Rabbi Michael Abraham: Free Will, God, Religion, Contradictions in Science, and the Creation of the World | Daniel Dushi Podcast #76

This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

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

🔗 Link to the original lecture

🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI

[0:00] Can science examine the existence of God?
[5:46] The connection between free will and neuroscience
[7:46] Libet’s experiment and understanding the readiness potential
[15:04] Determinism versus free will in the brain
[19:45] The physico-theological proof and the assumption of complexity
[21:09] Neo-Darwinist views on God and science
[26:22] Motivations versus arguments – why that isn’t relevant
[26:22] The difference between motivations and arguments in philosophy
[28:17] Religious and secular responses to people who become observant – different motivations
[28:17] The religious and secular interpretation of conversion
[29:26] The importance of discussing the arguments themselves and not the motives
[31:24] Religion as the opium of the masses – a quote from Marx
[32:40] Looking at evolution and its effect on the discussion
[34:24] The laws of nature and evolution – a fixed framework
[34:24] Evolution and examining the laws of nature
[35:34] The example of the sentence “to be or not to be” and randomness
[35:34] An example of randomness and weighing meaning
[42:18] Multiverse versus God – an analysis according to Occam
[42:44] Multiverse versus God – Occam’s criterion
[44:30] The parallel between science and faith – personal positions
[46:51] Personal rationality versus religious commandments

Summary

General Overview

The text presents the position that science can describe how the world was formed and develops, but it cannot empirically decide the question of who created the laws or whether God exists. Therefore, the question of God is mainly philosophical and traditional rather than scientific. Rabbi Michael Abraham argues that one can accept evolution, the Big Bang, and neuroscience without giving up faith, and that both atheism and religious fundamentalism are mistaken when they turn the relationship between science and faith into a zero-sum game. He emphasizes the distinction between examining arguments on their own merits and reducing everything to psychology and motives, and develops a critique of attempts to scientifically prove the absence of free will and of atheist uses of evolution as a “refutation” of God. He describes a rational, non-experiential religiosity that recognizes uncertainty, demands critical thinking even in relation to authorities, and sees obedience to authority as something that can generate evil when it is not accompanied by personal responsibility.

The Limits of Science in Relation to the Question of God

The position presented is that science has nothing to say either for or against belief in God, because science examines descriptions of processes such as evolution and the Big Bang, whereas the question “who created” or “who runs” the laws is a theological question that cannot be empirically tested. Rabbi Michael Abraham says he cannot think of an experiment that would reveal whether God exists or not, and that at present there are not even proposals for such experiments, although in principle he leaves open the possibility that in the future an experiment may be found that could decide the issue. He defines faith as a philosophical/traditional decision rather than a scientific inference, and presents himself as opposing the coalition in which both critics of faith and fundamentalist believers assume that science requires atheism or that faith requires rejection of science.

Reasons for Faith and His Personal View on Creation

Rabbi Michael Abraham answers that, as far as he understands, he does live in a creation brought about by a creator. He attributes this to a combination of tradition and philosophical considerations about the complexity of the world and its lawfulness, together with the claim that it is not reasonable that the laws came into being without a “lawgiver.” He stresses that there is no complete certainty in this area, but he sees the conclusion that there is a creator as a reasonable and rational conclusion. He rejects the demand that faith must somehow “line up” with scientific life, and argues that even an atheist scientist has no scientific fit for his atheistic position, because science does not decide the theological plane.

Free Will and Libet’s Experiments

Rabbi Michael Abraham presents a parallel between the faith-science debate and the free will-neuroscience debate, and argues that here too two kinds of fundamentalism are mistaken when they force a choice between science and free will. He describes Libet’s experiments: a subject presses a button, reports where the hand on a clock was when he decided, and researchers measure a readiness potential that appears before the press. The popular interpretation is that the brain signal “predicts” the decision and therefore choice is an illusion. He argues that the experiment cannot decide the issue, and points to a central distinction between “picking” decisions with no dilemma and “choosing” in a dilemma situation. In picking, it is unsurprising if the response rests on a signal, whereas in a dilemma one can also impose a “veto,” in Libet’s language. He adds that after his book came out, an experiment was published about choosing which charity to donate to, and there it was found that the readiness potential does not predict the decision as it did in the picking experiments. From this he concludes that the question remains open and that there is still no scientific way to decide whether free will exists.

Determinism, Compatibilism, and the Definition of “Choice”

Rabbi Michael Abraham defines determinism as the position according to which there is no free will and the future is determined by the past. He refers to “compatibilism” as a popular approach claiming that one can be a determinist and still believe in free will by defining things so that “I” decide even if the process is mechanical. In his view, this is wordplay, because in practice what you have is a deterministic machine. He distinguishes between materialists, who see the brain as “the thing that thinks,” and dualists/libertarians, who argue that a person thinks by means of the brain just as he walks by means of his legs.

Evolution and the Physico-Theological Proof

Rabbi Michael Abraham explains that the philosophical significance of evolution among atheist neo-Darwinists is an attack on the assumption of Kant’s “physico-theological proof,” according to which complexity does not arise spontaneously and therefore requires a guiding hand. He argues that even if that assumption were to fall, at most that would undermine one proof, not the conclusion itself—similar to an error in a geometric proof, which does not negate the truth of the theorem itself. He emphasizes that evolution does not say “there is no God,” but at most rules out one particular route, out of many possible routes, to faith.

The Laws of Nature, “Who Wrote the Software,” and Atheist Parables

Rabbi Michael Abraham argues that evolution operates within a rigid and precise system of laws, and that if physical constants were different there would be no chemistry, no biology, and no evolution. Therefore, the key question is who created that system of laws. He presents the claim that “whoever created these laws in effect created the outcome,” because the laws accompany the process and constrain it even if there is no point-by-point “intervention.” He criticizes a parable about producing “to be or not to be” by means of an algorithm that fixes correct letters, offered as an atheist argument, and says the parable proves the opposite, because whoever wrote the software dictated the result. He also uses a parable about a drunk man with a wall and a ditch, and concludes that whoever built the framework determined the outcome of the randomness. Therefore, randomness within a lawful framework does not eliminate the question of the lawgiver.

Multiverse and Occam’s Razor

Rabbi Michael Abraham distinguishes between randomness within an evolutionary process and the claim of a multiverse in which there are many universes with different laws of nature. He suggests that on the level of philosophical explanation, the multiverse seems less economical to him than positing a creator. He presents this as a consideration of Occam’s razor, and argues that an approach involving countless universes and unobserved laws is a multiplication of entities, as opposed to saying simply, “there is someone here who did this.” He adds that once you allow “anything” across an infinity of universes, then “gods in those universes” can appear as well, so it is not a clean alternative to the existence of God.

The Distinction Between the Context of Discovery and the Context of Justification, and a Critique of Psychologizing

Rabbi Michael Abraham objects to discussing psychological motives as an argument against a position, and formulates this as the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. He gives the example of the theory of relativity coming “from Grandma in a dream,” which would not invalidate it if it stands up to testing. He gives examples of attitudes toward stories of becoming religious and stories of leaving religion, where each side becomes “philosophical” when convenient and “psychological” when that serves an attack. He accepts that awareness of bias is important for a person in relation to himself, so as to neutralize foreign influences, but argues that in a substantive dispute one should discuss the arguments and not attribute motives. He quotes Marx’s line that “religion is the opium of the masses” and concludes that comfort does not prove falsehood; at most it allows for exploitation. Psychology is not an argument, but at most a tool after the argument has already been refuted substantively.

His Attitude Toward Science, Evolution, and Religious Interpretation

Rabbi Michael Abraham says he accepts what science proposes about the universe, including evolution, and stresses that evolution does not mean “we came from the monkey,” but rather that humans and monkeys came from an earlier common creature. He argues that there is no contradiction between evolution and faith, because one can see evolution as the way the Holy One, blessed be He, created the human being through laws of nature that He created. He restates the claim that believers and neo-Darwinists share the same mistaken assumption of “either science or faith,” and declares that the questions are not dependent on one another.

Rational Religiosity, Religious Experiences, and Miracles

Rabbi Michael Abraham describes himself as not sentimental and not experiential, without “religious experiences,” and argues that religion “mainly bothers” him, and that he does not believe in order to receive emotional satisfaction but because he thinks it is true. He says he is unwilling to adopt ideas he does not believe in in order to increase spiritual attachment, and defines experiential religiosity as especially prone to illusions. He relates skeptically to stories of wonders and miracles and suggests that most of them have statistical explanations, and criticizes the idea of thanking God for salvation without asking about the very appearance of the danger in the first place. He stresses that the non-experiential approach makes commitment harder, but in his view that is “the truth,” and therefore the price is accepted.

