Sh,
why aren’t you also doubtful about the claim you raised—“You can’t use a tool that you are doubting while you are doubting it”? So that at least it should become a double doubt.

Why shouldn’t I cast doubt on the very rules of double doubt? I already wrote that I do not deal with skeptical claims.

Rabbi—I wanted to prove that just as you argue (correctly) that there is a circle of fools for materialism, dualism does not really solve it. The difference is that the materialist places his trust in evolution to program him a brain capable of understanding reality, while you place your trust in God. Why is one better than the other?
The eye of the intellect is simply a synonym for intuition, no?

Yedidya—a good question. I think the answer is that I came to persuade the Rabbi, and if the Rabbi doesn’t cast doubt on that claim, why should I bother?

The materialist cannot place his trust in evolution, because he knows about evolution itself only due to his scientific mode of thinking, and in that mode of thinking he cannot have trust. By contrast, faith does not necessarily stem from scientific thinking but from direct cognition. I can believe in God unconsciously and act accordingly, and that is justified, but I cannot believe in evolution unconsciously. (I can of course be constituted in such a way that gives me confidence in it, but not think and decide that it is actually reliable.) Evolution is a scientific theory, and as such one arrives at it through scientific methods of inference. Faith is cognition of some fact.
It seems to me I wrote this in the fourth notebook.

But a person’s cognition of his God as well, in faith, ultimately comes from that same sixth sense in which the Rabbi places trust.
The moment the Rabbi raises a difficulty against the naturalist’s mode of thinking, it doesn’t make sense for him to challenge only specific parts of the ways of thinking and not all parts of thought. (Without making a fine distinction, of course.)

Okay, I just now looked again at the answer at the beginning and saw that you call this merely a skeptical difficulty, so never mind. (Even though I still don’t really see a noticeable distinction between the two in the end.) Sorry for barging into a discussion that wasn’t mine.

Well, this “direct cognition”—where does it come from? It is presumably just another kind of intuition (just as scientific thinking is ultimately based on intuitions). There is no essential difference here.

The Rabbi wrote in several places in the quartet that there is a certain circularity with intuition. Faith in God is auditory cognition that is based on auditory cognition itself. And the justification for trusting intuition is faith in a coordinating factor. Could you explain better the difference between the materialist circle and this one?

I explained this in several places. The difference is between ordinary skepticism and grounded skepticism. There is a difference between a doubt that arises just because there is another possibility, and a grounded doubt, where there is a reason to be in doubt. Even in Jewish law you need a reason in order to be in doubt (see Rav Kook’s well-known comments in Ein Ayah, Sabbath 30b).
The materialist thinks—or more accurately, is forced to think—that human thought and cognition were built in a random and blind process. From that it follows that the chance that these systems are reliable—that is, that what one perceives really does faithfully reflect what exists out there—is negligible. What are the chances that a system built in a blind process would be reliable? This is similar to Hoyle’s Boeing airplane—the probability that a storm passing over a junkyard would assemble a Boeing airplane out of it. Alternatively, if you assembled television parts together blindly and at random, what are the chances that a working television would come out? Of course it could happen, but in order to infer that it actually did happen, one would need to verify it clearly with evidence. We have no evidence for that. By contrast, my trust as a believer in my intuition is based on the assumption that it was built by the Holy One, blessed be He—of course, this may have happened through evolutionary processes, but those themselves are directed and governed by the laws of nature so as to reach the goal of a human being with reliable senses and thought—in an intentional and reliable way. My assumption may be mistaken—because there is no Holy One, blessed be He, or He did not create us, or He is simply toying with us—but that is just a plain skeptical speculation: maybe it is true and maybe it is not. There is no positive reason here for doubt, unlike in the materialist case. It is like doubting what I see because maybe something is deceiving me. That is possible. After all, there are sometimes optical illusions. But in order for me to conclude that this is indeed the case, I need evidence. This is pure skeptical speculation, and most people are not really troubled by it.
Of course, once we have reached the conclusion that materialism is circular, the materialist conclusion itself, too—such as the neo-Darwinian picture—comes under challenge. After all, we also arrived at it with those same problematic tools.

So basically your whole philosophy is based on the assumption that God wants you to know the truth. But in order to accept that assumption, one first has to accept that God exists. What I’m saying is that here too there is circularity.
In your view, the chance that a materialist process would arrive at truth is negligible, but by the same token one could say that the chance that an eye would come into being is negligible. A materialist already believes that evolution produced things whose chance of arising just like that is negligible, so this is simply one more item on the list. (And I’m sure one can find satisfactory models for why intelligence can improve survival and how intelligence arrives at truth.)
Bottom line, I don’t think a materialist has “positive” reasons to doubt his intuitions much more than a dualist does. In the end, both of them base their view on faith in something that directed their intuitions toward truth. For you it is more plausible that this is God; for others it is more plausible that it is a blind process.

Of course there is circularity, just as there is circularity in trusting the eyes or the senses. Just as the Supreme Court and the Knesset determine the framework of their own authority. That is always how it is when you reach the end of the chain. But circularity is precisely ordinary, negative doubt. I distinguished it from positive doubt.
I explained the rest well enough, and I see no point in repeating myself.