Faith – Lesson 8

Table of Contents

• Faith as a factual claim and the difficulty of arriving at it
• The failures of the logical-philosophical route
• The failures of the scientific route and the exception of “Test Me now in this”
• Free choice, truth, and moral judgment according to Leibowitz
• A model of the three stages of intellectual maturation
• Three ways out: skepticism, fundamentalism, and synthesis
• The definition of fundamentalism and the distinction from adopting something without proof
• The synthetic adult versus the dogmatic child
• Authority, the doctor, and Maimonides as reasonable grounds for trust
• The tradition argument of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, pragmatism, and not subordinating truth to utility
• Statistical arguments, Torah codes, and parapsychology
• Reading philosophy, Duties of the Heart, and the prohibition on thinking
• The maturation of civilization: from Greece to positivism to postmodernism
• Rhetoric as a third tool and faith as a cognitive capacity
• Those who are not “philosophers” and relying on others

Summary

General Overview

The text presents faith as a factual claim about the world, not as a feeling, and asks how one arrives at it if not through science and not through philosophical logic. It argues that a logical argument begs the question and therefore cannot turn an atheist into a believer, and that the scientific route is not applicable because the thesis of God has no experiments or empirical predictions—except for the narrow exception of “Test Me now in this” in the context of the tithe. It then presents a model of intellectual maturation in three stages—dogmatic childhood, rationalist adolescence that demands proofs, and adulthood that is forced to live without certainty—and from this derives three possible responses: skepticism, fundamentalism, or a “synthetic” position that accepts plausibility and common sense while remaining open to criticism. Finally, it argues that the tool that allows the synthetic adult to justify and apply criticism beyond deductive logic is rhetoric and non-deductive logic, and that faith is a broad cognitive capacity that is present in science as well and may be the path to faith in God.

Faith as a factual claim and the difficulty of arriving at it

Faith is defined as a claim about the world, not as an emotion or experience, even though it can be expressed through emotion and experience. The question is how one reaches the conclusion that there is a God or that there is no God. Two possible “toolkits” are presented, the observational-scientific one and the logical-philosophical one, and it is determined that neither can bring a person to faith as an end point.

The failures of the logical-philosophical route

A logical argument always begs the question, because the conclusion is already embedded in the premises, and therefore it cannot take a “real atheist” to faith. The logical argument can only expose that someone who thinks he is an atheist is in fact not one, because he made a mistake in diagnosing his own premises. The fear of engaging in philosophy is presented as unjustified, because a conclusion of heresy reached through inquiry only reveals a state that existed beforehand and does not “turn” a believer into a heretic.

The failures of the scientific route and the exception of “Test Me now in this”

It is argued that there is no way to observe God scientifically, and that the thesis of God is not a scientific theory because it does not generate predictions that can be tested empirically and falsified. The only exception brought is the verse “Test Me now in this,” in the sages’ interpretation regarding the tithe, where one is supposedly allowed to test whether a person who gives tithes “becomes wealthy.” It is argued that people do not carry out such a systematic experiment, perhaps out of fear of undesirable results, and instead what is common are unserious anecdotal stories. Experiments on prayer are described as having been done mainly by Christians, with controversial results, and it is said that “Jews don’t dare do things like that.”

Free choice, truth, and moral judgment according to Leibowitz

It is argued that if there were an experiment showing that God exists, “there would be no free choice,” and Leibowitz is cited as saying that the Jewish people, right after the revelation at Mount Sinai, immediately made the Golden Calf in order to show that free choice does not depend on ignorance of the truth. Free choice is described as the choice to act against what is clearly known to be right, similar to murder or theft, where a person knows that it is immoral. The claim is made that one can be judged for theological decisions only if the truth is clear and the person chooses not to follow it, whereas if someone honestly arrived at the conclusion that there is no God, that is “judgment” or “discretion,” not “choice.”

A model of the three stages of intellectual maturation

The model presents childhood, in which one dogmatically accepts what parents and teachers say, and adolescence, in which a “rebellion” awakens in the form of the demand: “Who told you that? Prove it.” Adolescence is described as a rationalistic optimism according to which only proof and certainty make something acceptable. At the transition point to adulthood, the adolescent discovers that “you can’t prove anything,” because every argument has unproven premises and the conclusion rests on them.

Three ways out: skepticism, fundamentalism, and synthesis

The crisis arises from two assumptions: that only something certain is acceptable, and that nothing at all is certain; from these follows skepticism, in which “nothing is acceptable.” The second route gives up the claim that there is no certainty and replaces it with certainty “above reason” by means of mystical tools, and this is defined as fundamentalism. The third route gives up the demand that only certainty is acceptable and accepts adopting positions on the basis of plausibility and common sense, while living without certainty, and this is defined as a synthetic approach “following Kant.”

The definition of fundamentalism and the distinction from adopting something without proof

Fundamentalism is defined as holding a position that is not open to critical testing and that no counterargument can shake, not necessarily as extremism or cruelty. It is argued that adopting things without proof is not in itself fundamentalism, but only when a person is absolutely convinced of them and is unwilling to consider counterarguments. Science is brought as an example of a principled willingness to accept counterarguments, and therefore it is not fundamentalist.

The synthetic adult versus the dogmatic child

It is argued that the synthetic adult may look to the adolescent as though he has “gone back to being a child,” because he too accepts things without proof, but the difference is that a synthetic adult adopts positions through judgment and discretion rather than because of authority, and he is willing to subject them to criticism and change them if persuaded. The adolescent has trouble identifying the difference because in his biography he knows only the stage of childhood and the stage of demanding proofs, not the stage of adulthood that accepts plausibility without certainty.

Authority, the doctor, and Maimonides as reasonable grounds for trust

A rational reliance on an expert such as a doctor is described, when there is a reasonable basis for trust, along with a willingness to change one’s position if it turns out that the expert was mistaken or an impostor. It is argued that one does not need to check everything personally, but one does need to exercise judgment in evaluating the authority and the field. The possibility is raised of relying on Maimonides if the reasoning for doing so is thoughtful and logical, while distinguishing between critical acceptance and blind obedience.

The tradition argument of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, pragmatism, and not subordinating truth to utility

A question is raised about a traditional basis for faith “like with Rabbi Yehuda Halevi,” in which an ancient event is passed down “from father to son,” and the answer given is that a synthetic adult examines whether the tradition seems plausible to him and does not demand proofs. It is argued that if a tradition is not true, there is no reason to preserve it “so that it will pass on to the next generation,” and truth is not subordinated to usefulness. The view that subordinates truth to what is useful is defined as pragmatism and presented as invalid.

Statistical arguments, Torah codes, and parapsychology

It is argued that courses presenting “secrets in the Torah” and predictions can be rational if they stand up to statistical testing, and someone who is not convinced also remains rational. A critique is presented of emotion and irrationality on both sides in arguments about Torah codes and parapsychology, with the claim that fundamentalism is expressed both in automatic acceptance and in automatic rejection without examination. A story is told about a “witch with pigeons” who supposedly cured jaundice, and it is concluded that a rational position is not to reject everything one does not understand, but to try to understand whatever is accepted after examination.