Free Will as Purpose, Robot-Like Behavior, and Self-Discipline

Rabbi Michael Abraham argues that free will is “the essence of our existence” and that the ability to choose between good and evil is a condition for humanity. He explains that if God gave choice, then apparently the value lies in doing acts out of decision and not merely in the acts themselves. He says he would not agree to hypnosis that would prevent him from transgressions and force him to perform commandments, because then “my brain is doing the commandments, not me.” He uses the distinction, “I think by means of the brain; the brain does not think.” He brings an anecdote about Asperger’s as a model of acting by rules and presents it as a theoretical rational ideal, while also acknowledging that people are not robots.

Good and Evil, Judging People, and Moral Responsibility Under Faith

Rabbi Michael Abraham argues that a person who chooses evil is “an evil person,” but qualifies this by saying that if a person is mistaken and convinced that this is the good, then he is mistaken and not necessarily evil. He applies this to Hitler, ISIS, and Hamas as people who may believe they are doing good. He insists that even religious faith does not exempt a person from responsibility, because one is required to check whether the belief is justified, especially when the act is extreme, like killing. He introduces considerations of expected value because of uncertainty even regarding the existence of God. He defines fundamentalism as a position that does not submit to critical thought, and illustrates that fundamentalism can appear both in “good” morality like Mother Teresa and in violent evil like ISIS, where the difference lies in the content and not in the structure of the position.

Faith as a Factual Claim and Not as Giving Up Knowledge

Rabbi Michael Abraham says that in his view there is no difference between faith and knowledge, and that they are synonymous words, because faith is a factual claim like “God exists,” just not a certain one. In the same way, claims about the world are also not absolutely certain. He rejects the idea that faith means “walking without facts,” and distinguishes between religious experiences described in songs, such as by Evyatar Banai, and his own faith as a rational outlook. He says he is not absolutely certain of anything, but uncertainty does not define the difference between faith and knowledge.

Authority, Discipline, and Nazism as an Example of the Danger of Obedience

Rabbi Michael Abraham describes an interfaith conference at ORT Ramla where others preached listening to elders, to the sheikh, or to the rabbi in order to reduce violence, while he presented the opposite view—“don’t listen to anyone”—and argued that personal autonomy is what moderates. He claims that discipline toward an authority figure is “a recipe for evil” because it depends on the authority being good, and in the Nazi example of “we were just following orders” he sees an expression of robotic behavior that removes responsibility. He distinguishes between self-discipline and discipline to authority, and emphasizes that even when one acts out of the belief that “God said so,” the responsibility still rests on the person to examine the matter and bear the consequences.

Full Transcript

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To what extent can science put the claim that God does or does not exist to an empirical test? Do you have some suggestion for an experiment that would reveal whether God exists or not? It may be that they’ll find some experiment that does succeed. But from all the experiments proposed up to now, and all the information we have up to now, you can’t draw that conclusion. That’s what I’m claiming. That’s all fine—I didn’t say there is. Yes, but that still doesn’t mean evolution says there is no God. All it says is that one route, out of, I don’t know, a hundred and nineteen other routes, that route is not correct. And you have to remember: there are laws here that accompany this process all the time and tell it what it’s allowed to do and what it’s not allowed to do. The laws of physics, the laws of nature. For example—who created them? Whoever created those laws in effect created the result.

[Speaker B] My guest today is the honorable Rabbi Michael Abraham. Michael has a PhD in physics and teaches at the Advanced Institute for Torah Studies at Bar-Ilan University. He has written three fascinating books—maybe more? About thirty, roughly. He’s written a lot of fascinating books, among them God Plays Dice, and he’s one of the brightest minds in Israel on the connection between philosophy, science, evolution, and Jewish thought. How are you, Rabbi?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Thank God, excellent.

[Speaker B] Excellent is good. I’d like to start with a very broad question that you’ve dealt with quite a bit: Are we living in a creation made by a creator?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. As far as I understand, yes. There are of course different ways to reach that conclusion, but from summing up all those avenues of reflection, it seems to me that the conclusion is yes. Now, of course, this requires a lot of elaboration, but briefly, it’s some combination of tradition that comes down to us together with philosophical considerations that look at, say, the complexity of the world or the laws that govern it—and it seems highly unlikely that these things, that the laws, came into being without a lawgiver. So it seems to me the conclusion is called for. And I’m putting this very simplistically and schematically, but the simplest conclusion is that there is someone or something behind this that is responsible for it. I’ll just say that nothing in the world, including in this area, is certain. That is, I’m not claiming there is full certainty about the existence of a Creator, maker, God—however you want to call Him—but I do think that this is the called-for, reasonable, and rational conclusion.

[Speaker B] And how does that fit together with the more scientific, academic lifestyle you live?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t fit together—but I don’t think it needs to fit together. In the same way, you could ask how the life of an atheist who is a scientist fits together with his atheism. There too, in my opinion, it doesn’t fit together. In other words, presenting things as though religious life doesn’t fit with scientific life, while scientific life fits just fine with atheism—that’s the atheists’ framing. I think it doesn’t fit with either side of the equation. Science has nothing to say, neither positively nor negatively, about belief in God. And on this issue I really do go a bit against both believers and critics of belief, because as I said earlier, somehow the feeling is that the critics of belief are on the side of science and belief is on the opposite side. But that’s not so. I think scientific theses such as evolution and the Big Bang—those are the scientific fields relevant to this discussion—can be examined with scientific tools, and if I’m convinced they’re true, then they’re true, and if they’re not true, then they’re not. But why should that be connected to my religious faith? It could be that God brought about evolution and the laws of nature that govern everything we see around us, and it could be that He didn’t. But what does that have to do with the question of what the laws of nature are? The question of what the laws of nature are has to be investigated scientifically, and then you reach a conclusion about what the laws of nature are. The theological question asks who governs them, who created them. Science has nothing to say in that domain, neither for nor against. It’s a philosophical decision, a traditional decision—I don’t know, each person has his own way of arriving at that decision—whether there is something standing behind all this. Now, what is somehow shared—and it’s very strange—by at least fundamentalist believers and their fundamentalist critics, which are two problematic religious sects, is that neither of them understands this. Both think that if you adopt the scientific description, then you’re supposed to give up the existence of God—that’s the atheists. And if you believe in God, then you’re supposed to give up the scientific description—that’s the believers. And of course, in this unholy coalition, both are mistaken. I’m in opposition to that wall-to-wall coalition.

[Speaker B] So you’re saying there won’t be a scientific solution to the question of how everything was created?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—how everything was created, that’s a scientific question. Yes, describing how everything came into being. But the question of who created it is not connected to science. That’s not a question within the domain of science. Everyone can answer it however he likes, but it’s not…

[Speaker B] Why isn’t it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How would it be? How can science put the claim that God exists or doesn’t exist to an empirical test? Do you have some proposal for an experiment that would reveal whether God exists or not? I can’t think of such an experiment. I have another book that deals with free will, and there too the positions are very similar. You have the religious fundamentalists who usually believe in free will, and therefore deny neuroscience. And you have the fundamentalists of neuroscience, who deny free will. And again, that’s an unholy coalition that I came out against, because I think the thing they agree on is false. The claim that the moment you adopt neuroscience, there is no free will, so you have to choose: either you believe in free will, in which case there’s no neuroscience, or if you believe in neuroscience, then there’s no free will. Not true. There is neuroscience, and there is also free will, and there is no connection between the two. And there, unlike the first area we discussed, there have actually been attempts—proposals for experiments—to test it. That is, there is a claim that the claim that we have free will is in fact accessible to scientific tools, meaning that one can try to test it scientifically. And there were even attempts—Libet’s experiments, at the end of the seventies, starting in the seventies of the previous century—and to this day all kinds of continuations of those experiments are still going on. And in the book I wrote on this, I showed in a very systematic way that there is no way to test this scientifically. There isn’t. Including all the advances that, as far as I know, have occurred in neuroscience—they do not touch the question of whether we have free will or not, contrary to what philosophers, neuroscientists, and believers on the other side say.

