Notebook 0 — Preface

General Introduction

The notebooks that make up this book were created as exercises in philosophical analysis. The question of the existence of God was chosen only as a medium through which I try to demonstrate the nature of philosophical reasoning in its various forms. This issue makes it possible to become acquainted with several kinds of arguments and to appreciate the differences between them.

Later, when I began working on my theology book, which presents a minimal theological picture (see the beginning of the second book), I realized that within such a picture it is impossible to avoid the discussion of the existence of God. This is the basis of everything that follows. For that reason I thought I would make use of these notebooks and turn them into an introductory book. Later still, when I worked on the theological discussion itself, I came to see that it required division into two books, one dealing with Jewish thought and the other with Jewish law. Thus the trilogy was created, and this book is its first volume.

Therefore this book is unusual in comparison with the two that follow it. Its character is philosophical, and the discussion in it is more detailed than the discussions in the next two. I did not give up the exercise in philosophical reasoning; rather, I added to it and integrated into it guidance toward conclusion-oriented thinking, as a foundation for the next two books. For that reason I also retained here the structure of five notebooks, each of which is an independent philosophical exercise, although as I have noted more than once, there are connections between them.

Introduction:

What Is Belief? Emotion, Knowledge, and Certainty

Introduction

This introduction is devoted to conceptual clarification and to defining the framework of the discussion in the book. The book deals with the most basic foundation of the religious world: belief in God. There is no shortage of confusion surrounding this subject, and before entering into proofs of the existence of God it is proper to examine the framework of the discussion and its implications. What, in general, is belief in God? What place do arguments have in relation to it? Is it dependent on them? Does belief mean certainty? Is it emotion or intellect? And so forth.

On Sentences and Factual Claims

The first question with which we shall concern ourselves is this: to what category should belief be assigned? Is it a factual claim? In order to clarify this, we must first define the concept of a factual claim. Since Aristotle, it has been customary to distinguish between sentences and claims. Sentences are collections of words that have some meaning. Claims, by contrast, are sentences that assert something, that is, whose content is judged in terms of truth or falsity. When I ask someone, "What time is it?" this is a sentence that is not a claim, since one cannot say of it that it is true or false. The same is true when I command someone to do X: there is no claim here. Commands are not judged in terms of truth or falsity.

By contrast, claims such as "Tomorrow will be Thursday" or "The table before me is made of wood" are factual claims about a state of affairs in the world. How do we decide whether a given factual claim is true or false? This is not a simple question in philosophy, but for our purposes it will be enough to say that it is the result of a comparison. We compare the content of the claim with the state of affairs in the world that it describes. If there is correspondence, then the claim is true; if not, it is false. The claim "There are one hundred million residents in Israel" is a false factual claim. By contrast, the claim "After sunset, darkness descends upon the world" is a true factual claim. What they have in common is that they assert something about the world, and that their truth or falsity is determined in terms of comparison.

And what if we do not know? For example, is the claim that there are one hundred billion ants in the world a factual claim? We obviously do not actually know whether it is true or not, but there are quite a few claims that cannot be judged by comparison. For example, the claim that all the ravens in the world are black cannot be verified in the manner we described. We will never be able to know whether we have observed all the ravens in the world. Nor can the claim that at this moment there are ten thousand clouds above the earth be judged by comparison. The same goes for the claim that at the center of the planet Jupiter there stands a mountain a kilometer and a half high and pink in color. Does that mean these are not factual claims?

The positivists argue that susceptibility to empirical adjudication (comparison with content) is the criterion for a claim’s factuality. But this is an extreme and implausible approach. It is commonly thought that all of these are factual claims, because they assert something, true or false, about the world. Even if we have no way to verify them and test their truth or falsity, it is still reasonable to define them and treat them as factual claims. According to this approach, even if we came to the conclusion that some claim is true by means of a revelation of Elijah, the testimony of trustworthy people, or any other mechanism, that changes nothing. One may of course debate whether such methods are reliable, but that is a debate about the truth of the claim, not about its factual character. It does not alter the categorical characterization of that claim as a factual claim. A claim that asserts something about the world is a factual claim, even if we do not know how to judge whether it is true or false, even if we dispute that question, and even if everyone believes that in principle no answer can be reached.

Are Ethical Claims Factual Claims?

And what about a sentence such as "Murder is forbidden"? At first glance it seems that this is not a factual claim but a normative-moral judgment. After all, we have no state of affairs in the world against which comparison will yield the correct judgment with respect to such claims. Against what are we to compare this claim in order to discover whether it is true or false? Such a comparison does not seem possible at all. But this is not a matter of technical impossibility (as in the examples above). It is a matter of principle, for the problem lies not in carrying out the comparison but in what one compares it to. There is nothing at all on the other side of the equation, and therefore there is no equation.

This is of course unlike the claim "According to Israeli law, murder is forbidden," which is plainly a factual claim. In order to verify it, we simply compare it to what is written in the Israeli law books. The same applies to the claims "Most people in the world think that murder is forbidden" or "Murder causes suffering to the murdered person’s relatives and friends," both of which are factual claims. But the claim "Murder is forbidden" is not of that kind, because, as noted, we have nothing to compare it to. It is a description of a norm, or a normative judgment about a certain type of act. The same is true of the claim "This painting is beautiful." That too is not a factual claim (as distinguished from the claim "This painting is beautiful in my eyes"), but rather an aesthetic-artistic judgment.

Such normative judgments or claims are not factual claims, since their content is not facts from the world. But there is still room to discuss whether they are claims. Many would say that they are claims, because they can be judged in terms of truth or falsity, even if this is not done by comparison to a state of affairs in the world. The alternative to this view is to declare them subjective claims of which one cannot say that they are true or false. This view expresses moral relativism. One who accepts morality as binding and is prepared to judge people, for blame or praise, ought to treat such statements as claims, even if they are not factual claims of the ordinary sort. Admittedly, judging a norm in terms of true or false, right or wrong, good or bad also involves comparison. We must compare it with the Idea of the Good and, as it were, contemplate it in order to see whether the content of the ethical claim indeed fits what we "see" there or not. We shall return to these claims in the third part of the fourth notebook.^[1]

Is Belief a Factual Claim?

