Q&A: Questions About Faith
Questions About Faith
Question
Hello,
I’m a secular young man who is examining my faith. Broadly speaking, on an abstract level, I understand the rationale for believing in God.
My personal problem with faith is in practice, when reading the Torah and the laws of Judaism (Jewish law). My questions are sincere and not meant to provoke:
- The Torah as a book doesn’t seem all that impressive. That is, there’s nothing written there that a human being couldn’t write. I’ll go even further and say that you, as a philosopher, rabbi, and physicist, could tomorrow morning write a book that, if it had been given to the people of Israel at Sinai, would have been far more useful and would have influenced the history of the nation much more decisively.
- Why did God wait until 1500 BCE to reveal Himself to the people of Israel? All of prehistory, with all its cruelty, passed before His eyes without any response or regard.
- If He was already waiting for the event at Mount Sinai, why not wait another 4,000 years—which is nothing relatively speaking—and reveal Himself to the modern world in a completely unambiguous way?
Thank you very much in advance,
Dor.
Answer
Hello Dor.
- My path to faith is described in detail in my book The First Existent and in the notebooks here on the site (in an outdated version). In any case, that path is not based on a deep impression from the book of the Torah. On the contrary, in my eyes too it is not especially impressive.
- I don’t know. By the way, there is also a lot of cruelty after the giving of the Torah. I can speculate that He waited until humanity matured and was ready to receive the Torah.
- I don’t understand why it matters when He reveals Himself. But again, I do not know His considerations.
All this has nothing to do with the question of whether God exists and whether He revealed Himself. There are arguments in favor of this, and you need to form a position about them. These difficulties neither add nor subtract anything.
Discussion on Answer
Suppose you received a document directly from the Holy One, blessed be He, and from looking at it you concluded that there was nothing special in it. Would you infer that it didn’t come from Him?
My claim is that the conclusion that the Torah was given to us from Heaven is not based (for me) on its uniqueness and wisdom, but on other evidence (as explained in The First Existent). Therefore the question about its content is not important for this discussion.
As for the question itself, one could perhaps think that it contains wisdom that is not obvious and not simply understood. For example, our survival and uniqueness as a people, and the uniqueness of our history, were created by it. So maybe there is something in it after all?…
Or perhaps the Holy One, blessed be He, did not intend to reveal His wisdom to us, but only to give us His instructions?
And so on.
Certainly in that case I wouldn’t be bothered by its lack of uniqueness.
I don’t entirely think that’s the right example, because we are in a state of uncertainty and are currently weighing the evidence for religion.
Now in such a case we put all the arguments on the table; you can think of it as a kind of beloved Bayesian formula.
So just as the Rabbi likes to preface things with the plausibility of revelation—why the Holy One, blessed be He, did not create a perfect world, and why we have free choice, and morality is a tool and not an end, etc. etc. (if I remember correctly, p. 17 in the fifth notebook)—what is the point of all that arduous and anthropomorphic introduction? To show that we have some a priori probability for the hypothesis that there would be revelation, so that testimony for it will be more easily accepted, or we might even expect it.
The same thing here: Dor (the theist?) is arguing by the exact opposite kind of evidence—that surely God is perfect, the Creator of heaven and earth, the seas and all that is in them, and even the fish, may its memory be for a blessing. So we would expect that insofar as there is revelation and some document is given in it, it ought to be a document whose reliability is evident from within it. Of course that’s not certain, but it is a claim with some weight.
That is, it sounds as though the Rabbi is already analyzing God’s desires based on his knowledge that the Torah is true, and on that basis constructing the arguments and our acquaintance with Him (and then updating the parameters to put into the formula), but the question is from the a priori side.
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P.S. Regarding the hidden wisdom that is not plainly understood, that sounds a bit like apologetics, because as far as I know you hang this on the event and not specifically on the book. And again the question is whether it is right to bring apologetics into considerations that initially are being given equal weight, rather than much weaker weight.
A nonsense question.
Not nonsense at all, but I answered the question. In my opinion, the Torah’s uniqueness does not indicate its divine origin. Now you need to decide whether that is decisive for you or not. In my opinion, not at all.
Thank you very much for the answer, and I appreciate your honesty.
Let me sort out your faith for you and save you a lot of time.
You believe in yourself, and that you know how to judge what is right and what is not.
That’s it. Everything else is secondary to that.
Posek, you’re very emphatic, but you’re writing things that I don’t see as having any connection to the discussion. Why are you doing this? If you want to contribute to the discussion, write clearly, and write things that are relevant to the matter at hand (whose relevance can be understood).
The asker’s whole question stemmed from “I’m a secular young man who is examining my faith.”
So I saved him time and effort and helped him reach the answer immediately.
The questions about the Torah are nonsense and come from noise, confusion, and distraction from his central goal. I helped him get straight to the answer to the main central question that interests him, namely clarifying his faith.
I imagine it might be interpreted that way, but the truth is that I did not mean to hurt anyone personally, only to strike at falsehood in order to help reach the true answer.
As someone chiming in from the side, I didn’t understand the end of the Rabbi’s remarks, that all this has nothing to do with the question of whether God revealed Himself.
After all, in point 1 the main question is that insofar as the story is divine, there is an assumption that it would be relatively perfect—something like the Muslims’ proof for their religion via the Quran. And insofar as that is not so, we would have expected the book to be perfect, and if it isn’t, that is an argument with some weight against the claim that God wrote it. I don’t know if it’s decisive, but still. From the end of your remarks it sounds as though this is not even an argument with any weight at all. Why?