Faith and Its Meaning – Lesson 13

Table of Contents

• Faith as a factual claim versus emotion, and the crisis of emotionalism
• The shift in the center of gravity away from reason: Dov Sadan’s joke and its implications
• Tanya: the divine soul and the animal soul, and the struggle that is not “good inclination versus evil inclination”
• Choice, sheep, and serving God as a stance rather than dependence on inclination
• Maimonides: “to do the truth because it is truth” and removing emotion from religiosity
• Defining religiosity: the existence of God and commitment to His command, not “I feel obligated”
• Criticism of the commandment of faith in Maimonides, and of commanding facts
• Rashi’s opening comment, the book of Genesis, and the claim that Judaism is Jewish law
• Faith as a precondition, and the universality of the question of God
• The limits of science and philosophy, and the claim that you can’t “make an atheist religious” through logic
• Intuition, rhetoric, and changing basic assumptions
• The paths to faith: Kant, rhetoric, intuition, and tradition, and the independence of the arguments

Summary

General overview

The text presents faith as a factual claim about the existence of God, not as an emotion or experience, and argues that relying on emotion is a symptom of a postmodern crisis in which reason loses authority and public discourse becomes emotional, with the hostage-deal debate as an example. It draws a distinction between instinct-driven conduct and intellect-driven conduct through the concepts in Tanya of the divine soul and the animal soul, and argues that serving God should mean “to do the truth because it is truth,” as stated by Maimonides, not for reward and not for emotional benefits. It then defines religiosity as belief in the existence of God and commitment to His command, presents a critique of the very possibility of commanding faith as a factual claim and of Maimonides’ formulations in this area, and places faith as a precondition for entering the halakhic game rather than as part of Jewish law itself. Finally, it argues that science and philosophy have difficulty grounding the claim that God exists in a way that would convert an atheist, explains the role of intuition and rhetoric in changing basic assumptions, and concludes with six ways of arriving at faith, including Kant’s three ways, while stressing their independence from one another and moving on to the third way, the physico-theological argument.

Faith as a factual claim versus emotion, and the crisis of emotionalism

Faith, at its core, is a factual claim that God exists, not an emotion or an experience, and someone can experience religious feelings and still be a complete atheist. Einstein is given as an example of someone who did not believe in God in the usual sense but did report religious feelings, so religious emotion is not an indicator of one’s position about the world. The text describes a crisis of despair over reason, referred to as postmodernity, accompanied by an upgrading of the status of emotion, though in his view emotion is not supposed to shape positions or make decisions.

The text describes the debate over the hostage deal as one that “isn’t really being conducted,” because people are acting “from the gut,” and argues that the public energy around it stems mainly from emotion. It adds that the tendency to support the deal is more connected to emotionality, and that opposition to the deal is usually less emotional and more rational, without deciding whether that position is correct. It presents turning emotional conduct into an ideology as a “serious social ill” and a severe blow to what is happening in the country today, because discourse is supposed to be conducted through arguments.

The shift in the center of gravity away from reason: Dov Sadan’s joke and its implications

The text cites a joke in the name of Dov Sadan about Jewish revolutions as a movement from the head to the heart, to the belly, and below the belt, until a future revolutionary will be “an orthopedic specialist for the feet.” He interprets the joke as an accurate description of a decline in the center of gravity of decision-making. He argues that people are not more stupid, but less intellectual, and distinguishes between talent and intellect on the one hand, and intellectual conduct on the other—conduct that gives reason the authority to make decisions.

Tanya: the divine soul and the animal soul, and the struggle that is not “good inclination versus evil inclination”

The text refers to a chapter in Tanya (chapter 9 or 7, “I think 9”) and criticizes the description of the moral struggle as a struggle between the good inclination and the evil inclination, because then “a good person” is someone whose good inclination won out, rather than the person himself. He presents the struggle instead as a competition between the divine soul and the animal soul, and defines the animal soul as the whole instinctive dimension, including both good inclination and evil inclination. He argues that a person led by the animal soul can be “wonderful” if his good inclination is strong, or “wicked” if his evil inclination is strong, but in both cases it is the same kind of instinct-driven existence.

The text argues that one must not be led either by the good inclination or by the evil inclination, but rather make decisions as an “I,” after listening to both sides. He identifies the divine soul with reason and with decision “from above,” and argues that the distinction is not between a smart person and a stupid one, but between an intellectual person and a non-intellectual person, even if that person is talented and smart. This, he says, explains how intelligent people arrive at mistaken views, and he quotes Oscar Wilde about “foolish things so great that only intellectuals can say them.”

Choice, sheep, and serving God as a stance rather than dependence on inclination

The text argues that faith determined by emotion is atheism in practice, and compares someone who follows his good inclination to a “sheep” with a pleasant nature that does not prey on others. He says that the Holy One, blessed be He, gave us choice so that we would choose the good, not merely do the good, and cites Elijah on Mount Carmel: “How long will you keep hopping between two branches? If the Lord is God, follow Him; and if Baal, follow him,” as a genuine call for decision rather than a rhetorical trick. He identifies unstable religiosity as following “the crowd” rather than following truth, and defines that as the absence of a personal stance.

The text argues that abandoning a religious path is not necessarily an educational failure; it depends on the reason. If the abandonment comes from the “evil inclination,” then it is a failure, but if it comes from what the person genuinely thinks, then it is a success in the sense that a “choosing creature” has been formed. He adds that someone who remains observant only because this is his comfort zone is an “educational failure,” because what has been created is a “sheep,” and he formulates the demand as a double one: to be a chooser and to choose the good.

Maimonides: “to do the truth because it is truth” and removing emotion from religiosity

The text says that emotion and experience are irrelevant to the discussion, and cites Maimonides in the Laws of Repentance, chapter 10, about serving not for the sake of reward but rather “to do the truth because it is truth, and the good will ultimately come.” He expands this to exclude serving for emotional and psychological benefits as well, and quotes Marx’s statement that religion is “opium for the masses” as something “more true than that.” He tells an anecdote about the Belzer Rebbe in connection with unfamiliarity with a “bird” and a “coin,” and weaves it into his critique of religiosity that is built on non-intellectual components.

Defining religiosity: the existence of God and commitment to His command, not “I feel obligated”

The text defines religiosity as belief in the factual claim that God exists and as commitment to His command, and emphasizes that even the commitment is based on a philosophical conclusion—that “if God commands, that obligates me”—not on a feeling of obligation. He argues that someone who is careful about commandments only because he was educated that way “has never fulfilled a commandment in his life,” because he is acting from programming rather than decision. He presents the demand that the correlation between education and action should be “zero”: neither automatic acceptance nor automatic rejection, but agreement or rejection based on thought.

Criticism of the commandment of faith in Maimonides, and of commanding facts

The text mentions “positive commandment no. 1 in Maimonides” as the commandment of faith, to believe in God, and argues that this is an “absurd” commandment because you cannot command belief when belief is a factual claim. He explains that a command means a requirement to do something by force of authority, even if without the command I would not have done it, whereas belief in a fact depends on persuasion, not command. He gives the example of being commanded to think that something is a table, and adds a joke about Rabbi Chaim of Brisk, Rabbi Baruch Ber, and the Griz around saying that the table is a cow.

The text expands this critique to the Thirteen Principles as well, and to belief in the coming of the Messiah, citing Rabbi Hillel in Sanhedrin: “Israel has no Messiah, for they already consumed him in the days of Hezekiah,” while the Talmud still calls him Rabbi Hillel and says, “May his Master forgive him.” He argues that if this is a person’s conclusion, you cannot demand that he believe otherwise; you can only persuade him. He notes the well-known difficulty that commanding belief already presupposes belief in the commander, and advances a broader claim: any command whose content is belief in a factual proposition is a conceptual contradiction.

Rashi’s opening comment, the book of Genesis, and the claim that Judaism is Jewish law

The text presents Rashi’s opening comment on the Torah in the name of Rabbi Yitzchak, who asks why the Torah did not begin with “This month shall be for you,” and identifies in that question the assumption that the Torah is supposed to contain only commandments, because “Torah” comes from the language of instruction. He criticizes Rashi’s answer—“He declared to His people the power of His works, to give them the inheritance of nations”—as a “limping” answer, but emphasizes the expression “and He gave it to whomever was upright in His eyes” as the deeper point. He interprets the creation chapter as giving a force-based argument of ownership, while the rest of Genesis teaches who is “upright in His eyes,” thereby substantively justifying the choice.

The text argues that the essence of the Torah is Jewish law, and that non-halakhic sections are peripheral and convey universal lessons; therefore, “there is no such thing as Jewish morality,” because morality is universal by definition. He argues that “Judaism is Jewish law, there is nothing else,” and from this concludes that “there is no such thing as secular Judaism,” because “Judaism without Jewish law” is an oxymoron.