I now wish to argue that belief is a factual claim. Seemingly this is a simple statement that needs no elaboration, but as we shall immediately see, many people err about this, or at least define belief differently.

Let us begin with the claim "God exists." Some see it as a normative determination (commitment to the commandments, or to a certain mental state called belief) and not as factual. Others (the positivists)^[2] see it as a claim that asserts nothing, since its truth or falsity cannot be determined by comparison with any state of affairs in the world.

I wish to argue here that this is a factual claim, because by means of it we are asserting something about the world. One can attack this claim, and even reject it (that is, be an atheist).^[3] But all these are marginal disputes relative to the categorical question whether this is a factual claim. Even the atheist must agree that the claim "God exists" is a factual claim, because it asserts something about the world. In his view it is a false factual claim, whereas the believer thinks this claim is true. But they have no disagreement about the categorical classification of this claim. Even a person who claims that demons with five wings are flying around us because that is what he is hallucinating in broad daylight at this moment is making a factual claim. In that case it is probably a false factual claim, but insofar as he intends to assert something about the world, it is a factual claim, since it is judged in terms of truth or falsity.

Belief versus Emotion or a Mental State

Let us now ask ourselves about the status of a claim like this: "I experience the presence of God in every fiber of my soul." This is a factual claim in the psychological sense (like "I find this picture beautiful"), that is, the fact it deals with concerns the speaker’s psyche, but not necessarily the external world.^[4] Sometimes a person may say that if I have such a powerful experience of divine presence, then He necessarily exists. That is already a factual conclusion (as noted, even according to the atheist who disputes it). But the religious feeling itself asserts nothing about the world. Exactly as the claim "I love so-and-so" asserts nothing about the world, but only about the lover himself. It is a description of his mental state and not a claim about the external world. The indication of this is that another person who does not love that individual is not in a dispute with him. Their feelings differ, and both say true things (about themselves). As long as we are not asserting something about the external world but about ourselves, there is no claim here in the accepted factual sense, except for a claim about the speaker himself (which is, of course, also a kind of fact).

Some define belief as nothing more than a description of a mental state. Many atheists claim that when a person declares, "I believe in God," he is really only reporting a mental state, and that his words contain no factual claim about the world. This is a category mistake. What he intends to claim depends solely on him. He intends to make a factual claim about the world: that there is a God in it. In the view of the atheists, this is a false factual claim, since they disagree with him. But their claim should not be seen as a dispute about the category. It is a factual dispute. They can of course argue that what led him into this error is some kind of subjective feeling or experience, but that is their claim, not his. He is making a factual claim, even if in their view it is a false one. The indication of this is that the atheist in fact claims that there is no God, and that is certainly a claim about the world and not about himself. If so, then the opposite claim of the believer, that there is a God, is also a factual claim (though, in the atheist’s view, a false factual claim, of course). Otherwise there is no dispute here, only declarations and reports of different feelings, like the opposing declarations of love in the example above.

Of course, a person can say "I believe in God" in the sense of reporting a mental state. If that is what he means, then all is well. He is only reporting the existence of religious feelings within himself, nothing more. But that is an uninteresting declaration and not one that can be disputed, so it is not worth discussing. Therefore, in order to synchronize our conceptual definitions for the discussion that follows, I will assume from here on that the meaning of a declaration of belief in God is that it is a factual claim about the external world. Religious experiences and feelings do not define a person as a believer in the sense that interests us here. At most, he has a religious soul, and nothing more. There are quite a few atheists who report that certain circumstances have aroused or do arouse religious feelings in them (standing before impressive nature, a marvelous work of art, or an astonishing scientific theory). None of this turns them into believers, so long as they do not take the additional step and assume that these experiences are not merely a subjective mental state but also testify to something in the world outside them, namely to the fact that God exists.

For our purposes here, belief in God means that the person who holds it believes something factual about the external world: that God exists. For that reason, various surveys that examine the percentage of believers in the population do not tell us very much in this respect. The question is what those who speak about belief mean by it: do they mean to report a religious emotion or a religious experience? Perhaps they mean commitment to a collection of practical observances (the fulfillment of certain commandments, or the whole system of commandments), or some other meaning altogether. For us here, only if they mean to assert a factual claim about the world outside them (that there is a God in it) will they count as believers.

For that reason there is also no room for statements like "There is no truth of the matter regarding belief in God." It cannot be that both the believer and the atheist are right, since this is a factual claim. If we were speaking about religious feeling, then there would be no problem at all in saying that Reuven has a religious feeling and Shimon does not. But if Reuven and Shimon are making opposite factual claims about the world, then there is no possibility of accepting them both. One can, of course, engage in sophistry and claim that Reuven believes in one god while Shimon denies the existence of another. One can also say that there is no way to prove or persuade, or no way to know which of them is right, or that there is no certainty in belief or atheism. But as we have seen, none of this touches the categorical question with which we are concerned here. By all accounts, these are two contradictory factual claims. The question of deciding between them will be discussed throughout this book.

By the same token, there is no place for the claim of an atheist who says that Reuven’s belief is a subjective hallucination. Reuven is asserting something about the world, even if someone else thinks he is mistaken, and even if no proof can be offered for it. The diagnosis made of him by Shimon, even if correct, neither adds nor subtracts anything in this regard. Even if the matter cannot be proved, that says nothing for our purposes. At most, if you are an empiricist in the strong sense, that is, if you accept only empirical observations as a basis for factual claims, you will conclude that it cannot be known whether this factual claim is true or not. We shall enter at length into questions concerning kinds of arguments (empiricism versus rationalism) in the course of this book.

