The Second Son

God the Locksmith

2012-01-30T12:54:00.001-08:00

Last night I was installing a lock for a customer when I had help from God.

They had given me an old lock that they had taken off of their front door asked me to install it on the back door. The back door already had a (broken) lock, so it was just a matter of swapping the broken one for the good one. Normally it’s a quick job, but this lock was giving me trouble. I just couldn’t get it to work properly. Either the inside part worked, or the outside part, but they wouldn’t both work at the same time. After fiddling with it for a half hour, I was ready to give up. My hand was hurting from holding the two halves of the lock together around the edge of the door, and I had run out of ideas. The quote from Einstein that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” was running through my head.

I figured I would leave the working lock in the door to cover the holes and go tell them that it was beyond my skill level. As I tightened the screws that held the lock in place, I thought that a believer might be praying for God’s help at this point. How nice it would be if there was a God to reach down for me and miraculously make the lock work! Once the lock was in place, I decided to try it one more time, on the off chance that I’d finally gotten it right. Surprisingly, it worked!

So, did I get help from God? Or is it just a coincidence: as a result of the culture I grew up in and my penchant for theological musings, I happened to be thinking about God miraculously helping me just before I accidentally got the lock’s mechanism in the right configuration?

On the one hand, were someone to tell me that they base their religious beliefs on experiences like the one above, I would dismiss it as ridiculously weak. We are conditioned to appeal to God in nearly every situation. Inevitably some of the time things will happen to work out, and it will be attributed to God. On the other hand, an experience like this one is pretty powerful. I can see why a believer would see discounting it as perverse. Logic is one thing; direct experience is another. For someone who is used to seeing the Divine in the world (and who isn’t inclined to philosophically examine every event in their lives), it seems obvious that only a terribly misguided or evil person would ignore such direct experiential evidence of God.

We’re Too Late

2011-12-18T14:27:00.000-08:00

Last night I was sitting in my living room, trying out the new recliner I just bought (very comfortable!) and reading “The Hebrew Goddess” by Raphael Patai when I had an awful realization: the fanatics already won! Those of us who bemoan the slide-to-the-right are thousands of years too late.

When I was a kid in school learning Navi the impression I always got was that the people the neviim denounced as evil idol worshipers were the exception, aberrations from the normative worship of Hashem in the Beis Hamikdash. Unfortunately, these few had strayed, and even more unfortunately, at times the idol worshipers were a significant portion of the Bnei Yisroel, but most people most of the time were exemplars of Jewish faith, pious people who we would be happy to welcome into our communities.

Is seems that this impression, like so many others, is wrong. The “The Hebrew Goddess” contends that the majority of the people the majority of the time worshipped “Yaweh and his Asherah,” and often other gods as well. Asherah, the Canaanite mother goddess who is the villainess of Talmudic polemics, was worshipped by virtually everyone as Hashem’s wife. Statues of her, referred to as “Asherahs,” were everywhere: small clay figurines in people’s homes, large pillar-like wooden statues in public spaces on baamos (high places) and under trees, and most shocking of all, in nearly permanent residence in the Beis HaMikdash. The author points out that:

“We find that the worship of Asherah, which had been popular among the Hebrew tribes for three centuries, was introduced into the Jerusalem temple by King Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, in or about 928 BCE. Her statue was worshipped in the Temple for 35 years, until King Asa removed it in 893 BCE. It was restored to the Temple by King Josh in 825 BCE, and remained there for a full century, until King Hezekiah removed it in 725 BCE. After an absence of 27 years, however, Asherah was back again in the Temple: this time it was King Manasseh who replaced her in 698 BCE. She remained in the Temple for 78 years, until the great reformier King Joshiah removed her in 620 BCE. Upon Joshiah’s death eleven years later (609 BCE) she was again brought back into the Temple, where she remained until its destruction 23 years later, in 586 BCE. Thus it appears that, of the 370 years during which the Solomnic Temple stood ion Jerusalem, for no less than 236 years (or almost two-thirds of the time) the statue of Asherah was present in the Temple, and her worship was part of the legitimate religion approved and led by the king, the court, and the priesthood and opposed by only a few prophetic voices crying out against it at relatively long intervals.”

Entire generations lived and died while Asherah was in residence in the Beis Hamikdash. They saw her when they made their pilgrimages during the shalosh regalim. She was served by the kohanim, the rites passed from father to son to grandson without interruption. Worship of the divine couple WAS normative Judaism; the strict monotheism of the neviim was the aberration. Those calling for the removal of Asherah must have been regarded as fanatics, the lunatic religious fringe. Yet they won.

