[Avodah] Belief?

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2025 at 10:58:40AM +0200, Joel Rich via Avodah wrote:
> Just listened to an interesting podcast interviewing Charles Murray
> It's my understanding that post-modern philosophy does not believe you
> can prove with 100% certainty just about anything. When I read modern
> Jewish philosophy when it often seems grounded in tradition or personal
> feeling which is not easily transferable. Question how would we categorize
> an orthodox individual who made the same statement as Dr Murray?

Who 
>                                                         he thinks that God
> has a better than 50% chance of being the explanation for our existence.
> 
> It's my understanding that post-modern philosophy does not believe you
> can prove with 100% certainty just about anything....

Going back earlier, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason argues that you cannot
prove anything beyond the world as experienced, what we called the
"phenomenal world".

   ... what things may be in themselves, I know not, and need not know
   because a thing is never presented to me otherwise than as a phenomena.

Thus the title of the work. Existentialism takes this further, and
Post-Modernism is just the same trend.

The Rambam's concept of emunah was definitely cerebral. He even says it
*must* be based on proof, and not merely on accepting truths from reliable
sources.

Whereas the Kuzari ch 1 famously argues that proofs are unreliable and all
you have are reliable sources.

Kant would have you reason from sensory perception (I couldn't figure out
how to limit the quote, so I put it at the end so that people won't be
skimming or skipping the next paragraph.

Personally, I think Emunah is a middah. Look at other uses of the word
"ne'emanus" is realiability. Mordechai is "omain es Hadassah". In my book
if you rely on idea when making decisions, you're a Maamin.

Here's the promised quote from Kant's CoPW:
    That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no
    doubt. For how should the faculty of knowledge be called into
    activity, if not by objects which affect our senses and which,
    on the one hand, produce representations by themselves or on the
    other, rouse the activity of our understanding to compare, connect,
    or separate them and thus to convert the raw material of our sensible
    impressions into knowledge of objects, which we call experience? With
    respect to time, therefore, no knowledge within us is antecedent to
    experience, but all knowledge begins with it.

    But though all our knowledge begins with experience, is does not
    follow that it all arises from experience. For it is quite possible
    that even our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we
    perceive through impressions, and of that which our own faculty
    of knowledge (incited by sense impressions) supplies from itself,
    a supplement which we do not distinguish from that raw material
    until long practice and rendered us capable of separating one from
    the other.

    It is therefore a question which deserves at least closer
    investigation and cannot be disposed of at first sight: Whether
    there is any knowledge independent of all experience and even of
    all impressions of the senses? Such knowledge is called 'a priori'
    and is distinguished from empirical knowledge, which has its source
    'a posteriori', that is, in experience...`


Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                 Here is the test to find whether your mission
http://www.aishdas.org/asp   on Earth is finished:
Author: Widen Your Tent      if you're alive, it isn't.
- https://amzn.to/2JRxnDF                      - Richard Bach