Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Four, section one

Scientific Evidence for God (Chapter Four, section one)

The author begins by saying he has shown in part one that a person, “is not a sophisticated animal but a lofty personality with unparalleled value.” I strongly disagree with the claim he has proven any such thing, but fine. Now let’s see if he can indeed, “present evidence that there is a God,” and, “explain why so many scientists adamantly negate God’s existence.” (Incidentally, that last sentence doesn’t work. It sounds like he is trying to say that many scientists adamantly deny God’s existence, which is true enough. What he said means that the existence of scientists in itself proves God doesn’t exist. Once again, this is a nitpick, but I believe it is important to be precise.)

I try to maintain a neutral tone, but what the author says next is so monumentally stupid that it makes me want to bang my head against the wall. He says that if we assume that the universe (the Big Bang) and the beginning of life (abiogenesis) were random chance, then humans are, “accidents: impersonal statistics… A statistic should have no hurts or disappointments. …even the most die-hard atheist, feels hurt and disappointment.”

How does one respond to such a statement? He is trying to say that because the universe came into existence randomly, we are all statistics, and statistics are unfeeling. Yet we do have feelings, so we can’t be statistics and the universe can’t be random. Let’s try to respond without screaming in frustration.
1) “Statistics” is a branch of mathematics used to analyze the frequency of given phenomena. A “statistic” is not a thing, it’s a data point.
2) Regardless of whether the universe “randomly” came into existence or was created by God, we would still be “statistics.” The number of humans alive right now is a statistic, as is the number of people living in the USA, France, and Nigeria, or the number of people who own blue shirts. These are statistics regardless of how the universe or the people who own blue shirts came into existence.
3) “Statistics” don’t have feelings because, like I said, a statistic is a data point, a number arrived at by counting up the occurrences of a given phenomena or the result of applying a mathematical function to a set of data. It is not a thing, it’s an idea. This is an example of the worst kind of equivocation fallacy. That we are “statistics” in the sense that each person is an occurrence of the phenomenon, “human,” does not mean that we are statistics in the sense that we are abstract concepts without the capacity for feeling emotion.
4) Since we are not abstract concepts but rather are physical beings with a nervous system, the fact that we can feel emotions has no bearing on how the universe came into existence.

He goes on to say that,”in a self-created world, there is no order.” I’m not sure how he knows this. It is entirely plausible to say that a world with physical laws could self-organize. This is in fact what many scientists believe to be the case in our universe. Not having had the opportunity to observe both known created and known spontaneously-occurring universes, we have no way to know what to expect each to look like.

He claims that in a spontaneously-occurring universe, there should be no sense of justice, no, “objective laws or truths.” He seems to be talking about moral laws and truths, in which case I completely agree. There is no objective morality. As for a sense of justice, the universe has no sense of justice. People have a sense of justice. People are an infinitesimal fraction of the universe, a vanishingly rare bit of order in an expansive void of entropic chaos. That humans want things to be fair should not be extrapolated to the universe at large.

On a related note, the author now cites the Anthropic Principle, the notion that the universe is fine-tuned for life. First of all, the Anthropic Principle in a scientific sense merely states that it is not a coincidence that we observe the laws universe are conducive to life, becuase if they were not, we would not be here to observe them. It is only as a theological argument that this is extrapolated to mean that the universe was deliberatly fine-tuned for our existence. Second of all, the universe as a whole is most certainly not fine-tuned for our kind of life. Most of the universe is inhospitable to humans. Most of our own planet is inhospitable to humans. Seventy percent of the Earth in covered in water. Of what’s left, a sizeable fraction is frozen wasteland or arid desert.

Thirdly, the Anthropic Principle has things the wrong way around. The universe is not fine-tuned to us; we are adapted to the universe. As Douglas Adams wrote:

“. . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

(Incidentally, I thought of a similar analogy, marveling at how well water fits inside its glass, on my own before I ran across Adams’. But his is better.)

The author quotes two physicists who say that were the laws of nature any different, life would be impossible. This is true, but as I said above, we are adapted to the universe, not the other way around. Were the physical constants different, life would be different. Perhaps there would be no life at all. But the fact that the physical laws allow for our kind of life in no more surprising than the fact that the puddle fits perfectly inside its hole.

Perhaps the argument is that the fact our specific form of life does occur shows that the universe was designed to produce it. After all, there could just as well be no life. That we sentient humans exist must mean that there’s a reason for our existence, right?

