Q&A: How Do We Know Whether the Holy One, Blessed Be He, Intervened
How Do We Know Whether the Holy One, Blessed Be He, Intervened
Question
Hello. I’ll jump straight to an example for the question; I think that will make it clearest.
The Jewish people return to their land. I have two ways to interpret this. 1 — a natural explanation. Statistically the odds are slim, but this is one people out of who knows how many, so maybe this was bound to happen. 2 — the Holy One, Blessed Be He, intervened in the world. And with the second option, the likelihood that this happened follows from my basic assumption: what are the chances that the Holy One, Blessed Be He, would intervene in the world? If I don’t think He exists / intervenes at all, I’ll go with the more reasonable explanation, which is the first. If I think He does intervene, I’ll go with the second way of explaining it (because it makes more sense to explain it that way).
What happens if I assume that He intervened openly in the past, and today either He intervenes secretly or not at all? I have no idea. But I don’t have to assume that there are no gaps in nature and that there is no intervention by Him in any form. I’ll examine each case, or a cluster of related cases together, and I’ll see what their probability is versus the probability, as I assess it, that He might intervene in nature.
Why, in your view (if I understood correctly), is it more reasonable to say that there are no gaps in nature and that He does not intervene? Do you accept this statistical framework, and you just think the probability of divine intervention is so low that you would need conclusive proof?
Thank you very much!
Answer
Obviously every person discusses the issue according to his own basic assumptions. So of course you form a position and assign weight to each argument according to your outlook.
I wrote not long ago that I do not rule out sporadic interventions, but I do not see evidence in any situation for such intervention. I have no way of knowing, and nobody else does either.
Discussion on Answer
No. I explained my position and went into it at length elsewhere, which you can find here.
I know that Rabbi Michi thinks differently than I do. Still, I’ll state my view:
The question is why He stopped / reduced His intervention. There seem to be two possible approaches:
A. He thinks that now we’ve matured and we can manage on our own (if I understood correctly, this is Rabbi Michi’s view).
B. Our world investigates more, and unlike in the past, open intervention would cancel free choice. (In the past, every nation was telling stories about its sorcerers and miracle-workers anyway, so His intervention did not interfere with free choice.)
According to option B, clearly there is no reason He should not intervene behind the scenes, in a way that has natural explanations.
According to option A, if there is a need in which we cannot manage on our own, then He indeed should intervene. It is certainly reasonable that the ingathering of the exiles to the Land of Israel (including all the obstacles along the way, of every kind) was an event that we could not have brought about on our own.
That is, of course, begging the question. If you assume that the ingathering of the exiles could not have happened naturally, then obviously the conclusion is that it was an act of Heaven.
According to your view, no case whatsoever would be sufficient evidence to say that involvement is more likely than non-involvement?
I understand that if the assumption were that the Holy One, Blessed Be He, does not exist or never intervened in nature.
But if you assume that He exists, and that He once intervened in nature, and there is a cluster of unusual cases or one especially unusual case, wouldn’t it make sense to say that here there was involvement? You wouldn’t count that as evidence? (For someone who holds that He exists and intervened in the past.)