Imagine what it must have been like in those periods when the king was one of the fanatics. Royal troops tore down the sacred Asherah in the Beis Hamikdash, perhaps over the protests of the kohanim. Soldiers ranged the countryside, desecrating sanctuaries set up with local donations and destroying public places of worship. They raided people’s homes and seized Asherah figurines that may have been in the family for several generations. Far from the joyful return to pure Judaism that is portrayed in Nach, it was a time of religious persecution.

Nor did the people easily come to agree with the fanatics. Again and again, the Asherahs were destroyed by purist kings only to quickly spread again once the persecution of Asherah worship was lifted – and be destroyed yet again when another fanatical king came to power.

From the point of view of the average First-Temple-Era Jew, kings like Chezkiah and Yoshiyahu weren’t tzaddikim, but instead played the same role as the yevanim do in the Chanukah story: that of religious persecutor and villain. Just as the yevanim outlawed Jewish religious rituals and practices, so too these kings outlawed what were traditional religious rituals and practices for the majority of Jews. Just as the yevanim desecrated the Beis Hamikdash, these kings desecrated the temples of popular gods and goddesses, and destroyed the sacred objects dedicated to Asherah and Baal that were found within the Beis Hamikdash.

This was just the beginning. As the centuries have passed, practices have come and gone, but the trend has always been towards more restrictive, more layers of interpretation and of halachah, more liturgy, more ritual. Men and women, who once mingled in the courts of the Beis Hamikdash and may have engaged in ecstatic orgies inspired by viewing the erotic statue of the keruvim, were separated and the women eventually removed to balconies. Feast days became fast days, and ascetic customs once observed only by the especially pious became binding on everyone.

We bemoan the creeping chumras that we see now, but these are only the latest symptoms of this long trend. We are much too late. The fanatics already won.

Pragmatic Morality

2011-11-29T20:04:00.000-08:00

One of the many useful things that religion does is provide a framework for morality. If God has told us what is moral, then the sincere religious person can rest easy knowing that by following his religion’s dictates he is doing what is right.

Without religion it’s more difficult to define morality and to decide whether something is right or wrong. At that, without a divine mandate, the entire enterprise of determining what is moral is called into question. Why does is matter is something is moral? After all, what is considered “good” or “bad” is largely determined by a combination of social norms and biological instincts. Neither of those are important in a written-in-the-sky kind of way, so who cares whether something is moral or not! That the norms of my society or my instincts tell me that I shouldn’t do something is not in itself a reason not to do it.

I think both problems, creating a moral code and a reason to keep it, can be addressed by adopting a pragmatic approach. And I think that a good starting point for a pragmatic morality is the Golden Rule. As Hillel phrased it: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”

This is entirely pragmatic. If everyone follows the Rule, then we will all be treated well by everyone else – and that also provides the reason for behaving morally. I must behave morally because if I don’t, the system breaks down. It may be in my best interests at the moment, to, say, steal something from the grocery. If I do, though, then my fellows hano longer have motivation to treat me well – since they are treating me well in order that I treat them well – and the system breaks down. Inevitably, someone will steal from me – something that I don’t want to happen. Therefore I refrain from stealing from the grocery store in order to maintain the universal agreement that we all treat each other well.

The Golden Rule provides a simple, though not easy, basis for judging if an action is moral. If I were the person my action is affecting – not if I was in his place, but if I was him, with his likes and dislikes, his personality, his history, etc. – would I want to be treated that way? If yes the action is moral, if no then the action is immoral.

Of course, as with any moral system, there are gray areas. For example, giving a child a shot. The child certainly doesn’t want to be stuck with a needle, but it is in his best interest. Perhaps we could say that, if he knew that it was in his best interest, he would want it – except that forcing someone against their wish to do what we judge to be in their best interest is a dangerous road to go down. This needs more thought.

There is also the problem of bringing criminals to justice. A criminal who recognizes that what he did is wrong is not much of an issue. We look at it from his perspective, and try to treat him as we would want to be treated if we were caught doing something wrong. If I did something wrong, I would like understanding and compassion, but I recognize that there must be immediate consequences to deter people for whom the long-view of keeping things pleasant for everyone isn’t enough to keep them from breaking the moral code and ruining things for everyone else.

But what about someone who believes that what he did is right? I certainly wouldn’t want to be punished for something that I thought was the right thing to do. Not that I would want to be punished for something that I agree was the wrong thing, but there at least I can recognize the necessity of the punishment and acquiesce. And what about someone who ascribes to a different moral system? We cannot subject him to the consequences of the Golden Rule moral system – after all, we would not want to subjected to consequences under the rules of his moral system. This also needs more thought.

