Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Question · Open

Can a believer say “none of the proofs work” and lose nothing? Judah Halevi’s answer

Tal Rosen Fellow
· 6 replies
Faith & reasonIslamicJewishAl-Ghazali#fideism#kuzari#natural-theology#revelation
Follow

I translate between Hebrew and Arabic, and Judah Halevi's Kuzari is a book I keep going back to, partly because he wrote it in Arabic about Judaism. The frame is a king who has a dream telling him his intentions please God but his actions do not. He questions a philosopher, a Christian and a Muslim, and finally a rabbi.

What has always struck me is how the rabbi begins. He does not open with a proof that God exists. He says: I believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who brought Israel out of Egypt. History and a public revelation, not the God reached by argument at the end of a chain of causes. The philosopher's God, in Halevi's telling, doesn't even know you exist.

That suggests a believer can be quite indifferent to whether the cosmological or ontological arguments succeed. But Maimonides, half a century later, thought the proofs mattered a great deal and spent much of the Guide on them.

So, an open question I'd like answered from more than one direction: does a believer lose anything if every argument of natural theology fails? Or do the proofs matter only to philosophers?

LikeAnswer
Follow6 answers

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

6 answers

  1. Bilal Rashid

    Fellow

    Al-Ghazali is the obvious parallel on the Muslim side. In the Deliverance from Error he describes a crisis of doubt that no argument could cure; he says he was healed by a light God cast into his breast. Yet the same man wrote theology full of arguments. I read him as saying the proofs serve to defend and clarify faith, not to found it. So a believer who sees every proof fail loses a defence, not a foundation.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Aoife Kilbride

    Fellow

    Aquinas would say the believer loses something specific. He distinguished the "preambles of faith", truths like God's existence that reason can reach, from the articles of faith that need revelation. If reason can't reach even the preambles, faith starts to look like something that floats free of the rest of what we know. For a Catholic that's a real loss, because grace is meant to perfect nature, not bypass it.

  3. Miriam Adler

    Fellow

    In Jewish thought you can see both instincts at full strength: Halevi's, that the living God of history is not the conclusion of a syllogism, and Maimonides', that a faith which cannot give an account of itself is vulnerable and not fully worthy of the intellect God gave us. Interestingly, Maimonides proves God's existence on premises he does not even accept, granting the philosophers an eternal world, so that the proof holds whichever side is right. That's a believer who cares very much about argument, but cares more about not resting faith on a contested premise.

    Helpful · 1
  4. Arvind Poojary

    Fellow

    Speaking as an atheist: I think the believer loses one thing, which is the ability to say to someone like me "you are making an error of reasoning". If faith rests on revelation, we simply have different starting points. That is actually more respectful than most proofs I've been offered. Kierkegaard would agree, I think: he thought proving God's existence was a kind of insult to God.

    Helpful · 2
  5. Eliana Halpern

    Fellow

    From the Talmud: the rabbis argued about almost everything, but very rarely about whether God exists. The arguing was within a relationship, about what God asks. I'd say the proofs matter to people for whom the relationship has broken down, or who are standing outside it. For them, an argument can be an opening. For most of the people I pray with, it would be a strange place to start.

    Helpful · 3
  6. Tal Rosen

    Fellow

    So the answers sort themselves: a defence lost, not a foundation (Bilal); a loss of harmony between faith and reason (Aoife, and Maimonides as Miriam reads him); a gain in honesty about starting points (Arvind, with Kierkegaard); and irrelevance to a relationship already lived (Eliana). Halevi would sign the last one, I think. I'm surprised how much the answer depends on whether you are inside or outside.