The Wirings Of A Worldview

Parshas Matos-Masei: Facts and their interpretations

He's strapped into an oversized bullet, shaking with pent-up energy, ready to be propelled skyward with enough force to break every bone in the human body. And then it happens. The roar. The vibration coursing through his entire being. A slow climb accelerates into something formless, a blur of colour and noise. And then, silence. A moment of weightlessness. No up, no down. Just one man, spinning helplessly through the dark abyss. The earth below is naked, a fragile marble glowing against the black. In an instant, he realizes just how small and insignificant humanity actually is.

John Glenn and Gherman Titov were trailblazing space explorers, two of the first to orbit planet Earth. Yet they provided starkly opposing interpretations of their identical experiences. John Glenn found it impossible to "look out at [the universe] and not believe in God", whereas, to Gherman Titov, space travel uncovered "no God or angels". These individuals contrasting takes on the cosmic experience are a well-worn cliche, but they reveal a penetrative truth about our subjective era. It is possible for intelligent and rational individuals to engage with the same set of facts yet arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions about God's existence.

Two men and two takes on the world’s inner workings

We can find this divide in every sphere of human endeavour. Consider Stephen Hawking and John Polkinghorne, two eminent theoretical physicists. Hawking was a convinced atheist. But Polkinghorne ended up an Anglican priest who identified theology as central to making sense of reality. Or take, for example, the pioneers of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. Jung saw faith as a doorway into higher wisdom, revealing immortal truths beyond the conscious mind's grasp. Freud took an altogether less generous view. From his perspective, faith resembled collective neurosis, a regrettable byproduct of man's psychological makeup. The list is endless.

It seems we don't form our worldview purely based on objective facts. In his introduction to this week's parsha, Rabeinu Bachaya brings this phenomenon into Jewish focus. He begins with the following quote from Mishlei:

Wisdom begins with acquiring wisdom;

With all your acquisitions, acquire discernment.

{Mishlei 4:7}

Rabeinu Bachaya interprets this verse as follows. The first line, 'Wisdom begins with acquiring wisdom', implores us to build intellectual foundations rooted in a Torah worldview. Only then should we 'acquire' secular understanding. Information ordering is key. Philosophies we adopt early on dramatically shape how we interpret all evidence. Our fundamental outlook establishes the scaffolding on which we construct our understanding; later nuances are filtered through that original prism. Therefore if one intends to view creation through the lens of faith, he must first orient himself with God's blueprint for comprehending our world—the Torah.

So this is why intelligent observers can inculcate identical sets of observations but produce vastly disparate conclusions. It all depends on their preconceived perspective. Aha, heckles a passing internet atheist, but surely materialists' initial assumptions are based on indisputable facts? Actually, not really. For scientists to even get the ball rolling, they need to hold several unscientific assumptions as articles of faith. For example, the unprovable belief that some ultimate, simple truth exists about the nature of reality - a "theory of everything" - undergirds almost all of Science's pursuit of knowledge.

But Rabeinu Bachaya is not just trying to level the playing field here. He wants us to pursue Torah's supreme truth. The Hebrew word for nature טבע also means to sink or drown. Rabeinu Bachaya sees this as indicating the dark outcome of forming our life's fundamentals from the natural world. Doing so, we sink into a crushingly bleak pit with nowhere to find our footing.

We can take this critique at two levels. First, we must understand that the tools of empirical inquiry typically fail us when interrogating realms of human experience beyond strict materialism. Spiritual life depends on aesthetic sensibilities, interpretations of meaning, and the unquantifiable dimensions of conscious emotion. Man trying to trap spirituality in a test tube is like a pigeon attempting to blackmail a cloud.

Despite brutal threats of blackmail, the pigeon couldn’t get the cloud to talk

Secondly, there is plenty of reason to argue that the farcical attempts to build morality out of Science are even more dangerous than they are non-sensical. There is a terrifyingly popular intuition that more scientific progress and more powerful technologies are unambiguously "good". Scientists continue to develop AI technology at breakneck speed with no idea of the possible outcomes and no lessons learned from the disasters of nuclear proliferation. If an individual exhibited such disregard with a smallish bazooka, we would rightfully deem him unstable. All of this can only be justified under the rubric of Science for Science’s sake.

So while data holds an alluring simplicity, we'd be remiss to treat it as disembodied wisdom. Instead, we bring the facts into dialogue with other values, which generate truth claims and explanations. To assemble information, we must shape it, crowbarring brute knowledge into coherent narratives. We animate findings with significance by filtering them through human meaning-making faculties. Facts alone do not speak. We speak through facts.

By stepping into this space of uncertainty behind secular mythologies, we open the doors to the divine presence. For many Jewish thinkers, it's in this place, before philosophical rationality, that a Jew truly finds himself in a relationship with God. After learning that the Anselm of Canterbury, a Christian theologian, spent many days in prayer seeking rational evidence for God's existence, Soren Kirkegaard sarcastically asked: Does the loving bride in the embrace of her beloved ask for proof that he is alive and real? Must the prayerful soul clinging to her Beloved in passionate love and ecstasy demonstrate that He exists?

Bertrand would not go forward with the wedding until he could mathematically demonstrate the ontological actuality of his bride to be

Now I wouldn't go as far as Kierkegaard. Personally, I have found it incredibly beneficial to ground my faith in sound reasoning and evidence. But here's the point. My faith is placed before rational thought, not after it. I understand that an intelligent interlocutor could hear my arguments and reply, eh, I'm not convinced. Our pre-existing beliefs affect how we interpret even the hardest facts:

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Faith comes from a place more profound than theoretical speculations. It comes from a personal encounter with the divine.

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In high school, I spent quite some time going down the internet rabbit hole of God versus atheism. I tried to build up belief from this place of pure rationality, but nothing did the trick. Going to Yeshiva, I was privileged to be immersed in a Torah world I am still blessed to be part of. My interactions with the Jewish corpus leave me experiencing first-hand encounters with my creator. Secondly, I have witnessed people who transcended the mundane. Teachers who I can look at and feel in my bones that there is something beyond all of this. This may not sound like a rational argument. That's because it's not. It's actually quite absurd for me to try expressing it in words.

Every Jew has a Godly soul. And this gives him the capability to encounter his Father in heaven. Yet our capacity to interface with the Almighty remains cryptic, a black box, fuzzily defined. It is impossible to prescribe what triggers faith experiences for each individual. But it will more likely than not involve more than just philosophical speculation.

The teachings of our sages through the ages point the way, lighting fires within restless souls like ours. But eventually, each of us must find our path to God through study, prayer, righteous deeds, and devotion to our community. Experiencing God is a lifelong journey, not a single destination or arrival. The most profound truths cannot be accessed online. They must be lived. And when we are privileged to sense His presence, we will know we're finally home.

Good Shabbos, and Keep Pondering!