[Speaker B] Wow. So for listeners who maybe don’t fully understand this, I’d love for you to explain more why exactly—because it’s fascinating—why there isn’t free will? Or how can you prove to me, let’s say, that there’s no answer to this?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, I can’t prove there’s no answer, and I’m not claiming that either. What I’m claiming is that so far all the proposals that have been raised to try and test this scientifically are mistaken proposals. In other words, there is no way to test this with scientific tools. Take Libet’s experiments, for example, which are often cited in this context. He was a Jewish American neurologist who decided to run an experiment to test… by the way, he was actually a libertarian—he believed in free will. He ran experiments and discovered, to his amazement, that apparently there isn’t free will. How? I’ll explain in a second. And he was honest enough to put it on the table and say: friends, I’m a libertarian, but science says otherwise. Then he tried to look for explanations; he proposed some, and there have been various debates about those explanations. But there was at least some ambition there to do an actual experiment that would test this. In the context of God’s existence there’s no such ambition—nobody is proposing such an experiment. So I think it’s easier there to illustrate my basic approach, which separates the domains. What did he do? He said: suppose there’s a test subject sitting at a table in front of a button. He can decide to press it. The moment he presses it, that is recorded—the moment of the press is documented. In front of him there’s a clock running. And on that clock there is one hand—it doesn’t matter exactly, some hand is moving there. And they ask him to say where the hand was when he decided to press. Not when he pressed—we know when he pressed, we can see it and it’s recorded. The question is when he decided to press, because of course we have no way of knowing when he decided. So we want him to report it to us. The hand is moving, and he says: when the hand was at two o’clock, I decided to press. Fine. Then in addition—that is, besides the clock and the button—he also has a device measuring brain waves. And we know there is what’s called a readiness potential, RP, an electrical potential that arises in the brain before the press. It essentially predicts the press; it appears before the press. And we measure that with electrical equipment, something like an EEG. What Libet did, basically, was to examine the relation between the moment he pressed—which is no problem, we know that—and the moment the readiness potential, that electrical signal, appeared, as compared to the moment the subject reported that he had decided to press. Why is that important? Because if the decision is free, that means the decision is supposed to occur before the electrical signal appears in the brain. Because if the electrical signal appears in the brain before the moment of decision, then it means the moment of decision is fictitious. After all, we already know beforehand that he’s about to press the button. He’s fooling himself into thinking he makes decisions, and saying “I made the decision when the hand was at two o’clock,” while already at one o’clock we knew he would press. So that means the decision is fictitious. Basically, it’s deterministic.

[Speaker B] And this indicates that this is how we function in everyday life? That this is the decision-making process?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, this is supposed to be an illustration. In science you always test examples and try to generalize from them. You can’t examine all the behaviors of all human beings at every moment. You test certain behaviors and try to infer the overall picture from them. So here there was, supposedly, a very clear illustration that choice is an illusion. In fact, we can predict in advance that he’ll press. He thinks he made a decision; he made no decision at all, because five seconds earlier we already knew he had “decided.” That means consciousness trails behind the unconscious processes, which are actually the ones making the decision. But this was an experiment proposed as an experiment to test the thesis of whether there is or isn’t free will—that is, to turn it into a scientific thesis. A scientific thesis is one that can be subjected to empirical testing, to experimental testing. So here’s an experiment—they proposed one. Now what’s the problem? There are several problems. I presented basically four problems, one on top of another, to show that on four different levels I can show that such an experiment cannot decide the issue. I’ll mention one of them because otherwise it gets too tedious. One of them is that a decision of this type is what in professional language is called a decision of picking, not choosing. What does that mean? On what basis do you decide when to press the button? There are no considerations one way or the other—whenever you feel like it, you press, right? It’s not some moral dilemma where there are arguments this way and that way and you need to decide. Whenever you decide to press the button, you press. With decisions of that kind, it’s no surprise that we don’t choose them freely, but simply respond to a signal in the brain. If there’s a signal in the brain that wakes up and tells me “press,” then I’ll press—why not? What is there stopping me? If I had considerations for and against, as in moral dilemmas, for example, then it’s not obvious that if a signal arose that pushed me to press, I would say, “Wait, hold on, this is morally problematic, I’m not willing to press.” And therefore I would impose a veto—that’s Libet’s own term. I would veto the signal and not press. The experiment they carried out was a case of picking, not choosing. It’s a case where there is no dilemma. In such an experiment, of course there’s no meaningful free choice—that’s no great insight. Do the same experiment in a situation where there is a dilemma, and then it would be more compelling. Afterward I showed that even there it still wouldn’t prove anything. But I’m focusing right now on this claim. What’s nice is that two or three years after the book came out, an experiment was published that involved many dozens of scientists from all over the world, among them the Israeli Liad Mudrik from neuroscience at Tel Aviv University. She’s a journalist, and she did a doctorate in neuroscience, and she has a lecture on this issue. That’s where I heard about it—on YouTube. They did an experiment, and it’s not simple to do an experiment like this; it was very interesting. They did an experiment on a choosing situation, not a picking situation, and it turned out that there the results were different. And in my book I said in advance that in my opinion the results would indeed be different in that kind of situation.

[Speaker B] And what did they do? What was the choosing case?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What they did was construct a situation where you have to decide—I don’t remember all the details anymore, but roughly—you have to decide which charity money will go to. Now, there are charities working for causes you support and charities you don’t really like. Now, if you tried to run an experiment about whether a person will die, that would never get past the Helsinki committee; you can’t do such an experiment, right? So it’s hard to create an experiment that tests a real moral problem. But if all these charities are legal, then fine—you don’t like them, so you won’t donate to them. That’s a moral dilemma. But the experiment will still be approved on the legal level. And that’s basically what they did. The money will go to this charity or that charity, and now you really do have a dilemma. And it turned out that there, when you examine the relation between the readiness potential and the decision, you see that the readiness potential does not predict the decision.

[Speaker B] Wait, so you’re giving an argument here in favor of free will? You’re saying it exists?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not in favor of it, but against the possibility of scientifically testing the question. It remains open. You can decide there is free will, and you can decide there isn’t.

[Speaker B] What I understood—the arguments I thought supported one side—was this whole issue of the nervous system and how it works. Like, do I act out of necessity, because things compel me to act, or is there really some agent here making decisions?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s a different question. That’s… no, that’s a different question. That itself is the dispute; it’s not an argument for or against. That’s what the debate is about. The question is whether our brain, which is made up essentially of nerve cells—the nervous system—is a mechanical, deterministic mechanism that basically makes the decisions, responds to inputs, produces outputs, and so on, while our consciousness—the sense that we make decisions—is just a side effect. That is, it comes afterward; we are in fact deluding ourselves. Or alternatively, whether we really do make decisions, and the nervous system is the organ through which we make and implement them. Just as we walk with our legs, we think with our brain. Not that the brain thinks. In other words, for materialists, determinists, the brain is the factor that thinks. For dualists, libertarians, those who believe in free will, they say no: just as the legs don’t walk—the person walks by means of the legs—so too the person thinks by means of the brain, but the brain itself does not think.

[Speaker B] If you’re against free will, are you necessarily in favor of determinism?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what determinism means. Determinism means that we do not have free will, yes.

[Speaker B] But determinism means that the future is, as it were, predicted by the past.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Now there’s a very popular approach in recent years called compatibilism—compatible, meaning you can be a determinist and still believe in free will. And their claim is—this is wordplay in my view—but their claim is: what is free will? Free will is that I decide; nothing else decides for me, right? But if I decide through completely mechanical, completely deterministic processes, that’s still me deciding; nobody else made the decision for me. So even though the process is deterministic and I could know in advance what will happen, still I’m the one deciding, no one else determined anything for me, and therefore in effect I have free will, I’m a free person. Not “free will” maybe, but I’m a free person despite determinism. So there’s a kind of definitional word game here. It’s not really interesting. You can call it free will if you want; it has no real significance. At the end of the day, you’re a deterministic machine.

[Speaker B] I understand. So everything we’ve talked about up to now was basically meant to show that there are things science simply can’t prove.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right.

[Speaker B] So if that takes us back to the question of God—I have trouble wrapping my head around the idea that there’s a question like that that simply can’t be answered.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know that I would say it can’t be answered. Even in neuroscience I don’t use that incautious formulation. It may be that some experiment will be found that does succeed. All I’m claiming is that from all the experiments proposed so far and all the information we have so far, you cannot derive that conclusion. A person wiser than me and wiser than all of us may come in a year, in ten years, in fifty years, and actually find such an experiment. And I hope all of us will be honest enough to accept the results of the experiment and say, okay, the problem has been decided, it has moved from the domain of philosophy into the domain of science, and it has been settled. And I hope I’ll be honest enough even if the result doesn’t fit the position I currently hold. In the context of God’s existence, there aren’t even proposals for such experiments. That is, there I have proposals that I disagree with; here there aren’t even proposals. Now if someone comes in ten years and tells me, look, I have an experiment I’m going to do—there it’s really hard for me to see how that could happen. But you know, with Libet’s experiment too, I wouldn’t have imagined it. There are smart people who may be able to think of such a thing—I don’t know, I invite them to try. Meanwhile I know of no proposal for an experiment that would test this, and therefore it’s clear that the question is not a scientific question but a philosophical one, a faith question. Each person decides as he thinks, but science will not decide it. Why do people think this is connected to evolution and scientific theories? There’s a very basic misunderstanding here. We said at the beginning that there are several ways to arrive at belief in God. One of them—and for some reason I’m used to saying “God” even though one should say “God.” Yes, one should. I think so, certainly when you’re speaking in a philosophical context and not a religious one, but I don’t know, it’s a linguistic habit. There are several ways to reach belief in God. One of them—and Kant speaks of three, or really four if you add another one, and you can add more routes beyond Kant’s routes. I counted seven kinds of routes. That is, each type contains several secondary routes or sub-routes, but there are seven kinds of ways to reach belief in God. The third one in Kant’s count—Kant spoke of three in the Critique of Pure Reason, and another elsewhere—but the third in the Critique of Pure Reason is what he calls the physico-theological proof. The physico-theological proof is an argument that says: look, the world is complex. A complex thing does not arise on its own—it’s not likely, statistically speaking—and therefore there is a composer, so to speak, which is what was to be proven. That’s God. Now there are lots of objections, and it needs… even though, in my opinion, at the bottom line it’s still a good argument, one that gets unfairly maligned. But that’s the argument. Now, what stands at the basis of this argument? There is some assumption that a complex thing does not arise without a guiding hand, without some factor that produces it. You can tie this to the second law of thermodynamics, for example: the level of order in the world doesn’t increase unless someone is involved and creates it. In natural processes, the level of order either stays the same or decreases; it doesn’t increase. Now, when you produce a world, you’re obviously producing things that are more and more ordered. Once there was only inanimate matter, then gradually plant life, animal life, human beings—and these are beings that are more and more complex. So you can formulate this in terms of entropy as well, though that’s more peripheral, and say that a complex thing doesn’t arise by itself. Therefore someone has to be involved, and we call Him God. Okay. What do the neo-Darwinists—the atheist neo-Darwinists—claim? Again, these are not scientists as scientists. I too can study evolution. When I speak about neo-Darwinists, I mean a neo-Darwinist philosophical outlook. It draws on science and presents itself as science, but it is not science—it is a philosophical position. Because I can adopt all of their science and still reach a different philosophical conclusion. So when I say neo-Darwinists, I’m not speaking about a group of scientists. They may also be scientists, but not in that capacity; rather, in their philosophical capacity as atheists. What are they actually claiming? They claim that evolution shows us there is a way to create complex, sophisticated creatures without anyone being involved in the process—a process that occurs spontaneously, naturally. No one is involved.