Faith as a precondition, and the universality of the question of God

The text places faith in God as a condition for entering the game in which Jewish law is binding, rather than as part of Jewish law itself. It argues that the question whether God exists and the question whether His command is binding are universal philosophical questions, not specifically Jewish ones, because facts are not “Jewish.” He rejects the idea of “Jewish physics” and expands this into the claim that, in his view, there is no such thing as “Jewish thought”; there is only thought that is right or wrong, regardless of the maternal identity of the thinker.

The text locates the Jewish uniqueness in the fact that this people is commanded in more things than others, so Judaism is about clarifying what we were commanded, after the general conclusions about the existence of God and the binding force of His command have already been accepted. He points to the opening of the Mishneh Torah—“to know that there is a First Being”—as a description of a factual claim that one is to know.

The limits of science and philosophy, and the claim that you can’t “make an atheist religious” through logic

The text distinguishes between an empirical-scientific toolbox based on observation and a philosophical toolbox based on arguments, and argues that both have difficulty deciding the claim that God exists. He argues that there is no observational experiment that can test the existence of God, so science is of no help here. He explains that a valid logical argument always “begs the question” in the sense that the conclusion is hidden inside the premises, and illustrates this with a joke about “And Abraham went” as proof for a hat, together with a formal explanation of logical validity.

The text argues that since a valid conclusion is contained in the premises, a philosophical argument for the existence of God cannot turn an atheist into a believer. At most, it can show someone who thinks he is an atheist that he has already accepted premises that contain the belief, and that he “got confused.” He rejects statements like “faith is above reason” as “nonsense,” and insists that faith is a factual claim that one must arrive at as the conclusion that the fact is true.

Intuition, rhetoric, and changing basic assumptions

The text argues that basic assumptions are acquired through a faculty of “intuition” that recognizes certain things as true, while logic only derives conclusions from them. He argues that intuitions can be changed through intellectual looking from another angle, and calls these tools of persuasion “rhetoric,” while distinguishing that from rhetoric as demagoguery. He describes rhetoric as an unmediated encounter with a situation that makes it possible to see it differently, and gives examples such as a film about murder, films about the animal-industry world, and the thought experiment of “Mary’s room,” in order to show new learning through direct experience.

The text gives examples from the world of Jewish law to argue that abstract perception is not enough without understanding the situation itself, including a claim about “in the ghetto there are no monetary laws,” and an imaginary discussion about a pen in a falling elevator. He reflects on returning to religion following trauma or “miraculous” events, mentions “there are no atheists in foxholes,” and tells a personal story about an accident in which a neighbor from Yeruham stopped beside him and drove his family, while rejecting the miraculous interpretation in the name of probability. He describes a rhetorical use of logic by presenting improbable results that follow from certain premises, in order to motivate reexamining the premises, and gives examples of paradoxes such as the Swedish army paradox, Achilles and the tortoise, and the possibility of saying there is a bug in an argument even if you cannot identify it.

The paths to faith: Kant, rhetoric, intuition, and tradition, and the independence of the arguments

The text concludes with a division into six or seven ways, focusing on six: three of Kant’s ways—the ontological proof based on conceptual analysis (Anselm), the cosmological proof that infers a creator from the fact that something exists, and the physico-theological proof that infers a designer from complexity and coordination. It adds a fourth way, which he calls the rhetorical path; a fifth way of direct intuition, “Mimar faith,” which does not depend on the fact that one’s parents said so; and a sixth way of tradition about revelation and transmission through the generations.

The text emphasizes that the paths are independent and that each path proves “a different God,” according to the implied definition of God—for example, God as the most perfect being, God as creator of the world, and God as engineer. He argues that it is enough for one argument to hold in order to reach the conclusion that God exists, and therefore evolution, which mainly challenges the physico-theological argument, is “very overrated” with respect to the question of faith. He closes by saying that the first two arguments have already been reviewed, that the discussion is now in the middle of the third argument, and that in the next lecture he will begin from the third argument and continue onward.

