” to say that a single part is not a cause; the cause is the whole set that is sufficient for the result. He concludes that parallelism is psychologically convenient, but it is not an answer to factual contradictions like “six thousand years or fifteen billion years” without a real explanation.
The postmodern stage and criticism of it
The speaker presents a postmodern stage in which science and religion are perceived as narratives reporting experience rather than claims about the world, so that a person “experiences” six thousand in the synagogue and fifteen billion in a scientific context. He attributes to Rabbi Shagar a formulation of a “circle of difference” in which everyone is equally distant from the center, and criticizes this as peace between “the absence of opinions” rather than between opinions, because the price is giving up the truths of both sides. As an extreme example in criticizing postmodernism, he mentions the attack on the foundations of science and the claim that physics is “constructed in a masculine way,” and quotes Gadi Taub in The Slouching Revolt saying that he does not want to get on an airplane built according to “the conditions of feminine physics.”
The synthetic stage: solving problems, checking assumptions, and ease
The speaker proposes a fifth, “synthetic,” stage that restores the demand to solve factual problems using tools of factual clarification, and is willing to reexamine traditional assumptions that gave rise to conflict. He says that as science advanced, certainty declined that “we know what happens in the world,” and therefore today one cannot simply accept that everything appearing in the Talmud is scientifically correct. He argues that there is no necessity to assume that the scientific details in the words of the Sages came down to Moses at Sinai, and brings from the Talmud itself descriptions of gathering information and consulting experts, such as “that one who was a cattle shepherd” in matters of blemishes in firstborn animals. He states that the Sages worked according to the information available to them and therefore were subject to the scientific errors of their period, and that precisely this position gives him a sense of ease, because there is no need to panic over specific contradictions.
Using modern tools within Torah study
The speaker argues that science and modern tools open up possibilities of understanding and analysis that earlier generations did not have, in the social sciences and humanities as well as in logic, and he says there are topics in which he is convinced that “all the medieval authorities were mistaken” in logic. He gives an example from the laws of mikva’ot regarding a pit of drawn water and a water channel, and argues that the medieval authorities made mathematical approximations that are “wrong by thousands of percent” because they did not have the tool of infinitesimal calculus, whereas today one can calculate more precisely. He says that if there is a contradiction that cannot be reconciled, then one must either reconcile it, or give up one side, or remain with “it requires further analysis,” but without slogans and without fear.
Fear, absolute declarations, and willingness to be tested
The speaker describes how earlier stages in the attitude toward Torah and science contain a sense of threat that gives rise to declarations like Wolff’s at the opening of his book: “Science is false and our Torah is true,” and he sees this as an expression of fear. He argues that the synthetic position eliminates fear because it is prepared to test claims and learn, and even says, in an extreme formulation, that if “they scientifically prove that there is no God,” then that would be the conclusion, without panic. He concludes by saying that he is stopping “at the declarative level” and suggests that next time it will be decided which topic to continue with.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I hope I’ll finish this chapter of our study on Torah and science today, and therefore the topic of free choice together with neuroscience and things of that sort—that’s a whole issue that, if you want, we’ll devote a separate chapter to. I’m not going to bring it in here. This whole business has gone on a bit longer than I thought, this discussion of Torah and science. So what I want to do today is, first, I still owe you something from last time, when I started talking about something and then in the middle I suddenly forgot what I had meant to talk about. On the drive back I suddenly remembered. So I’ll just complete that, and afterward I’ll come back and give a more general look at this topic—kind of history, but not really history, more essential in nature—and with that I’ll finish.
So I’ll begin, of course, with Paley’s watch. That’s where I got stuck in the middle last time. I talked about the fact that one of the formulations of the physico-theological proof for the existence of God is this one—yes—from some American priest, I think, from the 19th century, who says that if we saw a rock lying here and asked where it came from, we might say: it was always here. But if we see a watch lying here on the floor, then we ask where it came from, and we won’t accept the answer: it was always here. Why not? If there’s something that is complex, designed, seems somehow—yes—with low entropy, with some kind of complexity, then apparently someone made it.
Now of course a lot of people attacked him, together with Hoyle’s airplane and all the rest of those things—they’re part of the atheists’ list of ridicule. But I’m not going back over that; those are things I already discussed last time. I just want to explain why I started moving toward this point. Because an entire type of questions, coming from evolution, about belief in God can be illustrated through this issue. This is the type of question that says: if the Holy One, blessed be He, really made this, then why does it work this way and not another way? Why is there so much dust along the way, in short? Why do so many stages along the way die out? If the Holy One, blessed be He, wants to produce a system of laws that will take the singular point, say, in the beginning and make human beings out of it in the end, why not do it in a straight line? Why so much fallout on the sides? After all, huge numbers of species went extinct. It doesn’t look like an optimal process, like a process that was planned in advance in that sense. In other words, there’s some kind of claim here about the ways of the Holy One, blessed be He, or about the mode of action of the Holy One, blessed be He—that it doesn’t look right. That’s another type of question coming from evolution.
And here, with Paley’s watch, I think you can illustrate why all these questions are irrelevant. Because let’s say I discovered that this watch works in a non-optimal way. A watch made with some electric circuit inside, whatever, something in it was done in a way that contains unnecessary parts, okay? Or things that I would have made more efficiently. Would that overturn the conclusion that there was a watchmaker? Of course not. This watch is still complex, it still requires an explanation. In other words, the complexity remains. The only thing is that it’s a different kind of complexity—not the complexity you would have produced, but a complexity that comes from a different mind, from a different kind of thinking. So at most I can say that I don’t understand the watchmaker’s mind. But what does that have to do with the question of whether there is a watchmaker? When I see a watch here, I say there is a watchmaker. Now I open it up and see that it works in an illogical way. I would have built it better, if I had, if it were in my hands, okay? So the conclusion is not that there is no watchmaker, because it is still a complex thing that could not have arisen by chance.
[Speaker B] Maybe that means the watchmaker is stupid?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Huh? No, it doesn’t mean the watchmaker is stupid. It means the watchmaker thought differently from you. Now again, maybe to you he looks stupid—but there is a watchmaker, okay? So to you he seems stupid. Now start thinking: is it that you don’t understand, or maybe really he’s not all that intelligent. But you can’t say there is no watchmaker.
[Speaker B] Could evolution be the watchmaker? What? Evolution is the watchmaker? So what I said is—it’s a description, not an object. Evolution isn’t a being; it’s a process that produces complexity.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but that’s what I talked about last time. That takes us back there. But then we ask: who established the laws that govern this process? And therefore that brings us back to last time’s discussion. Here I just want to complete that point where I got stuck last time and wanted to illustrate it through the watch. It’s simply a misunderstanding, this kind of question. At most, it can challenge the image of the Holy One, blessed be He, as we know it from tradition. From a different tradition.
