Q&A: On the Fallacy of Faith as a Logical Conclusion
On the Fallacy of Faith as a Logical Conclusion
Question
Hello Rabbi Michael Abraham,
I am writing to you because I greatly appreciate the logic that comes through in your writing, and of course the knowledge as well, but I disagree with you about some of the conclusions that follow from that logic:
1. In one of your answers here on the responsa page you wrote, “To believe means to know,” and I would like to suggest a correction: to believe means to think that you know. As a man of science, you know very well how one establishes a fact and a proof. Real scientists do not subscribe to “faith” of the kind under discussion (in their professional work), but rather to hypotheses—their intuition does indeed suggest an answer to the questions they ask themselves, but they treat the answer their intuition gives them as a hypothesis, not as absolute belief, because absolute belief is an ungrounded hypothesis that a person is certain of without a factual basis. In fact, belief is the believer’s confidence in his guess (intuition proves nothing; our intuitions are wrong far more often than they are right—ask a casino owner, for example, how people’s intuitions usually work out for them in gambling).
2. Your conclusion about the complexity of the world/evolution as proof that a higher power is involved: yes and no (and therefore no). On the one hand, as far as human knowledge and logic are capable of grasping, things as complex as our world cannot come into being without the involvement of a guiding hand. On the other hand, if that is so, then the higher power itself that served as the guiding hand is also a super-complex entity, and it too could not have come into being on its own. Human logic is incapable of grasping this paradox, and therefore any attempt to determine a decisive answer is pointless (which is why great scientists, among them Einstein and Darwin, tended toward an agnostic view—a kind of admission of our inability to answer questions of this kind). There is no possible scenario for the creation of our existence as far as our logic can grasp: on the one hand, it does not make sense to us that the world was created from nothing, and on the other hand, it does not make sense that the higher power that created us came from nothing, so who created it? And who created the one that created it? There is no end to it. Of course, the common “religious” answer, “God is eternal,” is completely empty and pulled out only because there is no choice, not because it has any logical sense.
In addition, even if we were to agree that a higher power created us, there is no reason to think it has any connection to the divine beings portrayed by Judaism or by other religions. As far as we know, even if there was a guiding hand in our creation, it could have been the famous Flying Spaghetti Monster or an ancient alien race. In other words, the attempt to “prove” from our complex existence that the Jewish God exists is completely unfounded, and in fact I was a bit disappointed to hear you use these arguments after reading very intelligent texts by you.
I would be glad to hear your response to these points. Respectfully,
Dor
Answer
Hello Dor.
Your questions have been answered at length in several places on the site, and especially in my books God Plays Dice and The First Existent.
Let me begin by saying that your feeling/disappointment is certainly familiar to me. I too have often experienced frustration that intelligent people like Einstein or Dawkins arrive at foolish conclusions and write unintelligent things, and even fall into simple fallacies (like those you presented here and similar ones). But precisely because of that, I do not judge arguments by the person making them, but on their own merits.
1. You described my position correctly: in my view there is no difference between believing and knowing. You can of course call our knowledge about the law of gravity or about the fact that there is a wall in front of me belief and not knowledge (since after all I only think that I know), but then once again you have reached an identification between belief and knowledge. According to your suggestion, there is no knowledge in the world that falls under the category of knowledge and not belief. For me, that is what is called knowledge, but semantics are not important to me. Call everything belief—that is also fine. Either way, knowledge of any kind is not essentially different from belief, and you may call them beliefs or items of knowledge as you wish.
I completely disagree with your claim that our intuition usually errs. The opposite is true. All science is built on our intuition. True, we have no certainty about anything, but intuition is the main tool (indeed the only one) we have for arriving at knowledge/beliefs—in science, in religion, and in general. Even the principle of causality is an intuition, and trust in the senses is an intuition, and so on. To take as your example fools in a casino who follow an irrational feeling and declare it intuition is to set up a straw man in order to attack it. By the same token, I could bring you fools who make mistakes in mathematics and deny the reliability of mathematics. At every step of your life you make use of intuition, and usually you are right. Therefore, if you examine things empirically, the required conclusion regarding the reliability of intuition is the opposite of yours.
2. Here too I did not say anything decisive. What I said is that it is far more reasonable to assume that there is an intelligent factor underlying the universe and its laws. The question of who created it is a logical mistake and a misunderstanding of the argument (and as noted, I answered it at length both on the site and in the books mentioned above). You have two options: either at the beginning of this chain there stands an entity that itself does not require a cause (another entity that created it), or this is an infinite chain (which is a fallacy, called in philosophy an infinite regress). I see no third option. Since the second option is a fallacy, the first is certainly preferable to it. QED.
As far as I am concerned, the philosophical God is the entity at the beginning of the chain, and has no necessary connection to a religious God of any kind. It is true that once we have reached the conclusion that a philosophical God exists, when tradition comes and says that God revealed Himself, there is no obstacle to accepting that. But I have already expanded on and detailed this in several places, as above, and there is no point in repeating all that here.
All the best.
Discussion on Answer
Dor, it seems to me that your mistake stems from an incorrect definition of “fallacy.” If I do not know things, that does not mean I am in a “fallacy,” but in a state of lack of knowledge. The philosophical “fallacy” is not lack of knowledge but impossibility of existence.
You can say that an infinite chain is a “fallacy” in the sense of something that cannot possibly exist.
Whereas the “fallacy” in the conception that a complex thing came into being by itself is a lack of knowledge.
It seems to me that not knowing things does not mean you are in a problem.
As for the second point, you need to understand how proofs are built. A proof is built from basic premises. And the reason we have different basic premises is because we have a tool called intuition. It receives information about the world and infers laws from it. The fact that each person reaches different conclusions does not mean our proofs are incorrect, and it also does not change the fact that this is how one builds a proof.
If you do not want to use this tool, then you cannot accept any proof. And if you accept no proof, then you have no reason to conduct discussions with people, because nothing can be proven to you.
It seems to me that the reason you asked this question is that inside, you do think things can be proven to you, and therefore from your own perspective as well, intuition is a tool that needs to be used.
The basic intuitions are almost the same for everyone. You are confusing emotion with intuition.
The difference between belief and knowledge is like the difference between heaven and earth.
This can cause confusion among those who do not analyze enough.
An example of knowledge: a person knows that he sees something. No matter how blurred his vision becomes, the knowledge that he sees something does not change. What changes is the relation between what he sees and his interpretation of it.
An example of belief: a person believes that this table he sees is really a table. The more blurred and borderline the vision becomes, the more his belief that this blotch he sees is a table decreases.
The problem arises when one understands that knowledge itself is the product of the interpretation of the visual system in the brain. But even after this understanding, the knowledge itself does not change. The person still knows that he sees what he sees.
I will say again regarding the second point that the fallacy in an infinite chain is a fallacy only according to our logic, *exactly* just as there is a fallacy in the conception that a complex thing came into being by itself (otherwise there is no reason to rule out the possibility that we were created “without a cause”), so that both possibilities are equally inconceivable to our (limited) minds.
As for the first point, I am forced to understand that placing belief on the same level as knowledge is yet another escape route for a logical believer to deal with the inability to explain the basis of belief logically, as is relying on intuition as a source of absolute truth. The intuitions of 7.5 billion human beings differ, so I assume there are 7.5 billion different truths, which in any case brings us back to the point that there is no point arguing about beliefs, except with someone who does not believe in beliefs, who is probably an agnostic, and of course someone who believes is not afraid 🙂
In any case, thank you very much for your matter-of-fact answers.