Uncommon Sense
[Opinion]
How do we know what is true?
This was the question a friend put to me not long ago, after a lengthy discussion on the relative merits of homeopathy versus antibiotics and of germ-theory versus the sin-theory of disease. He mostly agreed with me on those topics, but he was less certain about subduction versus the mabul as a reason for our puzzle-piece continents, or about the ancient origins of man.
I had grown tired and a bit irritated by the constant barrage of nonsense fed to him by apologists of various stripes and repeated to me verbatim but, as often happens, my polite but clumsy attempts at changing the topic were repeatedly thwarted. Unsure of his case but unaware just how flimsy it really was, I was challenged to refute a wide range of nonsense, ranging from mysterious energies – with flux densities no-one ever bothered to measure or calculate, I note with surprise – to egregious assaults on the most basic physical laws and rules of logic. With arguments as brittle as a bad mood under direct sunlight, appeals to authority were ultimately the cement that held everything together.
See those stars? They have souls, and those souls are what we call angels. Don’t believe me? Aryeh Kaplan said so himself! Think you know better than Kaplan? Don’t you know he was the pre-eminent physicist after Einstein, only getting sidetracked by his immense love for torah? Never mind that nobody seems to know which institution granted him his master’s degree, or that he is completely unknown in the literature. He apparently has many persuasive hagiographers willing and able to fool those looking to be fooled. (I wonder whether those angels can communicate faster than the speed of light, or do they wait years and years for the call-and-response sequence mentioned in the liturgy, due to the immense distances between the stars.)
And, another argument goes, chazal were certainly right about the strict demarcation between life and non-life, domem and the other orders of existence, things that have a soul and things that don’t. Doesn’t this show something about the ultimate wisdom and divine origin of our tradition? When I mention that I don’t believe this clear demarcation exists, the ultimate trump card is pulled: Slifkin! He knows everything there is to know about botany and zoology and he clearly says this dividing line exists, I’m told. How can I argue with that? (Well, does he mention this little inconvenient thing called a virus?)
And this goes on and on, until we finally hit on the crux of the matter: how do we know what is true? How do we decide which claims to believe? It is a fantastically important question. If there is significant disagreement on the answer to this question all further discussion is futile.
“What do you propose?” I counter.
“Common sense, of course,” is the reply.
Not so.
The first problem with this is that common sense is painfully uncommon, and lots of nonsense is common in its place, as is common knowledge. Even were this not so, common sense is a very unreliable indicator of truth. Common sense is nothing more than common experience and intuition; the former is unreliable, the latter is a notorious liar.
Common sense tells me that time is absolute and particles don’t have dual identities – a lie. Common sense tells me humans are designed – if by an incompetent and bungling designer who puts an open trachea right next to the esophagus so that we often choke to death; saddles us with an appendix which is more trouble than it’s worth; and places a waste-disposal plant right in the middle of a playground – but designed nevertheless. This, too, is a lie.
Common sense tells me that heavier objects fall faster and mass cannot be created and the sky is a dome and air can’t freeze and diamonds and carbon are different elements and fire is also an element and horizontal gene transfer is impossible and no animal can see in the dark and… what else, and that God hates me and my mother loves me. Lies, lies, and more lies. (Okay, that very last one is actually true. I think.) Common sense is frequently deceiving, and using it to distinguish truth from falsehood is sure to mislead.
The other option is careful study of each and every subject. This isn’t very practical at all, and besides, eventually you come to a claim that is impossible to verify for yourself, and then you’re left with the question you started with: which claim do you believe?
The real answer to this question is surprisingly straightforward. So much so that it is a wonder it took humanity many thousands of years of thinking and blind groping in the dark to hit upon it. Now that we did, our knowledge has advanced exponentially in such a short while compared to the totality of our species’ history that the result is truly mindboggling.