These are some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for a while. A fully-developed moral system is beyond the scope of a single blog post, and likely beyond my amateur attempts at philosophy. I kind of like this idea, though. Any thoughts on how to make it more coherent?

Choosing Biblical Friends

2011-11-23T06:20:00.000-08:00

Who would you rather hang out with, the great tzaddik Dovid HaMelech or Eisav HaRasha?

Let’s compare them:

Job
Dovid was a shepherd. Eisav was a hunter. Both involve killing animals, but shepherding involves caring for the animals, which is traditionally considered noble.

Marriage
According to the medrash, Eisav married idol-worshipers. Not ideal, perhaps, but it’s not like he had real options. Even his brother Yaakov’s father-in-law was an idol worshiper, and at least one of his wives believed in idols enough to steal her father’s in order to rob him of their powers.

David married the king’s daughter, all well and good. Later, though, he notices a hot girl bathing and arranges for her husband to be killed so that he can have her.

Fealty to father-figure

Eisav was devoted to his father, and often brought him food. David deposed his father-inlaw Shaul after committing treason and fighting for years alongside the Philistines, the Israelites’ mortal enemy.

Decorum

Eisav sells his birthright for a bowl of soup. He didn’t value it much, but even so, this seems rash. Still, it was Eisav’s to sell, and he didn’t actually do anything wrong. David dances before the aron and in his enthusiasm gives the crowd a good look at his privates – which both violates the halachos of tznius and isn’t appropriate behavior from anyone, let alone the king.

Battle
According to Rashi, Eisav killed Nimrod, the evil king who tried to barbeque his grandfather. David killed Goliath, a menacing enemy warrior, but a man about whom we otherwise know nothing. It’s entirely possible that Goliath was a better person than Nimrod. Yet for killing Nimrod, Eisav is denounced as a murderer, while for killing Goliath, David is praised as a hero.

Family Relationships
Eisav wants to kill Yaakov after the brashos are stolen from him, but eventually forgives his brother. Dovid son goes to war against him, and ends up dead.

Neither of these figures are paragons of virtue, but between the two of them, I’d rather hang out with the guy who has a good marriage and isn’t chasing other people’s wives, who’s good to his father, and who won’t inadvertently expose himself when he gets excited.

You know, like this.

Amateur Scholarship?

2011-11-19T21:20:00.001-08:00

Last week an acquaintance of mine, a yungerman at the local kollel, gave me a couple of pamphlets he had written, one on tznius and one on ahavas Hashem. He said that each was the result of several month’s work. I read them over Shabbos. If I had to sum up my impression in one word, it would be “amateur.”

I don’t know exactly where this person ranks on the “talmin chachom” scale, but he’s been in yeshiva for many years, gives shiurim… were he in a secular university, he’d have to be at the very least a PhD candidate. Yet the content of the pamphlets was a string of assertions and logical leaps. Granted, I think that the intended audience is high-schoolers, so I wasn’t expecting sophisticated arguments. On the other hand, I also wasn’t expecting the bulk of the content to rely on nebulous, undefined concepts and non-sequiturs.

I can only hope that these works are not representative of the general quality of “learning” in kollelim.

So now I have a decision to make. My instinct is to fisk the pamphlets and point out to him where he’s wrong.* If nothing else, it would lead to some interesting conversations. On the other hand, he told me that the pamphlets were “well received.” Is some interesting conversation worth criticizing his work? Not that I’m anybody who’s opinion he needs to be concerned with, but having your work criticized is never pleasant, no matter what the source.

*I wouldn’t presume to try to show that he’s halchicly wrong, or that other sources argue with his conclusions. I have no doubt that his command of the material is far better than my own. What I would point out is where the logic fails (or is non-existent) and where he is factually wrong.

Happy Birthday to Me…

2011-10-05T20:41:00.001-07:00

Well, it’s official. I’m a grown-up.

I have an incredible wife, adorable kids, a house, two cars, and a filing cabinet full of bills. I have a graduate degree (which I don’t get much use out of) and a fledgling business. I’ve moved away from the city of my childhood, to a community with norms and hashkafos I can tolerate, if not always agree with, made up of individuals I can relate to, and in time, perhaps become friends with. I have a nearly developed philosophy of life and have a fairly good idea of my competencies and weaknesses. My wife and I are self-reliant, and our only debt is the mortgage on the house.

None of that has anything to do with me being a grown-up. Sadly, my youth is a victim of man’s eternal enemy: time. I’m turning thirty.

When I was a kid, it seemed that adults knew everything. I was in my mid-teens when I had the realization that my parents were just people, like everyone else. I was in my mid-twenties when I realized that when they had been in their mid-twenties, when I was a little kid, they hadn’t had a clue. And neither did anyone else.

