Q&A: God and Synthetic Thinking
God and Synthetic Thinking
Question
In Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon you write that:
“Belief in God is, in one respect, a more fundamental layer than the modernist-postmodernist layer, and in another respect it is secondary to it. On the one hand, belief in God is possible only when there is a willingness to believe in things in general (a synthetic, modernist stance). On the other hand, trust in synthetic capacities is based on belief in a coordinating factor, that is, in God. In Talmudic terms, one could say that these two ‘come together.'”
Could the Rabbi explain a bit more about the nature of the hierarchy between the two? Because it seems to me that the wording “come together” does not provide a sufficient explanation of the relationship between them, just as it does not sufficiently explain the relationship in the Talmudic topic either.
Answer
I didn’t understand the question. There is one aspect in which belief in God is the more fundamental one, and another aspect in which the capacity called belief itself is more fundamental. Belief in God presupposes both assumptions: that there is a God, and that we have such a capacity (intuition). There does not have to be any temporal order or causal order between them.