And the answer is this: you only know a claim to be true if it makes predictions that can be falsified, and if, after repeated observations, it continues to hold up. The more observations a claim of that kind explains, the stronger we suspect it to be true. If it happens to explain a very wide variety of phenomena and is also the most parsimonious observation, we might call this a scientific theory. This is the only real way we, constricted by our puny brains as we are, can tell truth from falsehood and a genuine explanation from gobbledygook.
Take the theory of gravity for example. It explains falling objects and swinging pendulums and orbiting planets. It explains oceanic tides and predicts the acceleration you need to get into orbit. It is continuously tested and observed and has never been falsified. We claim it to be a true fact. We do not claim it to be true because an authority told us so, not even a very smart authority. Sure, we might initially learn about it from an authority, but the crucial point remains this: how does that authority claim to know it? Does it explain any observation that, if we find this observation to be wrong, would falsify the theory? Einstein never insisted he must be believed because, well, he is the next Einstein. Einstein’s theories made bold predictions and explained the heretofore unexplained. He showed how other theories leave unanswered and unanswerable questions, and how his explanation works with every known observation. We can easily conceive of an observation that will falsify his theories. We now know it to be true (mostly).
Contrast this with the theory of God. It is certainly possible that God causes swinging pendulums and falling objects. But if we observe an object falling up the stairs, would this falsify our theory? Or can we claim just as well that the same God causes things to fall up as well as down? In that case, God isn’t really an explanation at all, for it can be used to explain the observation and also its exact opposite. It predicts nothing at all. It is certainly possible that god is the explanation for the longevity of the Jewish nation, but god is also the explanation for the genocide during the holocaust. Common sense doesn’t preclude this from the realm of possibility; perhaps God is schizophrenic or has an anger-management problem. But if a theory works well for any observation at all then it isn’t really an explanation to begin with. It is a mere chimera, a magician’s trick to help you overcome the uneasy feeling of not knowing something you want to know.
Such an all-encompassing claim keeps getting smaller and smaller, as soon as the people who recognize it for what it is find better explanations. In the past, god was used to explain disease and lightning and earthquakes. Now it is germs and electricity and plate tectonics. It is the incredible shrinking God, soon shrinking into laughable insignificance. Sure, some things still defy current explanation. The big bang! But God in this sense is a mere stopgap measure that doesn’t really explain anything, used by small minds who will never figure out the true reason behind the phenomenon in question. God keeps getting squeezed into tighter and tighter spots by desperate people in order to plug the ever decreasing holes in our collective knowledge, just so their brain-juice doesn’t leak out. God, we must surmise, is a… tampon?
We don’t reject any claim just because it doesn’t make sense to us, and we do not accept it just because it does or just on the basis of an authority who told us so. We accept something as true when it can be falsified in principle but hasn’t been so far, when it explains something other theories cannot, when the thing it explains, if found to be false, would then falsify our original claim. Anything else and we are left with no good way to judge its truth or falsehood, and we might as well dismiss it as someone’s sweet dreams or overactive imagination.
Claiming to know something to be true without any way to prove or disprove it does violence to our intelligence and makes a mockery of our logical faculties, and I will simply laugh upon hearing it, and sometimes even shake my head in mild disbelief at the incredible depth of human folly. And so should you.
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Very well written & true.
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I guess further discussion was futile…
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Baal, this is an outstanding piece. The best one you’ve written yet.
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FB, the writer just set up the rules for true and false. How can you say the article is true? Does it hold up with time? Does it answer previous unanswered questions? Is the article falsifiable? Has the article been put through rigouress scientific tests? According to the logic presented in the article, I think the author himself is yet undecided about its truthiness.
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God is a tampon… gotta love it
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lol, KS, yes, the article’s premise has been replicated numerous times by myself as well as many others. External & internal validity & reliability have been duly verified. But feel free to do a meta-analysis and report your results.
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The first step of ignorance is to be taught that the greatest virtue is to have blind faith in certain supposed wise people and to let them think for you. We have brains and we should use them.
