Faith – Lesson 9
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- [0:01] The stages of maturation: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood
- [5:13] The distinction between a synthetic adult and a child
- [9:31] The skeptic versus the synthetic approach
- [13:37] Critique of Ockham’s principle
- [23:52] The challenge of induction and causality in science
- [28:02] Kant’s unanswered problem
- [30:18] Scientific observation and the general law
- [33:08] Subjectivity versus intersubjectivity
- [34:16] Critique of Kant’s claim
- [41:57] The mystical context of intuition
- [44:16] Maimonides and the eyes of the intellect
- [45:43] Rabbi HaNazir and auditory logic
- [47:03] Intuition in solving an equation
- [51:59] Summary: faith, science, and the connection between them
- [54:08] Faith as the basis of human reason
Summary
General Overview
The text presents three stages in the maturation of a person and of a culture—childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—and shows how the adolescent demand for certainty and proof leads to three possible responses: skepticism, which disqualifies anything that is not certain; fundamentalism, which declares certainty from a transcendent source; and a synthetic path, which accepts positions on the basis of plausibility and common sense even without proof. It argues that science and faith are exposed to the same skeptical attack, because neither rests on absolute proof but rather on unproven foundational principles. It then offers a solution according to which a person has an additional cognitive faculty—intuition, or “the eyes of the intellect”—which is objective recognition through the intellect and not merely subjective thought. From this it identifies “faith” as the Jewish name for intuition, the basis of all logic, science, and values, and concludes that anyone who attacks intuition itself is dragged into total skepticism.
Stages of maturity and three modes of response to uncertainty
The text defines childhood as the stage in which one accepts things “because the grown-ups said so,” adolescence as the stage in which one accepts only what is certainly proven, and adulthood as the stage in which one understands that there are no absolute proofs, because every proof rests on unproven assumptions. The text lays out three possibilities for maturation: skepticism, which concludes that if only certainty is acceptable then nothing is acceptable; fundamentalism, which maintains that certainty exists from a higher non-logical source; and the synthetic path, which accepts positions without certainty if they are plausible, reasonable, and in line with common sense. The text describes the adolescent as demanding, “Who told you that? Prove it,” and rejecting answers such as “it’s reasonable,” because he interprets them as a return to childish dogmatism.
How the adolescent interprets the synthetic adult, and how he differs from the dogmatic child
The text argues that the adolescent identifies the synthetic adult with the child, because neither presents a proof, and therefore the adolescent dismisses him as someone who accepts things “just because someone said so.” The text distinguishes the synthetic adult from the child by two criteria: the adult forms a position after examining things with common sense and does not simply accept authority, and he is open to critical examination and willing to abandon his positions if opposing arguments or facts appear. The text gives the example of one’s attitude toward a rabbi or halakhic decisor: trust that arises from rational judgment, similar to relying on a doctor, is mature; but blind obedience—“whatever the rabbi says, I do”—is childish, and maturity is also expressed in readiness to abandon an authority if it becomes clear that he is unworthy.
What distinguishes the synthetic position from skepticism, and why one cannot “prove” a way out of skepticism
The text raises the question of why a person does not remain a skeptic once he understands that there are no proofs, and answers that the difference lies in the underlying stance: the synthetic thinker accepts the principle that what is plausible is acceptable, whereas the skeptic maintains that what is not certain is not acceptable. The text claims that there is no “thing that caused it,” but rather different outlooks, similar to political or religious differences. The text presents an attempt to argue that the skeptic in practice relies on past experience, and distinguishes between the problem of induction (“who says that what worked in the past will work in the future”) and the claim of psychological inconsistency in some skeptics, including the possibility that a skeptic may say, “that’s just how I feel like acting,” without any justification.
The skeptical attack on considerations of plausibility and on Ockham’s razor
The text describes a strong skeptical claim according to which even “plausibility” is not trustworthy, because it is merely psychology, habit, or things ingrained in a person, rather than a connection to truth in the world. The text offers a critique of Ockham’s razor: “the simplest” depends on what seems simple in light of what one already thinks, and therefore it is no guarantee of correctness. The text argues that a true skeptic cannot be persuaded, and that the real challenge is giving an internal account of why one does not accept the skeptic’s objections.
Science is in the same broken trough as faith, and the critique of the “skeptical trend”
The text describes a “skeptical trend” that identifies with accepting only what science says, but argues that science itself is not certain and is not mathematics; at most it is “not yet falsified,” following Popper, or what seems most plausible. The text states that science is based on generalizations and common sense, not only on observation, and therefore anyone who attacks faith in the name of science should, by the same logic, attack science as well. The text compares postmodern attacks on science to the skeptical attack, and emphasizes that the problem is not only about God but about every general law that goes beyond particular observations.
Hume, induction, and causality as the basis of the attack on science
The text explains Hume’s attack on the principle of induction—the move from observed cases to unobserved cases—and argues that there is no proof that generalization from experience is always valid. The text presents Hume’s critique of causality: what we see is only the succession of events, not causal “necessity,” and therefore one can always propose absurd alternatives that still cannot be refuted absolutely. The text concludes that anyone who seeks absolute certainty is dragged into skepticism regarding every scientific generalization, and that in this sense science and faith are “in the same boat.”
Kant: phenomena and noumena, and the difficulty of moving to the intersubjective
The text presents Kant as a major attempt to answer Hume’s tangle through the distinction between the world as it is in itself (noumena) and the world as it is perceived (phenomena), such that the laws of science are laws of the way cognition organizes experience and not a direct description of objective reality. The text raises a question about the leap from the subjective to the intersubjective—how one explains the fact that all human beings perceive through the same structure—and notes that Kant treats this as self-evident. The text states that it agrees with the distinction but argues that the Kantian solution does not explain why the limitations of cognition and thought are “coordinated,” and therefore itself requires further explanation.
Rejecting the dichotomy and proposing “cognitive thought” as intuition
The text argues that the root of the problem is the dichotomous description of two “toolboxes”—internal logical thought versus observational cognition—and proposes that there is a third domain in which the intellect functions as a faculty of cognition and not merely of thought. The text formulates an answer to the attack on scientific generalization by saying that one “sees” the general law “with the eyes of the intellect” מתוך the examples, in a way that is not merely a subjective computational process but an interaction with the world through the intellect. The text states that anyone who does not accept the possibility of objective cognition through the intellect must be a skeptic with regard to science as well, and that there is no third option between accepting this faculty and total skepticism.
Conceptual precedents: Maimonides, Husserl, and Rabbi HaNazir
The text attributes to Maimonides, at the beginning of The Guide for the Perplexed, the idea of “the eyes of the intellect” as an expression that joins seeing and cognition with intellect and thought. The text brings in Edmund Husserl and his phenomenology, with its “eidetic seeing” of ideas and general laws through particular cases. The text also mentions Rabbi HaNazir and “The Voice of Prophecy, the auditory Hebrew logic,” and interprets the combination of “logic” with “auditory/visual” as another expression of the category of cognitive thought.
