I finally finished the first phase of writing my book! I've
finished collecting and organizing my notes. The notes are culled from books,
articles, and blog posts I've read, and from things I've written. I'm
constantly finding new articles, and there's probably ten books on my current
reading list that are relevant to the book I'm writing, but I have to stop
collecting notes and start writing at some point. If I wait until I collect
every piece of relevant writing, it will never end. The (semi-) final page
count for my notes is 1,236 pages, among which is enough information to fill
out all of the points I want to address in the book.
The following is a summary of the book as it is now laid out:
Apikorsis!: Reasonable Doubts Regarding Orthodox Judaism,
Religion, and God.
Part One: Introduction
Chapter
1: Why I Wrote This Book
The book is, first and foremost, an answer to the canard
that people leave Orthodoxy because they are weak-willed hedonistic cretins who
can't control their taivos and throw off the ol hatorah to excuse their wallowing
in the fleshly pleasures of the world. It shows, at length, that there are
kashas that aren't terutzim, that it is reasonable to conclude that Orthodoxy
is incorrect, and that the many, many intellectual problems with frumkeit aren't
just weak excuses.
Part Two: Thinking About Religion
Chapter
2: Heresy
Truth and the idea of apikorsis are incompatible. If something
is true, then it is, and if it's not, nothing is gained by making it a sin to
think it. Apikorsis is only a useful idea if it's more important to hold
ideologically correct ideas than it is to hold true ideas. Labeling dissenting
ideas "heresy" is an attempt to protect beliefs through ignorance and
to bully dissenters into silence.
Chapter
3: Epistemology
Before we can determine if Orthodoxy is the truth, we have
to establish how we know what the truth is. This chapter contrasts revealed
religious epistemology, where there are pre-determined conclusions for which
evidence is collected, and the method (ideally) used in science and academia,
where evidence is collected first and conclusions drawn from what is found.
Chapter
4: Critical thinking, Cognitive Biases, and Logical Fallacies
This chapter explores formal and informal logic, common mistakes
in thinking, probability, and how to evaluate the truth of a claim.
Part Two: Orthodox Judaism
Chapter
5: Orthodoxy's Authenticity
Orthodoxy claims that it is the only correct form of
Judaism, essentially unchanged since the Torah was given on Har Sinia and
uninfluenced by the surrounding culture. This chapter shows that every one of
those claims is not true. There have been many forms of Judaism over the millennia,
none of which can be said to be more legitimate than any other; many aspects of
Orthodox Judaism would be unrecognizable to Jews of the past; and Judaism has
always been and continues to be a syncretistic religion that shares ideas with
the cultures in which it finds itself. Orthodoxy as it is now is the most
similar of the modern forms of Judaism to what traditional Judaism was just
before the modern era, but like the other streams of modern Rabbinic Judaism,
it has its origins as a reaction to modernity.
Chapter
6: Orthodoxy's Peculiarities
Orthodoxy has some idiosyncratic ideas, both sociological and metaphysical.
Among these are the parochialism of the frum world, in which it imagines it is
better than the rest of society and that everyone else is obsessed with what
frum people do; the slide-to-the-right and the escalating adoption of restrictive
chumros; the doctrine of Daas Torah; and the strange idea that every generation
is contemptible compared its predecessors.
Chapter
7: The Women's Section
This chapter addresses the role of women in Orthodoxy. It
includes issues such as women's secondary place in halacha and frum society,
the misogyny that is woven through halacha, and the hypocritical objectification
of women under the banner of tznius, which claims to change the focus from a
woman's sexuality to her inner attributes while focusing exclusively on how well
she hides her sexuality.
Chapter
8: Arguments for Orthodoxy
My mother's uncle's cousin's stepdaughter had an amazing
thing happen to her. Mamish a nes! That proves Orthodoxy is true! And surely
all the great rabbonim of the past and the gedolim of today are smarter than we
are, and they all believed! Shouldn't we rely on them, and accept that Orthodoxy
is true? No, we shouldn't, because how smart someone is has little to do with
how likely they are to be right. And people of every religion have miracle
stories, most if not all the result of the way the person experiencing them
frames the world and misunderstands probability. Nor do the positive attributes
of the frum community or its demographic success give us good reason to think
that frumkeit is the truth.
Part Three: Judaism
Chapter
9: The Kuzari Proof
The Kuzari is often *the* proof people rely on to show that
Judaism is true. This chapter lays out the premises of the Kuzari Proof and
shows in detail why each one is mistaken. If any of the Kuzari's premises are
wrong, then the Proof is invalid. As it turns out, every one of the premises is
wrong, and the Kuzari is useless.
Chapter
10: Factual Inaccuracies in Our Foundational Texts
This chapter discusses some of the inaccuracies in Tanach
and the Talmud, from the incorrect order of Creation to the gemara's acceptance
of spontaneous generation to mistaken ideas about how babies are made, and much more. It also addresses
the "explanations" given by traditionalists, from essentially
claiming the world was created five minutes ago to shunting all the inconvenient
claims off into an unknowable inaccessible "higher" reality where
these mistakes are all really the truth.
