Spinoza: A Superb Intellect Sacrificed on the Altar of Human Arrogance

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October 30, 2022

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Despite his brilliance, Spinoza's philosophy isn't quite as rational as it appears.

The following is an excerpt from the book Strauss, Spinoza & Sinai.

From a Jewish perspective, Spinoza's main legacy is his attack on Judaism from a particular angle – the literary consistency of the Bible. Of course, he also attacked the idea of Personal Providence, of the possibility of miracles, of the possibility of God having a choice whether to create the world or not – in short, a sophisticated form of pantheism. But pantheism was neither a new idea nor did it become a moving force in the world at any stage after Spinoza revived it. We wouldn't have to trouble ourselves much with that here, except for the fact that Spinoza himself builds his whole edifice on his ideas of what God is.

This is important because it would be tempting to allow our response to be dictated by Spinoza's attack on Judaism – i.e., to show why what ultimately became the Higher Critical theory (and in today's form, the Documentary Hypothesis) does not measure up to what Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch would call a scientific look at the text.1

But this is a mistake. No two sets of beliefs or propositions should be evaluated against each other by some subset of the total evidence. Rather, we must look at the total paradigm – and the evidence for or against it – to understand the value of any particular proposition.

Now, of course, Spinoza didn't address many of the issues that we today regard as evidentiary support for Judaism.2 So that leaves us with two choices: we can say that Spinoza made a very narrow claim and reject it, or we can surmise what Spinoza might have said were he to address these issues.

The latter, however, isn't even possible because the various types of support Judaism brings are in a different category than the narrow epistemological framework that Spinoza used. What I mean by this is that Spinoza filtered his information through a specific paradigm that begins with a few unproven axioms and allowed him only to see certain things and those things only in a certain way.

Stay with me, and I will show you what I mean.

The Definition of a Proof

Strauss makes a fatal mistake in dividing the world into proven and unproven. He then accepts that belief is not a part of the provable. (In this, he was allowing Spinoza to frame the discussion.)

If we want to prove Judaism – and specifically prove Judaism against Spinoza's claims – we have to first define what we mean by a proof. At what Rabbi Hirsch's work on the Torah, the Malbim, the Ketav Ve-Ha-Kabbalah, and Kavanat Ha-Mikra (Rabbi Wolf Heidenham) were all great works showing that the approach of the Torah-true commentaries was the most accurate way of learning the text. For example, the Malbim introduces the book of Leviticus with Ayelet Ha-Shachar, 613 principles of grammar, which all have to be applied to understand the true meaning of the text. The Higher Critical theorists were relatively poor in this approach, earning Rav Hirsch's critique of being unscientific.

I prefer "support" rather than "proofs," even though, for convenience, I use the word "proofs" many times in this essay.

At what point is it reasonable to stop proving and to begin believing? Different areas of human activity require different proofs. The paleontologist may use layers in a mound, or chemicals or context, or style to date something; the lawyer may use reported conversations, fingerprints, and forensics. The clinical diagnostician may be looking for tell-tale symptoms or indications, while the philosopher may get into conversations that show Hume's critique of Descartes and Kant's response to Hume.

Presumably, science is a part of the provable. But science, even physics (that most scientific of sciences), certainly doesn't work by dividing the world into proven and unproven.3 In fact, we cannot prove anything at the level that would resolve the "Strauss-Spinoza debate." In science, a theory is accepted if it is the best-known explanation for a group of phenomena amongst competing explanations. It is never proven conclusively. According to Sir Karl Popper, the most we can say is that it has not been disproven yet.4

Science ought to be able to make a greater claim on truth than philosophers like Spinoza. After all, our smartphones, airplanes, and skyscrapers really work. But in the main, science is quite humble, and at most, it makes a claim for approximating the truth. (This is in stark contrast to Spinoza's very bold claims.)

What about mathematics, you say? Only a little better. Mathematicians agree to a remarkable degree on whether a statement is true or false, but they cannot agree on what exactly the statement is about. Is it a discovery or an invention? Are numbers real or figments of our imaginations? "Proofs have core assumptions on which everything else hinges – and many of the philosophically fraught questions about mathematical truth and reality are actually about this starting point. Which raises the question: Where do these foundational objects and ideas come from?"5 Kurt Gödel showed that the axioms of mathematics cannot all be proven or disproven. Nor, he showed, can mathematics even prove its own consistency. Not even in principle.