Reading philosophy, Duties of the Heart, and the prohibition on thinking

It is said that those who forbid the study of philosophy are taking an illogical and fundamentalist position, and that there is no logical basis for forbidding a person to examine his own views in order to formulate a position. It is said that the approach of studying Duties of the Heart in order to examine and weigh things is synthetic, whereas studying it “in order to accept because that’s what Duties of the Heart said” is fundamentalism. The expression is cited: “By God, even if Joshua son of Nun had said it, I would not obey him,” and the point is emphasized that one cannot command a person to accept “facts” that he does not accept, because that is a logical absurdity.

The maturation of civilization: from Greece to positivism to postmodernism

An analogy is presented between the maturation of a person and the maturation of civilization: “pagan” dogmatism as childhood, the adolescent rebellion in Greece as the demand for proofs, and the break in the middle of the twentieth century when logical positivism collapses and skeptical postmodernism is born. The flourishing of religious and mystical fundamentalism is also described as a response to the vacuum and the disappointment with science, which does not give answers to “the big questions” and does not provide certainty. It is argued that the postmodern West has trouble dealing with fundamentalism because both share the assumption that only certainty can obligate truth, and the solution is to propose the synthetic route, which holds on to truth without certainty and remains open to criticism.

Rhetoric as a third tool and faith as a cognitive capacity

It is argued that the synthetic adult is required to justify how he criticizes and adopts views without logical proofs, and it is proposed that the toolkit for this is rhetoric, which is not necessarily demagoguery. It is argued that a scientific theory itself is not certain and yet is still rational, and that there exists a “scientific logic” or non-deductive thinking, with mention of Francis Bacon and the attempt to formulate an inductive logic. The author notes that in his book Truth and Unstable he develops an account of non-deductive logic inspired by the thirteen hermeneutical principles and inspired by Rabbi HaNazir. Faith is defined as a broad intellectual faculty beyond logic, one that is present in science as well, and from within it, it is argued, one can also arrive at faith in God by means of the third tool of rhetoric/faith as a cognitive tool—a subject that is promised to be elaborated later.

Those who are not “philosophers” and relying on others

A question is raised about people who do not have a constant ability for clarification and analysis, and the answer given is that relying on another person is similar to relying on a doctor and is permitted if it is based reasonably and in a relevant field. It is argued that the problem begins when trust is not tested by successes or is not shaken even in the face of failures. Finally, it is argued that in matters of faith “there is no expertise,” similar to the claim that there are no experts in policy and security, and a quotation attributed to Ben-Gurion is brought: “The experts are experts in what was, not in what will be.”

