Q&A: Is There Value to “Simple Faith”?
Is There Value to “Simple Faith”?
Question
Hello and blessings,
As you have said more than once, in your view there is no significant difference between belief in God that is drawn from the cosmological argument or from the physico-theological argument, and “simple faith,” whose basis is a direct intuition of God’s existence. (By the way, I haven’t seen that you devoted a column to this, although there is a bit about it in the trilogy.) Both are forms of belief that are the product of intuition, and as such they are, on the one hand, definitely meant to stand up to logical scrutiny—and therefore they are not fundamentalist; and on the other hand, they are a faculty through which one can arrive at some objective statement—and therefore they are not an exercise in myself and my feelings, as in the postmodern approach. The only difference is that “simple faith” is merely a kind of “shortcut” (there is no need to pass through the intuition of the “principle of causality,” for example).
I would like to ask whether you do not accept the claim that through “simple faith” the quality of one’s relationship with the Holy One, blessed be He, is superior. That is, there is a difference between a conclusion I arrived at through proofs and external inferences, and a conclusion that I reached through direct observation. I do not mean that there is a difference in the sense of certainty produced in a person, or that there is a difference in the various implications that arise from these two paths, but rather the claim that the very quality of the relationship is different. One might use the two ways mentioned in the Talmud for reclaiming a lost item: identifying marks or visual recognition. Don’t you see an advantage to the method of “visual recognition”? Indeed, the result in both cases is identical (the object is returned to its owner), but in the case of visual recognition the bond between the person and the object is tighter (assuming, of course, that visual recognition is a kind of intuition. One could disagree; this is just for the sake of the example). And so, one could argue that direct intuition of the Holy One, blessed be He, has greater religious value. It is a higher quality of relationship. Perhaps this is some kind of mysticism or metaphysics. Even so, don’t you see in this at least a trace of an advantage, or some logic to the argument itself?
With blessings,
Answer
I don’t know how to measure qualities of a relationship with the Holy One, blessed be He. I don’t think anyone does. What I can measure is observance of the commandments, and that is what is required of us.
Discussion on Answer
Maybe so. So what? That doesn’t mean one serves God more than the other.
Agreed.
Okay. And regarding commandment observance, isn’t it to be expected that someone who accepts God’s existence through other intuitions (the principle of causality and the like), then when he finds himself in a situation that requires self-sacrifice for the sake of a commandment, it will be harder for him to withstand the test? After all, the belief is not direct; it is only the product of another intuition, and so on. A person who directly perceives God’s existence will find it easier to keep commandments (though here too, of course, there is no certainty)?
It is worth noting that even if the above description is correct, it contains no criticism. In the end, it really is to be expected that when there is a “heavy price,” one takes into account that the intuition is indirect and not absolute, and so forth. But I want to argue that one can understand an education that tries to cultivate direct intuition, since it gives stronger backing to commandment observance. Don’t you agree?