All we're doing is reinforcing our instinctive visions of reality.You believe, I don't. Of course, we each have logical arguments to support our positions. But ultimately, it's a question of faith.

Skeptic: You know, the more we talk, the more convinced I become that all we're doing is reinforcing our instinctive visions of reality. You believe, I don't. Of course, we each have logical arguments to support our positions. But ultimately, it's a question of faith. Either you have it, or else you don't.

Believer: Oh, I see. We believers are the primitive, unthinking masses, while the skeptic is the enlightened, sophisticated, 20th century Ubermench....

Skeptic: I'm not knocking faith. Listen, there are advantages on both sides. I admit that skeptics are overly cynical, but you must admit that believers are often blind. Believe me, I've often wished I was a believer - it's so much easier...

Believer: Ah... that's the second one: faith is a cop-out, a refusal to take responsibility for one's life.

Skeptic: Well... isn't it?

Believer: Other than the fact that this is the common conception of the believer, on what do you base this, uh, belief? Give me a concrete example.

Skeptic: Well, the skeptic knows that there's no free lunch. If he wants to earn a living, he must acquire the proper training and devote the necessary time and toil. The more he invests, the greater his chances for success. The believer, on the other hand, maintains that “it's all in the hands of G-d”: if He wants me to be rich, I'll be rich; if He wants me to be poor, no amount of career planning, and no amount of overtime, will increase the balance in my bank account. So why bother? What will be will be...

Or take this Moshiach business: G-d made the world perfect, so, in the end, it cannot but be perfect. The course of history has already been decided...

Believer: What you describe is fatalism, not faith. It was the Talmudic sage Hillel who coined the phrase “If I am not for myself, who is for me?” - would you consider him a skeptic?

Certainly, the believer knows that no matter how much effort and expertise he invests, everything comes from G-d. But it is he who must create the “vessel” to contain G-d's blessings. In the words of the Torah, “G-d will bless you in all that you do”; or, as one chassidic master put it, G-d's blessing is like rain: if one does not plough and sow, it can rain for forty days and forty nights and not a grain of wheat will grow. On the other hand, our efforts, in of themselves, yield nothing without the bestowal from above.

As for the Moshiach issue, it's the skeptic, not the believer, who's taking the easy route. The skeptic accepts reality as it is. He's the ultimate conformist - he has a philosophy that's 100% consistent with the world he lives in. Sure, all the chaos, cruelty, and suffering may distress him emotionally (though he cannot explain why he cares) but rationally, hey, what do you expect? And when things seem to be getting better, hey, that's great! Look at that - we even get lucky sometimes.

The believer, on the other hand, agonizes over the state of the universe. He refuses to accept the status quo. Evil is wrong - morally wrong, rationally wrong. Things should not be this way - they cannot be this way. He fights the “reality”' the world represents him with every fiber of his being, struggling to unearth the real reality which is buried under all this fallacy.

Ultimately, however, you're right: the believer has it better. Not because he has less responsibility, not because it's easier for him, but because he knows that, ultimately, after he has done everything in his power, G-d will bless his efforts. He has the confidence that the potential for perfection - both on the individual and the universal levels - is there, and that after he has done everything in his power to realize it, it will be realized.

Skeptic: That makes for a very iffy situation. At what point can a person say “I have done everything within my power”? Isn't it very tempting to reach that conclusion after making a couple of phone calls and coining a few slogans?

Believer: Certainly. Faith has its pitfalls, and this is one of them. Free choice means that everyone has the option of copping out on life, including believers. But I think that skepticism is even more fraught with such dangers. If the skeptic wants to cop out, all he has to do is say, “I don't give a damn.”

Skeptic: Look, I agree with you. I don't think that believers are necessarily dumber or lazier or more primitive than nonbelievers. It's just that it takes a certain something - a certain naiveté, or gullibility - I don't want to offend you, but I don't know what else to call it - to believe. As I said, either you have it, or you don't.

Believer: Would you say the same thing about reason?

Skeptic: What do you mean?

Believer: Say that someone is acting in an unreasonable manner. Would you say, “Well, that's the way it is with reason. Either you have it, or you don't”?

Skeptic: No. Just about everyone (with a few notable exceptions) has a few ounces of gray matter between his ears. It's usually a question of how much a person develops and utilizes his faculty to reason.

Believer: The same is true of the faculty of faith. Everyone has is - it is no less integral to the human soul than the faculty to will, think, or feel. It's simply a question of how much it's developed and utilized.

Skeptic: But one doesn't usually think of faith as a faculty. It's more an absence of something - a surrender of reason and inquiry.

