Q&A: Soft Skepticism
Soft Skepticism
Question
Hello Rabbi!
I wanted to ask a question that seems to me very common, though not always stated explicitly: many people assume a kind of soft skepticism.
Unlike the famous examples of full skepticism, where there is no truth or full certainty at all, many claims come up that are somewhere in the middle.
For example, one might think that the more “distant” the thing being explained is, the less confidence we should have in the explanation, because our power of precision decreases. So even if the explanation seems plausible to us, we would not necessarily give it enough credence, and we would suspend judgment about it.
The same could be said about the creation of the world and what preceded it. Since this event is beyond our understanding by several orders of magnitude—what was before the singularity point—then even if there is an explanation that sounds very plausible to us, such as: there is a God, He was never created, and He is omnipotent (caused the world, etc.)—since this is such a complex event and so remote from us, we should give this explanation almost no credence. Just as you would not trust your eyesight even if you could supposedly see a book title very clearly from a distance of 50 kilometers…
And in this way we would knock down most of the proofs for God (cosmological, sufficient reason, physico-theological), and it seems this would also be valid with respect to the opposite proof from epistemology.
In my opinion, the professor who was with you at the metaphysical circus actually assumes this too. And it comes up many times.
Answer
First, this is not soft skepticism but healthy rationality. There is no certainty in the world at all, and you do not need to be a skeptic to understand that.
But regarding your actual point, I disagree. One must always examine what the alternative is. Between the possibility that God created the world and infinite regress, the first option is more reasonable. Infinite regress is not really an option at all. By the way, he himself spoke mockingly about “turtles all the way down” and understood that this is not an explanation. Only after he heard my argument did he suddenly wonder why one should reject the possibility of infinite regress. That is not serious. Beyond that, one can also explain further why regress is impossible, and I did so in the book. There was no time for that there.
Discussion on Answer
[By the way, the usual expression is “suspension of judgment,” not “delay of judgment.”]
The premise of the cosmological argument is that every entity of the kind found in our experience has a cause. This is a result of our experience, and it is applied to entities of the kinds we have encountered. Why do you see a problematic extension here?
Would you say the same thing about the law of gravity? That too is applied to every object in the universe, including stones on the moon or gases in the sun. What is the basis for that? Common sense, which says that if we have varied experience with many different things, then it is probably always true until proven otherwise. And what about scientific hypotheses about what happened here 14 billion years ago according to laws of nature that we know today?
As for your questions:
1. The question whether morality is objective or not is not decided by arguments but by a primary intuition. That is how it is for most of us, and I think it must necessarily be so. There are no arguments here. Therefore I see the validity of morality as an assumption, not a conclusion, and God is the conclusion. You can of course go from God to morality, if you independently conclude that there is a God, and that He commanded morality.
2. These are already almost facts. See the scientific examples I gave above. You can of course say that everyone is mistaken, but that at least shows that this is the common sense of most people, including atheists. Beyond that, experience confirms it again and again (that is exactly the principle of induction).
3. I did not understand.
I don’t think that is what you call healthy rationality. But in any case, where is the line drawn?
For example, take the first premise of the cosmological argument: it claims that every entity requires a cause and/or an explanation. The justification for this is usually common sense (as you mentioned in the discussion with him),
but of course once we speak about every entity in the broad sense of being, we see that the ability of healthy reason to speak about it diminishes drastically. So why should we talk about alternatives, and not simply suspend judgment?
Just as one would not trust eyesight even if one supposedly saw a book title very clearly from a distance of 50 km… where it stands to reason that we would suspend judgment. Even though apparently this is the only alternative we can think of (as opposed to the other billions of possible titles made up of the 27 letters of the alphabet).
So too in this way—it is possible, without much trouble, to reject (and suspend judgment regarding) all of metaphysics.
—
By the way, I had another question: someone who adopts an atheistic approach as a starting point—
1. Can he decide the question whether morality is objective? Assuming we know it was evolutionarily implanted in us so that we experience it as true… can one still trust the content of the experience? Or is this really like the train-to-Scotland analogy? Because here a priori he would not necessarily reject the conclusion, as below.
2. Would he have any essential reason to assume that a premise that sounds plausible to him regarding a distance of several galaxies from us indeed has more significant predictive power?
3. More generally, it seems that the very ability to talk about issues in the metaphysical circus pretty much shows that there is a metaphysical factor that coordinated it. Otherwise at most one could only suspend judgment, or assume that this whole plane does not exist, in the sense of actualism and not informativism.