Q&A: Faith
Faith
Question
Hello and blessings. For as long as I can remember I thought religion could be proven logically, but in recent years I’ve started to see that if anything, the opposite is true… Are there articles here that are supposed to give a reason to believe even without logical proofs?
Answer
By “the opposite” do you mean that atheism can be proven logically? I’d love to see such a logical proof. In my assessment, no such proof exists.
True, I don’t know what you mean by “logical proofs.” Every logical argument rests on basic premises, and the fate of the conclusion is usually determined not by the logic of the inference but by your attitude toward those premises.
You can look in the notebooks here on the site, or in the first book of my trilogy, The First Existent.
Discussion on Answer
Almost all of these topics are dealt with here and elsewhere in my writings.
If it’s funny to say that the world and humanity are less than 6,000 years old, then don’t say it. Many explanations have already been given on this matter, and Nachmanides already wrote nearly a thousand years ago that the account of creation is not a factual description.
As for the Flood, I don’t know why that is difficult. On the contrary, there are other myths that speak about it. One can discuss the details (whether it covered the entire earth or not), but that is not necessary even in the Torah.
To the question of evolution I devoted an entire book (God Plays Dice), and its gist appears in an article here on the site:
The focus is in the last part of your words. I definitely do not approach the Torah neutrally. As I explained in my book The First Existent, I have a starting point that God exists, and it is very well grounded, and from that it is very plausible a priori that He revealed Himself. From that point on I examine the Torah, and therefore the neutral approach here is actually unjustified and misleading.
I just want to note that if you think there is no logic in the Torah, then there is no point in looking for a way to believe without logic; rather, you should abandon the faith.
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A. Even if there are no proofs of the opposite, it’s enough that Judaism is also hard to prove. And to the best of my knowledge, the main logical argument it rests on is the “argument from testimony,” which is a very weak “proof,” and the way it’s presented in various places is mainly with a heavy demagogic spin.
B. The “opposite” I was talking about is not דווקא atheism but rather the truth of the Torah, which all along seems not to be true.
It’s funny to say that the world and humanity are less than 6,000 years old.
It’s very hard to say that the Flood really happened in reality.
It is reasonable to assume that the world was created through evolution in light of the many proofs.
Archaeological research points to many things that seem more likely to be anachronisms.
And even from studying the Torah itself, it does not give off a reliable impression. For example, it is not likely that the genealogies of Cain and Seth would have such striking similarities. It is not likely that there would be such a great difference between the style of the names of the princes and the names of the spies and their fathers (note this carefully). It is not likely that of the seventy souls who went up with Jacob there was only one daughter.
And one could go on with dozens of examples like these, though I assume the Rabbi is aware of most of them.
Of course, there are answers to everything, but it seems to me that any person of sound mind understands that when one approaches the Torah neutrally, as we would approach any other new book, it is much simpler and more reasonable to conclude that this is not a true book than to hang everything on all kinds of excuses.
Also, when examining the reality of our world, where the Torah’s firm promises and curses do not exactly come true, it is much more reasonable to say they are simply not true than to appeal to new theories of divine hiddenness, reincarnations, two worlds, and the like.