Answer

Either way, there is intervention here. Were it not for the intervention, the world would proceed according to the laws of nature plus human decisions. When God intervenes, even if He does not thereby force the outcome, this is still a deviation from the natural course of events. Of course this is possible, but it is still a deviation. Something like this was written by the commentators about the hardening of Pharaoh's heart. Some of them understood that it merely increased the weight on the scale, while still leaving him with choice.
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Questioner:
I agree that there is a deviation here. It's just that as I understand it, the reason you hold that nowadays there is no providence, or that it is very rare, is because you see that in the world there are no deviations from the physical laws of nature. But if we broaden the perspective beyond deviations from the physical laws of nature, we see that there could be many deviations in everyday life from the natural course of events, except that these deviations cannot be detected because they occur in human consciousness, and that domain is not empirical.
 
In other words, what I am trying to clarify is whether, in your view, it is plausible that deviations like the ones I described do happen nowadays? And if not, why not?
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Rabbi:
In principle, our thoughts and desires are accompanied by physical processes in the brain. But you are right that it is almost impossible to detect this empirically, and therefore intervention there is possible. A similar mechanism is also possible within quantum uncertainty, although that is only on very small scales.
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Questioner:
More generally, where do you think original ideas in our heads come from? I mean ideas whose source is within the person himself and which do not come in response to some external stimulus. Where do those ideas come from into our minds? And why does idea X come rather than Y?
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Rabbi:
About this the Sages said that Torah comes to a person when his mind is diverted, like a found object. Ideas arise in a way over which our control is limited, though not completely. They are a result of our experience and of creativity, which contains an intentional dimension together with a random dimension. The choice among the ideas is made in a controlled way and with judgment. As I said in the previous email, it is possible that God also puts ideas into our heads.
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Aviad Baron:
If so, אולי one could argue that prayer has a certain value, because God may intervene in human decisions and thoughts. Suppose I pray for someone's recovery, then it is possible that God will remove the doctor's free choice so that the right steps will be taken for her recovery..?
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Rabbi:
First, the suggestion was not that God removes someone's freedom of choice, but that He raises possibilities in the person's mind that would allow choices that would not have been made otherwise. Removing choice is like intervening in the laws of nature. What have we gained by removing choice as opposed to intervening in nature itself?
In any case, what you say is correct even without this move. It is possible that He intervenes from time to time in the laws of nature themselves as well (apparently, even if this happens, it is quite rare, and therefore we do not see it), and therefore if you have no natural way out, there is reason to pray. Just don't count on it helping.
To examine this systematically, one would need to conduct an experiment on a population people prayed for versus populations people did not pray for, and see whether there are differences in recovery rates (which is of course forbidden. It is forbidden to test the Holy One, blessed be He, except regarding tithes. And even there, in my opinion, it doesn't work). Several such experiments have been done, and apparently they are problematic (see the appendix to my book God Plays Dice). From my experience, I do not feel that prayer changes anything.
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Aviad Baron:
I didn't mean that there is any gain in that, only that unlike the laws of nature, where ostensibly there is no intervention because everything operates according to deterministic laws, in the case of a person, whose choice is free, there is no fixed lawfulness and one cannot determine with probability 1 what his steps will be. So maybe one could say that there God does intervene. But that's just a suggestion to make prayer more attractive.
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Rabbi:
As I said, I don't see a difference. The question of whether or not the future can be determined has nothing at all to do with the question of intervention. Even in quantum theory, which is not deterministic in the usual sense, intervention is "unlawful" (although it can happen, as can intervention in the regular laws of nature). But every such intervention is a deviation, whether it is a deviation from randomness, from choice, or from natural law. See about this in The Science of Freedom, in the chapter on quantum theory.