From the believer’s point of view, statements about some gene that is responsible for belief are nonsense, exactly like statements about another gene that is responsible for the fact that the gravitational force between two masses stands in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them. Genes are not responsible for facts (in the external world). Some atheist may claim that belief is a false claim, and that the believer’s feeling is an illusion generated by his genes, thereby turning it from a factual claim into a mental state. By the same logic, a skeptic could claim that the trust we place in the law of gravitation is the product of some gene and turn that too into a mental state. Such claims do not change the meaning of the believer’s assertion or its logical status (as a factual claim); they merely argue with it, and in effect intend to claim that it is a false factual claim.

Disputes about Belief

The conclusion from everything said so far is that, contrary to common opinion, belief is not an emotion. Emotion may perhaps serve as a source from which the factual claim that God exists is derived. Religious emotion may also be a derivative or consequence of belief in God. But religious emotion as such is not belief. This identification is confusing; it mixes different categories. Religious emotion is not belief, just as the feeling of fear of a tiger is not a tiger. The feeling of fear may arise from the fact that there is a tiger here, and it is also possible that the sense that there is a tiger here arises from some primal feeling of fear that comes from another source, but in any event the feeling of fear itself is not a factual claim about the existence of a tiger here in the world beside me. Conversely, the claim that there is a tiger is not a feeling of fear, but perhaps the cause of the fear or the result of a mistaken and fictitious feeling of fear. To view belief as emotion, and likewise to view religious emotion as belief, are simply category confusions or atheistic demagoguery (or both).

As I already mentioned, one can of course define the concept of belief differently and see in it a kind of emotion. But then our whole discussion becomes merely semantic, and there is no point in it. The common treatments, the disputes, the contradictions and difficulties, the arguments and rebuttals, the proofs and refutations, all of them assume—at least implicitly—that this is a factual claim (true or false) and not a mere feeling. There is no point at all in arguing with another person’s feelings. If some person has a religious feeling, then there is no reason for a person who lacks such a feeling to argue with him about anything. The disputes and polemics all indicate that all sides, atheists no less than believers, understand that this is a factual claim about the world.

Take, for example, the well-known saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. The meaning is that soldiers in situations of danger tend to turn to God, including those who ordinarily classify themselves as not believing in Him. What is the significance of this? Religious preachers are very fond of using this phenomenon to prove that everyone, deep inside, believes, and that unbelief is a product of the evil inclination. But that conclusion is by no means necessary. The opposite interpretation is also entirely possible: in states of pressure, a person, even if he is an atheist, invents for himself some factor on which to hang and rely. Some explain belief itself in that way even in ordinary situations (Marx already claimed that religious belief is opium for the masses). Because of states of pressure and the need for an authoritative and omnipotent factor to assist us in our cruel and arbitrary world, we invented God for ourselves and created belief in Him. This is no worse an explanation of the phenomenon, and therefore it proves nothing. It may be that in such times of pressure and fear some religious feeling is created (or, alternatively, revealed), and the turning to God is motivated by it. But a feeling, whatever kind it may be, is not belief. It is worth remembering that usually, as soon as the fighting subsides, the blazing belief that appeared in the foxholes disappears. It seems to me that this phenomenon is better explained in the second way (and it is not necessarily a matter of laziness or lack of commitment and the like, as adherents of the first interpretation claim).

Belief in a Postmodern World

What is the motivation of so many people for classifying belief in God as an emotion, and indeed as a non-factual claim altogether (or perhaps merely a report of a mental state)? If this is so widespread on the one hand, and so foolish and mistaken on the other, there must be some reason for it. It seems to me that such an approach can come from two contradictory sources. On the one hand, atheists claim that it is a hallucination, for the claim "God exists" has no empirical or other basis. Therefore, in their view, it cannot be a factual claim. As we have seen, they are mistaken about this, since the categorical classification of the claim has nothing to do with the question of how, if at all, one can ascertain its truth. What they ought to say is that it is a false factual claim (not that there is no factual claim here at all). On the other side, believers make a similar claim as well, mainly in order to escape difficulties (What is your proof? How do you know? I have evidence against you: they have just discovered a gene responsible for belief, and so on). Thus those who define themselves as postmodern believers (Rav Shagar and some of his students testify of themselves that they hold such a view)^[5] explain that their belief is not rational, but stems from a lofty and deep religious emotion that owes no account and no apology to reasonable atheistic arguments.

In my view, the meaning of this claim is: leave us alone—we are atheists. When we say that we believe in God, we are not making a factual claim about the world, but at most describing our own subjective mental state. About that, as we have seen, there is no point in arguing. As stated, they are right, but the price of this argument is in fact the abandonment of belief. This is a dispute between two atheists: those who possess religious feeling and those who do not. What is the point of arguing about feelings?

Rav Shagar, when discussing ideas and beliefs in our world, speaks of this in terms of dancing in the "circle of differences." A circle is a geometric shape all of whose points are equally distant from the center. Everyone is mistaken to the same degree, and no one even claims to be at the center (and if they do, then they are mistaken). Each person has his own point of view, his own narrative, and therefore everyone is right—and above all, therefore we are exempt from confronting the difficulties that arise in our belief. We are all equally wrong or equally right, and in fact there is no one who is right and no one who is wrong. If one wishes to deepen the powerful impression that such talk leaves on listeners, one should add statements such as: we must make an Olympic leap into the empty void, dive while clutching the husk of Amalek or the husk of Nogah, and live in a deeply existential fashion while holding the contradiction in a bipolar grip on both its sides. This nonsense sounds very profound to some people, for some reason, but in fact it says nothing. What it really says is: I have no solution to the difficulties, but I am not brave enough to draw the atheistic conclusions that follow from them. I prefer to take seriously the hallucinations imposed upon me.

The conclusion is that there is no escaping one of two interpretations of these postmodern sayings: either you are an atheist who experiences religious feelings, or you are a believing person who, on the basis of your religious feeling, also infers a factual claim about the world. If the second interpretation is correct, then you have gained nothing. You are still not exempt from confronting the difficulties that this raises. After all, such feelings can also mislead, and if there are good arguments pointing to such an error, you must deal with them. The meaning of this is that the believer’s agreement that these are not factual claims about the world is either unconditional surrender (covert atheism) or a statement that is of no use whatsoever and in fact says nothing.