[Speaker C] But you can’t say that, because there isn’t a model of a proof that isn’t perfect. So that’s…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can’t say: here you now have—
[Speaker C] You saw that there’s a watch here that wasn’t made well, okay. But if there’s God, then you have to say that the watch is an excellent watch, the best possible, but we just don’t understand.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying, wait a second, that’s a second-order question. I’m saying first of all: the claim is that He exists. After all, I already said that every proof for the existence of God assumes a different conception of Him. Every type of proof assumes a different conception, a different God. Wait—a different conception. One of them is the creator of the world, the second is the greatest sage, the third is the source of the good. Every proof assumes a different conception of God. Now, that doesn’t mean, of course, that these are different entities. It only means that each time we can look at Him from a different angle and prove His existence from a different angle… I’ll answer you. To prove His existence from a different angle.
And therefore, in this case, when I prove the existence of God in this context, I’m not proving the existence of a perfect being. A perfect being is the God whom one tries to prove in the ontological proof, which I didn’t go into because it’s a bit deep. Here I’m proving the existence of the creator of the world. And I’m saying that if there is a world, then it has a creator. The question whether He is perfect or not—that’s a different question. Maybe not, okay. But there is a creator of the world, that’s all. In other words, from the standpoint of this argument, it remains intact. After all, even if this watch worked optimally according to my standards, that still wouldn’t mean its maker is perfect. Maybe there’s an even better way that I just can’t think of. What am I, the greatest sage? Maybe there’s an even better form. I can never positively prove that the Holy One, blessed be He, is perfect, because I cannot—
[Speaker C] identify perfection even when I see it. In order to identify perfection, I would have to be… Rabbi, in Judaism that’s impossible. What do you mean impossible? Meaning, in Judaism it’s either-or, there’s no middle. You can’t say there’s a watch that isn’t perfect. Fine, then ask what you think.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I told you, that’s a second-order question.
[Speaker C] The first level—in Judaism that’s first-order.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, now you have to decide what Judaism is. All of Judaism is second-order.
[Speaker C] I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a God, okay?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now I’m asking: there is an entity that created the world. Now you ask whether it is perfect or not?
[Speaker C] Second question. Answer it. But if you’re Greek in the Greek world, okay, because there are Olympian gods who are not perfect and everyone does understand some measure of knowledge. But in the theology of monotheism, let’s say, there’s no such thing as a God…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I understand, I understand, but I answered that. I’m saying again, I’m saying that this is—
[Speaker C] first-order, that’s what I’m saying. Fine, that’s terminology.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let me tell you what I mean. When I reached the conclusion that there is something or someone that created the world, okay? Do we agree on that conclusion? I’m not talking about whether He is perfect or not. Is there such a thing? Yes or no? If I’m not talking nonsense, then fine. What do you mean no? Is there someone who created the world? Leave aside for a moment who or what He is, whether He is perfect or not perfect. Is there someone who created the world?
[Speaker B] If by the maker of the watch, then yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, assuming I’m following the argument. That’s all. And that’s where this argument gets to. And from there on, you can also ask whether He gave the Torah. This argument also doesn’t prove that He gave the Torah. It also doesn’t prove, I don’t know, a whole lot of other things. I’m not claiming that from Paley’s watch I’m going to get to putting on tefillin, or to Hallel on Rosh Chodesh. I’m saying that Paley’s watch takes me to that philosophical conclusion—that there exists something or someone that created the world. From that point onward, questions of what His nature is, whether He is Jewish, Christian, or Buddhist, whether He wants me to put on tefillin or, I don’t know, stand on one foot—those are many additional questions, but they’re unrelated to this proof. If people reach the conclusion that there is no God… okay, so I’m saying, they do not reach the conclusion that there is no God. They reach the conclusion that God is—
[Speaker C] not perfect.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, then in that case they’re mistaken. Because this argument says there is. At most you can say He isn’t perfect. Fine, that’s another debate. This proof is not the tool to deal with that. We cannot arrive by any philosophical proof at God’s perfection, except perhaps through the ontological proof, which is what that proof tries to do. Whether it succeeds or not—that’s a subtle question. But certainly not through observation. And all the other types of proofs are the result of observation. And the reason for that is very simple. Suppose this watch worked in an optimal way—would that prove that the watch is perfect?
[Speaker B] Sorry, wait—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One second.
[Speaker B] You’re saying it backwards, though. What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That I—
[Speaker B] can’t prove that the watch is perfect and that doesn’t bother me, fine. But if the watch I find supposedly proves to me that the watch is not perfect, that’s a bit of a different problem.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re right, but that’s why I said it doesn’t prove that the watch is not perfect. It proves that the watchmaker’s mind is above mine. Now I can decide whether he is perfect or not perfect.
[Speaker B] I’m just saying this proof won’t be the tool to decide that. Yes. The thought process says: if there is a created thing, there is a creator. That’s the idea. So why stop there? It’s only optional. If there is something created, who created it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I talked about all that last time, I’m not going back to it again. I’m just doing a completion now—we discussed it. I’m not going back to it. Not every being has a creator; only a being of the type our experience deals with has a creator. Otherwise this chain never stops. That’s another common mistake on various atheist websites. You can find all kinds of such questions raised with excessive confidence.
[Speaker D] I once heard people ask, wait, and who created God, and who created the one who created God? And then you can ask… But first of all there’s no such thing. First of all there’s no such thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, so that’s already a question about the method of discussion in general, yes. Okay.
Good, that’s the completion of last time. I’ll come back to our track. Basically what I want to do now is look again, from a bird’s-eye view, at the development of the relations between Torah and science. I’ll present it in a way that looks historical, but my purpose isn’t historical. Most of this history, or a large part of it, didn’t even happen among us at all—it happened in the Christian world. But I think that each stage highlights a different aspect or a different way of relating to these relations between Torah and science, and in that sense I think it gives some kind of map that will help us formulate a position or orient ourselves.
So the story begins—as I said, I’m describing it historically without being committed, of course, to every exception; this is a generalization. History is always more complex. When I say that in a certain period a certain approach dominated, it’s obvious that here and there there were other approaches too, but broadly speaking, from a bird’s-eye view.
