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'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'Fine, I respect that'. [...] I wouldn't have thought 'Maybe there's somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics' when I was making the other points. I just think 'Fine, we have different opinions'. But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody's ( [...] irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say 'No, we don't attack that; that's an irrational belief but no, we respect it'.

In what way is it irrational? I think the author conflates apparent lack of support with irrationality - the reason one shouldn't do the switch is that it is a type of work, it requires effort that would otherwise not be expended, Jewish scripture does not allow work on Saturdays, Rabbi's confirm that this is work. Rabbi's are inspired by God, God created us and inspired scripture and knows what is best.

Now we can pick all sorts of holes in that argument on lack of support. But it is a rational argument, it applies known (to the subject) facts in a logical manner to determine the true course to take.

You might argue that the premises are wrong, fine, but that doesn't stop the reasoning from being logical - if I tell you I'm wearing a green hat, then I ask you what colour of hat I'm wearing, you say green; but I'm not wearing a hat, that doesn't make you irrational it just makes you wrong.

The question of whether God exists is not a scientific question, so a better premise to attack would be that Rabbi's are inspired by God. "Rabbi's provide bad advice" might be a good first hypothesis - eventually we see that Rabbi's usually provide good advice, should we take that advice? Seems logical (within this limited discourse). Now that doesn't prove the premise we held true initially but it gives limited support to it and is of itself a good reason for listening to Rabbi's.

So, then we might consider why we are protective of the Jews belief that they shouldn't switch the light on Saturday. Well do we have scientific data which somehow shows his premises to be wrong? Financial data is relatively simple - did the pundits shares go up, etc.? I warrant that the reason we protect beliefs that we ourselves consider wrong (or in the authors case irrational (which I think is wrong!)) is because we don't have clear data. We belive they are wrong but can't readily show they are objectively wrong.

If one could flip to a "metaphysical indicators" page of the newspaper (! assuming we know its true) and look up "God: God is impersonal and does not require one to abide by any specific framework of laws except the Golden Rule" then we'd have a certain fact that we could rely on to demonstrate the falsehood of this Jews position.

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