I don’t think it’s fair to make the condition for discussion, “Go read my book and then after you read it maybe we’ll have something to talk about.”
Rather, I was hoping we could simply have a discussion.
“Some of them, in my opinion, are not really questions at all” — what does that mean about a question that is not a question? What is it then?
I understand that you won’t be able to enter into a detailed discussion of all the questions, so let’s discuss the last topic, which deals with free choice and the creation of the evil inclination.
First, I will prove that there is no such thing as free choice. Free choice is the context in which a person stands in a situation where there are several alternatives, and the person is “free” to choose whichever alternative he wants. In that situation there are two possibilities.

Either there is a reason why the person chose the alternative he chose, or it is random. If there is a reason, then there is no free choice because the reason forced him to choose as he did; there is something (the reason) that compels him to choose. And even if he does the opposite of what the reason compels him to do, still he has no free choice; there is something that forces him to choose in a certain way, something he does not really control, something outside him, namely the state of reality at the moment of choice (where the person and his mental state and his desires are part of reality at that moment), which forces him to choose in a certain way. One could say that the person is a slave of reality, and he cannot rise above what reality forces upon him.

And the second possibility is that no reason forced him to choose as he did, but rather it was random. But if it is random, then again the person has no free choice; he did not really choose, it simply happened by itself; there was no active act of choosing on the person’s part.

Now, if there is no free choice, one could say that all human beings are not so different from robots, who simply carry out commands of what reality causes them to want. By the way, there is no person in the world who truly knows what he wants, and the proof is that about every desire one can ask “why do you want it?” ad infinitum, or until the person no longer knows how to answer “why he wants it.” So this also fits with the theory that all human beings are sophisticated robots of reality, without any true will of their own, without even a drop of free choice; everything is a chain of causality, and it is not even clear what the initial cause of the chain is, if there is one at all.

And if all human beings are robots, and God created them without free choice, how can He come to them with complaints that they are not doing what He “wants”? After all, He Himself created them as they are, and they could not have behaved differently than they did—unless you incorporate into the robotic model an element of randomness, and even then it is not clear what God wants from human beings who do not follow His commandments, because it would have been a combination of choices forced upon them and choices they made randomly, or a combination of compulsion and randomness.

Uri, hello.
If anything is unfair, it is to attribute to me a quote I did not write. You put in quotation marks: “Go read my book and then after you read it maybe we’ll have something to talk about,” but I did not write that, nor anything with that wording. I wrote that I devoted a book to this, and in it I answered some of your questions in detail. That is not a demand or a dismissal of the discussion, but a suggestion if you want to go deeper.
Beyond that, if you raise so many fundamental questions all at once, it is entirely fair to refer you to a book devoted to them instead of starting here a discussion that will never end on all of them simultaneously. Moreover, it would certainly have been fair to ask you to focus on one question so that the discussion would not become muddled and could reach a bottom line. I am glad that is what you eventually did. Although I must say that even the question you raised is discussed by me in an entire book as well (I referred you to it too), The Science of Freedom, and I am afraid that it too cannot be exhausted here. Discussing it requires defining concepts, presenting models, examining implications, etc. It is not for nothing that I devote a book to this topic, since in my estimation an online thread is not sufficient for it. But since you raised it, let us nevertheless try to begin discussing it.
But before I begin, I will refer you (not require you to read) to the above book. If you want a summary, see the article here on the site: https://mikyab.net/%d7%9e%d7%90%d7%9e%d7%a8%d7%99%d7%9d/%d7%9e%d7%91%d7%98-%d7%a9%d7%99%d7%98%d7%aa%d7%99-%d7%a2%d7%9c-%d7%97%d7%95%d7%a4%d7%a9-%d7%94%d7%a8%d7%a6%d7%95%d7%9f/
And now to the discussion itself.

