Is praying for a “change in nature” not heresy? After all, it challenges the way the Holy One, blessed be He, runs the world and governs nature. He created nature in a certain way because that is what He saw fit.

“In the sea was Your way, and Your path in the mighty waters, and Your footsteps were not known.”

That is certainly not an argument. It was created on that condition—that if we ask, it will change.

“According to scientific knowledge, nature is closed.” Really?! Is there some empirical experiment that establishes the hypothesis that nature is closed? It seems to me that the closedness of nature is an assumption of modern science and does not arise from it—is that not so?

Indeed, like all the other laws of nature. Even claims for which we have empirical confirmation are based on such assumptions. So one could say this about all of modern science. The assumption is that what we see reflects the entire lawful order of things, and what we see is completely deterministic.

The Sages said that praying about the amount of produce already in the storehouse is a vain prayer, and one should pray only that “a blessing rest upon it.” If they meant to distinguish between deterministic processes (the amount of produce) and random ones (whether blessing will rest upon it), then according to modern science, in the view of the Sages one should not pray today for anything, no?
(Unless “that blessing rest upon it” means success in commerce, and then the prayer is for a change in human choices toward successful ones, and in that case nothing has changed from then until today.)

D,
Indeed. I have written this here several times already. I proved from the Talmudic topic of praying about the past that the Sages thought there is such a thing as intervention within nature, and today, to our knowledge, that is not correct, and therefore one should update the attitude toward prayer precisely if one wants to continue in the path of the Sages.
By the way, a prayer to change a choice is not essentially different from a prayer to change nature. In both cases the Holy One, blessed be He, intervenes and causes the world to deviate from its normal course. There was once a thread started by Oren who proposed such a mechanism for divine intervention in the laws of nature.

But what justifies your claim that everything is deterministic?
You’re harnessing the prestige of science for the claim, but it really does not seem to me justified. The only justification is intuition.
If, as you say, today we know that everything is deterministic (beyond quantum mechanics), then that is also true as an argument against free will.
But there you דווקא depart from the assumption, because there you have an even stronger intuition that there is free will.
Also, nothing was proved from the days of the Sages. What changed is that we discovered that the deterministic assumption is much more scientifically fruitful, but that does not prove it is true. And that is also true regarding free will, as you wrote here to a researcher who asked about it—that there too the researcher must assume determinism simply because that is the fruitful scientific approach and otherwise one cannot investigate.

I did not understand this strange hair-splitting.
According to your approach, if someone claims that hexagon-shaped objects made of wood float in the air and do not fall to the ground, I should tell him: in principle you are right. True, the more scientifically fruitful methodology says that objects do in fact fall toward the earth, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with science and facts (just intuition), and the righteous shall live by his faith. Well then, fine.
This has nothing to do with the question of determinism. There are not two competing claims here about reality. Even if there is some part of us that is not deterministic, the scientific assumption—which I also accept—says to look only at the deterministic part of reality/the brain, because that is what can be investigated. There is no assumption (at least not for me) that this is all there is.
Beyond that, there is no indication whatsoever of divine intervention in the world (today), and therefore no reason to assume it exists. But there certainly are indications of free will (the immediate experience that feels it, similar to sensory observation).

If it is clear to you that a person’s will changes the flow of electrons in the nervous system and brain, and that they fall into line with his free will—then is anything too hard for God to do likewise?

After all, He revealed in His Torah and through His prophets that His eyes are “open upon all the ways of the children of men, to give every one according to his ways and according to the fruit of his doings” (Jeremiah 32, and other sources mentioned in Guide for the Perplexed 3:17), so is He prevented from doing what every person does when making a choice?

And what has changed today? Open miracles were rare even in the days of the prophets, but intervention in natural processes that to the naked eye appear random and can develop into different scenarios allows the Creator to tilt them in the desired direction, without any visible change in the order of creation.

The scientific progress of humanity, which has not been accompanied by parallel moral progress and has brought man to a capacity for destruction that did not exist in ancient times, only requires increased divine providence in the world so that it not collapse into chaos; and we are not aware of what human beings might have done to us were it not for “the help of the Cause of causes.”

