I have been having an e-mail correspondence with a certain Rabbi discussing topics such as proof, evidence, the existence of Hashem and the historicity of the Tanach. The Rabbi's comments are in black and mine are in blue:
The basis of the belief in Judaism as the method of life written in the Torah, given to the Jewish people by G-d is both simple and complex. It has a simple intellectually understood, and enforced basis based on a complex number of understandings in principals of comprehension. I will list a number of matters which must be determined when addressing our question regarding belief in our faith. These matters are addressed in the Rebbe's letter which I have attached.
- The definition of a proof: What is defined as a proof? Must I physically see the object in discussion? Must my intellect enforce its existence as if I physically see it? Does it suffice to rely on other people’s experience? Does it suffice to rely on other people's knowledge? Does it suffice if the probability wades mainly to one side of the answer? Does it suffice if the mind does not comprehend but cannot fathom another option? Are intellectually leaned probabilities enough to overcome possible but distanced theories?
The answer: There is no absolute or proven definition of a proof. A proof is relative to one’s mind. For example: Jack and Mike are sitting in a room. Jack says he is currently staring at a cup. Mike says there is no cup. Jack says are you blind? Mike answerers: No, I see a cup, but it does not really exist, it is a figment of our imaginations, can you prove me otherwise? After all maybe we are hallucinating, or delirious. Jack says yes I can prove it, here I can touch it and hold it. Mike answerers: Maybe your mind is making you feel the dimensions of the imagined cup you are holding. Can you prove otherwise?
The morale of the above story: Even the most concrete and absolute level of proof that the human mind can fathom, which is actual sight, is given towards disbelief if the skeptic so chooses to stubbornly argue.
I agree with the concept that everything is subject to doubt. Thus when people talk about looking for “proof beyond a shadow of a doubt” not only will they never discover such proof, they are asking for evidence which will override any and all future evidence. This to me is quite foolish, since I don’t think there is any form of evidence that isn’t subject to doubt.
You mention (and so does the Rebbe in his letters) the word “proof” many times and as I have mentioned above the word itself seems to confuse the issue, since there is no such thing that wouldn’t be subject to doubt or scrutiny. I would rather use the word evidence in place of proof, since it has considerably less baggage.
You state that “the most concrete and absolute level of proof that the human mind can fathom” is the sense of sight. I would rather put it this way. The most direct form of evidence that a human mind can achieve is that of our senses. While it is true all of our senses have at one time or another given us inaccurate information, in order to determine anything about the physical reality in which we find ourselves we must at the very least grant that our senses give us true information about reality at least some of the time. This doesn’t just include our sense of sight, but also our sense of smell, tough, sound, taste and other less obvious senses such as our sense of balance, acceleration, temperature, kinesthetic sense, and pain. These are the tools for which we are able to retrieve as much direct evidence of reality as possible. So in the example above from the perspective of Jack his sense of sight gives himself evidence that there is a cup in front of him.
There are also indirect evidence, which is essentially the reports of others. Essentially indirect evidence is no different than direct evidence, except that the indirect evidence is more filtered than direct evidence, and thus is subject to more doubt. Indirect evidence are at best the remembered perceptions of a person (his direct evidence through his senses) reported to you. So while your senses may be flawed (dreams, hallucination, etc) another person’s perceptions are no more valid than your own. Just as you may misperceive and event or thing, so may another person misperceive the same event or thing. The indirect evidence is also subject to other flaws for which your direct evidence isn’t. For example, even if the person relating the report to you perceived the event correctly, they may have misremembered it. It is also possible that they may have miscommunicated the event to you. There are also the possibility of deception, perhaps they are lying to you. Therefore from the perspective of Jack, although it is true he could be wrong about his seeing a cup in front of him, it isn’t rational for him to place equal amount of trust in the report by mike as he has for his own perceptions. It is therefore reasonable for Jack to believe it is more probable that there is indeed a cup despite Mikes report to the otherwise. But although it is still probable for Jack to accept that there is indeed a cup in front of him, the report given by Mike should reduce Jack’s certainty that there is a cup by the amount of weight reports from others have on the probability that the cup exists.
Ultimately, Jack would need to test the cups existence through either more direct evidence (try touching the cup, smelling it, tasting it, hear the clink when he taps it, etc) or through more indirect evidence (ask others if they see the cup). The more evidence that supports his belief that the cup exists should increase the probability that it does exist and the opposite is true if there is more evidence that disconfirms the existence of the cup.
Evidence isn’t all or nothing. Each supporting evidence adds probability to the truth claim and evidence that doesn’t support the premise subtracts probability for its truth. This I feel is a very important distinction to make.
