Question

Hello Rabbi Michael Abraham,
 
I’ve been listening these days to your series “Faith and Its Meaning,” and before anything else I want to thank you for the interesting and profound content there. I wanted to ask you about the theological argument for relying on the senses, as presented mainly in lesson 20.
I have two difficulties I wanted to ask about:
 
1. You argued that we can’t rely on them because of evolution, since maybe the next stage will be better. This is difficult in two ways: a. Even if the next stage will be better, so what? Clearly the current stage is sufficient for survival, and therefore it is reliable enough. So it may be that in the future it will be even more reliable—why is that a problem? b. After all, God also creates the world and governs it through evolution. You want to argue that relying on the senses means believing in God, who created laws that would lead to the emergence of a human being with a reliable sensory system. But maybe we’re still on the way there and haven’t arrived yet?
 
2. The argument basically says that something needs to be created by an intelligent being in order to be reliable. If so, why does God need to rely on His own perception? After all, He was not created by an intelligent agent. True, He also was not created randomly (rather, He always existed), but it seems to me that even if our world were eternal, and there were a formation of stones in the shape of “Scotland” that had existed forever—it still would not be rational to rely on it.
 
Thank you, and have a pleasant day.