Unfortunately, teleological arguments fail because we could just as easily say that there is no reason humans or sentience exist other than chance and natural selection. This is not a thought we’re comfortable with, but so what? Our discomfort has no bearing on whether it’s the truth.


The author says that Judaism has always espoused the view that the Universe was created for Man. This is no doubt meant to mesh with the Anthropic Principle and the quoted physicists. Is it really surprising, though, that the same people who thought that the Earth was the physical center of the universe also thought that the same universe was created solely for themselves? In their worldview, the universe was a flat Earth with a hard dome over it in which hung the sun, the moon, and the stars. In this little universe humans were clearly the most advanced – and therefore important - beings, so it made sense to them that everything had been created for people. Today, when we know just how vast the universe is, to claim that the universe was created just for people, or even worse, just for Jews, is the height of arrogance. If intelligent extra-terrestrials were ever to visit Earth, how could we justify our implicit claim that they are merely part of a complicated web of interactions designed to produce and maintain the human race? (Undoubtedly, were we to actually meet aliens and establish relations with them, religious dogma would be reinterpreted to mean that the universe was created for intelligent life rather than specifically humans. But I digress.)

The author now quotes the Alter of Slobodka and, oddly, James Madison, whose quote is merely an appeal to people to behave in a manner consistent with the Ten Commandments. The Alter says that people are worthy of respect because they are formed by God in His image. I think this is a disturbing line of reasoning, and that it is our biological predispositions and social conditioning are what make us value human life, but in any case this line of reasoning is at best an appeal to consequences.

The author candidly admits that he hasn’t proven God, but claims to have, “established a need for God.” Given the failure of his ridiculous attempt with the word “statistic,” the failure of the Anthropic Principle, and the rather disturbing notion that without God people have no value, I don’t think that he has done even that much.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Part Two (III)

Finally, let’s address 3, the implication that at some point in the future science will discover that God does exist (and presumably that Judaism is the One True Faith). We must also address the secondary implication that the chance that science may in the future prove the God hypothesis correct is sufficient justification for a current belief in God.

There’s no reason except for wishful thinking to think science will one day find only God could have been responsible for biodiversity. It’s not as though there are currently two popular debated scientific theories, evolution and God, and the evidence currently leans somewhat towards evolution. In such a case, a person could reasonably say that he finds the God theory more likely despite evolution being favored by many experts. He would have to justify why he finds it more likely, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable for him to think further work in biology might show the theory he favors is in fact correct.


But that is not the case. What we have instead is one scientific theory – evolution - a theory about as well established as any other scientific theory; and a tradition stretching back to antiquity that claims God

created all the animals as they are now. There are many traditions that stretch back to antiquity, among them that the Earth is flat; the Earth is the center of the universe; and that everything is made of the four elements fire, earth, wind, and water. We have abandoned those traditions because they are counter-factual. We do not hold Aristotle’s elements and the modern elemental table to be equally valid theories. We do not propose that in the future, we might discover that everything is indeed made of earth, fire, wind, and water.

The phrasing also, once again, presents evolution / God-did-it as a dichotomy. There is an assumption that one of these two must be right, and that if evolution is proven wrong, the God theory is right by default. In reality, were evolution to be proven wrong it would be replaced with another scientific theory. In the history of scientific inquiry, never once has something which was once thought to be caused by supernatural phenomena and shown by scientists to be instead caused by wholly natural phenomena reverted back to being explained by the supernatural. While this doesn’t mean that it will never happen in future, it does mean that there is no good reason to assume that it will. No reason other than wishful thinking.

There is also the fact that evolution says nothing about the existence of God. It merely makes Him unnecessary for explaining biodiversity, just as the germ theory of disease made demons unnecessary for explaining illnesses. The most likely outcome of the religion / evolution debate is that religions will adapt and fit evolution into their theologies. Many moderate religions have already done so. Most fundamentalist religions acknowledge that diseases are caused by germs, yet still maintain a belief in demons. I think it may be only a matter of time before they adapt to theologically acknowledge evolutionary theory.

To scientifically prove God exists, it is not enough to disprove theories that provide naturalistic explanations of the world. There must be actual, positive proof of God’s existence. To prove God is responsible for biodiversity, for instance, it is not sufficient to disprove the theory of evolution and then point to a book that claims God did it. Independent positive evidence of God’s involvement must be provided. Alternatively, if one could scientifically prove God exists, prove God authored the book, and prove that God tells the truth, then we could accept the book’s testimony as to how biodiversity came to be.