Best regards, S. Tz. Levinger

I did not understand anything.
If someone raises a scientific hypothesis (a very strange one), I can do an experiment and refute it (or be surprised), and I can say to him that I will not even bother because the hypothesis seems completely implausible to me. How is that at all related to someone raising a non-scientific hypothesis (not empirically testable) about divine intervention?
And I also did not understand what you wrote in the last paragraph that this is unrelated to determinism. You wrote earlier: “The assumption is that what we see reflects the entire lawful order of things, and what we see is completely deterministic.”
As for the indication for free choice, I already addressed that. I did not claim there is divine intervention. I claimed that science does not at all contradict this hypothesis, only intuition does—and that same intuition also opposes free choice, so even by your own approach the power of that intuition is limited.

This reminds me of Shnirelman’s claim in the book At an Oblique Angle, on the Torah portion Beshalach, that science cannot identify miracles a priori. After all, even if there is intervention, we will simply shift the mean and variance accordingly and say: this is nature.

The connection between communal prayer and the descent of blessed rains can be seen by watching reports under the “drought” tag on Arutz 7.

In late December 2017, the Chief Rabbinate called to add a request for rain to the public prayer, and a prayer assembly with thousands participating was even held at the Western Wall, and indeed January 2018 was rich in blessed rains, contrary to forecasts predicting that January would be dry like the dry months before it.

Because of the blessed rains that fell, at the end of January Chief Rabbi Rabbi David Lau instructed people to return to routine and stop the special request for rain. They stopped arousing heavenly mercy, and in February 2018 the rains again diminished and it was dry as before the communal prayer.

It seems that God awaits our prayer, and answers it!

Best regards, S. Tz. Levinger

Y.D.,
I already argued here in the past that it is impossible to identify a miracle, and I asked for an example of what would convince someone that this is a miracle. The Rabbi answered that maybe a bullet passing through a wall. I argued exactly that if it is a one-time event, we will think there is some trick here or some rare thing that happened, and if it is regular, then we will formulate a law that includes it.
Now that you say that Shnirelman said this, maybe Rabbi Michael will listen to the claim and relate to it seriously. It seems to me that Shnirelman is in the group of people whose arguments he takes seriously.
By the way, this argument is also true regarding prophecy, which is also a kind of miracle. It is an intervention by God that changes physical things (in the brain, or earlier, if it is photons or acoustic waves that reach us). A person who experiences prophecy cannot determine that it is really prophecy and not an illusion or a personality disorder, except for the fact that he thinks so (exactly like people with a disorder). This is a claim with much more problematic religious implications.

Another point connected to chaos theories. There are many parameters in the world, most of which we are not even aware of. Even if we do not see intervention, that does not mean it did not happen. We simply were not in the area to notice it. It could be that God changed a small factor whose importance in the system we are not even aware of, and the final result is completely different. What is true is that we have never seen a miraculous change that contradicts the laws of nature as they are built one upon another—physics -> chemistry -> biology -> the human sciences… Anyone who expects today to see water burn would do well to look for other expectations. This has significance regarding going to all sorts of sorcerers and magicians who promise a lot but in practice cannot even imitate the heavenly entourage. I knew a woman who received a pill to help her conceive. After the fact it turned out that the pill is indeed used in fertility treatments by doctors, but since that person lacked any relevant medical or scientific training, he was completely unaware of the risks involved in taking that pill, which require certain tests such as blood pressure and the like. Therefore I say: it may be that even today the Holy One, blessed be He, intervenes. It may be that prayers help. But these interventions are not visible to us in the miraculous sense on which we were educated.

That is at the level of the individual. At the collective level, there are several events in the twentieth century that historians to this day are worn out trying to explain. They can explain in great detail how World War I broke out. No one has explained to this day why World War I broke out. One of the historians I most appreciate suggested that it broke out against the backdrop of the boredom of Western people with the long peace of the nineteenth century. By the same token, one can also accept Rabbi Kook’s explanation that the war broke out because of the wickedness of the people of Europe… One can go on and on, but anyone who thinks historians offer a sensible explanation of what happened is hard not to see as a naïve devotee of scientism.

Yishai,
And still, no scientific explanation will be able to explain how water (H2O) can burn. On this issue I am much more Aristotelian than modern. Water that burns is simply not water. The chemical structure is probably different in a way that allows combustion. A physical miracle in the sense discussed by the medieval authorities is simply not possible (unless it really is a miracle). And therefore, if the phenomenon has not happened, then apparently such interventions in nature simply do not exist.