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Just a random thought that has no relevance to anything.
I just gotta love it when someone tries to impress me with the Rollypolly Rebbe (or enter in this space the name of some other random and unheard of village in Europe) he’ll tell me, with a look on his face as if he is divulging to me “inside information” that should be taken lightly, do I know that So n’ SO taught him to read a kvittel?! Aaaaaah, the secret of “leinin a kvittel”! We, the simple folks, don’t know much about those things, but we know that it has to be written on unlined paper, in the exact format that has been given over generation after generation, lest the rebbe not be able to “see” the things he is supposed to see! We don’t want the interference that can be caused from the lines on ruled paper, because the “kvittel thing” won’t work!
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As long as you won’t come up with a coherent thesis “exactly” how it all started, from the Big Bang or the Primordial Soup, God is still your best answer.
As long as you cant explain why the Bible is the most printed book of all time and even in our evolved and advanced times it is still so obsessed about, debated, refuted, analyzed, whilst every other god from the Greeks’ Zeus to the Romans Jupiter all have been eradicated, dismantled and forgotten, God is still your best answer.
As long as you cant explain why 95% of Americans still rather believe in a God, while Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett “The four horsemen” keep on venting their frustrations as to why so little people buy evolution theories, God is still your best answer.
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Absolutly Pimp,
As long as you cant explain why the majority of Americans still rather believe in a God and in his son, we all need to accept jesus christ as our saviour, into our lives.
Amen.
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You’re a wonderful writer and obviously a very intelligent individual; however, there’s a fundamental problem with this article. You’re pretending as though the people who believe in God claim to know this for a fact (I can’t speak for that friend of yours). The truth is, those of us who say Ani Mamin each day, explicitly indicate that we don’t know it for a fact, hence the word “believe” is used, which implies the absence of evidence. And that’s what being a Jew means: believing unconditionally (aminah peshita). If you want to discuss it from a scientific point-of-view, you may have us beaten, but that was never our claim.
On a side note: If you think about it, at the end of the day we’re both believers; you believe in the “big bang” and we believe in a God. The “big bang” is your stop-gap (although, the “big bang” doesn’t necessarily contradict Genesis, but that’s a different conversation).
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Thank you, Baal. You’ve said a number of very important things that every religious person needs to hear. And you’ve said them with a lot of tact and sensitivity. But there are a few more steps to go, ones which will make people a little more uncomfortable.
The sad, simple fact is that revealed religion, any revealed religion, is incompatible with science. You can’t have both. And despite the efforts of many of the faithful and kind-minded scientists to bridge that gap it simply can’t be done. Most of the attempts try to divide things up so that science is on one side of the mechitza and religion is on the other. But the barrier keeps getting moved, and never in a direction which gives religion more breathing room. It’s always losing ground and having to guard a smaller space more jealously.
Why? It comes down to how these two fields view the world.
Revealed religion starts with the Truth and works downward through authority and degeneration. The gods are up at the top, in sole possession of The Truth. Then come the angels or demigods, then prophets – usually safely in the past where they won’t upset the applecart – followed by holy men, clergy, legalists, members without titles and finally, down at the bottom, anyone who isn’t part of the Club.
Truth is revealed, and there’s less of it at each level. The gods are always right. The angels aren’t the gods, but they are also always right. The prophets are right when the gods tell them what to say. The holy men, priests, scribes and judges may not always be right, but they have the authority of those who are. And they spend more time closer to the truth than you do, so if there’s a disagreement you’re wrong and they’re right. Even the humblest of the Faithful is right compared to the wisest outsider because Members have a special spiritual something which makes them better or wiser.
