Ifkha Mistabra:[1]  The Opposite is the Conclusion

by
Dallas F. Bell, Jr.

 

(This paper was presented at the Jonathan Edwards Society conference from 6-8 October, 2011, in Northampton, Massachusetts.)

 

 

Abstract:  The Bible records the government advisors and administrators, Joseph and Daniel in the Old Testament, contradicting the conventional views of their time.  In the New Testament, Saul was converted to Paul who also began opposing the mainstream (Jewish) views.  During the beginning stages of the U.S. revolution that led to its formation, Jonathan Edwards birthed many works designed to protect the theological underpinnings of the forthcoming U.S. societal ethics.  Each of these examples is expanded upon as to their importance of the ifkha mistabra tool for reaching a true conclusion, which at the time opposed sanctioned thought.  The U.S. and the nation-state of Israel's employment of this red-teaming process to anticipate "Black Swan" phenomena of low probability security events is also addressed.

Keywords: Jonathan Edwards, Ifkha Mistabra, epistemology, Black Swan, red-teaming, omniscience.

 

 

It has been said that Christians are to preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary they are to use words.[2]  Jonathan Edwards[3] was a practitioner of that directive.  His epistemology can be first explained as coming from man's regeneration by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  That Spirit evokes a love for the beauty of holy things.  Holy things serve to set the parameters for the behavior of human beings, such as to not covet or steal, to not hate or murder, and to not lust or commit adultery, etc.[4]  In this cause and effect, the omniscient God of infinity is demonstrated.  Edward's epistemological thought argued that sanctified people could also reason from evidence the reality of the omniscient God.  God's holy parameters for human behavior are evident in that they cause those compliant with Divine ethics to be harmoniously efficient with creation.  Conversely, people that choose to not be compliant with Divine ethics become inefficient when interacting with their environment.

Edwards accepted the classic Calvinist determinist view of human will.  He rejected the Arminian view largely due to its seeming to be counter-intuitive.[5]  He suggests that acts done in a state of equilibrium or indifference has no virtue of the heart in them.  It could be argued that Calvinism alone does not adequately differentiate between the human will in the mind and the soul's will.  His concern was to head off a heretical Christian political direction toward a "Dark Age" religion of works and ethical nihilism[6] and away from the proper theology of grace and individual accountability.

Jonathan Edward's stand was the opposite conclusion—ifkha mistabra—of theological salvation by works.  This is why the Edwardean Congregationalists supported the U.S. revolutionary Patriots, with the caveat that slavery be opposed so that God would support the war effort.  Calvinists that did not support the revolution were generally out of the mainstream, i.e. African and Native American converts.[7]  Pauline Maier, American history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, does not make any direct connection to Edward's theological beliefs and the U.S. founding.  She does point out that a delegate to the Massachusetts' ratifying convention named Amos Singletary did become a Christian but was a critic of the Constitution, especially of the provision outlawing religious tests for office.[8]

Edwards served as a voice for the opposition view of his times condensed in his widely known sermon (1741) of "Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God."  Over two-hundred years of U.S. history show that Edwards was correct and the Loyalists were incorrect.  Today, the director and students at Yale University's Jonathan Edwards College have an obscene motto to mock Jonathan Edwards and have as their mascot a spider to represent their view of the omniscient holy God.  If their view is correct and that omniscient God does not exist, then everything is permitted.[9]  Then, the secular ethics of politics deus ex machina[10] is correct.  The secularism in ancient Athens during Euripides' day can be seen in Pericles' funeral oration.[11]  Religion is never mentioned as a factor.  Instead, the public behaviors of citizens are restrained from lawlessness chiefly through reverend fear of law enforcement and not a reverend fear of their gods.

Steven Harris and Robert Low have applied the Divine attribute of omniscience to describe a property of a foliation of a space-time by time-like curves.  Such a foliation is said to be omniscient if the past of each curve in the foliation is the entire space-time (i.e. it's the world-line of an observer who eventually sees everything) and, dually, the future of every such curve in the entire space-time.[12] [13] Aquinas' Summas (Summa Theologica Q.14) and William Hasker's "God, Time, and Knowledge" (chapter 1-2) discuss omniscience and quantum cosmology.[14]

As many people are aware, Zionism is a Jewish political movement that sought and established the sovereign Jewish national homeland of Israel as prophesied in the Bible.  However, its ideology is an odd mixture of many beliefs yet the geography unified the effort to be Eretz Yisrael or the God given land from biblical times.[15]  The Palestinian maps do not show the state of Israel.  Recent Egyptian maps have also eliminated the nation of Israel.  Dan Blumberg, co-founder of the Homeland Security Research Institute at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has expressed his dismay of the Egyptian hostility.[16]

Alan Dershowitz, Harvard University law professor, is a self-described agnostic who supports Israeli security.  He points out that non-believers established Israel, such as Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), Chaim Weitzman or Weizmann (1874-1952), David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Golda Meir (1898-1978), Moshe Dayan (1915-1981), Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949), and Ehud Barak (b. 1942).  On the other hand, Charaidim are a separatist sect of Torah believers or Orthodox Jews, much like the Amish in Christianity, who do not serve in the army.[17]  Secular Jews hate Torah believers because they oppose their unbiblical behaviors and laws.[18]  For example, Robert Aumann, 2005 Nobel Prize winner in Economics' game theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Center for Rationality,[19] and the Degel Ha Torah party's opposition to homosexual marriage.