Okay, let’s begin. So, our topic is faith / belief, and in the first semester I basically started with general introductions to the concept of faith / belief, and after that we moved on to different arguments or different ways of arriving at it. And we’re now in the middle of the third path out of four that need to be spelled out. There are more, but there are four that need to be laid out. So first I want to briefly go back over the principles of the introductions I gave, and then touch a bit on the first paths, and after that get into the third path. So first of all, faith / belief at root is a factual claim. Not to exclude people who think that faith / belief is an emotion, some kind of subjective experience or other—Yosef Teitel, right, from last semester. Yes. Okay. As opposed to those who think that faith / belief is an emotion or an experience or something like that, faith / belief is a factual claim. Meaning, someone who believes in God is basically someone making a factual claim: there is a God. That’s all. Someone who has various religious experiences, overflowing feelings and all sorts of “goyim” with an ayin, and all kinds of things like that, can be a complete atheist. Meaning, that has no connection whatsoever to faith / belief. Not because—well, as an indication of that, there are declared, explicit atheists who report having religious feelings. Einstein is one example we talked about just now: he basically did not believe in God, at least not in the accepted sense, but he had religious feelings. There are many artists who report religious feelings and the like. And therefore the fact that you have a religious feeling says nothing about what you think, because feelings in general say nothing about what you think. Feelings are simply some mental state that you experience. That’s all. It has no connection to claims about the world. Therefore—yes, the remark is hard to resist adding—there has been, in recent generations, a crisis of despair of reason, what is sometimes called postmodernism, a despair of reason, and alongside it another crisis: the upgrading of the status of emotion. If people despair of reason, they replace it with emotion. And that thing is a real disease, because emotion is not supposed to deal with forming positions and making decisions. Emotion is simply something that awakens inside me as a result of one psychological structure or another that I have. And I think you can see these things very powerfully—really, yes, these very days. Take, for example, the question of the hostages, the deal, and all things of that sort. Beyond the issue of whether one should support the deal or oppose the deal, arguments this way and that way, one thing seems pretty clear: the discussion around the deal is not being conducted. There is no discussion. Whether a deal is good, whether it isn’t good—there is no discussion. Even when arguments are raised, they’re usually completely idiotic arguments. Both for and against, both sides. There’s no preference here for either side. And the reason is that people are operating from the gut. Meaning, people who go out to demonstrations, who risk themselves on the roads in order to bring back the hostages and say that this is the supreme value—these are people whose gut leads them, generally speaking, not all of them. There are some who maybe really did make a substantive decision that they are in favor, and there are arguments in favor. But most of what gives energy to these moves is emotion. And I think that in this case, by the way, there is a difference between the sides. Meaning, opposition to a hostage deal is generally less emotional, more rational. Regardless of whether it’s correct. You can argue about whether it’s correct or not. But it is simply less emotional, because the emotions take us, yes, to the place of wanting to bring them back, right? That’s the simple tendency people have. And therefore more emotional people will support a deal. That does not mean that anyone who supports a deal is necessarily emotional. And it does mean that someone emotional will generally support a deal. Meaning, that—and to my mind that is a problem, because discourse should be conducted with arguments. So the point is that emotional conduct is not some new invention. Human beings have always acted emotionally. The only difference is that in the past it was clear to people that if you act emotionally, that’s a failure. You have to overcome it. Meaning, if you act emotionally, you should try to make reason rule over emotion. What happened as a result of the postmodern crisis is that emotional conduct became an ideology. Not only do you not see it as a failure, for people it’s an ideology: you should act according to what your emotion says. Yes, you should connect to things. Various statements of that kind—what stands behind them is basically the idea that there is some ideology according to which conduct should be emotional. It’s not just that people don’t see it as a failure; there is despair of reason. Reason can’t lead us to anything, so what’s left? What I connect to, what does it for me, what arouses stronger feelings or experiences in me. And I think this is maybe the hardest blow of what is happening in the country today—this emotionalism. Again, I say, with no connection whatsoever to the claims themselves. Meaning, I personally strongly oppose hostage deals of any kind with any enemy, but that’s irrelevant—I understand that there are arguments in favor. It’s not that there are no arguments in favor. What I oppose categorically is the way the discourse around the hostage deal is conducted, not the claim or the position itself. The discourse either isn’t being conducted, or rather—there is no discourse. Maybe one can—maybe the reason I brought this up is because of a joke I once heard from Shlomi Nitzan on the radio, in the name of Dov Sadan, who was a literature lecturer at the Hebrew University. He said that the next person who will make a revolution in the world will be a Jewish orthopedist. Why Jewish? Because of course the people who make revolutions in the world are Jews. But why an orthopedist? He said because the first Jew who made a revolution in the world was Abraham our forefather—or Moses our teacher—who said, “Lift up your eyes on high and see who created these.” Raise your head; this didn’t come into being by itself. Okay. The second person, the second Jew who made a revolution in the world, was Jesus. He said: the heart—“The Merciful One desires the heart.” He said that the heart is what matters. The third Jew who made a revolution in the world was Marx—Das Kapital, yes—everything is in the belly. Right? The fourth Jew who made a revolution in the world was Freud, who said that everything is below the belt. Okay? So we started with the head, moved to the heart, went down to the belly, and below the belt. The next Jew who will make a revolution in the world will probably be an orthopedist dealing with the feet—that is, where else is there left to descend? Or maybe an orthopedic doctor for the joints, maybe the knees, somewhere else we can still… yes… There’s a podiatrist, I think that’s what a foot doctor is called. Anyway, to our matter: what that joke basically says—and there’s something to it—it puts its finger on something very true. Beyond the humor in it, it puts its finger on a very accurate point. The description it offers there is very accurate. There is a kind of descent of the center of gravity by which we make our decisions—from the head to the heart, to the belly, to below the belt. And that descent does not mean that people are becoming stupider. They aren’t. The people of this generation are not stupider than previous generations; maybe even the opposite. They do not have less intellect; they are less intellectual. That’s not the same thing. Meaning, you can be a very talented person, but you don’t place trust in reason as the thing that should make decisions. And that is exactly the crisis that describes the decline I spoke about earlier. There is a very beautiful chapter in the book Tanya—chapter 9, I think, or 7, I think 9—where he speaks precisely about this point. Meaning, usually they describe to us the struggle between good and evil as a struggle between the good inclination and the evil inclination. Right? Now that description is ridiculous. If you describe the struggle as a struggle between the good inclination and the evil inclination, then a good person is someone whose good inclination is stronger than his evil inclination. Where am I in this story? If my good inclination overpowered my evil inclination and therefore I go in its direction, then the good inclination overcame—not I. What does that have to do with me? It cannot be a struggle between the good inclination and the evil inclination, the struggle we are talking about. So between what and what is the struggle? I’m translating there; it’s in more Hasidic-kabbalistic language, but the translation is this: the struggle is between what he calls the divine soul and what he calls the animal soul. The animal soul is the whole instinctual dimension, including both the good inclination and the evil inclination. Both belong to the animal soul. Our entire instinctual dimension. Our instinctual dimension is the dimension that wants to take us after the gut. Or emotion or gut, doesn’t matter. It wants to drag us after it, yes, to neutralize the head and take us along, pull us in its wake—“Draw me after you, let us run.” A story by Agnon, yes, with the “draw me,” “draw me and we will run.” So those things are the instinctual dimension. And a person whose animal soul leads him can be someone who behaves wonderfully. Because his good inclination is much stronger, it overcomes the evil inclination, and since he is an instinctual person, he follows his instincts. So he is an astonishingly good person. He only does good. Fine. Another instinctual person, whose evil inclination is stronger than his good inclination, is a wicked person; he behaves wickedly, does wicked things. Why? Because he is an instinctual person, and in his case the evil inclination happens to be stronger and the good inclination less so. Okay? But both are instinctual people. And what is demanded of us is not to be instinctual people who go with the good inclination, but not to be instinctual people at all. Not to let either the good inclination or the evil inclination lead us. Both of them should sit on the side. The one who makes the decisions is me. You tell me what you have to say. The good inclination will speak, the evil inclination will speak, fine, I understood, I heard—now I make the decisions. That is called a person of the divine soul. Divine soul means the intellect, yes—the person who makes decisions from above, not the person who makes decisions, or fails to make decisions, while being dragged from below. And what happens is that a person of the animal soul is not a stupider person than a person of the divine soul. This is not a difference between wise and foolish, or between someone with intellect and someone without intellect. Rather, it is a difference between an intellectual person and a non-intellectual person, regardless of his level of talent. A person can be very talented and yet not intellectual. He isn’t intellectual; he conducts himself according to his emotions. But he can be very talented; that is unrelated. He can be very smart. Fine? Therefore we talked about the question of how one reaches errors, yes, in a previous conversation with you—how do people come to mistakes? How do smart people like me come to mistakes? The answer is because they are not intellectual people. They are talented like me, more talented than me, but instinct takes them, or tendencies take them, rather than decisions—and then they can arrive at mistaken positions even though they are very smart people. Not that everyone who thinks differently from me is an instinctual person. I’m saying: this is one possible explanation for how a smart person can arrive at problematic conclusions, yes. I mentioned that Oscar Wilde said there are absurdities so great that only intellectuals can utter them. That is