The Revelation is inarguable. You must believe it, or you’re not in the Club. And if you’re not in the Club you are a heretic to whom the Faithful may not speak. There are responses to questions, and a bunch of tired old “challenges” to the religion which members learn to blast away at like so many fish in a barrel. But it all comes down to fear. Step out of line on fear of death. Put in cherem, killed as a heretic or give up an eternity of Good Stuff in the next world it all comes down to the same thing.
It’s all a matter of bowing to the right authority. And the one thing you may not do is question the authority or the basis for the authority. The one thing revealed religions have in common is a set of boundaries. This you shall not ask. This you shall not do. Pay no attention to the man behind the man behind the curtain.
Science approaches things very differently.
The whole point of science is asking questions. And it’s not a matter of asking the guy in charge something which he can look up. It’s asking questions to which there are no answers and trying to find out what’s going on. Observe. Change things and observe again. See how the results are different. Find a pattern. Find one which correctly predicts what is going to happen next. When you have an explanation which fits all the observed facts, correctly predicts things you haven’t seen and which gives insight into what is going on you have actual theory.
In science every explanation is the best you can do at the moment. A new observation or a better theory can force you to adjust your thinking, turn your lifetime’s work into a special case of another theory or tear it down the bare metal and throw it all away.
In fact, that’s assumed. Every scientist understands that his or her work is just one more step towards better understanding or a dead end which will have to be abandoned. Every observation will be refined. Every theory will be changed and, in time, replaced by something else. Newton’s mechanics and optics were the best we had three hundred years ago. We have better now. Three hundred years from now we will have better still.
It all comes down to giving it your best shot and being willing to live with uncertainty, knowing that the best you can hope for is that your work will someday become part of someone else’s.
One of my favorite Jewish authors put it beautifully:
“It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy – it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.” –Roger Zelazny in Lord of Light
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Entertaining stuff. Definately true when it comes to statements of fact, but there are plently of statements that are not descriptive in that sense. For example, there are at least 2 interpretations of bereishis in bereishis rabbo that understand the whole creation story as a parable for human history. There are plenty of allegorical intepretations of bereshis – and I know that some people will scream “apologetics!!!”, but that’s not my point. My point is that when haza”l read the story, and probably when its authors wrote it (yeah, there I go with the “authors” thing), the story was probably meant to say more about the world than just describe an event. So there is always something more to understand, even as we apply more effective empirical methods to understanding the actual history and make-up of the world around us.
But I have something more interesting to say. And it’s this: It always blows me away how much frum Jews dismiss secular studies as a waste of time, and talk about how academics know nothing – but then when somebody with an academic background becomes frum, they are so proud! They say, “You know, Rav Ployniberg was a professor of maths before he became frum. He definately one of the smartest people in the world!” It’s this fantastic attitude of being utterly torn between disdain and disgust on the one hand, and awestruck on the other. Amusing stuff.
An example: A friend of mine was in a litvish yeshiva, and had a rebbe who had an academic background. He kept on going on about how this guy knows physics, he knows everything. (I heard him give a couple of shiurim for baal tshuves, and he really didn’t know much beyond physics – i.e. in the world of human culture he was an amooretz.) But I was at university, so this friend had to give me a hard time. He said: “What do they know there? You know, I heard that at the Hebrew University [where I was studying at the time] they have a WOMAN who’s a professor of Talmud [pronounced with lots of spit, as opposed to Gemara] who doesn’t even know how to read chumesh!” Now this is ridiculous. The guy had never been to the Hebrew University, he’d never met anyone from there other than me, he didn’t know anything about the place… I had to assure him that they know chumash (“prove it! You can’t!”), and that for a woman to get through the Talmud department (which is a men’s club) she’d need to know shas pretty bloody well.
The truth is, it was only afterwards that it struck me that the sexism of his statement was even worse than his misconceptions about universities.
So yeah, love and hate relationship. Or worship and piss-on-it.
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Well said (as usual) but nothing really new for many of us who’ve been around the block; except for that great shtickel about the delay in the angels response!