Every matter in life [I’ll make it a riddle for you to come up with something that can be an exception to this rule] in any subject, whether it be intellect, science, economics, world events, history, even mathematics can have two sides to make an argument. As even if one side has the simple straightforward path of comprehension, someone else can always come up with a twisted and mentally farfetched theory and there is no way to absolutely prove one way or the other, as it is impossible to absolutely prove the impossibility of a possible theory, no matter how farfetched it sounds, the same way one cannot prove that a certain physical item does not exist anywhere in the world. The reason for this is because there is no method of proving that a non-existence truly does not exist.
In conclusion: The human mind is twisted enough to come up with a disproof for anything and everything, and hence there are absolutely no real definitions of absolute proof.
Now however we are faced with a dilemma: I have just proven that there is no such thing as absolute proof in anything. How can I run life now? Everything I believed in and knew about anything in life has now been shattered by my realization that I am running my life based on assumption rather than intellectually absolutely proven premises. Thank G-d for some reason people are not bothered by this question and run life normally and casually based on their non-proven assumptions. The reason for this is because the mind and society has silently accepted definitions of proofs that are required for their belief behind a matter, despite the possible but improbable other non-disproven options. These definitions of proof split to two categories:
As above I describe “proof” as evidence that supports reasonable belief in truth claims.
A. Principals accepted by society as a whole, as true and absolute proof. The following are some examples:
The fact that some people accept some evidence as absolute proof doesn’t make it reasonable to do so. It is much more reasonable to recognize the shortcomings and possibility that the evidence you have doesn’t necessarily support your beliefs rather than assume that the evidence is infallible and “absolutely proves” your beliefs. Doing the former (recognize the shortcomings) allows your beliefs to be corrected and refined when necessary, but doing the latter forces your mind to stay intellectually stagnant when presented with conflicting evidence.
For example people used to believe the world is flat. If they accepted their simple evidence (“the world looks flat from when I look around”) as true and absolute proof, they would have dismissed all other evidence (“the planets look like spheres”, “ships seem to sink when they float out into the horizon”, etc) out of hand and would have accepted a false belief without further investigation. If they on the other hand said “Maybe the world is flat. If so then that implies I could travel to the end of the earth and get to an edge. Let’s test that hypothesis.” or other more simple tests they could have improved their knowledge about their world instead of accepting it “without doubt”. Good thing enough people don’t accept certain things without a doubt.
· Sight: Society accepts that what you saw is the reality. Hence the acceptance of eyewitness testimony in court, to the point of capital punishment, despite the above unproven argument of Mike above that perhaps the witness hallucinated at that moment.
Eyewitness testimony has been shown to be highly inaccurate. Although it is possible the witness “hallucinated” it is likely the witness misremembered the event or even lied to the court for various reasons. This is why other more physical forms of evidence such as DNA are so important and has to date exonerated hundreds of people from death row which showed that the eyewitness testimonies from the case were inaccurate for one reason or another.
The fact that we cannot be absolutely certain that any form of evidence proves anything at all should push us as a society to reconsider capital punishment altogether in my opinion, since it is irreversible. Again it is much better for us as a society and as individuals to recognize the shortcomings in our forms of evidence rather than accepting them as absolute proof because it can have dire consequences. Is killing a person for a crime they didn’t commit not enough reason to give us pause and rethink our assumptions and evidences?
· DNA: DNA is today fully accepted as a method of proof in a court of law, despite the distanced possibility of someone else carrying identical DNA [which is something that is impossible to disprove.]
Identical twins do carry the same DNA as one another. However it is important to recognize that just because we can’t absolutely prove something, that doesn’t mean the opposite opinion is just as valid or likely to be true. As I said above it all depends on the evidence we have. Every time we confirm that two non-twins have different DNA from one another this supports the belief that no to non-twins carry the same DNA. It should be clear then that without any evidence to support the claim that two non-twins can carry the same DNA there is no reason to revise our confidence that DNA is unique for each individual non-twin.
· Gravity: The power of gravity is an example of an accepted, un-debated, principal without any true intellectual basis. Perhaps there is no such power within the earth which pulls things down. Perhaps the power is really found within every object and that power pushes it down. Perhaps there is air pressure from above which is pushing it down. Perhaps there is absolutely nothing pushing or pulling it down and the fact it falls is just a fact of life as other accepted facts of life. Nevertheless, despite the above arguments society has accepted this theory of gravity as an absolute truth.
“principal without any true intellectual basis” How is all of the physical evidence supporting the theory of gravity not an true intellectual basis?