The mathematician example and the definition of intuition as a cognitive faculty
The text describes the immediate solution of a mathematical problem by a person who recognizes the answer without a long calculation, and emphasizes that this is not a subjective emotion but knowledge that can be checked. The text defines intuition as “the cognitive faculty of thought,” meaning the ability to arrive at a verifiable truth without a detailed chain of proof. The text mentions “visual recognition” in the context of the Talmudic passage in These Found Objects, and emphasizes that the issue in returning a lost item to a Torah scholar stems from the assumption that he is not suspected of lying, not from the idea that only he possesses such an ability. In this way, the concept is used to illustrate a kind of cognition that is not necessarily fully translatable into words.
Faith as intuition, and as the basis for foundational assumptions in every field
The text argues that the foundational assumptions of logic and philosophy are not proven and are therefore accepted by the power of intuition, and it identifies “common sense” with intuition. The text states that at the basis of every scientific theory, value judgment, and abstract proposition stands intuition, and defines “faith” as the Jewish name for intuition. The text presents “faith in God” as one possible content of intuition, but faith as such is a general cognitive faculty that also allows belief in causality, induction, and geometrical axioms such as “between two points only one straight line passes.”
Conclusions regarding skepticism, science, morality, and the critique of opponents of faith
The text concludes that there is no person in the world “who does not believe”; the dispute is only over the content of one’s beliefs, whereas attacking intuition itself leads to sweeping skepticism that undermines science, values, and even the acceptance of sensory data. The text argues that someone who attacks faith in the name of science, yet does not give up science, lives in contradiction and does not understand that science relies on the same faculty. The text distinguishes between a substantive and a semantic disagreement between the skeptic and the synthetic thinker by means of a moral example: the synthetic thinker blames a murderer because he believes the act is wrong, whereas a skeptic may act similarly only if he “feels like it,” even if behaviorally they appear similar.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so last time I talked about—well, I described the process of the three stages of maturation, both of an individual person and of our culture, our civilization, and I said that there’s a stage of childhood, a stage of adolescence, and a stage of adulthood. In the adolescent stage, the teenager thinks he will accept only things that are certain, things with proof. In the adult stage, he understands that there is nothing with proof—exactly what I was just talking about now—because every proof is based on a set of foundational assumptions, and those assumptions you cannot prove. And therefore there are three possibilities for maturing. One possibility is to become a skeptic, because if only something certain is acceptable and nothing is certain, then the conclusion is that nothing is acceptable, and you become a skeptic. A second possibility is to be a fundamentalist. A fundamentalist is someone who gives up the assumption that nothing is certain. There is something certain. True, not by the tools of logic, because there there are always foundational assumptions, but there is something certain in some transcendent source. It can be revealed from above by, I don’t know, the Holy One, blessed be He, or aliens, or whatever you want, my spiritual leader—and that is beyond all doubt, and behold, I’ve received the longed-for certainty. And I said that the third path, and the only possible one for dealing with the first two, is the path I called the synthetic path, which basically says: you’re right, there’s no certainty about anything, but you don’t need certainty in order to accept something. I’m willing to accept things even if they’re not certain. It seems reasonable to me, it makes sense to me, common sense—so I go with it. Who said it always has to be one hundred percent? There is no one hundred percent. Human beings don’t have one hundred percent. That’s exactly what we were just talking about. So in the end—and I think more or less that’s where I stopped—in the end, when the adolescent looks at the synthetic adult, what does he see in front of him? The adolescent says to his father, to his teacher, to some adult, whatever: who told you that? Prove it. Right? After all, he accepts only things that have proof. So the adult tells him: look, I don’t have proof, but this is common sense—it’s reasonable—so let’s go with it. The adolescent of course doesn’t accept that. As far as he’s concerned, only something proven and certain is acceptable. Okay. Now how does the adolescent—wait, maybe I’ll mute—how does the adolescent actually see the adult standing in front of him? When the adolescent looks at the adult in front of him, he basically sees the previous stage that he himself was in, the childhood stage. Because how does he see the adult? He says: here is this adult, he has no proof, he accepts things just because someone said them. That’s the first stage, childhood, where the child accepts what he is told because the grown-ups know, the grown-ups said it. The gedoylim, right. So when the adolescent looks at the adult, from his point of view he basically sees his own image from the previous stage, when he was a child. And therefore he despises that adult. He says: okay, you’re an idiot, you accept things only because people say them, but I’m going to be rational—I’ll accept only things for which I have proof. Why does the adolescent really interpret the adult that way? I think you can see this in real life too, I mean, this contempt for answers like, “Listen, it’s reasonable, it makes sense, I don’t have proof but there are no proofs.” Teenagers don’t accept answers like that. It’s not the kind of thing they’re willing to accept. I think the idea behind it is that each person—you know, everyone shaves on his own beard, meaning you can’t learn from other people’s experience. So what does the adolescent’s experience include? He has gone through two stages in life: childhood, and then adolescence. Those are the phases he knows. When he sees the adult standing in front of him, he doesn’t see someone in a third phase. He looks for him—or diagnoses him—according to one of the two stages he himself has gone through. Either he’s in the childhood stage, or he’s like me in the adolescent stage. Like me he definitely isn’t, because he accepts things without proof, and I’m not going to be like that—I’m going to be rational. So what’s left? What’s left is that this grown person has basically gone back to childhood or never really left childhood at all. He accepts things just because people said them. That’s why the adolescent, when he sees this kind of answer, takes it as basically a return to the dogmatism of the child, the baby. And therefore he looks down on this phenomenon. Now when I ask myself: okay, but is that really so? Why is that not correct? What really is different in the third stage—the only possible way to deal—no, sorry—what really is different in the third, synthetic stage, from the first, dogmatic stage? After all, both of them accept things because people said them, without having proof. So what nevertheless distinguishes the synthetic adult from the child? I think there are two things that distinguish them. First, the synthetic adult does not accept things just because someone said them. That really is childish. He accepts things after examining them with his own reasoning. He understands that it is not certain, but it seems reasonable to him. Which means that in fact he does form a position; he doesn’t just accept things because some all-knowing person said them. In that sense he is different from the child. The child accepts things because the adults said them; he doesn’t check for himself, “This sounds reasonable to me, and that’s why I accept it”—that stage of examination is missing in him. So it’s true that the synthetic adult doesn’t have proofs, but it is not true that he doesn’t exercise judgment. Judgment does not mean proof. Judgment is not only logic. That’s one difference. The second difference is the willingness to subject my positions to critical examination. The synthetic adult, in principle, thinks this is what common sense says, this is the conclusion he has reached. But if he hears other arguments, or encounters facts or considerations that make him think he has been mistaken until now, then he ought to be honest enough to give it up. Meaning, he is not dogmatic. He adopts things because they seem reasonable to him. Dogmatism means that you are unwilling to give those things up because it is obvious that they are correct—a kind of fundamentalism. No, here there is no fundamentalism. Here, first, when I form the position I form it by using common sense, by using reasonable considerations, and second, even after I’ve formed it, I’m still willing to hear arguments against it and see whether I’m right or wrong. In other words, I’m willing to take a critical attitude toward my conclusions.