As for the implication that the possibility God may be proven by science in the future is a good reason to believe in Him now, well, anything is possible. It’s possible I’ll sprout wings and learn to fly. But until I do, I’m not going to jump off any tall buildings. Using this epistemology it’s impossible to determine what it’s reasonable to believe in. After all, even if right now we have no reason to believe something is true, future discoveries may show that it is. The only rational approach is to look at the evidence we have right now and determine whether, in the light of current evidence, it is reasonable to believe something is true or false. That we might be wrong is an inevitable side effect of our being unable to see the future, but that possibility is not a justification for abandoning reason and arbitrarily declaring things true because, after all, we don’t know the future and maybe someday…

To make things worse, it may actually be impossible to scientifically prove God exists – at least, the idea of God most people hold. Before a premise can be scientifically investigated, it must be rigorously defined, and it may be hard to find a less well-defined concept. Ask ten people for finely-detailed definition of God, and you’ll get ten answers. Even we’re one to come up with a generally-agreed upon definition, nearly all definitions include non-falsifiable characteristics.

For instance, the claim that god always answers prayers. If you get what you prayed for, God answered, “Yes.” If you don’t get what you prayed for, God answered, “No.” It is impossible to test whether God answers prayers by looking at the outcomes because whatever the outcome, it is assumed God heard and responded to the prayer. Therefore it is likely that God cannot ever be scientifically proven. Not because His existence is “beyond the reach of science,” with the implication that science just isn’t up to the task; but because the concept of God is structured in such a way that it is impossible to point to something as a disproof. Yet the impossibility of proving this definition of prayer false is not proof that God answers prayers. After all, the same argument could be used to “prove” that a rock answers prayers, or a chair, or absolutely anything. It’s not right or wrong, it’s not even wrong. Without a concrete definition and falsifiable attributes, we can no more scientifically investigate the question of God’s existence than we can investigate the question of whether the rock answers all prayers with “yes” or “no.”

I think that in the coming chapters the author is going to try to scientifically prove the existence of God. That should be interesting. Maybe I read too much into the title of part two and its accompanying quote and have been tearing down straw-men. I sincerely hope so, but I have a feeling that I’m going to be disappointed.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Part Two (II)

Let’s now address 2, the implication that because scientific theories change they are unreliable. This is usually contrasted with religious doctrine, which remains unchanging. We generally perceive someone who constantly changes his mind as fickle and unreliable, while the person who can always be trusted to be true to his word and not change his mind is steady and virtuous. But claims about how the world functions are not people, and this is not a question of loyalty. This is instead like the person who insists that the sky is purple because that’s what his parents told him, and when you take him outside to show him the sky is blue squeezes his eyes tightly shut.


Scientific theories are our current best guess as to how the world functions, and so are subject to change as we uncover new evidence. Religion, on the other hand, as the revealed wisdom of the Creator cannot change. For religious doctrine to change implies that God was wrong. At the very least, it implies that generations of pious, learned paragons of faith misinterpreted God’s message. This rigid adherence to tradition is not a strength. While we all crave certainty, an unwillingness to change which produces the illusion of certainty is not the same as actually having certain knowledge of how the world functions. The reluctance of religion to change in the face of scientific discovery has led to some strange confrontations. The most famous is Galileo’s run-in with the Catholic Church, and while this was mostly his own fault (he insulted the pope and was notoriously rude towards those who disagreed with him) it, and the even more severe treatment of some of his predecessors, stands as an example of the difficulty of changing doctrine and the lengths of suppression organized religion will go to in order to avoid doing so.


Judaism itself has been left with many, many examples of counter-scientific articles of faith, ranging from the age of the Earth to the creation of the Earth before the Sun. While many of these sorts of difficulties can be gotten around by using non-literal interpretations, if we take the great rabbonim of past generations to be infallible (as much of chareidi Judaism does) we’re forced to accept things like spontaneous generation and Aristotelian physics (particularly the four elements).


What's worse, religion's claim to be unchanging isn’t even true. Religion has changed, often radically, and often in response to social and scientific advances. At a certain point, the evidence is overwhelming, and religious texts are reinterpreted allegorically to fit with the newly-acknowledged truth. There are few people today who claim that the Earth is flat and has corners or that the Sun goes around the Earth. Those who do hold such views are rightly seen as the lunatic fringe.