It has been accepted as true because every prediction made with the model of gravity has as of yet been shown to be true. You proposed a few alternatives and in order to test the reasonableness of those alternatives let’s look at them in perspective.
“Perhaps the power is really found within every object and that power pushes it down.” Objects are not being “pushed down” they are being drawn towards each other. Any object with mass has a gravitational pull, so what you said is essentially the theory of gravity itself. Therefore it isn’t really an objection.
“Perhaps there is air pressure from above which is pushing it down.” Perhaps, so let’s put it to the test. If air pressure is the reason why gravity seems to work, then objects in a room without any air pressure (they have such rooms) should float. This does not occur. It also fails to explain the rotation of the planets in our solar system. Thus the implications of “air pressure” being the reason for the effects of gravity can be rejected for a multitude of reasons. Those reasons mainly being that a model such as this does not accurately explain the evidence we encounter and more importantly this type of model does not make accurate predictions.
It is for this reason that gravity is accepted. Not because “it’s just a fact of life” which is just a non-answer, a proposal to accept and not question, but because the model that the theory of gravity presents is the best way to explain the evidence we have and it makes accurate predictions. It is not “without intellectual basis”, it has an astounding intellectual basis.
· The rules of logic-Intellectual principals considered absolute proof: DNA is an example of a proof due to improbability of there being another person with the same DNA. Sight is an example of an intellectual principal which accepts that what you see is reality. Other examples of rules of logic:
o Every item has a beginning and end.
o Space is limited.
· Time is limited
How are those rules of logic? Those seem like truth claims which should be tested to determine if they reflect reality or not. A rule of logic would be something like A always equals A.
B. Principals that are personally adapted by individuals based on experience in life, intellectual comprehensions of probabilities, emotional states etc. These principals are not accepted as whole by society and are rather on individual basis. For example: The decision of what field is best to go into in college. Every individual has a different opinion or belief based on his experience and knowledge.
I wouldn’t consider those “principals” but rather preferences.
The common denominator of all principals of life which are viewed as absolute and proved: They are based on either Probability or Rules of logic.
Probability: Man makes decisions based on probability, and that for him is considered absolute proof in terms of how he will lead his life. Hence if there are two options in understanding a certain matter practically man follows the most probable and rejects the most rare of the two options. This method in life is used for both simple and even life threatening matters.
I agree that evidence directs us to what is most probable and based on that we live our life. I disagree that it should be considered absolute proof. There should always be some measure of doubt, so that the person can improve his beliefs as time goes on.
Rules of logic: Man makes conclusions based on the rules of logic which are universally given.
How are rules of logic “given”? Rules of logic are determined through reason and to some extent experience.
The point of all the above is the following in relevance to our discussion: Just as in all matters of our life, including life and death matters, we accept the definition of a proof based on probability and rules of logic, similarly regarding proving G-d’s existence and the truth of the Torah, so long as they are both the most probable understanding or based on rules of logic, then they are too to be fully accepted as a proven truth and hence implemented fully into our lives with our full belief.
Again I agree that we should base our beliefs and decisions on what is most probable and logical, however they should not be accepted as absolute proof. The confidence you have in a belief should be relative to the probability that it is true. So for instance if you believe that the existence of God is 65% likely you shouldn’t act as if God’s existence is 100% likely, but rather as is it is 65% likely. This is important since you could make some very poor choices by mislabeling how confident you are in something. For instance if you believe that a certain bank is 75% likely not to go bankrupt and lose your money you shouldn’t put your entire life’s savings in that bank under the guise that it is 100% likely not to go bankrupt. I am sure you can see why that would be a poor decision to make.
G-d’s existence: This is both proven based on probability and the rules of logic.
Torah from G-d: This is proven based on probability.
As earlier I wouldn’t likely consider either “proven” but I would accept them as most probable if they are indeed shown to be most probable.
In my next letter [probably sometime next week] I will elaborate on the exact proofs behind each matter.
Look forward to it.
I know I have been a bit nitpicky here but to address your main points on a whole I will just say this. I believe that nothing should be taken as absolutely proved. Our certainty in the beliefs we hold should be relative to the evidence that supports those beliefs. Not all arguments against a particular belief should be equally as valid as the belief itself. Each belief held should imply something about reality and thus is testable to some extent, otherwise the belief would seem to be superfluous. Any test result which gives evidence to a veracity of a belief if the opposite were to occur should give evidence against that belief and as a result should reduce a person’s certainty in that belief. These are some of the main guiding principles I hold in determining what I believe and why. If I am found to hold beliefs that are contrary to this standard I will gladly revise or dismiss them.
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