Q&A: Doubts in Faith
Doubts in Faith
Question
The Rabbi says on various occasions that in practice every belief and every piece of knowledge is a decision made in a state of doubt. And it is a mistake to think that faith is somehow more certain than that. All in all, we have different considerations, and we decide according to what seems most reasonable to us.
I’ll present my question this way: when I discussed this with a friend, he told me that if so, then from now on with every desire and every doubt, you already have a double doubt. Meaning, if the whole religion is nothing but deciding under uncertainty, then isn’t it logical that we remain with that assumption as a doubt, and consequently when there is another doubt on top of it, then according to the degree of the doubts the probability that it is correct goes down—which is the logic behind a double doubt and the like.
Answer
As is well known, there are two rules in the legal framework of doubts: a. In order for there to be a doubt, there must be a reason. That is, a possible side of the doubt must be argued for and justified (positive, not merely negative). Jewish law (and human thinking in general) does not recognize a skeptical doubt, like “maybe not?” or “maybe the opposite?” as a genuine side in a doubt, and there is much evidence for this (see the wonderful comments of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook in his book Ein Ayah on Sabbath 30b). This is also the law that one may flog or stone based on presumptive status at the end of tractate Kiddushin. b. A doubt must be evenly balanced. A majority is not a doubt.
Now you have to consider your question in light of these two rules: if indeed you are in a situation where there is only one possibility out of four (the view of the Rashba is that we count possibilities), then you really are in a state of double doubt (though I do not know whether one may be lenient because of a double doubt outside the realm of Jewish law—that is, even when thinking about the observance of Jewish law itself). As for your main point: first, leave desire out of this discussion (desire is not a doubt but a need; I am speaking only about possible sides of doubt), and focus on doubts. If you really do have genuine doubts (not just some possibility that can be raised; see the two rules I cited above), then you are indeed correct.
And in general, if I had not told you that faith is not certain, would it thereby have become certain? This is simply the reality—that it is not certain. So this is not an objection to me. Our whole lives are conducted according to principles that are not certain, but if they seem reasonable to us, we act on them. Faith is no exception.
Discussion on Answer
Indeed, your decisions should be made in accordance with the degree of doubt you have. This is individual for each person. If you have a real doubt, I assume you would not sacrifice your life. But remember that people do sacrifice their lives for values that are less than certain (like a soldier in the army), or for pleasures (like a mountain climber). So when we speak about certainty, we mean certainty in the ordinary human sense, not the mysticism that sometimes comes up in discussions of faith. Each person has to make his decisions according to his values and according to the degree of his faith.
The question is how and why this decision is given the status of certainty to the point that we do not consider any doubt except in accordance with that decision. After all, if there really is a certain doubt, it would seem reasonable that any decision should obligate only up to a certain level of doubt. And where this matters, for example in a case of saving a life, or even regarding something else that we know with certainty [or with a definite decision], say regarding morality and the like, the rule should be that certainty overrides doubt—or at least that we should say that the doubt here is evenly balanced, and there is no reason one should override the other.