Q&A: A Thought Experiment
A Thought Experiment
Question
Hello, honorable Rabbi,
What would you do if God, or some other agent who had been proven with the highest possible certainty to be His reliable representative, were to make a claim that contradicts the laws of logic—for example, that God is omnipotent and can create a stone He cannot lift, or know in advance things that depend on free choice, or generally claim that God can change the laws of logic, which of course contradicts a basic assumption of thought itself? Would you accept his claim and say that apparently your thinking is too limited to understand it, or would you find some other way out of accepting those things?
Answer
That is roughly like asking what I would do if God revealed Himself to me and said that He does not exist. The answer is simple: it won’t happen, because it cannot happen. There would be nothing, because there is nothing.
Besides, I don’t deal in hypothetical questions like this one. When I experience it directly, I’ll be able to form a position and answer.
Discussion on Answer
There is no such thing as giving up the laws of logic.
Thought experiments are a very important tool. But I’ve also written about my view regarding forming positions about situations that are far removed from you (see my article on halakhic ruling in extreme situations).
Could I get a link to the article?
Thanks
I read your book The Science of Freedom, and you do use thought experiments there in order to answer fundamental questions. The question I’m really driving at is whether it is possible to believe in an event where, on the one hand, my senses and memory tell me it happened, but reason and logic tell me that such a thing cannot happen—that is, I can think of no rational explanation for how it happened. There are people who say they believe in foreknowledge and free choice, or in divine providence, or in God in general, because they believe in the Torah / the Talmudic Sages / tradition, even though in practice they don’t understand what these things mean, or they admit that they seem illogical to them. There are also Christians who believe in meaningless formulas like “He is the Father, He is the Son, He is the Holy Spirit.” Can such claims simply be dismissed on the grounds that they are inherently illogical and therefore there is no reason to take them seriously? Or on the contrary—should one say that apparently it happened, and apparently one needs to update one’s beliefs and give up part of the laws of logic in certain areas of one’s knowledge?