Q&A: Regarding 'From Deism to Theism'
Regarding 'From Deism to Theism'
Question
I am currently in the middle of reading the fifth booklet you uploaded to the site, and I am wondering about the explanation that a person who experienced a divine revelation is, relative to us, like a sighted person compared to a blind one. The reason is that with regard to the sense of sight in a human being, this is a fact known to all of us and cannot really be challenged, and even the blind person will have to admit that others have sharpened senses that he simply does not. But in the case of the giving of the Torah, that is exactly the point in question: whether there was a revelation, and really whether such a thing as revelation even exists. So the question is not only whether they "saw" a revelation, but whether there is such a kind of "seeing" as revelation. It turns out that not only are we relying on them that there is a picture in the middle of a jungle, but we are relying on them that it is even possible to see a picture at all—that is, in the parable’s analogue, revelation from heaven. And more than that: they themselves did not know that such an option as witnessing a revelation of God existed!! They themselves had been blind before that. Think of that same blind person who had never eaten or tasted olives, and people tell him that eating olives is "seeing"; if he did not have too much prior information about the definition of human seeing, there is a concern that he would believe it. For the Children of Israel, this revelation was something about which they had no prior information or concept at all, and therefore they themselves also had no ability to judge whether the sights they saw were in fact a revelation. Especially considering the fact that in the primitive world culture thousands of years ago, before the age of science and research, people had a much stronger tendency to believe in open miracles and in rabbis who flew through the air on a carriage… and in general in every illogical combination of the spiritual-heavenly world and this physical world. Also, many people today believe that they saw a spirit walking through the room and claim that they had a revelation involving someone who had passed away, and we tend to doubt that. So why should we not doubt that of the people of Israel? Sorry for the length, but this is the most concise wording I managed to write.
Answer
When a scientist observes the behavior of an elementary particle in a particle accelerator, no other person besides him can see and understand it. And still, the assumption is that if he saw it, then it is true (even though it is not clear to all of us whether something like the Higgs boson really exists). If other people had been present at Mount Sinai and risen to the level of prophecy, they too would have experienced the same thing. In my view, the two cases are completely analogous on the fundamental level. The degree of certainty in each is a matter of estimates and probabilities (and of course it does not have to be identical), but the principle is similar in both cases.
Of course, one can cast doubt on anything, and these are not certain proofs. It is a matter of probabilities.
Discussion on Answer
So we’ve gone back to the magic-tricks claims. I have nothing to say about that.
If you have nothing to say, doesn’t that somewhat pull the rug out from under the whole basis of the proofs from the giving of the Torah? The moment there is such a simple option to explain the revelation and say there was no unprecedented physical-spiritual connection, something never seen before, doesn’t that crush any proof whatsoever?
I have nothing to say about it because it is nonsense. I have nothing to say to someone who claims that right now I am not writing, and this is only an illusion or a trick causing me to think that I am writing.
Sleight of hand mainly relates to seeing with the eyes… (that’s pretty obvious, no?)
Illusions exist in all the senses.
A person who took part in a magic show can claim that he saw a person split in two, even though that is not the fact but only his interpretation and impression. A person at a magic show cannot claim that he felt and sensed that he was eating when he did not eat.
Not true. As I said, there are illusions in all the senses. Usually people demonstrate this through sight, but connect electrodes to an area in the brain and get whatever illusions you want in any domain. It seems to me we have exhausted this topic down to the finest detail. I do not have anything especially intelligent to say about it (and in my opinion there is no need to).
The difference is that a person who was at Mount Sinai did not measure this with scientific and research tools, and moreover someone presented the matter to him (Moses or God), so one can wonder who really was the figure who presented it to him and whether that figure had an interest or not. That is unlike a scientist, who conducted the test himself in an objective way, and there is no tendency to say that he lied. And again I will bring here the proof from the fact that people in our own generation, despite countless pieces of evidence to the contrary, tend to believe that they saw a ghost, so all the more so in previous generations, when there were no scientific objections, it would have been possible to lie and present a false display. Which, by the way, is another difference from research in a particle accelerator, where there is not really such an option of a false display, whereas at Mount Sinai it would simply have been possible to perform tricks and make sounds in order to make them believe. So it seems there are considerable differences between the examples.