The argument you raised was first presented by Peter van Inwagen, and it is brought at the beginning of every discussion of determinism. It contains a fundamental logical flaw, and I will try to explain here what it is.
Before entering such a discussion, one needs to define the two positions under discussion. Here is my analysis.
The determinist claims that everything in the world has a cause. Admittedly, this is not a necessary presentation of his position, because as you yourself present here, there is also the possibility of randomness (an event without a cause). So in fact what he claims is not that everything necessarily has a cause, but rather that if something happens without a cause then it is random. In other words, his claim is that there is no such thing as free choice.
The libertarian, by contrast, claims that there is also a third mechanism: free choice. Note well: his claim is that this is neither a causal mechanism nor a random one.
That is the dispute. Before I get into van Inwagen’s argument, I remind you that if you want to bring an argument against the libertarian, you need to start from his point of departure and show that he is mistaken. To do so from your own point of view is a fallacy (begging the question). Clearly, if you assume there is no third mechanism, then there is no third mechanism. But from the libertarian’s point of view, there is a third mechanism. Now you must prove to him that even according to his own approach he is wrong.
Van Inwagen’s argument attempts to do this, and of course fails. As a determinist, he assumes that there are only two possibilities: randomness or causality. But that is precisely what the dispute is about. Therefore his argument suffers from begging the question.
What confuses people (and especially van Inwagen himself) is that apparently these really are the only two possibilities and there cannot be a third. After all, either there is a cause or there is not. The law of the excluded middle states that there is no third possibility.
To that I say that this is certainly true. I too agree that either there is a cause or there is not. But van Inwagen assumes something additional: that if there is no cause then it is necessarily randomness. But the libertarian does not agree with that, as we have seen. The libertarian claims that under the heading “there is no cause” there are two different possibilities: 1. Randomness. 2. No cause, but there is a purpose, or an aim for the sake of which this action is done. At its root stands deliberation (and that is not a causal mechanism). This is the mechanism he calls free will or choice. Note that this is a third mechanism: neither randomness nor causality.
You can of course accept or not accept the claim that there is a third mechanism, but that is what the dispute is about. There is no point in assuming it, since your argument wants to prove it or attack the other position (that there is a third mechanism). But it does not do that. If you want to attack the libertarian position, you are invited to do so from within the picture I have described here, and not on the basis of your own assumptions.

Sorry for the unfairness. In any case, let’s continue the discussion if it interests you.
In order to accept the claim that there is a third mechanism, I need to understand what that means.
The claim says, “there is no cause but there is a purpose.” I will try to interpret that simply: if cause is “because,” then purpose is “for the sake of.” The central distinguishing feature is past versus future; that is, a cause is a factor from the past, and purpose is a factor from the future. But it is not clear to me why it matters whether we are talking about cause or purpose. True, there are differences between the two as I said, but they also have things in common, and for the purposes of the discussion they have the same essence, namely “why.” In that context, the word “cause” or “causality” includes both the meaning of “because” and the meaning of “for the sake of.”
“Why did you choose this way? Because of X.”
“Why did you choose this way? For the sake of X.”
As far as I’m concerned, there is no difference between “because of” and “for the sake of.” As long as there is a “why,” then as far as I’m concerned there is a reason for the choice, and that means the reason forced the person to choose as he did, and he has no freedom. And as stated, if there is no reason but rather a random mechanism, then again he has no freedom, and the choice has no meaning.
Note: as far as I’m concerned, even the “for the sake of” rests on a “because of.” I’ll explain intuitively—where did the person’s desire to achieve a certain purpose come from? “Because of” his perception of reality, which he acquired even before the desire to achieve that purpose. So from a certain perspective, there really is no difference between “because of” and “for the sake of.”

I do not know whether my analysis is what you meant by “there is no cause but there is a purpose.” I tried to explain how I understand what you wrote; if not, I’d be happy if you would explain the meaning of that third mechanism.

In any case, I am not one of those people who argue over assumptions. I have no interest in “accepting or not accepting the claim that there is a third mechanism”; I am only interested in clarifying the assumptions and checking whether they are reasonable. After it is clarified that they are reasonable, for all I care everyone can believe whatever they want, although personally I don’t understand where belief comes from if it is not necessary and one can also believe the opposite. But that is for another discussion; for now let us focus on the third mechanism.