It is important to understand that even if some conclusion of mine is reached by mystical means (whatever that means) and not by rational means, this does not exempt it from standing up to logical tests. Even in philosophy of science it is customary to distinguish between the context of discovery and the context of justification. The context of discovery deals with the question of how the scientist arrives at the theory he proposes. The context of justification says how to examine it at the empirical level, and whether it stands up to those tests. Even if the theory was discovered by a revelation of Elijah, or in the dream of my late grandmother, that does not affect in any way its being a factual claim. Moreover, it will be accepted only if it withstands the accepted logical and empirical tests. By contrast, a theory discovered through impeccably systematic rational work, but which does not withstand the empirical tests of justification, will be summarily rejected. Exactly so, a belief that I reached by mystical means may be accepted if it stands up to tests and to arguments of refutation. If not, no appeal to mysticism can save it.

Thus, for example, a belief that I reached by mystical or emotional means cannot contradict another belief of mine. The fact that, from the standpoint of the context of discovery, this belief came by a mystical or emotional route does not touch the context of justification, that is, the examination of it as such. Suppose that by mystical means I arrived at the conclusion that God can create a stone that He cannot lift. Does that mean there is no contradiction in this with the claim that He is omnipotent? Does it mean that, from the standpoint of belief, one can really speak of such a stone? It means none of these things (see on this the second chapter of the second book). When I make a factual claim, such as that God can create such a stone, I must solve the difficulties that accompany it or give it up, and it makes no difference whatsoever by what path I arrived at this claim. This is the meaning of viewing belief in God as a factual claim.

Emotion versus Intuition: Belief and Knowledge

I have devoted several books to the subject discussed here,^[6] and therefore here I shall only briefly summarize what is necessary for our purposes. What leads people to identify belief with mysticism is the absence of an empirical basis. It is very difficult to see belief in God as a scientific claim, since I do not see how one could subject it to an empirical test. Moreover, even a logical argument that would bring us to the conclusion that there is a God is based on premises, and those premises themselves require explanation and a source. Hence the tempting conclusion that this is emotion (or a claim of mystical origin; see below). But as we have seen, this way of relating to the matter is mistaken. Here I will try to clarify another aspect of that mistake.

Every logical argument is based on premises, and therefore belief is not exceptional in this respect. Every insight that we have built on a logical argument rests on the premises of that argument. From where are the premises themselves received? Seemingly we have returned again to emotion. But, as I explained, emotion asserts nothing about the world. The premises on which we base a factual conclusion are necessarily claims that assert something about the world. Therefore it is important here to distinguish between emotion and intuition. Intuition is a tool that gives us, in an immediate way, various insights about the world and beyond, and therefore it must not be confused with emotion. Emotion is something subjective, whereas intuition is our capacity to arrive at an insight about the world without direct observation and without a logical argument that grounds it. Thus, for example, a person who loves a certain woman experiences an emotion. As such, there is no room to argue with him. If I do not love her, I have no dispute with him (as we saw with respect to religious feeling). By contrast, if I am struggling with how to solve a difficult mathematical problem, and suddenly a mathematical genius appears and informs me that the answer is 7, and when I ask him how he got there he answers: I had a feeling—this is a mistaken and misleading expression. What he really means is: I had an intuition. What is the difference? Intuition can give us factual claims about the world, and therefore those claims are judged in terms of truth or falsity. Whoever disagrees that the solution is 7 is in a dispute with the genius who solved the problem. It cannot be that both are right. This is unlike emotional contexts, where there is no room for argument (each person with his own feelings). The treatment of intuition as a kind of emotion stems from an outlook that I called in those books "analyticity." This is the view that anything not proved is necessarily subjective emotion. In the analytic picture, factual claims are only proved claims (empirically or logically). Therefore first premises are, by definition, emotions, since they have no empirical or logical source (for if they did, they would not be first premises).

But it is clear that from an analytic outlook one cannot accept any meaningful claim about the world. If the claim derives from a logical argument, then its premises are unacceptable (because we have no proof for them). And if it is the result of empirical observation, all that you can say is that what you observed indeed occurred. But the general law that science derives from the particular cases we have observed is merely a "feeling," for we have no proof—logical or empirical—for it. In my books (see especially the second book of the quartet) I have shown that even scientific conclusions are unacceptable within the analytic conception.

If so, analyticity means skepticism. So what is the alternative? How can one nevertheless avoid skepticism? The only alternative is the view that I there called "syntheticity." According to this view, intuition has a special status. We are prepared to accept its products, despite the uncertainty that accompanies it. In the synthetic position, intuition, unlike emotion, is a legitimate tool by means of which we adopt insights that are factual claims even though we have no logical argument or direct empirical observation to ground them. In my books I show that intuition does indeed involve some kind of "observation," though not direct sensory observation. It is therefore no wonder that many people regard intuition as a mystical source (non-sensory observation). But they do not notice that all rational and scientific thought likewise rests on logical arguments, which themselves rest on premises, and those premises, as noted, are received from intuition. If so, in all fields—belief, science, or any other field of thought—we rely on "mysticism."

Therefore, it seems to me more correct to treat intuition as an ordinary tool of thought (in fact, it is the basis of thinking in all fields), and since it is the basis of rational thought, there is no reason to exclude it from the realm of rationality. Belief in God is based on intuition, exactly as science is based on it, and as philosophy and law are based on it, and as every other domain of thought is based on it. In this sense, there is nothing especially mystical about religious belief.