Somehow, it still seems that everyone knows more than I do. As if there was some memo that went around to everyone explaining how the world is supposed to work, and I wasn’t on the recipient list. I recently realized that I come across the same way to other people, even though I KNOW I know barely anything.

Take the blogosphere, for example. I read what other people write, and it seems like nearly everyone knows more about everything than I do. Then I read my own posts or comments, and I realize that I also sound like I know what I’m talking about. Of course, when I read my own comments I know that the assertive tone I have is an artifact of my writing style, that I’m always checking facts that I think I remember before posting, and that I occasionally have posted comments that I later realize were factually wrong.

I’m just a little kid, playing at being a grown-up. And I suspect that so is everyone else.

I’m getting old. The world my kids live in is so different than the one I grew up in.

I remember climbing up on a kitchen chair to reach the rotary phone on the kitchen wall. When we got a cordless phone, it was a big deal. It had a huge metal antenna on the base and a chunky plastic-encased antenna on the handset. My daughters have a toy cell phone that sings the ABCs. I remember when car phones and beepers were luxury items.

At that, it was only a few years ago that I saw a GPS for the first time, in a friend’s high-end car.

I grew up watching Sesame Street on a black-and-white TV in the kitchen, pre-Elmo. My older daughter went through an Elmo-obsessed stage, and has two singing-and-dancing Elmos, one talking Elmo, and a big stuffed Elmo doll.

My parents got their first computer, a 486 with a 500MB hard drive, when I was twelve. When I was in high school I taught myself how to use DOS. The guy in my class who was a computer geek had a computer in the dorm that ran on two five-and-a-half inch floppy drives, a bit of RAM, and had a monochrome CRT monitor. I got an internet connection in ’99. My kids learned how to use a mouse and keyboard almost before they could talk, and routinely play games online.

Ah. I have to go build a rocking chair so I can sit on my front porch and yell at the kids to keep off my lawn.

God the Programmer

2011-09-27T07:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday as I was walking my daughter home from school, my mind wandered and I found myself thinking about the mabul. Specifically, about how unfair it was for Hashem to punish everyone with death. After all, I reasoned to myself, if the product is defective, it’s the fault of the designer! If a computer programmer wrote a program which failed to function properly, it wouldn’t be reasonable to blame the program. Obviously, it’s the programmer’s fault. He messed up somewhere in the code, and he needs to fix it, not yell at his computer.

Then I had an epiphany. Hashem IS a programmer. And the mabul wasn’t a punishment. It was God saving the bits of the program that worked properly and deleting the faulty code so that He could try to fix the program.

Unfortunately, God isn’t a very good programmer.

With this perspective, so much makes sense.

God created the Universe (the program): In the beginning, God created the program. And the page was empty, blankness was on the monitor, and God’s fingers were hovering over the keyboard. And God typed, “Let there be light” and there was light. God saw that the code for simulating light effects was good, and He separated the light effects from the shadow effects. God called the light program “day” and the shadow program “night.” By then it was evening, and He powered down His computer until the morning – this was the first day.

God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent (more or less): He knows everything about the program and can see all of the results of the program (but doesn’t quite know why it’s not working properly); He can change the program as He wishes (but He’s not a very good programmer, so his code often doesn’t do quite what He wants it to); and He wants the ultimate good for the program, that is, for it to work properly (but individual pieces of the program are unimportant in themselves). He cares about and investigates the behavior of each part of the program, and is constantly involved in adjusting it.

There is a wonderful theodicy: Bad things generally are a result of bugs in the program. The plane crashes because of a bug. The little girl emerges from the wreckage without a scratch because God was furiously coding to try to fix the bug.

Other gods are software pirates who try to take credit for the program. This understandably upsets God.

And so on…

The Wisdom of the (Blogo)Spheres

2011-09-23T11:13:00.000-07:00

A new project: The Wisdom of the (Blogo)Spheres

Video Proves Afterlife!

2011-09-19T05:59:00.000-07:00

Yeah, right. If only.

A few days ago one of my friends posted a link on Facebook to this video.

In the video Rabbi Mizrachi claims that he will provide scientific proof of the existence of the afterlife. Always hopeful, I watched it. I didn’t bother watching the rest of the series. After rambling a bit and citing Torah sources, R’ Mizrachi outlines his five scientific proofs for the afterlife. They are:

1) Out-of-body experiences
2) Séances
3) Reincarnation
4) Hypnotic regression causing people to speak in languages they don’t understand
5) Two people inhabiting one body, by which I assume he means split-personality disorder.