an expression of this idea. In any case, returning to our topic: the claim is that faith / belief is supposed to be determined as a factual claim or as a position, not as an emotion. If what leads me to faith / belief is an emotion, then I am a complete atheist. I am an atheist whose emotion just happens, like the good inclination, yes—just as someone whom the good inclination carries is not a good person; he is a sheep. He is a sheep that also walks according to its nature. It has a very pleasant nature; a sheep devours no one, it does nothing, everything is fine. It has a very pleasant nature and it goes with its nature. A person who follows his good inclination is a sheep. And what is required of us is to be human beings, not sheep. And human beings are supposed to make decisions—and to make the good decisions, but to make decisions in a good way. If the Holy One, blessed be He, had wanted only that we do the good, He would have programmed us to be deterministic creatures programmed to do good. Why did He give us choice? Choice, after all, also allows us to do evil. Because He wants—not because He wants us to do evil, but because He wants us to choose the good, not merely to do the good. That is not the same thing. Yes, Elijah said to the people at Mount Carmel: “How long will you keep hopping between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him, and if Baal, follow him.” Usually we understand this as though he was cornering them, some rhetorical trick, some kind of demagoguery, right? He pushes them into a corner like that; he doesn’t really mean it. No, I think he really means it. If you really think that Baal is God, then go to him. And if the Holy One, blessed be He, is God, then follow Him. But each time you sway in a different direction. Why? Like the HaGashashim sketch, yes: I didn’t go with father or with mother, I went with the crowd. And it’s the same thing. Meaning, you don’t believe in Baal, you don’t believe in the Holy One, blessed be He—you believe in what the crowd is doing. So one day you go to Baal, one day you go to the crowd, to the Holy One, blessed be He. You are neither a believer nor an atheist; you are a nobody, you are a sheep. One day a sheep, one day it doesn’t matter, a tigress. But you are an animal. Meaning, a person is required to make decisions. And therefore, just as one implication by way of example—I don’t know if I spoke about this at the beginning, in the introductions of last semester, but it’s worth pausing over: a person who, say, when we have a student or a child, yes, who chooses to leave the religious path, many times we perceive that as an educational failure. Right? Failed—the child turned out non-religious. Okay? I don’t think that’s correct. It depends why. Because if he became non-religious because he was drawn after his evil inclination, then that really is a failure. But if he became non-religious because that is what he truly thinks, then that is a great success. Because we produced—we helped the child get to a state where he becomes a choosing creature, one that goes with the divine soul. And true, he is also required to choose correctly, and I think that child did not choose correctly. In my view, he did not choose correctly. But there is a success here in the fact that he is doing what he chooses—that is a great success. And someone who keeps doing everything, observing everything, because this is his comfort zone, because it’s convenient for him, because he lacks the strength, courage, wisdom—I don’t know, whatever you want—to go against the stream, and he remains a perfectly kosher Jew and observes all the commandments and everything is fine—that is an educational failure. That is an educational failure because he did not really choose it; you created a sheep. Meaning, producing a sheep is not the pinnacle of success. So I’m saying the demand is a double demand: to be one who chooses and, of course, to choose the good. It’s not that if you choose, then that’s it, mission accomplished. No—it is to choose and to choose the good. But it isn’t enough just to do the good; you have to choose the good. And that is the important point. And when you merely do good or do evil, then you are an instinctual person, a person who acts according to emotion. If your emotion is good, you behave well, and if your emotion is bad, you behave badly. But at the end of the day both of you are failures, sheep. This is a sheep with one instinct and that is a sheep with another instinct. That’s all. What is required of us is not to be sheep, but to be human beings. Okay? Therefore, to return to our matter, this means that emotion is irrelevant to the discussion. Meaning, it doesn’t matter what feelings I have and what experiences I have, what I have or don’t have—it’s not really relevant. Maimonides in chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance, at the beginning—after he speaks about the World to Come and reward and all kinds of things like that—says: “And it is not fitting to serve God in this way, for this is the way of women and children.” There are no women here so we can say—both women and children—“and it is not fitting to serve God in this way.” So what yes? “Do the truth because it is truth, and in the end good will come.” What does that mean? There is reward—not that there is no reward. The reward will come to whoever deserves it, everything is fine, it’s not that there is no reward—but you are not supposed to serve because of the reward. You are supposed to do the truth because it is truth. Now if I broaden that, I would say: you are supposed to do the truth because it is truth. That does not come only to exclude someone who does it for the sake of reward, but also someone who does it in order to sustain his emotion, in order to receive emotional, psychological benefits of one sort or another—what Marx called the opium of the masses. He said religion is the opium of the masses, and you will not find a truer statement than that. It is the opium of the masses. Very many people remain religious because it is their opium. It gives them some kind of calm, it soothes them, and they think that yes, there is a good feeling in knowing the absolute truth and understanding that everyone else… yes, it reminds me of the Rebbe of Belz. Stories told about the Rebbe of Belz, my uncle’s legends—I don’t know which Rebbe of Belz, doesn’t matter, we’ll have to believe it was him—he went to an eye doctor, and the eye doctor says to him: look, do you see that bird way over there? Try to follow it, because he wants to see how the eyes work. So he asked him, what is a bird? As if he was totally immersed in fiery holiness and doesn’t know what a bird is, or a coin, and things like that. Well, that’s generally what Hasidim look like, by the way, when the person leading them doesn’t know what a bird is and what a coin is. Well, anyway, sorry, I didn’t mean—if you don’t know what opium is, that’s perfectly fine, no problem at all, it’s totally fine, go on. So first of all we removed emotion. So what yes? We are basically talking about the factual claim that there is a God, and of course from that follows obligation to His command. And again, obligation to His command is also based on a conception that it truly obligates, not on a feeling that I feel obligated, but on a conception, a philosophical conclusion that says that if God commands, that obligates me. If I feel obligated, then again that’s an emotion—not interesting. Feel it, don’t feel it, it changes nothing. The question is whether in fact I am obligated or not obligated—that’s the point. Meaning, religiosity—or faith / belief and religiosity, yes, faith / belief not in the philosophical sense but in the religious sense—means to believe the factual claim that there is a God and to be obligated by His command. That is more or less the definition. And on both these planes, emotion has no significance and no role. Meaning, not in faith / belief regarding God and not in obligation. Not there either. Yes, if someone says to me: I am obligated because that’s how I was educated, I grew up in a home where it was terribly important to observe commandments. And therefore I am obligated; I am careful about every commandment, light and severe alike. Then the man has never fulfilled a commandment in his life. Meaning, he does things because that’s how he was programmed, because that’s how he was educated. Fine; a pagan was also educated to dance around the bonfire. So he too was educated. That’s not interesting. You should do what you think is right. And it is perfectly fine to take what you were educated to think about and arrive at a conclusion whether you agree or not. If you agree, fine. It’s not that everyone has to do the opposite of what he was educated to do. But you are not obligated to do what you were educated to do. The correlation should be zero—not one and not minus one. It should be zero. Understood? Okay. So the claim is that these are the two claims that basically constitute the concept of religiosity. I talked about subjectivity, about Rabbi Shagar and all those things; I won’t go back over those slanders again. There is positive commandment no. 1 in Maimonides: the commandment of faith / belief, to believe in God. I said that this is an absurd commandment. Meaning, you cannot command someone to believe, because if faith / belief is a factual claim, then it makes no sense to command someone to hold any given fact, to think that some fact is true. What sense is there in commanding? Suppose someone commands me to think that this is a table. Fine. If it really is a table, no problem, I think it’s a table—but not because I was commanded; because I concluded that it is a table. But if I think it is not a table, then what relevance is there to commanding me to think that it is a table? If you convince me, no problem, you convinced me. But if you don’t convince me and you want me to fulfill it purely by force of command—how can one fulfill that by force of command? Even if I wanted to, I cannot fulfill it by force of command, because I don’t think it is a table. That reminds me of a story about Rabbi Chaim. He had two outstanding students—Rabbi Chaim of Brisk. He had two outstanding students: Rabbi Baruch Ber, the author of Birkat Shmuel, and his son, the Griz, the Brisker Rav. And in the yeshivot they say: what is the difference between Rabbi Baruch Ber and the Brisker Rav? If Rabbi Chaim had said that this table is a cow, then the Brisker Rav would have said: well, if Father said so, then according to Tosafot from some other passage, apparently it really is a cow. Rabbi Baruch Ber would already not be here—he’d have run to bring a bucket to milk this table. Meaning, that is the difference between the two kinds of attitude. Okay. So in short, you cannot command someone to hold a factual claim. Because to command means to expect me to do something because of the command. Even if without the command I would not do it, I am supposed to do it because I am obligated by the command. For example, I am commanded not to sort on the Sabbath. Okay. What does it mean that this is a commandment? It means that even if I want to sort, think it right to sort, I will not do it because the Torah requires me not to sort on the Sabbath. Here it makes sense to speak about authority in its formal sense: a demand to do something purely by force of the command. Why? Because I can believe that it is permissible to sort on the Sabbath, and still one can demand of me: yes, but do not sort, because the Sanhedrin said no, and there is “do not deviate.” Okay, so that is a possible demand. I can decide not to comply, or to comply, but there is no contradiction in such a demand existing. But a demand to believe in God is a demand to believe a factual claim; it is not a demand to behave in a certain way. I can behave in a certain way even if I don’t think it’s right, and therefore it makes sense to demand that I behave that way. But you cannot demand that I believe. And all thirteen principles of Maimonides are likewise simply completely absurd. You cannot demand that a person believe in the principles. You can say that the tradition