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Thought experiment

שו”תCategory: philosophyThought experiment
asked 10 months ago

Hello, Your Honor,
What would you do if God or another entity that has been proven with the highest possible certainty to be God’s trusted representative, made a claim that contradicts the laws of logic, such as that God is omnipotent and can create a stone that he cannot lift, or that he knows in advance things that depend on free choice, or even claimed that God can change the laws of logic, which of course contradicts a basic assumption of thought. Would you accept his claim and say that your mind is probably too limited to understand it, or would you find another way to accept things?


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מיכי Staff answered 10 months ago
It’s kind of like asking what I would do if God appeared to me and said he didn’t exist. The answer is simple: It won’t happen because it can’t happen. There was nothing because there is nothing. By the way, I deal with hypothetical questions like this. When I experience it directly, I can formulate a position and answer.

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חגי replied 10 months ago

I read your book The Science of Freedom, and you do use it in thought experiments to answer basic questions. The question I'm trying to answer is basically whether it's appropriate to believe in an event that on the one hand my senses and memory say happened, but reason and logic say that such a thing could not possibly happen (i.e. I can't think of any logical explanation for how it happened). Some people say that they believe in knowledge and choice or in private providence or in general believe in God because they believe in the Torah/Chazal/tradition even though they don't actually understand what these things say or they admit that they don't make sense to them. There are also Christians who believe in meaningless sentences like He is the Father, He is the Son, He is the Holy Spirit. Is it possible to reject such events simply on the grounds that they don't make sense on their own and therefore there is no reason to address them, or vice versa - to say that it probably happened and that I probably need to update my beliefs and give up some of the laws of logic in certain places in my knowledge.

מיכי Staff replied 10 months ago

There is no such thing as giving up the laws of logic.
Thought experiments are a very important tool. But I have also written about my opinion on forming positions on situations that are far from you (see my article on ruling on halakhic law in extreme situations).

חגי replied 10 months ago

Can I have a link to the article?
Thanks

מיכי Staff replied 10 months ago

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%A4%D7%A1%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%9C%D7%9B%D7%94-%D7%91%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%90%D7%94-%D7%95%D7%9E%D7%A9%D7%9E%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%AA%D7%94-%D7%9C%D7%93%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%AA/

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