For over a hundred years, the two greatest scientific theories have been Quantum Physics and the Theory of Relativity. One, Quantum Physics, describes the micro world, and the other, Relativity, describes the world larger than an atom. For a half a century now, tens of thousands of scientists have attempted to combine these theories, mainly by trying to quantize gravity. The trouble is that the theories contradict each other in numerous ways.6 They cannot both be true, and at least one of them will have to be modified or overthrown. And yet, at least for now, the scientific community has no problem accepting them both and using them to prove new things as well as create practical inventions.

The scientist knows what the layman often does not – that a theory only approximates the truth and that the progress of science should be measured by successively closer approximations, not by truth per se.

Moreover, the scientist uses axioms which in and of themselves are not provable to prove his theories. Simplicity, unity, and beauty are all such axioms. For example, science believes there is a relationship between truth and simplicity – the more simple the theory, the truer it is. There is no rational reason why the world should be explained according to a simpler rather than more complicated formula. Ironically, in fact, the Church argued with Copernicus that the fact that his theory was simpler (and more elegant) was no indication that it was truer.7 But Copernicus was right: science believes the simpler, the truer. And this unproven axiom has served it well.

Nothing, it seems, can be wholly proven from a starting point of nothing at all.

I have spent time on this because it is important to understand what we can and cannot say about anything – even the things we are most likely to feel are factual.8

Proving Judaism – Attacking Spinoza

With all of this, we see the folly of setting the bar for proving the truth of Judaism so impossibly high that it could never be proven. In fact, we see that certain standards are impossible for any area of knowledge, including physics and mathematics. This does not mean that anything goes. It does mean that we be as scientific as we can when evaluating Judaism – accepting it as being true if it turns out to be the best possible explanation among competing explanations.

It does mean that we be as scientific as we can when evaluating Judaism – accepting it as being true if it turns out to be the best possible explanation among competing explanations.

This is an important point, and it means that any claim against Judaism must show that it has a better claim.

If a Creationist wants to debunk evolution, for example, it is not enough to point out its shortcomings. He has to show that his alternative theory is better. So, too, if Spinoza wishes to critique Judaism or the Bible, we have to evaluate what he is offering as an alternative.

It would be a mistake to consider the Higher Critical Theory, as it later became known, as this alternative. What we need to look at is Spinoza's entire philosophy, just as Judaism, in turn, claims to be verified based on the entire sweep of its claims. This is particularly true of Spinoza. For since his is indeed a brilliant and tightly-knit philosophy, the removal of any one of his vital pillars will collapse the entire edifice.

And so our question is: Is Spinoza's overall philosophy a more compelling theory of the world than Judaism? That is how science works, and that is how philosophy ought to work.

In fact, Spinoza failed to offer a more coherent moral vision than the one he wished to replace.

Spinoza’s Simplified Ethics and Sweeping Determinism

Spinoza's bottom line is that our happiness and well-being lie in living a life of reason and not a life enslaved to passions and materialism. To get to this grand conclusion – which any Torah-educated ten-year-old can tell you – one has to wade through the metaphysics of the first two sections of his Ethics. Nor does Spinoza give a comprehensive growth plan to achieve his vision. The Mesillat Yesharim (Path of the Righteous),9 or any other classic Mussar (ethical training) book, is streets ahead of this thinker who becomes strangely impoverished regarding actual living.

For Spinoza, nothing stands outside of Nature, not even the human mind. And these laws of Nature are always the same. Want to explain love or anger, hate or jealousy? How about a mathematical figure or formula?

"I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies." Want to know why we are motivated to grow? This is simply the law that "each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being."

And so man does not have free will, not in his choices and not even in his feelings. (Well, actually, we find out, according to Spinoza, that not even God has free will.10) For nothing stands outside of deterministic Nature, not even the human mind. This makes Spinoza a radical determinist. The human being is a part of Nature, existing within the same causal nexuses as other beings. Spinoza goes through each emotion – joy, sadness, hate, hope, fear, etc. – and shows how each one is simply a function of this or that external thing. Spinoza's human is not a real human. He is a bundle of thoughts and feelings caused by the passage towards or away from this or that. We seek joy and avoid sadness by pursuing things that are totally beyond our control. The more we pursue these things, the less free we become.

Spinoza's human is not a real human. He is a bundle of thoughts and feelings caused by the passage towards or away from this or that.