states these principles. If you accept the tradition, then you also accept these principles because that’s what it says—assuming it really does say that. Okay? You cannot command a person to believe these principles because they are principles, and if not then you are a heretic. So I’m a heretic—what can I do? If I think the Messiah will not come—Rabbi Hillel in tractate Sanhedrin, Rabbi Hillel said: “Israel has no Messiah, for they already consumed him in the days of Hezekiah.” He did not believe in the coming of the Messiah. The Talmud says: “May the Master forgive Rabbi Hillel.” And still they call him Rabbi Hillel, that same heretic. But “may the Master forgive him”—why? Because that is what he thought. What do you want him to do? You tell him: yes, but you are a heretic. So what can I do, then I’m a heretic. What can I do? If I think the Messiah will not come, that is what I think. What can you now tell me—no, but you are commanded to think that he will come? I cannot be commanded to think. If you convince me, then I will think he will come. If you did not convince me, you cannot demand that I think something you have not convinced me of. It is simply not a possible command. Even if I want to fulfill it, I cannot fulfill it. There is no such command; there cannot be such a command. Okay. People often object regarding positive commandment no. 1 of Maimonides, the commandment to believe: if you don’t believe, what is the point of commanding? Every commandment presupposes belief in the existence of a commander, right? If you believe in the existence of a commander, then you are obligated by his commandments. So how can one command belief in the existence of a commander? If you do not believe in the existence of a commander, one cannot command you; and if you already do believe, then you already believe. It cannot be by force of command. I am making a broader claim. It is not exactly the same thing. That claim is a specific claim about a command to believe in the Holy One, blessed be He. I am speaking about every command whose content is belief in a factual claim—not only belief in the Holy One, blessed be He. There cannot be a command to believe in the coming of the Messiah either. That too is impossible. Conceptually impossible. It is simply a conceptual, analytic contradiction. This has nothing whatsoever to do with sources—you can bring me sources here and sources there, it is irrelevant to sources. About this too the Talmud says, yes, “By God, even if Joshua son of Nun had said it, I would not obey him.” The Talmud in Hullin, perhaps. What does that mean? There are things that even if Joshua son of Nun had said them, I would not accept them. It is not true—what can I do? And therefore it makes no sense to command someone to hold a factual claim. And if belief in the Holy One, blessed be He, is a factual claim—not emotion and not experience and nothing of the sort—then it makes no sense to command belief. You cannot command a factual claim. Okay. One more point, right? Okay. Let’s continue. That is one introductory point. A second introductory point concerns perhaps an observation about Judaism in general. Let’s try to do it this way. Rashi’s very first comment on the Torah brings Rabbi Yitzhak’s question. Rabbi Yitzhak says what? Why did the Torah not begin with “This month shall be for you the first of the months,” in the portion of Bo? Right? Which is the first commandment we were commanded. There is an interesting subtext to that question. Why indeed should it begin there? What sort of question is that? There is some assumption here that the Torah is basically supposed to contain only commandments, right? Agreed? That is the assumption in that question. Interesting assumption, no? He has answers, and the answer is completely lame, yes? The answer—why write the whole of Genesis, a chumash and a quarter until the portion of Shemot?—“He declared to His people the power of His works, to give them the inheritance of nations.” So that if the nations come and say about the Land of Israel, “You are robbers,” yes, that you conquered the land of the seven nations, something like that, we will say to them that the land belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He, and He gave it to whomever was upright in His eyes. Come on, really? Are you serious? The whole chumash and a quarter is there to teach us that if the nations come? I don’t know—I get the impression that Sennacherib wasn’t especially impressed by that. In short, lame. But what is more interesting in this Rashi is the question, not the answer. Why begin with “This month shall be for you”? Why do you assume that Torah is only commandments? And the answer is because Torah, from the root meaning instruction, really is supposed to contain only commandments. Anything beyond commandments requires an explanation as to why it is there. It should not be there. Torah is basically supposed to convey to me the commands of the Holy One, blessed be He. The Torah should have been only Jewish law. But the fact is that the Torah contains parts that are not Jewish law. And the question is why are they there? So if one reads Rashi’s answer with somewhat greater sensitivity, it seems to me that the focus is not to give us an excuse for why the Holy One, blessed be He, gave us the Land of Israel—although yes, Religious Zionist thought really clings to this Rashi in a wondrous way—but rather the focus, the emphasis, is in my opinion “and He gave it to whomever was upright in His eyes.” Because there is a difference between the force-based argument that says: the Holy One, blessed be He, created the land, He is the owner, so He can give it to whomever He wants—that is a force-based argument, right? It’s my right; I created it, it’s mine, I give it to whomever I want. But Rashi doesn’t say only that. He says: “and He gave it to whomever was upright in His eyes.” The term “upright” is not accidental. “The Book of the Upright” in the words of the sages is the book of Genesis. Why? The Netziv in the introduction says it is the book of the upright. It teaches uprightness; it teaches proper conduct. Yes, if we are a bit selective about Jacob’s various deceits and so on, but in principle it teaches conduct—it is supposed to teach upright conduct, to bring us examples, upright figures, and the like. Okay? So Rashi is basically telling us that the book—we can ask even more than that. Before—so you explained to us, Rashi, why chapter 1 is written. And what about the rest of the first chumash and two more portions in the second chumash? You came to explain to us that the Holy One, blessed be He, is the owner because He created the world. Chapter 1—we got it. But where do the other fifty chapters come in? After all, you asked why these fifty chapters and two more portions are needed. And the answer is: the first chapter comes to give us the force-based right. The Holy One, blessed be He, is the owner; He created the land, so He can give it to whomever He wants. The rest of the chapters come to teach who is upright in His eyes. That is a substantive justification for why we received the land, not merely a force-based one. Force-based: it is His right to give it to whomever He wants. But why indeed did He choose specifically to give it to us? Because we are the ones upright in His eyes. How do we know that? That is what Genesis comes to teach. The Book of the Upright. Yes? So Genesis basically comes to teach, you could say, morality. Jewish law begins in the portion of Bo. The essence of the Torah is Jewish law, but there are peripheral sections that speak about morality or other lessons, perhaps various historical descriptions. What defines, I would say, Judaism as a religion, Jewish faith / belief, is only Jewish law. Nothing but that. There is no such thing as Jewish morality; all those other things do not exist. Judaism is Jewish law; there is nothing else. Morality is something universal by essence. What is moral obligates all human beings. Everyone must be moral. This is not a demand only of Jews, right? There is no such thing as Jewish morality and non-Jewish morality. If it is moral, it is moral; and if not, then not. There is Jewish law. It does not necessarily always coincide with morality, but morality is by definition universal. And therefore those parts of the Torah that are not Jewish law are indeed universal parts. The nations also use them; Christians study them and even attribute holiness to them. There is nothing Jewish about them in principle. Also regarding our matter, current matters: there is no such thing as secular Judaism. Yes—“secular Judaism” is an oxymoron. Judaism is Jewish law. Judaism without Jewish law is like mathematics without mathematics. There is no such thing; it is just wordplay. Therefore when I speak about faith / belief, this is a sensitive point, because Judaism is only Jewish law. So what is the status of belief in God? It is not Jewish law, because positive commandment no. 1—I said that is, I don’t know, an invention of Maimonides, a strange invention—but there is no source for such a commandment. It is not a commandment. Belief in God is a condition for entering the game. If you believe in God, you are in the game. There is Jewish law, you are obligated by it. A Jew is obligated thus, a gentile is obligated thus—after you believe in God. Belief in God is some kind of preliminary condition: if you pass it, you are in the game. It is not part of the Jewish law. And the game is Jewish law. So therefore, when we deal with faith / belief, we are basically dealing with a subject that in a certain sense is universal. It is not a Jewish matter. When we deal with the question whether there is or is not a God, that is a question every person, every gentile, can ask himself. And if the answer is that there is a God—that is the correct answer—then from the point of view of an Eskimo too that is the correct answer. He may not know it, but if the true conclusion is that there is a God, then there is a God. That is a factual claim. It is not a Jewish claim. Facts are facts, not Jewish facts. Only the Nazis thought Einstein’s physics was Jewish physics. There is no Jewish physics; there is correct physics and incorrect physics. If it is correct, then it is correct, and if not, then not. Therefore in my view too there is no such thing as Jewish thought. There is correct thought and incorrect thought. If the thought is correct, then it is my thought, and if it is not correct thought, then it is not mine, and it does not matter who the mother of the thinker of that thought was. If his mother was Jewish but the thought is not correct, then I do not adopt it. And if his mother was not Jewish but the thought is correct, then I do adopt it. So why should I care whether it is Jewish thought or not Jewish thought? I don’t know—there is correct thought and incorrect thought, that’s all. Meaning, facts are by definition universal. There is no such thing as Jewish facts. And therefore the discussion of whether there is or is not a God is a universal discussion, a general philosophical discussion, not connected to Judaism at all. The question whether there is or is not a God must be clarified—this factual claim is either true or false. The second question, whether I am obligated by His command—even that is not Jewish. Because if I am obligated, if in fact a commanding God creates obligation, then everyone addressed by that command is obligated by it. So that is true for all human beings. So where then does the Jewish uniqueness enter? In that we are commanded in things that others are not commanded in. The obligation to every command exists for all human beings. A gentile too is obligated to fulfill what the Holy One, blessed be He, commands. But de facto He commanded him fewer things than He commanded us. Fine. Therefore Judaism is simply the task of clarifying what He commanded us—not belief in God, and not the conception that His commands obligate. The two aspects I spoke about earlier are not connected to Judaism. Judaism enters after that, after I have reached the conclusion that there is a God, I believe that God exists, and I have