No one also could explain how waves that strike metal cause electrons to be emitted from it, and only when the waves have a certain threshold frequency.
Until Einstein came along.
If people see water burning, they will try to isolate the conditions in which it happens, and then raise hypotheses and test them.
By the way, even today there are unexplained things—for example, that under certain conditions (which are themselves not fully clear), two identical bodies except for their temperature freeze at different times, specifically with the one that was hotter freezing first. This was already reported by Aristotle, but modern science thought he was just babbling (after all, Aristotle did not check the number of teeth and he was just stupid, so why should we investigate our strange claims), because it sounds about as plausible as water burning. I have not yet seen anyone claim that this is a miracle. There are hypotheses, and people try to investigate the phenomenon.

If while praying one remembers that
“And the Lord said to Moses: Why do you cry out to Me? Speak to the children of Israel, that they go forward,”
then prayer certainly helps.

S. Tz. L., did I write that such a thing would be beyond Him? I explicitly wrote that it would not. What I wrote was that my impression is that He does not do so.

Yishai, and what I answered you is that the intuition (mine) opposes divine involvement, not free choice (which we experience directly, and whoever claims that this is an illusion bears the burden of proof). I also wrote that your distinction between science and intuition has no basis. All science is based on intuition. Therefore, when I write something according to the science known to us today, that includes intuitive components. And I also wrote that sporadic intervention is possible, but in the ordinary course of things I get the impression that there is no such thing.
By the way, the hypothesis about hexagonal trees is not scientific in your sense. Once you do an experiment and it fails, I can always say it was not a perfect hexagon and that is why it fell to the ground. And even if it does not fall, you can always say it is a coincidence (it is only intuition that there are fixed laws, not a scientific finding). And still no one would think to say that the statement about those hexagons is not scientific but intuitive (which is of course true, but there is no distinction between the two).
What I wrote in distinguishing between choice and divine involvement is that the hypothesis of divine involvement is not confined to a distinct sector of creation (and some expand it to all creation all the time), whereas free will is a distinct part of the brain with which neuroscience does not deal (because its methodology assumes determinism and therefore focuses on the deterministic part of the brain).
It seems to me that this discussion is unnecessary hair-splitting in philosophy of science (about what van Fraassen calls actualism).

S. Tz. L.,
With such “research” on droughts you will not get far. To draw conclusions, one must conduct an orderly study. If you show me that whenever people prayed it was answered in a statistically significant way relative to situations in which they did not pray, you can move from articles in Besheva to some academic scientific journal.

Y.D. and Yishai,
You need not go on at length. I myself wrote these things (that it would be hard for me to become convinced that a miracle had occurred). And still, in practice there would be many situations that, if they happened, I would admit were miracles, despite your hair-splitting. If a bullet passed through a wall, or if someone appeared to me in a dream and told me what would happen tomorrow, etc. Why would I not make a generalization that includes the deviation as a new law? Because I would not (and even if I did, from my perspective it would be a miraculous law). But this is not only about a miracle that directly contradicts the laws of nature; even a statistical miracle is possible. For example, if there were a statistically significant regularity that prayer helps bring rain (especially prayer by Jews). You could of course argue endlessly that prayer is a law of nature. Fine—then it is a law of nature. That is what I call a miracle.
Everything you wrote here is nothing but repetitions of the problem of induction in various forms, and of our inability to define which generalizations seem to us simpler and more reasonable and which do not. These are, once again, entertaining bits of hair-splitting in philosophy of science (old challenges to the ability to determine ad hoc laws, or to identify deviations from them). Apparently you are now in a philosophical mood that sends you back to foundational arguments in philosophy of science. Enjoy.

The Holy One, blessed be He, can suspend the laws of nature, but by the same token He can also change a female into a male or turn time back to before the scream.
The Sages understand that most things are not changes in nature, but more like drawing assistance from God so that the laws of nature work in their favor.
Therefore, anyone who holds that nature is closed must conclude that there is no such thing as a prayer that is not a vain prayer (unless we explain that turning time back and the like are such basic things that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not touch them).