The list is laughable. Even his proof from the Torah that there is an afterlife is hardly conclusive. He says that the Torah forbids us to communicate with the dead. This, he claims, proves that it is possible to speak to the dead, which in turn proves that there must be some sort of afterlife.

Unfortunately for him, this is not necessarily so. Many things in the Torah are polemics against idolatry. Communicating with the dead was common practice in many idolatrous cults of the Ancient Near East. The prohibition is as likely meant to prevent Jewish people from engaging in this idolatrous practice of their neighbors (despite it having no efficacy) as it is meant to prevent actual communication with the dead.

I had never heard of R’ Mizrachi, and at first I figured he was just some local rav who had decided to give a hashkafa lecture and had it filmed. But no, it turns out that he has his own kiruv organization, with its own website with many lectures purporting to PROVE that Judaism is right scientifically and theologically.

What little I’ve seen of his lectures show that it’s not even worth debunking. I mean, going through it might be fun, and picking stuff like this apart is good for my ego, but there’s no real accomplishment in picking such low-hanging fruit. And yet, Rabbi Mizrachi’s bio claims that one of his videos was distributed to more than 200,000 people, he’s given 4,000 lectures, and his Facebook page has 56,000 friends and over 1,000,000 hits a month. In the tiny frum world, those are celebrity stats.

Bad science and terrible “proofs” from kiruv organizations is hardly news. Being confronted by something like this video, though, brings home just how bad it can be and highlights that sad state of popular Orthodox theology.

Country Music

2011-09-14T07:38:00.000-07:00

I’ve started listening to music on the radio recently (over the last few months), and it’s been a new experience for me. As I wrote here, growing up I only listened to Jewish Music. Even when I started listening to non-Jewish music in my early twenties, it was mostly older songs. Recognizing the music I hear from too-loud car stereos, in stores, or even what was played during the 4th of July fireworks show is a strange new experience.

I mostly listen to country music, which I discovered that I liked way back when I was dating my wife and would put the radio on during the long drive from my house to hers. While there are a fair number of songs about pickup trucks (which I don’t own) and beer (which I don’t like), many songs are about family and living life. I identify with a lot of these songs in a way I never did with pasukim put to music.

For instance, there’s this song about a guy who takes his daughter fishing and talks about how he’s building memories with her. I often think about how my kids will remember their childhoods, and me, when they’re adults. Songs like this speak to me.

There’s this one, about a guy who works hard to support his family.

And this one, about a guy who’s applying for a job so he can take care of his kids.

There are songs about being a parent, like this one about a woman dealing with her daughters being typical teenagers, and which makes me think about what my two daughters will be like in a few years.

And songs about missing family who have passed away, like this one about a guy who misses his grandfather and wishes he could take his family on a day trip to Heaven so his kids could meet their great-grandfather.

There are also the raunchy songs my high-school rabbeim polemicized against, like this one, which is actually rather clever.

And this one, which of all songs is the one that my four-year-old daughter leant most of the lyrics to.

There are songs about small-town American culture, or at least the idealized version of it, which are remarkably similar to aspects of idealized frum culture. Like this song about a guy who goes out of his way to buy American to support ”his” people, just as many frum people will shop at frum businesses to help support their owners.

There are songs about 9/11 which are far better than the single sappy song I can think of that came out of the frum music industry.

There’s this one, which has a triumphant ring.

And then there’s this one, which can break your heart. My oldest is four, about the same age the girl in the song would have been in 2001. I heard it on the radio once, and I can’t bring myself to listen to it again. I’m not an overly sentimental guy, but anything to do with kids always gets to me. Especially now, when I have kids of my own. This song made me cry, something that no repetitive Hebrew song has ever done, however beautiful its melody may have been.

Babylonian names = Jewish insight?!

2011-09-05T10:58:00.000-07:00

Babylonian Calendar

It’s that time of year again. It’s Ellul, and I’ve been bombarded with vertlach that darshan the name of the month to produce cute riffs on the theme of teshuva and closeness to Hashem. This is despite the undisputed (pagan) Babylonian origin of the names of the months of the Jewish calendar, and that most of the d’vrei torahs’ wordplays only work in Hebrew.

Now, I would have no complaints if these divrei torah were presented as clever mnemonic devices or inspirational quips meant merely to remind us of the significance of the month. Instead, they are presented with the unstated assumption that the intrinsic flavor of the time of year is reflected in the name of the month.

The last time I mentioned this phenomenon, I did a Google search for “Ellul” and found a Mesopotamian god named Enlil/Elil, whose name I assumed was the origin of “Ellul.” Since then I’ve learned a bit more about mythology and have done a bit more research into month-names, and it turns out I was wrong.