So let’s say that until the end of the Middle Ages, the beginning of the modern era, the end of the Middle Ages, there was some kind of hegemony of the religious conception. And because of that there really wasn’t a genuine rival. In other words, the game hadn’t started yet. The game hadn’t started because the religious outlook was such that if someone proposed a different outlook, he was simply mistaken. He wasn’t a heretic, he was mistaken. It just wasn’t correct because it didn’t fit the dogmas, and what doesn’t fit the dogmas is illegitimate. Now true, the dogmas themselves also came from Aristotle, so the description I’m giving now isn’t all that simple. The dogmas didn’t come down from Mount Sinai or from the Sea of Galilee. But never mind—in the accepted churchly or religious outlook, when someone said something contrary to the religious principles, to the religious conceptions, then he was simply mistaken.
When science begins to develop—and we talked about this a little in one of the previous meetings—say in the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries, more the 15th and 16th, then some first signs of conflict begin to appear, and at that point a confrontational stance emerges, yes? Let’s call that the first stage. The first stage is the confrontational stance, in which we perceive these two methods as standing opposite one another. And since religious hegemony, the religious conception, is still dominant, hegemonic, they deal with these confrontational rebels in the simplest ways possible—they just burn them and solve the problem. That’s the church’s method for dealing with Torah-and-science problems.
Now in the Jewish world, by the way, it’s easy to say this, like in the Kuzari—it’s easy for us to vilify them because we couldn’t do that then; we didn’t have the power. I don’t know what would have happened if we had had the power to do it. That’s another discussion. But Maimonides’ books were indeed burned, in one way or another. Burning Maimonides’ books isn’t exactly the same thing, but it’s still something. But that was the first stage.
[Speaker B] In the—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the second stage, science starts to strengthen, the 16th, 17th centuries and onward, and then you can no longer solve the problem by burning. In other words, we begin to encounter a more significant problem, and with time the wheel turns a bit the other way. I’m skipping through time, of course—this is a very high-level description. The religious conception starts to find itself on the defensive. In other words, this is the apologetic stage, the stage in which we explain that really what we… yes, we know these kinds of things today too, but it started, I think, in the 17th century or something like that, when we explain that actually what science discovers fits what exists among us—what we already have. In other words, with this interpretation or that interpretation, it’s really already there. You can’t any longer—to beat them, join them, as the saying goes—in other words, if you can’t burn him, then show that he’s really already with me. In other words, I too know what he knows. So that’s the apologetic position. That’s the second stage.
So we started with the confrontational stage under religious hegemony. The second stage is still confrontational, but through apologetics I manage to reconcile the matter. The third stage—you could perhaps call it the parallel stage. The stage in which people arrive at the conclusion, or at a picture, in which the scientific description and the traditional or religious description live in parallel. In other words, they don’t speak to one another.
And I know that when I was a child, we were constantly taught, in questions of Torah and science, that science speaks about the what and Torah speaks about the why. Or statements of that sort. And so this is really an attempt to cut, with a sharp knife, the scientific picture away from the religious picture, to create some possibility of parallelism in which they don’t speak to one another. And that too is another way of coping, because you understand where this comes from. It comes at a stage where apologetics no longer works either. It’s a retreat battle. A retreat battle. In other words, we began by burning anyone who didn’t think like us. We continued by explaining: no, no, what he discovered is really already found by us too. That’s apologetics. At the stage when that doesn’t work either, we say: his discourse is one thing and my discourse is another; there’s some kind of parallelism here.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz was perhaps one of the sharpest representatives of this conception, when he says that as a man of science the world has existed ten billion years or twenty billion years, and as a Jew it has existed six thousand years. And that’s that. He doesn’t trouble himself to explain how those things fit together; he just says it and lives with it.
Now there are less extreme forms, but still, there are less extreme forms, but still that was the spirit of things, I think, in the 1970s, I would say, among us. And now I’ve shifted to Jews already, not Christians. Everything they forgot, we haven’t learned yet. But when I look at the Jewish picture, then among us, say, for observant scientists—that’s apologetics. That’s the stage that ended, I think, in the 1970s or 1980s, and after that came the parallel stage. The stage that says: leave it alone, these are two things that don’t speak to one another.
Now, what I want to examine a bit more is this point about parallelism, because it remains with us to this day, and not for nothing. There are points in it that are important, even when I get to the later stages. On the face of it, it looks problematic. The world exists for ten billion years or six thousand years—what does that mean? As a scientist I think this, and as a believing Jew I think that. What you think is a report about psychology. I’m asking what was. Not what you think. In other words, what do you think was, yes? How can one say two contradictory things and stay alive?
Now here there’s a subtle point that can shed some light, but one has to be careful with it. Many times we have a tendency to perceive different explanations as necessarily contradictory. In other words, if explanation A is correct, then explanation B is not correct, and vice versa. Right? I think I once mentioned here the example of the person who becomes religious and the person who leaves religion. Didn’t I? The person who becomes religious, yes? Someone who becomes religious—I mean a secular person who becomes religious, not “repentance” in Maimonides’ sense, or not in its broader meaning. So his secular friends immediately look for some crisis he went through. I don’t know, a personal crisis, his parents, something happened, his girlfriend, he broke up with his girlfriend, I don’t know exactly what. Some sort of crises like that which caused the whole thing. In other words, they look for the explanation on the psychological plane. And what do his new religious friends say? Oh, he discovered the light. In other words, finally he understood where the truth is. They’re philosophers. Right? The secular people are psychologists and the religious people are philosophers.
Now what happens with someone who leaves religion? Someone who leaves religion—the religious explain that he wanted to permit forbidden sexual relations to himself. Right? So they’re psychologists. You see, as a psychologist—he laughs. And the secular people are philosophers. They say, oh, finally he stopped all his nonsense; he discovered the truth. Right? So they’re philosophers. In other words, in both these processes, opposite sides of us somehow show themselves. One time we function as psychologists, one time we function as philosophers. And beyond a certain lack of integrity that this exposes, the question is: how does that happen, or can such a thing really be? Or I’ll put it even more simply: who is right?
Well, it depends whether you’re religious or secular. The question of who is right, of course, also depends on that. But it seems to me that not so. Both are right. Both are right because for every side of what a person does, one can offer explanations on the philosophical, ideological, value-based plane, whatever; everyone does his own soul-searching. And one can also find explanations on the psychological plane. The whole question is really in what context you’re looking at the person. If you’re looking at him as a psychologist, then your role is not to analyze his worldview but to see what brought him to these things, and if he’s uncomfortable with it then perhaps help him deal with the matter. But the psychologist looks at it with such lenses, so the explanation he finds is a psychological explanation. And the philosopher who looks at it—or just a person who isn’t a psychologist, you don’t have to be a philosopher for this, just someone who looks and wants to examine the positions themselves—he looks at it through philosophical lenses. What I’m calling philosophy here for the purposes of the discussion is that he asks: what is the person’s logic, what questions did he ask, what answers did he receive, what decisions did he make as a result of that? In other words, that’s on the philosophical plane. Who is right? Both are right.