[Speaker B] Someone who says, “I don’t think—whatever the rabbi says, I do, I don’t think”—what stage is he at?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A child. I mean, again, he could say, “Look, I checked, and I came to the conclusion that I accept Jewish and halakhic tradition, and it says there, ‘Do not turn aside,’ and ‘Do not turn aside’ refers to so-and-so,” let’s say. I don’t think that’s right, but let’s assume it is. If he made that calculation and in the end reached the conclusion that he has to obey the halakhic decisor, that’s perfectly fine, because he made a judgment. Then later, if he discovers that this decisor harasses various boys or girls and is therefore criminally charged, then he’ll leave him too and won’t continue listening to him, because he’s a critical person. That’s perfectly fine. But if he follows him because he said so—not because he reached the conclusion that this is the right thing, and not because he… and he is unwilling to give it up under any circumstances, no matter what the facts and considerations may be—then that really is the state of a child. And many times people’s trust in their rabbi really does resemble the childish approach I described. Not always. It is definitely possible for a person to trust his rabbi because he knows him as a wise person, because he reached the conclusion that the Torah expects him to obey him, because he understands Jewish law better than I do, so therefore I think what he says is more likely to be correct. Exactly like when I go to a doctor and I don’t understand medicine, so I accept what he says. That is a completely rational consideration. It’s perfectly fine. Again, I can argue about details of that consideration, and I in fact do argue, but I accept that as a fully legitimate consideration. It’s not childish. On the contrary, it’s a mature consideration that says, “I can’t be an expert in everything,” so there are areas in which I will accept the opinions of experts. But if someone shows me that this person is not an expert, or that he has interests, or he is corrupt, or I don’t know, all kinds of things like that, then I’ll also give up my previous decision. That’s exactly the difference between a synthetic adult and a child.
[Speaker C] Rabbi, I didn’t quite understand. What causes a person with this approach—once he arrives at the point that there are no proofs—what causes him nevertheless to accept things and not remain in skepticism like the skeptic?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What causes him? His outlook. His outlook says that if something is reasonable, then from his point of view it is acceptable. You don’t need certainty. The skeptic also has an outlook—his outlook is that anything that isn’t certain is not acceptable. Fine, they disagree.
[Speaker C] He reached a point of doubt, right? They both reached skepticism; one stayed there and the other came back—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To reasonable things, right?
[Speaker C] Yes. So what caused him to come back to reasonable things? Like, what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, you’re asking what caused him, and I’m telling you: there isn’t some thing that caused him. He has views. One person’s view says, “Anything that isn’t certain, I’m not willing to accept,” and another person says, “I’m willing to accept things even if they’re not certain, as long as they’re reasonable.” Those are two different positions. What caused one person to be left-wing and another to be right-wing, one to be religious and another to be secular? Those are their positions. They reached that conclusion, and that’s what they think.
[Speaker C] Can I suggest something, Rabbi? Tell me what you think. I think it’s because in reality he sees—he sees how things work. Do you hear? Reality—what? I’m saying, he sees that when he applies the test of plausibility, things work out for him, he succeeds in managing his life.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, but about that itself one can also ask: okay, who said that if it worked in the past it will also work in the future? Hume’s problem of induction, right? You can ask a skeptical question about that too. Skepticism can attack everything.
[Speaker C] Wait, one second—up to now it’s working for me, I build airplanes and it works.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What, it worked until now and tomorrow it won’t work? Where did you get that principle from, that what worked until now will continue to work later?
[Speaker C] It doesn’t matter. I’m arguing that the skeptic lives a lie, that he lies to himself. What’s my proof that he lies to himself? He does fly in airplanes, he does accept things in practice.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no, you switched completely to something else, entirely. Two completely different things. Your first claim was: if it worked until now, then I’m supposed to accept it going forward as well. To that I told you: there is a philosophical challenge to that claim, and it’s called the problem of induction. Who told you that itself—that what worked in the past will also work in the future? There too there is a skeptical attack. That’s one claim. Your second claim was a completely different one. You’re saying he’s inconsistent, because he himself learns from past experience, so he shouldn’t tell me that he doesn’t accept past experience. Well, there each case has to be examined on its own. Maybe you’ll meet a person who doesn’t accept past experience—I don’t know. You have to look at each person and see. It may be that he is inconsistent. By the way, some of those inconsistent people have an answer to that too. And their answer says: you’re right, past experience proves nothing about the future, but this is how I feel like behaving. It isn’t justified. I have no justification, but this is how I feel like behaving. I don’t believe it’s true. What will you say to such a person? You can say you don’t believe him; I don’t quite believe him either. Okay, but there’s nothing to say to him. That’s a claim you can’t really deal with. A true, substantive skeptical claim you can’t really deal with. You just have to decide whether you are there or not there. There’s a person who is there—so he’s a skeptic.
[Speaker C] There’s another person who says, I’m not—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A skeptic. For me, what is reasonable is acceptable. So he’s not there. That’s the discussion, that’s the argument. Clearly, though, one can still come and ask—and this is another point made by the skeptics—that even the arguments I’m giving you right now can be attacked by the skeptic, who can say: yes, but it’s simply because this is ingrained in you, you were born with it. So now you rationalize it. You say it’s reasonable and my intuition says this, and so on—but in the end these are just things that are ingrained in you and convenient for you to go along with. You have no proof that this is the truth, that this is really what happens in the world itself, that it matches what happens in the world itself. Here there is already a kind of distrust of plausibility considerations as such. Before, the claim was: even if plausibility considerations are like that, there still isn’t certainty here. Now there is a stronger claim: there isn’t even plausibility here. It’s not just that there isn’t certainty here; there isn’t even plausibility here, because what you call plausibility is just something you got used to, or something ingrained in you, or built into you. That’s all. You just got used to it. You know, there’s a very famous challenge to Ockham’s razor. Ockham’s razor is the principle that says we choose the simplest solution or explanation among the possible explanations. We choose the simplest explanation, with the fewest entities—there are various formulations, but roughly that’s the idea. Now one of the strongest criticisms of Ockham’s razor says: what do you mean, the simplest? The simplest is a function of what you currently think. If something fits with what you currently think, it seems simpler to you, right? In other words, you’re telling me there is a logical justification for conservatism, or for sticking close to what I already think—but there isn’t any logical justification. Who said what you currently think isn’t mistaken? The fact that something fits what you currently think—what you call simpler—is no guarantee of anything. Obviously, because that’s what you currently think. But the question is whether what you currently think is correct. And therefore Ockham’s razor itself comes under a very similar attack. Because what seems to us—for example, Ockham’s razor is a consideration of plausibility, right? It sounds reasonable to me, not certain. It could be that the more complex theory is actually the correct one, but it seems reasonable to me that as long as there’s no evidence, I choose the simpler theory—it seems more likely to be true. The skeptic says to me: that itself, the preference for the simpler theory, is itself some kind of after-the-fact rationalization. You basically just want to justify the fact that you continue along the path you were already following. So you invented some principle for yourself. Do you have proof for it? You have proof for nothing. Therefore all considerations of plausibility are attacked by the skeptic not only because they give seventy percent and not one hundred percent, the way a proof supposedly does, but because he says they don’t even give me the seventy percent, because in the end it’s all psychology. It’s all things ingrained in you. And therefore the skeptical approach has claims that require some kind of response. Now when I talk about a response, I don’t mean answering the skeptic and convincing him—you won’t succeed. A real skeptic cannot be convinced. I mean dealing with myself, meaning answering myself why I do not accept the skeptic’s objections. Okay, that is really the important point here, because you can’t just dismiss these things. Now before I continue, I want to—
[Speaker C] Rabbi, Rabbi, if I can add one more point—wait—if I give the skeptic a cup of water and a cup of bleach, will the skeptic drink the cup of bleach?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the water.