[Speaker B] That is the prevailing opinion in academia, though.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I assume so, among researchers of evolution, I assume. I’ve never checked, but I’m fairly convinced—it sounds like the classic thesis. I’m pretty convinced most of them are atheists. But I don’t know the percentages or how many; I haven’t checked. It also doesn’t interest me. I’m not impressed by what this group says or what that group says. Each person has to form his own position. There are smart people on all sides. But someone who paints the picture as though here are the smart ones and here are the stupid ones—that person is an idiot.

[Speaker B] No, but there is supposedly a mainstream of science that is accepted—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s not the mainstream of science, that’s the mainstream of scientists. It’s not a scientific result. You don’t get that from science. But most scientists who deal with this field—I really do think they’re atheists. A large number of them, by the way, also think that this follows from science, but that’s not a scientific mistake; it’s a philosophical mistake they’re making. It’s not in their area of expertise. They may be very good scientists and less good philosophers.

[Speaker B] It’s also just a very overwhelming majority.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, okay, so what? Interesting. In any case, the claim is—what is their claim? That the assumption of the physico-theological proof, that a complex thing does not arise in a spontaneous process and therefore requires some guiding hand, is incorrect. Look—evolution shows that it isn’t. Okay. That was basically Darwin’s great discovery. And that is its philosophical significance. Beyond its scientific significance—and it has enormous scientific significance—its philosophical significance was to attack the assumption of the physico-theological proof. Now let’s think about what that means. Suppose they’re right. They’re not right, but suppose they are. Then the assumption at the basis of the physico-theological proof has fallen. Okay. Why? Because complex things can arise on their own. So the fact that the world is complex does not mean there is a God, because complex things also happen in spontaneous processes. Right? That is basically the claim. Let’s assume that’s true. Again, I’m saying it isn’t true, but let’s assume it is. What does that mean? Almost nothing. Why? First of all, think for example of a geometric proof that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. Now you handed me the exercise—I’m the teacher, okay? I checked the exercise and found a mistake. Does that mean the sum of the angles in a triangle is not 180 degrees? No. It only means your proof isn’t correct. But the theorem itself can still be true.

[Speaker B] But I’ll tell you what I think, as a secular person who thinks this way—and I think many people think like I do. What we take from the atheist Darwinist claim is that the religious idea sort of dressed itself onto reality, and then secular people feel they’ve removed something.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I don’t have a problem, everything’s fine, it’s a legitimate argument. I’m just saying: evolution, all it does in this discussion is attack the assumption behind the physico-theological proof. That’s what it does, that’s what evolution did. Beyond that, you can be an atheist, do whatever you want, think whatever you want, those are different discussions.

[Speaker B] What does evolution do? You call it an attack—I’m only commenting on the word “attack”—because I think it’s the opposite. I think it’s more like shedding the attacking theory, at least that’s how people see it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s semantics. As far as I’m concerned, what the atheist is really claiming—when I bring him the physico-theological proof, he says: your assumption is incorrect, because evolution shows that this assumption is incorrect. Okay, that’s the discussion between us. Call it shedding, attacking, it doesn’t matter, it’s not essential. So I’m saying, let’s suppose it’s even true. It’s not attacking, but let’s suppose it’s true. So what does that mean? It means that proof number three—or one version of proof number three, from category three out of seven categories—has fallen. Does that mean the conclusion is false? Like the sum of the angles in a triangle. So the proof I brought wasn’t successful. Okay. That doesn’t mean there is no God. It only means that this proof for God’s existence has failed. Now we need to discuss it anew, everything’s fine, I didn’t say there is. But that doesn’t mean evolution says there is no God. All it says is that one path out of, I don’t know, 119 other paths—well, this path isn’t correct. Okay? But I have other paths. So maybe I reach God by path 102 even though path 91 was disqualified. Okay? Sorry that I’m using numbers here like in the Psalms. But all you did was remove one path. Okay, so what happened? So one of the proofs that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees fell apart. That doesn’t mean the sum of the angles isn’t 180.

[Speaker B] Yes, but in practice why do you want—why is it so important to you to prove this? It’s because of your way of life. You understand? The question is whether that comes first.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why is it so important to you to prove it isn’t true? Because of your way of life. Fine. We’re all shaped by the landscape of our birthplace. Fine. Still, I want to discuss arguments, not the question of what the motivations are for raising arguments. The question of motivations for raising arguments is, in my view, not a legitimate question in a substantive discussion, because that’s ad hominem. Let’s look at the argument. Does the argument hold water or not? That’s what matters to me. Whenever people start examining other people’s motives—and by the way, this exists on both sides of these debates—it really irritates me. Why? Because I think you’re dropping down to psychological levels when the discussion is a philosophical one. We’re all driven by all kinds of odd psychological motives. None of us is immune. But it’s important that they be on the table. No, absolutely not. Raise the argument. If it holds water, why do I care where you got it from? If it doesn’t hold water, then I’ll explain why it doesn’t hold water, again with no connection to the question of why you raised it. This is what in philosophy of science is called the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. Suppose someone comes along and found the theory of relativity because his grandmother appeared to him in a dream and told him the theory of relativity: E equals mc squared. Now he comes to the scientific community and says, look, my grandmother appeared to me and said E equals mc squared. Does that invalidate the theory? Not at all. Go check it—if it’s true, why do I care that it came from his grandmother? If it’s not true, then it isn’t true even if it didn’t come from his grandmother. So why do I care where it came from? That’s the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. When you examine a scientific claim or theory, don’t examine how it was discovered or why people want to argue for it. That always very much characterizes the discourse of people who want to hit below the belt. When you don’t have arguments, then you immediately check what motives the person opposite you has, and you accuse him of some motives—as if you don’t have motives. Everyone has motives. We’re all flesh-and-blood creatures, with psychology. You know, it really is…

[Speaker B] No, you’re welcome to finish the sentence too, if it was…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, there’s a nice example of this that always comes to mind. Someone becomes religious, okay? So his religious friends say, well, finally he discovered the truth. What do the secular people say? Apparently he went through some crisis, broke up with his girlfriend, right? So the secular people are psychologists and the religious people are philosophers. Exactly. Now someone leaves religion—what happens then? So his new secular friends say: oh, finally he discovered that everything he used to live by was nonsense, he discovered the truth.

[Speaker B] They’re philosophers. No, but they don’t think they say it…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A lot of them say it. I mean, the point is, he discovered… they don’t say that secularity is the truth, but that he discovered there’s nothing in religious life. Fine, so they’re philosophers. And the religious people say he wanted to permit sexual prohibitions to himself, wanted to live a more comfortable life. Meaning—they’re psychologists. So you see that adopting the philosophical plane or the psychological plane is tendentious. When it suits you, you’re a philosopher, and when it doesn’t suit you, then you’re a psychologist. Meaning, if you don’t have theses that can successfully defend themselves or attack the position of the person you’re arguing with, then you say: ah, for you this comes from such-and-such a psychological motive.

