Q&A: Is Judaism Falsifiable?
Is Judaism Falsifiable?
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask you whether, in your opinion, Judaism is a belief system that can be falsified.
If so, then how could it be falsified? Jewish thought always resists ideas that seemingly contradict Judaism, and then when it has no choice it adopts them and says they do not contradict Judaism. For example: evolution, the age of the universe, and now I see the same trend with respect to biblical criticism (which is actually a much stronger refutation of Judaism, but somehow I feel that we’ll manage even if biblical criticism is proven correct). Belief in God is also something that cannot be falsified. So where could falsification happen?
And if it is not falsifiable, then what exactly are we saying here? I always liked Maimonides, who says that if it were proven that the world is eternal, religion would collapse. That gives the feeling that at least we have a position on something.
And thank you very much for this site—I was really happy when I discovered it; it helps me so much.
Answer
Hello Yossi.
No. If faith were a theory that could be falsified, it could be tested with scientific tools. In my book God Plays with Dice, I pointed out that there are areas in which the Popperian criterion for scientific status is not useful (for example in psychology, and likewise in other non-scientific fields). That criterion defines what a scientific theory is, but not what a correct theory is. There are theses that are not accessible to scientific tools, and then the way to form a position about them is common sense or intuition. Insisting on falsifiability narrows our fields of inquiry to only a very small range. By the way, as David Hume already showed, even science itself contains quite a few principles that cannot be falsified (the principle of causality, for example).
In my notebooks, I tried to show how the question of faith can be handled in a systematic and rational philosophical way, even though scientific and empirical tools do not apply to it. I dealt there quite a bit with your question, both in the first notebook and in the third.
When you discuss “Judaism,” you need to define what it is. Biblical criticism attacks certain principles that were accepted in the tradition, but one can argue that they are not necessary. The same is true regarding evolution. By the way, Maimonides does not say that if it were proven that the world is eternal, religion would collapse. He says exactly the opposite: that if this were proven, he would interpret the verses in Genesis creatively and not get upset about it.
If we were to reach the conclusion that there is no God, or that He did not give the Torah, then it seems to me that “Judaism” would have collapsed. But if we discover that more secondary principles fall away, there is no reason not to give them up. The fact that people in some previous generation thought something, and it has now been discovered to be incorrect, should not obligate the Holy One, blessed be He, and/or us. For example, people once thought that the world was flat, and that is also how it appears in the Talmud. So when it was discovered that the earth is round, did “Judaism” collapse? No. The sages incorporated their insights into Judaism, and once it became clear that those insights were incorrect, they can be discarded.
The price is that when we examine our tradition, it is very important to distinguish between what is essential and binding and the additions that can be given up. This is one of the main projects I have taken upon myself on this site and in general. In addition, when one discovers a scientific or other finding that contradicts an accepted belief, one need not necessarily reject it. If it is persuasive, one must not give up common sense. On the contrary, one should reject the secondary detail in the belief, because it has turned out to be incorrect. In my latest post I also addressed these matters, and the trilogy I am now writing is supposed to present the full picture of this with regard to faith.
Regarding Maimonides, it is true that he says we can offer creative interpretations of anthropomorphism, and in principle also of the eternity of the world. But when he lists the reasons why we do not do that, he says first of all that the eternity of the world has not been proven, and second that this principle, unlike the principle against anthropomorphism, contradicts the Torah at its root. And then at the end of the chapter he also says that if Aristotle’s view of the eternity of the world were proven, as opposed to Plato’s view, then “the Torah as a whole would fall” (I am quoting from chapter 25, part 2).
But in any case, I agree that evolution and other secondary things we can adopt, and that does not contradict anything. And I always thought that the existence of God and that He gave the Torah are indeed essentials on which the religion depends (and I feel that free will is too). But these are such imprecise statements that we do whatever we want with them. Once we would have said revelation at Sinai, which is a more precise statement, but now we’ll say that it was given by God, and even if biblical criticism is correct, and the entire Torah was written by human beings, we will still say that the Torah is from Heaven. At least that is my feeling when I deal with these questions; that is the direction I see with respect to biblical criticism, and generally in all questions of faith. And if religion is not falsifiable, that is fine—but what does religion say? Even the concept of Torah from Heaven is starting to become something very unclear.
And thank you very much, I’ll look for the notebooks, and I was really happy about the trilogy project. It will help a lot.