On the Fallacy of Faith as a Logical Conclusion

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asked 5 years ago

Greetings to Rabbi Michael Avraham,
I am writing to you because I appreciate the great logic that emerges from your writing and, of course, the knowledge, but I disagree with you on some of the conclusions that stem from the logic:

1. In one of your answers here on the Responsa page, you wrote, “To believe means to know,” and I would like to suggest a correction – to believe means to think that you know. As a scientist, you know very well how to establish fact and proof. Real scientists do not advocate “faith” of the kind in question (in their professional work) but rather hypotheses – their intuition does offer them an answer to the questions they ask themselves, but they treat their intuition’s answer as a hypothesis, not as absolute belief, because absolute belief is an unfounded hypothesis that a person is confident in without a factual basis. In fact, belief is the confidence of the believer in his or her guess (intuition is not proof of anything, our intuitions are wrong far more often than they are right; ask the owner of a casino, for example, how people do most of the time with their intuitions in gambling).

2. Your conclusion about the complexity of the world/evolution as proof that there is a higher power involved: Yes and no (and therefore no). On the one hand, as far as human knowledge and logic can grasp, things as complex as our world cannot be created without the involvement of a guiding hand. On the other hand, if that is the case, then the higher power itself, which served as a guiding hand, is also a super-complex entity and could not have been created by itself. Human logic is unable to grasp this paradox, and therefore an attempt to definitively determine an answer is pointless (which is why great scientists, including Einstein and Darwin, tended to adopt an agnostic view – a kind of admission of our inability to answer questions of this kind). There is no possible scenario for the creation of our existence as far as our logic can grasp; on the one hand, it does not make sense to us that the world was created from nothing, and on the other hand, it does not make sense that the higher power that created us was created from nothing, and then who created it? And who created the one who created it? There is no end to it. Of course, the common “religious” answer, “God is eternal,” is completely arbitrary and is drawn out without choice, and not because it has any logical reasoning.
In addition, even if we were to agree that a higher power created us, there is no reason to think that it has anything to do with the divine beings portrayed by Judaism or other religions. As far as we know, even if there was a deliberate hand in our health, it could have been the famous spaghetti monster or an ancient alien race. In other words, the attempt to “prove” our existence as evidence of the Jewish God is completely absurd and actually disappointed me a little to hear you use these arguments after reading very intelligent texts from you.
I would appreciate your consideration of these points, with great respect.
generation

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מיכי Staff answered 5 years ago

Hello generation. Your questions have been answered in detail in several places on the site, particularly in the chapters God Plays Dice and the First Manuscript. Let me start by saying that I am certainly familiar with your feeling/disappointment. I too have often experienced frustration with intelligent people like Einstein or Dawkins coming to stupid conclusions and writing unintelligent things, and even falling into simple pitfalls (like the ones you presented here and the like). But that is precisely why I do not usually examine arguments through the claimer, but rather through their substance. 1. You described my position correctly: In my opinion, there is no difference between believing and knowing. You can of course call our knowledge about the law of gravity or about the fact that there is a wall in front of me belief and not knowledge (because after all, I only think I know), but then you have again come to identify belief with knowledge. There is no knowledge in the world that falls under the fence of knowledge and not belief according to your proposal. As far as I am concerned, this is what is called knowledge, but the semantics are not important to me. Call everything belief, that is also good. Either way, knowledge of any kind is not fundamentally different from belief, and you can call them beliefs or knowledge as you wish. I completely disagree with your claim that our intuition is usually wrong. The opposite is true. All of science is built on our intuition. Indeed, we have no certainty about anything, but intuition is our main (and actually only) tool for arriving at knowledge/beliefs, in science, religion, and in general. The principle of causality is also intuition, and trust in the senses is intuition, and so on. To take as an example fools in a casino who follow an irrational emotion and declare it to be intuition is to set up a straw man to attack it. To the same extent, I could bring you fools who are wrong about mathematics and deny the reliability of mathematics. At every step of your life, you use intuition, and you are usually right. Therefore, if you test empirically, the obvious conclusion regarding the reliability of intuition is the opposite of yours. 2. Here too, I did not say anything definitive. What I said is that it is much more likely to assume that there is an intelligent agent here that underlies the universe and its laws. The question of who created it itself is a logical error and a misunderstanding of the argument (and as I said, I answered it extensively both on the website and in the aforementioned books). You have two options: either at the beginning of this chain stands an entity that itself does not require a cause (another entity that created it) or it is an infinite chain (which is a fallacy, which in philosophy is called infinite regression). I do not see a third option. Since the second option is a fallacy, then the first is certainly preferable to it. Mishal. For me, the philosophical God is the object at the beginning of the chain, and has no necessary connection to a religious God of his kind. It is true that after we have reached the conclusion regarding the existence of a philosophical God, when tradition comes along and says that God has been revealed, there is no reason to accept it. But I have already elaborated on this in several places and elsewhere, and there is no point in going back to all of that here. All the best.

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דור replied 5 years ago

I will say again about the second point, that the fallacy of an infinite chain is a fallacy only according to our logic *exactly* as there is a fallacy in the perception that something complex was created by itself (otherwise there is no reason to rule out the possibility that we were created “without a cause”), so that both possibilities are unacceptable to our (limited) mind to the same extent.

Regarding the first point, I am forced to understand that placing faith on the same level as knowledge is another of the logical and believing person's escape routes to deal with the inability to logically explain the basis of faith, as well as the references to intuition as a source of absolute truth. The intuitions of 7.5 billion people are different and therefore assume that there are 7.5 billion different truths, which in any case brings us back to the point that there is no point in arguing about beliefs except for those who do not believe in beliefs, who are probably agnostics, and of course those who believe are not afraid 🙂

In any case, thank you very much for your relevant answers.

Y replied 5 years ago

Dor, it seems to me that your mistake stems from an incorrect definition of ”failure”. If I don't know things, it doesn't mean that I am in ”failure” but in lack of knowledge. The philosophical ”failure” is not lack of knowledge but the impossibility of existence.
You could say that an infinite chain is a “failure” of the impossibility of existence.
Whereas “failure” in the perception that a complex thing is created by itself is lack of knowledge.
It seems to me that if you don't know things, it doesn't mean that you are in a problem.

Regarding the second point, you need to understand how to construct proofs. A proof is built from basic assumptions. And the reason we have different basic assumptions is because we have a tool called intuition. It receives information about the world and deduces laws from it. The fact that everyone has different conclusions does not mean that our proofs are not correct, nor does it change the work that goes into constructing a proof.
If you don't want to use this tool, then you can't get any proof. And if you don't get any proof, then you have no reason to have a discussion with people, because nothing can be proven to you.
I think the reason you opened this question is because inside you do think that things can be proven to you, and therefore, from your perspective, intuition is a tool that needs to be used.

ישי replied 5 years ago

The basic intuitions are the same for almost everyone. You are confusing emotion with intuition.

הפוסק האחרון replied 5 years ago

The difference between belief and knowledge is like the difference between heaven and earth.

This can cause confusion for those who do not analyze enough.

An example of knowledge: a person knows that he sees something. The more blurred his vision is, the knowledge that he sees something will not change. What will change is the relationship between what he sees and the interpretation of it.
An example of belief: a person believes that this table that he sees is really a table. The more blurred and limited his vision is, the less his belief that this spot that he sees is a table will decrease.

The problem arises when it is understood that knowledge itself is a product of an interpretation by the visual system in the brain. But even after this understanding, the knowledge itself will not change. And the person knew that he saw what he saw.