This has serious ethical implications. Spinoza's determinism extends to all aspects of our essential humanity: our thoughts, emotions, and action. "In the Mind, there is no absolute, or free, will, but the Mind is determined to will this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity" (II p. 48). How on earth is there to be any moral accountability in such a system?

Spinoza was very clever in his proposals of the Nature of man – the mind-body issue, the Nature of our minds, and our feelings. But all of this does not – indeed cannot – translate into a proper ethics because it all lands with a thud on the altar of determinism. All we can choose is our attitude to what happens to our minds, souls, and every other part of ourselves. We cannot control our passions, for they are not really ours; all we can do is learn how to replace the passions that are caused by things outside of ourselves with those that come from our own Nature. But those, too, are determined!

And then, as if by magic, we become active, autonomous beings in the very tiny window Spinoza leaves for man to operate. No one can explain how Spinoza jumps from determinism to this. To make sure we don't think we are now free, Spinoza stresses that we will now be ruled, not by our own choices, but by our own Nature, which is necessarily determined. At least, he feels, we won't be determined by our senses and imagination, which in turn is led by the objects around us. Do this, and you will magically become a rational human being.

To make sure we don't think we are now free, Spinoza stresses that we will now be ruled, not by our own choices, but by our own Nature, which is necessarily determined.

I call this "making the patient comfortable." Having doomed man to the terminal disease of determinism, Spinoza purports to show how palliative care can at least make our tragic time on earth more manageable.

Let's see the masses or even the elites lining up for such a proposal. They never did, and they never will.

Spinoza produces so much puffed-up air to tell us that we are helpless except with regard to our attitude to life. And that is why you will never find a Spinozean in real life, someone conducting his life according to Spinoza's truncated vision of man.

The Arrogance of One Man

Spinoza was an uber-rationalist, leaving even Descartes in the dust. Spinoza's arrogance led him to state that we could know all of Nature and its innermost secrets with the degree of depth and certainty that Descartes never dared to claim. This is doubly daring when we realize that Spinoza thought that adequate knowledge of any object and of Nature as a whole involves a thorough knowledge of God and of how things related to God and his attributes. No problem for Spinoza: We can know God perfectly and adequately just by lying on our beds and thinking about Him.

Imprisoning God

Even God does not escape Spinoza's determinism. His view is that the world had to be produced by God. God had no choice. It is impossible that God should exist but not the world.11 So much of what Spinoza says about God and man is dependent on this point that it is impossible to sustain his philosophy once this pillar is removed.

Well, that could be fitted into 2,000 years of science until Quantum Physics came along. Quantum Physics showed that the world was intrinsically only probabilistic rather than deterministic. Spinoza was simply wrong on this, as was every philosopher-scientist until the 20th century.

Having decided what God is, Spinoza concludes that such a God could not have produced the Torah. Ipso facto, it must have been man-made. This is a vital point. The Higher Critical Theory is not the starting point of Spinoza's approach to Torah. The end result is the explanation that fills in the gap left by a God that no Jew believes in.12 It is the backup plan of Pantheism.13

The False Logic of the Spinozeans

Spinoza relished the fact that he was being so logical.

Let's take an example.

Spinoza claimed that God does not perform miracles since there are no, and cannot be, departures whatsoever from the necessary course of Nature. For God to perform a miracle would be for God or Nature to act against itself, which, according to Spinoza, is absurd. The belief in miracles is due only to ignorance of the true causes of phenomena.

Spinozeans translate this into the following:

A = Judaism believes in miracles.
B = But God cannot do miracles, so this is an irrational belief.
C = Therefore Judaism must be false.

God created the world. But if He were to create the world, there are no possible alternatives to the actual world we see. Everything is absolutely and necessarily determined.

But this is all really nonsense because:

A = The faith of Judaism is not dependent on miracles. It is dependent on the Sinai revelation.14
B = This revelation provides an empirical base to Judaism, not a rational one. There are things far less rational that are nevertheless empirically verified. Quantum Physics doesn't make sense to the average person, or to most scientists for that matter. It says weird things that no sane person can make sense of. Yet, we believe it to be true because it has thus far been empirically verified. Spinoza would be totally out of his depth when faced with an argument of this sort.
C = I will show below that, therefore, the faith of Judaism is a rational belief based on an empirical base.15 This is an entirely different order of argument to the one Spinoza makes.