Last time, basically, we came back with something of a dead end. I said that if we start from the premise that faith / belief is a factual claim, a claim about the world—not an emotion, not an experience, not all kinds of things like that; it can express itself in emotion and experience, but at base it’s a factual claim—then the question arises: how do we get there? Meaning, how do we arrive at the conclusion that there is God, or there isn’t God; how do we arrive at faith? And here, seemingly, there are two possible toolboxes. One toolbox is the observational-scientific one, and the second toolbox is the logical-philosophical one. Rational consideration or observation. And last time I showed—or at least I think I showed—that neither of them brings us to the goal; they can’t bring us to the goal, even before I start examining different arguments and different paths people propose. They simply cannot bring us there. The logical-philosophical route doesn’t bring us there because a logical argument always assumes what it seeks to prove. In a certain sense, the conclusion is already embedded in the premises, and therefore if I reach the conclusion that there is God on the basis of some logical-philosophical argument, that means it was already embedded somewhere in the premises. So it cannot take a genuine atheist to faith in God. What it can do is reveal to a person who thinks he is an atheist that he isn’t. Meaning, that he basically made a mistake in self-diagnosis, in identifying his actual inner convictions. That’s the logical-philosophical side. The scientific side is of course that there is no way to observe God scientifically. The theory that there is God is itself not a scientific theory. Meaning, it doesn’t produce predictions that can be subjected to empirical testing. There is no experiment where someone can tell me: do this experiment; if such-and-such happens then it supports the claim that there is God, and if the opposite happens then it falsifies it—as is supposed to exist in a scientific theory. As an aside, I’ll just say that if there is such an experiment, then maybe there is one experiment that the Torah itself tells us to do, or at least according to the interpretation the sages give it, and that is the verse “Test Me now with this.” What the Talmud says, in effect, is “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse,” and so on; yes, the Talmud says that one may test the Holy One, blessed be He, in this matter: if someone gives tithes and does not become wealthy, yes, and does not profit financially from it. In every other context there is the prohibition, “Do not test the Lord your God”; it is forbidden to test the Holy One, blessed be He. The possibility of testing, of doing what we might call a scientific experiment, exists only in the context of tithing. And let’s say I don’t know anyone who has done this experiment, and I suspect that’s not accidental. In other words, I suspect many people are afraid that if they do this experiment they’ll get results that don’t match what they want to get. And so somehow, although this is permitted, people don’t do it. Except, of course, for all kinds of tall tales about so-and-so who gave charity and immediately became a lottery millionaire the next morning, and all that nonsense—folk stories. When I talk about an experiment, I mean a scientific experiment. A scientific experiment means taking a thousand people—two groups of a thousand people in roughly the same economic condition, or with equal distribution—one thousand give charity, or give tithes, and the other thousand do not give tithes, and then you see what happens after, I don’t know, a year or ten years, and compare the economic situation of those thousand against those thousand. That’s more or less how you’re supposed to do a scientific experiment—of course there are more details. Nobody has done that. I have read that experiments on prayer have been done—the effectiveness of prayer, whether prayer helps or not. The results are highly controversial. Of course only Christians did this; Jews don’t dare do such things. To the Christians’ credit, they really believe—not like us, who only declare. Anyway, in short, to close the parenthesis: the empirical-scientific route does not seem able to take us to faith. The philosophical-logical route, as I said before, either we are already there and it reveals that to us, or if we’re not there, then no—it has no way to take a person to faith. And within that I also noted last time that the fear of engaging in philosophy, philosophical inquiry into faith and God and in general—that too, in my view, is an incorrect fear, an unjustified fear, because even if by means of philosophical inquiry I arrive at the conclusion that I do not believe in God—which is the fear of all those who try to forbid this or not recommend it—then in fact, as I said, that only reveals to me that I never believed in Him in the first place. It does not take me from believing in God to not believing in Him. And since that’s so, it merely reveals the fact that I was already an atheist beforehand. So it doesn’t make me an atheist. Therefore it seems to me that these fears are baseless. If there were an experiment showing that there is God, there would be no free choice. You know, Leibowitz said about that that the Jewish people, after the revelation at Mount Sinai, immediately made the golden calf. In other words, free choice is not based on your not knowing the truth. Free choice exists where you know the truth and still have the choice whether to go with it or not. When a person murders, he has a choice whether to murder or not, whether to steal or not, whether to commit a crime or not—he knows it’s immoral. The choice is not whether to think it’s right or not. On the contrary, if the choice is whether to think it’s right or not, that’s not choice—that’s judgment; you have to decide whether it’s right or not. A choice for which you are judged as a choice is something where, if you choose badly, you are judged, you are responsible for what you did. That exists only where it is clear to you what is right and you chose not to act that way. So in my opinion it’s actually the exact opposite. In other words, our ability to be judged or held accountable for our theological decisions—for having believed or not believed—exists only where the truth is in fact clear to us, and we chose not to go with it. Because if we truly and honestly reached the conclusion that we do not believe in God, then what do you want from me? That’s judgment, not choice. That’s my judgment; that’s what I think. So in my opinion that’s not correct. But according to what you said, there’s no harm in engaging in philosophy, but there’s also no benefit. It can’t bring one to faith, so why engage in it? Right, that’s what I’m saying. Those are two sides of the same coin; that’s exactly what I said. I said that on the one hand it doesn’t bring me to faith, and on the other hand I’m only noting parenthetically that for the same reason it also undermines the fears of those who forbid engaging in it. It simply turns out not to be a relevant tool. Maybe it’s relevant for revealing to me that I already believe, yes, or something like that—but not really for converting someone from atheism to faith or vice versa. In that sense that is exactly my claim: these two toolboxes cannot do anything in this field. So then what remains? And how, all the same, does one get to God? So here the concept of faith / belief therefore gets all sorts of interpretations, even like—say, if I go with what Professor Turkel said earlier, okay? Then what do people say? Fine—precisely because of this we have free choice, because we have no way of reaching the conclusion that there is God by a systematic, valid, acceptable route—neither science nor philosophical logic—therefore we have choice. Fine, okay, and now according to what am I going to choose? Suppose that’s true. According to what? What remains apart from the logical-philosophical route or the empirical-scientific route? It’s not that having choice means I’ll draw lots. A lottery isn’t choice either. And that’s another way of explaining why I disagree with the previous claim. In other words, it doesn’t enable choice, and the choice is meaningless anyway. So yes, the question is a good question. So basically, okay: if not the logical-philosophical toolbox and not the empirical-scientific toolbox, then what? What can bring me to faith? And again, here there are several paths, and I’ll describe it in a framework I’ve already spoken about before: the three stages of maturation. Yes, that’s my favorite model. The three stages of maturation are simply a model through which I try to illustrate the dilemma and the options for getting out of it, and basically the claim is this. I’ll describe a person’s maturation as a three-stage process—of course I’m speaking about intellectual maturation, not psychological-emotional maturation. And I’ll call those three stages childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. In the childhood stage, the child basically accepts what parents, teachers, adults tell him in a dogmatic way. In other words, if they say it, they probably know, and he accepts it. At some point adolescent rebellion arrives. Of course there are all kinds of psychological explanations for this, but I’m speaking on the intellectual plane. Adolescent rebellion on the intellectual plane means saying to the parents or the teachers: who says so? Prove it. Why should I accept something just because you say it? Yes, this is exactly the point—he leaves the phase of the child who accepts things just because adults say them, and he says to himself: wait a second, so what if they say so? Do they have proof? Let them prove it. Who says so? Maybe the opposite. Yes, these annoying questions of children or teenagers, to which of course we never have answers, which is why they’re so irritating. As lawyers say: never ask a question if you don’t know the answer. The other side of that coin is that a question that irritates you is usually a question you have no answer to. That’s the other side of the same coin. In any case, what does this question assume in the background? The fact that children say “who says so? prove it. maybe the opposite?”