In the books mentioned above, I explained that belief, not necessarily in the religious sense, is nothing other than a human capacity that forms part of our rational abilities. Our basic beliefs (the principle of causality, logic, induction, spatial conceptions, probability and statistics, and more) are the basis of all our rational, philosophical, and scientific structures. This basis itself has no justification outside itself, because it is the basis that provides justification for everything else. Therefore belief is not the opposite of knowledge. Belief is not experience and not emotion, but simply knowledge. Belief is the basic capacity to distill insights about the world and know them by means that are neither logical nor empirical. Once we have adopted them, we can derive from them all the other conclusions of our rational thinking. Belief in God is an application of this capacity to the recognition of the existence of God. Just as I believe that only one straight line passes between two points (in straight Euclidean space), and that without proof and without the ability to see it directly with my eyes, and just as I believe in the principle of causality (that everything has a cause), likewise without any proof and without the ability to derive it from empirical observation,^[7] so too I can believe in God without observing Him. Sometimes I believe in something more general, in some premise, and derive the existence of God from it by a logical argument. We shall see examples of such arguments later in the book.

Is Belief in God a Scientific Claim?

I wrote above that belief, that is, the claim "God exists," is a factual claim about the world. How can one arrive at it? At first glance it seems that two toolboxes are available to us: the scientific-observational (the empiricist), and the philosophical-logical (the rationalist). It is quite clear that direct observation cannot yield belief in God (we have no way to observe Him directly). In several of my books I have already pointed out that a logical argument cannot provide the goods either, for if an argument is presented whose conclusion is that God exists, then it is clear that the conclusion was already latent in its premises (the conclusion of a logical argument cannot contain information beyond what is contained in its premises).^[8]

One of the common ways of arriving at belief in God is the physico-theological argument (Kant’s term), which proves the existence of a creator from the complexity or inner suitability of the world. We shall deal with this argument in the third notebook of the book (I devoted almost an entire book to it, Elohim Mesachek Be-kubiyot). Here I only wish to present my conclusion that the way of arriving at belief is not essentially different from the way we arrive at various scientific generalizations (laws of nature). Above we saw that belief is based on the capacity we called intuition, and this is the basis of scientific thinking in general. Belief in God can be based on considerations very similar to scientific considerations. Just as the law of gravitation is accepted as a generalization from many cases in which we saw bodies with mass attract one another, so belief in God is accepted from the generalization that entities like our world must have a cause, or a maker (in Kant’s terminology, this is the physico-theological argument). This is a remarkably rational conclusion, although there are those who challenge it (wrongly, in my opinion).

We have seen that belief is a factual claim. We have also seen that it can be derived from the facts by a form of reasoning very similar to scientific generalization. Later in the book we shall see that nevertheless this is not a scientific claim, because it cannot be subjected to empirical test. Try to think of an experiment such that, if it failed, we would be forced to abandon belief in God, and if it succeeded it would confirm belief in Him. I do not think there is such an experiment. If so, the claim "God exists" is not a scientific claim, but it is certainly proper to regard it as a rational claim. There is no need at all to resort to mysticism.

The Ways of Arriving at Belief in God

Different people, of course, arrive at belief by different and varied paths, and the physico-theological argument is only one of them. Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason , speaks of three such ways: the ontological argument—which is based on conceptual analysis; the cosmological argument; and the physico-theological argument—which are both based on quasi-scientific generalizations. In other writings, Kant presents an argument from morality, which is somewhat different from the previous three. Each of these four arguments will be discussed in one of the four notebooks in this book.

Beyond these four ways, some base their belief on revelation and the tradition that testifies to it, while others base it on religious feeling; and, as we have seen, their implicit assumption is that the feeling testifies to the existence of God in the world outside us. There are those who, even without religious feeling, simply find it obvious that God exists, full stop. This is a first premise rooted in primary intuition, not a product of logical reasoning. As I shall remark in the first notebook, an intuitive first premise (what I will there call "simple belief") is a perfectly legitimate rational consideration, for even more complex arguments are ultimately based on primary intuitions (which yield our premises).^[9]

Of course, every such proof must first define the object with which it is concerned. As we shall see later in the book, the ontological argument (discussed in the first notebook) assumes a definition of God as a being possessing all perfections—the perfect being. The cosmological argument (discussed in the second notebook) defines Him as the creator of the world ex nihilo—the Creator. The physico-theological argument (discussed in the third notebook and in the first part of the fourth) defines Him as the creator of the world’s complexity—the engineer/assembler. The argument from morality (discussed in the third part of the fourth notebook) defines Him as the source of moral validity—the legislator, and so on.

If someone accepts only one of the arguments, then he has proved the existence of the being with which that argument is concerned. And what of one who accepts all of these arguments? He could conclude that there are many gods, each of whom is the subject of a different argument. Another possibility is to assume that this is the same object, who is both the engineer and the legislator and the creator and the perfect being and the source of the validity of morality. After all, there is no contradiction among these definitions, since they can characterize one and the same object. Although at first glance there is no direct philosophical grounding for the claim that this is one being, one may invoke Occam’s razor in its favor, according to which it is preferable to posit as few entities as possible. As in science and in the rest of our fields of thought, simplicity is a criterion of truth. We shall return to this point at the end of the book.

Is Belief in God Rational?

Let us now return to the discussion of the arguments themselves. Although this may perhaps seem surprising, all these paths can certainly be regarded as thoroughly rational paths. There is no need whatsoever to resort to mysticism in order to ground belief, and there is no need to regard this intuition/belief as something mystical, that is, something above the rational. In my articles on YNET and in my book Elohim Mesachek Be-kubiyot, I showed that rational thought almost compels belief in God. A rational person cannot be an atheist, for two reasons: A. As we saw above, belief is the basis of rationality. Without it there is no basis for rational thought (at the foundation of rational thinking there are very many assumptions for which there is no reason to adhere to them without belief. See on this the first part of the fourth notebook). B. Because there are excellent, logical, supremely rational arguments that lead to the conclusion that God exists. The objections and atheistic arguments, even those formulated in impressive language and uttered with absolute scientific confidence (as is their wont), are generally implausible (see there and there). We shall deal with all of this in the four notebooks that follow in the book.