The real difference between science and religion is that for a scientist, acknowledging mistakes is okay and, “I don’t know,” is an acceptable answer. For the religious apologist, changes to the religion have to be ret-conned so that they were part of the tradition all along, and, “God did it,” serves as a handy answer to any mystery. For the scientist, mistakes are opportunities for improvement and mysteries are exciting new areas of discovery. For the apologist, mistakes are at best a demonstration of the puniness of humans attempting to understand God’s will and mysteries are an opportunity to marvel at His greatness.

Mechanistic Metaphysics

I went to a shiur tonight where the speaker discussed differing minhagim various communities have, particularly differing nusachs for davening. He said that it is brought down in kaballah that there are twelve windows through which prayers travel into heaven, corresponding to each of the twelve shevatim. If a member of one shevet attempts to daven using the nusach of another shevet, it will try the window dedicated to his shevet and will fail to pass through because it is the wrong kind of prayer for that window. Today no one knows which shevet he’s from, and further, no one knows the proper nusach for each shevet. Therefore it is important that we each keep the nussach we inherited from our forefathers, because that is the one most likely to be the proper match for the shevet we come from.

Leaving aside that the various nussachs we have today evolved slowly, developing regional differences (and to be fair, the speaker did address the various additions that have accumulated over the years), and that it is very unlikely that these differences have any real relationship to differences that may have existed between the prayers used by the various shevatim, this represents a very mechanistic view of the spiritual world. In this view, our prayers aren’t praise and pleas listened to directly by an omniscient Being, but rather are more like an email packet sent over the internet that must be encoded in the proper language and sent to an appropriate decoder to be unpacked and rendered so that the recipient can read it. If the teffilos are in the wrong nusach, they don’t get through, much like a corrupted email lost forever in cyberspace.

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across this idea of the spiritual world functioning according to rigid rules much like the ones that govern physical reality. Perhaps the most unfair halachos are those that apply to a mamzer, a child born of an adulterous or incestuous relationship. The child, through no fault of his own, is a spiritual pariah, denied many of the spiritual rights of other Jews and forbidden to marry anyone except for another mamzer. When I complained about the inherent unfairness of such laws, one of my rabbeim compared a mamzer to a crack baby. It’s not the baby’s fault that his mother used cocaine while she was pregnant, but he is still born with physical and mental impairments. Fair doesn’t enter into the equation. That’s just the way it is.

At the time, I really liked his explanation. It changed the halachos of mamzer from the punishment of an innocent to an unfortunate side effect of his parent’s actions. But it also, like the windows for davening, implies that the spiritual world is a place with natural laws. This concept is found, subtly and not-so-subtly, through much of Judaism. It is very different from the intuitive way we think about a spiritual realm. It implies that, were we able to scientifically investigate this realm, we would be able to form the same sorts of theories we do about the physical world, and perhaps even develop technologies. How about an auto-prayer, guaranteed to deliver your tefilos to the right place every time?

More importantly, it reflects a view that the way the world is, including the spiritual world, is the way it must be. The analogy between the mamzer and the crack baby could just as easily be posed the other way. Just as it is unfair that someone suffer spiritually for his parents’ actions, it is also unfair that someone should suffer physically for his parent’s actions. A mechanistic approach absolves God of blame only if He didn’t actively choose to make the world the way it is. If He did, then He is ultimately to blame for both the mamzer and the crack baby.

This in turn would bring us to a discussion of exactly what “omnipotent” means, but I’m already too far from my original point.

According to the speaker I heard tonight, davening is not a direct communication between a supplicant and an omniscient Listener. It is instead an incantation that must be precisely fitted to the individual in order to be effective; if it is not, God can’t hear you. It is a redefinition of “prayer” from the way we typically understand it to a ritual which, if not performed in a way properly fitted to our particular tribal heritage, we get neither credit for nor benefit from, regardless of our intentions or even of our ability to know the proper way to pray.

During the question and answer session that followed the speech, not one person addressed this point.

Effortful Thinking

“But they’re so boring!’ I protested. I was talking to the professor who taught my Experimental Psychology class. We had just finished reading through samples of journal articles, and I found them entirely too dry for my taste. I could write better material, and I was all of twenty years old. These things had been written by people with Ph.D.s!

“I read journals all the time,” one of my classmates chimed in. “That’s how they are.”