—yes, these vexing questions—basically contains a certain outlook which in some sense is optimistic. It says: I will be a rational person, not like my idiot father. I will accept things only if they are proven to me. In other words, if I don’t have proof, I don’t intend to accept it. I’m a smart person, a rational person, I exercise judgment and make decisions—not just because somebody said so. I’m ending my dogmatic period as a child, and now I’ve matured—yes, I’m already a teenager—and from now on only reason; reason will answer everything. Fine. A few years pass, our rationalist teenager grows up, and the important crossroads arrives, what I call the crossroads of maturation—the transition from adolescence to adulthood. And at that crossroads what happens is that our nice teenager discovers that nothing can be proved. You can’t prove anything, as is well known. Those sitting here are already adults, I think we’re past that age, and we all know it’s true. You can’t prove anything. At most what you can do is bring an argument. That’s what I said before about faith: you can bring some good argument whose conclusion is the claim you want to prove, but if you dig into it you’ll discover that the conclusion is already inside the premises. You didn’t prove it; you assumed it—that’s begging the question. And from the other side, which is the other side of the same coin, I’m basically saying: if you bring an argument that proves this claim, that argument has premises—there are no arguments without premises—and the premises themselves you did not prove. So why should I accept this argument? In other words, in the end, the teenager who seeks proofs, who seeks certainty, is left facing a dead end. He basically says: yes, I seek certainty; I accept only things that have proof. If someone comes to me with an unproven claim, I won’t accept it. And then suddenly he discovers that nothing is proven. Nothing is proven. There is nothing proven. And then three paths lie before him. One path is to become a skeptic. Right? Because basically the crisis he is in—and by the way, the crisis he is in is exactly the dead end I spoke about earlier; that’s why I’m bringing this description here—the crisis he is in basically stems from two assumptions of his. First assumption: only what is certain is acceptable. What has proof, what is certain—only that is acceptable; that is the first assumption. Second assumption: nothing is certain. There is nothing that can be proved independently, yes, without unproved premises, and so basically nothing is certain. The obvious conclusion from these two assumptions is: if only what is certain is acceptable, and nothing is certain, then conclusion: nothing is acceptable. And then you become a skeptic, a pluralist, a postmodernist—I don’t know, all these funny names they give it; it’s all the same thing. In other words, you become a skeptic. Okay? That’s the obvious maturation. And then he reaches a state of skepticism, stops searching, and calms down. That’s one kind of adult. A second kind of adult—I’ll remind you again of the two assumptions that create the tangle: one, that only what is certain is acceptable; and the second, that nothing is certain. The first way out was to adopt both assumptions, and the conclusion is that if so, nothing is acceptable. Of course the next two possibilities are either to give up assumption A or to give up assumption B, right? There isn’t much combinatorics here. So to give up assumption B would mean saying that… or rather, I called it giving up assumption B: to say that there are certain things. It’s not true that nothing is certain. What, for example? Faith. All these statements that faith is above reason, faith is some kind of mystical certainty, supernatural, supra-rational, supra-philosophical; where philosophy ends, faith begins—and all sorts of slogans of that kind, which are simply a joke. But many people recite this, and again, it’s the result of that same crisis. It’s the only way out they found from that crisis. So what do they say? We give up the teenager’s conclusion that nothing is certain. Not true—there is certainty. Only what? The certainty is not obtained by logical-philosophical tools, but by some mystical tools, yes, transcendent ones. Some kind of thing above reason, some supra-sensory, supra-rational perception or whatever you want—I don’t know, you can already hear from my tone when I use these expressions what my attitude toward them is. But that’s how people talk; many people talk like that. And this is what I call fundamentalism. Why do I call it fundamentalism? Because we are used to relating to fundamentalist phenomena as extremism, exceptional cruelty, mainly in a religious context, but it seems to me that fundamentalism in its philosophical sense is something more abstract and more basic. I would define fundamentalism as holding a position that is not open to critical examination. In other words, reason has nothing to say about it. Therefore you are convinced it is correct, and no argument raised against it can unsettle it, because it is not subject to rational criticism. Meaning, you’ll tell the critic he’s a heretic and that’s it; you won’t bother answering him. You do not subject your thesis to rational and critical examination, and therefore you are a fundamentalist. Now, if you are a fundamentalist, then you hold your position absolutely—yes, without the possibility of undermining it, without the possibility of criticizing it. Now the question is only what that position is. It could be the position of Mother Teresa, who in effect advocated—she advocated helping every person, giving your life in a fundamentalist way. Nobody is going to shake her on that. So it’s not the fundamentalism of ISIS, of course, but it is also fundamentalism, because it is holding some position that does not stand up to critical examination. It’s just a fundamentalism that’s nicer to live next to. But there is the kind of fundamentalism that is usually what we call by that name—the fundamentalism of ISIS, al-Qaeda, or I don’t know, all those nice people—which is basically fundamentalism that advocates, in an uncritical way, an extreme position, an immoral position, a cruel position, I don’t know what to call it. So the point is not the extremism and the cruelty; the point is that you can’t talk to them. In other words, fundamentalism ultimately begins with the certainty you have in what you think. What you think could be many things. It’s just that if you think something that doesn’t harm others, people aren’t disturbed by your fundamentalism. Because what do I care if I can’t persuade Mother Teresa to be a little less moral? Fine, we’ll only gain from it. But if I can’t persuade ISIS not to slit people’s throats, that already sounds a bit more frightening or disturbing. And therefore that’s where fundamentalism bothers us. But fundamentalism in its essence is not necessarily connected to cruelty. Fundamentalism in its philosophical sense—again, as I define it and understand it—is the adoption of a position in a way that does not allow rational intellectual criticism. I don’t understand. We know that all the laws of nature cannot be proved. So if I really believe there is such a thing as gravity, does that mean I’m a fundamentalist? No. Because I can be persuaded that it isn’t true. Adopting things without proof is not fundamentalism. Adopting things without proof and being absolutely convinced of them—that is fundamentalism. Not submitting them, not being willing to accept counterarguments. Science is willing to accept counterarguments. Bring me a good counterargument against gravity and I’ll give up my belief in that law. At the moment I don’t know such an argument, but that doesn’t matter. If one appears, that’s not fundamentalism. I’m willing to accept counterarguments and I’ll consider them. In a moment I’ll come to the thesis you’re suggesting; that’s a third way. I’ll get there in a moment. I said there are three ways. So the first way is the skeptical way, which adopts both assumptions of the teenager: nothing is acceptable; nothing is certain, and only what is certain is acceptable. Put the two together and you get skepticism. The second way is if you give up the assumption that nothing is certain. How do you give it up? By saying: fine, not logic and philosophy—rather, I have exalted sources that give me truth, and therefore I can still arrive at certainty even though logic and philosophy do not give it to me. I leave rational thought and go to what I called fundamentalism, while still holding the position that only what is certain is acceptable. I did not give up that assumption. I gave up the assumption that nothing is certain, because there are certain things. But my criterion remains: only what is certain is acceptable. Therefore according to… A question: according to this, was Abraham our forefather a fundamentalist? Why? I very much want to think not—I didn’t know him—but I very much want… No, but we know him from the Torah, yes? According to what we know from the Torah, he believed in things he couldn’t… So you’re returning to Professor Turkel’s question from before, and I answered it. To believe in things for which you have no proof is not fundamentalism. To believe in things for which you have no proof and not be willing to submit them to critical examination—that is fundamentalism. In a moment I’ll get to that view; that’s the third view, and then maybe the difference will be clearer. So, as I said, the first view is skepticism, which adopts both assumptions. The view of fundamentalism adopts the first assumption and gives up the second. Only what is certain is acceptable, but there are certain things. It’s not true that there aren’t certain things. The certain things are what is above reason, fundamentalism, and so on. So