Alter Ego, the’re not much here, in this brief post, that contradicts a God. But the point is, IMO, even in the unlike event there’s a creator God, the stories religion tells and the explanations for nature are just simply irrelevant and simply untrue.
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How does the idea of truth only being found through the process of disprovable hypothesis work when trying to decide if something is a “true” historical fact, or a “truthful” understanding of a piece of poetry or literature?
Im not attacking!!!!, just asking. Ive been stuck on this one for a while.
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too long, didn’t read.
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Chossid Ex, that’s why history is a difficult discipline. The short answer is that you look for evidence. Birth and death records. Documents from nearby communities from around the time of the supposed event. Physical evidence like pottery shards and arrow points. Genetic markers and blood groups. There’s a thousand things you can investigate to try and find evidence for or against a hypothesis.
Proving a negative is generally impossible. But you can accumulate enough evidence to be reasonably sure, provisionally. Let’s take the whole Noahide flood nonsense. Given the Biblical time frame we find that:
1) We know what floods look like geologically. No evidence.
2) We have a certain amount of historical documentation of the period from other parts of the world. There’s continuity of settlement and no mention of such an event.
3) Look at the numbers for world population at various times after the purported flood. Realize that starting with a population of less than twenty people you’d need every woman constantly pregnant with litters of twenty for decades.
4) Examine continuously-living organisms like creosote bushes in the American Southwest that couldn’t survive immersion.
5) And hundreds of others.
Eventually you say “There’s no evidence this happened. Unless you come up with something that explains everything we know about history, geology, physics, botany, population biology, genetics and paleoanthropolgy better than what we have now, passes the basic science sniff tests and supports your hypothesis sane people will reject it.”
Sometimes it isn’t that easy. Consider the Kennedy assassination.
Other times it’s pretty cut and dried. How do we know the details of the Norman invasion of Britain? A lot of people in the day were writing about it independently – kings, secretaries, Church officials. People at the time made artwork about it like the Bayeaux tapestry. There is a verifiable archeological record of a bunch of Norman and Saxon bodies and armor at Hastings consistent with a big battle there around 1066 CE. Then there’s a replacement of Saxon documents with Norman French ones – the ones that weren’t Latin of course, a spreading influx of French artifacts and so on.
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Lefk, it’s too bad you found the article “too long”. It was as short as it could be and still cover so many of the important points. Not everything can be written in 300 words or less.
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BD the first time I read this article, I was amused at just having discussed these same issues with a certain someone.
Then I re-read it, and through using “hypothesys” I came up with a “theory” (if you know what I mean) that you just insulted me in public, you didn’t bother to enclose that I agreed with almost everything you said, and even after I left I Dismissed kaplan and slifkin as a bunch of non-sense, what I don’t understand is I told you I always read this blog but you didn’t bother to disguise your identity. Btw I wrote an article of my side of the story, and although I’m not a writer, I hope they will publish it so you can see what I said is true.
But of course it’s all in good humor, I really enjoyed our extensive discussion.
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Always amusing how non-scientists attempt to use science to prove there is no G-d.
Science is only as good as current technology. You yourself admit that what we know today can and probably will be overturned in the future. Yet you cling to what science seemingly proves.
The black swan and the null hypothesis. There is hardly any research today that proves anything as fact. It is much safer to say most swans are white than to say there are no black swans. The former statement will never be disproved, regarding the latter, all it takes is one black swan to render the hypothesis invalid.
You only take science as fact, because you only live on this world for 100 or so years. The greatest scientists from 200 years ago, if around today preaching their same thoughts, would be considered fools. The same for you in 200 years from now.
When science comes across an “unnecessary” organ or an aberration in nature, the findings cause an “enlightened” one to conclude there must be no G-d – or a G-d that makes mistakes. Yet only time will tell if they are really unnecessary or not. Sickle cell disease, or any thalassemia seems pretty harsh. Yet it protects millions from the harmful affects of the malaria-causing Plasmodium species.