Is there a person on earth who does anything not influenced by psychological aspects, by his environment, by emotional things he goes through? Obviously not. None of us is exempt from that. But on the other hand, if a person is not in some problematic state, then naturally he will probably also offer a justification or rationalization for what he’s doing, right? And he’ll also have some explanation for why he sees logic in the decision he made. And that too will be there. So in fact both are right.
But before I continue with this “both are right,” then why does each of us choose only one of the two explanations, if both are true? Yes, because we choose what is convenient for us. Each of us, after all, doesn’t want to deal with someone who goes against his own worldview, so the easiest thing is to attribute it to some crisis he went through, right? Because that exempts me from really dealing with what he is doing, with what he is claiming. Maybe there are really arguments there that require dealing with. And someone for whom it is convenient, of course, is happy to discover that another person is joining the right camp. So then why bring in psychology? It’s all philosophy. In other words, we’re all pure intellects when someone joins us, and when someone leaves us, then we’re aching souls.
Still, I think I’d say one more sentence so as not to leave things in quite so grotesque a form. There’s something more genuine here. Here I actually don’t agree that it is necessarily a lack of integrity. Why? Because obviously, if I think my religious conception is true—this is my worldview, this is what I think—then if someone joins me, why assume that some crisis did it to him? In other words, he probably really understood that this is what is true. I’m saying this from both sides. But if someone takes a step that in my eyes is irrational, then I look for explanations on the psychological plane. In other words, from his own standpoint there is something to that, yes? If I think my position is correct, then when someone acts in a way that is not—usually when do we look for psychological explanations? When the rational explanation doesn’t seem plausible to us. So I say, fine, he gives me a rational explanation, but that rational explanation is nonsense, so why did he really reach that conclusion? Probably because of a psychological crisis. And of course the same from the opposite side. In other words, both sides are following their own assumptions here, and I don’t think it is necessarily a lack of integrity, unlike in other cases.
For example, other examples of a lack of integrity, it seems to me, can be found quite easily. And I’ll just say this very briefly: this is a topic I call illusory correlations. Illusory correlations are basically a structure very similar to this issue of becoming religious and leaving religion. It first occurred to me during Rabin’s second government, when once again—as happened one of thousands of times, I no longer remember which one—the debate arose whether to conduct negotiations with the Syrians over the Golan. So yes, of course there was a big public debate, and I was riding on a bus and saw on some car a sticker that said: Rabin has no mandate to return the Golan. And then I asked myself whether the owner of the car supports an agreement with the Syrians or not. And I answered myself: you can’t know. Why can’t you know? Because there were two questions on the table that are, in my opinion, completely independent.
The first question is whether it is right to do this or not—on the ideological level, the security level, the religious level, each in its own dimension. Is it right to do this or not? Fine, that’s one debate; both sides have arguments; you can debate it. The second debate is one of political morality. You promised something before the election—can you do it afterward? Can you do the opposite afterward? Yes, “things seen from there are not seen from here.” A question in political morality, not a simple question. Now I assume that in extreme cases we would all agree no, in less extreme cases perhaps we would agree yes, but where the line is drawn—that’s where we have a debate. Because if it were an outright contradiction, that would be a correlation of minus one; there’s no such thing as zero correlation. So the moral question is also a question with two sides. It really does have two sides. The question whether a person can retract in light of “things seen from there are not seen from here,” when he sits in the prime minister’s chair and sees other things, is exposed to different information—that’s obviously true. The question is how far one can use that consideration and where the line is. Good question, a debatable question.
Now there were two debates there. When there are two independent debates, how many positions should emerge in the public? Four, right? Two to the power of the number of debates, okay, if they are independent. How many positions were there in the public? Two. Which two? Those who thought this was wrong and that it was not right to do also said it was immoral. And those who thought it was right to do also said it was moral. What’s the connection? What’s the connection between the moral question and the political-ideological-security question? There is no connection. They are simply completely independent. So why do these positions get attached to one another? Why don’t we find those more complex positions that say, look, it’s moral but in my opinion it’s not right, or it’s not moral but actually I support such an agreement? There were almost none—again, maybe here and there on the margins, but generally in society there wasn’t, there was no such view. You don’t find it.
Here it is certainly a lack of integrity. Unlike the previous case, which I could explain from each side’s own standpoint, this case is certainly a lack of integrity. These are people making decisions in an intellectually dishonest way. Not always consciously, by the way, okay? Not always consciously. Sometimes a person is captive to his own conception, so he judges the morality too according to where he wants to end up. But clearly there’s some dishonest element here.
[Speaker C] No, because they thought the line was drawn right next to their side.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but somehow those who thought it was right also think the line was drawn next to their side, and those who thought it wasn’t right think the line was not drawn next to their side. It’s the same question; that doesn’t solve the problem.
[Speaker C] It was such a heavy matter. In the end they said this wasn’t some medium thing, not so important—they said it was the destructive thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I can say that it isn’t right but it’s not such a weighty matter.
[Speaker C] I can say that it is right and that it is a weighty matter. The weightiness doesn’t depend on what my position is regarding that question.
[Speaker D] When can you say, “These and those are the words of the living God”? When there is a dispute—this one says this and that one says that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, wait, “these and those are the words of the living God” is another topic. Maybe we’ll talk about that one of the next times. But I don’t want to mix it in here. It may be related, but it’s not the same thing.
[Speaker B] So it seems to me that here specifically the example is very interesting, because I’m one of those for whom the positions really are independent in this matter, right? An exception. I think it was justified. There was a root there that raises arguments…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I’m not talking about the media. I’m talking about people I spoke with.
[Speaker B] There were a lot of people who were split on it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t meet them. No, really. I spoke with people, I tried to look, until suddenly the penny dropped for me: there just weren’t, I hardly found any such people.
[Speaker C] So it’s complex. Okay. A person got up and spoke about all four things.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Too bad. I once spoke about this in Makor Rishon, I once wrote a response about the conversion issue, about the controversy surrounding Rabbi Druckman’s conversions, the criticism by Rabbi Sherman, and so on. And I wrote that, just off the cuff, cold, I can think of at least fifteen independent questions that have to be answered in order to formulate a position on this issue. Are you in favor of this conversion or against this conversion? So how many positions should there be in the public according to that? Two to the fifteenth power, right? There are people who answer yes to question A… what? I’m not talking about the conclusion. I’m talking about the overall picture. Meaning, there are people who say yes to question one, no to question two, no to question three, no to question four, yes to question five, and so on. Others divide it up differently. There are two to the fifteenth power possibilities. How many possibilities were there in the public? Two. There were those who were against the conversions from every angle, and there were those who were in favor of the conversions, and that too from every angle.