that is the fundamentalist view. The third view is what I call the synthetic view, following Kant, and this is the view that says: I give up the first assumption, not the second. You are right that nothing is certain; I accept that assumption, that conclusion, however you want to call it. But I do not think that only what is certain is acceptable. That is the assumption I give up. It’s not true that only what is certain is acceptable. If something seems reasonable to me, that’s enough too. Why must one cross only the threshold of certainty, one hundred percent, in order to adopt something? It’s enough if it’s eighty percent—I don’t know, each person can set his line somewhere. Common sense: if it sounds reasonable to me, I accept it. Who said it has to be certainty? Notice that the rebellion of the Enlightenment began with the desire to get proof for everything. Only what was certain—that teenager was willing to accept. Maturity is exactly getting out of that. Maturity is saying: that is false hope; certainty is impossible. No tragedy—I’ll live without certainty, but I will still think things through and arrive at my conclusions even without certainty. This I call the path of synthetic maturity. Incidentally, as an aside: when an adult of the synthetic type has a child, and the child now reaches the period of enlightenment, and he asks his father, “who says so? prove it,” and you try to tell him, “Look, not everything has proof, but maybe proof isn’t always necessary,” the teenager smirks inwardly—we all know this, I think—and says to himself, “That old fool, I won’t be like him. I’m a rational person; I’ll live only with things that can be proven.” And in fact more than that: he associates the view he hears from his father or mother, from his parents, with his own childhood, the stage he himself has already passed through, the previous period. Because what happened in that previous period? He accepted things just because someone said so. That’s the whole rebellion of the Enlightenment. The rebellion of the Enlightenment says: I stop accepting things just because someone said so. I want proof. Without proof, I won’t accept it. Now when he hears his father saying “accept it”—after all that’s what I’m saying and therefore accept it; I don’t have proof—what does he basically tell himself? “My father has gone back to being a child. I won’t be like that. I’ll be a rational person.” Until he reaches the point of maturation, where he has to choose one of the three paths. But why does he make that misreading? Because in his own biography he went through the stage of childhood and the stage of enlightenment. He has not yet experienced the third stage. So he doesn’t know there is such a stage. He doesn’t recognize it. So when he sees his father before him, he identifies him with the first stage and says, “There—my father accepts things without proof, just like that. So he’s a child. He still hasn’t matured. Okay, I’m already mature; I don’t accept things without proof.” In other words, he identifies his father with the previous stage that he himself knew, because that’s the stage he knows. He hasn’t yet gone through the third stage; he hasn’t experienced it, so he doesn’t know how to identify it. He doesn’t understand that this is a different state from the first one. The third state is different from the first state. Now maybe I’ll add one more sentence: in what way is it different? Seemingly, what do you want—after all, the synthetic adult basically accepts things without proof just like the child, so how is that different from dogmatism? It is different from dogmatism exactly at the point I made earlier: he is willing to submit it to rational examination and to give up his view. The child is not—if dad said so, then it’s true, period. He is dogmatic; he is a fundamentalist. Fine? But the synthetic adult says: as far as I’m concerned, my common sense is an excellent tool. If I arrive at a conclusion by common sense, that is my conclusion. But I know it’s not certain. If someone raises good counterarguments and convinces me that I’m not right, I’m willing to listen. If he persuades me, I will be persuaded; I hope I’ll be honest enough to be persuaded. At that point it is already different from childhood. That’s one side. A second side, another difference, is not how he criticizes his views, how he gives them up, but how he adopts them. I adopt them not because someone said so, as with the child—that dogmatism of the child. I adopt them because I exercise rational judgment. It’s just that rational judgment does not mean a formally valid logical argument; rational judgment means something like common sense or whatever it may be. So there are two differences that the teenager does not understand, but there are indeed two differences between the third, synthetic state and the first, dogmatic state, in which a person accepts things just because his father said so, or the teacher said so, or the rabbi said so, or I don’t know, somebody said so. In the third state I claim that, first, I adopt the claims not because somebody said so, but because I reached the conclusion that they are reasonable; and second, precisely because of that, I am not certain they are true, unlike the child, and I am willing to submit them to critical examination. And if I hear arguments—or think of arguments myself—that refute my position, then I will change it. In that sense this is a mature attitude and not a childish one, even though, yes, I do accept these things without proof. The teenager’s criticism is correct: I accept things without proof because there is none; you can’t—there is no proof for anything, no certainty about anything. Therefore this phase of the adult is basically a phase the teenager cannot accept. It’s some sort of compromise. But what can you do? Adults understand that sometimes you have to compromise with life. Not every desire we have will be in our hands. The need to compromise in life does not mean giving up truth and becoming skeptical, nor becoming a fundamentalist; rather, there is common sense and we work with common sense. So again, if I return to science: there is no person who knows everything. I know because my doctor said so, some great scientist said so, and so I believe it because X said it. I didn’t check it myself and receive the proof. I say: if he said it, I accept it. I never said anywhere that you have to check everything yourself; there is no reason to check everything yourself. The check you did is the check that says: if this person is a wise, great, recognized scientist, then it is a rational consideration that what he says is likely to be true—without certainty, because nothing is certain. That itself is a judgment you make. The child doesn’t make that judgment. The child accepts it because I am his father. He doesn’t know whether I’m wise or an idiot. In other words, that too is judgment: I go to a doctor and I know I’m not a doctor and he is a doctor, so I understand that he understands medicine better than I do. So when I take the medicine he prescribes for me, I am acting in an entirely rational way; there is nothing dogmatic here. But do you know why it is not dogmatic? Precisely because if it becomes clear to me that he did not prescribe the right medicine, I won’t take it. What did I do? I used my judgment, saw that he is a doctor, received certification, understands this field, so my assumption is that he probably knows what he is prescribing. That is a completely reasonable and rational assumption. A rational person is not supposed to be a professional in every field; there is no such thing, that’s not serious. Rather, you should exercise rational judgment and submit the result of that judgment to critical examination. If someone comes and says to you, “Listen, this doctor is an impostor,” or “He’s just an idiot, he got certified and I have no idea how he passed the exams,” then you’ll stop listening to him. In other words, if you believe the critic, of course—even the critic must be evaluated rationally. But I’m saying: once your conclusion is a conclusion reached by reasonable considerations, and you are also willing to give it up if good arguments appear, then you are a synthetic adult and you are a rational person. That is perfectly fine. The fundamentalist is not willing to accept this; even if you prove to him that his rabbi is an idiot, he will continue to obey him. I know many such people—both of the idiot-rabbi kind and of the kind that obey him. Another question? Yes. So according to Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, as I learned him, he says there are things from many generations ago. There definitely was faith; something happened many generations ago, and since then something has been passed from father to son. Right? Now, and that is a basis for faith. Meaning, it is a basis for matters of faith. Now, if every child would say—or everyone who learned this would say—until someone proves otherwise, I accept it, yes? How will that continue to the next generation? Meaning— I’ll tell you two things. I’ll tell you two things. First of all, it can indeed continue to the next generation. If it is true, then the next generation will also accept it for the same reasons I accepted it; and if it is not true, then it won’t accept it, and rightly so. But there are no proofs, end of story, that whole summit is over. That is exactly the point. I said, you don’t need proof. The synthetic adult does not demand proof; he demands common sense. Examine whether this tradition seems reasonable to you. If yes, accept it. If not, then you rightly won’t accept it. I don’t see any problem with that. That’s one thing. And second, I am not willing to subordinate truth to utility. That is pragmatism. In other words, suppose even the result, the outcome of what I said, was that everyone in the next generation would become heretics—would that make what I’m saying false? It would still be true. What can I do? So I have a problem, but that problem does not change the facts. It’s like saying: if I reached the