As Alter Ego pointed out, it is called believing in G-d – it is something that cannot be proven. But to say that you are more logical because you live the scientific way is taking a myopic view of the universe and history. Science always changes – live by its word if you must but realize that it can very well be that it is you who is not the logical one.
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Sweetest Baal,
How do you prove that this very way of proving things is true???
“Arvoch Arva Tzurich” Af Tzvas Bi’Tzvas Assuyah”. Or as Reb Yoselle Heller would have it “Catch 22″.
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Far Frum It,
As BD and I have said, you hardly ever prove anything in science. As you say, black swans. Mostly you disprove and discard explanations. What you can do is accumulate a lot of evidence, to the point where you can say “To the limits of our ability to measure and experiment this is the best explanation. You’re going to have to do a lot of work to come up with something better.”
But then, scientists understand that it’s a moving target. You’re always going for the best you can.
What’s really ridiculous are religious people saying “You don’t know everything, so our beliefs are just as good as the evidence and the theory.” One approach says “I want this to be true, so it must be true.” The other says “This is the best we’ve got. It’s better than anything else so far. Come back and talk when you can do better.”
Flat earth? Nope.
Lice come from sweat? Nyet.
Mice spontaneously generated from mud? Not even.
Evil spirits cause disease? Sorry, the germ theory really does work better.
Only seven planets, one moon and the Sun stuck in crystal spheres orbiting the Earth? The world has moved on. Read Kepler and Newton.
Gods required for explaining the variety of life? Not any more.
And so on.
In all of these cases we know better now. And we have every confidence that we will do better in the future. That’s the real difference
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The worst are the religious apologists who use the latest scientific buzzwords to validate their revelation. I’ve had to hold my tongue in private and quietly warn rabbis, shaykhs and priests in private about this one.
Science is an approach. As such it’s a moving target. If people say “Science proves my religion” they are bound to be embarrassed down the road. When theory changes they are left in an unenviable position.
They must either change the religion to fit the new science or engage in some truly heroic backfilling and rationalization. This is usually along the lines of “Scientific understanding stops here. It was all good until we got to this point. But anything past that is heresy.”
In short, it’s bad science and bad religion.
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Todd
You couldn’t have said it better, the religious people who don’t even look at science, will still be able to do so hundred years from now, but the banned apologists, will be the biggest fools at that point.
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Todd, why will they be the biggest fools? Is Ptolemy considered a fool? Is Tycho Brahe considered a fool? Their theories were incorrect. Obviously, our universe is not geocentric and planets orbit elliptically, but we still regard them as brilliant guys. And they were. Their fallacious hypotheses served as building blocks for future studies, which led us to the considerable knowledge at our disposal today.
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The difference is whether you make a theory, or you say that’s what god said, imo that was also the babilonion scholars’ mistake, taking current (then) scientist theory and building god’s word around it, and now years later we realize that it was all made up by humens built on primitive knowladge, if not for that mistake we all here would have still suffered from religion, now that’s what I call divine providence.
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Bethany, you underline my point very nicely. Science builds on the past. Those who came before were hardly fools. They did the best they could with what they had. Everything we have now is built on what they accomplished.
What is foolish is taking a snapshot of how we believed the world worked at some time in the past and freezing it, saying “Beyond this point you shall not question. Past these walls you may not look. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” When your fall-back position for everything you can’t understand is “The gods did it” instead of an honest “I don’t know. Let’s find out” you will almost certainly strangle human progress by turning the asking of questions into blasphemy.
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Todd, sorry, I just noticed that I responded without reading properly. You didn’t make the *biggest fools* comment, and it actually wasn’t meant as I thought. So yes, we agree.
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Todd, from what I’ve seen, you think clearly and express yourself clearly, and with dignified moderation, too. If you haven’t written professionally on topics that interest you, you might consider doing so. If you have published something, I’d be interested in knowing more about that.
