Question

Hello Rabbi, I’m already starting the Rabbi’s fourth booklet, Evidence, and I’m really enjoying it so far. Regarding chapter 13 in the first booklet, the Rabbi writes about Reuven, whose rabbi forbids him to read critical and philosophical material lest he arrive at the wrong conclusions. And if we analyze his current view, he is actually a heretic, except that he is not doing what is necessary to expose it. If Shimon the atheist were to present him with this or that logical argument, Reuven would change his view and become an atheist. We have already seen that if Reuven is persuaded by some logical argument, then clearly the conclusion of the argument was already present within him unconsciously. He is essentially an unconscious atheist. And in booklet 4, part 1, on the distinction between a “philosophical” inference and a “theological” inference: deduction, the Rabbi concludes on page 12—and I’ll quote: “We have therefore seen that the ‘philosophical’ argument is an argument whose purpose is to change a person’s beliefs, that is, it is a converting argument, whereas a ‘theological’ argument has a revelatory character.” We see that a “theological” argument does not reveal something new to us, but rather exposes before us something that was already latent within us, and sometimes we were not aware of it. In other words, when I, the simple believer, am exposed to ontological arguments and agree with them, this basically means that I am an unconscious heretic, and that I have only discovered the assumptions hidden within me. And if I were exposed to philosophical arguments, here the situation seems ostensibly different, and he may convert his assumptions. If so, I understand that what the Rabbi wrote applies only to theological arguments, or am I missing something here?