The totality of evidence in favor of belief
Hello Michael, apologies in advance for the length.
In the lessons and in the fifth notebook (as far as I remember) you do not discuss historical arguments in favor of Jewish tradition, and say that the 'witness argument' does not have particularly strong weight on its own, and only when you look at the totality of the evidence does a "picture" emerge that is strong enough to adopt the commandments.
To briefly summarize the conclusion that emerges from the rest of the evidence in the previous notebooks:
God created the world and us for a purpose external to the world, and it apparently depends on our choices because He gave us free will.
But at this point, I can think of a few options that could serve this purpose, which do not ignore our free choice:
1- To create a non-deterministic world: It may be that the main purpose of creation is not related to humans, and their entire purpose is to create an unpredictable dimension in it - through the free choice to do as we wish. For some reason, a world whose future is not fixed "Interesting" God more.
2-Our creation is the goal itself: Just as an artist may enjoy painting a particular painting, but after he is finished he may not necessarily care where it will be hung or whether it will be used at all, so the fact that God has a certain "religious" value in our creation does not mean that he cares about its consequences - for some reason he prefers to create us with free choice, and our existence in the world is just a projection of this, and he does not care how we use the ability to choose.
3- Our sense of hesitation is a value for Him: God has a certain benefit from putting people in a dilemma about what to do, and to achieve this, man must have free choice. In this case, one could even say that giving man commandments and instructions would only hinder the purpose of creation, since it would reduce the situations in which he would feel hesitation.
4- Every choice a person makes has the same value for him: a person's independent choice of a certain act does constitute a goal for him, but the decision itself is the goal and there is no different weight for specific acts. In fact, this is a principle that exists in every case in the world - for example, if I have one coin and in front of me two poor people whom I do not know at all, it is clear that there is no meaning in choosing which one to give. I propose to expand this principle and argue that perhaps (if the decision itself is the goal) the option of not giving the coin to anyone also has a value that is equal to the other two options.
5- The deontological dimension of morality: You argue that moral decisions can indeed be the "religious" correction that God expects from us, but only on the condition that we are aware of this (through revelation) and thus do not treat morality only as a means To repair the company.
On the other hand, you mentioned in several places that you have no indication that religious people behave more morally than secular or atheists. So I don't understand on what basis one can decide that God prefers moral choices that are made precisely as a result of explicit revelation, over the same behavior in a way that the performer is not necessarily aware of the goal. One can even think of Benefits of instilling a natural moral sense in a person, nothing more than a one-time revelation that can be forgotten and distorted over the years.
The possibility that God expects us to choose certain actions that are immoral may sound more predictable and perhaps less strange to us, but He does not necessarily "think" in the same way as we do.
A priori, all options are equally likely.
You mentioned that the "witness argument" does have some weight, meaning that the credibility of Jewish tradition gives some preference to the possibility that it requires us to perform specific acts that were revealed in Revelation, but that is still only one possibility out of several. From a cold statistical perspective, it seems that most of the odds are still in favor of one of the other options.
Without reasons for the improbability that the tradition was forged, there is apparently no "strong enough picture" here. Perhaps I would not expect a rational person to comprehensively review the Torah, and also to fear to some extent that this is a possibility. But it seems that he would not adopt a full religious lifestyle either.
I discussed the witness's argument and the appeals against it in detail in a column dedicated to it. You can search here on the site.
If you read what I said, you could understand that an appeal of the kind you raised is irrelevant. You are discussing each component separately when the whole idea was that their combination is what makes the difference. A certain tradition has come down to us that our role is to choose to do a commandment, so the assumption that we were given a choice to choose certain actions is reinforced by that. Why go into all sorts of other speculations about our role?! The combination of the components leaves all the possibilities you raised aside. Anything could have happened, but the tradition says that this is the correct answer.
Leave a Reply
Please login or Register to submit your answer