Question

Hello Rabbi,
I would be glad to know the Rabbi’s position regarding some central claims of contemporary atheism:
It is impossible to prove the existence of God because this is a pseudo-scientific construct; that is, He cannot be put to the test and examined. One cannot use reason to investigate Him, and at the same time one can use reason to investigate Him, because our perception as human beings is limited.
From here the question arises: how do people believe in such an entity in the first place if they cannot “grasp” it?
1) Some would say that they see God’s intervention in everyday life all the time. This claim is mistaken because it contains each person’s subjective perception, and apparently represents a mistaken understanding of reality, since when they are asked to give an example they will not describe a case that departs from nature, but rather a coincidence that can be explained in other ways.
2) Another common claim is that “creation” testifies to the Creator. This claim also does not hold, because it relies on humanity’s lack of information regarding the formation of the universe. Just as in the past people thought that Baal was the one who brought down the rain, today we know how rain falls and that this is not supernatural intervention.
3) The survival and uniqueness of the Jewish people: this is a subject that has been studied historically, and again, the miracles described are nothing more than historical events showing how precisely the expulsion of the Jews and the persecution of them contributed to their adherence to faith. Persecution itself may preserve and unite. As for the uniqueness of the Jewish people, this is pride of the highest order. There are countless peoples and populations around the globe for whom Israel ranks together with Micronesia and the Canary Islands: a marginal and insignificant region. Not to mention the size of the universe and the span of time for which it has existed. On that scale all of humanity is less than a grain of dust.
4) The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh): the Hebrew Bible constitutes written testimony to the relationship God created with the Jews. But precisely biblical criticism, archaeology, and other ancient writings prove and suggest that the Hebrew Bible is, to put it mildly, an inaccurate document. Worse still, the Hebrew Bible presents a definitional image of God as having emotions and feelings, similar to the other gods in the region such as Baal. It also seems that various stories in the Hebrew Bible were copied from, or inspired by, other ancient stories from the region. Only after the destruction of the Temples, when the Jewish people lost the actual cultic worship and the institution of the priesthood, did Judaism become a religion of important symbolism and turn God from a peripheral god into an absolute God—the god became an idea. Unlike other gods, who could be destroyed by destroying their idols or their temples, an idea cannot be destroyed.
5) The revelation at Mount Sinai: in my opinion this is an argument not even worth mentioning. The revelation at Mount Sinai is described only in the Torah—that same document through which believers seek to show that the revelation at Mount Sinai happened. This is a circular argument and therefore invalid. In addition to the claim that the souls of all Jews were at Mount Sinai, every believer should ask himself honestly: does he have any memory whatsoever of the revelation at Mount Sinai?
6) Most people believe in God, and many believers are involved in science: according to the argument from the majority, we should in practice convert to Christianity, Islam, or become Buddhists. The fact that a majority of people do something does not indicate that they are right. Religious scientists generally would not claim, for example, that the version of the creation of the world as described in the Book of Genesis is the actual way the universe came into being. They would say that it is a metaphorical way of illustrating a very long process, or a spiritual process, and so on. The same goes for evolution, abiogenesis, and a variety of other topics. It is important to emphasize that religious scientists do not carry out religious practice while doing their work. If a religious scientist were to decide that the answer to the challenge before him is that God is responsible for it, he would be thrown out of the faculty immediately. For many people religion is a cohesive social framework of belonging that adds value to their lives, and therefore they do not see a contradiction between their work and their social lives.
7) There is another aspect to faith, namely the aspect embedded in us evolutionarily. Here is an excellent lecture explaining why people tend to believe in supernatural occurrences of all kinds, divine and non-divine alike; why “belief” exists in human beings at all; how it contributes to survival; how it is in fact a trait that other animals also possess; and how it may bias one’s perception of reality. https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception?language=he
8) Clinical death: similar to the influence of drugs and other substances, clinical death leads to partial or faulty functioning of the brain, something that may affect one’s perception of reality and mix imagination with reality. There are countless proofs and studies refuting the matter with a simple web search. For me the simple proof is that people in clinical death saw supernatural figures in whom they believed: a Christian saw Jesus, a Muslim Muhammad, and an Indian saw Ganesh with the elephant head. No one saw someone else’s God proving him wrong.
9) Seance: for your consideration, the ideomotor effect https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%94%D7%90%D7%A4%D7%A7%D7%98_%D7%94%D7%90%D7%99%D7%93%D7%99%D7%90%D7%95%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%98%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99
For more serious reading, one may turn to the articles listed at the bottom of the page.
10) A personal miracle: personal proof, a subjective miracle, is not a miracle; it is something that at that point in time you could not explain. Since this is a case that happened only to the individual person, it is hard for the other party in a discussion to argue against it, because he did not observe the phenomenon. In any case, a personal case includes only the judgment of the individual who experienced the event, and it can be assumed that this judgment was mistaken based on the fantastical nature of the person’s claims. Thus a person who claims he saw a unicorn will get strange looks at best, and be thrown into a medical institution at worst.
Three additional arguments that are not related to the question of why people believe in God in the first place. In my opinion these are arguments believers also ought to address:
A) There is a puzzling phenomenon in which every person is born into the religion of his parents and, in addition, in the overwhelming majority of cases continues to believe in adulthood—when his judgment has already matured—in the religion into which he was born. Do you think this is mere coincidence, or does it make you doubt your faith even a little? After all, I would like to believe that the chosen people are almost as humble as their prophet and would not tend to say that they are better and wiser than the other nations of the world.
B) The validity of the Torah in the current world. I believe that the religious world notices the desperate and ongoing chase it has been conducting against the modern world ever since modernity emerged: a cyclical chase whose stages are these: first, total rejection of the new idea proposed; examination and experimentation with the new idea; collapse in the religious-secular border zones where there is contact and continuous connection between the two populations; growing demand within the religious population for the idea; approval of the idea by religious authority; entrenchment of a small number of conservatives in their position; and acceptance of the idea by most of the religious public. When this is the situation, one should ask whether this is not actually a case in which the Torah folds before the will of the public, supposedly through reinterpretation.
C) The morality of the Torah in the current world: this point is especially sensitive for religious believers because, by the Torah’s very definition, it is sacred and its words are absolute truth, the manufacturer’s instructions. I ask that this section not be seen as provocation but as an innocent question whose purpose is to look through your eyes, the eyes of believers. The Torah holds a clear position in which owning slaves is desirable, there is reference to women and children as property, and killing a person in certain cases is desirable. (I am aware of the Sanhedrin argument.) The question that arises from this is clear: the Torah was written at a different time, when the rules of the game were different. Is it not a mistake to try to enforce the rules of the Torah nowadays as well? Are there not in fact cases in which you ignore these “problematic” verses? Is a reinterpretation of these verses not a crooked way of deceiving ourselves and saying: look, it is the same lady in a different dress?