Dr. George Schlesinger
What do we do when confronted with an honest skeptic, someone who is not an ill-intentioned scoffer but, on the contrary,
strongly desires his doubts to be allayed and sincerely wishes us
to convince him of the validity of the basic tenets of the Torah?
How do we demonstrate to him that man was created in the
image of God, that he has an eternal soul and that he has duties
to perform as laid down in the Torah? By what arguments do
we establish that ultimately there is justice in this world and that,
contrary to appearances, the good is rewarded and the evil punished? And, indeed, by what form of reasoning can it be shown
that an Omniscient and Omnibenevolent Almighty exists?
Often the doubter who seeks reassurance is informed that rigorous proof, convincing demonstration and decisive evidence
in this particular area of inquiry just does not exist and what he
must strive for and acquire, is faith. This answer, however,
rarely strikes him as particularly reassuring. It is strange, after
all, that there are such a vast number of facts on which complete
information may reliably be secured with relative ease. We were
able to find out, with virtually absolute certainty, the chemical
constitution of countless substances, as well as their melting point,
conductivity, refractive index, specific heat, co-efficient of expansion, modules of elasticity, etc. Much of this information is
trivial, if not entirely useless, but even the part which is important can hardly be said to be vitally important and indispensible to ultimate human happiness. Yet when seeking answers to
questions of the highest significance about the existence and
nature of the Almighty, answers upon which the meaning and
purpose of one's life depend, there is no set of experiments or
observation, no method of inference, no rules of inquiry at all
that are relevant. We have nothing to rely on but faith-unaided
by reason or fact.
It is said about a group of Jewish students in Berlin at the
beginning of the so-called "Age of Enlightenment," inaugurated
by Moses Mendelssohn, that they were greatly troubled by religious doubts brought upon them through their encounter with
secular culture. They used to debate among themselves how to
resolve these doubts and how to prove the various claims of Judaism, but without success. Finally, they decided that it would
be unfair to conclude that no answers existed to their questions
without giving the "other side" a hearing. They resolved, therefore, to send one of their members to the Yeshivah in Volozhin
- at the time the leading Yeshivah in the world - for a period
of two years, where he would study all the sources and consult
the authorities and see whether satisfactory solutions to the problems plaguing them were available.
Consequently, one of their
group - an intelligent and diligent boy - went to Volozhin
for two years, where he immersed himself completely into the life of the Yeshivah. On his return to Berlin he was met by his
friends who eagerly inquired:
"Well, how was it?" his friend asked.
"It was wonderful," he replied. These two years have been
probably the best years of my life." "Do you now have answers to all the questions we had?"
"No, I have answers to none of those questions."
"What, then, was this all for?!"
"But I have no more questions left, either. . ."
There is insight contained in this classic anecdote.
Suppose one day you were confronted with someone, with
whose welfare you were concerned and who posed the following
question: how do I know that other people have feelings; that
they have inner experiences; that they are capable of experiencing joy and pain like myself? Now this individual, being a
rather intelligent person, goes on to explain: I know, course,
that others behave as if they had inner experiences; that when
I step on their toes they moan, when pinched they scream, and
when tickled they laugh, but how do I know that these reactions
to stimuli are accompanied by mental and emotional processes?
It is only in my own case that I know for sure this to be so. On
what basis am I to assume the existence of these extraneous
processes, which are wholly inaccessible to my senses in the case
of others whose behavior can fully be accounted for without
them?
I do not suppose that the reader has ever encountered a genuine solipsist (which is the name for people who argue like this)
and I am fairly certain he would be quite taken aback and feel
at a loss for an answer.
He might attempt to point out: other people surely must have
thoughts, feelings and emotions like yourself, because they can
be observed to reason and act intelligently and to react emotionally like yourself.
But, as I mentioned, the solipsist we are dealing with is supposed to be a rather intelligent person, thus he will quickly see
the weakness of the preceding argument. He will reply: What
I observe is that others have brains and act intelligently but not,
definitely not, that they have thoughts.
To strengthen my point, consider some of the machines which are manufactured these
days. Some of these may be observed to have very complex brains
made of metal and plastic and to act very intelligently, in many
cases with intelligence exceeding by far our own. Yet I will not,
for a moment, attribute thoughts to such machines, nor the experience of effort which I feel when working at a problem and
the experience of exhilaration which usually accompanies my
finding a solution to a difficult problem. Again, I observe that
others have hearts, kidneys and nervous systems and that they
react to stimuli, but not that they have feelings. As is known,
there are some machines which are so built that they scream
when stepped upon or when being kicked and give out a laughing
sound when tickled, yet it would never occur to me to attribute
consciousness to these machines. I am quite convinced that they
are devoid of all traces of feeling and emotion and are merely
programmed in such a way as to react as if they had inner experiences. What reason have I to believe that all the walking and
talking bodies around me are more than just programmed robots?