Let me unpack this a little.

Truth and Faith

We mistake faith for a religious exercise. We believe in God or something else. But this is not true. Faith is a basic tool of everyday life. Let's say I am walking down the street and hear footsteps behind me. Do I keep on walking? Do I cross to the other side of the street? Do I run and scream for help? To react, I must believe something about the Nature and intent of the person behind me, even though I haven't a clue who that person is. We are forced to do this many times a day. To do this, we make hundreds of beliefs or assumptions about the world, especially about the people around us. We assess COVID risks or risks of flying or all kinds of things we are not expert in. We make assumptions without which we would not be able to function at all.

Science does that, too, for there is no escape from this. And it is not just the axioms of science. Thomas Kuhn of MIT wondered why science seems to happen in revolutions of a century or more apart (Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Quantum, & Relativity) with only puzzles solved in between. Kuhn showed that this is because scientists ordinarily operate within a paradigm that determines what kind of questions they will ask and which ones they will consider as either illegitimate or naive. Most scientists would not even realize that they were so restrained. Then, along comes a youngish scientist, not fully trained to think in the paradigm, who asks those illegitimate questions, leading to a scientific revolution.16 And what happens to the older scientists after a new theory is introduced? Max Borne stated that they simply have to die out.17

Even a simple thing – so seemingly objective – as collecting data requires the filter of a belief-set. In any situation, scientists could never afford to go out and simply collect raw data at random. There would be an infinite amount of data for each hypothesis they want to collect. The very data they collect is determined by assumptions, axioms, and views of the world.

Do you believe? Of course you do. If you are alive and human, you have no other way of negotiating this world.

Evaluating Beliefs

Does this all mean that we are left with saying, Strauss-like, "Well, you can't prove Judaism; ultimately, it is a question of faith"? And why should I, based on a faith claim alone, dedicate my life to being an observant Jew?

But this is a mistaken question, for we cannot escape believing in something. The atheist has as many axiomatic beliefs as the person who believes in God. He, too, is a believer. The question is: If we are to be good scientists, which belief system is most compelling; which best explains the world?

Generally, when we are left to our own devices to figure things out, we do very poorly. Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow is full of hundreds of examples of how we consistently make the wrong assumptions about situations. He shows how even trained statisticians make lots of beginner's mistakes in their own professional field.

Spinoza Vs. Judaism: Comparing Testability

Spinoza was unscientific in the sense that his views are not testable. On the other hand, Judaism makes many specific claims about the world, and I am open to answering challenges about Judaism. But I do feel there is an eligibility bar that has to be crossed, and, so far, I haven't for the life of me been able to see how Spinoza crosses that bar.

When I say I believe in God, for example, I am saying that I believe that God is the best explanation for the world as I see it, given the atheistic alternative.18 When I say that I believe in the Torah, I am expanding that belief to say that I believe that God gave the Torah to the Jews and that alternative claims are far weaker.

The claim of Judaism was never – can never be – that we don't need to believe. According to Judaism's own narrative, the world was so constructed that there would always be a place to say, "You don't have to say that. Instead, you could say . . ." But the claim of Judaism is the most potent claim that I know. The leap of faith is smallest in the case of Judaism. Our belief is a natural extension of specific rational and empirical claims. In this, it is qualitatively different from the claims of other religions or systems or Spinoza, for that matter. You have to take a bigger leap of faith to believe in Islam, Christianity, or Spinoza.

Multiple Reinforcing Claims

There are beliefs and beliefs. The claim of National Revelation is not in the same category as Mohammed going into a cave and coming out with a new religion. Moreover, Judaism has multiple reinforcing verification claims for what it says.

Let me illustrate this with an example from science.

The Big Bang Theory states that everything in the universe was accelerating away from each other, which implies that it had a beginning, reversing two thousand years of scientific orthodoxy.19 When it was first discovered in the 1920s, not every scientist accepted the theory. The resistance went beyond mere scientific skepticism, prompting America's leading astronomer, Robert Jastrow, to pen "God of the Astronomers," suggesting that scientists' resistance to the new theories had to do with its theological implications. But today, no scientist denies the theory of the Big Bang. This is because there are now several separate proofs for this theory.20 It was the cumulative proofs that did the trick.