[Speaker B] But when you make a decision, sometimes…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not the decision, I’m talking about the arguments. That’s what he pointed out earlier. I accept that point. I’m not talking about the decision, I’m talking about the arguments. You saw the arguments, you saw that there were people who supported this conversion and all along the whole front they answered yes.
[Speaker B] Maybe because they assign greater importance to one of the questions.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, then let them answer no to that one and tell me that the yes-question is more important, and therefore that’s the answer. Almost nobody said that.
[Speaker C] But it’s even worse here. I saw a video with Rabbi Sherman against Rabbi Amsalem and Rabbi Ronsky. They argue—someone like Rabbi Sherman sits opposite Rabbi Ronsky and says that Rabbi Ronsky includes Conservatives and Reform in the conversion process. And they also change the facts.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, okay. So again, there are many more problems there. I’m not going to get into all the problems there. I’m just saying this is another example.
[Speaker C] Not theoretical—they go all the way…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but I’m saying as an example… I’m bringing this only as an example of a discussion that is much more complex than it looks at first glance, and again it’s an example of illusory correlations. There’s a correlation between the answers we give to different questions, but those correlations aren’t real.
[Speaker C] I’m saying even among you, where this is supposedly obvious, even the facts get adjusted—they adjust the facts.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, then even more so. Fine, accepted.
[Speaker C] So there are eighteen here. What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. So I’m saying, there are very many situations where we discover things like this, and by the way this characterizes everyone. Nobody is clean of it. Meaning, I didn’t just pick one or two examples here, I can bring you ten more. Meaning, it’s everywhere. Here too, in the arguments around Religious Zionism and Haredi society, whatever you want. Here nobody is exempt from this. True, on this issue—I just want to clarify one more important point—no specific individual can be accused of not being honest. Because you could genuinely, sincerely happen to answer all fifteen questions that way; that’s a legitimate position. It’s possible. So every individual can always say, look, you’re right, I simply answered yes or no to each question independently. So with any specific individual you can’t point and say he’s dishonest. But when you look at the distribution of opinions in the public, and you say that in the public there are only two groups, then something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Meaning, every individual on his own may be perfectly rational, but somehow among us there are lots of irrational people floating around. It’s like the two paths. Yes, everyone who passes through the two paths gets the same status even though one of them is impure and one pure.
[Speaker C] Meaning yes, the moral and halakhic aspects aren’t always correlative. For example, the sale permit or something like that. When you look at the halakhic side, you say okay, here I agree that it’s permitted or something. I have other things. Here they say there are fifteen arguments and all of them are on one side.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But in fact here, when you look at the public debate around the sale permit, you see less of that complexity. Less. Exactly. You see less of the people who say okay, there are these aspects, there are those aspects, I think that in the final analysis it should be this way, in another framework otherwise. There are a few like that. I think this debate has already crystallized enough for slightly more complex positions to emerge, but certainly when it started—I mean publicly, not halakhically—it did not look that way.
[Speaker E] But halakhically, underneath all these precise details, there’s always some meta-level thing, like always being stringent or lenient. Or going in a certain direction… I mean sometimes that’s the basis of the dispute here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Stringent in what—morality and lenient in what, politics? What do you mean, stringent or lenient?
[Speaker E] No, I’m saying, on an issue like conversion or something like that, there’s some meta-level thing above it that often underlies the dispute.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You mean that whenever there are two halakhic opinions on any issue, those who always tend toward stringency will answer no to everything. And the question of what here counts as stringency and what counts as leniency—that’s another question.
[Speaker E] Maybe it’s not a matter of stringency or leniency, maybe it’s a worldview, but there’s some kind of meta-level thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, but in politics and morality, for example, that already won’t be true. I accept the point. Okay, fine, this is just an example I’m bringing to show how sometimes parallel explanations prevail from a different angle. Let’s get back to our subject. So what does this actually mean? That when we propose two explanations for something, I don’t always have to choose one and reject the other. Sometimes both explanations are true. Another example of this: Newton is sitting under a tree, and according to the accepted myth, an apple falls on his head. Yes, apparently Eve’s apple. And then he asks himself why apples fall on the heads of innocent Christians. And he reaches the conclusion that there is a force of gravity. Now Newton was an innocent Christian, devout, apparently very believing. And I would expect him to understand that the answer is that he got an apple on the head because yesterday he didn’t turn the other cheek. Meaning he violated the Christian commandments, I don’t know what, and there’s a theological explanation for why an apple fell on his head. He didn’t accept that. He didn’t accept it; he looked for a scientific explanation. Does that mean he wasn’t a believing Christian? What, you don’t know? An apple fell on your head because you sinned. What’s so hard about that? Why do you need to look for a scientific explanation? Because he apparently assumed that the theological explanation exists on one plane and the scientific explanation exists on another plane, and he was apparently prepared to accept both of those explanatory planes. When the Torah tells us, “If you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments… then I will give your rains in their season,” and “if you indeed listen,” and so on—then on the one hand we look at rainfall as a product of commandments and sins. And on the other hand we listen carefully to the forecast to see what the weather forecaster tells us: will it rain tomorrow or won’t it rain tomorrow? So does it depend on commandments and sins, or does it depend on climate, on climatic considerations? At least we assume that both answers are probably true.