I was unconvinced. It wasn’t just that the articles were boring. They were annoying. I had expected an interesting narrative about an experiment. Instead I read, in exhaustive, pedantic detail, about exactly what they were trying to determine, exactly how they conducted the experiment, the makeup of the subject sample, how the sample was chosen, how the sample was divided, how each segment of the sample was assigned various conditions, detailed descriptions of the props and equipment used, the precise details of what was done… on and on and on.

Since then I’ve read a lot of journal articles, and while I’ve found some that are well-written, for the most part they are the same sort of plodding, technical, detailed description and analysis. I’ve come to two conclusions: 1) Most scientists should have taken more writing classes in college, and 2) scientific thinking is not comfortably intuitive.

We’re used to hearing stories. People love stories so much that we’ve built huge industries around making up and presenting stories as books, movies, plays, and television. Anecdotes have a powerful effect on us, but we don’t usually analyze stories. We take away the main points and the interesting bits. If you hear a story about a boy who kicked a dog and got bitten, the take-away point is: don’t kick dogs. It’s not important how old the boy was, how old the dog was, where it happened, what breed the dog was, or what the boy had been doing before he kicked the dog.

For a scientist trying to determine under what conditions a dog is likely to bite someone who kicks him, all of those things (and many more variables) may be important. Trying to think scientifically is not natural, and more, it’s annoying. All those details to keep track of! Yet it is our best method of understanding the world. It is not enough to know that dogs may bite when kicked. By learning why they bite, in which conditions they bite, we increase our knowledge of animal behavior, knowledge which helps us to understand the world in which we live and to make better use of it.

The scientific method, critical thinking, formal logic – all of them are effortful and often counter-intuitive. These ways of thinking are not instinctive, but need to be learned. Unfortunately many people never have the opportunity to learn how to think analytically. Worse, they assume that they know how to think as well as anyone. After all, they think about things all the time! They make intelligent, rational decisions about all sorts of things.

They’re smart people, but they’re like I was that day in college. They find the fussiness of the scientific method annoying, they don’t have the training in critical thinking needed to evaluate a proposition, and they don’t know enough about logic to notice a flawed argument.

I realize this sounds elitist, and maybe it is. But it takes training to do anything well, even things we have a natural talent for. We can all run, but it takes training to run a marathon. We can all talk, but it takes training to be a polished public speaker. And we can all think, but it takes training to use effortful modes of thinking.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Part Two (I)

Part Two: Faith in Science or Faith in God?

The author includes an unattributed quote before each chapter, and I have reproduced the one that begins part two of the book in full. It reads:

“If you were an intelligent, rational person living in the twentieth century then you believed in evolution. But as science continues to probe the secrets of the universe, it becomes clearer that believing in God is the more rational option.”

Judging by part two’s title and the quote with which it starts, the author is trying to do a number of things here. In no particular order:
1. He is implying that both science and God equally require faith.
2. He is implying that science is not reliable because scientific opinion changes over time.
3. He is implying that at some point in the future science will discover that God does exist (and presumably that Judaism is the One True Faith.)
4. He is mistakenly assuming that either evolution is correct or God did it. This is a false dichotomy, as it is entirely possible that some third, as-yet-unimagined explanation for biodiversity is in fact correct. Thus, if evolution was shown to be incorrect, the answer to the question, "How did biodiversity arise?" is, "We don't know," not, "God did it."

Each of the first three points deserves a lengthy discussion which is beyond the scope of this critique. Instead I will try to (relatively) briefly show why each one is wrong.

Let’s begin with 1, the implication that both science and God require equal faith. Before we can discuss this premise, we must first define “faith.” The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines faith as:

1 a : allegiance to duty or a person : LOYALTY b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions
2 a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust
3 : something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs

Definition 1 is not relevant to our discussion. Definition 2a is not useful to us because if faith is by definition belief in God we cannot speak of faith in science. Definition 2b cannot be what is meant here by faith, both because science is the attempt to build up a system of proven rules about the way the world functions and because the book is an attempt to prove the existence of God and various precepts of Judaism. This leaves us with definition 3, “something that is believed especially with strong conviction.”

Using this definition, it is reasonable to speak of faith in science or God; that is, the strong conviction that science is the best way we have to accurately explain the world or the strong conviction that God exists.
(I would like to note that this is not necessarily an either/or, and I frame it as such only to paraphrase the author's question.)

