Q&A: Accepts the Designing God but Not the Torah
Accepts the Designing God but Not the Torah
Question
Hello,
After years in which I defined myself as a clear atheist, I’ve listened to many of your lectures over the past few months (to be honest, I listened to you for hours every day over the past few months). First of all, I want to say thank you for all the information you provide; I enjoyed it and continue to enjoy your words of wisdom.
You opened up my thinking. I came with a skeptical approach, but the arguments for the existence of God made me question the way I had been thinking, especially the argument from complexity regarding the laws. Evolution explains the development of complexity, but it does not explain why the laws are specifically these laws. And I really tried to hold on to the opinion I had before—to find what was wrong with your argument, to consult with people—and I didn’t find any good answer. Despite my attempt to deny it, I realized that you simply convinced me.
As for the arguments from morality and tradition, I feel less convinced. It feels to me that the claim that the Designer must reveal Himself, and that this revelation is what is passed down to us through tradition, involves major assumptions that do not feel intuitive to me.
One of the things that makes it hard for me to accept the tradition is that the content of the Torah and the Talmud does not impress me (Yaron Yadan’s critique). You argue that once we accept that the Creator exists and that the tradition is true, then the content should not interest us. But what if the content were a child’s drawing from kindergarten? Then presumably we would not accept it as a message from the Creator. The question is where the line is drawn. I look at these texts, and my intuition tells me they were written by people who lived in that period, flesh and blood, without divine intervention. It is hard for me to believe that the great Designer who created the laws of nature—the very argument that convinced me that He exists—wrote these works. The gap is too great: between inventing DNA and writing a book like the Torah.
Do you think there is anything else I should do, or change, or learn? In general, I’d be glad to hear your opinion.
Answer
It is hard for me to answer the difficulty you describe, because this is a general impression. To me, the content does not look like something from a child in kindergarten, even if a considerable part of it is not understandable to me. There is a difference between nonsense and something that is not understood. Of course, as you noted, the starting point is very important. If I assume that God exists and that it is very likely that He would reveal Himself, then it would take a very strong argument to convince me that the tradition that reached me is not from Him. If the starting point is the opposite, then the threshold required is much lower.
Beyond that, as I explained, the content is not expected to be moral, since morality is already planted within us and does not require revelation, and morality is meant to create a proper society, but that cannot be the reason for creating humanity. Don’t create humanity and morality will not be needed. So from the outset I do not expect content that is understandable to me.
Note: I understood your question about tradition, but I did not understand why you also mentioned morality.
Discussion on Answer
“If I assume that God exists and that it is very likely that He would reveal Himself, then it would take a very strong argument to convince me that the tradition that reached me is not from Him”
Why? There are thousands of religions in the world. The very fact that you accept only one of them shows that your default is that it is not true unless there is strong proof, no?
None of the religions transmits an unbroken tradition from a mass revelation. Those that do claim such a thing also speak about the revelation at Mount Sinai (Islam and Christianity).
Ziv,
I also had trouble with this question, but in the end I understood that the Torah was indeed written in a simple way so that it would suit the general public, and indeed it does not claim anywhere to prove its divine origin (such claims are the product of people in later generations). Trust in it is supposed to be based only on the transmission of tradition. That is clear from the text itself.
(This is similar to a jurist drafting a law intended for publication to the general public. He has to phrase it simply and clearly for every reader, and not in sophisticated legal language.)