[Speaker B] But that works for believers, not for theories. Wait.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll get to the problematic side of this issue, I accept that point. So this is another example. There’s a very beautiful description of this, a very beautiful literary description, in Oscar Wilde’s book The Happy Prince. He describes there how the swallow got stuck there— all her friends flew off to Egypt, and the swallow got stuck there in cold Europe, and she starts carrying out the mission of the Happy Prince, distributing diamonds and gold leaves from his body—it’s the statue of the Happy Prince, yes?—to all the miserable people around. And in the end the cold becomes unbearable, and she takes a heartbreaking leave of her friend the prince, the statue, and then she dies from the cold. And then a dull cracking sound is heard: his heart, his lead heart, split in two, the prince’s. “How dreadful the cold must have been.” That’s how he writes it there, and that sentence caught my eye, because what is he really saying? That the lead heart split in two because of temperature changes. It couldn’t withstand the cold; that’s why the lead split in two. But ostensibly it split in two out of grief over the parting, over the swallow’s death, right—the death of the swallow. So who is right? Did it split because of physics, or did it split because of the statue’s psychology, in the literary sense? So all these planes try to move us in the direction that two explanations can live in parallel. And if I bring this back to the question of Torah and science, I can live with a scientific explanation on the scientific plane and a Torah explanation on the Torah plane. Within the Torah world we know the “seventy faces of Torah,” Pardes, all the parallel interpretive methods for the same verse. It doesn’t bother us that there are several parallel interpretations of the same verse. Even though if the interpretation is this, then apparently it isn’t that—so it would seem. But no, it doesn’t have to be that way; different explanations or interpretations can exist in parallel. By the way, this is a dispute between Maimonides and Nachmanides in the second root. Maimonides says that there really can’t be more than one interpretation of a verse—the only interpretation of a verse is the plain meaning. And Nachmanides attacks him on this point, because Maimonides assumes an interpretive method according to which only one interpretation of a verse is correct. That’s it, only one explanation is correct. And Nachmanides says, what do you mean? There are seventy faces to Torah. Maimonides, for example, says “a verse does not depart from its plain meaning”—the meaning is: a verse does not depart from its plain meaning. Not the way we usually understand it, that someone brings us a homiletic interpretation and we say, yes, but still a verse does not depart from its plain meaning, meaning the plain meaning is also correct. Maimonides says no. “A verse does not depart from its plain meaning” means only the plain meaning is correct. The homiletic reading is not an additional interpretation of the verse.
[Speaker C] Then what is it? That’s another whole discussion.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’ll talk about that another time too.
[Speaker C] But an explanation, or an explanation of facts?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If there’s a fact here—
[Speaker C] Who built the synagogue? Wait, you’re going back to the earlier point. I think it’s even beyond facts.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, it’s connected to facts. Let me present the problem this way. Look, when I talk about explanations, about parallel explanatory planes, the parallel picture is problematic. Even though we’ve already become a bit accustomed to it in our religious-scientific education. Because an explanation, at least in the usual sense, is supposed to give me a sufficient condition for the existence of the thing being explained. A sufficient condition means that if the cause exists, then the effect necessarily follows. There cannot be a situation in which the cause exists and the effect does not follow. Is this sufficient condition also necessary, or is it only sufficient? The philosophers of analytic philosophy debate this; they discuss the concept of causation there—whether it has to be a necessary and sufficient condition, or whether it’s enough for it to be a sufficient condition. It’s enough that it be sufficient. But sufficiency is certainly required. Why? Because otherwise it’s not a cause. What’s a cause? A cause is when I say this happened because of that. But if that thing happens and it’s not necessary that the result appear, then we don’t call that a cause. It’s not anything.
[Speaker B] Like in genetics, there are people with a tendency to develop diseases, so the gene can be a cause, but there are carriers who don’t develop it. There’s probabilistic determinism. So the gene isn’t a cause—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So the cause is the gene plus the circumstances that caused the disease to develop. That whole package is the cause, and that whole package is sufficient. As a whole. Yes, fine, but that’s the cause. Each part of it is not a cause. Good. Now, if we really understand the causal relation in that way, that it has to be a sufficient condition, then we run into a problem with parallel explanations. Because then if Newton is sitting under the tree and he doesn’t deserve punishment, but in terms of the strength of the apple’s attachment to the tree it isn’t enough to resist gravity, then the apple will fall. Even though he doesn’t deserve punishment.
[Speaker D] It’ll fall on his head?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, if physics says it’ll fall on his head, then it’ll fall on his head. Either you accept the physics or you don’t. Meaning in the end, given certain circumstances, the causal view says there must be one result. Meaning, those circumstances dictate a result. And if you say that the physical circumstances do not dictate a result, but rather it depends on your deeds, that means you don’t see physics as an explanation—or alternatively, you don’t see your deeds as an explanation. One of the two. Therefore this parallelist conception may be very convenient and spare us from dealing with problems, and if I’m talking about facts then of course it’s much stronger: is it six thousand years or fifteen billion years? As long as you don’t reconcile that, you haven’t said anything. It’s just words. In the end you have to explain to me—maybe you’ll explain that the axis of time works differently, I don’t know what happens—then maybe. But as long as you haven’t given me an explanation, there’s no such thing as both six thousand and fifteen billion. That’s just words.
[Speaker C] But the story with Noah—that’s not right. I’d say if he were righteous he would have sat somewhere else.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the fact that he sits is also a physical event. Where he sits is also a physical event. No, so that’s also a decision of… No, divine providence applies to everything. Even to physics there is divine providence. Right. If you’re talking about his choice, that’s something else, then I have to discuss it separately. We’ll talk about his choice, and his choice too is included here under deeds. His choice is his decision, so one way or another it isn’t the Holy One, blessed be He. It doesn’t solve the problem just because it moves it over to the human being. The human being is also part of the world, so that doesn’t—
[Speaker C] Let’s say there are all kinds of stories about some plane that crashes, and suddenly some person, for whatever reason, doesn’t get on the plane. Okay. If you say it’s because he’s righteous or something, that’s the Holy One, blessed be He.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But that’s not his choice. The Holy One, blessed be He, arranged it. Fine, and the Holy One, blessed be He, can also arrange the falling of the apple, but then that means the apple fell not because of material strength but because the Holy One, blessed be He, brought it down. So now the other side isn’t true. Now the explanation is theological; that means the physical explanation isn’t true. I have no problem—whichever of the two you want to accept, you can accept—but not both together. No.
[Speaker B] You can’t accept both together. Science doesn’t assume that everything is foreseen. What do you mean? That’s not true. Even if you have all the physical laws, science still wouldn’t know how to analyze where this molecule in water will end up, it can’t say.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not being able to say doesn’t mean that everything isn’t foreseen. Not being able to say is only my limitation.
[Speaker B] You can’t derive it from science.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I can’t derive it, but I can know that this molecule will get to its place. No, I said, I’m not going into free choice now, because in any case it has nothing to do with this discussion. Whatever you say about free choice—even if I go to the other side because of my choice, that still isn’t the providence of the Holy One, blessed be He, it’s my choice. So one way or another, it’s not the Holy One, blessed be He.
