Question

Hello Rabbi, in the fourth notebook, in the second part of the objections to Taylor’s proof, you bring the objection from evolution, which could serve as a coordinating factor between thought and the world. But you wrote there that one of the problems with that claim is that it involves circular reasoning. You then raised the question of how this differs from the theological explanation, and wrote as follows:

“Here there is an important difference between these two explanations. The claim of the proof from epistemology is that belief in God is implicitly present in every person, even if he denies it. He is aware of this and encounters God in an unconscious way, and therefore also assumes His existence without being aware of it. In contrast, trust in evolution would seemingly have to depend on conscious knowledge of it, since it is a scientific theory whose source is observation. To become convinced of it, one must observe it and go through all the processes of inference and scientific formulation. In fact, this is the main argument with which we are dealing here. The argument from epistemology tries to show a person that belief in God as a coordinating factor has already long been present within him. We are not persuading him to begin believing, as is done in the “philosophical” formulation of the argument (as in the previous notebook). It is hard to say the same thing about the trust we place in a scientific theory even before we have studied it and encountered it.”

Don’t you think this answer is evasive? I mean, how can one say that the belief is implicitly present within him if until a moment ago he did not believe and denied the belief, and perhaps was not even aware of the existence of God before that? The whole reason he would believe in God בעקבות the argument is only because he thinks this argument is correct and infers backward from his thinking to some connecting entity. But he does not secretly believe within himself in a connecting entity; rather, this only exposed to him that he needs to assume that such an entity exists in the background in order to be able to trust his thinking.
Also, the proof attacks this very thinking itself, as you wrote according to one of the many formulations you presented for the argument. So if that is the case, it seems that the argument, even on your own view, attacks itself.