Q&A: The God of Philosophy and the God of the Bible
The God of Philosophy and the God of the Bible
Question
A question that has been bothering me for a long time. I really can’t find any connection between the God of philosophy, who created the world 14.5 billion years ago—the God who gave validity to moral rules and commands us to act in accordance with them—and the God of the Bible, who created the world in seven days, commanded the destruction of all Amalek because they decided to deny God, ordered the conquest of the seven nations because they simply lived here, and more. The excuses about the age of the world don’t really hold water (“a day” is not our kind of day, Adam the First was actually several people, and other ridiculous explanations of that sort). To say that the main thing is the messages also sounds far-fetched to me, since throughout the entire Torah we—or more precisely, the Sages—make fine distinctions out of every little thing they find, and the general attitude is that these are the words of the living God. In addition, it is not clear to me why that miracle-working God, who splits seas, creates worlds, and brings ten plagues, could not have driven out the seven nations in a normal way, but instead had to command us to kill them all. There are many more questions, but these are the main points: why would God lie and write all kinds of stories that never happened, and second, how is it possible to identify Him with the God of morality?
Answer
This is a collection of unrelated questions that you are also mixing together. It is hard to answer all of them in one place (some of them, even on their own, require a long answer). So I’ll address them briefly:
- I don’t understand what there is to connect between the philosophical God who created the world and the religious God. They are two aspects of the same being.
- If you mean the differences in their approaches, I don’t know what kind of approach you see in the philosophical God who created the world.
- And perhaps you mean the God of morality; that is a question of ethics and Jewish law, and I refer you to column 541.
- God does not do things Himself in the world, but hands them over to us. I do not know the reason, but I do not see why this should be troubling. He could have done everything in our place. For reasons of His own, He decided that these are the tasks imposed on us. This is the discussion between Turnus Rufus and Rabbi Akiva in Bava Batra 10a.
- When people write stories that convey messages, that is not a lie. It is a common way to convey messages.