Question

A response to Rabbi Michael Abraham about the trilogy
Hello Rabbi Michael,
First of all, a huge and heartfelt thank you for all your work, which has been lighting my way for years. I’ve read 3 of the 4 books in the quartet: The Science of Freedom, Truth and Unstable, and God Plays Dice. Your work really does make faith possible, and the “thin theology” is something I had been looking for for a long time and had even tried to build for myself.
A few points came up for me בעקבות the reading. I’m mixing all the questions into one text because there is some connection between them.
The ontological proof
Here is what I don’t understand about the proof. Suppose there is a world with no God. It still has concepts in it. According to the ontological proof, even in such a world the ontological proof would prove that there is a God. If the proof shows the reality of God whether He exists or not, then it is meaningless as a proof.
God’s intervention in the world
In the book you wrote that since physical nature is deterministic, and it seems that everything has a physical explanation, then (nowadays) God most likely does not intervene, except perhaps in a few rare cases. (It may be that what you meant is that God does not intervene at all, and you wrote that He does intervene in a few cases so as not to shut the door completely, and still leave room for some providence.)
 
You don’t take into account how much reality can be affected by very tiny interventions. A classic example is the murder of the Austro-Hungarian heir, where a split-second decision was the trigger for a historic turning point that led to World War I and then World War II, a leap in hundreds of technologies, the founding of states, the philosophical shift from modernism to postmodernism, and the rise of the U.S. as a leading economic and cultural power.
 
If God does in fact intervene in rare cases, He can know what extremely small intervention will create an enormous impact, and in that way supervise reality and control it. There is no need to know the future for this. A very deep understanding of the present is enough.
Intervening in a few cases allows for a very profound intervention in what happens. And that allows for prayers and miracles.
The intervention is probably not in the physical world—as you wrote, that seems fully deterministic—but rather in the one reality that is not deterministic: human choice, as you wrote in The Science of Freedom. Our experience of ourselves as choosing beings cannot be denied. Just as it says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, so too He can dramatically affect reality, both humanity as a whole and individual people.
 
As you wrote in The Science of Freedom, the basis for free will lies outside physics. There is an interface through which non-physical will moves particles. That exact same interface allows God to intervene dramatically in what happens. Tilting human desires can guide social and personal events very effectively.
A parable for the relation between a homeopathic “medicine” and a real medicine: in the latter there is a tiny fraction of active substance, and that is all that is needed.
 
Even the forces of nature can be influenced through a tilt in human will (or even just changing a person’s internal “topography”). Many natural forces operate according to chaotic equations, where the flap of a butterfly’s wings can create a chain reaction that causes a storm. If God wants to “activate” nature, He only has to bring about a human act that serves as the necessary butterfly-wing action. No need to know the future—only to know the present fully.
 
How deep can knowledge of the present be? For all chaotic equations, there is information that tells how a change in input affects the output. That information is not accessible to us, but it is accessible to an omniscient being. There is no need to know the future for that. (It may be that in our lifetime we will still see computers with computational power approaching this, and able to give estimates close to reality for the future of chaotic systems.)
 
What you proposed in The Science of Freedom is a narrow opening in which there is an interface between the spiritual (non-physical, choice) and the material, between will and the motion of particles or force fields. That is all God needs in order to intervene in what happens. There is definitely room for hope that prayer can change reality.
Why don’t we see this clearly in the statistics? I don’t know; explanations can easily be invented (for example: God preserves a “law of conservation of suffering,” so once X amount of suffering has been decreed upon a population, one person whose prayer is answered comes at another’s expense; or: God does indeed “evade” such tests for reasons known only to Him). In any case, once there is a theoretical possibility of an answer to prayer, prayer has meaning.
Besides, prayer is not only an attempt to affect reality but also a human need. When people say “there are no atheists in foxholes,” they do not necessarily mean that in the foxholes they become religious. Rather, in foxholes even atheists experience the need to pray. It is a human need that works almost like an automatic reflex.
Knowledge and choice
True, there is a logical failure here. But one can know the future with high probability without any logical failure. A driving instructor can tell a student, “If you take the test this week, you will fail,” and be right without knowing the future. He just knows the data well enough.
You say to your daughter: “Don’t start baking a cake Friday afternoon. You won’t have time, you’ll turn the whole kitchen upside down, and in the end you’ll cry and Mom will have to both finish the cake and clean everything up, and also be late for prayer.” The girl vehemently denies it, promises, and says none of that will happen—but you, as her father, know the future at a level close to certainty. That is how God knows the future. This is the knowledge of the future expressed in the final message of the Written Torah—the Song of Ha’azinu.
Knowledge of the future on the basis of a deep understanding of the present—that is also what the Raavad meant by the knowledge of the astrologers (139), not as you wrote.
God of the gaps
In the book you reject the position that says divine providence is found in the gaps in current evolutionary theory. I look at things the other way around.
Clearly, if a complete and well-established Big Bang–evolution theory stood before me, I would admit that all faith must be subordinate to the theory. But right now there is no need to answer a theory that does not yet exist. The challenge from evolution is premature.
 