Fundamentalism and Certainty

So why, despite all this, do so many people identify belief with mysticism? And why do so many religious people resort to mysticism as part of their religious world? I wish to argue that this stems from a fundamental crisis rooted in the analytic conception.^[10] The crisis rests on two claims: A. If something is not proven, then it is subjective and there is no justification for accepting it as a factual claim. B. It is impossible to prove anything rationally (logically or empirically). Every proof is based on premises that themselves are unproven, and every general scientific claim (as distinct from a specific claim about a specific event that we observed) is the result of a generalization for which we have no indication that it is correct. Once a person understands these two simple insights, three paths stand before him: 1. Skepticism. The person retains both premises. Therefore, if no claim can be proven, and only proven claims are acceptable, then no claim is acceptable. 2. Fundamentalism. To retain premise A and deny B. The meaning of this is to give up rationality and adopt certainties that we reached by mystical means, that is, means that are "above reason." What characterizes the second option, of course, is radicalism and lack of criticism. If something comes to me from above, by non-rational means, then it is not open to criticism. This is the basis of religious fundamentalism, which has found for itself a mystical supra-rational source (divine revelations, prophets, and various sages), and therefore adopts everything without rational and logical criticism.

It is worth noticing that these two opposing phenomena, skepticism and fundamentalism, have a common philosophical root: the identification of truth with certainty, that is, the notion that only something proven and certain is acceptable as true. As I tried to show in the introduction to my book Emet Ve-lo Yatziv, this is the reason the pluralistic West is unable to cope with radical-fundamentalist Islam, since both share a common root. My conclusion there was that there is also a third alternative, and here I propose it in the religious context: 3. Syntheticity. To abandon premise A (that what is not proven is unacceptable), and retain premise B (that there is no claim that is certain or rationally proven). Now the dilemma does not arise at all: indeed, there is no way to prove anything, but it is not correct to say that unproven claims are unacceptable.^[11]

In the previous chapter we dealt with the superiority of reason; now we can see that the meaning of the conception I am proposing is syntheticity, and that this is the only alternative to skepticism on the one hand and to fundamentalism on the other. According to this conception, belief in God is also not certain, and certainly every other claim we make about the world, including most of the interesting factual claims, is not certain. In the rational and non-fundamentalist conception, belief in God, like belief in anything else, is not absolute. In the first part of the second book we shall see that belief is open to rational and logical criticism, for reason is also the basis of belief, and therefore it is clear that it can also qualify, process, and criticize it.

Like every conclusion of human reason, belief too cannot be certain. This has nothing to do with God’s omnipotence and wisdom, for belief is a human condition. It is our conclusion regarding His existence, and therefore it is exposed to all the flaws of human thought. Belief is not exceptional within the totality of our thinking.

Fundamentalism is not prepared to accept rational criticism of principles of belief and tradition, and as we have seen its basis lies in identifying belief with certainty (and in understanding that rationality cannot create certainty). But as we have seen, this is merely an evasion of the problems. The fundamental problem from which fundamentalism tries to flee is the inability to prove belief and to be convinced of it by rational tools, and therefore it resorts to mysticism that is supposedly immune to criticism. In the first part of the second book we shall see that fundamentalism is nothing but the refuge of the lazy (those too lazy to think) or of the powerless (those who have no systematic and logical answers to the difficulties they face). Therefore precisely those who have no answers to difficulties will use, with greater force and intensity, claims such as "That is heresy!" "It is forbidden to say/think such things," "We believe that such-and-such is so," and so on. We shall see there that the flight from the need to analyze and think critically is accomplished by vagueness on the one hand and by fundamentalism, which forbids criticism and regards it as illegitimate, on the other.

The more polite among the proponents of this approach make a point of using formulations such as: "On the contrary, we encourage criticism—but constructive criticism, not destructive criticism. Criticism that does not bring you to abandon the path, but only to clarify better why our path is the correct one. To deepen belief, and Heaven forbid, not to examine it." This is throwing dust in people’s eyes, because the way of a rational approach is to draw conclusions from the logical insights to which one arrives. Clarification whose conclusions are fixed in advance is not rationality but fundamentalism in disguise. In such an approach, conclusions are not the result of thought, but a goal dictated מראש to it. Someone once said that philosophy takes premises and derives conclusions from them, whereas theology takes conclusions and derives premises from them.^[12]

Conclusions: Back to the Tactical Plane

We have seen that belief is not emotion but a factual claim. On the other hand, a rational approach to belief brings us to the conclusion that we cannot have complete certainty about it (just as we cannot about anything else). The fact that God is omnipotent and omniscient does not change anything in this respect. Belief is a claim about what I, as a human being, understand of the world, and as such it is exposed to all the limitations and qualifications that exist in my human thinking.

Religious education that presents belief as something certain is in fact challenging those who have doubts and difficulties by implying that they are not true believers. Therefore, many people in whom doubts about belief arise experience anxiety lest they are in fact no longer believers at all. I have personally met many such people who came to consult with me and revealed to me the fact that, despite the costume they wear (kaftans, suits and hats, or just knitted skullcaps and sandals, Heaven help us), they do not believe at all. When I ask my interlocutor how he reached that conclusion, I usually receive an answer like, "I realized that there cannot be certainty, because there is no proof for anything."

This is the fruit of an education that identifies belief with certainty. It has two main drawbacks: 1. It is essentially mistaken, because certainty about anything is impossible for human beings. Just as I have often erred in the past, there is no reason to assume that this cannot happen to me again in the future, including with respect to belief and tradition. 2. It is harmful, because it leads thoughtful, critical, and courageous people to abandon their religious commitment because of the lack of proofs. Therefore it is so important to shatter this sacred cow that identifies belief with certainty. It is not true, and it cannot be true. Whoever testifies of himself that he is certain of his belief, in my estimation either lies to me or lies to himself (that is, he does not really understand what certainty is).

