Between Intellectual Optimism and Pessimism: 3. The Road to God (Column 496)

With God’s help

Disclaimer: This post was translated from Hebrew using AI (ChatGPT 5 Thinking), so there may be inaccuracies or nuances lost. If something seems unclear, please refer to the Hebrew original or contact us for clarification.

In the two previous columns I described the fundamental epistemic rupture that philosophy has faced from its dawn until today. This is the “cemetery” among whose ruins Hillel Zeitlin and Lev Shestov wander in their search for God. In this column we will keep walking with them among the rubble on the way to Him, and with this I will conclude the present series.

Zeitlin’s faith

As I noted at the beginning of the previous column, Zeitlin leaps straight from the ruins to God. I did not find in his words any argument as to why that devastation proves or necessitates God’s existence. It looks like an existentialist solution: in the absence of standards and tools to rely on—“we have no remnant but this Torah”—what remains, at the height of despair, is only faith in God. But who says God really exists? Perhaps, indeed, we have nothing to lean on and should remain in despair?

By wondrous providence, only yesterday I reopened C. S. Lewis’s marvelous book The Abolition of Man. In the first part of the book he sets out the destruction inherent in the subjectivist-relativist view of ethics and aesthetics (its paradigmatic expression is logical positivism, which regards ethics and aesthetics as pseudo-propositions). He opens the second part with these words:

“[This Green Book] is the work by which he presents the subjectivist view. The practical result of education in the spirit of the Green Book can only be the destruction of the society that accepts it. But this does not of itself refute subjectivist theory about values. The right doctrine might be one which, if we accept it, we die. One who speaks from within the Tao [i.e., the objectivist view] cannot reject it on that ground: ‘Kill us in broad daylight.’”

The sentence that ends the passage is taken from The Iliad (Book 17, line 647): the Greeks turn to Zeus to disperse the mist covering their forces, so that at least they can see what is happening on the battlefield—even if the gods have decreed that they will be defeated and die.

Many criticize postmodern and critical conceptions in a consequentialist fashion, as Zeitlin does: they show the devastation that can result from adopting them. But Lewis is a lucid and brilliant philosopher who understands that this is not a substantive critique. Perhaps that is the truth—only it destroys. Perhaps Zeitlin, and we, are doomed to live in a cemetery. The fact that we end up among ruins does not mean there is something else, and it does not justify the assumption of [God’s] existence. Therefore Lewis immediately moves to the second part of the book, where he explains why subjectivism is also false in itself (it entails theoretical difficulties).

Zeitlin does not do this. It seems he has no evidence for God’s existence, and not even objections to atheism. He merely points to the devastation atheism carries. It appears that Zeitlin creates God ex nihilo only to obtain relief from his distress. This is a pragmatist-existentialist move that conflates the necessary and the useful with the true: if we need God, then apparently He exists. If God answers my needs, then apparently He exists.

I have stated my view of existentialism as a philosophy more than once (see, for example, column 140), and likewise my view of pragmatism (see my book The Prime Existent, throughout the Fourth Conversation). A person who believes in God because it solves some distress for him, or due to a religious feeling, is an atheist in disguise. Atheists also have religious feelings, and developing a fantasy about the existence of God—or the Flying Spaghetti Monster—can certainly help them too (“opium of the masses,” as Marx said), but such a feeling proves nothing. The fact that you need God does not make Him exist. If, on rational grounds, you do not arrive at the conclusion that He exists, then even if you conjure a fictional God to solve your troubles, you remain an atheist. I made a similar distinction with respect to the search for meaning—the therapeutic sense of “meaning”—in column 159.

Two notes:

a. There is also the possibility that you do believe, but you are philosophically untrained. That is, you believe He exists but cannot provide a reasonable argument for it, and therefore flee to the realms of existentialism-pragmatism.

https://mikyab.net/en/posts/7393

https://mikyab.net/en/posts/8462

b. Sometimes people think that the very existence of a feeling is evidence that it has a correlate in reality, or that if something is useful it is also true. I am not sure I agree, but this is a legitimate and internally consistent view of faith. That is not pragmatism and not existentialism (in the sense discussed here).

https://mikyab.net/en/posts/70490

Meaning, in Viktor Frankl’s sense, is what solves my distress. Philosophical meaning requires justification, not merely need and relief.

