A question following a podcast you participated in (The Hedgehog and the Fox)
Hello Rabbi,
I heard you on the aforementioned podcast recently and I wanted to ask a question that is probably asked a lot and is very annoying to you.
From what I understand, you are claiming that belief in God is the logical (philosophically?) necessary thing.
10-15 years ago, I was very preoccupied with this issue, and over time I developed a belief (perhaps ardent) that these are issues that cannot be proven/disproved, not in the rigorous sense of the word (the only reference I have is proofs in mathematics, by the way, your son's summaries are excellent and useful).
This applies both to arguments from tradition and, even more so, to more general arguments ("it is impossible that this is so")
So if you could please direct me to books/articles that contain such proof, I would be very grateful.
Before I ask for proof of God's existence, it is important for me to define what I even mean by God:
What is not God? When I started asking such questions, I was told, "Look at this whole complex world, do you think it created itself?" (The clock argument) This is a meaningless argument to me (beyond its logical fallacies), as if I were claiming that without God everything is understandable.
I am convinced that there are things that cannot be understood, and that it is not a function of time, knowledge, or IQ.
So a claim that ultimately shows me that I don't know how to explain something misses the point.
What is God to me? It's not well defined, but to me God is someone and not something, and perhaps God is something that gives moral validation to something, not my or your validation but an inherent validation of existence.
thanks,
By the way, I'm adding another argument here that I find problematic, but this email is already long.
I recently heard a claim that "there is no 100% proof" but there are many good "90%" arguments and putting them together brings us almost to the brink of confessions (whatever that means).
I encountered well-defined (abstract) objects in a fairly simple way, and yet calculating their distribution was difficult to very difficult. Therefore, when a person of average (and not-so-average) intelligence claims things that involve "infinity," "the cause of causes," and in fact even the infinity of parameters that surround us on a daily basis – because it indicates X 90% of the time, it sounds like meaningless gibberish to me.
If brilliant mathematicians describe stock market trading as a random walk (it's true that a thing or two can be said about this object as well), it doesn't sit well with me that an average synagogue can define a distribution of an event that includes the stock market, the planet on which the stock market is located, and everything in between.
(The last line is not accurate, the difficulty in analysis does not always increase as the event includes more details, this is just a way of trying to explain how presumptuous it is in my opinion to give a probability to all sorts of exotic possibilities)
Additionally, from my brief experience with mathematical proofs, if it's almost true, and it feels true, and for every plausible scenario I can think of it's true – then it's not true in a significant portion of cases.
So I'm quite skeptical about the "percentage approach."
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