conclusion that there is no God, I’m forbidden to publish it because otherwise there won’t be religious people in the next generation. They won’t be religious because in my opinion there is no God. So what do you want—that I should give up my conclusion that there is no God because in the next generation there won’t be religious people? I am not willing to subordinate my views, my faith / belief, to outcomes. If there are problematic outcomes, we have to deal with them—but what seems true to me is what seems true to me. I will not change what seems true to me because the consequences are such-and-such. That is the philosophical position called pragmatism. It subordinates the true to the useful. Okay? Whatever is useful to me is, for me, what is true. I revolt against that. I think it’s nonsense; that’s not called truth. Another question. There are all kinds of outreach courses, to bring people to repentance, showing that there are secrets in the Torah that tell what will happen in the future and so on. Is that fundamentalism or is it rational? Entirely rational. Entirely rational, as long as it really stands up to statistical testing. Do a statistical test. Depends on the dispute. Fine, so that’s exactly what I’m saying. But if you do a statistical test, you check, and you reach the conclusion that it convinces you—that’s entirely rational judgment. Another person whom it does not convince remains unconvinced, and he too is rational. Fine? It’s judgment like any other judgment. That is perfectly fine. Even though around this whole debate about prophecies and jumps and Bible codes and so on, there are so many non-rational emotions on both sides that in practice there is a huge amount of irrationality there. But in principle such an argument is an argument. Let’s hear it. You have arguments? Let’s examine them, let’s see. If it’s convincing, why not? Maybe I’ll add another thing. There was once someone in the yeshiva where I studied, in Gush, someone two years above me, something like that—today he’s a well-known figure. In any case, he had jaundice for a long time. Maybe I told this once. He had jaundice for a long time and didn’t recover—something like half a year, I think; he just didn’t get over it. At some stage he was hospitalized, and he hadn’t been in yeshiva for a long time. We had a mutual friend. A friend of mine—he was also his friend—visited him there in the hospital, and told me: listen, some kind of witch came there with doves, put them on his bellybutton, the doves died, and a few days later the guy came back to yeshiva. He recovered. Well, pretty amazing. Later it became known—yes, these pigeon tricks for jaundice. Rabbi Tau has a famous article about it, by the way. He claims it’s all nonsense. But I took that story and told it to my parents. I came home for Sabbath and told it to my parents. My parents wrung their hands and said, “Wow, what stupidity—this yeshiva is driving him crazy. What a dark, fundamentalist yeshiva; they’re stuffing mysticism into his head.” We’re talking about Gush Etzion, yes? So they’re stuffing mysticism into his head. They wanted to take me out of there. I said to them: tell me, what do you consider rational thought? Is rational thought refusing to accept anything you don’t understand? If that were rationality, today we would still have the science of Adam. Every process, every scientific advance, comes from the fact that there are findings I do not understand, but I accept them even though I don’t understand them, and now I try to understand them. I try to understand them despite the fact that I don’t understand them; I do not reject them because I don’t understand. I adopt them if I’m really convinced they happened, and then I think: what explains them? A rational position is not to reject everything I do not understand; a rational position is to try to understand everything I accept. Those are two different things. Someone who rejects everything that seems irrational to him is not a rational person. He is a fundamentalist person. He is someone unwilling to submit what he thinks to critical examination, even though in his own eyes he looks very rationalistic and enlightened. Rationalistic, as distinct from rational, is sometimes not rational. In other words, to be rationalistic—to cling to what is scientific, to what is understandable—is sometimes not rational. Because if there are good claims against that, then a rational person should accept them, and only afterward think about what the scientific explanation is, or some other explanation, it doesn’t matter, for those phenomena. That is what a rational person does. Okay, so here too, with Bible codes, everyone feels this is some kind of sorcery, mysticism, and there’s a revulsion from it—which I also have, but I overcome it. I overcome it because in my view, if the data proves itself, then as a rational person I ought to accept it. And if not, then not; I’m not bound to it either. I’m saying: I’m open to hearing it, let’s hear your arguments. I think that is the right way to relate to this kind of argument. And if statistically it convinces me, then that is the opposite of fundamentalism. On the contrary—not accepting the arguments of Bible codes is fundamentalism. Not accepting it just because it seems fishy to me, yes, because it seems mystical—that is fundamentalism. Who said there’s no mysticism? Check. They’re giving you statistical arguments that you can try to examine. Therefore in my view, to consider it substantively is truly a synthetic approach. To reject it out of hand or to accept it automatically—that is fundamentalism. Okay, but that’s the dispute generally in what’s called parapsychology and all sorts of things you can’t prove; scientists say it’s nonsense, it can’t be. And again I’ll tell you the same thing, and exactly that happens there in the same way. Exactly the same thing. I’ve read quite a bit about it. The debates around parapsychology are of two kinds, just like around Bible codes—it’s the same thing. There are the fundamentalists who accept it automatically without checking statistically whether it is really justified. There are the fundamentalists who reject it out of hand in the name of rationalism, because it cannot be true—again, without checking. And there are people who give it substantive consideration. If I see in a statistically clear way that it works, then I accept that it works, and now we need to think what the explanation is. That is called a substantive attitude. And in fact, in the debates around parapsychology too, there is a huge amount of irrationality on both sides. Both among those who accept parapsychology and those who reject it. There is a lot of fundamentalism there. And there are people who very much like to cling to what suits them or to what feels familiar. So people who are very scientific in their outlook tend to reject it out of hand. People who believe in mysticism in their outlook tend to adopt it out of hand. Both these and those are fundamentalists. Examine the evidence. What do I care whether it fits what you like or doesn’t fit what you like? If there is good evidence, fine; if not, then not. By the way, there are a few—it’s rare, by the way. In most cases, from what I have seen at least, most experiments done are experiments that do not stand up to the test of a systematic scientific experiment, but there are some that do. In parapsychology—I forgot his name—Arthur Koestler writes about him. There was some American fellow who did a real series of orderly, systematic experiments already almost a hundred years ago. And he produced findings that cannot simply be dismissed out of hand. And I say this as a rationalist person who recoils from those results, or at least suspects them at first glance. But fine, suspect all you want—there is data, check the arguments. That’s exactly the point. One must not be a fundamentalist in any direction. Also in the context of belief in God there is lots of fundamentalism on both sides. There are fundamentalists who believe in Him regardless of any argument you raise against them, and there are those who deny Him regardless of any arguments you raise against them. Both these and those are fundamentalists. Both these and those are fanatics. Both these and those hold a belief that they are unwilling to submit to critical examination. And there are masses of such people on both sides—most on both sides are like that. Each side accuses the other of it, but it’s true on both sides. Okay, perhaps just one important point, a note in parentheses. Rabbi? Yes, yes. Regarding “The Chapter on Unity and Faith” in Duties of the Heart, as opposed to those who say not to study it—how should we classify them? I spoke about that earlier. I said that someone who forbids studying philosophy—it makes no sense for many reasons. First, his fear is unjustified. Because if I discover that I’m an atheist, then I was always an atheist—or the reverse. But beyond that, even if this weren’t true, you still cannot forbid me to investigate in order to formulate a position. By what authority do you come to forbid me? By the authority of faith? But I want to investigate whether I believe. So on the logical level I do not accept these prohibitions. They are foolish prohibitions. It’s impossible—you cannot forbid such a thing. So I meant: to which of the three do the two views belong—the view that says to study it and the view that says not to study it? The view that says not to study it is fundamentalist. And the view that says yes, study it, is synthetic. It says: come and see. But I say, study it in order to examine it, not in order to accept it because Duties of the Heart said so, because that too is fundamentalism. Rather, examine his arguments and see whether they convince me or don’t convince me. That is what a person should do, it seems to me—I don’t know. Again, you don’t have to; if you don’t want to, then don’t read whatever you don’t want to. But if someone feels these are relevant arguments worth considering, then obviously he should read and think about