[Speaker C] So obviously not—then how does he know?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because it’s ingrained in him to drink the water. What I answered you before—the same thing. The answer hasn’t changed. In the last five minutes the skeptical theory hasn’t changed. It’s the same answer—there’s no…
[Speaker C] I didn’t understand. So he says that the cup of water might be healthy just like bleach, only by chance?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. You have no way to know. But when there is no truth, I do what I feel like, what is pleasant to me, what suits me. And what the skeptic says is that you do the same thing too, only you rationalize it. But basically, you do what you feel like doing. Fine—again, I also disagree with him, I’m not trying to defend him—but that’s what he would answer you. I’m telling you, I have a lot of experience with skeptics. I’ve spoken with many, many skeptics, and I’m an expert in the skeptic’s answers. Those are the answers you get. Let me continue for a moment, and broaden the problem a little. Basically, you have to understand that even though the skeptics—what today are called the skeptics, what’s called today in the world the skeptical trend—the skeptical trend means clinging to science. Right? Meaning, accepting only what science says, and not accepting all the things that are not scientific. Those are what are called skeptics. There is a Skeptics Association; there is one in Israel too. By the way, these are intelligent people, and it’s interesting to read what they write. There are very, very interesting arguments there, and they teach critical thinking in a very nice way. They are mistaken in their conception, but there is definitely a lot of material there that is worth reading. In any case, what the skeptics don’t notice is that science itself is exposed to the same attack. Science itself doesn’t work—this isn’t mathematics—science doesn’t operate in terms of certainties. No one can say that a scientific law is certain. A scientific law is at most what seems least implausible to me, or what seems most plausible, if you want to be more optimistic. But that’s what you can say about a scientific law. You have no proof for it. According to Popper, all you can say is that it has not yet been falsified. That’s too restrictive a formulation, but even in less restrictive formulations, science is basically just a synthetic domain. If you’re not a fundamentalist who believes in science because Einstein is the Holy One, blessed be He, and whatever he says is true, and you’re also not a skeptic, because a skeptic isn’t supposed to accept science—then how do you accept science? Only on a synthetic basis. Which means that the very same dispute may exist not only in relation to faith in God, not only in relation to intellectual, value-laden, or other kinds of issues, but also in relation to science. The exact same dispute. And indeed, postmodern critiques of science attack science precisely on this plane, exactly on this plane. Who told you? These are just your forms of thought as privileged Western white males—WASPs. Right, that’s it. And maybe this whole story is just your narrative; there is nothing objective here. Well, that’s a pretty stupid claim, because apparently it wasn’t supposed to stand the test of experiment. But these claims can be formulated a bit more intelligently. That’s very rare in the writings of those fools, but there are somewhat more intelligent formulations of these critiques, and it isn’t so simple to dismiss them. In any case, all I want to say is that the same broken trough that I described in the context of faith—you remember? Before I started with the three processes of maturation, I said that in effect faith brought us—the desire to examine faith brought us—to a broken trough. On the one hand, logic: there is the logical toolbox and the empirical scientific toolbox, the logical-philosophical and the empirical-scientific. The logical-philosophical toolbox can’t do the job for us. Because the foundational assumptions are always unproven, and from the foundational assumptions you can’t derive a conclusion. Therefore the fact that you think thoughts in your head is no indication that they are really true about what is happening in the world. You have some philosophical argument that there is a God. Okay, that means that the way you are built leads you to the conclusion that there is a God. But who said that there really is a God? In reality. Right? You see—that’s the same question. And of course in the scientific toolbox, in the observational toolbox, you can’t get there either, because there’s no way to observe, scientifically, the Holy One, blessed be He—God. So that basically means that there is no toolbox that can do the job for us, that can take us to faith. Following the move I made after that point of the broken trough—the three stages of maturation, and then the three ways of maturing: fundamentalism, skepticism, and synthetic thinking—now suddenly we discover that this broken trough is actually standing at the doorway of science too, not just faith. Because in science too one can always ask you: who told you that? Prove it. Do you have proof? In science there are no proofs. At most there are confirmations. There are no proofs. So if you do not accept anything for which you have no proof—right?—then, like the adolescent, you basically become a skeptical adult, and then you’re not supposed to accept science either. You’re not supposed to accept anything. So in the end this skepticism is not skepticism with regard to God; it is skepticism with regard to everything, or maybe everything you have not seen directly. If I’m willing to let him have the claim that what is directly seen is indeed certain. Even about that one could argue—who says? There are people who also see mirages, all right? Even our direct observations cannot be said to involve certainty. Maybe our brain deceives us, anything is possible—Descartes’ deceiving demon. But even if I say I accept that, science is not the result of direct observations. No one can say that he saw that every object with mass attracts another object with mass. No one saw that. What you saw were a few specific examples. How do you know that this is a general law, that it is true for all kinds of objects everywhere? Generalization—you make some kind of intellectual move. That intellectual move is your responsibility, because that’s how you’re built. But who said it’s true about what happens in the world? Therefore this attack, which attacks the ways to faith, actually attacks the ways to scientific laws, to scientific research, in exactly the same way. And therefore this broken trough is much broader than merely the broken trough of faith. And in this matter, that really brings me back briefly—I won’t get into all the details here—but briefly, this is basically the point at which philosophy of science stood after Hume. After Hume, the claim was that the most basic tools of science itself—namely induction and causality—induction, the attempt to learn from cases you have seen a general law, or from what happened in the past to learn that it will also happen in the future, or that it will also happen in other places. The more correct formulation of induction is not from past to future, but from cases I have seen to cases I have not seen. Whether they already existed or whether they will be in the future, it doesn’t matter—cases I have not seen. So the principle of induction and the principle of causality—that everything has a cause and that there are causal relations between events at all—these stood at the center of Hume’s skeptical attack. And his attack was exactly this. Do you have proof that induction works? Who told you that what worked in the cases you saw is a general law, that it always works? Maybe you saw certain cases, and in other cases it won’t work. And regarding causality, the same thing: Hume asked how you attribute a causal link to pairs of events. Right? You see that you put wood into the fire and the wood burns. Okay, who said the fire caused the wood to burn? All you saw was that you put it in the fire and afterward the wood burned, but you didn’t see that because of the fire the wood burned. That’s your conclusion. Because you see that if you throw it into the sea it doesn’t burn, and if you throw it into the fire it does burn. Fine—who said? Maybe it’s accidental. Maybe it burns at every even moment, and in the sea you threw it at an odd moment, and into the fire you threw it at an even moment, and that’s why it burned. You can never really know your scientific conclusion with certainty. And therefore these attacks, born of the desire for certainty, attack science too and not only faith. And in that sense I think that faith and science are in the same boat. Even though they are often portrayed as two rivals, as two enemies, they are in the same boat. Meaning: whoever attacks faith is actually attacking science too. And that, by the way, is one of the basic points the skeptics don’t understand. Because the skeptics attack faith in the name of science—not specific arguments for faith; they attack faith itself. They attack the very fact that you hold positions to which science cannot lead you. That is the essential skeptical attack. And I’m saying that someone who holds scientific positions also holds positions to which science cannot lead him, because there too my common sense operates, my a priori reason, and not only observation. Observation is a pretty small part of science. Scientific laws are always the result of generalizations I make on the basis of observations—mental processes, elimination, Ockham’s razor, common sense, a great deal of ordinary reasoning, healthy reasoning. And therefore when you attack that and refuse to accept its conclusions, in effect you should not accept the conclusions of science either.