The names of the months on the Jewish calendar come from the Babylonian names by way of Akkadian. Akkadian was the common language of the Ancient Near East, and Babylonian was actually a variant of Akkadian. Akkadian was used in the ANE for some two thousand years, until it was replaced as the common language by Aramaic with the rise of the Persian Empire about three thousand years ago.

“Ellul” was originally “Ululu” in Babylonian and “Elulu” in Akkadian. It comes from a root meaning “harvest” and also refers to the “mission” of the reigning deity of the month, Ishtar. Ishtar was the Babylonian fertility goddess, and shared a similar-sounding name and near-identical story and powers with the Egyptian goddess Isis and the Semitic Astarte. So, using "Ellul" as a the basis for vertlach is not quite as damning as creating divrei torah directly from the name of a Mesopotamian god, but certainly it is a word that has nothing to do with repentance and closeness to God. “Ellul” is at best a straightforward name for the time of year – “harvest time” – and is at worst a reference to the role the Babylonian fertility goddess was believed to play in the annual agrarian cycle.

The other month names have similar origins:

Nisan
Babylonian: Nisanu – First, refers both to the month as the first month of the year and to the presiding god, Bel.

The first week of this month was the Babylonian New Year’s celebration. This is speculation on my part, but it seems likely that this is where the idea of Nissan as the beginning of the year comes from. Pre-Babylonian exile, the months of the Jewish year were numbered rather than named, and the numbering started in the spring. Yet now Nissan is called the new year for the months, and Tishrei in the new year for the year. In the Babylonian calendar, Nissan is the beginning of the year and of the first half-year, and Tishrei was that beginning of the second half-year. That these months are both considered new years in the Jewish calendar is too much of a coincidence.

Bel, known as Baal in Israel, is not really a name but a title. It means “lord” and refers to Marduk, first amongst the gods in the Babylonian, and later Persian, pantheon. Bel Marduk has the distinction of being both the most vilified god in tanach and of being Mordechai HaTzadik’s namesake.

Iyar
Babylonian: Āru / Ayaru - Bull or Herd, Prosperity. Presided over by Ea, the Babylonian name for the (earlier) Sumerian god Enki, the god of life. Originally the god of water, Enki is often depicted with the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flowing from his shoulders.

Sivan
Babylonian: Simanu - Brick-making. Presided over by Sin, the god of the moon, after the conflation of the Semitic god Sin with the Sumerian god Nanna. Interestingly, the main centers of Sin worship were Ur and Haran, both cities which figure prominently in Avraham’s story: the first as his birthplace and the second as his long-time adopted home.

Tammuz
Babylonian: Dumuzu – Babylonian name of the god known in Hebrew as Tammuz. The only month to share its name with a god. Originally the god of vegetation and later of the sun, Tammuz must spend six months a year in the underworld, a mythical explanation for winter. According to the myth, his wife, Inanna, descended to the underworld to visit her sister, Ereshkigal. Once there, Inanna sat on her sister’s throne, and immediately became a corpse. To return to the world of the living, Inanna had to find someone to take her place in the underworld. Tammuz agreed to exchange himself for her, but had second thoughts and was hidden by his sister, Geshtinana. Demons were sent to find him and drag him to the underworld. Eventually an arrangement was agreed to where Tammuz and Geshtinana each spend six months in the underworld.

The month of Tammuz, during which the summer solstice fell and the days began to get shorter, marked Tammuz’s annual death and descent to the underworld. It was a time of ritualistic mourning in the ANE. Tammuz’s annual funeral was a week-long Babylonian holiday.

According to Chazal, the name Tammuz was kept despite being the name of a pagan god deliberately to remind us of the bad things that happen as a result of avoda zara – as attested to by the breach of Yerushalayim’s walls on the 9th of Tammuz, the disruption of the avoda in the Beis HaMikdash on the 17th, and the annual “three weeks” period, starting on sheva assur b’Tammuz, during which we observe mourning rituals and there is supposedly an increased danger of bad things happening.

Is it a coincidence, though, that there was a widespread tradition of mourning during Tammuz, and that the Jewish people just happen to have their own, independent reason for mourning at the exact same time? Or is it more likely that we today are observing during sheva assur b’Tammuz and the three weeks the last vestiges of the ancient mourning rites for the annual death of Tammuz?

Av
Babylonian: Abu – Fire.

Elul
Discussed above.

Tishrei
Babylonian: Tashritu – Beginning. The beginning of the second half-year of the Babylonian calendar. Presided over by Shamash, the Mesopotamian god of the sun and the likely origin of the Hebrew word “shemesh.”

Marcheshvan
Babylonian: Arachsamna - Eighth month. Presided over by Marduk, here going by his name rather than his title.