I also discussed this at length in my book The Science of Freedom, and I’ll explain briefly.
One must distinguish between two kinds of teleological explanation: 1. Aristotle’s teleology (the stone falls because it wants to return to its source, the earth). 2. A purpose that a person sets for himself through deliberation. The first type is not truly teleological, since mathematically it is equivalent to a causal explanation. It is just another way of formulating it. There are mathematical proofs that for most causal explanations in physics there is a teleological formulation as well (such as Fermat’s principle in optics, or Lagrangian mechanics). The stone cannot but “strive” to return to its source. So there it is only a matter of formulation. And many make a mistake when they dismiss Aristotelian explanations, because they identify them with attributing a will (free?) to the stone. By contrast, in human choice we are dealing with deliberation that chooses a future goal, and from that derives a present action. For example, I want to meet a friend tomorrow morning, so now I call him to arrange a meeting. My desire that moves my hand to dial is created out of a future goal that I set for myself. My claim is that this happens without a cause that produces it; rather, the will is the setting of a goal ex nihilo. This is the libertarian position. The determinist does not accept this, but that is what the dispute is about. An explanation of this kind has no equivalent causal explanation. Unlike the stone, a person can also choose not to want the meeting, in which case none of this would happen.
Therefore, the focus of my distinction is not whether it is rooted in the past or the future, but whether there is a cause that forced the outcome or not. I claim there is not.
As for your request that I explain this mechanism, I explained in the book that it is based on a mistake. When one looks for an explanation of some mechanism, one is really looking for its cause (what caused it, what produces it). But here we are dealing with conduct without a cause, and therefore looking for a cause for it is a mistake. The fact that you do not find an “explanation” is because you are trying to reduce a third mechanism to the first. But this is a different mechanism that cannot be reduced to the first.
By the way, this is also the reason (!) that as you ascend the sciences from inanimate matter to human beings, the explanations become more teleological. Physics is supposedly entirely causal (that too is not correct, and I have already addressed that as well), and so is chemistry, though there it is harder to see this (because the systems are more complex). But in biology you already find entirely teleological discourse (to which evolution offered a causal explanation). In psychology the discourse is entirely teleological (a person does such-and-such because he wants to do such-and-such and his purposes are such-and-such). Even when a causal explanation is offered for this, it is in order to change the outcome. The subtext is very non-causal. When one moves to society (sociology and anthropology), this returns more to causality because of the law of large numbers (as in quanta, where there is dephasing on larger scales). But there is no point getting into all that here.
In the book I also explained that the aspiration to reduce choice to causality is itself absurd, because out of the three mechanisms only the third (choice) is known to us directly. Every person feels that he chooses, but determinists choose (!) to ignore this feeling and define it as an illusion because it cannot be reduced to causality (as van Inwagen does). But causality is an a priori hypothesis (as Hume and Kant showed), and randomness is something not understood at all and not familiar to us from life (which is why we twist ourselves into knots around quantum theory). So why take a familiar mechanism and try to look for its reduction to two other mechanisms less familiar than it?! And then infer the conclusion that if we did not find one, it probably does not exist. We did not find one precisely because it does exist. On the contrary, perhaps it would make sense to look for reductions of causality and randomness to choice, which is more familiar, and then deny the existence of those others. In philosophy, by the way, many indeed deny the existence of causality—like Hume—and of randomness (hidden variables in quantum theory),