them. Yes, clear? And more generally, it’s not only Duties of the Heart. I do not accept any categorical prohibition on reading things or thinking about something. Even if the Holy One, blessed be He, stood here and said to me with His own mouth, “I forbid you to read these and those books,” I would say to Him: I do not accept it. I do not accept it. No one can forbid me to examine the views on the basis of which you come to forbid me. That’s absurd. If I need to examine the validity of your commands, you cannot tell me I’m forbidden to examine—you need to adopt my commands without examining. We talked about this when I discussed the commandment of faith, because I spoke there about exactly these paradoxes of Maimonides’ first positive commandment, the commandment of faith. We discussed this on one of the previous occasions. Anyway, returning to our matter: the Talmud says, “Even if Joshua son of Nun had said it, I would not obey him.” So there are things such that even if Joshua son of Nun stood here and told me, I would not obey. I would not obey, because it cannot be; there is no such instruction, I do not accept it. Here I made a mistake that the Talmud says Joshua son of Nun and not Moses our teacher. Interesting, because somehow it seems that regarding Moses our teacher the Talmud hesitates a bit to say it. I said it rather lightly, even about the Holy One, blessed be He. I’m sharpening the point. If the Holy One, blessed be He, tells me something, I assume I’ll accept it, but I’ll accept it because I’ll be convinced it’s true, because He knows. But if I have a doubt whether it’s true, it won’t help that He says it here and tells me, “Accept it because you are obligated to accept it.” Because I have to examine whether I’m convinced or not. You cannot command me to accept facts when I do not accept them. That is a logical absurdity. Fine. Anyway, back to our line of thought. Therefore synthetic maturity is, on the one hand, not dogmatic, because it does not accept things just because someone said so, but rather out of considerations. On the other hand, it also does not seek proofs. It is not the child and it is not the teenager. The child accepts things just because, and the teenager accepts nothing without proof. And synthetic maturity is something that is neither this nor that. I accept things with judgment, but not proofs. I do not need certainty in order to accept something. That is basically the point. Just a note in parentheses about this whole structure: it appears not only in the maturation of a child or of an individual person, but also in the maturation of our civilization in general. At least that’s how I understand it; it’s one possible way of looking at it. Earlier civilization was basically childish dogmatism. Yes, there was this kind of paganism, idol worship—if there was a drought, people had to dance around the fire so it would rain. Why? Because the sorcerer said so. So if he said so, he probably knows. A kind of childish dogmatism, yes. After that comes adolescent rebellion. I think that adolescent rebellion matured in Greece: rational thought, that is where logic was created, where philosophy was created—or at least consolidated; it existed earlier too, but it was consolidated there—and mathematics and so on. Therefore too, in the great tension in the encounter between the sages of Israel and the Greeks, there is basically an encounter here between a religious outlook that in certain senses is fundamentalist or childish or whatever you want to call it, and adolescent rebellion which says: who says so? prove it. I have philosophical considerations. And they did not know how to deal with it. Like a parent who doesn’t know how to deal with his child. So immediately there were bans and “cursed is the one who teaches his son Greek wisdom” and things of that sort, because there was no way to deal with it. That is the adolescent stage that began in our civilization. And I think that stage ends in the middle of the twentieth century. The point of maturation appears around the beginning-middle of the twentieth century, where on the one hand positivism arrives, which is the essence of adolescence: you do not accept anything that is not fully defined and fully proven—logical positivism. And then the great break in the middle of the twentieth century suddenly turns that modernist, positivist view into skeptical postmodernity—there is no truth, everyone has his own truth—a kind of crazy break that happens in the middle of the twentieth century, and the postmodern person is born. I’m speaking in very broad strokes, of course. What happens in the middle of the twentieth century? What happens there is the maturation of the adolescent into the postmodern adult. The adolescent who thinks science will solve everything—in the early twentieth century they thought science would solve everything. There was even the phrase “the science of law”; among the German Jews there was “the science of law.” The positivists were usually German Jews. So the great break occurs when people suddenly understand that nothing can be proved with certainty, and that science cannot deal with the real questions that trouble them. It can tell us a lot about the world, but it cannot solve our problems, and certainly cannot give us certainty. Therefore a huge break is created, and from that break people emerge in one of the same three ways exactly as in the case of the individual person, and we see them right before our eyes. The first way is the skeptical way: postmodernity, everyone has his own truth, if you are logically consistent then fine, I’m also logically consistent so I’m fine too, everyone is fine, nobody is right or wrong—that is the skeptical view. Then there is the fundamentalist view, namely the fundamentalism that began to flourish in the middle of the twentieth century, and it stems exactly from that point, from the great disappointment with science, the disappointment that science in fact cannot really give us answers to the great questions of life—we cannot arrive at certainty—and so people return to their religious roots and try to extract from there the longed-for certainty. That is perhaps the attraction of Muslim fundamentalism in Europe, where we hear about people who grew up—not Muslims, not Arabs, nothing of the sort—Europeans somehow enlisting in ISIS, converting to Islam, and so on. Again, it’s not such a large phenomenon, but there is such a phenomenon, and it is an expression of the vacuum a person feels in the West, because postmodernity doesn’t do it for him; he seeks certainty, and therefore he is drawn in. The New Age is a result of this. People communicate with aliens, find themselves all sorts of exalted sources of knowledge, because they are looking for certainty, they are looking for God in a place where there is no God—so this is basically a kind of fundamentalism. That is the second channel. And by the way, the reason the pluralist or postmodern or skeptical West cannot deal with fundamentalism is that these two views are two sides of the same coin, because both think that only certainty yields truth. The West concludes from this, “Fine, if so there is no truth,” and fanaticism—the fundamentalists—conclude from this, “If so, truth is not in philosophy and science but in religion or mystical conceptions or whatever.” But both are fighting each other on the same platform, and that platform is that only certainty is binding truth. Therefore there is no way to deal with it. And I think the only philosophical way—I have no military technique—but the only philosophical way to deal with this conflict or get out of it is to adopt synthetic maturity and say: “Friends, I do have truth. I do not have certainty, true, but I have truth and I believe what I believe—not in a fundamentalist way, not from exalted sources, but out of common-sense considerations—and I am still willing to fight for it and I believe in it, and I do not think you are as right as I am; I think you are mistaken and I am right, even though if you raise arguments and persuade me, I am willing to be persuaded.” Now there are quite a few people in the West who hold such a position; not all are postmodern, absolutely not—on the contrary, there is some retreat from postmodernity—but I think this thesis or this option is not on the table. People constantly sway between postmodernity and fundamentalism, and I think nobody is seriously enough putting the third option on the table: there is a third way. And once you put it on the table, I think many people will understand that they are actually there. They are not pluralists. Many people who classify themselves as pluralists do so because they do not have the word to describe themselves, so it seems to them that they are pluralists—but they aren’t. Pluralism means everyone is equally right. No—I am willing to hear what you say, I am willing to relate patiently to what you say, I am willing to make room for what you say. But you are not as right as I am—unless you persuade me. Give me arguments and let’s see. That is a synthetic view; it just needs conceptualization, it needs a name, so that people can identify under that heading. And that is not happening. I think one of the ways out of this pluralist-fundamentalist tangle is to conceptualize this tension and then show that there is a way out of it. There is a third way that says: it is not true that you have to be either this or that; there is a third possibility. And this point leads me directly to faith. It is precisely this point that leads me to faith, not to fundamentalism. And I want to explain. Because the big question is basically: okay, so you spoke very nicely, as they say, very nice speeches—but the question is, what are you relying on? After all, you have no proofs. So what does “common sense” mean? Common sense is just things you were born with. So instead of being honest and admitting that you are dogmatic, that you are simply going with things because that’s how you feel, you are turning it into an ideology. But in practice you are an irrational person