Question

To the Rabbi
 

Following your last two columns, I found myself rethinking things a bit.
Over the years I learned to make a fairly clear distinction between semantics and argument, between intuition and fact, and between the connection of these to values.
And when I artificially made a cold separation, for a moment, between facts and intuition and the actual reality of the values that follow from them, the results were quite surprising. Let me say in advance that this is not a practical consultation or a request for psychological help of some sort, but rather a desire for an outside evaluation regarding the ability to draw philosophical conclusions from certain endings.
Does everything really begin from an intuitive point of view—and in fact, in the logical, philosophical, and probabilistic realm, is everything basically a bluff?
I’ll explain what I mean.
Seemingly, regarding the question of God's existence, the initial intuitive, probabilistic, and logical sense is clear: a primary being exists, because from a logical, intuitive, and rational standpoint, the chances of the universe as we know it coming into being from nothing are not high. Likewise, the chance that the primary being is many rather than one is even lower. And if we assume that the primary being is actually matter or energy without consciousness, which can pass away or cease to exist now or in a few billion years, and there is nothing that necessitates its existence—then that sounds unreasonable.
But seemingly, from a purely analytic standpoint, there is no difficulty here, because the materialist will tell you that just as concepts like good and evil, logical and illogical, possible and impossible, strong and weak, are non-objective, immeasurable, and completely meaningless concepts—since everything is entirely material, including consciousness and the human being—so too anything outside the human world has no objective logical necessity behind it. Therefore blind laws of nature can exist. A primary being can exist that does not conform at all to the rules of logic and probability, since probability and statistics are only our conjectures for describing things; he may even agree that intuitively it makes no sense that the world was created and has no cause, but it was simply formed arbitrarily. And it can be destroyed and recreated arbitrarily, and it also may not be—because reality does not operate according to any rational conditions whatsoever.

This is of course also the materialist answer to the question of consciousness: our initial intuition is to assume that if such high intelligence as that of a human being developed, then it is not at all reasonable that it came about—even completely indirectly through a natural process like evolution or abiogenesis—by means of a factor or circumstances that have no wisdom or intelligence. And forget wisdom or intelligence—even consciousness or will. For this intuitive argument also applies to animals: the laws of physics or the laws of nature do not feel fear, anxiety, or pleasure, whereas animals and human beings do. That has in any case always been my intuitive feeling. The materialist will of course say that concepts like consciousness and intelligence, high and low, are also completely subjective, and that there is no reason to assume that our consciousness makes us objectively superior to inanimate things or other entities.
And
if so, the only basis we can hold onto is intuitive and ethical. There is no reason to deny the existence of the primary being, God. And therefore we have no reason to deny the tradition about His revelation and His demand that we succeed in the ethical and moral sphere. But analytically speaking, the situation is pretty empty and dry.
And I would like to ask a number of questions:
1. Do you agree with this description in general?
2. Rabbi Cherki once said jokingly that, from his point of view, an atheist gentile can be considered righteous—but only on condition that he is a real atheist, since he denies everything, and idolatry in general, and that is the beginning of monotheism. But that most atheists are not atheists at all, rather some kind of pantheists who attribute some kind of consciousness to time and the universe. He is of course speaking about materialists of the second kind, for whom it sometimes seems that they still retain remnants of belief; for they speak of planned and fully ordered laws of nature that stand in their own right and do not sway right or left; they speak of infinite energy and infinite time that are beyond human grasp and understanding—descriptions reminiscent of the conception of divinity among believers. In your own experience, and without attributing this or that psychology—and I assume you know many professionals and scientists who are materialists—do most of them attribute objectivity, order, organization, and logic to the laws of physics, logic, and so on? And if so, how do they explain their eternity?