[Speaker B] Because there are people who say that the apple falls because the Holy One, blessed be He, decrees that it should.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right.
[Speaker B] That there are no laws—that every single thing that happens, a leaf falls because God decreed it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are people who learn that from Nachmanides at the end of Parashat Bo: “A person has no share in the Torah of Moses unless he believes that all our occurrences are nothing but miracles.” Meaning, that everything is miracles. And anyone who studies Nachmanides carefully will see that he doesn’t say that. But even if he did say that, I don’t agree with him. Meaning, no—I do think there are laws of nature, and that things generally proceed in a fairly…
[Speaker B] The Baal Shem Tov.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Baal Shem Tov is much easier for me to disagree with. Well, in any case, for our purposes, the point is that this attack really is a serious attack. Who told you? Who told you that what you saw in those examples is correct as a general rule? And here it already becomes a question where, even if I tend not to accept what the skeptic says, I still owe myself some kind of accounting. What am I relying on? What could really ground such a view? In The History of Philosophy there is a book by Hugo Bergmann, who was a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University, and he wrote a book called Introduction to Epistemology. In the ninth chapter of that book, which is called—yes, it’s somewhat archaic Hebrew—The Rationality of the World, the Fit of the World to Our Intellect, he raises various attempts throughout the history of philosophy at how philosophers tried to answer this question. The last attempt, and relatively the most convincing, was Kant’s attempt, but in the end he reaches the conclusion that there is no answer. In the history of philosophy, no reasonable answer was ever given to this question. What was Kant’s solution? I’ll focus only on him because he’s the important one for our purposes. I also don’t agree with him, but I think he opened a very important door toward the version that I believe in, and I’ll tell you that in a moment. Kant basically tried to formulate Hume’s problems in a more general way. And what he said was this, without getting into Kant’s terminology—synthetic and analytic and a priori and a posteriori and all his gadgets. I’ll put it simply. Kant basically said this: we have two toolboxes, a toolbox of thought and a toolbox of cognition. What corresponds to the two toolboxes I described earlier—philosophy and logic—that’s the toolbox of thought, and cognition as observation is the scientific toolbox. Kant says: the laws of science, or any interesting proposition we think about, cannot come out of either of those two toolboxes. Because the toolbox of thought merely reflects how I am built. If I infer conclusions about the world by means of my thought, there is no reason in the world to accept that they are true. The fact that my thought is structured in a certain way—does that mean that the world also operates that way? That’s how my thought is structured. Therefore the empiricists come and say: of course not, we have to stick to observation. Because our thinking is basically a function of how we are built. We have no guarantee that we are built in a way that will give us the conclusion that is actually true in the world itself. That is basically what lies behind the skeptical claim. They say: you have to stick to reality—yes, the skeptics, to scientific observation. But thought… And now we discover that scientific observation also doesn’t really do the job, because it gives us particular facts. I saw that this phone, if I let go of it, falls downward, but I did not see that all bodies with mass fall downward. Therefore scientific observation does not give me the general scientific law; it gives me certain cases that I observed. And how do I get to the general law? By means of my thought—I generalize. Generalization is not an observational procedure; generalization is a mental procedure. It belongs to the toolbox of thought, not to the toolbox of cognition. Therefore Kant says: basically, the predicament we are in, or the broken cistern standing before us, attacks science too and not only faith. His proposal was the following. When I speak about the world—let’s say I formulate a scientific statement about the world, all bodies with mass fall toward the earth, or attract one another—then he says: I am actually not talking about the world as it is, but about the world as I see it, noumena versus phenomena. Noumena is the world in itself, and phenomena is the world as I perceive it. So of course everything I call scientific facts is not really things that happen in the world; they are things that happen in the world as I experience it, right? Because when I see a body falling toward the earth, that’s not… I don’t know whether the body is falling toward the earth; what I know is that in my cognition there is an image of a body falling toward the earth. Right? That is basically what I know; I cannot know what happens in the world itself. So Kant says: if that’s so, then the facts I discuss, the ones science deals with, are not facts in the world itself; they are facts located within our cognition. And if so, then it is no longer implausible that mental tools, which are also inside me, can understand the general scientific laws. Because the general scientific laws are not laws that govern the world, but laws that govern the way I perceive the world. I too am always inside this game; it is not the world in an objective sense. And since that is so, Kant says, then it is no wonder that thought-processes such as generalization, or causality, or certain assumptions that we bring with us from home, are used to decode what happens in the world. Because this is not really an engagement with what happens in the world, but an engagement with the picture formed in my cognition when I look at the world.
[Speaker D] How much weight should be given to the fact that almost everyone in the world basically thinks this way? Does the significance of such a quantity of people who think this way already affect the quality? That’s an interesting claim.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that’s an interesting claim. As far as I know, it’s a very, very common claim in discussions around Kant. Because Kant basically makes a leap here from the subjective plane to the intersubjective plane. There’s a difference between objective, subjective, and intersubjective. Intersubjective means something that is true in the subjectivity of all people, not just my own personally. And the question people ask about Kant is: you reduce us from the objective to the subjective, but how do you get to the intersubjective? Meaning, how do you explain that in all people subjectivity works in the same way? So all kinds of answers were suggested about this—maybe we’re all built in the same way, evolution, which of course didn’t exist in his time yet, or things of that kind. Kant himself, as far as I know—I’m not some great expert in his thought—but as far as I know, Kant himself did not address this leap. He assumed it as obvious that when he spoke about subjectivity, he meant the subjectivity of all of us. We all think the same way. But that itself requires explanation: how did that happen if it doesn’t really correspond to something objective? So how does that happen? Right. In any case, for our purposes, what I… again, my goal is not Kant’s doctrine, but eventually to get to the concept of faith. What I really want to say is the following claim: I think Kant is not right. For many reasons. One of them, for example, is that I see no reason in the world to assume that my cognitive limitations correspond to my mental limitations. Suppose that in the world Newton’s true second law were that force is proportional to acceleration squared, not to acceleration as Newton stated it, but to acceleration squared, but because of the limitations of our cognition we are unable to see objects that move according to that law—we only see objects moving according to F = ma, force proportional to acceleration. Let’s say that’s some simplistic consequence of what Kant says. Now I say: why assume that… our cognitive limitations correspond to the constraints of thought? Let’s say our thought led us to the generalization of F = ma, but why can’t I see a body moving with an acceleration whose square is proportional to force? What, is there some barrier in the eyes? If such a body passes before my eyes, I won’t be able to see it? Why won’t I be able to see it? If it has an acceleration of five meters per second squared, and the force acting on it is such and such, I’ll see it; but if the force acting on it is different, then I just won’t see the body? That is no less mystical than the problem you came to explain. And Kant’s explanation is itself an explanation that requires explanation no less than what it came to explain. So I don’t see what he gains here. It’s not convincing. I want to take Kant’s analysis, which I really did here in a nutshell, and formulate it a little differently. And I think this is the only way to answer this question. There is no other way. In the entire history of philosophy there isn’t. This is an important point, because people have this image that in philosophy there are many opinions and there’s never any way to decide. Who knows whether this one is right or that one is right, so what’s the point of bothering with it? This question, for example, is a wonderful question in that sense, because you can see that none of the answers given throughout history holds water. And therefore the conclusion that emerges from here is one conclusion. And here is our way of learning from philosophy. Here is a wonderful example of how one really can learn