Question

Dear Rabbi Michael Abraham,
 
My name is A., 24, Jerusalem.
 
First of all, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing the book God Plays Dice. I have no words to describe the depth of the change this book brought about in me.
 
I grew up in a world where the word “God” was a semi-taboo word, a word that carried with it an obligatory baggage of cynicism and superficial contempt. I don’t think my opinion about the concept of God was really formed until adolescence, when I bought Dawkins’s book The God Delusion. That book convinced me very easily that Dawkins was completely right, that belief in God is pure stupidity. I have to note that a life like that, without spirit, without faith, is an especially difficult and complicated life.
 
About a year ago I came across the book God Plays Dice. Reading it was very difficult for me. The book’s abundance of details and examples exhausted me more than once. The introduction in particular was hard. I needed to keep Google open on my phone in order to interpret the following foreign terms: deterministic mechanism, coherence, dichotomy, folkloristic, apologetics, anachronism, empiricism, polytheisms, ad hoc, methodologies, ad hominem, agronomist, tautologies, sophisms, naturalistic, and the words inherent and substance in the first chapter. All of these were words that, for me as an ordinary person, were a mystery.
 
If a new edition of the book comes out in the future, I would definitely recommend making concepts like these more accessible to readers.
 
After that I was exposed to a truly amazing world of philosophy. I never imagined that the concept of philosophy could be so interesting. I had lived with a very superficial view that philosophy was just unnecessary sophistry. I should note that I credit my change in perspective regarding the concept of God to the cosmological proof in the second chapter, and I thank you for that.
 
For some reason דווקא the physico-theological proof didn’t really “do it for me.” To this day, when I look at the complexity of the universe, from quantum physics to the world of plants and animals on Earth, the possibility that all of this happened by chance still echoes within me. 
 
In conclusion, I want to thank you for a masterful book that brought about a spiritual transformation in me from one extreme to the other. I can’t even begin to imagine how much work you invested in the book. For me, the word “God” represents the concept of a supreme power, that primordial “something” that brought about the Big Bang and introduced content into our universe. That same God also made sure that I would read your book.
 
Respectfully,