Q&A: Philosophical Critique of Your Conception of Providence
Philosophical Critique of Your Conception of Providence
Question
There is someone named Rafi Vered who published on Facebook a few years ago a philosophical critique of your conception of providence. I’d be glad if you could respond to his critique. Thanks in advance:
Let me begin by saying that I like Rabbi Michael Abraham very, very much. Back when I was in my first year, I came across his immortal book Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon (the first edition, without margins and with size-6 font), and I read it eagerly (I hold the record of finishing three of his books). Later on I even set him against Rabbi Kalner—not directly, of course—and enjoyed the results מאוד. By the way, I think the two of them are actually not very far apart in their outlooks on matters of faith. When I was doing my bachelor’s degree, I managed to arrange with the Rabbi, together with two other guys, a study group on philosophical issues that lasted almost a year, and today I have the privilege, besides our being neighbors, of hearing him quite a bit in the classes he gives in Lod.
And despite all that, there are topics on which I definitely disagree with him. A few months ago I was asked (and don’t try to figure out why I, of all people) a question about Rabbi Michael Abraham’s conception of providence, for he writes explicitly:
“In any case, in my humble opinion it is not reasonable that there is reward and punishment in this world, regardless of the rabbinic sources, since it does not seem to me that there is any involvement at all of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the conduct of the world. It seems quite clearly that the world around us runs according to the laws of nature and our choices, without divine intervention.”
This, more or less, is what I answered that questioner:
The question of providence is certainly a difficult one, and it does indeed clash head-on with the laws of physics as we know them. But before you raise difficulties about the possibility of providence in the natural world, you have to ask a much simpler question touching your basic assumption: does a person have free will at all?
Free will also contradicts the laws of physics as we know them. A common way to illustrate this idea is by means of an imaginary creature called Laplace’s demon. That demon knows exactly where every particle in the universe is at a given moment, and also their exact velocities. Given this information, it is able to calculate instantly where each and every particle will be at any future moment. That is true לגבי distant stars, but no less true of human beings themselves. That means that since we too are, in the final analysis, composed merely of atoms and elementary particles, we are subject to those same laws of physics. Those laws determine how we behave and what we do—not some supposed choice of ours that can break physics.
For what is choice, if not simply a collection of electrical signals running along synapses, transmitting information between neurons? That “mental process” too is ultimately nothing more than a product of physics, subject to its rigid laws. Therefore, the electrical signal running in your brain right now is not the product of “free choice,” but of the physical initial conditions that already determined exactly what it would do. In other words: just as the motion of the earth around itself and around the sun follows in a fully determinate way from the universe’s initial state some 13-plus billion years ago, so too every molecule moving around inside your skull does so not because you chose it, but because physics decreed it from time immemorial.
At this point everything becomes much simpler: if you believe that a person has free will (one of the foundations of faith, according to Maimonides), and that he is capable of bending the physics of Laplace’s demon—even though modern science does not allow for this—then believe that the Holy One, blessed be He, supervises His world and bends physics according to His will. The revolutionary idea that you have “free will” that can alter the deterministic course of reality seems self-evident to you because you truly and sincerely believe in this illusion that you have the ability to choose. But at bottom, this is a miracle.
Providence, in a fairly simplistic form, is the divine response to human choice. So no less than providence requires a reworking of nature, your free will requires it as well. And just as you do not succeed in seeing how nature folds before free will (and for some reason that doesn’t bother you at all), do not expect to be able to see the effect of providence on the laws of physics.
Believing that whatever cannot be measured scientifically does not exist is simple materialism, and therefore in effect outright heresy. Jewish faith claims that there is something above nature that governs reality and sometimes bends the laws of physics: free will and providence. And just as Rabbi Michael Abraham believes in free will (and he does—his book testifies to that), he can believe in providence.
Answer
I’m astonished at Rafi for making such a mistake about so simple a matter. I never said that providence is impossible, that is, that it cannot exist because of the laws of nature. Can the Holy One, blessed be He, not bend the laws that He Himself created? Of course He can. My claim is that in practice I do not see His involvement in the world (that is, violations of the laws of nature). In other words, although He can violate the laws, He apparently chooses not to do so. That is His policy. By contrast, free will is something I do experience, and therefore it is clear to me that this does happen.
In short, I certainly could believe in providence if I were convinced that it actually exists.
Discussion on Answer
No. You did not understand correctly. We have no knowledge that we cannot deviate from the laws. On the contrary, we have knowledge that we indeed can. That is one of the laws of nature. I don’t know what “scientific computational knowledge” is, but I suspect it’s a pompous but empty phrase.
