Q&A: A Question I Wanted to Squeeze In at the End of the Session
A Question I Wanted to Squeeze In at the End of the Session
Question
Sorry, Rabbi, toward the end of the session we just had, right at the end when I came to ask a question, my phone died in the middle… haha, I imagine it looked pretty funny from the outside.
I wanted to ask whether the Rabbi accepts my understanding that Leibowitz, back in his day, was constantly asked about his “faith,” and he said quite firmly: “I *choose* to believe (!).”
That seems to imply that this was something he could have refrained from doing (if he had chosen/wanted otherwise), only he chose not to…
When I read James, at certain points in his article, I was reminded of that statement by Leibowitz.
And I suspect that Leibowitz actually was influenced by the approach James takes. That the will is ultimately what causes belief (a person needs to take upon himself “faith” in God, and it is not enough merely to grasp it intellectually).
In the Rabbi’s opinion, was Leibowitz influenced in his faith by the above article?
Answer
I don’t know whether he was influenced, but it is indeed similar. Except that in my opinion Leibowitz did not interpret himself correctly. As a positivist, he was accustomed to thinking that anything that cannot be justified/proved is arbitrary (dependent on will and not on reason). But what he meant to say was that it cannot be justified, not that it is arbitrary. That is of course a paternalistic statement, and still I think it is correct (the alternative is to say that he was a fool, which does not seem plausible to me). I wrote about this in an article: https://mikyab.net/%D7%9B%D7%AA%D7%91%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%9E%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%AA%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%A6%D7%95%D7%9F-%D7%91%D7%9E%D7%A9%D7%A0%D7%AA%D7%95-%D7%A9%D7%9C-%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%91%D7%95%D7%91%D7%99%D7%A5-%D7%A4%D7%95%D7%96
If I remember correctly (the book is not in front of me), in the book Conversations with Tony Lavi, Leibowitz explains that the will indeed cannot be rationally justified, but that it is also not arbitrary. That he chooses to believe means that he regards the value of faith as absolute, even though he cannot justify it rationally.