exactly like the child. In other words, I am asking: does the synthetic adult have any way to criticize his views and justify them, or to criticize or justify them using rational tools that are not logic? Because we said logic does not give us the goods, it does not do the job. So what does? And I claim that there is such a system of tools. That system of tools is called rhetoric. And rhetoric has a bad name in our world; it is treated as a synonym for demagoguery, but that is not true. They say it is a synonym for demagoguery because of the logicist conception, the conception that says everything is logic and everything that is not logic is demagoguery and brainwashing. But that is not true. There is an entire toolbox, a whole system of tools, that is not formally valid logical arguments, and that toolbox is rhetoric. Of course it also includes biases, and biases are demagoguery, but not everything there is bias. There are certain forms of thought that are not necessarily exactly logic, and still I give them validity. By the way, this system of forms of thought is what underlies science. A scientific theory is not certain; for that it takes all the criticisms throughout the history of modern philosophy. It is not certain. On the other hand, would anyone say it is just fundamentalism, some guess in the dark, not sensible, not rational? No, it is rational. People are using their heads, their common sense; they are not accepting things just because. There is a system of tools; there is even such a thing as scientific logic. It is not logic in the same sense we are used to, but there is scientific logic. Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century tried to build an inductive logic. This is a logic whose conclusions are not necessary. He tries to describe how we make scientific generalizations or scientific eliminations through certain logical patterns. Why is this important? Because this gives you the ability to apply criticism to your ways of thinking in this field. And here you become an adult rather than a child—an adult who exercises judgment and reaches a rational, sensible conclusion about what he believes. He does not accept things just because he was born with them or because someone said so, but because they seem rational to him. They seem rational to him even though he has no logical argument proving them. Now here indeed the burden of proof rests on the synthetic adult. Show me that you really do have reliable tools, or at least reasonable tools, on which you can rely. Logic I understand; logic is clear. But you say your tools are beyond logic, because logic cannot give me certainty. So I say: who says there are any such tools at all? What is inductive logic? Isn’t that just words—just saying, do whatever comes into your head and call it logic and then everything is fine? You called it logic and survived. That’s not… The question is whether one can really justify this. That is the point. Now, in my book called “Stable Truth and Unstable Truth,” I basically described the move I’ve been talking about here, and I devoted a chapter—or a section or a chapter, I don’t remember—to the logic of non-deductive thinking. And by the way, I derived that logic from the Thirteen Principles of Interpretation, I think—under the inspiration of Rabbi HaNazir. I think the Thirteen Principles are a logical system that is actually the infrastructure of non-deductive thinking, the logic underlying rhetoric. And it was an attempt to show that there is such a thing as a synthetic adult. The synthetic a priori is basically a person who uses a rational system of tools, but one that does not give him certainty. And here this matter requires some further philosophical clarification, which I’ll do next time. What does this mean? And I’ll just preface it with one sentence so you can see where this is going and what the framework is. Ultimately it begins and ends with faith. I think faith is the—let’s say, as distinct from the intellect which is responsible for logic, let’s say—the faculty responsible for rhetoric, for thinking outside logic, is called faith. But the mistake of people who say that faith is outside reason is that in my view faith exists in science too. There is no science without faith. What I call faith is something much broader than faith in God. It is part of our mode of thinking in every field, not only in relation to religion and faith, faith in God, yes? So in that sense faith is an intellectual faculty. It is not some particular content, faith in God or something like that. Faith is a certain type, or a certain set of faculties, that we have beyond logical faculties. And it is also what gives us faith in God, and this is how I want to solve the logical dead end from which I began. When I say: if logic does not do the job and science does not do the job, then what does? I claim that rhetoric—or faith as a cognitive tool, not faith in God but faith as a cognitive tool—is what can give us faith in God. Which is neither science nor philosophy in that sense—not logic; philosophy yes, but not science and not logic. Okay? So in that sense I’m saying there is a third tool here. I’ll elaborate on that next time. Can I ask something? Of course, yes. You said something nice about history. I can hear weakly. Oh, sorry, one second. I heard the history of the maturation of humanity and so on, but within humanity itself there are all kinds of levels of understanding, capacity for understanding. Okay? So what the Rabbi is describing is good for professors like you, or people who have the—they are capable each time of rethinking, or asking, or reflecting and clarifying. But there are many people who don’t have that, or they can’t. Okay, so what about them? So that’s the question—maybe it’s synthetic in the sense that someone else does that thinking, everyone agrees that this person can do that thinking, and they conclude that I rely on that person; he has those capacities and I move on. So as I said earlier regarding a doctor: if there is indeed a reasonable basis for the trust you place in that person in the relevant field, because a person can be very smart but that does not mean he speaks sensibly in another field—but if there is a rational basis for it, that is perfectly fine. That is rational conduct. I have no problem with it. Right. And that doesn’t mean that someone who has the knowledge and the ability to do this shouldn’t do those examinations even if there are people… Exactly! Exactly as I say regarding a doctor, I would say here too. Provided that it really is well founded. Because if you conclude that your rabbi can tell you how best to invest your money, but you have no rational basis for that, then the fact that you gave him the authority does not make you a rational person. It’s not rational. If you see that this guy succeeds like Warren Buffett—meaning he knows how to invest wonderfully even though he understands nothing, but the fact is it works—I have no problem with it, just as I said regarding jaundice. If it works, then it is sensible to rely on him. Perfectly fine. My problem with belief in all kinds of factors like that is that such belief is not tested by success. Even when there are failures, they keep believing. In other words, that’s why I call it irrational. The trust itself is not irrational. To place trust in someone who can be trusted in a field in which he has proven himself—that is perfectly fine. There is no principled problem with that. Not everyone has to be a philosopher or a doctor. Can I say that I rely on Maimonides on this issue, since he was wise? If you have a good reason explaining why you rely on Maimonides. I see that he is wise, his analyses seem sensible to me. Fine. Like a doctor. Yes. I may have an argument with you on this issue—that is, on whether Maimonides’ conclusions are in fact correct. But by your lights, if you examined it, reached the conclusion that he works correctly, and you trust his conclusions, that is a rational and reasonable way to conduct yourself; I have no principled problem with it. In the final analysis, with Maimonides, I go with Maimonides’ medicine. Same thing—if you have a basis for thinking that it works, then perfectly fine. So that’s the question. Therefore I’m saying: I have no problem with someone who relies on Maimonides or with someone who rejects Maimonides. My question is why you rely on Maimonides or reject Maimonides. If there is a rational consideration at the basis of it, then you are a rational person. If you just do it, then you are a fundamentalist. Medicine has changed since Maimonides’ time. I agree. I also wouldn’t rely on Maimonides’ medical teachings. But if someone says, “I checked, and Maimonides’ medicine is wonderful; he is a perfect doctor. I checked, I did a controlled experiment and verified that it works”—I don’t think that’s true, but if he thinks so and he checked, then fine, I think it’s reasonable that he should rely on it. No, I’m speaking about matters of faith, not matters of medicine, which has changed. In matters of faith I think there is no such thing as expertise. In matters of faith I think there is no such thing as expertise at all. Therefore if someone says to me, “Look, he is an expert in matters of faith, therefore what he says seems right to me,” I won’t agree, because I do not think there is such a thing as experts in matters of faith. From his point of view, if he thinks there are experts in matters of faith, then I cannot criticize him. I have a disagreement with him over whether there is or is not expertise in this. Just as I think there are no experts in matters of security or policy, so too I think there are no experts here. There are people with more experience, that is true. I do not buy this thesis of expertise in all kinds of fields. In very many fields there are no experts. As Ben-Gurion already said, experts are experts in what was, not in what will be. Anyone else? Thank you very much. Thank you very much, thank you very much. Okay, more power to you, Sabbath peace. Goodbye, Sabbath peace.