“But Gedolim Smarter than You Believed!”: The Appeal to Authority

Overview: The fallacies of basing belief on someone who is allegedly smarter and yet believes. 

By Meir Gold

The argument is put forth to our wanna-be heretic that he should trust the evaluation of the great Jewish Leaders throughout the ages. As Rabbi Sapirman put it:

We have an amazing heritage that has been transmitted to us from the generations that came before us. For over three thousand years,​​ klal yisrael​​ has delved into every nuance of our Torah. Not only have they pondered its laws and all their implications, but also our claims and beliefs. Our leaders and scholars were not only the most righteous of people, but also possessed the greatest minds. These geniuses analyzed our faith from every possible angle. Had there been a single flaw in it, they surely would have found it. But no! They believed wholeheartedly in the Torah because they understood that it​​ is 100 percent true. We can say with absolute certainty that if Rabbi Akiva, Rav Ashi, Rashi, the Rambam, Vilna Gaon and the Chofetz Chaim believed in Hashem and his Torah you can be sure they didn’t miss a loophole. This alone is sufficient to allow us to rely confidently on the​​ mesorah​​.[i]

Before we note the objections that are raised to this it must be noted that this is often used as a defensive reaction. For instance Zev, one of the people Ayala Fader interviewed recounted that:

“[W]hen​​ he​​ eventually revealed to​​ his unlicensed religious therapist​​ that he was having religious doubts, in addition to the depression he had come in with, the therapist started to yell at him, ‘Do you think you’re smarter than Rashi?’”[ii]

Viewed syllogistically (though it’s never put this way) the argument would look something like the following:

Premise A: Jewish Religious leaders evaluations of the likelihood of their faith are​​ infallible​​ (alternatively, ​highly​​ reliable).

Premise B: Jewish Religious leaders evaluate their faith positively.

Conclusion: Judaism is true.

The problem, critics allege, is that the premises, in particular premise A, has a number of issues. First, the reverence for religious leaders as extremely special is common to all religious traditions and hasn’t been established as fact.[iii] ​​Second, the reason for​​ preferring the evaluations of Jewish religious leaders as opposed to that of Christian ones hasn’t been established. Plenty of very smart Christians do and have evaluated their faith positively,​[iv] as have smart Muslim religious leaders.[v] Considering that Muslim and Christian leaders are just as smart as the Jewish ones by this logic we should convert to their religions because they have more geniuses who think it’s true. Last of all, most of the people on the list lived before the modern era and all the discoveries that have challenged faith[vi] and wouldn’t have even known about them or (for those in the modern​​ era) didn’t know about them. There is a complete lack of evidence that the vast majority of them they​​ ever even turned their skepticism on religion and found religion to be vindicated.[vii] Many of them would not even touch any secular books[viii] making this exceedingly unlikely. Furthermore, one does not need to be smarter than someone to know better than them. (Eg. Newton believed in alchemy).

That being said, one can perfectly understand why this argument has such intuitive appeal. We often base our beliefs on the evaluation of experts[ix] and to the religious, their respective religious leaders appear as experts.​​ Vis a vis the objection from other experts, Rabbi Danziger on a closely related subject writes:

The inevitable objection is that​​ emunah​​ is very different from the Lincoln assassination. Nobody denies that Lincoln was shot, but there are billions of people who don’t think Yiddishkeit is true. If there was a strong contingent of historians who felt that John Wilkes Booth was a myth, our students would not be so confident in what they happened to have been taught in school. This is where the Ramban in V’Eschanan (4:9) comes in. The Ramban explains that when a​​ society gives over a communal experience to the next generation, there is an inherent acceptance of the facts as presented.​​ Just as people are psychologically and emotionally built to accept as real something that they can touch, see, or logically prove, so too people accept something that is handed down to them as a national heritage.​​ The billions of detractors are no more disturbing to a child who received emunah as a mesorah than they are to someone who sees something as a logically incontrovertible fact.[x]

My chief objection here is this winds up just being a psychological reason as opposed to a rational one. My personal view is that as a psychological reason this is perfectly fine but as a rational basis of faith it fails for the reason outlined above though in principle it may be okay.[xi]

[i] Rabbi David Sapirman,​​ Emunah: A Refresher Course,30-31

[ii] Ayala Fader,​​ Hidden​​ Heretics:Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age,155

[iii] Eg. this list of testimonies about Joseph Smith https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/teachings-joseph-smith/chapter-43?lang=eng. This interestingly is actually false. See the stuff cited at https://coldcasechristianity.com/writings/investigating-the-evidence-for-mormonism-in-six-steps/ for some less flattering material on Joseph Smith’s character.

[iv] Eg. C.K Chesterson, Max Baker-Hytch, Gary​​ Habermas, William Lane Craig, Michael Licona, Sean Mcdowell, C.S Lewis, Frank Turek, Augustine,Aquinas etc.

[v] Eg. Hamza Tzortzis, Averroes,Avicenna, Omar Suleiman etc.

[vi] Eg. evolution, heliocentrism etc.

[vii] There are occasional exceptions such as Rav Nachman of Breslov or the Sredei Aish but they are by far the exception not the rule.

[viii] Relevant to this I heard a story in the name of Rav Boruch Ber. The story goes that Rav Boruch Ber (who was undoubtedly brilliant) was once learning and a heretical thought entered his head. He jumped out of his seat and started running around as though he was on fire. Once his students calmed him down, he explained that a heretical thought had entered his head and in anguish he ran around in an attempt to “douse” the thought. Obviously Rav Boruch Ber would not be capable of dispassionately and unbiasedly analyzing the truth of Judaism despite his undoubted brilliance.

[ix] Eg. Can you demonstrate that everything your doctor tells you about health is true?

[x] Rabbi Yosef Chaim Danziger, To Instill or To Instruct, emphasis added.

[xi] Though appealing to experts is okay and is, in principle, a good argument it fails as a rational argument (as opposes to a psychological reason) to believe in Judaism for the reasons outlined above.