This does not mean that rational believers must conduct themselves hesitantly and refrain from adhering to religious and Torah commitments and paying prices for them. On the contrary: just as I accept other scientific or evaluative claims, there is no reason not to accept belief as true and whoever denies it as mistaken, though not with certainty. Certainty is not required in any way for serious religious commitment, and in fact even if it were required, it is simply impossible (at least for one who insists on intellectual honesty). It is true that commitment to every halakhic detail will be lower when one lives with this awareness, because the details, like belief itself, are open to rational criticism. But if we have reached the conclusion that a certain detail is true and correct in our view, there is no reason not to adhere to it and act in accordance with it with full commitment. Just as I accept the laws of nature, though they are not certain, so I accept belief in God (which to me personally seems no less certain than the laws of nature) and act accordingly. The degree of certainty that I can attain is sufficient certainty for me in every field, including the religious field. It seems to me that this is usually what people mean when they speak of certainty (unless they are deceiving themselves or others). This is certainty at the practical level, but it is not immune to logical criticism and to the conclusions and changes that may follow from it.

At the practical level, it is clear that fundamentalists adhere much more tightly to their path, for they see every detail as something that descended from on high and is therefore not exposed to criticism. When there is no room for criticism, it is easier to generate commitment (so long as people continue to buy the line). It is also likely that in such a society there will be less falling away from belief, but this stems from an education in vagueness and evasion of confrontation. Moreover, in the first notebook I shall argue that I doubt whether it is proper to call all such people believers, for they are such only because they have not subjected their belief to critical and rational examination. Had they done so, it is quite possible that they too would have given it up. On the logical plane, these are really covert atheists, or atheists in denial. The difference between them and those who subject belief to critical examination, whether they abandon the path or continue to adhere to it, lies mainly in courage and intellectual honesty, but not in belief. Therefore I am not sure that, in this comparison, fundamentalism necessarily comes out ahead. But even if it does, truth is also a consideration. To adopt "holy lies" merely in order to gain a smaller chance of abandonment seems to me a dubious path.

Put differently, the believers in fundamentalist belief cling tightly to God and His Torah, but these are probably the wrong God and the wrong Torah. They are very religious, but they hold the wrong religion. This recalls Maimonides’ parable of the elephant. In Guide of the Perplexed Part I, chapter 60, he discusses his doctrine of negative attributes, according to which nothing positive is to be said about God; one may only deny things of Him. And on this he writes:

Whoever ascribes an attribute to Him knows nothing but the name alone, for the thing to which he imagines this name to apply is something nonexistent, a false fabrication. It is as though he had applied this name to a nonentity, something that has no existence. The example is this: a person hears the name elephant and knows that it is a living creature, and seeks to know its form and true nature. Then one who errs, or who misleads him, says to him: it is a living creature with one leg and three wings, standing in the depth of the sea, its body transparent, with a broad human-like face and shape, speaking like a man, sometimes flying through the air and sometimes swimming like a fish. I do not say that this person has described the elephant differently from what it is, nor that he has merely fallen short of grasping the elephant. Rather, I say that the thing he imagines under this description is a false fiction, and there is nothing in existence that is like it. It is a nonentity to which he has given the name of an existing thing, like a fabulous bird or a man-horse, and other such imaginary forms to which this name has been attached from among existing things, whether by one name or a compound name. The matter here is exactly the same. For the Name, blessed be His name, exists—demonstration has established His existence—and what necessarily follows from necessary existence is absolute simplicity, as I shall explain. But that this simple essence, whose existence is necessary, should be, as people say, a subject possessing attributes and other notions attaching to it—this is something that cannot exist in any way, as demonstration has shown. And when we say that this essence, called God, for example, is an essence with many notions by which it is described, we have applied this name to sheer nonexistence. Reflect on how great the danger is in ascribing attributes to Him. What must be believed concerning the attributes that occur in the book of the Torah or in the books of the Prophets is that they are all meant to direct us to His perfection, exalted be He, and to nothing else; or else they are attributes of actions that proceed from Him, as we have explained.

He explains that if a person describes the elephant as a living creature with one leg and three wings, and so forth, he is not mistaken in describing the elephant; rather, he is describing something that is not an elephant. So too, one who says something positive about God (whereas according to Maimonides one must not do this, but only deny things of Him) is not mistaken in describing God, but is speaking about something else and calling it by the same name. In fact, he is an atheist, because the god in whom he believes is not the right God. We shall address the issue of negative attributes again in the second book.

When Rav Kook came to the Land of Israel and saw the people of the Old Yishuv in Jerusalem, he wrote things strikingly similar (in Orot Ha-Emunah, p. 25):

There is a denial that is like affirmation, and an affirmation that is like denial. How so? A person affirms that the Torah is from Heaven, but that Heaven is pictured for him in forms so strange that nothing at all remains of true belief. And how is denial like affirmation? A person denies that the Torah is from Heaven, but his denial is based only on the impression he absorbed of the image of Heaven from minds filled with thoughts of vanity and chaos, and he says: the Torah has a source loftier than this. He begins to find its foundation in the greatness of the human spirit, in the depth of its morality and the height of its wisdom. Although he has not yet reached the center of truth, nevertheless this denial is as important as affirmation, and it continues to draw nearer to the affirmation of authentic belief. And such a topsy-turvy generation must be judged favorably. "Torah from Heaven" is a parable for all the general principles and details of belief, with respect to the relation between their verbal formulations and their inner essence, which is the main thing sought in belief.

What he means to say is that sometimes people deny because the Heaven that is portrayed to them is so constricted and repellent that truly it is not fitting to believe in it. That is not the right Heaven, and therefore this denial contains great belief. Such deniers are convinced that Heaven cannot be so narrow. Implicitly, they believe in a greater Heaven. And there are those who believe in a Heaven so mistaken that their belief is like denial. How can one believe in such a Heaven? In the Old Yishuv that he encountered, there was great fear of Heaven, but the Heaven that they feared was a narrow and mistaken Heaven, not the Heaven in which it is fitting to believe—that is, not the true Heaven.

