Druskin, for the pause

There is a certain kind of incompatibility, especially in value judgments, when someone says, for example: “How intelligent is the design of the human body,” substantiating this only by examples of those organs in those cases when they function normally. But if one recalls that all people get sick and die—for the most part, not from being sated with life, like the Biblical patriarchs, but accidentally, or from illnesses, or simply get sated with life before their time—or that there are many unintelligent organs, one might as well say that the human organism is designed unintelligently. These two propositions cannot be called equivalent, simply because they express nothing at all beyond the human need to utter general judgments, i.e. a simple desire to talk, a preference for talking rather than keeping silent. This kind of behavior is typical of the insane. Therefore we are all precisely insane. But, having uttered this, I, too, speak like an insane person. My insanity in this case consists in uttering a general judgment without having sufficient grounds for it. I was coming from empirical, and moreover, rational grounds. I discussed rationally illnesses, premature satiation with life, and premature death. But how do I know that they’re premature, that illness has no purpose, when in my experience it has been granted me to see its purpose and the madness of the wise who deemed that is has no such purpose? For a human being is not a body, not an organism but God’s image and likeness. When my arguments cross their proper boundary, I become a madman. I pick up distinct inklings, although they are mere inklings, of a supra-rational, irrational rationality, of the existence of Providence, but I reduce the life of a person to merely the life of a human organism, and supplant absolute rationality with my own limited, irrational rationality. -- Yakov Druskin