Once, the physico-theological proof cried out, and there was nothing that could stand against it. Anyone who looked at reality 300 years ago had to wonder where all this came from. (And that was when reality seemed simple! Without particles, quanta, galaxies, cells, bacteria…)
Later came the theories of the Big Bang and evolution, which supposedly offer an alternative explanation. But still—not yet! When they become complete, when they answer the major questions that remain open (as I understand it, the major questions are: how the first cell came to be, how the leap happens from one species to another, and how complex systems can be explained when they require several coordinated mutations to occur together)—then we will have a theory before us, and then we will say there is no room for a God of the gaps. But for now, the gaps in the theory leave us with the default position that existed before the theory—the wonder at the existence of a complex world, which points to a composer.
I have a feeling that before there is a complete theory explaining everything from the Big Bang to man, there will be a few more turns and interesting discoveries that will reshuffle the deck. So for now we remain with the physico-theological proof, together with a convincing but incomplete scientific theory. And when a complete alternative appears, we will accept it with an open heart and willing soul.
By the way, the common mistake in the secular world is that they think we are already there. People outside the scientific world think evolutionary theory has long since provided a sufficient explanation that answers all the questions of origins. I’m surprised by this every time anew in conversations with secular people.
 
At the same time, what you wrote about taste, fine-tuning, and all the other arguments showing that the physico-theological proof still stands even when evolution exists—that is valid.
 
The main point is missing from the book
In the book there are detailed explanations of why the “thin theology” does not include providence, prayer, miracles, and so on.
And then there is a leap over an abyss, and you begin discussing the details of Torah study as a central religious practice. But you did not explain why Torah study gets that status. Why is study itself a central principle in the theology? I assume that if there were a convincing philosophical argument, you would have written it. You would explain how, given that there is a creating, caring, moral God who exercises (passive) providence, there is meaning to detailed analytic study of the content of revelation, and therefore one must continue to elaborate and refine the message of revelation without end.
As you wrote, faith in the sages is not enough.
The statements about Torah study that appear in the text of the revelation are far from explaining why study became the central religious occupation in Judaism.
 
In my opinion it is clear that a selection process happened here. The people who teach Torah are people who are naturally drawn to study. These are people with a certain character, intellectual enthusiasts. They have an incentive to think that study is important, because study is the occupation their soul is drawn to. And so it came out that the scholars claim the most important practice is study.
The testimony about the revelation
The arguments are not strong. Could it be that the texts of the revelation appeared and people simply believed them? Not likely, as you wrote and explained.
But I studied in a religious seminary for girls. And I saw how stories get inflated as they pass from one person to another even over just a few months. A 20-second scuffle, which may have included 30 moderate punches among the first rows, after a few months of oral transmission turns into an all-out war that lasted half the night at maximum violence.
Even the people who witnessed the event become convinced by the exaggerated stories.
It is entirely possible that there was (or was not) some formative event, and the story simply got inflated in the tradition over several generations, and then the exaggerated version was accepted and written down for posterity.
Interpretation of aggadah versus interpretation of Jewish law
You gave interpretation of Jewish law an easy pass. Everything you wrote about interpreting aggadah and the Hebrew Bible is true; it really is evident that most of the effort is to hang on the text what we believed in the first place.
But to a large degree this is also true in yeshiva learning. The fact is that there is a “strict” rabbi and a “lenient” rabbi. In many cases, you can predict in advance a rabbi’s attitude toward a certain topic based on his personality.
 
On the other hand, the experience of studying the Hebrew Bible or aggadah is that there really is something enriching in the text, something that gives me detail and development of the values and beliefs I came with from home.
The difference between studying aggadah / Hebrew Bible and Jewish law in this context is more quantitative than qualitative. In both there is a measure of commitment to the text, and in both there is a projection of personal values onto the text. But it is not black and white—rather light gray and dark gray.
Text generator
This is not such a great trick. Of course one can pile interpretation onto a text, whether authentic or gibberish. Especially when the matters are not empirically testable, unlike a scientific text or a Talmudic text (where the test is whether the content fits). That does not mean the authentic text has no meaning. To my taste, this exercise is more of an amusement at the expense of the discipline (a fairly successful amusement), but it is not evidence of a lack of meaning.
I have no doubt that if we programmed a “generator of contradictions in Maimonides” that takes Maimonides’ language in Jewish law and creates fictional contradictory texts—you would find lots of “general lectures” with enlightening explanations for those contradictions. Torah scholars would not distinguish between the real contradictions and the fictional ones. It’s funny, but it isn’t really a serious argument.
Stars and sun
A thought I had that points to a non-human source of the Torah: there is a commandment not to worship the heavenly bodies—the sun, the moon, and the stars. How could it be, in the ancient world, that someone would deny the heavenly bodies as an object of worship? Even if you say the Torah was written in the Second Temple period—that is still amazing. There is no mysterious phenomenon more astonishing and awe-inspiring than the heavenly bodies. There is no culture that did not worship the heavenly bodies for thousands of years. And that was the observable and absolute truth throughout thousands of years of history (and probably prehistory) until Renaissance science. It is impossible that a human being, on his own, would deny that the heavenly bodies have power; and even more impossible that such a statement would be accepted by the general public. This is a convincing claim that the source of this text is not human.
Tzimtzum not literally understood
You make the argument look ridiculous by taking it literally—as though before and after the tzimtzum God’s presence is exactly the same. There is no need for that. Both schools hold that there is tzimtzum. Even if it is not literal, some kind of contraction is still there. True, these are words that do not say very much. But they cannot be dismissed by the arguments you raised.
Corrections
Footnote 327, paragraph 2, line 5—the arrow is not in the right place
There were one or two places where the word “not” was missing, but I don’t remember where (that’s what happens when you read on the Sabbath)
 
Again, thank you for this tremendous work. May God add to your strength and wisdom to continue researching and writing, and may He add to mine to continue reading and responding.