reached the conclusion that His commands obligate. Up to that point, these are general philosophical conclusions. From that point on, now I need to study Jewish law in order to know what He commanded and what He did not command, and then I know what is incumbent upon me to do. That is a Jewish occupation. A gentile has no reason to occupy himself with Jewish law; it is not relevant to him. Okay? So that is a Jewish occupation. But the two aspects I spoke about earlier are not connected to Judaism; this is a discussion in philosophy. Okay, yes—this is the opening of the Mishneh Torah: “To know that there is a First Being, and He brings all beings into existence, and all beings exist only from the truth of His existence,” and so on. “To know that there is a First Being”—you need to know. That’s all. A simple factual claim. So now—how does one arrive? I asked: how does one arrive at this factual conclusion? I’m focusing right now on the first question: whether there is or is not a God. The question of obligation I hope we’ll reach by the end of the semester. But first of all, the factual question: is there or is there not a God? We are dealing with this factual claim. How can one arrive at a conclusion about it? We have, in principle, two toolboxes at our disposal in thought generally: the philosophical toolbox and the empirical, scientific toolbox. The empirical toolbox is based on observation. I simply make observations and learn various things from them. That is the scientific toolbox. The philosophical toolbox is a toolbox of logical arguments, premises, conclusions, arguments—philosophy. Philosophy cannot be decided by means of observation; otherwise it would not be philosophy, it would be science. But philosophy still deals with claims that purport to be true or false. Meaning, the discussion there concerns what is true and what is false. The decision whether something is true or false is not made by empirical tools. But it is still a toolbox that deals with questions of truth and falsehood. So we have two toolboxes. The problem is that we have trouble handling the factual claim that there is a God in either of these two toolboxes. In the scientific toolbox too, it is difficult to reach the conclusion that there is a God. How can I propose an experiment that would test the claim whether God exists or not? I see no observational, scientific way to reach that conclusion. So the scientific toolbox cannot really help us here. So maybe it is the philosophical toolbox. But the philosophical toolbox is also problematic. Why? Because philosophy is usually based on arguments—exactly the things we spoke about earlier. Philosophy is based on arguments, and arguments derive conclusions from premises. A conclusion from premises, let’s say. But what does it mean to derive a conclusion from premises? You know the joke in yeshiva—I already mentioned it, but still—the jokes in yeshiva: from where do we know that every Jew must go around wearing a hat? Because it says, “And Abraham went.” A Jew like him surely did not go without a hat. And if Abraham went with a hat, then we, his faithful students, his faithful descendants who walk in his ways, also need to go with a hat. Which was to be proven. What do you say about that proof? Good? Everything okay? Valid? Should we bring in the hat truck? Is there a problem in it? What do you say, good argument or not good? Why? What’s wrong with it? Right: it begs the question. What does that mean? It means that along the way I basically smuggled in, implicitly, the very conclusion I want to prove. The conclusion is that every Jew must wear a hat—that’s what I want to prove, right? Now let’s track the proof. It says, “And Abraham went,” right? A Jew like him surely did not go without a hat. Why would such a Jew not go without a hat? Because every Jew must wear a hat. Meaning, the conclusion we wanted to obtain—that every Jew must wear a hat—actually entered indirectly, implicitly, as one of the premises of the argument. Therefore this is called begging the question. What I asked to prove, I am already assuming inside the premises. Okay. Except that every logical argument begs the question. If all these tables are brown, and this thing is a table, therefore this thing is brown. Why exactly, if I assume that all tables are brown and that this thing is a table, do I also have to accept the conclusion that this thing is brown? Why can’t I adopt the premises and deny the conclusion? Because the conclusion is contained within the premises. When I say all tables are brown, this is simply a general statement that abbreviates a whole collection of many statements: this table is brown and that table is brown, this table is brown. Instead of pointing to every table, I say all tables are brown. But that is only shorthand, right? In principle what I mean to say is: each and every table is brown. And if this too is a table, then what did I actually say? That specifically this thing too, this table too, is brown, right? So the conclusion I wanted to prove was in fact embedded within the premises. That is precisely why someone who accepts the premises cannot fail to accept the conclusion—because it is already in them. Or in other words, this logical argument is valid because it begs the question. Or in yet other words, begging the question is not a fallacy. Begging the question is another name for a valid logical argument. A valid logical argument is an argument that begs the question. Saying this and saying that are the same thing. The only difference is that sometimes begging the question is stupid—it helps us not at all. You haven’t advanced me in any way, because if I don’t accept that every Jew should wear a hat, then I also won’t accept your argument, because one of its premises is something I don’t accept. So what did that premise help? What did that argument help? By contrast, in more complex arguments—think about geometry, for example. Geometry too is basically logic. You have your premises, and only by logical tools can you reach conclusions. Why then in geometry does it feel nontrivial? Not something banal that everyone could have understood by himself even without the teacher’s help? Why not? Because the path is more sophisticated, that’s all. There too, everything is contained within the axioms. All the results you arrive at are in one form or another contained within the axioms. The route from the axioms to those results is just more complex, and usually we don’t manage it on our own—we need help. That’s all. But after we receive the help, we basically understand the route, and we see that the conclusion was embedded in the premises. That is what a proof means. A proof means showing you that this result is embedded in the premises. That is called a proof. When someone proves to me that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees, what are they really saying? That if you accept the axioms of geometry, then you must infer that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. Why? Because that conclusion is in some way contained within those premises, within those axioms. In a sophisticated way, but it is there. Once I asked students: what is more certain, or more correct, in geometry—the axioms or the theorems? The theorems have proofs; the axioms do not. So are the theorems more correct than the axioms? That sounds plausible. My logic says otherwise. A proof of a theorem means grounding it in the axioms. That is what proving means. Now if you do not accept the axioms, what help is the proof? The proof brings you from the axioms to the conclusion. And if you don’t accept the axioms, then the proof won’t help you in any way. A proof is simply grounding the conclusion in the premises. That’s all. And the premises—how do I know them? I have no proof for them. How do I know? What does that mean, someone gave me them? Who gives me premises? And how much do they cost? I have to reach the conclusion that certain premises are true. But how? By means of a logical argument? Then that argument too will have premises. How? So I spoke about this; I won’t go back into it at length. I claim that this is a faculty we have for understanding that certain things are true. I call that faculty intuition. We have an intuition that says certain things are true. And if I trust it—and I do trust it—then for me that is the tool through which I acquire premises. And then logic can enter and derive conclusions from those premises. But everything begins with intuition. Logic is not a replacement for intuition. Without intuition, logic has no meaning whatsoever. What does that mean now? It basically means that every logical argument begs the question. Every logical argument that proves some conclusion is basically showing us that this conclusion is embedded in the premises of the argument. Because if it were not embedded there, there could be no valid logical argument that would bring me to it. But if that is so, then the philosophical toolbox too cannot bring us to belief in God. Why? Because imagine that someone brought me a philosophical argument whose conclusion is that there is a God. You understand that if this argument is valid, that means that the conclusion that there is a God was hidden within the premises of the argument. That is the meaning of a valid argument. Now, if I do not accept those premises, then the argument will not convince me, right? If the argument did convince me, that means I accepted the premises. And if I accepted the premises, then already from the start I know that there is a God, because after all the claim that there is a God is hidden inside the premises. In short, you cannot bring an atheist to repentance. A logical argument addressed to an atheist can never prove to him that there is a God. At most, you can show someone that all along he was a believer. He thought he was an atheist; he was mistaken; he did not read himself correctly. He was actually always a believer. How do I show him that? Because I take premises that he accepts, and I show him through logical means that the conclusion that there is a God follows from them. But if that conclusion follows by logical means, that means it was hidden within the premises. And if he accepted the premises, then he was actually already a believer in God from the beginning; he was just not aware of it. So now I have brought that to his attention. Meaning, a philosophical argument cannot take an atheist and turn him into a believer. A philosophical argument can reveal to an atheist—to someone who thinks he is an atheist—that he is not really an atheist; he is in fact a believing person. He wasn’t aware of it, but the argument shows him that. That is all an argument can do. So now I return and ask: then how can we reach the conclusion that there is a God? Empirical science cannot do the job, and the philosophical toolbox cannot either. At most it can take a believing person and persuade him—persuade the persuaded. But you cannot take someone who does not believe and bring him to belief in God by philosophical tools, by tools of philosophical argument. So neither the philosophical toolbox nor the scientific toolbox can do the job. So what can? Well, this is where we get to all kinds of statements I won’t go into. My body language already says what I think about them. Statements that faith / belief is above reason, that it is a higher emotion—exactly all kinds of things like that. You don’t need either science or philosophy; where philosophy ends, faith / belief begins, and all sorts of statements from supervisors of the moral order of that type, various kinds of nonsense. There is no such thing. Faith / belief is a factual claim, and I have to reach the conclusion that this fact is true. If I do not reach the conclusion that this fact is true, I am an atheist. I’m an atheist with religious feelings. But if neither the philosophical toolbox nor the scientific toolbox can bring me there, then what can? To understand that, one has to understand how in general we come to hold certain premises. I said that we do that by means of our intuition. Our intuition brings us—or reveals to us—various insights that seem to us true, and