God created the world so that we would do His will (morality + Jewish law). The whole game starts when you recognize the commanding God, and then you are required to choose the good. There is enough evil inclination that we won’t do the good even when it is clear to us. God gave us pretty bad starting conditions here in this world, so for so many people in the world the game doesn’t even begin. The geographical correlation that determines whether you even start the game is so strong that it depends almost entirely on where you grew up and how you were educated.

I understand that you argue that once you have strong evidence for the existence of a commanding God, all the other questions remain unresolved and do not refute His existence, but:
1. Even you admit that a God who revealed Himself in order to reveal His will to us is evidentially weaker, and our evidence there is not very strong.
2. All those difficulties may not be supposed to change your belief, each one on its own, regarding His existence, but each one is at least a blow to the wing of the theory that a commanding God exists, whereas the theory that a commanding God does not exist fits all these difficulties just fine.

How many such difficulties would be enough for you to switch paradigms, as Rabbi Thomas Kuhn taught us?

One could also ask why He gave us choice instead of programming us to do what He wants. Apparently, beyond the bottom line, He also wants us to choose. Similarly, it may be that He wants us to arrive at it, and not spoon-feed us. But as I said, in my view the evidence is good and the inclinations are in our hands, not His, and therefore this whole discussion is only about the possibility that it isn’t.

Hello Rabbi,
I listened to all the arguments I was able to find, and still I have not reached a sufficient level of certainty. The claim that if we knew with certainty that God demands religious obligations of us, that would deprive us of the ability to choose, is a mistaken claim, because we see in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) that even when there is certainty about the reality of God, the Jewish people still sin. And even people who experienced direct revelation sometimes do not keep God’s commandments (see Jonah, Moses, David, and others).
Also, from our own reality we know situations in which we have certainty about certain moral truths, and still we fail and do not live by them, out of weakness of will, laziness, or following our inclinations. So how can one say that this is only due to inclination or bias?

It seems to me that I once heard you explain that if God wanted to teach us lessons through history (assuming He intervenes), then He is a pretty poor teacher, because all in all there are enough good students here who want to learn authentically, and each one learns something different.

If God wanted to achieve religious goals through our choice to keep His commandments, He should have provided clearer evidence for the existence of the revelation at Mount Sinai, with the set of Torah-level commandments that Orthodox Judaism today is trying to sell.
Do you think we really are poor students? (Aside from those good students who became convinced that God really wants us not to eat pork.)

That analogy is not relevant. My claim regarding learning from history arises because the claim it attacks speaks about learning from history. That cannot happen, so it is clear that this is not the goal. You are broadening the canvas to include everything that does not sound reasonable to you. What I raised is a difficulty or a contradiction, whereas what you raise is a question. If you want, I’ll tell you that indeed you can prove that God’s purpose is not the observance of the commandments in and of itself (but rather observance that comes from an uncoerced and non-deterministic decision, and in your view also not one that is completely clear intellectually; in my view it is clear). As I wrote to you, the proof of this is the very fact that we were given choice, instead of being programmed. By the same token, one can say this about circumstances that do not necessarily lead everyone to the right conclusions (and note well: I am not claiming that this was done so that we would have choice, as the common claim goes. In my eyes that is an implausible claim).

I’m not attacking the issue of choice. The value of our choice, and not being robots, is completely clear to me. It is precisely from the value of choice itself that I am challenging you. The whole “game” of choice and its value begins when I know that God forbade pork to me. Now I have to choose whether to keep that or not. My difficulty is that God did not bring clear evidence at all that eating pork is forbidden. You argue that He wanted us to “choose” and overcome our biases and realize that if there is a Creator of the world then of course He is also the one who gave us the Torah 3,000 years ago. I claim that it is not at all plausible that so many smart people who come openly to examine the arguments for the truth of the Torah and the tradition (even if they accept the arguments for a Creator of the world) are not authentically convinced by them. Therefore it is not plausible that God really commanded this. If that was the purpose of creation, it would be proper for it to be clear that these are the rules of the game, and now let’s see the Jewish people choose whether to observe them or not.

I’m starting to despair. I explicitly write that I am not dealing with the question of choice, and that the argument that this was done for the sake of choice is, in my opinion, foolish (exactly because of what you wrote here).