We can apply this principle to Judaism as well. Take the idea of the Jewish people. It defies normal historical rules in many different ways. These include the longevity of our survival under horrendous conditions, the uniqueness of antisemitism, the staggering contribution of the Jewish nation to humankind, and the prophecies that make specific predictions.

Here are four claims, some of which are stronger than others. But cumulatively, they make for a strong general claim that we are not subject to the normal rules of history. These claims, in turn, are a part of the larger set of verifications of the Torah – such as the National Revelation, the indications that Moses would not have written the Torah, etc.

Truth as Vibrancy

Ways of living come and go. They may take over half the world for a period before fading – Communism, National Socialism, Confucianism – but fade they do. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans are relegated to academic departments. The British Empire, the largest in history, is down to its original island self.

America has been the leading civilization of the world in recent times. America's belief system may have been self-evident to its founders, but it sure is not to a large part of today's American citizens. The average American cannot tell you the various strands of thought that his belief system is based on. He cannot tell you how to balance the tension between equality and freedom, and he doesn't know what you mean by Natural Law. He surely would be at sea trying to explain what parts of the American ethos come from Utilitarianism, which from the harm principle,21 and which from natural or self-evident laws.22 He has probably not heard of the Social Contract Theory of the State.23 Moreover, increasingly, Americans do not agree with their neighbors about what these values should be.

Here was a society that showed incredible vibrancy for around three hundred years and now appears to be in decline. As such, it follows the pattern of all previous civilizations: rise, peak, and decline.24 America's three centuries will be considered pretty short for a civilization. Both National Socialism (i.e., Fascism) and Communism were discredited because they didn't last. There may be small pockets around the world that propose a return to these models, but they won't last.

No one today proposes that people live as Egyptians or Spartans, or Mongols. And why is that important? Because if we are to be good scientists, we judge the truth of a theory in part because of its vibrancy. We have made lots of practical discoveries through Quantum Physics and Relativity. And they keep on coming. This isn't a guarantee that they are correct. Newton is not, and we made a whole lot of progress using Newtonian physics.

But it means that they must approximate the truth to some degree. Well, Judaism has been vibrant for almost four thousand years now.25 There has always been a strong core of Jews who have been truly energized by living Torah-true lives under an astonishing range of differing circumstances: war and peace, poverty and wealth, antisemitism and tolerance. It may be that we can say that Spinoza lives on in the form of the Documentary Hypothesis. But to claim that survival in the stuffy corridors of academia whose impact on themselves – let alone the broader world – is negligible is hardly a claim for vibrancy.

In Conclusion

Strauss claimed one couldn't prove Judaism, and therefore it is a belief not subject to Spinoza's true-false paradigm. I have shown how this critique of Spinoza is far stronger than Strauss imagined – that Spinoza had a fundamentally flawed view of what could and could not be understood that led him to absurd conclusions about the Nature of God and man. In addition, Spinoza's alternative, his Ethics, is a singularly unsuccessful match with the human condition and hence attracted no active adherents.

It is true that Judaism, at some point, demands a leap of faith. Had God created a system that could be proved conclusively, there would not be free will.

However, there are beliefs, and there are beliefs. There are ways of clarifying how worthwhile a belief is – how likely it is to be true and how worthy it is for our commitment. Judged by these standards, Judaism is not just another belief, and it is not just somewhat better than the alternatives. Subject to a rigorous scientific approach, Judaism stands alone as making a claim on our fealty.

This is my God. And this is His Torah.

The original version of this essay was published in Strauss, Spinoza & Sinai.

Related Spinoza Articles:

  1. Rav Hirsch’s work on Chumash, the Malbim, the Ketav Ve-Ha-Kabbalah, and Kavanat Ha-Mikra (Rabbi Wolf Heidenham) were all great works showing that the approach of the Torah-true commentaries was the most accurate way of learning the text. For example, the Malbim introduces the book of Leviticus with Ayelet Ha-Shachar, 613 principles of grammar, which all have to be applied to understand the true meaning of the text. The Higher Critical theorists were relatively poor in this approach, earning Rav Hirsch’s critique of being unscientific.
  2. I prefer “support” rather than “proofs,” even though, for convenience, I use the word “proofs” many times in this essay.
  3. More recently, there have been a number of theories, such as String Theory, which some scientists have said are not provable even in principle. But, their reaction to this is that hence these theories do not really constitute science.
  4. Sir Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies.
  5. Kelsey Houston-Edward in Scientific American, September 1, 2019.
  6. To mention some of the differences: Quantum says any specific reality is never certain; Relativity denies this. Relativity says time can expand and contract and change according to the perspective of the observer and what is happening to him. Quantum has a much more fixed notion of time. Relativity does not allow an object to move faster than the speed of light. Quantum allows for entanglement and wormholes defying this.
  7. Copernicus had proposed a heliocentric system of planetary motion in contrast to the Church-accepted doctrine of Ptolemy’s ingenious and accurate but very complicated system of circles and sub-circles, with different radii, tilts, and different amounts and directions of eccentricity.
  8. Were I a philosopher, I might have taken a different route and plunged into the thorny arena of epistemology (the philosophy of what we can know) with its Kant,Hume, and Berkeley. But, he who enters this arena will never come out again, and so I have preferred to use science as yardstick instead.
  9. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (1707–1746), also known by the acronym Ramchal, wrote this work, which is one of the most studied works on character development.
  10. See below, under “Spinoza Tries to Imprison God.”
  11. It is possible that Spinoza would admit that nothing outside of God forced God to create the world. But if He were to create the world, there are no possible alternatives to the actual world we see. Everything is absolutely and necessarily determined.
  12. By this I mean that the definition of God as defined by Spinoza is what we mean when we use the term God.
  13. The fact that the world of academia doesn’t stress this point tells me that they are immersed in a paradigm that carefully filters information only from within the paradigm. They are proof of Spinoza’s determinism – unthinking human beings. Unfortunately for them, the rest of mankind is proof that they are not representative of the human species.
  14. Maimonides, Yesodei Ha-Torah 8:1, writes: “The Jewish people did not believe in our teacher Moses because of the signs that he did, for one whose belief is dependent on signs always has a doubt in his heart.” Hence Maimonides (ibid.), Nachmanides (Negative Laws that Maimonides left out no. 2), Rabbi Joseph Albo (Sefer Ha-Ikkarim) and other Rishonim all say that the verification of the Torah was the Sinai revelation. Maimonides further writes that all the miracles that happened were necessitated by the needs of the Jewish people at the time.
  15. By contrast, Spinozism is a rational system based on made-up logical premises with no empirical support.
  16. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn stated that the questions and the new solution were due to the accumulation of anomalies in the current theory over time.
  17. Borne was one of the founders of Quantum Physics. His statement preceded Kuhn’s theory by over six decades.
  18. Of course, beyond believing, I actually want a relationship with God – I want to express my faith as faithfulness.
  19. The Big Bang was discovered by Georges Lemaitre in 1927 and confirmed by Edwin Hubble in 1929 by observing that objects in the cosmic sky were on the red shift of the color bar, which meant that they were not only moving away from us but accelerating away. (The red shift observation implies that waves were being stretched out, a reflection of their acceleration.) The previous theory, that the universe had always existed – the static universe theory – was originally proposed by Aristotle. In his Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides brings four separate proofs against the static universe theory.
  20. The Big Bang explains the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation (discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1964), and large-scale structure. The theory was further proven by the satellites COBE and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, whose results were released in 2003. In addition, the Big Bang model predicts the concentration of helium-4, helium-3, deuterium, and lithium-7 in the universe. In 2011, astronomers found two clouds of gas containing no elements heavier than hydrogen and deuterium, making it likely that they formed in the first few minutes after the Big Bang. The age of the universe as estimated from the Hubble expansion and the CMB is now in good agreement with other estimates using the ages of the oldest stars, both as measured by applying the theory of stellar evolution to globular clusters and through radiometric dating of individual Population II stars. The prediction that the CMB temperature was higher in the past has been experimentally supported by observations of very low temperature absorption lines in gas clouds at high redshift. The theory suggested the existence of both dark matter and dark energy, both of which, in turn, solve numerous problems.
  21. This is a modification of Kant’s principle: Do everything in such a way that it can become a universal principle.
  22. Freedom and equality mainly, which were so non-self-evident that it took until the eighteenth century for the French philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot to discover them.
  23. As proposed in different forms by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
  24. This understanding was made famous by Arnold J. Toynbee in his A Study of History. However, the Maharal discusses this in several places several centuries prior.
  25. Abraham was born 1810 year BCE. That is 3830 years ago as of 2020

Image source, smudgyguide.net

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