something from philosophy and reach conclusions. And I want to make the following claim. Basically, what Kant assumed when he got stuck in this tangle—or the way he formulated Hume’s tangle—he says: we have two toolboxes, the cognitive one, scientific, observational, and the mental one, logical-philosophical. And either you use this one or that one, but neither of them can really give you the laws of science, and therefore you’re in trouble. And I claim that this dichotomous description is the root of the problem. What I really want to claim is that there is some part of our thinking that is actually not mental. It is not done inside our heads, but is part of cognition. What I really want to claim is that what we call thought is not pure thought. It has dimensions that belong to the second toolbox, to cognition. I’ll give you an example. Suppose I saw several bodies with mass and they all fell toward the earth. I generalized and reached the conclusion that there is a law of gravitation, that all bodies with mass fall toward the earth. Then they attack me: who told you? Generalization is a mental process. A mental process is inside you. Who told you that it corresponds to what happens in the world? And observation didn’t give you the general law; it gave you only the particular facts you observed. That’s the attack. The only answer that can be given to this is that I see the law of gravitation. I see it directly. I see that there is such a general law, that all bodies with mass fall toward the earth. Now of course the term “see” here is misleading. I don’t see it with my eyes. I see it with the intellect. It’s a different kind of seeing. But what I want to claim is that this thing is not pure thought; it is not something that happens merely as some computational process inside my brain. Yes, thought—what is the distinction between thought and cognition? Cognition is my interaction with the world, right? I look at the world and draw information from it. I interact with the world. Thought is done inside me, not connected to the world. I process the information and make generalizations and think thoughts inside my head without connection to the world. And that is where they ask: wait a second, if thought gives you the laws of nature, how can you assume that those really are the correct laws of nature in the world? After all, it’s thought. Your thought is simply a function of how you are built. How can you know that this is really what happens in the world? Yes, like Mark Twain said, the world owes you nothing; it was here before you. Meaning, the fact that you think a certain way doesn’t mean that the world behaves that way too. My answer: scientific generalization is not a mental procedure. It is the result of observation. When I look at those cases where bodies fell toward the earth, I simply see with the eyes of the intellect that what caused this was their having mass. Or in other words, that there is a general law that every body with mass falls toward the earth. I simply see it. It isn’t thought; it’s cognition. But it isn’t cognition through the senses. It is cognition through the intellect. The intellect functions here in a role that belongs to the world of cognition and not to the world of thought. That is basically the claim. I did this somewhat briefly. I hope it came out clearly enough anyway, because one would have had to go into Kant and dig a bit. Whether what you’re claiming now, yes,
[Speaker D] Whether what you’re claiming now doesn’t create a situation in which you’ve basically turned the subjective into the objective? Is there a certain situation in which from subjectivity I can arrive at objectivity?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That is exactly what I’m claiming. Excellent definition. That is exactly what I’m claiming. I’m claiming that this is not something happening merely inside my own head, it is not a subjective matter. It is interaction with the world just as I have in scientific observation. Only here the interaction is not carried out with the senses—hearing, sight, touch, and the like—but the intellect has some power, a cognitive power, not a thinking power. It is a power that manages to grasp things in the world. And here one must understand that we have only two options. Whoever accepts this can go with science and believe in it—not in a dogmatic way, of course. Whoever does not accept this has to remain a skeptic, even regarding science, not only regarding faith. Okay, I can’t deal with chats in the middle, so forgive me that I’m not answering. At the end of the class—or if someone has an urgent question he can break in during the class—at the end of the class there’s time, it’s possible to answer questions more calmly. So the point is that there is no third way. Meaning, you can either be a skeptic, or if you are a mature synthetic thinker, you must accept that our mind has some power, some ability, a cognitive faculty, not a thinking faculty, an objective faculty and not a subjective one. Otherwise there is no science. Now you can say, okay, there’s no justification for this, it sounds mystical to me—but then know that science too is mystical, so give up science as well. Meaning, if you accept this, then you can maintain science, and I think it is not mysticism; it is part of our cognitive abilities. And therefore there is nothing mystical here; it is simply not the logical part of thought, but a part that I call—and now I’ll already give it the name—the part called intuition. Intuition is basically some ability we have to grasp something in reality not through the senses. That is called intuition. You know, sometimes in yeshivas they call it the discerning eye of a Torah scholar. Yes, you know, the Talmud in “These are the lost items” says that a lost object is returned to a Torah scholar based on visual recognition. He doesn’t need to give identifying marks; it’s enough that he says: I recognize this object, it’s mine, I identify it. Okay. Now, usually people say that only Torah scholars have such visual recognition. That’s a mistake, of course. The Talmud says the opposite: only to Torah scholars do we return it on the basis of visual recognition because a Torah scholar is not suspected of lying. Not because only he has visual recognition. On the contrary, from the Talmud there it emerges that every person has visual recognition, not only a Torah scholar. Another person might be lying to you; you can’t know. A Torah scholar is presumed not to lie, therefore we return it to him on the basis of visual recognition. But for our purposes, every person has visual recognition. Now what is this visual recognition? It is one of two things: either there are little signs that he cannot formulate, cannot verbalize, yes, cannot put into words, or he has some ability to grasp that this is his object not by way of external signs. I don’t know, he simply sees that this is it. You can say it this way or that way, I don’t know. But it seems to me that it definitely could be—listen, sometimes we have sensations of someone standing behind us. How do we feel that? There are such intuitions where people grasp things not through the senses, but afterward when you look, you’ll see that it really is true. They grasped something correct; it’s not subjective. Turn around and you’ll indeed see someone standing behind you. That means we basically have some kind of ability that I’ll now call cognitive thinking. And in Kant’s terminology this means that the distinction between the toolbox of thought and the toolbox of cognition is not dichotomous. There is some intermediate area that combines the two. It is cognitive thinking. It is thinking by means of the intellect, cognition by means of the intellect, not cognition by means of the senses. And this is the only way to solve the problem posed by Hume and Kant. There is no other way out. I also found for this approach three precedents. The earliest precedent is Maimonides. At the beginning of Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides speaks about what are called the eyes of the intellect. Now notice: the eyes of the intellect is an oxymoronic expression. Because eyes belong to perception, sensation, cognition, apprehension, and the intellect belongs to thought. And yet it is called the eyes of the intellect. Maimonides distinguishes there between seeing and gazing, yes—there are things that are seen with the eyes of the intellect. Even in biblical language there are expressions reserved for seeing with the eyes of the intellect, not seeing with the eyes. So what is that? What is this thing? I want to claim that he takes an expression from the world of cognition—eyes—and an expression from the world of thought—the intellect—and connects them together. Which is basically what I call cognitive thinking. Our intuition. A second precedent for this is Husserl, Edmund Husserl, a twentieth-century philosopher, a well-known twentieth-century philosopher, the founder of the view called phenomenology. And he indeed speaks about eidetic seeing. And he asks himself how we arrive at Plato’s ideas. He says we see them—not with the eyes. We understand the idea מתוך the specific examples we observed. We see the general law through the particular examples that we see with our eyes. He is the closest to the formulation I presented earlier. And the third precedent is Rabbi HaNazir. When Rabbi HaNazir speaks about the voice of prophecy, the auditory Hebrew logic—yes, he contrasts there between auditory logic, which in his view is Hebrew, Talmudic, prophetic logic, and visual Greek logic. Now both visual and auditory are concepts that belong to the world of perception, the world of cognition, right? To hear and to see. Reuven and Shimon, by the way—Reuven is sight and Shimon is hearing. That already appears in Rabbi Tzadok. So sight and hearing belong to the world of perception. Logic belongs to the world of cognition—yes, to the world of thought. Once