Q&A: A question following a podcast you participated in (The Hedgehog and the Fox)
A question following a podcast you participated in (The Hedgehog and the Fox)
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I recently heard you on the above-mentioned podcast, and I wanted to ask a question that I’m sure gets asked a lot and must be very tiresome for you.
From what I understood, you argue that belief in God is the logically required conclusion (philosophically?).
About 10–15 years ago, I was very preoccupied with this issue, and over time I came to believe—perhaps passionately—that these are questions that cannot be proven or disproven, at least not in the rigorous sense of the word. (The only frame of reference I have is proofs in mathematics; by the way, your son’s notes are excellent and very helpful.)
This applies both to arguments from tradition, and even more so to more general arguments ("it cannot be that such-and-such").
So if you could please point me to books/articles that contain such a proof, I’d be very happy.
Before I ask for a proof of God’s existence, it’s important for me to define what I even mean by God:
What is not God? When I started asking questions like this, people told me, "Look at this whole complex world—do you really think it came into being by itself?" (the watchmaker argument). To me that’s a meaningless argument (beyond the logical fallacies in it), as if I’m claiming that without God everything can be understood.
I am convinced that there are things that cannot be understood, and that is not a function of time, knowledge, or IQ.
So an argument that ends by showing me that I don’t know how to explain something misses the point.
What is God, in my view? It’s not well defined, but to me God is someone, not something. And maybe God is something that gives moral validation to something—not my validation or yours, but validation inherent in existence.
Thank you,
By the way, I’m adding here another argument that seems problematic to me, though this email is already long enough.
Not long ago I heard the claim that "there are no 100% proofs," but there are many good "90%" arguments, and taken together they bring us almost to the threshold of certainty (whatever that means).
I’ve encountered (abstract) objects that were defined quite simply and clearly, and yet calculating their distribution was difficult to extremely difficult. So when a person of average intelligence (and even above-average intelligence) makes claims about things involving "infinity," "the cause of causes," and in truth even the infinite number of parameters that surround us in everyday life—and says this indicates X with 90% certainty—it sounds to me like meaningless verbiage.
If brilliant mathematicians describe stock-market trading as a random walk (true, one can also say a thing or two about that object), it doesn’t make sense to me that the average synagogue rabbi can successfully define the distribution of an event that includes the stock market, the planet on which the stock market is located, and everything in between.
(The last line isn’t precise; the difficulty of analysis does not always increase as the event includes more details. It’s just a way of trying to explain how presumptuous it seems to me to assign probabilities to various exotic conjectures.)
In addition, from my limited experience with mathematical proofs: if something is almost true, and feels true, and is true in every plausible scenario I can think of—then in quite a few cases it turns out not to be true.
So I’m fairly skeptical about the "percentage approach."
Answer
Hello,
I very much prefer questions sent through the website.
As for what you wrote, it’s hard to elaborate here. In my opinion, there are quite a few mistakes in it. You asked for a reference, so I can refer you to my book The First Being, which deals with this topic at great length. There I respond to everything you asked here and much more.
Regarding the second half of what you wrote, anyone who speaks about probability in questions like these is not aware of the meaning of the concept of probability. In these contexts one should speak about plausibility, not probability. For that there is no need to calculate or know distributions.
As you yourself wrote regarding the example of the stock market (which is plainly mistaken), increasing the scope of the perspective and of the subject does not necessarily increase the complexity of the discussion. On the contrary, sometimes looking at a larger scale greatly simplifies the discussion. This happens quite often in mathematics and physics themselves. But the simplest way to see this is through the relationship between the different sciences. Think about biology. If you were to do a full physical analysis of every particle in a biological system, you would not get very far. The laws of biology are an averaging of all those analyses over all the particles, and they provide a simpler and much more effective tool for biological discussion (though they also confuse biologists quite a bit—for example, evolution researchers who think it contains a random component).
By the way, this also happens with proofs for the existence of God. Going down into scientific details is plainly unnecessary and complicates the discussion for no reason. There too it is right to broaden the perspective to all of creation, and then the conclusions become quite compelling. See my above-mentioned book.
And indeed, there are no 100% proofs. By the way, not even in mathematics, and certainly not in any other field. Every proof is based on assumptions, and the assumptions are not 100%. There were several philosophers throughout history who tried to formulate a proof that requires no assumptions (but is derived from conceptual analysis alone; Kant called this the ontological argument). Descartes and Anselm are the two most prominent examples. Gödel also proposed a mathematical proof of the existence of God (I discussed it in a column on my website). So if you are looking for completely certain proofs of anything in this world—not only of faith / belief—I can already save you a great deal of time and tell you that you won’t find them. I dealt with this in my books Two Carts and Truth and Unstable, and also in various articles and lectures.
All the best, and happy holiday,