חדש באתר: NotebookLM עם כל תכני הרב מיכאל אברהם

Q&A: A Question I Find Intriguing

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Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

A Question I Find Intriguing

Question

In honor of Dr. Michael Abraham, good morning,
I know the following question is a bit unusual—but then again, you’re not exactly usual yourself, thank God..
Years ago I asked Gilad Diamond, owner of the blog “Sharp Thinking”, which encourages skeptical thinking, a simple question:
Can you imagine an empirical-public-direct scenario, one that doesn’t require dragging in statistics, graphs, surveys, and references, but rather a “one shot and done” kind of thing, in which you would become convinced of the truth of the Torah and faith?
He stammered (apparently because of the depth of the concept and the limitations of the one trying to grasp it), so I formulated a scenario for him:

I take you to the grave plot of your ancestors, and there—before your eyes—a miracle occurs: your relatives rise from the dead, identify themselves to you with all the childhood memories and secrets that only you shared, tell you what really happens after death, and confirm that everything those “annoying Haredim” told you is true and certain: the World to Come, reward and punishment, commandments, Heaven, Hell, prophecy, even Torah study as strategic combat service… (that part is for you, Michi 😉).

I asked him: Would you be convinced? Would you become religious?
And he answered—not necessarily. Maybe these are aliens with advanced technology who “took on” the appearance of my relatives.
And that’s when it clicked for me: skepticism is not a critical stance—but sometimes an immune system against self-doubt. Total immunity. An auto-epistemological disease. And I dropped him and his blog (I acted the same way toward Yaron Yadan when I discovered that on the site “Stop Here, We Think,” they thought some Haredi person had caught him in a mathematical mistake and he kept twisting and stammering and wouldn’t admit his mistake; I understood the man wasn’t serious and stopped taking an interest in him and his teachings.)
And so my question to you is divided into two parts:

A. What do you think about this scenario—could it, in your view, count as “evidence,” or at least a weighty indication in favor of the position of faith?
(That is: can one in principle reach an empirical conclusion even in the religious-faith realm—or is every attempt to offer proof doomed from the outset to endless deconstruction?)

B. If even that wouldn’t be enough—could you sketch a scenario that would?
Suppose 20 famous atheists from the podcasts and blogs you know, including you yourself (for the sake of getting internal feedback), gather in a room with neutral witnesses.
A rabbi arrives, recites a verse, and within five minutes all of you find yourselves in London (or Kyrgyzstan, or any other place agreed upon in advance), and within a day you are brought back on a regular flight to our tiny country.
The event is documented publicly, the witnesses outside the room confirm it, the media goes wild.
Would that change your position? And if not—what would?

 
 

Answer

A strange message. Not admitting a mistake is a general human tendency, and I wouldn’t dismiss anyone if I caught him at that. Beyond that, why should I care whether he admits the mistake or not? The question is whether his arguments are interesting / instructive. That’s what matters. What, are you punishing him for his bad character traits?
As for the question itself, I’m wary of questions like these, because until you’ve actually experienced such a situation, you can’t judge it. That’s why I have very little regard for all sorts of Turing-test-style thought experiments that try to determine when a computer should be considered a human being. According to Turing, LLM models have already long been human. We’re experiencing this now and understanding that they really aren’t.
But beyond all that, I don’t understand the question. If something happens that convinces me, then yes, I’ll be convinced. Why is this question interesting? Are you testing my good character traits?

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