[Speaker B] But you’re talking about my psychological motives.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m pointing to a mode of conduct that I think—I very much recommend not conducting yourself this way. It has nothing to do with motives. Rather, I’m saying we need to discuss arguments on their merits. Either you’re convinced or you’re not convinced, and that’s perfectly fine either way. But why I raised the argument belongs to the context of discovery, not justification. And you need to discuss the context of justification. If the theory is true, we’ll check in the lab and see whether it’s true. That’s what determines it, not whether it came from my grandmother or my neighbor or some other idea. Fair enough, really fair enough. So in this context too I say—and not that it isn’t true—we’re all creatures with psychology, we all have good reasons why we say things and why we raise arguments, all of that is true. I’m only saying: not because of that. Maybe he’s right. If he’s right, then it’s worth adopting it even if it comes from a psychological motive you don’t like.

[Speaker B] Yes. Human beings are just crazy animals. Okay. And you, as someone who deals with evolution, know that—that we have things running us that are so ancient, really from the ape. All of that is true.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t say it wasn’t true.

[Speaker B] So knowing that seems to me to be something of a higher level.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Knowing that is very important. Very important. Bringing it into the discussion, into the argument—not relevant. Below the belt. When I do—when I want to neutralize outside influences on my thinking, it’s very worthwhile to know those influences and try to neutralize them. But when I’m arguing with you about an argument you raise, I’m not going to say, look, there’s some influence on you because you grew up there or because you want to achieve this or because you broke up with your girlfriend. That’s not relevant. I want to know whether the argument you’re making is logical or not. If it’s reasonable, I’ll say it’s reasonable no matter where it came from. And if it’s not reasonable, then I need to raise arguments for why I think it’s not reasonable. Therefore it’s very important that you examine yourself, maybe where it comes from, in order to neutralize influences and all that. But when I discuss your arguments, I need to discuss the argument, not your motives for raising it. We all have motives. Marx said, to a large extent rightly, that religion is the opium of the masses. True. To a large extent rightly. It’s convenient for many, many people to live a religious life. For some people less so. And for many people it’s very convenient. It explains the world to them. It settles things. There’s someone to rely on. Very comfortable. By the way, there are people for whom it’s also comfortable to live a secular life. Doesn’t matter. Everyone with his own comfort. So what if it’s the opium of the masses? Does that mean it isn’t true? Meaning, the fact that something is convenient for me doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

[Speaker B] But it does say other things. It says that it’s easy to use it to exploit you, or easy to use it to use you for certain needs.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you show me that I’m being exploited or that I’m arriving at a false conclusion, then you can now tell me: pay attention to what brought you to this. Now look into the psychology. But psychology is not an argument. Psychology is a conclusion. Meaning, after on the substantive level I reached the conclusion that your argument is foolish, now I say: look, you’re an intelligent person—how are you making such a foolish argument? Try to think, apparently there was some psychological influence that tilted you. But to tell you the psychological influence as an argument against it—that’s not substantive. Do you understand? I need to refute your claim. After we’ve reached the point where even you agreed, let’s say, yes, that the claim is foolish—now we can try to think how you came to make a foolish claim. Maybe the crisis with your girlfriend caused you to, I don’t know what.

[Speaker B] So let’s get back to the substance. Okay. And I’d be happy—since we really touched a bit on evolution—I’d be happy to hear what you think about evolution. How you look at it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so I’m saying: my claim is that evolution merely attacks the assumption of the physico-theological proof. That proof—that assumption—that a complex thing is not created in a spontaneous process, that you need someone…

[Speaker B] …to be involved there.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying even if that were true, then it attacks the assumption of the argument, but it doesn’t attack the conclusion. The conclusion says that by this route you probably aren’t forced to reach the conclusion, and it can still be true.

[Speaker B] And what does that say to you?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It only tells me that this route to God has been closed off to me, so I have the other 118 routes left. That’s all. And here evolution has finished its job. That’s why its role in the discussion is very minor, honestly. I’ll say more than that—even route number 91, which evolution supposedly knocked down, doesn’t really knock it down. It’s simply a philosophical mistake. Wow. Meaning, even that it doesn’t do. Why not? Because what are you actually saying? You’re saying that evolution shows that something can improve and become more complex, can come into being—that a complex thing can also come into being through a spontaneous process, without a guiding hand, without some involved agent. Not the initial push—maybe at the beginning yes—but you don’t need some factor…

[Speaker B] …that accompanies the process.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The big question is—and all the analogies that are always brought on websites and in atheist arguments are so stupid, because they’re analogies that prove the opposite. Simply people with an appalling lack of understanding, really in my view, and this comes back on all the websites and in all the places. The point is that evolution is something that takes place within a system of very, very rigid laws of nature, very special and specific ones. The fundamental forces of physics, and on top of that chemistry, biology, and so on. Okay? If the laws were different, then there would be no chemistry, no biology, and of course no evolution either. Meaning, if the speed of light were different, or the gravitational constant were different, something like that—there would be no chemistry, no biology, no evolution, there would be nothing. Okay? Now given this system of laws, then of course you can fire and forget. There are third-generation missiles. So you say the process runs and somehow increasing complexity arises over time without anyone being involved. You need to remember: there are laws here that accompany this process the entire time and tell it what it’s allowed to do and what it’s not allowed to do—the laws of physics, the laws of nature. The question is: who created them? Whoever created those laws basically created the result. So what if he doesn’t accompany the result directly? The laws he created accompany the result. You know, it’s like one of the stupid examples I mentioned earlier, which gets brought up over and over. Someone once did an experiment—it was even published in Nature, I think, or Science, I don’t remember anymore. Someone did an experiment on the famous example of “to be or not to be,” the well-known Shakespearean sentence. That’s fourteen letters, say, without spaces—“to be or not to be,” write it continuously. Okay, what’s the probability that something like that would arise by chance? Negligible, right? There are twenty-two letters in Hebrew, fourteen positions, so that means twenty-two to the minus fourteenth power, a very, very small number. Meaning, you can’t even imagine how small it is. There’s no chance such a thing would arise by chance. If you randomly pick, say, fourteen letters, the chance that you pick exactly those is negligible. Okay, now someone says: fine, but suppose I give my letter-randomizing program an extra feature, and I say, look, once you reach the first letter lamed, do a draw—if aleph comes out, throw it away; if chet comes out, throw it away; if lamed comes out, accept it. Now move to the second letter, draw again—if aleph comes out, throw it away; if heh comes out, accept it. “To be or not to be,” right? And so on. Then obviously the probability skyrockets. And in that situation, if you run the program long enough, this sentence will come out. And this means—that’s basically evolution—and therefore the religious people who believe in God are mistaken; look, we have it: evolution can actually produce a meaningful sentence that has no chance of arising on its own unless someone creates it. But this is such a stupid example that sometimes I pinch myself wondering how intelligent people say it. After all, who wrote the program? The one who wrote the program is the one who dictated that the result would be “to be or not to be.” He said: stop at lamed, stop at heh, right. Meaning, he planned the “to be or not to be,” he wrote… Now true, it runs by itself and nobody is using it or anything. That’s exactly what happens in our world. Meaning, this example proves why you must arrive at the conclusion of God, not why you don’t need God. And this is an example that all atheists quote again and again. I had some debate with—what was his name? He was the Director General of the Ministry of Science, a very famous autodidact, I forgot his name, he died not long ago, a very nice man, Tzvi Yanai. What? Tzvi Yanai. Tzvi Yanai? Yes. Very interesting, a very interesting character, also a very… atheist. So I had an argument with him about this, and he responded in an article—there are filmed debates we have too—but he responded in some article to this claim of mine with total nonsense, just utter nonsense.

[Speaker B] About your claim?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] About this claim that “to be or not to be” proves God, it doesn’t refute Him.

[Speaker B] Yes, that sounds logical to me.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There was nothing there— I didn’t see anything there that really holds water. In any case, that’s exactly what happens in the world. Meaning, in our world there is a very, very specific and precise system of laws. Meaning, if anything in it were different, we wouldn’t be sitting here. Right. Okay, so what does that mean? It means that whoever created this system of laws—even though what happens inside it is evolution, there is no guiding hand, it happens, it goes extinct, it comes into being, heredity, natural selection, everything’s fine, everything’s true, everything’s excellent—and in the end suddenly the two of us are sitting here talking. Yes. It began with the Big Bang in some, I don’t know, point of matter somewhere, and here we are sitting and talking, all this madness happened on its own without a guiding hand, but yes, within a very, very particular system of laws, without which it could not have happened. So I ask: who wrote the system of laws? Not who accompanies the process. Whoever wrote the system of laws is in fact accompanying the process through it.