Believer: That's exactly where your misconception of the nature of faith lies. At times, faith overrules reason, but it is wrong to define faith as nothing more than the point at which one stops to think. “Believe” is an active verb. Faith is a perceptive tool with which we actively grasp and relate to certain truths - just like the mind, the eye or the ear actively grasp and relate to the specific stimuli that each is designed to perceive.

In his Tanya, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi writes that the statement “G-d is so lofty that he cannot be understood” is a ridiculous statement. Imagine one who says, “This idea is so abstract and ethereal, that it cannot be grasped by the human hand.” No idea, not even the most “coarse” and prosaic idea, can be grasped by the human hand - the sense of touch simply has no access to the realm of the intellect. Now, if one were to say “This physical substance is so fine and ethereal, that it cannot be grasped by the human hand,” or “This idea is so lofty that he cannot be understood,” or “The light is so powerful that it cannot be seen” - this would indeed be an attestation to the fineness or loftiness or brightness of the substance or idea or the light. But to say that G-d cannot be understood is to say that G-d's reality is a rational reality, one whose loftiness and abstraction is measured in terms of the intellect's grasp or non-grasp of it. Ultimately, this is as much a misstatement of the divine truth as to say that G-d can be understood.

The eye sees things that are seeable, the ear hears things that are hearable, the intellect understands things that are understandable. We cannot see sounds or hear colors any more than we can eat soup with a fork - the tool is simply not designed to deal with the object. In the same way, there are truths that lie beyond the realm of reason, truths that can only be perceived with the faculty of faith.

Skeptic: That's truly an original way of looking at it - at least to me it is. But how do know this is so? Oh - I guess you believe it...

Believer: If you want to see the faculty of faith at work, look at the three-year-old child. He believes. Tell him that you have his nose in the palm of your hand, and he'll believe you. But why does he believe you?

Skeptic: He believes you because he cannot understand that you're teasing him!

Believer: That's not a reason why he believes. It only explains why his intellect does not prevent him from believing. When I ask you why you see something, it's not enough for you to say “Because there's nothing that's preventing me from seeing” - if you didn't have eyes, G-d forbid, you wouldn't be able to see. You see because you have eyes that absorb and react to light, and a sense of sight that interprets these reactions as images.

Why does the child believe? Because each and every one of us is born with a faculty of faith. A faculty that recognizes truths that are infinitely greater than ourselves - so much greater that they are incontestable on any logical level (to the child, the utterance of a grownup) - and accepts them and assimilates them as real and relevant.

Skeptic: And then we lose it?

Believer: We don't lose it - it is ruined for us. We are lied to. We are lied to about where babies come from, about the tooth fairy, about the integrity of the role models we are told to emulate. Time and again, our faculty for faith is abused. We accept things on faith, and then we acquire the intelligence and information that expose their fallacy. So we begin to distrust our faith, to quell the inner voice that tells us “This is true. I cannot perceive it logically, for it lies beyond the scope of my intellectual prowess. But I know it to be true, I sense its truth with every fiber of my being. I believe it.”

Skeptic: But how is one to know what to believe?

Believer: How do you know what to see, hear or understand? You use your mind, and you trust your basic instincts. If you see an elephant flying through the air, your mind tells you: “This is wrong. Elephants cannot fly. I am either dreaming, or being misled by an optical illusion. My sense of sight tells me that an elephant is flying, but I know that this cannot be. I deduce that, in this case, my sense of sight has no grasp of the true reality.” If I were to prove to you, with infallible logic, that it is now night, your mind would tell you “Rationally, this man's proofs are utterly convincing. My sense of reason accepts them. But I know that it is day. Obviously, my sense of reason, in this case, has been mislead.”

In other words, we each have an interior “judge of truth” - an “I” that transcends all our senses and instincts and is the ultimate assessor and arbiter of the information and perceptions they feed us. At times, it tells us a logical truth we have deduced should overrule a misguided conviction or feeling. At times, it rules that the rational mind should yield to a truth that has been embraced by one's faculty of faith.

Skeptic: So the mind, then, is the ultimate authority.

Believer: “Authority” is the wrong word, since, as I said, the mind must itself recognize the limits of the area under its jurisdiction. To say that the mind is our “guide” through life would be more correct. The mind is the link between our subconscious self and our behavioral self. It is the “command center” which processes our convictions and impressions into the thoughts, feelings and actions of daily life.

A mature mind treats its own intellect as one amongst many faculties. It has a clear understanding of its powers (which are formidable - the intellect will often overrule the other faculties) but also of the axiomatic truths, perceived by faith, which it has neither the authority nor the means to challenge.