Q&A: The Circular Discussion
The Circular Discussion
Question
I watched the Rabbi’s debate with the atheist and was very impressed by the Rabbi’s intellectual rigor.
But there was something I didn’t understand. In the debate you argued that nothing is necessary. If so, how can one draw conclusions? And how can one reach a conclusion regarding the existence or non-existence of God? More generally, what meaning do our inferences about reality have?
At most, one can argue that belief in God is rational. But if rationality is not a guarantee of the correctness of the conclusions that follow from rational methods of inference, then it has no significance whether the belief is rational or not. So let it not be rational. Let it be based on emotion, tradition, pure invention, or because I got up on the wrong side of the bed today. In any case, the rational approach is not preferable here to any other approach, because it too will not lead to necessary conclusions.
Answer
You’re conflating truth with certainty. Nothing is certain, but certainty is not required in order to adopt a view. Science too is not certain, so should I therefore not believe in it? Certainty means knowing something at 100%. Anything less than that is not certain. The uncertainty may be 5% or 90%. As far as I’m concerned, uncertainty of 10–20% doesn’t bother me, and even if it did bother me—that’s what there is. We have no way of reaching certainty.
Discussion on Answer
Yes, you did conflate them. You asked: according to my view, if there is no certainty about anything, how can one draw conclusions? That is a conflation.
1. I don’t know how to estimate it quantitatively.
2. Science too has had lots of things that were refuted. So what? On the contrary, what you’re saying is self-contradictory: after all, what cannot be subjected to a test of falsification cannot be refuted.
If you can’t rely on that kind of inference, then don’t rely on science either. Being open to falsification guarantees nothing.
3. As I said (and I really didn’t spend much time on it), every paradigm shift in science is a move toward the unfamiliar. Of course one can be mistaken, as in anything else. So what? Our eyesight also deceives us from time to time. So should we not accept what we see?!
Thanks for the answer. I didn’t claim that truth and certainty are equivalent. Truth will remain truth even if nobody knows it (although there are philosophers who would disagree with that).
I have a few more questions
1. What level of uncertainty regarding God’s existence would you estimate?
2. It’s true that science is not certain (and you mentioned the problem of induction in the discussion), but at least it subjects things to the test of falsification.
A method of inference, especially concerning the unknown, does not allow falsification and proceeds from first assumptions. There were rationalists like Aristotle who built an entire doctrine on things supposedly derived from first assumptions and logical inference, and in the end it turned out that almost everything he wrote was completely refuted.
How can one rely on this method of inference, especially when what lies beyond reality is so unclear and speculative? Also, how can one assess the degree of uncertainty?
3. Isn’t there a problem with inferring from the known to the unknown? In the debate you didn’t elaborate on that too much. But in science and mathematics there have been quite a few mistaken conclusions that stemmed from inferring from the known to the unknown (many inferences about infinity, Zeno’s paradoxes, “God does not play dice,” and so on).