[Speaker B] I completely understand your argument. If I were—if some senior academic were sitting opposite you here right now, someone who supports these opposing claims and probably even quotes that article, that study, then he would argue that randomness is the point—that there have been, as it were, infinitely many—the term infinity, which I don’t think you can really confront even in science—infinitely many Big Bangs, infinitely many possibilities…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re taking us to somewhat different territory; here you need to distinguish between several different claims under your description. First of all, within the evolutionary process, the claim is that of course there is a random component. Yes, after all, things happen and something goes extinct because suddenly there’s a heat wave; this survives because it has food—obviously, a completely random process. But if this random process were taking place within a framework that wasn’t these laws, nothing would be created. Meaning, this randomness—you know, there’s an analogy by Stephen Gould, I think, also an atheist, a neo-Darwinist—again, an analogy that demonstrates the opposite. Meaning, he gives the analogy of a drunk leaving a bar, okay? And he walks on a sidewalk, and on one side there’s a wall and on the other side… on the other side there’s a ditch. In the end, you’ll find him in the ditch. Meaning, he swayed this way, he swayed that way, it’s all random, in the end you’ll find him in the ditch. Now I say, good Lord—good Lord in both senses. This example shows you exactly: who brought the drunk to the ditch? The randomness? Whoever created the situation where there’s a ditch here and a wall there. Whoever built the space within which this randomness is operating is the one who actually determined the result. So the fact that the drunk sways randomly right and left—what do I care? If there weren’t a ditch here and a wall there, he’d sway in every direction; he wouldn’t end up in the ditch. Yes. Meaning, it’s true that a random process operates within this system and it happens randomly, and it’s true that if you wait enough times a random thing can do many things—but there are many things it cannot do. And the laws of nature, which are the framework within which the thing operates, are what actually make the process possible. This drunk is moving within a very, very defined space—there’s a ditch here and a wall there—and only because of that can you know in advance that he’ll end up in the ditch.

[Speaker B] Yes, but if you take the word I said—“infinity”—and apply randomness to it, it looks different. So how do you deal with the word “infinity”?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, the word “infinity”? Make whatever infinity you want; in anything—once the system of laws was different, you could wait an infinite amount of time, do whatever you want, no human being would emerge. Nothing. Because a human being requires a very, very particular system of laws, a very special one, in order to function. It’s not that randomness… Think of a world in which there are no laws of nature at all, or the laws of nature are these: if there’s a particle here, it moves one step to the right, that’s it; and after another hour it moves another step to the right—those are the laws of nature, let’s say, a very, very simple system, okay? Do you think that if you wait long enough, a human being will come out of such a system?

[Speaker B] I understand—you’re applying specific laws…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course! You need some very, very specific set of laws, a very special one, even if you say it’s a random process.

[Speaker B] No, but if there’s no regularity at all here?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then nothing will happen.

[Speaker B] Supposedly that’s the time people claim there was—like before the Big Bang there was an infinite amount of time in which things formed…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, but the laws of nature were the same laws of nature—unless you’re going to many universes. That’s why I said there are other claims; you have to distinguish among the claims. There’s the randomness within the Darwinian, evolutionary system—that’s what I’ve answered until now.

[Speaker B] Got it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now there’s another claim: maybe there is a multiverse, many universes, and in each universe there are different laws of nature, and in fact all kinds of different bizarre creatures can emerge. To that I can only say the following: when you raise this in order to offer an alternative to the claim that there is a God… yes. Now I ask you: what seems more economical and simple to you in terms of Occam’s razor? To say that there are infinitely many universes, in each of which there are all kinds of bizarre creatures that I have no idea what they are, and different laws that I have never seen even hinted at—does that seem to you a more rational and simple alternative than just saying there is someone here who made the whole thing? I think that’s much more reasonable. But again, everyone with his own criteria of simplicity.

[Speaker B] Yes, but here too you’re going a little into motives, which is not really…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, not motives, no.

[Speaker B] It’s a little beside the point—the substantive claim, just for the sake of fairness, isn’t exactly as you’re presenting it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean? It’s exactly the same claim, only substantively. I didn’t talk about psychology at all. Okay. What I just said is entirely substantive: I have two alternatives, and the way we usually choose between two alternatives is by Occam’s razor—we choose the simplest one, the more economical one, the one with fewer entities, fewer principles. That’s the accepted principle; science… so decide what seems simpler to you. In my view, I think this answer is much simpler. I’ll tell you more than that—it’s another way of saying the same thing: once there are infinitely many universes and in each one anything can exist because the laws of nature are different, so there are different creatures and everything, then there can also be gods in those universes, right? Right. All kinds of things. So what are you doing? Then you too are accepting the existence of God. And that’s more economical than saying there are no universes because we haven’t seen them, and there’s no… there is one God who created the world, because we see that such a thing came into being and it isn’t likely that it came into being without God. I don’t know, that sounds much more logical to me. But again, everyone with his own considerations.

[Speaker B] Totally. It’s like… this discussion about the very… it scratches the brain. I think what’s really in me is a resistance to the surrender of control that I’d need in order to acknowledge the existence of God.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so here that’s already your business. I told you—your psychology is something you need to examine. I’m not touching your psychology. I’m talking to you about what I think of your arguments. Now you decide your own decisions about what you do with that.

[Speaker B] Fascinating. Okay, so there’s something here that remains open for me that I don’t fully understand. In your life, do you accept what science proposes as truth about the universe, about existence? Yes, obviously. You accept—you came from the ape? Is that how you look at everything?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We don’t come from the ape. Evolution doesn’t say we came from the ape; rather, we and the ape came from some more primitive creature. Not that we came from the ape. But yes, in principle yes, that’s plausible.

[Speaker B] How does that fit with… I mean I think most of our listeners who disagree, and they’re religious people—the way religion prevents them… how does that fit with it? I think most of our listeners who disagree, and they’re religious people—the way religion prevents them from agreeing with that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. That’s what I said earlier, that there’s this kind of zero-sum game that both the believers and the creationists, let’s call them, and the neo-Darwinists are partners to. Both sides think you have to choose either science or faith. And I say both are mistaken; it’s simply not true. You can believe or not believe, no problem. You can criticize science if you have evidence or don’t have evidence, everything’s fine. But one doesn’t force the other; there’s no connection. These are two questions, and on each of them you need to answer yourself independently.

[Speaker B] Yes, it doesn’t…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t bother me to hear that I came from the ape or that we both came from some more ancient thing, some more ancient creature. So what happened? What’s the problem? That’s the way the Holy One, blessed be He, created me. The laws of nature that He created caused human beings to arise. How did human beings come into being? They can come into being this way, or another way, so He chose the evolutionary path. Fine—so what happened? What does it mean? That He chose this path of formation and not another?

[Speaker B] No, I’ve left here the argument about whether He exists or not.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s why I’m saying: so what difference does it make to me? So even if God chose an evolutionary route to create me, my obligation toward Him, His status in my eyes, is the same. What difference does it make whether He created me with His own hands from the dust of the earth as described in the Book of Genesis, or whether He did it through an evolutionary process? Fine—what difference does it make?

[Speaker B] So who is He, in your eyes, in your life? I’d really be happy to hear on the personal level.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know how to answer things like that because my religiosity—and my personality in general—is not sentimental, not emotional, not experiential. I’m a cold rational person. I have no religious experiences. Religion doesn’t fulfill any needs for me; it mostly bothers me. And I don’t believe because of those things. I believe because I think it’s true.

[Speaker B] So then how do you maintain this way of life throughout your whole life?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know. I’m a rational person, I try to behave as I should. I’d be lying to you if I told you that my religious motivations are the same as those of fanatics who are sure God is in their pocket and accompanies them every moment and rewards them too for everything they do—which I don’t believe. Right, those aren’t the same motivations. Fine. A rational person—there are prices you pay, and you need to refuel yourself a bit more in order to do what you need to do, and sometimes you fail too. Fine. We’re all human.

[Speaker B] I understand, you look at it as…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not willing to adopt conceptions I don’t believe in and that aren’t me, just in order to be more attached to the religious path. If I don’t believe in religious experiences, I don’t attribute truth-value to them, I don’t think you really meet God on that experiential plane—in my eyes that’s usually illusion. So to decide that it’s not illusion only because it’ll motivate me more to observe the commandments—that’s deceiving myself, and I’m not willing.

[Speaker B] And what does that say to you about the revelations in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and things like that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Revelations in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) are something else, I think. Meaning, as a rationalist person, usually if someone came to me today with all kinds of revelations, I would tend not to believe him. I don’t rule it out—anything is possible, we can never know with certainty. On the face of it, my initial position is that something here is probably off, or he’s lying, or he’s naive, whatever—not always lying—but it didn’t happen, it didn’t really happen. I don’t believe miracle stories, and for most of them I also have explanations. Meaning, I show statistically that it’s not a miracle and not a wonder. Many times people in the religious world get terribly angry at me when I raise arguments like that, because all the miracles everyone gets so excited about and thanks the Holy One, blessed be He, for—in my eyes it’s sheer vanity. There’s no miracle there; it’s statistics. You thank Him for saving you—why aren’t you angry at Him for the fact that they shot the bullet at you? It seems like a very childish way of thinking to me. Now, I’m not denying that childish thinking of that sort strongly motivates you to fulfill your religious obligations. Of course—if God accompanies you every moment and watches and sees and responds, and your life is wonderful if you serve Him and not wonderful if you don’t serve Him, then you have a huge motivation to serve Him. But I don’t believe that. So I’m not going to adopt something I don’t believe in in order to be a better Jew, someone who observes commandments more faithfully. And that has a price—it’s less, I agree, it’s less. We’re human beings, as we said before, we are all driven by motivations of all kinds. And once you have fewer emotional, experiential motivations, it’s harder to remain attached. True. Fine. But that’s the truth—what can I do?