Kislev
Babylonian: Kislimu (meaning uncertain). Presided over by Nergal, a god of the sun as it appears during specific times of day and of the year.

Tevet
Babylonian: Tebetu – Violent rain. Presided over by Papsukkal, the messenger god.

Shevat
Babylonian: Shabatu – Rain.

Adar
Babylonian: Adaru – Threshing time. Presided over by Erra, an Akkadian plague god, also responsible for political confusion (perhaps like that found in the Purim story?).

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

2011-07-26T23:58:00.000-07:00

I came across the following passage in 1812: War With America. It’s an excerpt from an eyewitness account written by a man who lived in Halifax, Canada at the time.

“The upper streets were full of brothels; grog-shops and dancing houses were to be seen in almost every part of town.” In the area around Brunswick Street, “nearly all the buildings were occupied as brothels for the soldiers and sailors. The streets of this part of town presented continually the disgusting sight of abandoned females of the lowest class in a state of drunkenness, bare-headed, without shoes, and in the most filthy and abominable condition.”

Firstly, this account flies in the face of the modern-society-is-becoming-increasingly-degenerate myth. Not that that particular myth is at all difficult to debunk, but the above passage is a concise description of an entire town sunken in debauchery. Not even Las Vegas fits the above description today.

Secondly, and far more interesting, is that the writer notes the bare-headedness of the prostitutes. This could be understood in one of two ways. The first, and the way I think he meant it, is as a description of how disheveled these women were. In a society where it was customary for everyone to wear hats or bonnets outside, the lack of a head-covering is a sign of slovenliness almost as serious as being filthy.

The second way it can be understood is as a moral failing. He is describing women “of the lowest class,” prostitutes who are habitually drunk and so brazen as to go about bare-headed and barefoot.

Suppose, instead of merely being part of a memoir, this passage made its way into a text believed to be an eternal guide to the proper way to live. Would it be more likely to be interpreted the first way, or in the second way? If the latter, it would likely lead to a religious requirement for head-coverings. Say, you wouldn’t happen to know of a real-life instance of a similar scenario…

On another note, for a few years now I’ve been doing handyman work to supplement my income from my near-nonexistent career as a psychologist. Since I moved six months ago I haven’t bothered to get licensed in this state, figuring that the extremely slim chance of getting a job in my field doesn’t justify the expense and trouble, and have been focusing on the handyman business instead. Incidentally, I make more money per hour patching drywall and hanging blinds than I would as a school psychologist. Go figure.

Anyway, I was working last night in a young kollel family’s home. When I arrived, Mrs. X requested that I leave the door open because her husband wasn’t home yet. I was once that yeshivish too, and I understand how seriously yichud is taken in the yeshivish world, but:

1. She was expecting her husband to come home from night seder any minute, and told me so. Given that he could have walked in at any time, halachically, there was no reason the leave the door open. Even locking it wouldn’t be a problem, because her husband has a key.

2. The implication that I might jump her if the door were closed is mildly insulting. Now she’d never met me before, so perhaps it can be argued she has no reason to trust me, but that is itself the problem. Intentionally or not, halachos like yichud breed distrust between the sexes and help perpetuate the women = succubae/ men = satyrs stereotypes.

“God Was Not Good, Just on Our Side”

2011-06-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

I recently came across this clip. It’s from God on Trial, a Masterpiece production based on accounts of a group of concentration camp inmates who convened a beis din and put God on trial.

It’s a powerful clip, and makes some excellent points. I was making similar points ten years ago, but back then I’d yet to have any contact with anyone who agreed with me. (I posted an excerpt of something I had written back then here.)

To be fair, the God of the Bible is nicer than many other gods, like, say, Zeus , or Loki, but He’s not GOOD. At best, when He was in a good mood and we hadn’t done anything lately to tick him off, He was good to us.

Gedolim Stories: Lies or Lunacy?

2011-05-18T12:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Life in Israel had a post in which he related (and questioned) the following story:

A yeshiva bochur that was not interested in learning torah went to Rav Shteinman. He asked Rav Shteinman if he would like steak or ice cream.

Rav Shteinman asked what those things are, what the words mean. The boy responded that they are the names of very delicious foods. Rav Shteinman than said no, he would not want those foods.

The young man than said that if he is offering the rav food that everybody considers to be delicious, yet the rav does not want any of it, so "I can also not want to learn Torah even though everybody claims torah is very sweet. So why do they force me to learn torah?"

Rav Shteinman responded that if you would give someone honey and he would put it in his mouth and say it is bitter, it is a sign that this person has sores in his mouth. The same thing with Torah - someone who does not want to learn torah, it means that he has lashon ha'ra in his mouth and therefore has no desire to learn torah.