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Todd,
You claim that it is more logical to live your life based on science because at least there is a methodology to its teachings. Yet we all agree that it is highly probable that many of those teachings will be deemed irrelevant or false in the future.
Don’t get me wrong – I always live my life based on what science tells me. I just think it illogical to say that science, because of its tested methods, always trumps religion – after all, we are but living for 100 years in a universe billions of years old. There is enough subjective logic to live your life by the word of an unproven G-d than to live by the word of an inevitably false science.
You write:
‘“Beyond this point you shall not question. Past these walls you may not look. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” When your fall-back position for everything you can’t understand is “The gods did it” instead of an honest “I don’t know. Let’s find out”’
What is wrong with saying that G-d did it? This is an answer that can explain everything, but it is only used to explain everything by fanatics. I believe G-d wants us to use our intellect to discover the hidden secrets of the natural world and this is the role of science. You falsely assume that science contradicts G-d while the opposite is true – it enhances Him. Science can explain many things – but what it cannot, there is nothing wrong with saying that it is by the hand of G-d. Science can explain a lot, for everything else there’s G-d.
It all boils down to the basic foundation of faith – do you believe in G-d or not?
But please don’t ridicule those that believe.
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Todd
You couldn’t have said it better, the religious people who don’t even look at science, will still be able to do so hundred years from now, but the banned apologists, will be the biggest fools at that point.
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FarFrumIt, it’s not specific scientific results which are the issue. It’s the approach to the truth – or at least our best limited attempt to get closer to it.
This may come as a surprise. I am not an atheist. I believe in what is beyond our comprehension, the numinous, that which still is when everything we have made up is stripped away. I see its fingerprints in the spin of atoms, the deaths of stars, a lover’s touch and the colors at the edge of shadows. My reasons for belief in the One I believe in are personal and to a great degree subjective, so it would be wrong to ask anyone to take them on faith. On the other side pure mechanistic materialism is an act of faith just as much as pure theism and just as unprovable.
Did God do it? Ultimately yes, I believe in that which we call God. But it is just belief. It is not knowledge. That belief can change as we learn more. If it turns out to be wrong, if the boundaries of what we must abandon include everything we thought had to be Divine that’s fine. I will have been incorrect which is the ultimate fate of every explanation. If it turns out Mumbo Jumbo God of the Congo was really in charge the whole time we’re all screwed
When anyone, even the wisest, draws an eternal line and says “On this side is what we can explain. On that side we say God did it,” it leads in one direction. The mileposts are the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, Stalin, the Klan, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung and the Taliban. They are written in the blood of prophets and of the little child who said the Emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes.
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Todd,
“Did God do it? Ultimately yes, I believe in that which we call God. But it is just belief. It is not knowledge. That belief can change as we learn more. If it turns out to be wrong, if the boundaries of what we must abandon include everything we thought had to be Divine that’s fine.”
Ahhhh, so this is where we differ. You don’t really believe – you just use it as an explanation for that which you cannot understand. As such, it is only logical that your belief should change if evidence points against G-d. I believe in G-d (not to confuse modern-day Judaism with G-d) because, well, I believe. And there is enough subjective logic in that belief that nothing can really be done to change it. (i.e. Lets say I believe in Judaism and the truth of the literal Bible. Who cares that there is no evidence of a global flood ever occurring or that 600,000 Jews left Egypt. This does not concern me in the slightest, it just adds to the ever-growing list of things my puny human intellect cannot explain.)
“If it turns out Mumbo Jumbo God of the Congo was really in charge the whole time we’re all screwed
”
Oh yes we are!!!
“The mileposts are the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, Stalin, the Klan, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung and the Taliban.”
I am actually surprised you included Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung – some of the authors of the greatest wars in history – yet not religious (more like communist). And I’ll raise you Ghengis Khan and Adolf Hitler. Lets not make believe that all wars are in the name of G-d. Definitely not the “Jewish” G-d.
