Q&A: Intuition and Faith
Intuition and Faith
Question
Can the argument “God exists” be equivalent to the argument “I think, therefore I am”? In the end, both are based on intuitive assumptions, if we assume that the average person has some sense of creation—whether from a moral perspective, a thirst for something “beyond,” and many other reasons a person has to assume that there is a God who created him with a purpose. Can one simply define it as: “I think (that is, I intuitively feel) that God exists, therefore He exists”? After all, the Rabbi holds that there is an objective place for our intuitions. For example, I feel within myself that to roughly the same degree that I am certain I exist, I am certain that I and the whole world have a purpose, and that there is absolute morality—in short, that there is a creator directing the world. Is this argument flawed?
What should I say to a person who does not feel this? Look around you! From my perspective, he is like a person who doubts his own existence (maybe the percentage of such crazy people is equivalent to atheists).
Best regards, Y.,
Thank you very much and have a good day!
Answer
The argument “I think, therefore I am” is not a claim of intuition but a logical proof. The assumption that I do not exist leads to a contradiction. At least that is what it purports to be, and of course there are critiques of it.
As a rule, every ordinary argument is based on premises whose source is usually intuition. The argument you raised is not flawed at all. If someone does not feel this, then you have nothing to say to him on the plane you described. At most, you can try to prove God’s existence to him by various methods (see the notebooks here on the site), or bring him in various ways to feel this (that is the field called rhetoric. And identifying it with demagoguery is, of course, itself very demagogic).
Discussion on Answer
Hello Y.,
As I explained, there is no assumption at the foundation of the cogito. That is the essence of the argument: it arrives at a necessary conclusion from itself, without assumptions.
I did not understand your question about risk.
As for my evidence for faith, see my five notebooks on the site.
Thank you for the answer, Rabbi!
Following up on my question, what is the intuitive assumption of the cogito argument?
Did Descartes himself not end up being pushed to say that the statement itself is really an inner intuition because of logical difficulties?
And continuing with the question of God, the Rabbi presented two ways to arrive at faith for a person who does not feel the same experience that I felt: 1. that he should turn to rational evidence; 2. that I should try to explain to him that he too feels those same sensations, he just doesn’t call them “God” (in accordance with the dream of the Kuzari).
Isn’t the first way deficient, since logical proofs are under constant risk?
What is the reason that the Rabbi believes in God?
Thank you very much!