again, this coupling of auditory logic or visual logic is basically a coupling of a concept from perception with a concept from cognition. Or in other words, I think this too comes to express the fact that we have cognitive thinking. There is such a category, some human capacity called cognitive thinking. Now I want to clarify a bit more exactly what is meant here. When we… I’ll give you an example. Suppose someone is sitting over a difficult mathematical problem, and he’s been on it for two months and cannot solve the equation. Someone comes over, looks at the sheet he’s bent over, and says to him: the solution is this, e to the power of k cosine x. That’s the solution. Fine, doesn’t matter what equation and that’s its solution. Well, the first person plugs it into the equation and sees: yes, that’s exactly the solution. He asks the second fellow: tell me, really now, listen, I’ve been working on this for two months already. How did you manage in a moment to see that this is the solution? So he says: I don’t know, I had this kind of feeling, I had a sense that this was the solution. Is it correct to call such a thing a feeling? A feeling is a subjective emotion. I love someone, hate someone, fear someone or something. That is subjective. Here, after all, I can put it to a test. His “feeling,” in quotation marks, gave a solution that I can check. The solution works. It is the correct solution. Meaning that this thing, although many people call it emotion or feeling, is actually neither emotion nor feeling, but a cognitive faculty. A mathematical genius can give you the solution directly and not with half a year of calculation like you need in order to arrive at the solution. And still you will arrive at the same solution. What does that mean? It means that he has some ability to look at the equation and “see,” in quotation marks—not with the eyes—see with his intellect that this is the solution. He doesn’t need to do the calculation. He knows immediately that this is the solution. But notice: he knows that this is the solution; it is not that he senses or feels that this is the solution. Because I feel love or feel fear. But love or fear are subjective emotions; they say nothing about the world. There is no way to check whether this is true or not true, because it does not make any claim that needs to be true or false. Here he is making a claim. He says: the solution to this equation is this. Check me. If that claim is true, what does it mean? That he had some ability to know a fact about the world by mental means. He did not perform the calculation, he did not inspect it with the eyes; he simply saw—saw, of course, with the eyes of the intellect—that this is the solution. This is an example of what I call intuition. Intuition is basically the cognitive faculty of our thinking. Cognitive thinking. Now I want to return to the set of problems, the set of problems I spoke about earlier. The claim is basically this: after all, we asked what the fundamental assumptions of a logical or philosophical argument are based on. The conclusion has a proof on the basis of the fundamental assumptions. But the fundamental assumptions themselves have no proof. So the skeptic asks: then why do you accept them? Who told you they are true? The answer I give is: because I have an intuition that they are true. What we call common sense, common wisdom, whatever you want to call it—that is intuition. I have some immediate understanding that tells me: this is true. Not that I happen to feel like it, not that it is built into me, embedded within me, but that I have such a cognitive faculty—I see that this is how it is true. That is my basis for axioms. Now a person may refuse to accept this and remain a skeptic. But whoever is not a skeptic must accept it. You have to understand: there is no third option. Either you are a skeptic, or you accept this “mysticism.” That’s it. There is no third way. There is no other way to ground the synthetic, non-skeptical view. Therefore, what I want to claim is that at the basis of every philosophical doctrine, at the basis of every scientific theory, at the basis of every value-position, at the basis of every interesting thing on earth—as distinct from particular facts that I observed—every abstract, general statement that cannot be directly observed rests on intuition. And when I speak about faith in God, I actually think that the concept of faith, which so confuses people, is the Jewish name for intuition. Intuition is faith. That’s what it means. A person can come—and we’ll discuss this later—a person can come and say: I believe in God because I have an intuition that there is a God. The skeptics ask him: but you didn’t see anything, it’s not observational, so it’s not valid. But I have an intuition that there is a God. But what do you mean? Make up your mind: did you observe Him? No. So it’s not scientific. Did you think about it? Did you think it because that’s how you’re built? Because you have the gene of faith? Because there is something imprinted in you that causes you to be a believing person? But then you don’t really have a real basis for thinking that there really is a God, that in the world itself there is a God. My answer is: not true. It is cognitive thinking. It is intuition. I have an intuition that there is a God. I’ll spell this out more—it’s not quite as simple as it sounds—but that’s where I’m heading. And what I basically want to say is that I want to sharpen, and this is the important thing that emerges from this whole move: faith has nothing at all to do specifically with God or theology. Faith is a cognitive faculty. One of the human cognitive faculties. A person has the senses, through which he observes particular facts. A certain fact happening before my eyes, I observe it and know it. That’s the senses. I have the thinking tool. The thinking tool derives conclusions for me from fundamental assumptions. Yes, that’s logic. That’s another cognitive faculty. And there is a third cognitive faculty, and that is the faculty that gives me the fundamental assumptions themselves, on which logic operates and from which it draws conclusions. That faculty is called faith. When people ask me why between two points only one straight line passes, my answer is: because that is what I believe. I have no proof. It is not observation. You can’t know that maybe not, maybe you missed something—maybe there’s another straight line passing between these two points? How can you know to tell me that you saw that there isn’t? You saw one line, but you didn’t see that there isn’t a second. So how do you know? Because somehow it is clear to me that there isn’t a second. That is cognitive thinking. My intuition tells me there isn’t a second. That is faith. It is exactly the same faith as faith in God, or as faith in the principle of causality, or as faith in the principle of induction. And therefore I want to broaden the concept of faith beyond its religious context. The concept of faith is the infrastructure of human reason. It is not mysticism. It has nothing to do with mysticism at all. All human reason rests on it. Science rests on it. Everything rests on it. Whoever does not accept this faculty as a reliable faculty, whoever does not accept the conclusion of intuition, ought to abandon science as well, and values as well, and faith as well. He ought to remain in total skepticism. Maybe except for specific things that he saw with his eyes or heard with his ears. That’s it. Only those things can he accept. And even about that I can raise objections—who told you your eyes didn’t deceive you. But even if we let him have that, then fine, almost everything he believes he cannot accept. And therefore there is no person in the world who is not a believer. That’s nonsense. The whole question is only what you believe in. And about that one can argue—whether to believe in God or not. But whoever attacks this faculty itself, the faculty of faith, is talking nonsense. Or he is a complete skeptic, in which case he is attacking science too. If he does it in the name of science, then he is talking nonsense. He simply does not understand what he is talking about. It is not even a matter for debate; it is just a foolish mistake. He can say: I do not accept the arguments that there is a God; I do not have an intuition that there is a God. That’s perfectly fine, to each his own intuitions. But you cannot say: the fact that intuition says something means nothing. If that is your claim—yes, there are people who say: yes, my intuition also says there is a God. But intuition—so what if intuition? That’s something built into me. Fine, so what if intuition? The principle of causality is also intuition. The axioms of geometry are also intuition. Everything is intuition. There is a very, very important point here, because the concept of faith, which is so attacked in the religious context, people do not notice that it is actually the infrastructure of our thinking everywhere—in the moral context, in the scientific context, in the legal context, and in the religious context too. Everywhere. And whoever does not accept it is attacking this power itself. Again, one can argue about what intuition says. One can argue with arguments, and in a moment we’ll see what arguments do in the context of intuition—that will come later. But of course one can argue; I’m not saying one cannot argue with the conclusion that there is a God. I’m only saying that if someone argues against the very use of intuition—not against a specific intuition that there is a God, but against the very reliability of the concept of intuition or faith—then he is simply a complete skeptic. He ought to throw out everything he believes in. I know very few such people. There are many people who attack the reliability of this tool called faith or intuition, and very few of them are genuine skeptics. Which means that the overwhelming majority of them live in contradiction.
