Q&A: Providence
Providence
Question
Hello Rabbi.
I read this past Sabbath in the second book about the topic of providence, and I have a few questions:
1. Maybe a person is not always in a state of free choice; maybe only during part of the day or part of the time he has free choice, and if so, then he can murder only someone who was decreed to die. And God arranges for him to encounter someone who deserves to die? And likewise maybe a person also does not always decide whom he marries, since it is not certain that all people have the choice to marry someone unfit, and therefore, for example, a righteous person may indeed be decreed a certain wife?
2. On the subject of the laws of nature and divine intervention:
So certainly, most of the time the laws of nature exist. But it could be that part of the time God secretly breaks the laws of nature—since He has plenty of room to act. For example: He puts thoughts into a person’s mind not to go downstairs, and that way he is saved from an accident. A bird makes noise and the mother hears and turns her gaze and sees that her son ran into the road, and so she saves him.
There are millions of places where God can intervene and nobody will notice. So what is the proof? After all, most of the time the laws of nature do operate, but 20 percent, say, can be changed through prayer, and then the case you brought about drug research is no longer difficult.
3. In a tsunami, for example, one could say that God summoned everyone who needed to die, and sent on a trip a week earlier everyone who would live.
And maybe also most people in the world, in principle, deserve to die because of their sins, and therefore a tsunami strikes lots of seemingly random people, supposedly without any reckoning. But really there is a reckoning, in that most of them deserve it, and the minority God causes to flee or saves?
So true, you’re boiling with rage because what I’m saying sounds forced; but maybe it is true, because God is immense and maybe He has the power to play this hide-and-seek? And also because 99 percent of the great Torah scholars thought there is providence. It seems very strange to say that people who thought and investigated this subject so much made such a fatal mistake. That’s too bizarre and embarrassing, no?
What would you say, for example, about Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, regarding whom there is endless testimony from reliable people that he operates on the level of divine inspiration: for example, he identified a gentile from among Jews, knew people’s names though he did not know them, and also the well-known story with the police commissioner? Is it all nonsense?!
On the subject of knowledge and free choice: I didn’t understand what Maimonides got tangled up in. Maimonides himself said that there is no logical contradiction even for God in the case of a triangle that is a square, so why does he suddenly get tangled up here? Let him say that God does not know, and that’s it.
Please don’t brush me off on any of this. The subject is important to me. I have no idea what to do at hitchhiking stops. Try to make it so I understand. I feel that you are right.
Thank you very, very much.
P.S. If possible, please deal with the problem that I can’t send or write follow-up questions, so I’m unable to clarify important things. It always happens.
Answer
You can’t comment in a thread that has only just begun, until I respond. That’s how the site is built.
As for your actual points, I’m not boiling with rage about anything. True, my patience is wearing a bit thin, because these questions have come up again and again and I’ve answered them to exhaustion. So I’ll answer briefly.
- Maybe. And maybe not.
- Maybe. And maybe not. Do you have proof? When we make generalizations, it is always on the basis of cases we have observed. That is how all the laws of nature are built. If you cast doubt on them too in the same way, then you are a skeptic and I have nothing to answer you. But if it is only here, then you are simply not being intellectually honest.
- It is certainly possible. One can also say that every time an object is left in the air, a demon comes and throws it downward, or alternatively throws me upward so that it seems to me that the object is falling, and then another demon comes and makes me forget everything that happened.
- People investigated nothing at all. They said what seemed right to them, and therefore the burden of proof is no more on me than on them. Besides, how exactly does one investigate such a thing? In any case, as I have shown, there are those who held like me as well, even if many tend to deny that.
- Stories like the ones about Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky also exist here about Oren Zarif, and likewise about Christian saints by the thousands. If you are inclined to believe such stories—good for you. I do not believe them until the matter is properly examined. People who are not skilled in scientific and statistical thinking fail all the time in noticing such phenomena and in misinterpreting them. It happens every day.
- I thank you on behalf of Maimonides for putting words in his mouth, even though he wrote the opposite explicitly (he writes plainly that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot perform logical contradictions, such as a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side. And so too in the responsa of Rashba and elsewhere. It is all brought in my book). Many thanks.
Discussion on Answer
That is exactly my claim (and perhaps Maimonides’ as well). See the aforementioned series.
Sorry for butting in; I think the questioner made a mistake in the wording, and therefore the local master understood him incorrectly. In number 6 he meant to ask: since Maimonides holds that the Holy One, blessed be He, has no power over impossibilities and cannot make a triangle that is a square, what is the problem with saying that it is impossible for Him to know the future? Let’s say there is free choice and no foreknowledge.