from there our basic premises are formed, and then logic begins to work. Okay? Can intuitions be changed? Someone whose intuition is X and someone else whose intuition says Y—can one persuade the other? Yes, obviously. How? How does it happen? In exactly the same way that the intuition arose. How did I become convinced that X is true? Intuition is some kind of looking at reality, and I understand that X is true. Looking—not with the eyes, but intellectually. I understand that X is true. Okay? It could be that I can take the other person to look at reality with the same gaze with which I look at it, or from the same angle from which I see it, and suddenly he too will become convinced that X is true, exactly as I became convinced of it in the first place. He will understand that he had seen incorrectly before. He thought Y was right—no, mistake. Now suddenly he sees it from another angle and understands that X is true. So persuasion at root is basically looking from a different angle. Again, an intellectual look from a different angle, not with the eyes. Looking from a different angle—you suddenly see things differently and understand that what you previously thought is not correct and the truth is otherwise. Only thus can one persuade. Simply by using tools that work with intuition. Those tools can be given a name. Those tools are called rhetoric. Rhetoric has a bad name among us. Usually rhetoric is identified with demagoguery. Demagoguery is basically distraction—you fool a person, mislead him. Okay? That’s a negative thing. But rhetoric—rhetoric consists of means that are not logical, perhaps more literary even, which try to get a person to look at a certain situation and see it differently, and thereby change his mind. Suppose you don’t see what’s wrong with murder. So someone says: let’s show you a film about murder. Watch the film, understand what this thing is, now check yourself again. Tell me: do you think murder is a positive thing or a negative thing? Many people, after seeing that film, will understand that they are in fact opposed to murder, that they think murder is bad. That is a kind of persuasion. It is not brainwashing; it is persuasion. It is an attempt to see certain aspects of reality from another angle, and then what you thought you thought before turns out not to be what you think—you think differently. These are tools that are more literary or artistic and less logical, though logic too can sometimes do the job. Logic takes premises and derives conclusions from them. But if you want to deal with the premises themselves—how do I change someone’s premises?—then you cannot use logic. The premises are the basis on which logic operates. But the premises themselves operate in the intuitive sphere, not in the logical sphere. Therefore the tools for adopting or rejecting or changing premises are tools of rhetoric, not of logic. Now how do rhetorical tools work? I gave an example earlier: for instance, they show you a situation in a film of murder. Suddenly the murder is present before your eyes; it’s not just some abstract concept, and suddenly you say: wait, this is something I cannot accept. Okay? Think, for example, of something perhaps more realistic for us, because murder feels remote since everyone is horrified by it, right? But think, for example, about eating animals, not murdering human beings. There are all sorts of shocking films by animal-rights organizations and the like, showing what those animals actually go through in the stages of their raising. Horrors—it’s a Holocaust. They simply undergo abuse, a complete Holocaust. Okay? So that I can have eggs or chicken or whatever on my table to eat. Now when you see it in the supermarket, wrapped nicely in plastic, you don’t—even if intellectually you know it went through certain problematic stages there—you don’t see it. Everything is fine; you eat the chicken, everything is wonderful. Okay? Then suddenly you see the film, and wait—that cannot be, that I am eating something produced in such a way. Okay? Now some will say that this is brainwashing. Brainwashing means they basically created some sort of shock in you. I claim not. It is some sort of direct encounter with the situation that helps you understand it better than you would have understood it without that encounter, and suddenly you form a different position regarding that situation. That is rhetoric, not demagoguery, not brainwashing. Think also—I think there is an example in Wikipedia—you can see what is called Mary’s room. Do you know it? Mary was a brilliant physicist, just as a parable, yes? A brilliant physicist, an expert in optics. She knew all the principles of optics in all their shades, shades in every sense. She knew everything. All her life she worked inside a black-and-white room. There were no colors in the room, yes? Now she knew everything—fields and wavelengths and anything you want. We know that wavelength determines color, right? So she knew everything each wavelength does, everything, but there were no colors in her world. Now she went outside and suddenly sees a world with colors in it—green, red, all sorts of things, yes? You should know that brown, for example, has no wavelength; brown isn’t really a color. That’s an interesting riddle, but never mind. Red, green, yellow, things like that. Did she learn something new? That’s what the parable asks. After all, she was an expert in optics. She knows what yellow light does, what red light does—everything. But she had never encountered the color red, yellow, green, yes? She didn’t know what color is. She knew wavelengths, waves, how they behave—everything she knew. But what does a color look like? Now clearly she learned something new. She encountered directly things she had known theoretically, abstractly. For example, regarding halakhic ruling this is a wonderful example, I think, because when it comes to halakhic ruling, many times if you do not understand the situation directly, even if you are an enormous Torah scholar and can analyze the situation very well in theory, you are forbidden to rule about it. There is something in the situation you do not understand. I once wrote an article about halakhic ruling in the Holocaust, and there I said there was a lesson there. I took as an example a series of articles by someone named Rabbi Gibralter who lived in the Kovno ghetto. His son wrote those articles. He held that in the ghetto there are no monetary laws. There is no ownership of money in the ghetto. The laws of monetary ownership lapsed. Therefore, for example—if someone borrowed money from him and came to repay it after the Holocaust, when he was a rabbi in Italy, and came to repay the money he had borrowed from him, he would say: you do not owe me; the money was not mine. There are no monetary laws in the ghetto. That was his claim. Then there was a response by some rabbi involved in monetary law who said: okay, that was in the ghetto and all that—we cannot blame him, and there were no books there—but obviously this is not true, he says. Halakhically, what do you mean? There is theft, obviously. Now this is a wonderful example of someone who may be a very great Torah scholar, but if you have not experienced the situation directly, you cannot form a position about it. Someone who experienced the situation can understand that in such a situation there are no monetary laws. Yes, it is not relevant. In a place where any Ukrainian child can shoot you in the head and take everything you have and not be punished—no problem, a completely legitimate act—you cannot define monetary ownership. The laws of ownership have no force in such a situation. But only someone who experienced this directly can say that. An abstract intellectual look at the situation is not enough to determine such a thing. The example I gave there, I think: two people go up in an elevator—or go down in an elevator. The cable snaps, and the elevator plummets downward from a height of fifty floors. Okay, they have one minute. In another minute they crash and end the career, let’s say. Okay? During that minute one says to the other: give me a pen, I want to write a farewell letter to my relatives. No, I’m not willing to give it to you. Is it permissible to rob him of the pen? You understand that there is great logic in the claim that his ownership of the pen has no meaning, right? He can’t do anything with the pen; in another minute both of them are dead, and the pen too will be smashed, so it won’t even pass by inheritance to descendants—there is nothing. In another minute this entire story no longer exists. In such a state, ownership of the pen has no meaning; I can take your pen. Maybe that’s right, maybe not. But you understand that this kind of argument is legitimate. There can be such an argument. Because someone who experiences that situation directly understands that in such a state ownership of money expires. There is no ownership of money. So the point I want to make is that persuading someone by rhetorical means is basically bringing him into some sort of direct encounter with the situation. Then suddenly he can realize that his position is different from what he thought it was. And yes, something I struggled with quite a bit: all sorts of people who become religious after severe trauma. He survives some terrible battle in the army, or some serious car accident, and then becomes religious. Is that real? Or was he just brainwashed? He went through some difficult experience, it shook him, and that’s it. There are no atheists in foxholes—you know that saying? In the trenches everyone turns to the Holy One, blessed be He, because who will save them under bombardment. Even someone who doesn’t believe in Him says: if it won’t help, it can’t hurt—I’ll turn to the Holy One, blessed be He. Is that genuine belief? Is it really revealing a genuine belief inside them, or is it just, I don’t know, a psychological effect? I don’t know—interesting question. Maybe for some it is this and for some it is that, I don’t know. I’ll give you an example—just a second, an example. Let’s say someone becomes religious because a Book of Psalms stopped the bullet in his pocket. You know those stories? A Book of Psalms—I haven’t checked how many New Testaments stopped bullets, or how many comic books stopped bullets, and done statistics whether Books of Psalms stopped more bullets. I assume not. But in fact there are people who become religious because of such events. He comes from the border, calms down after the battle is over. But there are those who really continue. Is that real? Or was he just psychologically shaken and that’s all—brainwashing? You can say he encountered the situation in some direct way, exactly what I said before. Or alternatively that it’s like the Book of Psalms that stopped the bullet, or all those kinds of things. Same thing—I don’t know. It can be discussed. In any case, for our purposes—after we forgot that there is no God, let us return to the premises that there is one. The ability to change starting positions, basic premises, really belongs to rhetoric. And rhetoric often uses logical tools. You can show him a film, confront him with the situation—or you can use logical tools. For example, I can show him what results logically follow from his premise that there is no God. For example. Then I ask him: check yourself—do these results seem reasonable to you? If yes, everything is fine. But if not, then apparently you need to reconsider the question whether you believe in God or do not believe in God. And notice here: I used logical tools to do this, because I logically derived conclusions from his premises. But the use I made of those tools was not to persuade him of the conclusion, because he already understood that he rejects the conclusion, but rather to show him that if this conclusion follows from those premises and in your view it is not correct, then check your relation to the premises. Apparently those premises are not correct; they need to be thrown out onto the premises heap, so to speak. Yes? So this is using logical tools in order to perform a rhetorical action—to change your attitude toward basic premises, not