Q&A: The Invisible Pink Unicorn
The Invisible Pink Unicorn
Question
Rabbi, hello,
First, I’d like to say that I really appreciate you and what you do. I’ve had many questions about faith in recent years, and thanks to you—through the articles, the site, and the videos—I’ve managed to formulate a position on the whole issue.
A question for you, if I may.
There are conclusions that there is God—logical conclusions, faith-based conclusions, and so on and so on. There are conclusions.
But what if all these conclusions are valid only within the “fake” reality we are in? As if some other being placed us into a reality in which, with all the materials it gave us to learn with, or with the laws of logic it built, we would arrive at the conclusion that there must be a beginning to something, and therefore we decide that there is God—but maybe reality is completely different?
And there could be countless other examples I could give you that, theoretically, could be true, and we would not necessarily succeed in disproving them.
(I deliberately put “the invisible pink unicorn” in the title.)
My question is less focused on the examples themselves (which, as I noted, could be endless), but rather: what really is our attitude toward claims or assumptions that theoretically could be true, and that we cannot disprove?
Why is it that at the crossroads of searching for truth, we specifically decide that there is God, rather than deciding that there is something else, also invisible, that put us into a fake reality?
Why is God a more legitimate claim?
(Sorry if I confused you, and sorry if the wording is perhaps too simplistic.)
Thank you very much
Answer
I generally do not deal with skeptical questions. There is no way to answer skepticism, and all I can tell you is that you need to examine whether you yourself are a skeptic or not. If you are a skeptic, no answer will satisfy you—not only in matters of faith and the religious world, but in every field on earth (including science). And if you are not a skeptic, then what is the point of dealing with these questions? There is no way to handle them.
Discussion on Answer
Regarding claims that cannot be disproved, I just answered that. If there are good reasons, and by their very nature they are not the sort of thing that stands to be disproved (that is, this is not something that is supposed to stand to disproof), then there is nothing wrong with the fact that they cannot be disproved. It is like belief in God, which cannot be disproved, but there are good reasons to hold it.
The truth is, I’m not a skeptic.
I’m just very curious what the Rabbi’s attitude is toward claims like these that can’t really be disproved, like the teapot.
Does the Rabbi think that a claim that cannot be disproved has any weight at all just because we are unable to prove that it is false?