Q&A: Question Regarding the Book Truth and Not Stable
Question Regarding the Book Truth and Not Stable
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I read your book Truth and Not Stable and enjoyed it מאוד.
My question concerns the basic claim that one cannot arrive at certainty. This is understandable analytically based on the proofs you brought in the book, but inner certainty can be subjective; that is, one can believe something with absolute certainty. For example, just as I know with absolute certainty that my mother loves me, and also contrary to what the Rabbi wrote, I know with absolute certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow. True, this cannot be proven logically one hundred percent, but at the moment I cannot find any force or anything else that could convince me otherwise. I would be very happy if certainty in God were as clear to me as the certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow.
I would suggest saying that such subjective certainty, which is apparently based on intuition or some kind of inner feeling, depends on the amount of reinforcement I get from reality, and the more reinforcement I get for something, the higher my level of certainty about it becomes.
What I ultimately want to say is that from the standpoint of faith, one can arrive at inner certainty in the way I suggested.
Answer
What you call inner certainty is a subjective matter, and I have nothing to say about it. I deal with certainty in the objective sense. In that sense, nobody can be certain of anything. About feelings I have nothing to say; each person and his own feelings.
The way to test the question of whether there is certainty is to examine whether there is another hypothesis that explains the current data adequately, even an imaginary hypothesis. If such a hypothesis exists, there is no certainty. If not, that does not prove there is certainty, but perhaps there really is.
So too regarding the sun: one can raise possibilities of events that would cause the sun not to rise tomorrow—so de facto there is no certainty.
A person can also be sure that Maccabi will take the EuroLeague this year in light of the renewed roster, but that is a feeling and not objective certainty.