to prove the conclusion to you. You know, once I heard in a philosophy course, an introduction to philosophy, someone—the lecturer—said: what is the difference between philosophy and theology? In philosophy you take premises and derive conclusions from them. In theology you take conclusions and derive premises from them. You look for the premises that will lead to the conclusion you so much desire. Yes, that is usually what theologians do. We talked about this when we discussed Anselm’s proof. Yes. So here too, basically, it is the same thing: it is a rhetorical move. A rhetorical move is basically to find what the relevant premises are if my conclusion is this conclusion. And the logical tools are serving me, but in the opposite direction. Instead of taking the premises and understanding what conclusion follows from them, I show you what conclusion follows from the premises in order to show you that you do not agree with the premises. Because that cannot be a conclusion you would accept, since it is an unreasonable conclusion. When we deal, for example, with paradoxes—I also wrote a few columns about that on my website—when we encounter a paradox, yes, the paradox basically proves some claim, while my intuition says that this claim is not correct. But here, this argument shows you that it is correct. That is what is called a paradox. How do you solve a paradox? One option is to find an error in the argument, a sophism or something like that. A faulty argument; there is a fallacy somewhere inside it. Then everything is fine, right? I remain with my original assumption: you proved the opposite conclusion to me, but there is a mistake—the argument is flawed. Alternatively, I found no flaw in the argument. There is no flaw in the argument. Then, if I am intellectually honest, then here it has been proved to me that my position is not correct. There is an argument here proving that the opposite is true. So I should be honest and give up my position, right? I was given a convincing argument for the opposing view. That is what an honest person should do. Not necessarily. There is another possibility. If I am very, very convinced of my conclusion, then when the paradox proves to me that this conclusion is not correct, I suspect that something there must nevertheless be defective. I did not find the defect. Maybe I’m just not smart enough. It could be that there is a defect in the argument and I’m not smart enough; I didn’t manage to put my finger on it. Therefore, despite being intellectually honest, I do not give up my position even though there is an argument proving it wrong and I did not find the flaw in that argument. Think about the Swedish army paradox. Do you know the Swedish army paradox? That’s one of the examples I brought there. Sometimes it’s called the surprise exam paradox. Yes—the instructor in the Swedish army says to his class: you will have a surprise drill on one of the coming week’s days—Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—a 24-hour drill. It will begin at 6 in the morning and end at 6 the next morning. Okay? And this will be between Sunday at 6 in the morning and the next Sunday at 6 in the morning. Fine? You will have a surprise drill. Now, on the last day it can’t happen. Because if it happens on Saturday, from 6 a.m. Saturday until 6 a.m. Sunday, then before 6 a.m. I already know there’s going to be a drill, because if it hasn’t happened until now and it has to happen this week, then it will happen now, right? So it is no longer a surprise. Therefore it is clear that the commander cannot do the drill at 6 a.m. on Saturday, right? But if so, he also can’t do it at 6 a.m. Friday. Because if I know it cannot be done on Saturday, then once it is 5 a.m. Friday I know it will be at 6 a.m. Friday, because on Saturday it cannot be done. Well then, again it won’t be a surprise drill, so it cannot be done on Friday either. But then not on Thursday either. Same thing. Not on Wednesday, not on Tuesday. In short, there is no surprise exam. There is no such thing as a surprise exam or surprise drill. Now I assume all of you are convinced, like me, that there is such a thing. We have all been surprised by surprise exams more than once, right? But I bet that if you think hard, you won’t find the bug in this argument. It is a very misleading argument. You won’t find the bug. There is a bug in the argument. You won’t find it. So what do we do? Fine, then they proved it to us, we should be honest and give it up—so apparently there is no surprise exam. There is no such thing as a surprise exam. Right? To be honest, no? But I am terribly convinced that there is, what do you mean? It happened to me. So I say: okay, apparently there is some flaw in the argument, I’m just not smart enough to identify it, that’s all. That’s an option, no? That could also be. Yes, that’s also an option. Therefore, many times arguments of this kind, rhetorical arguments, are arguments that tell you: look, this is the connection between the premises and the conclusion. If the conclusion doesn’t seem right to you, then either find a flaw in the argument, or give up one of the premises, or give up the conclusion. Those are the three options. Right? But many times even if I don’t find a flaw in the argument, there is still the possibility of saying: fine, but maybe there is a flaw in the argument and I just don’t know—I haven’t put my finger on the flaw. Okay? Think of Achilles and the tortoise. For people who aren’t somewhat practiced in mathematics, Achilles and the tortoise sounds like an amazing argument with no answer, that Achilles can’t overtake the tortoise. Obviously he can overtake the tortoise; he does overtake the tortoise. Yes, okay, converging series—but, but, but, someone who doesn’t know that idea—I’ve met people who tear their hair out even after I explained it, they still couldn’t understand. It’s a crushing argument. So what, because of that Achilles won’t overtake the tortoise? But obviously he does overtake the tortoise. So what then? You have to say: okay, apparently there’s a bug in the argument and I’m not smart enough to understand what it is, and that’s all. Therefore many times rhetorical arguments are indeed weaker arguments because you say: look, I am using logical tools to infer a conclusion from premises; that conclusion does not seem right to the person I’m speaking with. Still, that does not mean he will give up one of the premises or adopt the conclusion. It could be that he says: fine, maybe there’s a bug in the argument and I don’t know; I just haven’t identified the bug in the argument. Okay? Fine. So that is regarding—it took me a long time to get through that, but never mind. In any case, what all this means is that the basic tool we are supposed to use when we come to examine arguments for the existence of God is the tool of intuition. Our intuition is what gives us the basic premises, and any argument that proves the existence of God will always proceed from intuitive basic premises—that is what gives them their force, their intuitiveness—and then there can be a logical argument deriving the conclusion from those premises. Up to here, the introduction. Now I’ll jump almost to the end so that at least today we finish the introduction and the summary, the summary of last semester. I divided the ways of arriving at belief in God into six or seven ways. Kant pointed to three ways—depending on the Talmud in Kiddushin, whether it is three or “three ways,” yes? Kant pointed to three ways: the ontological proof, the cosmological proof, and the physico-theological proof. The ontological proof is a proof based on conceptual analysis, Anselm’s argument; I won’t go back over it here. The cosmological proof is the proof that says: something exists, no matter what it is and what its character is; therefore someone created it. The physico-theological argument says: something exists and it has certain properties—it is complex, it is designed, it is coordinated—and therefore someone created it. Similar to the second, but it assumes things about that existing thing, not merely that something exists. And that is the third path. The fourth path—we will get to it later—I call the rhetorical path, which is what I spoke about a bit today: rhetorical ways. I won’t detail it here; we will get to it. There is direct intuition. I think there is a God because I have an intuition that there is a God—which is perfectly fine, what is often called simple faith. Simple faith is not because my parents told me so—so what if they told me? The pagan’s parents also told him there are demons. Rather, I have an intuition that there is a God. And that is perfectly fine. Just as intuition can give me premises from which I derive the existence of God, intuition can also simply tell me that there is a God. So that is the fifth path. The sixth path is tradition. Say I received, through tradition, revelation—that there was a revelation, the generations transmitted the tradition of revelation to me—and I trust that tradition, and therefore I reach the conclusion that there is a God. Fine? So there is tradition, direct intuition, rhetoric, and Kant’s three ways. Six ways. Six kinds of ways. Okay? I said that the ways are independent in several senses. First of all, each such way proves the existence of a different object. Every argument for the existence of God assumes a different definition of what God is—who is this God whose existence I am proving. Beyond that, the arguments are different arguments. So to say that argument number three is flawed but in my opinion arguments one or two are fine—that is enough. It is enough that one of them is valid in my view in order to reach the conclusion that there is a God; not all of them need to be valid. Therefore, for example, evolution, which attacks the third type of argument, the physico-theological argument, is very overrated in this discussion. People think: well, if there is evolution, then that is a decisive blow to belief in God. Even if we say that it attacks the physico-theological argument, so what? There are still several other ways of arriving at belief in God. So this path doesn’t hold water—fine. So what? Does that mean there is no God? No. As I said, if I brought you a proof that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees, and you found a mistake in the proof—does that mean the sum of the angles in a triangle is not 180 degrees? No. It means the question remains open because I have no proof. If I have another proof, then by its force I will reach that conclusion. Same thing here. The fact that we knocked down one proof says nothing about the conclusion. Okay? Therefore there is independence among these arguments. It is enough that one of them holds water in order for us to reach the conclusion that there is a God. Not all of them need to be correct. Then we began surveying the different arguments. We started with the ontological argument, which is an argument that assumes that God is the perfect being. That is the definition of the God being proven. Doesn’t matter—we talked about that argument, about its flaws, its character, and so on. After that we moved on to the cosmological argument. The cosmological argument basically proves the existence of God from the fact that the world exists, and if the world exists, someone created it. So this is basically God as creator of the world. The physico-theological argument is God as engineer, because you assume the complexity of the world, not merely its existence. The complexity of the world, and you say: something so complex needs a composer, an assembler. Therefore this is God as the engineer of the world, the intelligent designer with abilities and so forth. So each such argument proves the existence of a different God. We discussed the first two arguments—we finished them. We were in the middle of the third argument. In the next lesson I’ll begin with the third argument and then continue onward. Okay? I’m doing a bit of review for the sake of those who joined, so again, apologies to those who already heard it. There were a few additions today, but still, I said most of it before. Okay, that’s it.