[Speaker B] According to scientists, if you take that argument all the way, there’s no free choice either. But scientists don’t say that, the scientists—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Those scientists—most of the people I know do say that, but I don’t know, maybe you know different scientists. Really, I mean, they say we’re programmed robots. That’s what they say. Not me—I wrote a book against that—but they say it, yes. Fine, but let’s leave that, that’s a different discussion. It doesn’t concern us here in any case. Even if it’s choice, it still isn’t the Holy One, blessed be He. So therefore it seems to me that this pastoral calm of parallel explanations, which somehow spares us from having to confront things, is very convenient, but when it comes to the hard-core problems it doesn’t work. There are places where it can work, for example with going off the religious path and returning to repentance. Why? Because there, when a person acts, the cause really isn’t psychology and not philosophy, but the combination. So in that sense it’s clear what you said earlier: when there is a suitable psychological state, then certain value-judgments or intellectual decisions will be made. When the psychological state is different, maybe different decisions will be made. So in the end, if I want to talk about a cause in the philosophical sense, I have to give the whole package: the psychology plus the person’s values or basic assumptions, and then I think one really can talk about decisions in the sense of cause and decision. And again, without getting into free will—that’s another discussion. So when the explanation is partial, it can work. But when the explanation is full, it can’t work. There are no two full parallel explanations, because a sufficient condition means that nothing additional is needed for the effect to occur. Meaning, that’s it. So therefore this parallelist route also can’t work. So notice what we’ve gone through up to this point.
[Speaker B] How are we doing on time?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. So far we’ve gone through the stage of—yes—the stage of the fire, the apologetic stage, which is the opposite but still adversarial, yes, a conception of the two sides as clashing; and the parallel stage, yes, exactly. The parallel stage says we live with these two things in parallel together, like such monads that don’t speak to one another. That too apparently does not provide an answer to the hard-core problems. The fourth stage is what you could call the postmodern stage. The postmodern stage is basically a stage that in a certain sense throws out the baby with the bathwater. Meaning, it treats both the scientific discourse and the religious discourse as a kind of discourse, as a narrative. What does that mean? I’m not really making claims about the world; I’m reporting the way I experience the world. Then there’s no problem. Then you can say that as a religious person I experience it as six thousand years, and as a scientist I experience it as fifteen billion years. I’m not making a claim about the world, I’m making a claim about myself, and that’s perfectly fine. There can be different experiences in different contexts, there’s no problem with that, and seemingly salvation has come to Zion—the postmodern turn has finally redeemed us. As Rabbi Shagar writes—he’s one of the prominent representatives of this approach, not specifically in the context of Torah and science but in general—we join the circle of difference. The circle of difference: a circle is a place where all the points are equally distant from the center. Right? In other words, everyone is equally wrong. And therefore everything is fine, we dance in a circle and experience true peace among all opinions and everything is wonderful. Except that it isn’t true peace among all opinions, but true peace among the absence of opinions. Meaning, you don’t believe, and he doesn’t think science is true, and therefore there’s no contradiction. So what you’ve actually done is create a double problem. You haven’t solved the problem, you’ve created a double problem: now science also isn’t true and Torah also isn’t true. That already sounds downright absurd to me. I think both are true. So forcing me to give up one—fine; you want to force me to give up both? In the end, when you treat your faith as a kind of discourse, then you’re basically saying: I don’t believe. I’m not making a claim about the world that God exists—something that I certainly also experience, or see, or know, that God exists. No, I know that God exists. Meaning, the claim is only about me; it’s not a claim about the world. The moment the claim is about me, there’s no problem, because then you don’t have to deal with any contradiction. You solved all the problems by turning the question mark into an exclamation point—basically by flattening it. In that case you’ve thrown out the baby with the bathwater. So postmodernism creates this relaxed feeling, a kind of shanti, that feeling that always accompanies New Age—everything’s fine, there are no problems, you can say whatever you want and survive. Contradictions and non-contradictions, even logical contradictions, everything goes. No problem at all; you’re exempt from dealing with anything. Meaning, there’s no problem—you’re just not claiming anything, and the price is that you’re not claiming anything. The price is that you remain a nonbeliever. You solved all the problems because you don’t believe. In my eyes that’s not called solving the problems; that’s simply giving them up, or giving up both faith and science. Equally, fairly, you give up everything, not just one side. So that sounds truly absurd to me.
[Speaker B] In a postmodern framework, how long has the world existed? You still have that question.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean? Are you asking me what I experience? So it depends. In synagogue: six thousand. Ask me again in fifteen minutes and I’ll tell you fifteen billion.
[Speaker B] So there’s no objectivity in the world at all?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, there’s nothing at all. Everything is just reports of feelings. The postmodern critiques—what’s called the new hard critique—attack the foundations of science, Newton’s laws. One reflection of that critique is to say that physics—basically, why don’t women succeed in physics? Because physics is built in a masculine way. So Gadi Taub writes in his book The Slouching Rebellion—yes, there are such people—he writes that he would not want to get on a plane built according to the conditions of feminine physics. Meaning, if you give up your confidence in physics, you haven’t saved physics, you’ve simply thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Okay? Now the truth is that even about that there’s a bit more to discuss, but I’m not going to get into it. You can formulate the same physics in a different language, and in that sense there is some truth in that claim, but I don’t want to dig into that further. Rabbi Steinsaltz is giving another minute at the entrance, so I’m wrapping up. So basically we come to the fifth stage. The fifth stage, it seems to me, is a stage that retreats a little backward and moves a little forward, and in a certain sense it really is psychological. Hard problems require a solution; you can’t run away from that. You have to solve them. Either the world is six thousand years old or it is fifteen billion years old. And that was my assumption all along. Now I’ve opened that up for discussion, but basically all along that’s what I assumed. And my claim was that we solve problems about facts using the tools we use for dealing with facts—the tools of science in this context, tools of observation, whatever the tools are by which we handle facts. And therefore I say this is part of the view that says problems need to be solved. Problems aren’t something about which you can just utter a slogan and survive. But on the other hand, precisely that feeling that the problems must be solved opens up all sorts of possibilities that at first glance I might not have been willing to consider. I wouldn’t have been willing to consider them. If I’m really unwilling to accept slogans. Fine—but they contradict each other. So what can I do? I have no choice; I have to find a solution or give up one of the sides. Sometimes I’ll find a solution, sometimes I’ll give up one side, sometimes after giving it up I’ll discover there was never really such a side, or I mistakenly thought there was such a side, but there wasn’t. Fine? For example, as long as modern science had not developed, the feeling was that more or less we know what’s going on in the world. In fact, our confidence in the level of our knowledge goes down the more we know. Once there was a kind of certainty that Aristotle had basically solved the principled problems, meaning all that remained were details. And therefore basically we more or less know what is going on in the world, and so nothing additional is expected, and the Sages also probably knew that. And since that was so, people could live with