[Speaker F] Okay, so for now we’ve established that there is…
[Speaker G] May I make a comment? I can’t hear.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One at a time, yes.
[Speaker F] I’m saying that today we established that there is another sense called intuition, and that’s fine. But still, to claim and compare science and faith—that has a problem in it, because…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, we’ll get to that at length. You’re jumping ahead. We’ll get to that at length. I didn’t make a comparison. I only said that both are based on this faculty called intuition. That’s all. From here on there will be differences and there will be similarities, and we’ll still discuss that at length.
[Speaker F] So next time, okay.
[Speaker G] May I make a comment? Yes, yes. First of all I want to say, this class was wonderful today, thank you very, very much. But I want to give you another case in which intuition apparently operates, and it not only gives you the possibility of knowing, but you also take actions based on it, and those actions make you right—you even make quite a bit of money from them. And that is the world of top-level chess, world chess champions. Today computers can perform a meticulous deterministic analysis of every chessboard position containing seven pieces. Eighteen years ago they could analyze only positions of six pieces. In order to perform deterministic analysis of seven pieces, those programs use a database of 20 terabytes. Okay? Now chess grandmasters encounter positions with more than seven pieces, they make decisions, they win world championships, it’s millions of dollars. But that’s…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Here on this matter I actually don’t quite agree, and I’ll tell you why. First of all, in today’s situation chess programs beat world champions. We’ve already passed that point. And since that’s so, it’s true that they can do full analysis only of positions of seven pieces, apparently, if that’s what you’re saying—I’m not familiar—only of positions of seven pieces. But in partial analysis, or several moves ahead, not to the very end, they can do that on a full board too, and today they do it better than a human player. Today’s artificial intelligence programs already do that. Therefore I’m not sure that would be a good example for the matter. The question is whether artificial intelligence itself might perhaps be a good example of what I’m saying here, because there too the thinking is done in some different way, but that’s a philosophical question I won’t get into here. It’s an interesting question in itself. A comment?
[Speaker C] Yes. I understood the Rabbi to be saying that cognitive thinking—that’s the term I understood from the Rabbi, cognitive thinking—and the Rabbi says that cognitive thinking is like cognition itself. If I understood correctly. It is what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t hear the end. It is what?
[Speaker C] It is like cognition itself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is cognition, not by means of the senses.
[Speaker C] Fine, so I want to ask the Rabbi: does the Rabbi nevertheless still distinguish between them? Are they equal in strength completely?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, does the Rabbi still say that science is more certain than
[Speaker C] cognitive thinking?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know how to make those comparisons. That was asked earlier too. I’ll still get to the distinctions, the comparisons and distinctions between faith and science, although at their base both rest on faith or on intuition. But from there on there are differences, and I’ll still talk about that.
[Speaker C] Fine. Rabbi, may I add one more thing? Yes, yes. Rabbi, may I add one more thing? The skeptic and the one who believes in synthetic thinking—is the dispute between them perhaps only semantic? After all, in the end they both conduct themselves in the same way in reality. Not true, I think this is a substantive dispute.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They both conduct themselves in the same way, but for different reasons. Rabbi, may I ask something? The skeptic and the one who believes in synthetic thought—is the question whether the dispute between them is not merely semantic? After all, in the end they both conduct themselves the same way. No, no. I think this is a substantive dispute. They both conduct themselves the same way, but for different reasons. One behaves that way because he thinks that is what is right, and the other behaves that way because he feels like it. For example, a practical difference: suppose a person sees me murdering someone. If he is a skeptic, he ought not accuse me. He doesn’t refrain from murder because he is used to not murdering, not because it is right not to murder. So if he sees someone murdering, he ought not accuse me unless he feels like accusing me, but if he doesn’t feel like it then he won’t accuse me. A person who believes that this is what is right will accuse me for murdering because I acted wrongly. But you can have identical phenomenology in both these things.
[Speaker C] But doesn’t the skeptic also have that murder is bad because he too is programmed that way? Doesn’t he think that way?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I said: if he feels like accusing me, he’ll accuse me too. That’s why I’m saying there won’t necessarily be a difference. But there could be a difference. If, for example, someone really doesn’t feel like accusing me, then he won’t accuse me. But I, as one who is not a skeptic, even if I don’t feel like accusing someone who murdered, I will accuse him because I think that is not the right way to behave.
[Speaker C] Understood, thank you.
[Speaker E] I have a question regarding the distinction between cognition and logic or thinking. In the end, even sensory cognition is ultimately done in the intellect, in the same brain.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I said that. That’s why I said that the skeptics who accept the particular facts that I observe, they too are basically assuming that the system—my perception—works properly, that it is reliable. And my perception is not only the eye; it obviously includes the visual center in the brain, the whole processing procedure. I completely agree. And therefore, on a basic level, if you are really a genuine skeptic, then you shouldn’t accept even particular facts, not only generalizations. Anyone else?
[Speaker C] Rabbi, regarding what you mentioned with Kant. I actually understand better what the Rabbi explained in Kant—that everything is what I see, my truths are what I perceive reality to be.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that I also agree with. I’m only claiming that it didn’t solve the problem he presented. I completely agree with his distinction, but I claim that it did not solve the philosophical problem he was trying to solve. But that’s a topic for a class on Kant.
[Speaker H] Understood, perfectly fine. Rabbi, can the class be summed up in two words: everything is intuition?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The basis of everything is intuition. There is still more work to be done on the basis of intuition, but that is the foundation. That’s where we start. Understood, understood. But I’m saying, we’ll still get there, we’ll talk. But notice that here I not only relied—I not only did two different things here, and I’ll still talk about this too, just to sharpen it. The concept of faith, as far as I’m concerned, I want to know by what routes one can arrive at God. Fine? So I tried to define my relation to the various toolboxes. But in the end I reached the conclusion that faith is basically a general cognitive faculty, not specifically connected to God. And there’s a kind of double meaning to the concept of faith here. Faith in God is a specific content of faith, but faith as such, not specifically faith in God, is a general cognitive faculty. And one can make use of it in many, many contexts, and in fact people do make use of it in many other contexts. Okay, we’ll still talk. Sabbath peace, goodbye.
[Speaker G] Sabbath peace, thank you.