Unfortunately, when we speak of faith we usually think of definition 2b, “firm belief in something for which there is no [or inconclusive] proof.” The way the question is worded, “Faith in Science or Faith in God?” together with our usual interpretation of the word faith misleadingly implies that it is equally reasonable to trust that science accurately explains the world and to trust that religion accurately explains the world.

Even using definition 3, we must remember that a “conviction” is not proof of accuracy. That someone firmly believes in God does not show that God exists, any more than someone’s firm belief in the truth of a scientific principle means that principle is correct. Our beliefs must be justified. A detailed discussion of epistemology is beyond the scope of this critique, but let us briefly look at how science and religion each derive their principles.

Science begins by assuming we know nothing and our speculative hypotheses are considered incorrect until proven otherwise (the null hypothesis). We then painstakingly prove each premise through experimentation, observation, induction, and inference. Proven hypotheses that collectively explain observed phenomena form theories, which are then tested for accuracy by further experimentation and observation to see if the world actually behaves in the way the theory predicts that it will. Science is done by fallible human beings who may design flawed experiments, misinterpret results, and even come up with theories that seem to be accurate but are later shown to be false. A high demand for independent verification and the prestige that comes with new discoveries, especially paradigm-changing discoveries, ensures that experiments are repeated by many people, many of whom are often trying to prove the original experimenter wrong. This verification process assures that mistakes will eventually be caught and corrected.

In short, science moves from premise to proof to conclusion, and the proofs and conclusions of any given scientist are scrutinized by others looking for mistakes and are reinterpreted or discarded in light of new evidence.

Religion knows what is true not through the careful establishment of premises, but through revealed wisdom. Religion begins with the conclusions, does not require independent corroboration of those conclusions, and marginalizes or ignores all evidence against those conclusions. After all, there can be no greater Authority on how the world functions than its omniscient Creator. If God tells us something is true, it must be so, and any evidence to the contrary must be wrong.

Religion assumes its conclusions are true and immutable because they were handed down by the ultimate Authority, God.

The question is which is more justified? One of the problems with the religious approach is that it is essentially an argument from authority – the authority (God) said it, so we assume it’s true without bothering to examine the authority’s reasoning. Yet we can reasonably argue that an omniscient God is different than a human authority. We must examine a human authority’s justification for his statement because people can make mistakes, regardless of their stature. God is infallible and all-knowing.

This argument still leaves us with a problem. How do we know that God in fact exists, is omniscient, infallible, etc., and that a given book is indeed His revealed wisdom? That the Torah makes these claims is not by itself evidence that these claims are true. The only way to conclusively prove these premises is through experimentation, observation, induction, and inference. And now we’re back to science.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Three, section four

The Global Kindergarten (Chapter Three, section four)

The author now addresses why God would have created us with the desire to do bad things. He is at this point assuming he has demonstrated the existence of free will, and says that only by having the opportunity to choose to do bad do our choices to do good become meaningful. This is a pretty standard line or argument, and is usually presented as part of a larger set of arguments that attempt to answer the Problem of Evil.

The author complicates it though with an emotional appeal by noting that little children are not allowed to make important decisions, and making decisions is a sign of adulthood. The implication is that if you’re denied the possibility of making choices (either because free will doesn’t exist or because God didn’t provide us with the option to do bad things) you’re functionally a preschooler. To which our reaction is supposed to be, “How dare you say that I’m like a child! Of course free will exists, and how kind God is to allow us to make choices!”
{emotional appeal}

The argument itself seems to make good logical sense. We can only make choices if there are options to choose between. Note though that this argument presupposes that the benefit of having free will outweighs the cost in evil acts people will commit.
If we were to grant that it is worth the cost, we then have to address why in many cases we seem to be programmed so that we are driven to commit bad acts. This goes beyond merely having the choice of good or bad.

For instance, people are predisposed to divide themselves up into little social groups and to see those outside the group as less-than-human. This predisposition has been the root cause of untold suffering. Yet it doesn’t seem that this particular tendency is necessary for free will. Wouldn’t it be sufficient if we felt neutral towards those outside our group? Then we truly could choose to be kind or cruel to them. Instead, we have to fight our nature (through socialization, education, etc.) just to see outsiders as fellow human beings.