“Scientific computational knowledge” really is something I improvised on the spot (which testifies to clumsiness and an inability to express myself in rich language while writing off the cuff). What I meant was to point to something that runs contrary to the rigid laws of science, like a person’s ability to float in the air and the like. In any case, for our purposes, it seems to me you made a kind of hocus-pocus jump. Take, for example, the parable of the person in the air: if I tell you that the people living in the building next to you have the ability to deviate from the laws of nature, for example to float in the air without wings, you quite rightly would not believe me until you saw it with your own eyes (after checking reliability, to make sure there isn’t some bias or illusion), because it contradicts what we know about the rigid laws of nature. Now when I ask you how, then, it is possible to deviate from the physical laws of nature through free will, you more or less tell me that here I am, experiencing it every day (as though parallel to the previous claim that here I am, having seen my neighbors floating in the air). But it is not comparable, because an intuitive experience is not equivalent to seeing with one’s eyes—not even to the “eyes of the intellect,” as you like to define it. So if there were no obstacle standing against this experience of yours, fine—it would make sense to say that most likely it reflects that very determination, because why should we give up this experience for no reason? But here, in our case, there is an obstacle, namely our knowledge that the laws of science cannot be deviated from. So what do you answer me? That they can indeed be deviated from by virtue of the fact that I experience it that way! Well done. It’s like me telling you that nature is handed over to Torah scholars, as written in our sources, and then you ask me that in reality we have not seen that this is actually so (incidentally, do prayers help?), and I get clever like you and say: it does work, because it is written in the manufacturer’s instructions, and that overrides what appears to you in reality. And that is really my question here: why did you decide in favor of your experience, such that because of it you decided to define it as knowledge equivalent to sensory perception, overriding the other side known to us in tangible, visual fashion—that there are no deviations in the laws of nature except for miracles of the Holy One, blessed be He, who rules nature and created it?
If you tell me, I won’t believe you. But if each of us sees this every day, then all of us will understand that it is part of the laws of nature. Therefore it is not true that we tangibly know that there are no deviations except miracles. If anything, we haven’t seen miracles, whereas choice is something we experience all the time.
So then it is only a matter of definition. You define intuitive experience as solid knowledge—even if it is not equivalent to sensory perception—but enough to assume that it is indeed true and not an illusion, overriding everything we know about the laws of physics in all other sensory realities. On the other hand, if we compare it to a similar well-known example, the phenomenon of vertigo in pilots, where too there are two possibilities—either the pilot’s illusion, which feels to him like a real experience exactly like your feeling of free will, or a deviation from the laws of nature—you would define that all those pilots are indeed experiencing something real, because experience overrides our accumulated knowledge of the rigid laws of physics. Lucky for you, Michi, that you’re not a pilot, because then you would decide to follow this “real” definition of breaking the laws and keep racing toward solid ground without being able to recite the blessing of thanksgiving.
If we wrote all this just to arrive at the novelty that people have different intuitions, fine. And if it has also emerged that all our insights, including “computational science,” are based on such intuitions, fine as well. And the fact that you write in a tone as though you raised some significant claim does not make it a significant claim. If you want, don’t accept your intuitions, and good luck with that.
I’ll just note that inferring from this that it is only a matter of definition really indicates a serious problem in understanding.
Actually, out of this mocking reply of yours there is one correct line: that science too ultimately boils down to intuition, and that is indeed a correct definition. But I distinguished for you between intuition that comes from empirical science after checking—that is an intuition accepted in the world, open to refutation, on which people even build airplanes and future predictions—and intuition that comes from subjective experience, which there is no way to measure externally as such. Moreover, it contradicts the intuition that also exists in us that the laws of physics do not change. Therefore this intuition is not real like the former intuition, but an illusion, like the vertigo experience of pilots. So what do we have here? A nice game by you with definitions, and in the end a nice counter-game by me with definitions too, when by good fortune a third intuition was born to me, and I also brought a fourth intuition, that of the pilots’ experience. When all is said and done, the practical bottom-line ruling is that two out of these four must be rejected as illusory fiction—and shall we say that’s that?
Tell me if I understood you correctly, Michi. In this answer of yours to Yishai about free will, the laws of physics really are broken and bent every time we choose (that is, the very fact of our choosing is in any case a breach of the closed domain of physics as far as we know it). But when you have before you, on the two sides of the divide, either to give up the experience that you feel—that you are really choosing and that this is not an illusion—or to give up what science tells us, namely that there are rigid laws of physics that humanity has no ability to bend in any way whatsoever (except for the Holy One, blessed be He, who can perform miracles if He wishes), then in this exceptional case of each and every person’s free choice, do you prefer the intuitive experience over scientific computational knowledge? (By the way, if so, then at the end of the day the world is full of billions of human beings performing miracles.)