It seems your only concern is with the “approach to the truth.” I maintain that if the scientific path does not lead to the truth anyways, it makes no difference if the approach was done with an open mind. It might not be inferior to, but it definitely does not trump the religious approach.
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Not quite, FarFrumIt.
When I see something I don’t understand my response is “We don’t know what happened here. Let’s figure out what happened and why.” Every explanation starts off unproven and continues that way until the weight of evidence and the quality of the explanation are sufficient. And even then it can be changed.
As for God, I believe, as I said, for reasons which are sufficient for me. But it is nothing on which I would ask anyone else to base his or her faith.
Your position is somewhat different. Every unknown starts off as a miracle. “God did it.” Any other explanation must first pry the facts away from a fallback position to which you are emotionally attached rather than intellectually convinced. It is based, as you say, on “I believe because I believe.”
I believe because I believe is not just weak intellectually. It makes for a weak and immature faith as well. “Just because” is the protestation of a child, not the mature and grounded faith of a spiritually mature adult.
Belief doesn’t just spring up from nowhere. It comes from somewhere, from what your parents taught you, from learning Torah, from trust in people who tell you things, from experience, from still small voices and burning bushes. An inability to recognize that makes any progress or even meaningful conversation difficult. If the source of a belief is wrong it makes it impossible to identify and correct it or even to figure out where it rightfully applies.
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…continuing on…
I mention modern atheistic monsters as well as religious ones because they are more current and more emotionally accessible to a modern audience. It’s also out of compassion for the audience. Religion’s track record is abysmal. And the history of the Abrahamic religions is about as bad as it gets.
“Blessed is he who takes their babies and dashes their heads against the rocks.”
“Leave not one stone upon another.”
Kill the cattle, the men, the children, but leave enough captive girls to rape.
“Kill them all. The Lord will know his own.”
“Burn them. If their words are in the Quran they are redundant. If they are not in the Quran they are blasphemy.”
“They ought to know the yoke of perpetual enslavement because of their guilt. See to it that the perfidious Jews never in the future become insolent, but that they always suffer publicly the shame of their sin in servile fear.”
Multiply by ibn Wahab, the pogroms, stone-throwing charedim and so on.
You really don’t want to go there. Trust me.
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Todd: “Blessed is he who takes their babies and dashes their heads against the rocks.”
I must take exception to your depiction of this verse. As far as I know, scholars consider this an emotional outburst, not to be taken at face value. It is regarded as antithetical to biblical theology. If the Psalmist (or editor) were into contemporary political correctedness, he would surely have removed it. In fact, Rav Oshry utters this statement in his sefer in reference to a horrific Nazi act, and his translator has wisely chosen to remove it. Nobody thinks Rav Oshry genuinely wished to see innocent children, even children of Nazis, being bashed against walls. Such statements are an outcry of a heart so anguished, it can barely endure the pain. To portray it as if this is truly what the Bible wants is deceiving.
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Laura, this is part of why I emphasized modern proponents of non-theistic philosophies. Using examples from their sacred texts and revered religious figures is bound to make people uncomfortable and side-track the discussion.
Maybe the psalmist didn’t really mean it. But he allowed the verses to be preserved, and they were eventually written down and made canonical. That’s just one tiny example out of many where religions – ours no more or less – are blood thirsty, murderous and preach destruction to the outsider.
It’s not a Jewish thing. It’s a human thing. When we create gods in our own image they usually don’t represent the best of ourselves. My rant about “Deep Idolatry and the Mirror in the Ark” is one for another time. Suffice it to say there’s a reason the mystics say the most insidious form of that particular sin is making an idol out of your religion.
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Tim Minchin says it better. And is a much bigger curmudgeon than I could ever hope to be:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_htqDCP-s&feature=player_embedded
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basicaly you have a point but how can i know that you`re right?
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