The theological argument for relying on the senses
Hello Rabbi Michael,
I am currently listening to your series "Faith and Its Meaning," and first of all I want to thank you for the interesting and in-depth content there. I wanted to ask you about the theological argument of reliance on the senses, as presented primarily in lesson 20.
I have two questions I wanted to ask:
1. You claimed that we cannot trust because of evolution because maybe the next stage will be better. This is difficult in two ways: a. And if the next stage is better, then what? Clearly, the current stage is sufficient for survival and therefore reliable enough. So it may be that in the future it will be even more reliable, why is this a problem? b. After all, God also creates the world and guides it through evolution. You want to claim that relying on the senses means believing in God who created laws that will result in the creation of a person with a reliable sensory system. But maybe we are still on the way there and have not yet arrived?
2. The argument essentially says that someone intelligent must create something for it to be reliable. If so, why should God trust his own perception? After all, he was not created by an intelligent being. It is true that he was not created randomly either (he always was), but it seems to me that even if our world were ancient and there was a form of "Scotland" stones that had always existed - it would not be rational to trust it.
Thank you, and have a nice day.
- My question was different: How do we explain our absolute trust in our senses, when there is no reason to think that we have completed the evolutionary process. Even if God created us through evolution, he may have made sure that our sensory system was reliable and that we knew it.
- I am small.
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