[Speaker B] Yes, but the importance of attachment in your eyes is…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s no such thing as the importance of attachment. Attachment is a given.

[Speaker B] You do the commandments no matter what—not important how I feel about them.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I try. I won’t tell you I always succeed. I try. That’s the approach. Someone who always acts according to his approach is a robot, and that usually doesn’t happen. I wish I were a robot, but nobody is perfect. The point is that what I think ought to be—that’s it. No, I always have this familiar joke that a lot of people… they already laugh at me about this—that I read The Rosie… you know, that story from Australia, what’s it called, about the… about the Asperger’s. A very famous book, something with Rosie, I don’t remember anymore. He has a series of books, several very interesting books, the guy, some Australian writer, Simsion something, Simsion something. So the hero was basically some kind of Asperger’s, even though it’s not mentioned in the book, but it’s obvious to everyone that it’s Asperger’s. Later I heard in an interview that he said he intentionally didn’t mention that it was Asperger’s, because listen, he works in high tech. He says, in high tech I know a hundred guys like that around me and they aren’t diagnosed, but fine, we’re all somewhere on that spectrum. So I always say that Asperger’s was perceived—and by the way today I already understand that not—but it was perceived as some kind of mental disorder, and in my eyes that’s perfection. Meaning, whoever isn’t Asperger’s is the mental disorder—but nobody’s perfect. Meaning, if we were perfect, we’d be Asperger’s. What is Asperger’s? Asperger’s is someone who follows exactly what should be done. He doesn’t understand the human nuances. He doesn’t accept that sometimes people come two minutes late to a meeting. Meaning, what do you mean—we set it for seven, how are you arriving at seven-oh-two? That’s how the book begins there. He doesn’t—he doesn’t understand, as if there are rules, and he works with the rules. He’s this kind of robot, very rational, very logical, and really very perfect in my eyes—that really is a perfect model. We aren’t like that, but that’s the fact. But there’s nothing to be proud of in that fact. I don’t think the Asperger’s person is the problematic one—we’re the problematic ones. But that’s what we are.

[Speaker B] What interests me is just from the behavioral direction of a human being who adopts commandments like these. You said that you even wish, as it were, you were a robot. Maybe that’s the means—the means too of reaching the greatest achievements in the world—it’s self-discipline, really. That’s what Judaism requires.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, yes. Self-discipline. And as long as you’re not a robot, it’s a stronger demand because it’s harder to conduct yourself without discipline. Not that I’m idealizing a robot—I think free choice is a very essential and important thing. A robot has no free choice. But on the basic level, I mean emotional and experiential biases are in my eyes really biases. Meaning, one should try to get rid of them; it’s not something I make into an ideal. Free choice is something else. Choice is the essence of our being, I think; without choice we wouldn’t really be human.

[Speaker B] The ability to choose between good and evil.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Which also—that’s always the question: if God wanted us to do a certain set of actions, then why did He give us choice? He could have built us programmed to do those actions and not others.

[Speaker B] Exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If He gave us choice—and I believe we have choice—then if He gave us choice, apparently what matters to Him isn’t only doing the actions in themselves, so what; rather, doing them out of a decision to do them. If I do all the actions but not out of my own decision to do them, it has no value. Robots He can make by Himself; He doesn’t need me for those things. He needs me—I don’t know whether He needs or doesn’t need—but He created me because He expects me to choose this path and to act because I chose. And therefore it was apparently not right from His perspective—I’m speaking entirely in guesses, of course, I don’t know what goes on in His mind—but it was not right from His perspective to create me as a machine that observes commandments in a deterministic way. That wouldn’t have done the job, even though it would have performed the actions themselves optimally. But the goal is apparently not the collection of actions; the goal is the choice of that collection. If someone were to offer me now, let’s say, to hypnotize me so that I would be unable to commit transgressions and would only pursue commandments day and night, I would not agree to that offer.

[Speaker B] That also doesn’t count—it’s not exactly the product.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s a product that… so in effect my brain is doing the commandments, not me. But as we said, I think by means of the brain; the brain does not think. Meaning, I am not the brain; I am the one who uses the brain.

[Speaker B] Yes. And what about good and evil? So you’re saying that supposedly we have a choice to choose between good and evil? And what about someone who chooses evil—how do you explain that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s a bad person, what can I do?

[Speaker B] He’s just a bad person, basically?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, if he’s mistaken and thinks that’s the good, then he’s not a bad person, just mistaken.

[Speaker B] That’s not always the case.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not always.

[Speaker B] A person, yes—well, obviously not always.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. If it were always like that, you couldn’t judge anyone. Meaning, psychopaths do understand what good and evil are, but they’re indifferent to it, they don’t have the…

[Speaker B] Okay, let’s even take it on the current-events level—the war right now. So Hamas, for example, they’re sure they’re doing good.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. I’ve written in many places that judgment, in my opinion—judgment of a person, not of a position. Judgment of a position is according to arguments: whether it’s true or not true. Judgment of a person—whether he is a good person or not—must always be made according to his own view. Meaning, for me even Hitler—I wouldn’t judge him as evil if I were… I don’t know, but if I knew that he truly and sincerely believed that this was what was good for the world, or I don’t know what, because the Jews really, I don’t know what—then I wouldn’t judge him as evil. I would kill him because he threatens us, because he endangers the Jews, the world. I would shoot him, but not as punishment. Meaning, I don’t judge him as a bad person; I judge him as a mistaken person. And when we look at something closer to us, like ISIS—that’s already in our own time, not seventy or eighty years ago—the same thing. I think about it all the time. Meaning, these are people who apparently truly and sincerely believe that this is what their god wants. And therefore I can’t relate to them as bad people. They really think that’s the case. They’re terribly harmful, terribly cruel, it’s horrifying in my eyes. You have to shoot them because they can’t be left in the world. But I can’t judge them as bad people, if they truly and sincerely believe this. I do think there is a certain demand made of human beings—and these are always arguments I also have in the Jewish religious world, which is less wild than ISIS, but there too there are actions justified in the name of religion. And I think the value of justification in the name of religion is not infinite. Meaning, in the final analysis there is also responsibility on you. Meaning, fine, God said, the Torah says—check: does it make sense? Is it right to do such a thing? If it’s not right, check carefully—maybe He didn’t say it. Maybe you aren’t willing to do it even if He did say it. Maybe He doesn’t exist at all. There are, for example, certain things that are such a severe moral problem that because I’m not certain of anything, including the existence of God, I’m not sure I would do them—even if I were sure this is the interpretation of the Torah and I had no other interpretation, let’s say. But you know, you make expected-value calculations. Meaning, if I’m not sure it’s true, then that’s not strong enough to make me kill children, or give up my life, or I don’t know, very, very radical things, you understand? So there are implications to this rationality and to this unwillingness to accept things as absolute. I define fundamentalism on the philosophical plane. We usually think of fundamentalism as a kind of wickedness, cruelty—that’s not correct. Fundamentalism in the philosophical sense is someone who holds a position and does not subject it to the test of critical thought. That is a fundamentalist person. Now that can also be Mother Teresa. She is a fundamentalist of morality. Now to be near her is a delight. Meaning, yes, she’s a righteous woman. Right? But that’s fundamentalism in every respect. And the fundamentalism of ISIS is to accept other positions in a way that doesn’t stand the test of critical thought—and there you don’t want to be around. Okay? But both are fundamentalists. And I have a claim against fundamentalists in this sense: true, you think it’s right, but everything must stand a critical test. Meaning, even if it comes from God in your view, because it’s not certain that it’s true—it passed through human mediation. And who told you it really came from Him? And who told you He exists? That too is not certain. Okay? And therefore there’s no such thing. Every person in the end is responsible also for the things he does by force of a religious, divine, or other command. Just as the Nazis said, “we were following orders.” And Germans really do believe in following orders. It’s not just lip service; it’s in their nature.

[Speaker B] But earlier you said that you don’t judge Hitler, for example, as evil—so the Nazis too, supposedly, are a kind of…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I said, I want to qualify what I said earlier. In principle, I judge every person by their own view. But I can judge why he adopted that view as his view. Meaning, if you adopt it just like that because someone said so, then you took an unserious step. You have responsibility: you adopted a position without examining it properly, and you kill on its basis. When you kill on the basis of a certain position, I expect you to check very, very carefully whether that really is the binding position.