In chapter 3 of his essay on Lev Shestov (pp. 185–193), Zeitlin explains that Shestov does not actually speak about God and faith in Him, but one can hear in his search hints of faith. For Zeitlin, the search itself is the highest expression of faith. He also adds that faith in God is a subjective matter, attainable only once we abandon the naïve and futile aspiration for objective truth. The unity of opposites is not absent from his words either; you can find in him, in one stroke, all the hallmarks of religious opium.

Recall that at the beginning of the essay, Zeitlin showed that we lack objective tools to ascertain God’s existence—or to reach any conclusion at all—since all our tools have sunk in the sea of intellectual ruins. Therefore, in contemporary thought there is no room for faith in God or in anything at all (this is the cemetery of ideas). Yet Zeitlin maintains that what remains for us is the search, and this search is faith. Perhaps he only meant that the search expresses a state of faith (if you are searching, you presumably assume there is something to find), but that is not what he says. For him, faith is a subjective state, not an objective claim of intellect and cognition about the world.

This style of argument parallels, to a considerable degree, many modern-day ba’alei teshuva (outreach) approaches. They try to show the lack of foundations of rational thought, to undermine science and philosophy, and thus it seems to them they have proven God’s existence. I assume that what underlies this is that they address people who already have the intuition that God exists, but are troubled by scientific and philosophical difficulties. In such a situation, perhaps shattering the basis of rational thought suffices to wave the difficulties away and remain with intuitive faith. But demolishing rationality, by itself, of course proves nothing.

This is the conception I labeled, at the start of the first column, intellectual pessimism. The devastation and despair it engenders lead a person to conclusions that alone can rescue him from that state. As noted, in my view a person who holds such conceptions is an atheist in disguise.

My argument

I will present the matter briefly, since I have discussed it at length in my books The Prime Existent (Fourth Conversation) and in the second part of the fourth conversation. My aim here is not to persuade you of the proof’s soundness, but to set it against Zeitlin’s and clarify the intellectual optimism that it contains.

To present the argument, we must return to the epistemic rupture. We saw that our scientific knowledge contains information we did not observe (general laws of nature). Hence there is information about the world (synthetic) that was not gathered by observation (a priori). How is that possible? My answer is that this information is gathered by observation—but not by the senses.

From the dawn of history there has been the familiar dispute between empiricism and rationalism. The parties agree on a dichotomy between cognition by the senses (observation) and by the intellect (reason). Both sides assume these are two separate, independent faculties. My claim is that we have a third cognitive capacity that deals with cognition while combining them both. Some will call it a “sixth sense”; I prefer the name intuition (see column 364); it is also the capacity sometimes called “faith”—not necessarily faith in God.

When I see a person kick a ball and the ball flies, and I am asked: how do you know the kick caused the ball’s flight? my answer is that I simply see it—though not with my eyes, but with my intellect. I have an intuition that recognizes a causal relation between the two events. This is a kind of cognition that is not mere sense-perception, but rather a thinking-cognition. The same holds for scientific generalizations. I see objects fall to the ground and infer a law and a force of gravity. Hume attacks this again, arguing there is no empirical justification for it. In laws we do not see that there is such a force or such a general law. Again my answer is that we do see it—with what might be called the “eyes of the mind,” i.e., intuition.

The premise of this proposal is that the distinction between thinking and perceiving is not sharp. There is a gray zone that blends them. Husserl calls this capacity “ideational seeing,” Rabbi Ha-Nazir calls it “auditive logic,” and Maimonides calls it “the eyes of the mind.” What they all share is a capacity that combines cognition (hearing, sight) with thinking (logic, intellect, ideas). All of these (not always fully consciously) tell us that the boundary between thinking and perceiving is not sharp, and that there is a cognitive capacity we may call cognizing thought.

Husserl speaks of ideational seeing—that is, of perceiving ideas. He means that we can look through particular objects or events that appear before our eyes, and see through them, as if they were transparent, the generalization (the idea) they instantiate. Through the horse we can see horseness; through the cases we have observed we can see the general law. These are not the products of empirical observation in its conventional sense, nor of (discursive) reasoning. The generalization is the product of another kind of observation. In fact, all our synthetic-a priori insights are the product of intuition, i.e., of cognizing thought. Incidentally, in my book The Spirit of Law I showed that this is also the basis of what legal theory calls “judicial legislation,” which causes endless turmoil in that field. On the philosophical level, all this is nothing but the legal aspect of the debate over the synthetic a priori.