Chapter
11: Torah Shebichsav (TSBK) and Modern Biblical Scholarship
In the frum world, Biblical Criticism is usually dismissed
as a silly attempt at undermining the truth of the Torah. If only the Bible
Critics could read the meforshim, they would understand that Torah is emes!
This chapter explains that academics can and do read the meforshim, and shows
why the academics come to the conclusion that the Torah is a composite work. It
discusses some of the many examples of Sumerian and Egyptian mythology in the
Torah, and traces the development of Tanach from oral Israelite myths to the
seventh-century BCE redaction of the Torah to the canonization of the Masoretic
text.
Chapter
12: The Development of Torah Shebaal Peh (TSBP)
I've heard Orthodox opinions on the divinity of TSBP that
range from an insistence that every sefer ever written was given to Moshe on
Har Sinai to that Moshe was only given a set of rules for interpreting the
written Torah. This chapter traces the development of the concept of an
authoritative Oral Tradition and the development of the tradition itself.
Chapter
13: The Historical Development of Judaism in the Ancient World
No one really knows what the origins of the Jewish people
are. This chapter begins with plausible speculation about Jewish origins in the
Canaanite highlands, and moves from there onto firmer ground with a discussion
of the development of Jewish monotheism and the impact of galus Bavel and
Judaism's exposure to Zoroastrianism.
Chapter
14: Proofs for Judaism
The most common proof for Judaism, after the Kuzari Proof,
is the Argument from Jewish Survival. This chapter opens with a discussion of
Jewish survival and the mundane, if unusual, conditions that allowed Jews to
survive for millennia as a distinct people. This chapter also addresses other
popular arguments for Judaism, such as Bible codes, the supposedly humanly
impossible complexity of the Talmud, and, for a good dose of Jewish guilt, the
Argument from Jewish Martyrs.
Chapter
15: Question From Other Religions
This is perhaps the greatest argument against emunah
peshutah. There are people all over the world who sincerely hold different religious
beliefs. Often, the beliefs of different groups are mutually exclusive, which
means that at least some of these people must be wrong. What are the odds that
we happened to be born into the one religion that got it all right?
Part Four: God
Chapter
16: What is "God?"
Before we can discuss whether or not there's sufficient reason
to think that God exists, we have to figure out what we mean by
"God." This chapter discusses various conceptions of God, including polytheistic
ideas, the God of Tanach, and currently acceptable frum ideas of what God is.
It also discusses where the idea of God might have come from if He doesn't
exist, and how we might go about determining if there's reason to think that He
does.
Chapter
17: Morality and the Problem of Evil, or The Most Common Argument Against God's
Existence
One of the common arguments for God is that if there is no
God, there is no objective morality, and so God must exist. Of course, it could
be that there is no God and there is no objective morality, however much we may
want morality to be objective. Nor can
God have anything to do with an objective morality, something we've known since
Plato. From the Argument from Morality, we move to the Problem of Evil, which
asks how there can be evil in the world if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and
omni-benevolent. Various theodicies are discussed which try to reconcile the
existence of evil with a tri-omni God. One of the most common theodicy is that
evil is necessary for us to have free will, and we look at whether we actually
have free will in this deterministic universe of ours. Finally, we look at the
empirical evidence. Was the world more moral in the past, when religion was
taken for granted, and has morality been declining along with the decline of
the centrality of religion in society, as religious demagogues often claim?
Chapter
18: The Argument From Design, or The Most Common Argument For God's Existence
Rashi cribbed from Aquinas when he said that just as a house
points to its builder, so the world points to a Creator. The complexity of the
universe and of life, and the fine-tuning of the world to allow for life, is
the most common argument for the
existence of God. This chapter explains why complexity doesn't in itself point
to a Creator, and gives an overview of evolution as an alternative explanation
for how the complexity of life arose.
Chapter
19: Other Arguments for God
This chapter covers many of the arguments for God's
existence, among them the argument that
the universe had to have a cause, and that cause is God; that there are many
things we don't understand, and God is the explanation for those things; the
argument that there are many immaterial concepts, like love, that we accept are
real, and so we should also accept that God is real; and what for many people
is the most convincing reason to believe in God, personal experiences that leave
them sure that they know God is real.
Part Five: The Baby and the Bathwater
Chapter
20: Pragmatic Religion
Even if God isn't real and religion isn't true, religion
provides all sorts of benefits. And anyway, shouldn't we be frum, just in case
it turns out that it's all true after all? No. The answer is no. It's true that
religion does all sorts of useful things, but pretty much all of those things
can be accomplished without religion, and religion has too many costs to justify
pretending it's true in order to keep its benefits.
Chapter
21: Going OTD
This chapter explores the various reasons why people leave
the frum community, what they experience when leaving, and what the frum
community tells itself about those who leave.
Afterword
So after all this, is there anything that could make me believe
in frumkeit again? And is there any value in being Jewish? I think the answer
to first question is it's possible, but incredibly unlikely. The answer to the second
question is that I can only speak for myself, but I don't think that being
Jewish loses its value as an identity without the belief in Judaism. And I
think that the overwhelming majority of Jewish people would agree with me.
These are some other ideas for a cover I've been playing with:
