Rabbi Dr. Michael Avraham: Why Atheism Is Simply Not a Rational Position

[Speaker A] Rabbi Michael Abraham, Dr. Michael Abraham, thank you for coming on my podcast. With pleasure. Glad you’re here. You’re very popular with our audience. I want to open with a question related to… In your book God Plays Dice, right? That’s the name of the book. As I understand it, you’re trying to prove rationally, logically, the fact as you see it—the existence of God. And my question to you is whether that doesn’t in some sense undercut the free choice involved in faith in God. Because Dennis Prager, for example, says that the fact that God didn’t reveal Himself directly except to Moses is a feature meant to allow us to choose to believe in God. So doesn’t a proof of the kind you’re trying to offer in some way contradict the Torah?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, a few comments. First of all, in the book my goal isn’t exactly to prove God’s existence, but rather to show that the question remains open even after evolution. In other words, there are people who think that once you adopt the neo-Darwinian picture, then necessarily there is no God. So first of all, my basic goal was to show that that’s not true. Meaning, you can adopt that picture lock, stock, and barrel and still remain a believer. After that, beyond this point, I also argued something more—that evolution, in my view, actually strengthens the evidence for God’s existence—but that wasn’t really the goal of the book; that was more of a bonus.

But as to the question itself, a few comments. First of all, let’s say there were no proof, okay? No indication whatsoever of God’s existence. In what sense would that leave it up to our choice? You could make it a lottery, not a choice. Choice is when there’s something that has good arguments in its favor—you can go with it and you can choose not to go with it. That’s your choice. But if you have no good arguments for it at all, then that choice isn’t a choice, it’s a lottery.

Think, for example, about moral principles. I have a choice whether to behave morally. Do I determine the principles of morality? Absolutely not. Moral principles are given—without getting right now into who determines them, that too can be discussed—but almost all of us would agree that these principles are not handed over to the individual person. A person can’t decide that murder is good. He can decide whether he murders or not, but the claim that murder is good is an objective claim. So דווקא where there are good indications of what is true, or in the case of morality what is proper, that is precisely where choice has meaning. Otherwise it isn’t choice but a lottery. So I don’t accept this argument that somehow things need to be left open in order for my decision to have value. On the contrary—the exact opposite is true. Once things are left open, my decision has no value, because then it’s basically a lottery, and a lottery is meaningless.

Beyond that, I think the very concept of proof is often misunderstood—if Prager said such a thing. What does proof mean? Proof is always based on some assumptions that seem reasonable to you, right? There is no proof that isn’t conditioned on assumptions. Even in mathematics, you can’t prove theorems except on the basis of some axioms. And the same is true in philosophy and in every field. So even when you say there’s a proof of something, all you’ve really said is that this claim can be grounded on other claims, on some axioms. But as for those axioms—you have to decide whether to accept them or not without proof. So the fact that there is a proof does not at all eliminate the freedom you have with respect to claims for which there is no proof. The only difference is whether this particular claim itself is your intuition, or whether it is based on other claims that are your intuition. But in essence that’s not really a fundamental difference.

[Speaker A] Okay, so let me go back for a moment to Prager’s argument. If, for example, I see you—fine, in the end I’m relying on certain assumptions. But the fact that I see you and hear you lets me prove, in quotation marks or not, that you exist. So Dennis Prager says the reason God does not reveal Himself to us in that way, on the basis of our assumptions—assumptions like, if we can feel something and hear it and see it, then we assume it exists—is because… there’s a reason behind that. Okay. The reason he seems to present, as I understand him, is to allow us free choice—or maybe I’m misunderstanding him—but how do you see it? If, for example, you say I can arrive at a proof of God’s existence not necessarily on empiricist assumptions in the sense of seeing or sensing Him through the senses, but I can arrive at His existence on the basis of other assumptions, then why shouldn’t He also reveal Himself to us through the senses in that same way?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] First of all, He did reveal Himself through the senses to the generation at Sinai, yes—to the desert generation, according to my faith at least. And since that happened, He did reveal Himself. To me, living thousands of years later, I’m nourished either by tradition or by one kind of proof or another, not by direct revelation. So first of all, in my view both things existed.

Why did He choose to reveal Himself specifically to a certain generation and not leave even them to get there by proof? There too, at least according to our tradition, it didn’t begin there. Abraham was the first to recognize God’s existence, and he arrived at it דווקא through a kind of philosophical reflection, yes? שאו מרום עיניכם וראו מי ברא אלה (“Lift up your eyes on high and see who created these”). Through a line of thought that is basically very similar to the one I rely on. In my opinion, he got it right. So the decision to reveal Himself is a decision that comes after we already have some interaction with God. Meaning, He does not reveal Himself in order to prove to us that He exists; He reveals Himself in order to convey something to us. The conclusion that He exists had already been reached much earlier. That’s one point.

Beyond that, as I said before, I think indications of His existence do not empty our decision of meaning; on the contrary, they’re what give that decision its meaning. Otherwise, as I said before, it’s just a lottery.

[Speaker A] Okay. So from what you’re saying, I hear you saying that you do read the Torah also as a historical text. Partly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Partly.

[Speaker A] So okay, then tell me which parts yes and which parts no. Because, for example, I can tell you that at one point I uploaded a video giving a psychological interpretation of the creation story, okay? Psychological or philosophical. And one of the responses I got was that alongside the fact that you can read the Torah through all kinds of interpretations—psychological, philosophical, literary—that still doesn’t exempt us from reading it literally as well. Meaning, if it says that Adam was created, that Eve was created from his rib—yes, from Adam’s rib—then that’s how she was created. And if it says all sorts of other things, then that’s what happened. In other words, it’s not just like what Jordan Peterson does, where he gives it a very interesting psychological interpretation—you can read it that way too—but it’s not only a phenomenological description of human experience. Meaning, the creation story can be read as a story describing how consciousness came into being, for instance, or how a human being perceives the world, but it is also a historical story. Do you agree with that claim?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I agree with it partially. That is, I don’t agree that we must read the Bible literally—absolutely not. I do agree that even if there is a psychological reading, that does not negate the possibility of also reading it literally. Those are two different things. What you described here contains two claims. One is a logical claim; the other is, you could say, a theological or historical claim. The logical claim says that the fact that I adopt some psychological interpretation of the Bible does not negate the possibility that the things actually happened—that the events are historical. On the logical level, there is no contradiction between the two interpretations.

[Speaker A] But doesn’t that contradict what you say in your book? Because in God Plays Dice, as I understand it, you don’t reject the possibility of the Big Bang and evolutionary theory and so on. But according to the creation story, the world was not created that way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly—that’s what I’m saying. Not that it doesn’t negate it. What I’m saying here is exactly that. What I’m claiming is that your remarks contain two different claims.

[Speaker A] One.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One of them I agree with, and the other less so—partially. One claim is the logical claim. Meaning, when you interpret a text psychologically—the biblical text, but really any text—that doesn’t mean it wasn’t historical. Right? I can describe an event that happened to you. I’m describing it historically: this is what happened. Does that mean I can’t also give a psychological interpretation of why it happened to you, why you acted that way? Of course I can. What connection is there between those two things?

I can absolutely accept interpretation—not only that, I tend to accept non-historical interpretations, because in my view the historical record in the Bible is ultimately meant to teach us something beyond the facts. That something can be psychological, theological, philosophical, whatever you want—Jewish law, not important. But clearly there is supposed to be some interpretive plane beyond the historical plane.

So there is no contradiction. Now there’s an additional claim in what you said. Once we’ve reached the conclusion that there’s no contradiction, must I also accept the historical interpretation as the correct or binding interpretation? Here I no longer agree. I claim that the Bible is historical only in part. But not because I have a psychological interpretation. That does not force the second claim. If there is a psychological interpretation, there could in parallel also be a historical interpretation, and there also might not be. The question remains open. And regarding that open question, I argued that there are probably things in the Bible that are non-historical. Some things are, some things aren’t.

How do I know that? You asked earlier how I can know. I’d say: I can’t always know. But there are points where I can know. For example, when scientific information has accumulated—information our ancestors probably didn’t have, but we do—and we understand that the description of creation does not fit the scientific facts, my conclusion is that this part of the Bible is probably mythical, or something meant to teach us something else, rather than historical facts.

But that’s ad hoc. You can look at it as a kind of apologetics. I don’t see it as apologetics, because I’m not coming to defend the Bible. I’m trying to learn it for myself. And when I learn it for myself—not to defend it against someone attacking me—how do I understand the Bible as someone who is committed to it? For me, if it contradicts my scientific knowledge, then it’s not a fact. That’s all.

[Speaker A] So for example, suppose you’re stuck—okay, let’s say you now receive the Bible for the first time and start reading it. I assume… would you need some guidance in reading it? A modern Western person today who reads the Bible—how is he supposed to understand it, if we don’t already assume in advance that it’s a book that is maybe partly historical and partly not?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, the question is—it’s all a matter, as with everything else, of the starting point. When you approach a text, you don’t approach it as a blank slate. Right? You have certain assumptions about it, and those assumptions play a role in the interpretation. Whether you like it or not, there is no interpretation that is “clean” in the sense of being detached from context. A person is shaped by his native landscape. It isn’t disconnected from the context in which I live, and it isn’t disconnected from the assumptions with which I come to the text. That’s true of all of us. Of a secular person too. He also makes all sorts of assumptions about this text. Maybe he assumes it’s not true. There are people who assume that. Others assume that it is true. You can ask on what basis those assumptions are made, and that’s a separate discussion.

But once I’ve reached the conclusion that this text is—well, what does “true” mean? Divine. “True” is already factual language. But if it’s divine, if it’s something I take seriously as something that obligates me, then now I examine this text and ask how to read it in light of my assumptions. And if there are certain things in the text that contradict my scientific knowledge, then I’ll assume that they are probably not factual. Someone else will say: since I never assumed this text was true in the first place, I’ll assume it’s some folk tale or myth that arose one way or another. And that will be his conclusion about the text. But all of us are context-dependent. There is no interpretation that is not context-dependent.

So that’s true for me too. And therefore, I can’t tell you in advance by some fixed criteria which parts of this text are myth and which parts are historical description. The creation account, by the way—even just on the textual level, as much as it’s possible to detach from context—when you read the text, it looks like myth. It’s not like the chapters that come afterwards, say from Abraham onward. The visit of the angels—you can debate that a little too. But those are events involving human beings, fighting each other or talking to each other, events that happen in ways that overall you can read as historical narrative. I think the creation account—even if there were no contrary scientific knowledge—I’m not sure I would read it as historical description, because it doesn’t look that way. It looks like something outside our normal human world. It looks very similar to myth. And in that sense, to me this is not a flaw. It only means that this part of the Torah is probably a mythical section. Now, if it also contradicts my scientific knowledge, then I’m strengthened all the more in that conclusion.

[Speaker A] Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But these aren’t really the kind of questions that especially trouble me. Generally speaking, I’d say I don’t deal much with the Bible; it doesn’t interest me all that much. So these questions don’t really bother me. I deal with the things written in Rashi script.

[Speaker A] Okay, okay, fine. So I was going to ask you another question about this, but fine, I’ll ask it and you tell me whether you want to get into it, because I assume… If God wrote the Bible, and you’re saying that the Bible is a text where at least the book of Genesis is undoubtedly a mythological text, then if God wrote it why are there so many elements in it that we also see in other mythologies that, historically at least, predate the text? Right? We see references there to Mesopotamian mythology and so on—specifically words like “the deep,” “formless and void,” things people say connect to Gilgamesh and the flood and everything tied to Tiamat from Mesopotamian mythology, and so on.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. First of all, the fact that there were such earlier myths basically just means that every myth carries messages within it. So it’s entirely possible that the Torah adopted earlier myths. If you want, maybe those earlier myths were themselves even given by the Holy One, blessed be He—I don’t know, that too is possible. Because our tradition says He also revealed Himself to Adam and to Noah and gave them various things. So it’s entirely possible that certain parts of the Torah were attached to those earlier revelations.

But even if not—that’s just speculation—even if not, fine. There are certain myths that carried messages meaningful to the author of the Torah, and he decided to use them and incorporate them into the biblical text in order to convey them as part of the message he wanted to transmit to us. That’s perfectly fine. And he formulates them in his own way. There are differences between these things. Even Hammurabi’s laws versus the Torah’s laws—there’s a lot written about that. There is some similarity, and there are also quite a few differences. And precisely those differences suggest that even if something earlier was taken, it was reworked in a way meant to convey the message that the author of this text wanted to convey.

So it really doesn’t bother me that he uses earlier myths. In my view there’s no inherent sanctity in those events, especially if those events are mythical. So why should I care? They’re just a medium through which messages are conveyed to me. So if someone chooses to use a known medium of existing myths, so what? It’s like if I, as an atheist for example, wanted to convey a message to you through the story of the Garden of Eden—there’s no problem. Lots of people do that, because it’s a widespread myth in society, and I want to use the figures of Adam and Eve, who are already loaded with connotations and already mean something to people, in order to convey the messages I want to convey. I don’t see a problem with that.

[Speaker A] Okay, okay. Let’s talk for a moment about the possibility of life outside Earth. I ask this because often in discussions I hear—for example there’s some debate between Dennis Prager and an atheist professor, I don’t remember exactly who—where the atheist says to him, look, it doesn’t seem likely to me that this entire gigantic universe we live in, and maybe some people even talk about more than one universe, yes, all of this was created for human beings. And Dennis Prager says to him, look, scale—the scale, the size—doesn’t necessarily point to the meaning of the text. So my question to you is: if we discover that there is, as not a few physicists think, intelligent life outside Earth as well, does that change our conception, the meaning of the Torah, our understanding of the Torah?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. First of all, by coincidence yesterday I heard a nice podcast about this with some physicist, and he really raised this statistical argument. There are so many planets, billions of planets, and among them we already know of something like six thousand that more or less have conditions suitable for the formation of life like ours. And I’m not even talking about intelligence of a different kind, maybe not exactly like ours—not carbon-based, not water-based, things like that. So the chance that life did not arise in them is very small. It sounds like a very reasonable argument.

I’ll still make one comment about it before answering your question. What’s interesting is that so far we haven’t found any. First of all, that’s already interesting, because we do have means of observation. Granted, we are still very far from covering all those worlds. But according to common atheist claims, life—or not life, intelligence or complex beings of any kind, even if not the organic type we know—is supposed to develop under all conditions. Meaning, this is a natural thing that should happen. Here, life of the sort we know developed because those were the environmental conditions that dictated it. But the common claim on atheist sites is that basically any set of natural laws or conditions will, over enough time, produce complex beings. Strangely enough, they all prophesy this while ignoring the fact that so far, in every place we’ve encountered, we’ve found not a single hint of anything like that, aside from all sorts of fears about aliens and things of that sort.

So that’s just an interesting comment. Maybe this persuasive statistical argument itself is actually telling us something—so why really haven’t we found anything? Maybe after all there is some sort of directionality here. That’s one thing. But I’m not committed to that, because it’s entirely possible that we haven’t found any because we simply haven’t found any yet, and we will later on. I’m against a God of the gaps. I don’t build my faith in God on gaps in scientific knowledge that may later be closed.

Second, I don’t see why this should disturb me or worry me or change anything for me if intelligent life or intelligence is discovered elsewhere, whether life like ours or intelligence of another kind or whatever. What difference does it make? At the end of the day, there would be another planet that also has life on it. Maybe the Holy One, blessed be He, also gave some kind of Torah there, or maybe not—I have no idea. Everything’s fine. Why does it concern me? What does it have to do with me? I’m not a megalomaniac. I don’t insist on a situation where I’m the center of the universe. I’m not even willing to accept that I’m the center of our own planet. Even that pseudo-megalomania I don’t like. I don’t like this discourse that the world stands on us and we uphold the world with Torah study or things like that—I don’t buy into that, and certainly not regarding the universe. So it’s entirely possible that I’m one among infinitely many other worlds where life arose and everything proceeds in parallel. I don’t see why that should change anything for me.

[Speaker A] Okay, okay. In your book, one of your claims—which I actually find pretty convincing, though I’m not sure how well it fits with the idea that we are creatures created in the image of God—is that the whole set of laws, the physical laws, the chemical laws, the biological laws, which led to the emergence of life and evolution and the whole natural world we see around us, including the movement of the planets and everything that happened from the Big Bang onward, are we human beings part of that world or not? And if we are not part of that world—if there is in us some component that is above nature—then how do you, as a physicist, explain that? I mean, your argument is very rational, very scientific, but can you explain with those same tools this thing—whatever you want to call it, the image of God, or consciousness, or that thing which, according to Judaism, is what makes us beings above nature and not merely part of nature?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Look, as I said before, a person is shaped by his native landscape, so it’s hard for me to know how much my beliefs depend on my own starting point. Someone else has to look at me from the outside and try to locate that, or make that kind of diagnosis. But as far as how I myself understand my views right now, my view about dualism—that there is in us something besides matter—and that this is not connected to the world we might call physical or physico-chemical, has nothing to do with the religious world. It’s simply how I understand things in themselves. I think I would say this even if I were not a believer. It seems to me—again, this is all from my present point of view, so I can’t say it with certainty—but at least as I see it now, it is not conditioned by my religious outlook. I genuinely think that this is reality, first of all.

[Speaker A] Wait, you’re saying that reality is that human beings have a soul too, basically?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. I’m a dualist, yes. I think there is in us something more than matter. Right now I’m actually writing something about consciousness and various hypotheses about the emergence of consciousness through evolutionary processes, and I’m showing how circular those arguments are, how they don’t deal with the point at all—they completely miss it. Scientists who are excellent in their own fields are simply talking nonsense in the philosophical and conceptual sense; they’re just confused.

And again, even if I’m wrong that it’s dualistic, scientific discussion of these issues is misleading, and scientific discussion of these issues always latches onto the symptoms. When you want to define what consciousness or awareness is, then a scientist trying to examine it, or trying to examine its evolutionary origin—how these things emerged evolutionarily—first defines the phenomenology of the matter, meaning what consciousness looks like. Because without that you can’t base yourself on observations. You want to see which creature has consciousness and which doesn’t.

But the whole point—and Leibowitz already wrote this in his little book on the psycho-physical problem—is that the whole idea of consciousness is precisely that it is not observable. Everything I know about the fact that you have consciousness is because you tell me, and I believe you. That’s how I know you have consciousness. A creature that cannot tell me that—I have no way to know whether it has consciousness. I can guess, I can guess not, but it’s not a scientific issue. Therefore the whole pretension to deal with it by scientific tools is foolish. You can say, okay, if I have no scientific access to this question, then I don’t recognize its existence. In other words, I don’t believe there are such things. That’s a foundational assumption of people who think that only what is accessible to physical or scientific measuring tools exists. That’s an assumption I do not accept—but they have the right to assume it. It just isn’t science. It’s a philosophical premise that I do not accept.

So the fact that I work rationally and am committed one hundred percent to the findings of science, that applies to those things to which science has access. As for science making determinations about God—in my view, there are no such determinations. Does that mean I don’t accept His existence? I think in the most rational way possible I arrive at the conclusion that He exists. And to the same extent, I also say that I don’t know how to approach this question with scientific tools, with observational tools. The same applies to the soul and to consciousness and to many other things.

What I can show is that people’s attempts to explain these phenomena in materialist terms are pretty silly—sometimes downright foolish—and at best don’t really hold water, don’t really do the job. Even those who do it in a more careful and intelligent way.

[Speaker A] Okay. So then free will—when people argue that there is free will, they really rely on the dualist argument, on the idea that we have a soul, some component above nature, and therefore we are not completely deterministic creatures. Meaning, our choices and all our behavior cannot be predicted according to the set of physico-chemical laws, unlike maybe everything else in nature—unlike the movement of the stars, which you can predict thousands of years ahead, and maybe unlike other components in this world as well, if only you had access to enough information. Because there are lots and lots of chaotic components, but if you had access to the information you could predict everything. That’s not true of human beings.

But maybe the strongest argument I’ve heard against the claim that a person has free will is from Robert Sapolsky, who recently published a book—not this specific one, here he talks about human behavior, but he has a book called Determined, where he argues that we are completely deterministic creatures. And I hope I can explain his argument well enough, but basically he says: look, Michael, I, Kieron, maybe in my subjective feeling, in my experience, it seems to me, I feel as though I chose to do this podcast with you. I chose, right, I chose to message you, and I chose this hour, and I chose to read your book, and I can go backward and think of lots and lots of choices I made. But really, there are lots of things I didn’t choose. Okay? For example, I didn’t choose to be interested in what you write about. We all know that if only we could choose to be interested in certain things, then for example in high school civics I would have gotten much better grades, because it just didn’t interest me. So I didn’t choose to be interested in that. I didn’t choose to have, I don’t know, a certain IQ that even allows me to understand the texts you write. There are lots of things I didn’t choose, lots of things you didn’t choose. There are so many circumstances over which neither you nor I had any control that led us to this meeting. And basically he says: in the end, all these circumstances that seem somehow related to free choice, you can trace them back to a totally materialist component. From the very moment of your conception, the joining of sperm and egg, through all the prenatal conditions in the womb that have tremendous influence on your personality and development, through the mother you were born to and the environment—lots of things. In the end he says there’s really no room for free choice in that whole set of factors that brought you to where you are today. So what’s your response to that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Actually, that’s a very common argument. I think Stephen Hawking once wrote that if a stone had consciousness, it would be… sure that it had chosen to fly when someone threw it, or something like that. So basically that’s the argument.

I think this argument fails completely. I’ll tell you why, from a few angles. One reason is that most of the things you described as things I have no choice about are things I also don’t think I chose. For example, when you said I didn’t choose what interests me, I can’t choose to be interested in something—why did you say that as something self-evident? Because you really know you didn’t choose it. You are consciously aware that this truly was not your choice, okay?

Now why do you see that as evidence regarding things where, in my direct awareness, I do think I chose? Why do you draw the conclusion from here that there too I’m probably mistaken? Why? It’s like saying: look, I had a mirage—I saw something that in fact didn’t exist. Does that make me doubt everything I see? No, right? Sometimes you see a mirage, that’s clear. Sometimes I’m wrong about things I think. But certainly in places where I don’t even think that—I don’t think I chose those things—you can’t prove from there that I’m mistaken, because there I’m really not mistaken. I really think—and nobody disputes this—that many of the things we do, maybe most of them, are not done out of choice. I agree with that too, even as a libertarian, someone who thinks human beings have free choice.

So to bring evidence from the fact that many things we do are not done out of choice—I really can’t understand the logic of that evidence. The big question concerns those things that I do feel I choose. The question is: what do I do with those? Now someone can come and say that’s an illusion. Fine, he has the right. I think that anyone who claims that something I experience directly is an illusion—he may be right, but the burden of proof is on him. The default assumption is that if this is what I experience, it’s probably true. If you persuade me otherwise, I need to be honest enough to admit I was wrong. But you have to persuade me otherwise. You can’t just tell me: look, that’s what you feel, but I claim it’s an illusion. Fine, so you claim that. I feel yes, you feel no—why are your feelings better than mine? Especially since you don’t actually feel no either. You also feel that you have free will; you’ve just reached the conclusion that this feeling misleads you. But because of that you want me to conclude that this feeling misleads me too? I just can’t understand that logic.

[Speaker A] Okay, so let me push a little more. He could say—what Sapolsky would say is: you think, in your feeling, that you turned to Michael Abraham out of choice, but it could be that this was really connected to your hormonal state that day, and maybe if you had slept less well that morning you wouldn’t have contacted him, and maybe if you had eaten something else you wouldn’t have contacted him. And I think he also uses the example—you probably know it too—about the patterns of judges, how willing they are to be lenient with defendants depending on whether it’s after lunch or before lunch.

[— Part 2/2 —]

[Speaker A] Because in the end we say that in the morning, generally speaking, their rulings are much more favorable to defendants, and then it drops against them as they get closer to lunch, and after lunch it rises again. There can be all sorts of interpretations of that, but insofar as it really has to do with how satiated they are, then that too—okay, I understand I’m not bringing you a smoking gun—but maybe if we keep going down this rabbit hole, we’ll discover that we really don’t have free will.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So let me sharpen one more point that people often miss in the libertarian picture, the picture of free choice. There’s a kind of caricature of libertarianism that determinists usually attack, and that caricature says that a person acts in a vacuum. Meaning, if I’m a libertarian, then apparently I act in a vacuum—nothing influences me, everything is in my hands. Now those are simple facts, and anyone who denies them isn’t a libertarian, he’s just an ostrich—meaning, he ignores the facts. I don’t think there is any sober, intelligent libertarian who claims such a thing. And most materialist attacks attack that position. It’s a straw man.

A sober libertarianism is something entirely different. I usually illustrate it with a parable. Think, for example, of a little ball moving across some kind of topographical surface—mountains, valleys, slopes, and so on. Okay? Obviously the topographical layout will determine where that ball rolls, where it ends up, where it goes, right? Completely deterministic.

Now think of a human being standing on the same topographical surface. The human being also has mass. Physical forces also act on him, right? Everyone knows that. And yet the person can decide: I’m not going down into the valley, I’m climbing the mountain. Okay? So I say: all the same forces that act on the ball act on the person too. All the physical, biological forces, whatever you like—they certainly act on me. The difference between me and the ball is not whether these forces influence me, but whether they determine my behavior or only influence it. Those are two different things.

I claim that all these things influence me. So of course before a meal, in the morning, I’ll tend to be harsher with defendants like anyone else because I’m hungry. No question that this affects me. The question is whether I am compelled to do it in a deterministic way. That’s already an enormous logical leap.

Because in the end, of course if you check this across a hundred judges, then the law of large numbers says that a higher percentage of them will convict before lunch than after lunch—or vice versa in the relevant direction. I agree with that. But when you want to infer from that that the individual judge is compelled to do so, that’s no longer a statistical conclusion, it’s a deterministic conclusion. And if it’s statistical, I accept it too. Every judge has free choice whether to judge this way or that way, and he has control. Even in the morning he can acquit, and in the afternoon he can convict—and most people actually do just that. It’s not deterministic. Rather, statistically there is a greater tendency in one direction. That’s exactly the influence of the topographical surface—influence, not determination. That’s the difference.

So all the genetics, the psychology, the environment, hunger, whatever you want, education—all of that certainly influences me. As a libertarian I don’t deny that. When people say they found in me a genetic structure responsible for religious faith, stinginess, cowardice, courage, whatever, I completely accept all those claims. The only difference is that I say: don’t jump from “it influences me” to “it determines what I do.” Those are two totally different things. If it influences me, that means it’ll be harder for me not to believe if I was born with some believer’s genetics, let’s say. It’ll be harder—but the choice is still mine. I can still decide that my conclusion is that I do believe, or despite my genetics I do believe, or I don’t believe—meaning, I go against my genetics. That’s the debate. The debate is not whether there are influences.

That’s why all the findings of psychological studies and genetic studies and environmental studies and everything else—all of them are accepted by me completely. There is no scientific dispute between me as a libertarian and the determinist. The dispute is about how I interpret these results. Are they results of influence or results of determination?

A little anecdote: my son worked at Facebook, and he told me, “Listen, I’m just stunned by what goes on there.” He sat at the computers and watched how they move people toward purchases, because he was responsible for marketing through Facebook. He said to me, “I’m telling you, if I decide that in Taiwan on Monday morning cottage cheese purchases will go up by ten percent, then I’ll do all kinds of advertising tricks and cottage cheese purchases on Monday at ten in the morning will rise by ten percent.” Then he said, “Tell me, what does that leave of us as human beings? We’re just one huge ant colony that you can manipulate with computer buttons.”

I told him: that’s the law of large numbers. The law of large numbers says that statistically it will behave that way. Can you tell me whether Ho Chi Minh in Taiwan will buy cottage cheese at ten in the morning on Monday? No, you can’t say that. You can say that if it won’t be him, it’ll be his cousin. Because you moved the button in a way that biases them.

This is exactly Maimonides and the Raavad in chapter six of Maimonides’ laws of repentance. They have a dispute exactly on this point. Maimonides says: after all, the Holy One, blessed be He, told Abraham in the Covenant Between the Pieces that the Egyptians would enslave us and do such and such to us. So Maimonides asks: then where is the Egyptians’ free choice? God already said in advance that this is how they would behave. So he answers: the Holy One fixed it with respect to the Egyptian people collectively, but each individual Egyptian still had a choice. That’s statistics.

So the Raavad asks him: what do you mean? If each Egyptian had a choice, then each one individually could have chosen not to enslave us, and then it would turn out that even on the collective level God’s prophecy would not have been fulfilled. You can’t disconnect micro from macro. But today we know Maimonides was right. Because you can predict very clearly what will happen at the macro level, even though every individual person has a completely free decision.

Take the law of large numbers in a simple case: you roll a die. From the first ten rolls, you can’t tell me how it’ll be distributed, right?

[Speaker A] Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But if you roll six billion times, I’ll bet my head that there will be about a billion, plus or minus a bit, for each face. Right. How? But every roll is completely free. And I’ll say more than that: the whole law of large numbers works—the whole ability to predict the result according to the law of large numbers—precisely because each roll is free and independent of the others. It comes from that. Not only is it not contradicted by freedom. In other words, freedom is the condition for the law of large numbers to work. It doesn’t just fail to contradict it.

Aha.

[Speaker A] And therefore—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think that whole argument is simply based on a misunderstanding.

[Speaker A] Okay. Earlier you compared throwing a stone across some topographical structure to a person—but what if we put a gazelle there? If we put a gazelle there, the gazelle also won’t roll like a stone. What does that mean? Does a gazelle have free choice then?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no idea. I don’t know about animals and free will.

[Speaker A] No, but people say the image of God is consciousness, is free will. So you don’t agree with that claim?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no idea. I don’t know how to interpret these concepts—they’re too amorphous for me. Clearly our will is a very important thing. Do animals also have some kind of choice? Maybe like us, maybe less. There are all kinds of degrees. I have no idea. It’s like intelligence. I think animals also have some level of intelligence. So does that mean the superiority of man is not in intellect? It does mean that, because our capacity for thought is probably far beyond what animals have. Sometimes a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference. When the quantity is very, very large, the difference becomes qualitative. So it’s hard for me to know regarding consciousness or choice in animals. I don’t know what to answer.

[Speaker A] Okay. I think we’ve touched on this pretty well, but I do want to close this evolutionary corner. I’ll start with a little story. I served in Unit 8200, and I remember that on one of the Sabbaths I was confined to base, the base commander—not exactly from the intelligence world, so maybe… I mean, I’m not sure why I’m mentioning that, but anyway—he came up to us and asked me, “What book are you reading?” or something like that. And I think I was reading a book by Desmond Morris, the anthropologist—The Ape Within Us. So I told him that, and he was wearing a kippah, and I told him that’s what I was reading, and he said, “Oy vey.” To be honest, I didn’t understand why he said that. It seemed so innocent to me. I said it completely honestly and innocently; I was sure he’d be impressed, because it was a serious book and Morris is a famous anthropologist. I assume you wouldn’t say “oy vey,” right? You don’t see a problem with the claim that we and chimpanzees had a common ancestor?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not at all. I disagree with him on two levels. First, I don’t see any problem with it—it’s a fact. A fact is never problematic for me. That’s one thing. Second, even if it weren’t true—so what? Does that mean you’re not allowed to read the book? Look at his arguments, weigh them, and reach your own conclusion whether you agree with him or not. I’m not willing to accept censorship even where you happen to be right—let alone here, where you’re not even right. So my disagreement with him is twofold.

[Speaker A] But Michael, you understand that the position you’re presenting is not a popular one. I mean, anywhere. Right? Not in the religious world and not in the secular world.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t run for parliament. I never committed myself to popularity.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. I mean—okay. You know, you say a person is shaped by his native landscape and so on. I’m simply saying… A person is shaped by his native landscape. Since you’ve received things from them, of course you’re influenced by them—genetically, educationally, everything. But obviously you also have your own characteristics. Each person in his own proportions and in the directions he takes. But the fact that I’m shaped by my native landscape is not deterministic. It’s influence.

[Speaker A] Explain to me then, as you see it, why so many people—again, in the religious world too, not just the secular world—the secular atheist often doesn’t understand Judaism, doesn’t understand religion. From his point of view it looks like a world of ignorance. So I’m not talking about them. But even in the religious world this seems to be a pretty widespread view, that saying human beings descended from apes—again, not exactly precise, common ancestor and so on—is heresy.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. So again, the secular perception of the religious world as ignorant, the way you described earlier, comes from your second point. Your first remark follows from the second, because it really is a world of ignorance. There really is a certain element within religious education that educates people into ignorance. And often people take a condemnatory attitude toward someone who wants to open himself to other directions, even if in the end he remains religious—he just wants to read, he wants to know. In the end he can reject or accept; it doesn’t matter. I haven’t even adopted what Darwin or Morris wrote—I’ve only read it. Afterward I’ll decide whether I agree or disagree. But why am I forbidden to read? What do you want—that I remain exactly as I was born to my parents? Where is it written that everyone has to remain the way he was born? The pagan born into some tribe in Africa who worships his campfire—is he also supposed to obey his parents and not read your books and become convinced that you’re right? What kind of strange approach is this, saying that if you were born here, you’re forbidden to investigate other alternatives because, after all, you were born here. So what? I was born here by accident. I could have been born anywhere else. What is sacred about the place where I was born?

I’m very much in favor of checking whether the place where I was born is right or not. And not because I’m a pluralist—quite the opposite. Because I’m a monist. If I were a pluralist, then there would be no right and wrong. Precisely because I think there is a right and wrong, I say yes—but who said the place where I was born is the right one? There are claims made by intelligent people from all kinds of directions. You have to read them and reach your own conclusions.

That’s why, by the way, even on the practical level this is a mistake. Because the more you try to close people off, the more interesting it obviously looks, and obviously the more intelligent people won’t listen to you, and so you end up losing precisely the more intelligent people. I meet all these people who get lost to the religious public, partly because of this very policy. They come to ask me because they can’t ask their rabbi or their parents or whoever. And often by the time they get to me it’s after they’ve already made decisions, and it’s very hard to do anything about it. Sometimes I can’t persuade them either, yes—they haven’t made their decisions, but it’s not as if I can give satisfying answers to everything. Still, I do think I have answers to many things that they don’t get anywhere else. And I see the ricochets from this supposedly more pious policy. It supposedly preserves religiosity better, but in the end the price is—you know, back in my cheerful Bnei Brak days, I had all kinds of arguments with Haredim who said, “Look how much secularization comes out of Religious Zionist education, and how little comes out of Haredi education.” I told them: look around you at the Jewish world. It has a huge secular majority. All of it came out of Haredi society. The secularization of Haredi society is the biggest of all. It’s only a question of timescale.

In the short term it succeeds in preserving things better, but in the long term the price is severe. Because when people do get exposed to other ideas, they have no tools at all to deal with them, and they just fall like flies. And that’s exactly what happened during the Enlightenment, and unfortunately that’s also what I expect can happen today, because today we’ve returned to a kind of huddling-in, the same kind that existed in that period.

And I don’t think—I already see it. There are thousands upon thousands who leave Haredi society every year, and that’s only the documented portion. There are many others who are coerced, and all kinds of phenomena of that sort—I meet many of them. Very many people within Haredi society have internally left; they’re hollow. Sociologically they’re still religious or Haredi, but inside they’re empty. Why is that better than a thinking person who either reaches the conclusion that he leaves—and I greatly respect him for that, because he’s doing what he thinks is right, and that deserves a great deal of respect in my eyes even if I disagree with his conclusion—or he stays, but he stays out of a real decision after examining the alternatives? Then I also get a religious person whom I respect more. Instead of that I get a hollow religious person and a whole secular person. Is that better?

Why is that better? In the Amish community in the United States, they have a wonderful custom. I’m just fascinated by it. When a child reaches the age of seventeen, around the threshold of adulthood—I think it’s seventeen—he goes off for a year to the big city to live in general society. And after a year he has to come back and decide whether he returns to being Amish or whether he has decided to leave. Amazing. This is an ultra-conservative, very closed society, and every person has to—it’s part of the procedure—spend a year or two, I think a year, in the general society. Live in the general society and decide: either you come back and then you’re with us, or you don’t come back and that’s fine, you made a different choice. It’s such a wonderful policy in my eyes. I’m full of admiration for that society. And that’s conservatism built on choice. I don’t like their conservatism—I’m not conservative like they are—but it’s conservatism built on choice, and that kind of conservatism I deeply appreciate.

[Speaker A] Tell me, where are my questions? Here. There are, let’s say, two questions. One: is there some atheist counterpart of yours where you say, okay, this one really has arguments properly laid out, someone who truly challenges me? And another question: is there any evidence that could cause you to stop believing in God?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] First of all, it’s “properly laid out” and “on its wheels.” I have a friend who’s a judge and a language enthusiast. I think once Avigdor Feldman appeared before him as a lawyer, and he said, “This is properly laid out.” And my friend corrected him and said, “It’s ‘properly laid out’…” So Feldman said, “No, I meant ‘spoken’ with a vav. A thing that is spoken takes shape on its wheels.” It was a beautiful little flash of wit.

Anyway, to our topic. There are various atheists who raise meaningful arguments. I don’t know anyone especially impressive. I’m not especially impressed by those arguments. I understand that some people accept them. For me, the answers I offer are entirely satisfactory. In my eyes, atheism is not a reasonable position—not reasonable on a completely rational level. But fine, this isn’t mathematics. Nachmanides at the beginning of his commentary on the Rif, in Milhamot Hashem, writes that the wisdom of our Torah is not like the wisdom of astronomy and mathematics. It’s not science and it’s not mathematics. It’s softer reasoning. But even in soft reasoning there are still things that are more reasonable and less reasonable, as in philosophy. And I think the religious conclusion appears to be a very compelling conclusion.

There are arguments by Dawkins—I wrote a book against him, you mentioned him earlier—or all kinds of arguments like those, Hitchens or others. I’m not especially impressed by those arguments. They also mostly repeat themselves. More or less I know the arguments, and that’s fine, you don’t have to invent new ones. I’m only saying: among what I know, I don’t know anything especially impressive. I don’t see some special counterpart over on that side.

[Speaker A] Okay. And regarding the question whether there’s something that could make you change your mind.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, since this is soft logic, as I said earlier, I can’t give you some Popperian criterion. Some experiment such that if it’s falsified, the theory falls. Even in science it doesn’t work that way, as Thomas Kuhn taught us, and certainly not in philosophy. You need some sufficiently high threshold or a sufficiently large number of arguments where you feel you’re being squeezed too much in order to reconcile them or reject them. There are arguments where my explanation is strained. I just mean that the decision isn’t based on one argument, okay? It’s not Popper.

So in the end, the overall picture seems persuasive to me. And within that there are degrees of freedom. As I say, I no longer accept the ethos that the entire Bible was given to us at Sinai word for word, because there are things that look later, things that are myth and not fact, and all kinds of things like that. I update myself because of those local difficulties. Once there are too many local difficulties, at some point I need to be honest enough to say: okay, the paradigm has fallen. As Thomas Kuhn says, once you have too many experiments, you no longer suffice with ad hoc explanations; you say, okay, we need a new paradigm.

But even in science there’s no criterion for exactly when that happens. That’s why he called it the sociology of science and not the philosophy of science. And if that’s true in science, then it seems to me that in philosophy or in a religious worldview it’s certainly true. So I can’t point to a specific point.

I do want to hope that I’m honest enough that if I encounter a sufficiently large number of problems, I’ll be honest enough to admit I was wrong and retract. I hope I’m that kind of person, but I don’t know—it’s hard for me to know that now. If it were proved that there was no revelation at Sinai, then I think my religious career would be over. Not that there was no Sinai in the sense of all the pyrotechnics around it—that’s fine, there are embellishments and flowers around the story, that’s obvious—but that there was no interaction at all. Meaning, that the entire Torah was created by human beings and was not received from the Holy One, blessed be He. In that case, I’m done. That’s clear. I just don’t really see how one could prove such a thing.

[Speaker A] Right, right.

[Speaker A] Okay, fine. Before we move to audience questions, I want to talk to you about AI. You know, it’s almost a cliché by now to say we’re in a revolution, but I’m really curious to hear how you see this phenomenon. Are you worried about it? Are you looking forward to it? Do you see it as simply another revolution like the agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution, or is it really on a qualitatively different level altogether? And what new moral problems—as someone who deals a lot with morality—what new moral problems do you think this AI era poses for us as human beings? What moral challenges?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] First of all, all the answers to your first question are correct. I’m very worried about it, and I’m also very much looking forward to it, and I’m absolutely fascinated by this phenomenon. I’m awestruck by it. I also engage with it a little. It’s unbelievable. I mean, even the pace of its progress—what’s happening here compared to what was happening here half a year or a year ago—is simply insane. Simply insane.

Now it casts a very frustrating light on human abilities, because the most creative human abilities—or what we used to think were the most creative—are slowly being revealed as something that a machine can actually do in a completely mechanical way. And I still believe this machine is mechanical. I’m not one of those who think it also has consciousness and will and mental functions. But I do see the computational capacities it displays—or computational, not mental-thinking; thinking can be mental—but it has an utterly insane computational capacity, and it’s only getting better.

And if we extrapolate—usually there are asymptotes, but if we extrapolate—I don’t know what’s going to happen here in another two years. There is no chance I can even imagine it. So I’m both worried and awestruck and don’t know. All the answers are correct. I’m far too small to predict. At the same time, it may also turn out to be… you know, when you’re living inside a revolution, people living through the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, all the earlier revolutions, the internet revolution—all of them were sure this was going to break us and finish our role on Earth. Right now this one looks like that too. But I don’t know. In the end you need some perspective.

It’s entirely possible that at some stage, first, there will be a glass ceiling for these machines. I’m not with the die-hard optimists either, because that too is a kind of prediction I don’t think we have the tools to make. It’s a chance, it’s a possibility. But to say I’m sure where this is going—not at all. Not in the optimistic direction and not in the pessimistic direction. There may be a ceiling, and even if not, it could be that in certain domains it really will eliminate the need for us, but we’ll still remain in some other aspects—who knows what they are—just as we emerged from earlier revolutions. But all that is just possibilities.

One of my tendencies is not to fear anything. I mean, what will happen will happen, and we’ll have to manage with it, or we won’t manage with it, and then we won’t. I don’t know. But I don’t see the point of fearing. What good does fear do me? Right now I look at it more with anticipation and enormous curiosity, to see where this thing is going. There are certain concerns, but they don’t run my life and they don’t really trouble me.

As for moral questions, there are of course all sorts of moral questions. Anthropic’s model, Claude, came out recently—I think a few months ago—and the claim was that it discovered vulnerabilities in software that had been considered the very software on which the whole field of cybersecurity had been built. It supposedly found thousands of vulnerabilities in those programs, and then they immediately restricted its release only to authorized people. Later they said it was an Anthropic myth to boost their sales. I have no idea what’s true, but it could be true, I don’t know. So that really is something that raises concern. And if you add quantum computers to that, then I really don’t know where we are. So the offensive side seems to me to be way ahead of the defensive side in these areas. But I assume—it’s always like this—the defensive side advances too, and we’ll somehow have to manage.

So in that sense these are concerns; they’re not necessarily moral issues. The moral issue is what uses we make of this. Here Anthropic deserves praise: they have ethical rules that are worthy of admiration, quite strict ones. They’re even willing to lose money on deals with the Pentagon and so on because they’re unwilling to allow certain kinds of use. I may disagree with them, but I very much appreciate their standing by their ethical principles. I’m pretty sure that in China and Russia there are no parallel ethical principles, and when they get to these capabilities it won’t be a fair fight if we continue to be ethical and they do not. So that’s a very real dilemma—how far to preserve ethical rules.

It may be that one should not preserve ethical rules at the development stage, but preserve ethics in the implementation. Meaning, let the developers run freely across the whole field, but at the implementation level there must be strict regulatory rules—while making sure we still have the tools to deal with other developments that are not subject to the same regulations we impose here in the West.

There are of course other moral rules, other moral questions—autonomous cars, autonomous weapons systems that make decisions computationally. Here, for example, I’m much less troubled than others, because to me these anxieties are a kind of phobia. I don’t think these are real concerns, mostly. Again, I don’t know—maybe some are—but mostly in my eyes it’s phobia.

Take autonomous cars. For years already, autonomous cars have driven much more carefully than human beings, much more carefully. If all cars were autonomous, the number of accidents would drop dramatically. That’s already been true for years. But every time there is some accident involving an autonomous vehicle, it immediately makes headlines, and everyone says, wait, you can’t rely on them. They ignore the fact that human beings cause thousands of accidents all the time. Human beings are even less reliable. So by the time regulation gets passed allowing autonomous cars to operate independently, who knows what decisions they’ll make in trolley-problem scenarios and things like that. What decision would a human being make in the trolley problem? When you do psychological experiments, you see that human beings are also divided on whether to divert the train or not. Right? So at most the model will behave like this group of humans and not that group of humans. So what?

On the contrary, if you release a model to the market, you can let parliament, the Supreme Court, whatever institution you want, determine what it should do in the trolley problem. That’s something you cannot do with flesh-and-blood human beings. A flesh-and-blood person will respond however a person responds in that situation. So it’s all advantages—or almost all advantages—and all these fears are mostly phobias.

The same goes for weapons, by the way. What’s wrong with automated decisions by a weapon system? The question is what that automation is trained on. What policy are you giving it during training? If you give it a moral policy, then it will behave morally just like people. And if not, then human beings too can decide not to behave morally. I don’t see why the autonomy itself is the problem.

There is a problem, though, because autonomous weapons often have much greater power. So when you give something with much greater power the ability to make decisions that may be mistaken, then even if the probability of error is lower than with human beings, the expected damage is greater. The smaller probability multiplied by the scale of the possible damage can still yield a large expected harm. So it may be that with catastrophic weapons—I don’t know, nuclear weapons controlled by an autonomous system—that really does sound a bit frightening.

Yes, there are moral problems. I don’t really know how to deal with them, and I don’t think anyone does. As I say, there are many players on the field. You are not the only one. And if you impose regulations on your weapons while your enemies do not—roughly like what happens between us and the Palestinians or the Iranians or whoever—then you will lose the battle. And that’s a real dilemma. The dilemma is not whether to let this proceed without regulation; the dilemma is whether to impose regulation or not, because there is also a moral argument in favor of not regulating and not getting all of us destroyed. And that’s a harder dilemma, because I do want things to be conducted morally, but I know I’m not alone on the field.

[Speaker A] How do you think human beings will find meaning if AI—you say that already now it makes you feel very small, right? You’re saying that many of the things I thought were the crown of human intelligence, suddenly you see that there’s a machine doing them much better than you. So how will people find meaning in an age where AI does almost everything better than a human being?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let me give you an analogy. Here, finding meaning is a psychological process, not a philosophical one, so it’s hard for me to predict. Evolution will probably take care of it. But I’ll give you an image that might illustrate the point.

Take athletes. There are athletes who train, sweat their souls out, in order to run one hundred meters in 9.8 seconds instead of 9.9. Now any ordinary cheetah does it in four seconds. Okay? And yet people find tremendous meaning in this, and I’m not belittling that. These are nice and intelligent people, like you and me, and they find a lot of meaning in it. Why? Because for human beings it really is an amazing achievement to run 100 meters in 9.8 seconds. The cheetah does it in four. Now I don’t see why if I solve a puzzle in mathematics, it isn’t a challenge just because AI can do it effortlessly in a quarter of a second. Okay, but for human beings it’s a meaningful challenge.

[Speaker A] No, no, certainly—but in the end I think the source of meaning for most people isn’t intellectual challenges דווקא. It’s their daily work. It’s going to work, you know, as a teacher, as an engineer, as a cleaner—whatever. Having some routine. And if AI already frees you from working, then you know…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then he’ll solve puzzles in his spare time, read great literature, or go to work even though he’s not needed there, because it’s like solving puzzles. Just as you run even though the cheetah runs faster than you, so you can also go to work even though AI does it better than you. Because all of us have an interest in not being bored. Because if you, as the employer or the head of Google or the owner of Google, understand that if everyone is bored they’ll shoot you in the head, then you give them work.

[Speaker A] Fine, but people need to feel that they’re doing something meaningful, right? That’s part of the point. You finish the workday and say, wow, today I helped someone, I made someone’s life better.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Like the runner. The runner too says, wow, today I got to 9.9, amazing. Fine—the cheetah did it in four seconds. Right. And still it’s real. It’s really like that. It’s not that I look down on him because he’s an idiot. If I were in his situation, I’d be exactly the same. So I’m saying, basically all of us will be like that. I’m just throwing this out as one possibility among many. I only raise it as a possibility to show that the problem is basically in the realm of psychology and evolution—evolutionary psychology. In the end, people will probably find some kind of meaning for themselves. Or they’ll implant AI into themselves, insert themselves into the computer; they’ll simply use AI and think of it as themselves because it will be part of them. And then that will give me meaning.

I’m just speculating, yes? This is already science fiction—but actually not all that fictional anymore. But I’m saying, here’s another example: if AI becomes a true human-machine interface, becomes really something with consciousness that is me, then what’s the problem? AI does the work in a second—wonderful, I’m proud, I did the work in a second. Or I created an AI that did it in a quarter of a second, even though your AI does it in half a second. So there you go, I get great satisfaction from that too. I have no idea where we’ll end up, and I don’t know where evolution will take us. But fine—wherever it takes us, it takes us. I’m not…

[Speaker A] Good, good. Michael, I think we’ll stop here. I wanted to say thank you very much for this conversation. It was a fascinating conversation. I’m sure our listeners enjoyed it a lot too. So yes, I wanted to thank you for your time, Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham, and thank you viewers for being with us.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Thank you.