How does this connect to God? In the fourth conversation of The Prime Existent I argued that our ability to place trust in the cognitive-thinking tools embedded within us is conditioned on the assumption that they were fashioned by an intelligent agent who ensured their reliability—that is, that the picture they present to us matches what occurs in the world in itself. Without this, there is no reason to assume such a match (i.e., that intuition actually works and gives us a faithful picture of the world as it is in itself). I called this “the argument from epistemology.” I will not enter into its details here so as not to extend this discussion; I have elaborated elsewhere.

What is the difference between the arguments?

At first glance my line of reasoning looks very similar to Zeitlin’s. We both conclude that without God there is no way to ground our epistemology, and therefore, like him, I too “create” a God to resolve my distress and raise the ideas from their grave. The resemblance is real, but there is a thin, decisive difference—one that returns us to intellectual pessimism vs. optimism.

Zeitlin answers: necessarily I start from the premise that our cognition is not reliable; now I ask myself how that could be. He then declares that since rational cognition has been razed to the ground, if we wish to live we must adopt an alternative. This is not an argument but a need (existential or utilitarian).

By contrast, I present an argument: if our cognitive tools are reliable, then necessarily there is someone who confers that reliability on them—and that is God. I therefore relate to my route as intellectual optimism, since I start precisely from the premise that our rational thought is reliable, and from this arrive at faith in God.

I am not claiming that faith erects rationality; rather, that I need not raze the rational world in order to arrive at faith. That may sound similar, but the direction is completely opposite. As I noted in the first column, the difference is not only in the music that accompanies it and the direction of travel. My claim is that Zeitlin’s doctrine is, in truth, atheism in disguise, whereas mine is religion: his is warm and full of feeling, but it is only feeling. Intellect is demolished and what remains is only the subjective plane—very reminiscent, of course, of Rav Shagar.

Logical formalization: modus tollens and modus ponens

I wrote that my argument is a valid logical inference, and indeed it can be given a formal deductive shape using two basic patterns.

Modus Ponens (MP):

A → B
A
────
B

There is also a parallel pattern called Modus Tollens (MT):

A → B
¬B
────
¬A

Let A denote “There is no God,” and B denote “Our cognition is not reliable.” My argument can be formalized thus:

A → B    (If there is no God, then reliable cognition is impossible.)
¬B       (Our cognition is reliable.)
────
¬A       (Therefore, there is a God.)

This has the structure of modus tollens and is a valid logical argument.

Incidentally, in the third part of the fourth conversation I presented a similar argumentative form with respect to morality, where B was “There is no valid morality.” The structure is exactly the same (see column 456). In both of these arguments I move backward from the consequent (B) to the antecedent (A), unlike MP, where one goes forward from antecedent to consequent.

The difference between the arguments (again)

In that fourth conversation I called the second pattern (like mine) a “revealing” argument, as opposed to MP, which I called a “constructive” argument. In other terminology, I called the revealing argument “theological,” and the constructive one “philosophical.” That terminology comes from a quip I once heard in a course by Asa Kasher: what’s the difference between a theologian and a philosopher? The philosopher relies on premises and derives conclusions from them; the theologian relies on conclusions and derives premises that lead to them. The believer constructs an argument whose conclusion is that God exists—but his faith did not in fact arise from that argument; it preceded it (see the opening of the first conversation in The Prime Existent). His route is the reverse: he builds the argument so that it will lead to the desired conclusion (that God exists); he goes from the conclusion he wishes to prove to the premises.