Still, the basic premise that evil at least needs to be possible still stands, even if we can’t explain why God thought it was necessary to predispose us towards evil in some situations. This brings up another question. What is evil? Let’s define evil, in this context, as going against what God would prefer you to do. In that case, we could have free will without anyone having to suffer. God could have arranged it so that the only choices we had were whether to keep bein adom l’makom mitzvos like Shabbos and kashrus, while it would never even occur to us to steal or murder. This way free will could be maintained without the need for human suffering. That evil is necessary for free will is not a justification for the ability of one person to cause another to suffer.

That said, I concede that hypothetically speaking for us to have free will there must be options to choose from, and for us to choose to do “good” (defined as what God prefers) we must be able to choose to do “evil” (defined as not doing what God prefers). Of course, if free will is just an illusion, this is all irrelevant.

The author now quotes a rabbi who asserts that free will is what constitutes the self, and the author states that, “Just as the seat of hearing is the ears, the seat of free will is the soul.”

Firstly, the statement that free will is the self is rather strange. Surely there is more to the self than that! What about our thoughts, emotions, memories, and personality? Aren’t these what we usually mean by the self?

Secondly, why should we assume that free will is seated in the soul? Has the author forgotten his own argument from the beginning of the chapter, where he explained mechanistically how free will is made possible by the balancing of all influencing factors? If his theory is correct, there is no need to posit a metaphysical soul to explain free will, just a module in the brain that decides between options when all other influences are balanced. But then, the brain is a physical construct and therefore is itself influenced by the environment. Therefore such a brain module would itself merely be a product of influence, and such a choice could not truly be said to be free will. He may be right that we need something metaphysical, completely removed from all influences, if we are to come up with a scenario in which one could be truly said to be exercising free will. Yet this still:
1) Assumes free will is a real phenomenon, something that has not been demonstrated.
2) Redefines the soul as that thing which allows us to make uninfluenced choices in rare specific cases. This is in contrast to the traditional understanding of the soul as that which animates the body and defines the self. Showing that in a specific hypothetical case for a given hypothetical phenomenon to function there must be a metaphysical component, and then labeling that component, “the soul,” does not show that the soul as traditionally defined exists. It’s just playing with semantics. In short, an equivocation fallacy.
3) Positing a metaphysical component to make free will work doesn’t really explain how free will functions. All it does is take one thing whose functioning we don’t understand – free will – and replace it with another thing whose functioning we don’t understand – the soul. This is the fallacy of pseudo-explaining one mystery with another mystery.

The author now cites, “The Zohar (the authoritative, ancient book on mysticism),” as saying that man has two souls, a lower animalistic soul the same as that which animates all animals, and a higher soul that makes, “Homo Sapiens become human beings.”

Firstly, he might want to qualify his statement about the Zohar by adding, “Accepted by many Orthodox Jews as…” Textual scholars, many rabbonim at the time of its publication, and a good number of contemporary Orthodox Jews agree that while the contents of the Zohar may be based on extant kabalistic ideas, the book itself was most probably written by Moses De Leon, the man who claimed to have discovered it in 1270. If that is the case, the Zohar is old, but not ancient. It also probably shouldn’t be accepted as authoritative, as its claim to authority rests on its authorship by R’ Shimon bar Yochai.
{questionable historical fact}

The second issue is more of a nitpick than a problem with his point. The author is trying to say that the higher soul is what makes people different than animals, what elevates our physical bodies to become people. What he actually said is taxonomical nonsense.

From Wikipedia: “The word "human" is from the Latin humanus, the adjectival form of homo.” Thus the word “human” technically refers to the entire genus homo. Modern humans are Homo sapiens, a single species (although the only non-extinct one) within the genus homo. (If we want to be precise, all people currently living are Homo sapiens sapiens - members of the sapiens variety of the species Homo sapiens.) Thus earlier humans became Homo sapiens, not the other way around.
{incorect scientific fact}

The author ends the chapter by once again asserting that the soul is the seat of all virtues and that it must remain in control of the body, this time comparing the soul to a parent that must control their impulsive child. He says that neither the child nor the body are “bad” for desiring pleasure, but, “It is the juvenile nature to choose indulgence and pleasure.” This unsupported assertion is an emotional appeal that attempts to equate fulfilling one’s desires with a child’s insistence on eating candy for breakfast. Once again, we are supposed to react by shying away from any implication of childishness and proclaim that, of course, we have a soul and it is in firm control of our bodies. We are adults! I’m not disputing that a young child has little self control. But drawing an analogy between a child and the body to reinforce an assertion that the body is the seat of all desires and the soul is the seat of all virtues does not make it so.
{emotional appeal}