I do not think the point needs further elaboration; it should
be quite clear that it is exceedingly difficult - if indeed not
entirely impossible - to show to a genuine solipsist that other
people do not merely appear like himself, but do possess inner
experiences as well, although these will forever remain inaccessible to an outsider. Fortunately enough, there are hardly any
genuine solipsists around. There are, of course, philosophers
who, from time to time, raise doubts about matters taken for
granted by everyone. This, however, is done in order to illuminate
the status of the assumption that other minds and consciousness
exist and not because anyone is actually plagued by doubts about
their existence. I say fortunately, for imagine if solipsists did exist
in large numbers. They would be devoid of all motivation, except
fear of retribution, to act ethically. They would refrain from
overtly hurting people, but otherwise would completely lack
mercy, compassion or sympathy toward the feelings of others,
simply because they would not believe that others possessed
feelings.
The crucial point, then, is that the doubt about the existence
of other minds is like the doubt about the existence of the Almighty: once they are seriously entertained, both are extremely
diffcult to dispel.
The great difference between the two cases is
that we have been born and raised in a society where everyone
is conditioned to take for granted the existence of inner experiences in others as if it were a self-evident truth. As to the basic
tenets of the Torah, however, we have been less fortunate -
we are born into a society where many entertain strong genuine
doubts about them.
Similarly: how would we deal with a person who was genuinely
worried that the walls of the building might melt any moment
and, consequently, was in fear that the ceiling was going to come
crashing down upon us? I suppose we would try to reassure him
by pointing out that the temperature in the room is well below
the melting point of walls and thus his fears are entirely groundless. But what if he persists in his worry, asking on what basis do
we believe something no one has ever yet observed, namely, that
in the next moment the melting point of the wall is going to
remain what it has been in the past?
Here again, fortunately, only philosophers worry about such
matters and even the philosopher Hume, who was the first to
raise this kind of a problem (known as the problem of induction), openly confessed that he only worries about it in his capacity as a philosopher, but, when not engaged in philosophizing,
he goes about his daily tasks just like everybody else, completely
unworried about the stability of walls, unafraid that the ground
may give way or the air ignite and confident that the sun is going
to rise tomorrow like it has risen every day so far. At the same
time, he knew that there are no logical grounds whatever upon
which to believe these things to be true or even to be likely, to
any degree, to be true.
Hume, two hundred years ago, was the first man fully to have
realized that the usual claim, that our assumptions about the
workings of nature have so far worked, is completely beside the
point and such a claim merely begs the question, since we are
now querying the very supposition that something that has
worked in the past is going, or is likely to be going, to work
in the future. And it is utterly useless to try and argue, that in
the past, the future turned out to resemble the past, for what we are interested in at the moment is, Bertrand Russell has pointed
out, not in past futures but in future futures!
However, unlike in the case of the claims of the Torah, all
of us have been completely conditioned to accept, unquestioningly, the basic unproven and unprovable principles of empirical reasoning, which generalizes on the basis of instances
and draws inferences from the observed to the unobserved. Indeed, the conditioning has been so thoroughgoing that we often
blatantly declare that science has produced a vast number of
useful results securely established and tested by experience, as
if experimental results and observations themselves, without the
aid of interpretative rules, articulated any laws of nature and
expressly endorsed any empirical hypotheses. The world of pure
experience is mute. Only after we have accepted without proof
- because there can be no proof - the validity of certain principles which lay down the rules how data are to be interpreted,
principles of theory constructed on the basis of observation, that
we can talk of scientific hypotheses securely anchored in experience.
In fact, should we ever encounter a real-life solipsist or someone genuinely skeptical about the validity of the basic rules of
empirical reasoning, I believe most of us would take the attitude that what the situation called for was not so much the marshaling of evidence and arguments, but therapeutical care. An agnostic with respect to the existence of other minds or the validity
of induction would be regarded by us as emotionally unbalanced
and who has gotten into an unfortunate and unnatural frame
of mind from where he gets a perverted view of the world, incapable of perceiving what should look as self-evident. The psychological causes for the condition of such a person would require looking into and treatment, aimed at restoring his mind
to the healthy state in which unfounded phobias and uncertainties are eliminated, would have to be administered.
The story about the students in Berlin intends to convey the
idea that the situation, with respect to agnosticism regarding the
Torah, is basically similar. To a typical student of Volozhin,
agnosticism is an unnatural state of mind, which calls for therapy, rather than arguments. Therefore, a person afflicted with doubt should be invited to separate himself from his unhealthy
environment and seek cure in sharing the experiences of those
who find complete fulfillment and intense satisfaction in a totally
committed life in an intellectual and emotional climate in which
the tenets of the Torah seem incapable of being questioned.
By saying all this to the skeptic, there is, of course, no guarantee whatever that one is going to succeed in helping him to
resolve his doubts. But there is a great deal to be gained from
making clear the nature of his difficulties. For it is certain that
no solution is going to be found to a problem, the nature of
which is completely misunderstood. What I have attempted to
do is just this: to define the problem of the skeptic. It is a grave
error to think that the special difficulties in establishing the
factual claims made by the Torah arise out of the peculiar logical
status of these claims, as compared with other knowledge claims.
Cognitive claims cannot be established in a vacuum; however,
in other domains of knowledge, we are not forced to begin from
scratch, for, by innate inclination and continuous conditioning,
we accept unquestionably the initial premises and the basic rules
of inference, vital for the acquisition of knowledge. The problem
with religious propositions is with our innate inclinations and the
cultural climate in which we have been brought up and conditioned.
[Tradition 1969]
