Accepting the God who plans but not the Torah

שו”ת › Category: faith › Accepting the God who plans but not the Torah

asked 11 months ago

peace,
After years of defining myself as a staunch atheist, I have listened to many of your lessons in recent months (in fact, I have listened to you for hours every day for the past few months). First of all, I want to say thank you for all the information you provide, I have enjoyed and continue to enjoy your words of wisdom.
You opened my mind, I came with a skeptical attitude, but the arguments for the existence of God made me question the thinking I had, and especially the claim about the complexity of the laws. Evolution explains the development of complexity but does not explain why the laws are precisely these laws. And I really tried to maintain the opinion I had. Find what is wrong with your argument, consult with people, and I did not find a single good answer. Despite my attempt to deny it, I realized that you simply convinced me.
Regarding the arguments of morality and tradition, I feel less convinced. I feel that regarding the fact that the designer must be revealed, and this revelation is what is passed down to us in tradition, there are major assumptions here that I don’t feel are intuitive to me.
One of the things that makes it difficult for me to accept tradition is that the content of the Torah and Talmud does not impress me (Yaron Yadan’s criticism). You claim that once we accept that the Creator exists and the tradition is correct, then the content should not interest us. But what if the content was a drawing by a child in kindergarten? Then we would not accept it as a message from the Creator, apparently. The question is where to draw the line. I look at these texts, and my intuition says that they were written by people who lived at that time, in the flesh, without divine intervention. I find it hard to believe that the great planner who created the laws of nature – the same 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’s anything else I need to do, or change, or learn? In general, I’d love to hear your opinion.

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מיכי Staff answered 11 months ago

It’s hard for me to answer the difficulty you describe because it’s a general impression. To me, the content doesn’t seem like a kindergartener, even if a significant part of it is incomprehensible to me. There’s a difference between nonsense and something incomprehensible. Of course, as you mentioned, the starting point is very important. If I assume that there is a God and that it is very likely that he will reveal himself, a very strong argument is needed to convince me that the tradition that has come down to me is not from him. If the starting point is the opposite, then the required standard is much lower. Beyond that, as I explained, the content is not expected to be moral, since morality is already ingrained in us and does not require revelation, and morality is also intended to create a proper society, but this cannot be a reason for creating humanity. Don’t create it and morality will not be required. Therefore, I do not expect content that I understand in advance. Note: I understood your question about tradition, but I didn’t understand why you also mentioned morality.

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משה replied 11 months ago

Ziv,
I also had difficulty with this puzzlement, but in the end I understood that the Torah was indeed written in a simple way to suit the general public, and indeed does not claim anywhere to prove its divine origin (such claims are the creation of people in later generations). Trust in it is supposed to be based only on the transmission of tradition. This is clear from the text itself.
(This is similar to a lawyer who drafts a law intended for publication to the general public. He must draft it in a simple and clear way for any reader and not in a sophisticated legal style)