To provide strategic security direction in Israel after the Yom Kippur War, Israel established a special unit headed by a senior intelligence officer called Ifkha Mistabra.  This unit is staffed by the best officers who look for underlying assumptions of the current assessments and challenge them.  In the U.S., the net assessments office has been ran by Andrew Marshall for many decades.  The U.S. calls the process red-teaming.[20]  Shmuel Bar, Director of Studies at the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, says the Israeli method forces the Prime Minister to listen to challenges of assumptions and forces the rest of the community to address them.  Bar recalls Itshak (Yitzhak) Rabin often saying that he was capable of integrating facts on his own and Shimeon (Shimon) Peres expressing his opinion that intelligence officers where "always wrong."  It seems that there is always an interaction between analysts and political leaders in low probability security scenarios.[21]

Bar also believes that Israeli leaders tend to listen to scenarios which seem, prima facie, to be far-fetched because every Israeli knows the stories of why Jews did not flee Europe before the Holocaust: they could not conceive of the Germans doing what they were saying they intended to do.  The reasoning was based on a rational actor model: the Germans would not shift resources from the war effort, they needed Jewish slave labor, and they do not want to antagonize the world any more than they already had.  The result of that mistake in "intelligence estimate" of an entire people is burned into their DNA.[22]

Lieutenant General William Boykin (retired), former U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and currently professor at Hampden-Sydney College, says that Americans have no understanding of what life is like for an Israeli. Most do not realize that there are 1.4 million Arabs living there and every citizen is one rocket away from death every day. So the academics and arm chair generals are generally speaking theoretically and not from a fundamental understanding of the situation nor with due consideration for the issues for which the Knesset and the prime minister has to deal.[23]  Unfortunately, the North American Jews' feeling of disaffection and indifference toward the plight of Israel is not decreasing.  The increased intensity of anti-Zionism rhetoric and activism, especially of young Jews, is clearly aimed at harming the security of the state of Israel.[24]  However, Ward Goodenough, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, does not see the distinction between emic and etic support of Zionism as relevant.[25]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's[26] 2007/2010 book titled "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" characterized low probability events as rare, as having extreme impact, and with retrospective but not necessarily prospective predictability.  Taleb considers himself to be an epistemologist of randomness.[27]  His concern is about epistemic limitations in some areas of decision making.  The first problem involves psychological bias against a low probability event.  The second problem is identified as the lack of experience or extrapolation of a possible low probability event.  Taleb claims that almost all consequential events in history have come from the unexpected and would argue for the use of counter-factual reasoning when considering risk.

Critics of Taleb make the point that probability of events are given rank by the employment of experiential knowledge at that time and so if the knowledge is incomplete the estimated probability will be skewed.  All human knowledge is finite but to not use what knowledge is available would wrongly paralyze choice in decision making.  Robert Aumann is not convinced that there is an irrational resistance by policy makers to plan for low probability events.  His view is that planning consumes (finite) resources, the cost of which must be weighed against the probability of the disaster as well as its consequences.  Thus, it is not clear to Aumann that policy makers act irrationally in this respect.[28]

The Bible records Joseph's Divine advice to Pharaoh in Egypt and later Daniel's Divine advice to the Babylonian kings, each of which was the unexpected of the accepted conclusions at that time and were eventually proven to be true.[29]  In the New Testament, Paul said a great door is opened to me and there are many adversaries.[30]  That observation is that the higher the Divine purpose, the higher the probability of resistance creating both high and low probability events.  Individuals and nation-states need strategies that do not overlook low probability security events.

Finally, as many people recall, when Alice (Through the Looking-Glass) says to White Queen, "One can't believe impossible things."  The queen retorts, "I daresay you haven't had much practice... When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.  Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."[31]  Therein lies undeniable wisdom for the ages.

(Note: Northampton, Massachusetts, has one of the highest concentrations per capita of Sodomites in the U.S.  Jonathan Edwards' former church, First Churches of Northampton, is now run by Sodomites as the U.S. military for the first time in its history now accepts and promotes Sodomites.)    

 

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