“My claim is that this happens without a cause that produces it; rather, the will is the setting of a goal ex nihilo.”
“Whether there is a cause that forced the outcome or not. I claim there is not.”
Let’s focus on those claims.
Let’s take a simple case. A 5-year-old child is sitting on the floor and playing. Suddenly he notices a candy that is on the table. This causes him to want to climb onto a chair and take the candy from the table. One could formulate it this way: the child chose to stop playing and to do actions aimed at achieving a goal—getting the candy; that is his purpose right now. Is this child’s purpose detached from causality? After all, if he had not seen and wanted the candy, he would not have chosen to change his desire and achieve the goal. In this simple case, I have no idea what is meant by “happens without a cause,” because the cause seems clear to me. Proof: if he had not seen the candy, the desire to get the candy would not have arisen in him. Just as if a child had not seen a balloon, he would not have wanted to get a balloon. I’d be happy if you would explain in this case what is meant by “without a cause,” and how desire is created ex nihilo in this case.
And let’s take another case, a bit more complex. Let us say there is a Haredi person who grew up in Bnei Brak, who every day calls a friend to arrange going to a Torah class. And let us say there is a secular person who grew up in Tel Aviv, who every day calls a friend to arrange going to a bar to hit on girls.
In my understanding, their choice depends on what they know and on their perception of reality. It would never occur to the secular person to set as a “goal” (the term you used) to arrange every day with a friend to go to a Torah class, and it would never occur to the Haredi person to set as a “goal” to go to a bar every day and hit on girls. Because each one acts according to his world of values, which is derived from his perception of reality. Do you think the Haredi person’s choice is unrelated to how he was educated? And to the society in which he grew up?
Could it be that the choice is completely random? And just by chance the Haredi person arranges a Torah class every day, but just as well he could have chosen to go to a bar and hit on girls. Yes, it could be that it’s just by chance. But there is a much more logical explanation: that it isn’t just random, that there is a cause. And your claim that there is no cause does not seem connected to reality; it seems to deny reality, to deny the logical explanation, and to adopt the improbable possibility that we are dealing with a non-causal scenario. Someone could come and claim there is no such thing as gravity, and the fact that until today all apples have fallen to the ground is only by chance; just as well they could have floated in the air or flown upward; only by chance until now they have fallen downward. Even so, there is still a possibility that there is no cause and there is another mechanism, and if that is an assumption then there is nothing to argue about, although it will be very hard for me to accept that assumption. In the end, if one says that everything is random, then obviously relative to that assumption every belief will be rational; if everything is random then that fits with there being a God, and it also fits with there being a Flying Spaghetti Monster. But it is hard to accept an assumption like “everything is random.” I am not saying it is not a possibility, only that it is hard to accept. In any case, one still has to understand what this assumption means. You did not explain how something can be created ex nihilo. Even when people explain that God created the world ex nihilo, it is still not clear what that means. But in a human context, when one says that a person creates ex nihilo, it is even less clear. To me that sounds like a paradox. A person creates something. Out of what? Out of nothing. So then out of what does he create the something? What is the something made of? Of nothing? How can something be made of nothing?

Sorry for butting in.
I believe in free will (by the way, only thanks to Rabbi Michi! and thank you for that…), but what does this have to do with belief in God? Determinism does not contradict faith / Judaism.
It could be that the Creator created people without the ability to choose, and punishes the wayward in order to repair the world.

Even a committed determinist wants a proper legal system (independent?…).
That is, it could be that punishment for sins is so that they will hear and fear, and not for the sake of correcting the person.
And Rabbi Hasdai Crescas already wrote this (for those interested in sources…)

With God’s help, 27 Av 5783

To Ezra—greetings,

I’m not currently immersed in the topic, but it seems to me that according to Rabbi Hasdai Crescas, even if actions are subject to determinism, a person’s thought is free, and he is responsible for identifying with his actions.

Best regards, Fish"l

See Rabbi Ze’ev Sultanovich’s lecture “Understanding the Times” on Rabbi Hasdai Crescas (on the Har Bracha website).

Best regards, Fish"l

Ezra,
You are absolutely right. That is what I wrote to him at the beginning of the conversation. But here we are discussing determinism in itself.

To the one citing Rabbi Hasdai Crescas,
There is a contradiction there between two parts of the book. It seems to me that Avi Ravitzky pointed this out in an article.
I already wrote here in the past that in my opinion this is an untenable position. If my thoughts are in my hands, then why assume that my actions are not? My thoughts are an event in the world like any other event, and if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows them in advance and this does not contradict my freedom to think, then there is no contradiction regarding actions either. And if He does not know, then one can say He does not know and there is no theological problem with that, so why not say the same regarding actions?!

Uri,
With your pardon, I’m going to stop here. All of this is discussed in detail in my book The Science of Freedom (and in summary in the article I referred you to), and if you want you can look there. It is hard for me to continue, especially with such long gaps.

Uri:
I expected the Rabbi to write the following, but since he did not, I will write what I assume he would have answered (of course, this is my responsibility alone).
In the comparison between the Haredi person and the secular person, you are attacking a straw man. Even someone who believes in free choice does not necessarily claim that it is unlimited; it can be tiny and still be free at that tiny point. In practice it is quite clear that a person acts within a range of influences of different kinds that limit his freedom of choice. That does not contradict the very existence of choice, the intuition about which many people have; it only narrows it.