Q&A: Free Choice and the God of the Gaps
Free Choice and the God of the Gaps
Question
Hello Rabbi, I listened to a few of your podcasts on free choice. As I understand it, your argument in favor of free choice is that, at present, science does not provide an answer to the dilemma (though it may in the future), and therefore the claim still belongs in the realm of philosophy, so you side with your basic intuition.
Isn’t that a kind of God-of-the-gaps argument? After all, you’re building a claim on a current gap in science that may well be closed in the future.
Answer
And the claim that there is no free choice—isn’t that also a God-of-the-gaps argument? They too are making claims without any scientific basis.
I’m not proving that free choice exists because of a scientific gap. I’m arguing that there is free choice because that is what intuition says. And the claims that science contradicts this are baseless.