[Speaker B] But where’s the line? Because supposedly that’s the definition of faith / belief. Faith / belief is going without—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, in my view there’s no difference at all between faith / belief and knowledge. They’re synonyms.

[Speaker B] But doesn’t faith / belief inherently require the absence of facts? You have to believe in something without—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What are you talking about? To believe is to know. They’re synonyms, it’s the same thing. When I believe in God, it means a factual claim: there is a God. Right? Yes. Not certain—other factual claims aren’t certain either. I’m also not sure there’s a lamp here. I think there is; my senses show me that there is, but you know, there are also mistakes, there are mirages. Nothing is certain to me. So whether it’s certain or not certain is not what distinguishes faith / belief from knowledge.

[Speaker B] Evyatar Banai has a song about God, where he says to fall into the arms of the merciful father; that’s how he defines it, as kind of letting go like that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, he’s describing experiences. I don’t share religious experiences.

[Speaker B] He’s describing an experience. Got it. It just feels to me that the experience of faith has to be based on lack of knowledge.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I don’t have experiences of faith. Understood? For me, faith is a conception, it’s a factual claim. I don’t have experiences; I’m not built that way.

[Speaker B] Yeah, interesting. How do you know? That’s the thing. Hamas, for example—what just happened now is simply an excellent example. We all got hit in the face by evil in a way we didn’t know. So basically, evil, in my view, is derived from the fact that this is a person who chose. Only within choice.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If he didn’t choose, then he isn’t evil; he’s coerced into doing it, obviously.

[Speaker B] Right, so why doesn’t it work out? Secular people have a hard time seeing the—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? I think Hamas chose this. Yes, yes, and therefore I do define it as evil. True, there are arguments here for mitigation of punishment, so to speak, because they believe in it as a religious faith. But as I said before, even someone who believes in something with religious faith—that doesn’t remove his responsibility. Check your beliefs. Based on those beliefs, you are doing very problematic things. You need to be very, very convinced that this is the right thing to do in order to do things like that. Say, I don’t know, someone goes and… they caught people, right? They shot in Be’er Sheva—there was once someone who just shot some guy they thought was a terrorist, and he wasn’t a terrorist at all. So they thought he was a terrorist—what can you do? No, that was a long time ago.

[Speaker B] No, there was one like that a few weeks ago in Jerusalem.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] With that lawyer?

[Speaker B] Yes. At the station, some station like that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. In Be’er Sheva?

[Speaker B] Was that the one in Be’er Sheva?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. So I’m saying: what can you do? He thought he was a terrorist. How can you… He’s ostensibly right—what is he supposed to do? So I don’t know, I’m not familiar with the details of the case, but at the level of principle, so what if he thought it was a terrorist? You’re going to kill a person. Check very, very carefully how sure you really are that he’s a terrorist, on what basis you thought he was a terrorist. Meaning, the fact that you thought he was a terrorist—obviously that’s a claim according to your own view. I judge you by your own view, so you’re not guilty. But I do judge the question of why that is your view. Meaning, were you responsible enough when you adopted that view? And that, yes, is a valid claim. Once I was at an interfaith conference at Ort Ramla, which is a comprehensive Arab high school. I live in Lod, so it’s really right near us, on the Ramla-Lod border. And they gathered all sorts of Druze and Muslims and Christians and me, rabbis and all kinds of people from all religions, to speak with the students. It was very impressive, by the way. An extremely impressive school—the principal as well as the students. I hadn’t encountered anything like it. And it’s just a regular comprehensive school, no screening, nothing, all the students from the area.

[Speaker B] How do you explain that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, amazing. Really amazing. The students were genuinely interested, behaved amazingly. During breaks they came to talk, to exchange questions. I haven’t encountered anything like that elsewhere. Anyway, so I spoke with them there, and for me it was fascinating to see my colleagues. Because they kept explaining: you have to listen to the elders and them, because that will moderate you, you won’t go wild. There are sometimes riots by some youth or another, and they say, listen, listen to the elders, to the teachers, to the qadi, to the sheikh, and that will moderate you; that will tell you what’s right and what isn’t right. And my thesis was exactly the opposite, and they were really angry with me—the lecturers, not the administration, the others. And that was the first time I argued with members of other religions about an issue that I constantly argue about with my colleague rabbis. Because I argue the exact opposite. Don’t listen to anyone—that’s what will moderate you. Because if you listen to someone, and that someone is a radical or extremist guy, you’ll all turn into a gang of robbers, terrorists, Hamas, I don’t know who. If each of you, autonomously, makes his own decisions and doesn’t listen just because he said so—even if God said so, and certainly not if His representative on earth said so—in my view the world would be better. Obedience is a recipe for evil, not a recipe for good. You’re making very optimistic assumptions about the authority to whom the obedience is directed. Meaning, if he’s a good person and everyone listens to him, then everything will be good. But there are all kinds of people in the world. You may listen to a good person, but equally there’ll be another group that listens to a bad person, and then that creates endless troubles. And I’m very—

[Speaker B] No, because I didn’t understand how obedience means that it’s evil.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Like, when you obey a bad person and everyone is very disciplined, that’s exactly the Nazis—they were very disciplined, right? The Germans followed orders.

[Speaker B] No, but self-discipline is something else.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not self-discipline—obedience to an authority. The opposite, not self-discipline. So that can lead to terribly horrific things. This robot-like quality and lack of personal decision-making are not a guarantee of good and moderate behavior—quite the opposite. Meaning, I believe in the invisible hand, economically too, in every respect, and I do think the world works out better if each person does what he thinks, and not if someone manages it from above and dictates to everyone what is right and what is not right. And then after that conversation they really scolded me, like, what do you mean, you’re creating problems for us. You wouldn’t want us to come to Jews, your students, and tell them not to listen to rabbis. I said to them, I would very much want that; I also tell them that—not to listen to rabbis. And that was the first time I realized that exactly the same phenomena I know in our community exist in all religions, the same thing. Now, why am I bringing this up? Because I said to them exactly that if, say, you do something because the sheikh said so, or because the rabbi said so, it doesn’t matter—each person and his own authority—and you do it because of that, the responsibility is still on you. You can’t say, he told us, and therefore ISIS told us, the caliph al-Baghdadi said so, and therefore we slit the throats of all the infidels. Okay, no. I demand that you examine it carefully, and you have responsibility for what you do even if you are believers and even if you think that… Baghdadi really is the true caliph. Check very, very carefully whether what he says truly represents what Allah wants. Meaning, you need to check that, because on that basis you are doing very extreme things.

[Speaker B] I think in Islam that’s really how things are run.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I know. In the Jewish world too there’s a kind of ideal like that, of obedience and “da’at Torah” and all that, except that in our community the instructions aren’t as wild as they are there, so it doesn’t lead to those kinds of results. Sometimes there are problematic results, but not on the levels of ISIS—we’re not there. But still, in my view, obedience is the root of all sin. I’m against obedience.

[Speaker B] I think we’ll end here. I’m—wow, I need to process the information for a moment. All right, so thank you so much for coming, Dr. Michael Abraham, thank you so much for being here.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] My pleasure.

Rabbi Michael Abraham: Free Will, God, Religion, Contradictions in Science, and the Creation of the World | Daniel Dushi Podcast #76

Table of Contents

Summary

General Overview

The Limits of Science in Relation to the Question of God

Reasons for Faith and His Personal View on Creation

Free Will and Libet’s Experiments

Determinism, Compatibilism, and the Definition of “Choice”

Evolution and the Physico-Theological Proof

The Laws of Nature, “Who Wrote the Software,” and Atheist Parables

Multiverse and Occam’s Razor

The Distinction Between the Context of Discovery and the Context of Justification, and a Critique of Psychologizing

His Attitude Toward Science, Evolution, and Religious Interpretation

Rational Religiosity, Religious Experiences, and Miracles

Free Will as Purpose, Robot-Like Behavior, and Self-Discipline

Good and Evil, Judging People, and Moral Responsibility Under Faith

Faith as a Factual Claim and Not as Giving Up Knowledge

Authority, Discipline, and Nazism as an Example of the Danger of Obedience

Full Transcript

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Table of Contents

Summary

General Overview

The Limits of Science in Relation to the Question of God

Reasons for Faith and His Personal View on Creation

Free Will and Libet’s Experiments

Determinism, Compatibilism, and the Definition of “Choice”

Evolution and the Physico-Theological Proof

The Laws of Nature, “Who Wrote the Software,” and Atheist Parables

Multiverse and Occam’s Razor

The Distinction Between the Context of Discovery and the Context of Justification, and a Critique of Psychologizing

His Attitude Toward Science, Evolution, and Religious Interpretation

Rational Religiosity, Religious Experiences, and Miracles

Free Will as Purpose, Robot-Like Behavior, and Self-Discipline

Good and Evil, Judging People, and Moral Responsibility Under Faith

Faith as a Factual Claim and Not as Giving Up Knowledge

Authority, Discipline, and Nazism as an Example of the Danger of Obedience

Full Transcript

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