The Need To Know

 

Suppose your stockbroker were right two-thirds of the time – twice as often as he was wrong. You'd make a profit. That's much better than you could do on your own. After all, just by guessing, by sheer luck, you could probably get it right half of the time. Then, however, you might only break even.

But even though you were already making a profit at sixty-seven percent, you might look for an adviser with a seventy-five percent success rate. And then even higher. It's not likely that you'd suspect your new advisor of “fixing” stock prices or controlling sales, or whatever it takes to pick a winner, but only that he was better educated, harder working and more adept at researching, possibly even possessed of better intuition than his predecessor, and would have a better chance of predicting what was going to happen. It doesn't take control to be able to anticipate the future, nor inside information, only skill and knowledge.

If someone had in his possession all the pertinent facts and could apply them to every conceivable situation, he would not need to control the future even if he might seem to know what was going to happen.

Rabbi Akiba said, “Everything is foreseen [by G-d] but freedom of choice is given.”ⁱ It seems to be a contradiction, but now that we know about DNA it all makes sense. For our DNA is the regulator of what we do. And the Giver of the DNA certainly understands where it will lead and what we will do. Our choices are predictable, but the foreknowledge of what we will choose does not imply control. Thus there is no contradiction between free will and foreknowledge. There is no predestination.

But every solution causes its own problems. Rabbi Akiba certainly didn't know anything about heredity, so he could not have based his view on that. I suspect that he, like all the rest of us, was aware that there was a lot more he did not know than what he did. But for him, there was no source better than the one he used – the Torah.ⁱⁱ Perhaps its pronouncements required interpretation, but their truth was not in question. It contained, after all, the words of G-d. The interpretation of those words, however, no matter how true they themselves might have been, often raised issues which required new understandings – new interpretations of the old. And so it is with heredity and with DNA.

The obvious difficulty is that the idea is based on the concept that G-d is the Creator of all beings, and it follows that He who gave the DNA controlled our future actions in doing so. And to the degree that our decisions are based on the milieu in which we live, and the people surrounding us – people whose actions also result from the DNA assigned to them – each of our actions and responses in this world created by G-d is really controlled and predictable.ⁱⁱⁱ So that makes the belief of Rabbi Akiba one that is difficult to understand. It's just as well that he was unaware of the science we have now. But if free will does not really exist, how can we justify a philosophy of reward and punishment?

Back to square one.^iv

 

Next episode: “Square One” – Another approach. But one that works only if you want it to.

i     Avot, 3:19. A section of the Jewish Talmud.

ii    The five books of Moses. The first section of the Bible.

iii    That's the nurture to go with the nature (DNA).

iv    Actually it's square zero. We're nowhere at the moment. “Square one” implies that we've started.