Even if one does not accept these words literally at the philosophical-logical level (for this can be said, if at all, only where we are dealing with essential and necessary attributes of God, and certainly not regarding every mistake in the conception of divinity), it is still clear that there is a claim here about a defect in belief, exactly as in our discussion. Fundamentalist and uncritical belief may be very strong and committed, but it may be belief in the wrong God, or at least a mistaken belief about the right God. Therefore it is doubtful whether the success (in the sense of a smaller chance of abandonment) justifies holding onto it. Beyond that, in the long run fundamentalism may actually lead to more severe and greater abandonment, because in the end the bubble bursts and many people encounter the difficulties and problems, and then it becomes clear that they have no tools to deal with them. Moreover, the ability of many people who belong to fundamentalist societies to cope with difficulties and not abandon the path is based to a large extent on those very people who crossed the fundamentalist lines and developed ways of coping with the difficulties. They provide the answers, and thus in effect return and preserve the fundamentalist society, which then prides itself on its power of preservation and survival in contrast to those outside it. For all these reasons, to the best of my judgment, these comparisons of success and survival have no great significance. The question of truth and of correct belief is far more important and meaningful.

The Structure and Aim of the Book: Its Role in the Trilogy

Here I come to the purpose of the book. The arguments that will be examined here are meant to help the reader examine his belief on the initial philosophical plane, and to deal with the various counterarguments without denying the difficulties and without concealing the weak points in the different arguments. I will try to put the premises on the table, to define the concepts in a reasonable way, and to point out the weak points in the various arguments as well as their strong points. To the best of my judgment, this is generally not done in the traditional literature.

In each of the first four notebooks I deal with a different type of argument for the existence of God, according to the Kantian classification mentioned above. The first notebook deals with the ontological argument. The second with the cosmological argument. The third with the physico-theological argument. The fourth with the argument from morality and with several arguments of the logical pattern that I shall there call "theological arguments." The fifth notebook deals with the move from the philosophical God (with whom we have been dealing until that point) to religious commitment.

Each of the arguments analyzed in the various notebooks is based on premises (including the first, which purports to be a priori). Therefore all of them are open to various criticisms, and every reader should independently formulate his position regarding each of them, and of course not rely uncritically on those who came before him. I will say already here that there will be no certainty here, and it is quite possible (indeed likely) that certainty will be undermined for those who presently possess it. But as stated, a person cannot have certainty in any area of life, and belief is no exception.

In the next two books I shall continue the critical discussion and direct it to the fields of Jewish thought (the second book) and Jewish law (the third book). One may say generally that if this book is the "for," in that it offers a basis for conventional belief-thinking (aside from the undermining of certainty mentioned above), then the next two belong to the category of the "against." They will contain criticism, sometimes fundamental and incisive, of the foundations to which we have become accustomed in traditional thought. In that sense as well, the first book, with its notebooks, completes the overall picture presented in the trilogy.

As stated, this book is built as a chain of five notebooks, each of which is almost an independent essay. The next two will be built in the standard way.

1. See also my book Emet Ve-lo Yatziv, chapters 12, 16, and 17. ↑

2. The logical positivists, a European philosophical school of the early twentieth century, held that the existence of an empirical or logical way to verify the truth of a claim is a condition for defining it as a factual claim. This is not the accepted view. ↑

3. There is another claim, namely that the definition of the concept of God is vague and therefore the claim is empty of content. We shall enter this question later in the book. ↑

4. On this distinction and its implications, see a sharp discussion at the beginning of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, and the discussion of it in my book Emet Ve-lo Yatziv at the end of chapter 24. ↑

5. See my book Emet Ve-lo Yatziv, chapters 24 and 28. ↑

6. See my quartet, especially the first book, Shtei Agalot Ve-kadur Pore’ach. See also my book Emet Ve-lo Yatziv, Yedioth Sefarim, 2016. These books are all devoted to this very important point. ↑

7. This was pointed out by the philosopher David Hume. See also my books: Mada’ei Ha-Hofesh, in chapters 5 and 6, and Shtei Agalot in chapter 1. See also Emet Ve-lo Yatziv in chapter 7 and chapter 9 and their surrounding discussion. ↑

8. This is what is called the emptiness of the analytic. See on this my book Shtei Agalot in the first section, and at greater length in my book Emet Ve-lo Yatziv. ↑

9. One exception is Pascal’s wager. This is a mistaken and absurd argument, and therefore I do not discuss it here. See an analysis in the second chapter of my book Elohim Mesachek Be-kubiyot. ↑

10. See details in the introduction to my book Emet Ve-lo Yatziv, and in my article in the journal Psifas, issue 2, September 2014. ↑

11. In my books I discuss the idea known in philosophy as "the emptiness of the analytic." If above we noted that demonstrability is not a condition for acceptability, one can actually show more than that: proven claims add no information whatsoever. Necessary claims are usually trivial. These are logical tautologies such as "necessarily (X or not X)," or specific scientific claims that we observed directly, such as "at this moment this particular stone fell to the earth," and the like. The meaningful claims in our lives (values, beliefs, general laws of nature, and so on) are never proven and therefore are not certain. If we assume that such claims are not acceptable, we shall be left with nothing but a collection of trivial claims. As human beings we are condemned to a life of uncertainty, and we will never be able to know anything with complete certainty. What we have seen here, in fact, is that the price of rationality is the abandonment of certainty. The alternatives are skepticism or fundamentalism. See on this the first part of Shtei Agalot Ve-kadur Pore’ach, the book Emet Ve-lo Yatziv, which is devoted entirely to this point, and also my article Avraham Avinu Ve-Kova’o—In Praise of Begging the Question, Tzohar 17, Winter 5764, p. 111. See also the appendix to this chapter, where I will דווקא defend begging the question. ↑

12. The entire fourth notebook is devoted to an extended discussion of the emptiness of this distinction. ↑