I explained there that the joke is sharp and has something to it, but on reflection it throws dust in our eyes and aims to belittle theologians’ modes of argument. Philosophy, too, often relies on “revealing” (or “theological”) arguments, and theology sometimes relies on “constructive” (or “philosophical”) ones. The most prominent example of a revealing argument in philosophy is Kant’s treatment of the synthetic a priori. Awakened from his dogmatic slumber by Hume’s doubts, standing before the epistemic rupture and seeking a remedy (a justification of our cognition), Kant stresses that he is not asking “whether synthetic a priori judgments are possible,” but “how such judgments are possible.” It was clear to him that they are possible; his only question was how to justify this. Notice that he granted the a priori trustworthiness of the laws of nature and the meta-scientific principles on which they rest (causality and induction), and only then asked himself how it could be that we are entitled to trust them. From there he moved backward and found (so he claimed) the sole way that allows this—the distinction between phenomena and noumena, and the use of transcendental arguments. In other words, de facto he built an argument that would yield the desired conclusion (that we may trust our cognition). Kant was undoubtedly a philosopher, not a theologian—and yet he was the first to place this “revealing” move explicitly on the table. Many before him had done so, but he was honest enough to say it explicitly. After I rejected the Kantian picture and said it cannot answer the epistemic rupture, the revealing argument falls. Trusting our cognition does not force us to adopt the Kantian picture (phenomena/noumena and transcendental arguments). Yet I also said that the Kantian picture may be true in itself, even if it does not solve the rupture; therefore I replace the revealing (Kantian) argument—based on our acquaintance with the structure of cognition and the cognitive component in perception—with a constructive argument.

https://mikyab.net/en/posts/75181

Returning to our discussion, a revealing argument has the modus tollens form I described above. A constructive argument corresponds to modus ponens and says:

A → B     (If there is no God, reliable cognition is impossible.)
A         (There is no God.)
────
B         (Therefore, there is no reliable cognition.)

The difference lies in the second premise, and the conclusions are opposite. The revealing argument arrives at the picture that God exists and our cognition is reliable; the constructive argument yields the opposite: there is no God and our cognition is unreliable. Both are, of course, logically valid and legitimate. Choosing between them depends on whether one accepts A or ¬B. At the purely formal level there is no advantage of one over the other. One clear point, however: you cannot adopt a worldview in which there is no God while still maintaining that our cognition is reliable (or that morality is valid). You can only do so by rejecting the first premise (the implication)—which, as I have shown, is highly implausible.

Thus a revealing argument is a valid logical argument just like a constructive one; there is nothing wrong with it. The only question is whether we accept ¬B or not. But that is true of any logical argument: its conclusion follows only if we accept its premises. The distinction between “revealing” and “constructive,” or “theological” and “philosophical,” is illusory. There is no defect in revealing arguments. The usual criticism covertly assumes that any revealing argument is a kind of pragmatism—that is, arbitrarily adopting a premise in order to obtain the desired conclusion. But as we have seen, that is not the case. I do not merely wish B to be true; I assume that ¬B is in fact true (my intuition says it is). By contrast, with Zeitlin it appears that this is precisely what he does: he looks for an alternative and does not find one, and thus he clings to faith subjectively and without justification—though he was honest enough to say that his conclusion is subjective-existential-pragmatist, rather than presenting it as a binding philosophical conclusion.

Summary

Zeitlin’s premise is that there must be something optimistic (not ruined). I see no real basis for that premise; for me it is wishful thinking. His God is opium for the masses, for he creates Him for pragmatist-existentialist reasons.

By contrast, in my argument the foundational premise is that our cognition is reliable (or that our morality is valid). This very much accords with the intuitions of any reasonable person, and thus adopting such premises is sensible and fitting. Remember: every logical argument begins from premises, and premises, by definition, are not based on other premises but on intuition. In that sense, my revealing argument is not exceptional. Although it may look pragmatist on the surface (as if I “invent” God to underwrite morality and cognition), it is not truly so.

A person can certainly claim he does not accept this premise (that our cognition is reliable, or that morality is valid), and then the argument will not lead him to the conclusion that God exists. But that is true of any logical argument: it speaks only to those who accept its basic premises. This is therefore not a flaw in the argument—at most a disagreement about its premise.

By contrast, in Zeitlin’s move there is no argument at all. He razes our cognition and thinking, and then declares that we must believe in God. Why? No explanation. No wonder he himself says that his God is subjective, for he has no argument that proves His existence. He adopts Him by default, as the last option that might rescue or console us amid the ruins of rationality.

In other words, Zeitlin murders rationality to prove God’s existence, whereas I presuppose rationality (the validity of morality and the reliability of cognition) in order to prove His existence. That is why I described Zeitlin’s stance as intellectual pessimism, for it is built on the destruction of rational thought, and the edifice it constructs is nothing but a subjective fiction, not a true building. My argument, by contrast, is built on rational thought and the trust we place in it, and explains that what constitutes it (or prevents its destruction) is faith in God.