the view that everything that appears in the Talmud is scientifically true. That’s, let’s say, one of the issues of this kind. Today the situation is such that I cannot accept that. Personally I cannot accept it. I think many people cannot accept it. There are things that quite plainly do not fit. And then when I open this whole matter up for discussion, as that’s already what we did in the previous sessions, I arrive at the conclusion that basically the fundamental assumption from which I set out toward this conflict may not be necessary at all. Who said that the scientific details appearing in the Talmud were given to Moses at Sinai together with the oral law from Sinai? That’s the assumption, supposedly. Otherwise why assume that the Sages knew everything? Contemporary sages go to experts to consult them on scientific questions. The Talmud itself describes—and I brought this in your father’s dissertation—that the Talmud itself describes how the Sages gathered scientific information. They performed dissections, they consulted some cattle herder in order to learn blemishes of firstborn animals, and so on. Meaning, the Talmud tells us that they gathered information the way sages today gather information, the way any rational person gathers information. But then of course they are subject to the same scientific errors that existed in that time. Now, precisely because I’m not willing to live with those slogans, I say: wait a second, let’s reexamine what I think of as the tradition that created this conflict in me. Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. It could be that I really need to wake up from that earlier conception and say: wait, I’ll reconcile it this way, by saying no—the Sages worked according to the information available to them, and that information really wasn’t correct. So what happened? The sages of today would also make mistakes if it turned out that today’s scientists are wrong in another fifty years on whatever issue it may be, right? Nothing has changed. So precisely this supposedly threatening approach, which looked so frightening from the older perspective, the perspective that prevailed until a few generations ago, actually creates a very great calm. Notice that throughout these meetings we have hardly dealt with specific problems. Because from the outset I neutralized the need to deal with them. Meaning, I don’t—like I told you—if it turns out that there is something in the Talmud that fits science in a way that was not true at the time but only matches science that developed later, that would greatly surprise me. For me that would be a difficulty, not an answer. Meaning, people say: if there’s a contradiction, then they find some solution that basically says science is wrong, or science—never mind—something happened here, the Talmud knew everything. Right? And I’m saying that my position has turned around 180 degrees. Meaning, for me, if there is such a match, that requires investigation. Because that would mean the Talmud was wrong twice. It was wrong twice because it thought that the science of its time said such-and-such, and that wasn’t true, and the science of its time was also wrong, since today we know the truth. So overall there was a double error here. Since I don’t accept the assumption that they had some source of information beyond what any wise person has. And therefore, in a certain sense, this creates a kind of peace of mind: I’m not afraid of anything. If it turns out that something I thought is not true, then I learned one more thing. What’s the problem? I’ll examine it, of course; I’ll see whether it has to be that way or not, what the meaning is. It’s very important to distinguish between the facts and the interpretation of the facts—that’s a question on which many scientists fail, and of course people on the other side as well. But after all that, after I’ve done the examination, I’m completely at ease; I feel no threat at all. Now, this stage—I would call it the fifth stage—which I think today is quite widespread. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish it from postmodernism, because that too brings a kind of calm, but for different reasons. But really, under the shelter of postmodernism another kind of calm developed. And I would call this the synthetic stage, in which I make a synthesis between the two sides, and I say: as far as I’m concerned, science opens all sorts of options that did not exist for earlier generations. I have the ability to understand things that earlier generations could not understand. I even have the ability in the social sciences and humanities, by the way—I can understand and analyze texts in ways that earlier generations perhaps could not analyze. I can use logical tools—and I do use them—logical tools that earlier generations did not have, and solve all kinds of problems they did not know how to deal with. I can show you places where I am convinced that all the medieval authorities were wrong. And not in science—in logic. All the medieval authorities were wrong. And I can explain the passage without resorting to all their strained answers, and I am convinced that this is the correct explanation. But—but this opened up before me because I have some modern tools that they did not have. I can use them, yes? Exactly. Just yesterday I remembered someone who once did a doctorate in mathematics at the Technion, and he did his doctorate on halakhic problems, mathematical problems in Jewish law and in the Talmud. And he asked me whether I had examples to give him. He wanted some meat to sink his teeth into. So I gave him various examples. One of them was a Mishnah in tractate Mikvaot about a pit of drawn water, with a water channel passing through the pit at a given rate, and the question is from what point one may immerse in the pit. When are there fewer than three log of drawn water here? And the assumption is, say, uniform mixing and all sorts of assumptions of slow processes. So the medieval authorities there make calculations that are wrong by thousands of percent—not by ten percent, by thousands of percent under certain conditions, and of course it depends on the conditions. Because they make approximations, since they didn’t know calculus. So they make one approximation or another that sometimes works, but in many cases doesn’t work. Now we have that tool of calculus; I’ll do the computation and tell you exactly. Not that I’m claiming that the sages of the Mishnah knew calculus. They don’t write there either from when one may immerse. They say: from when there are fewer than three log of drawn water, you may immerse. But how do you know whether there are or aren’t? If you have modern mathematical or scientific tools, you can know that. If you make rough approximations, you can be very wrong. And therefore I think that from the synthetic perspective I basically see these two things as a kind of synthesis. If there really is a contradiction here that cannot be worked out, then it has to be solved. Either show that it isn’t a contradiction or give up one of the sides—no tricks—or remain with it needing further investigation, and that too is possible. But precisely this extreme conception, this threatening conception, leads me to a state in which I’m not afraid of anything. Meaning, I have no problem: everything we’ve learned, we’ve only gained. Now let’s see what happens. In the earlier phases of dealing with this conflict, there’s a feeling of threat. You’re constantly afraid. I think I told you that Wolff writes at the opening of his book, Seminar Wolff—one of the strictest German-Jewish types—he opens the book by saying: science is false and our Torah is true. That’s how the book opens. Meaning, a declaration descended upon him from Mount Sinai. He doesn’t even know what science says, but it’s false and our Torah is true. I hope he at least knows what the Torah says. But there’s a kind of declaration here that clearly points to a very deep fear. It’s obvious. Such declarations always come out of fear. They always come from a situation in which you don’t know what to do with these questions, you have no way to cope with them. But in a place where I say: look, I’m not afraid of anything—if they prove to me scientifically that there is no God, I’m not afraid of that either; then there is no God. So what’s the problem? What? If I’ve reached the conclusion that I was mistaken until now, assuming they prove it to me. I’m taking this to a very extreme point now, okay? Even that doesn’t bother me, because if I really trust those tools then as far as I’m concerned that’s the conclusion. What’s the problem? What do I need to be afraid of? I’m not afraid of anything. Meaning, if there are tools that will help me solve problems, wonderful. If there are tools that will dismantle something for me, then I’ve learned something new. I don’t think this feeling of threat is justified. Now I won’t have time to bring one or two examples of the difference between—and the application of—this synthesis, so maybe I’ll stop here at the declarative level, and for next time we’ll need to decide which topic to deal with.