Like many stories meant to show the piety of the Gedolim, it instead makes its protagonist look foolish. It suggests both that R’ Shteinman is ignorant of something as common as ice cream and that he is not intelligent enough to understand that honey and ice cream fill the same niche in the analogies of this discussion.

It was while listening to a similar gadol story years ago that I realized that either these stories are less than accurate or the gedolim were nuts. In that story a group of talmidim were following a rav around while he did bedikas chometz. When he was finished, one of the talmidim said, “Rebbe, this is good, we searched the entire house and didn’t find even a crumb of chometz!” The rav ripped his shirt open, pounded on his chest, and cried out, “There is no chometz in the house, but in here, in here there is still chomtz!”

I think there are three possible origins for such stories.

1) It really happened as described. I can see that there are people who would be inspired by someone so holy that they are so immersed in Torah they don’t even know about common things like ice cream or who is given to effusive, exciting emotional displays of piety. To me, treating as near-divine the words of someone profoundly ignorant of the culture he lives in or of someone given to emotional outbursts seems foolish.

2) The story is based on a real incident, but is exaggerated for effect. There really was a bochur who complained to R’ Shteinman that he didn’t like learning, but there was no mention of ice cream. The rav pointed to his heart and bemoaned the presence of “chometz”, but he didn’t rip open his shirt, pound on his chest, and shout. This to me seems the most likely origin for gadol stories. Most people don’t make up stories, but will often embroider and exaggerate real incidents to make them more exciting.

3) The stories are completely made up.

Given the number of gadol stories circulating, chances are there are some that fall into each of the three categories.

It was crazy gadol stories like those above that started me questioning what I had been taught. For all that exaggerated stories may be inspiring to some, perhaps the frum community should think about the potential harm of such stories, both to people like me who may go from questioning silly stories about gedolim that are portrayed as semi-divine to questioning stories supposedly written by the Divine hand; and to the gedolim that both star in these stories and are made to look foolish by them.

What was Moshe’s name?

2011-04-30T21:57:00.001-07:00

I was thinking about my latest post last night, and it occurred to me that “Moshe” probably was not Moshe’s real name. What follows is purely speculation, as I haven’t yet researched any of this, but:

1) Perhaps “Moshe” was a nickname for people with “Mose” as part of their name, rather like calling someone named McSomething “Mac.”

2) Perhaps Moshe’s name started out like all of the Pharaohs with “Mose” as part of their name, and had a god’s name as a beginning – such as Ramose (born-of-Ra) or Thutmose (born-of-Thoth) - and the name of the idolatrous god was later dropped as incongruous with the man who spoke directly with (the jealous) God and was the greatest monotheistic leader of all time.*

Call me cynical, but I’m leaning towards the second explanation.

*In keeping with the pasuk that says he was named for where the Egyptian princess found him, perhaps he was named for the god of the Nile, in which case his proper name would have been Hapimose – born-of-Hapi, god of the Nile.

Pahro and Pharaoh

2011-04-28T20:39:00.000-07:00

Statue of Hatshepsut, the female Pharaoh

About eight years ago, I went through a phase when I was very interested in researching the historical background of yetzias Mitzrayim. At this point, while I had my questions and doubts, I still mostly believed in what I had been taught in yeshiva. I was also newly interested in history – while I had discovered that I liked reading about history while in high school, I didn’t start reading history books instead of novels until I was in college.

What I found was fascinating.

If the Hebrew and secular calendars are adjusted for an apparent 165 year discrepancy a surprising number of things line up.

The New Kingdom period in Egypt begins at roughly the same time that the Jews were enslaved. The New Kingdom marks the point at which the Hyksos, a Semitic people that had ruled Egypt for a hundred years, were ousted by the Egyptians. It was indeed a new Pharaoh who was now ruling over Egypt, from a new dynasty and a different peoples than the one who was indebted to Yosef. This new ruling class would feel no obligation to the memory of someone who had been a collaborator with their former oppressors. If anything, it would give weight to their concerns related by the Chumash: that the Jews would side with the enemies of Egypt. In the Chumash, this concern seems to come out of the blue. Within its historical context, it makes sense. The Egyptians were concerned that the Semitic Jews would side with the recently deposed Semitic Hyksos, exactly as Yosef had done. The solution was to enslave all the Jews.

The Pharaoh into whose household Moshe is adopted is Ahmose. Mose, an Egyptian word that means “born of,” is both given by the Chumash as Moshe’s name and is the major component of the Pharaoh’s name.

The Chumash says that Pharaoh died, and the work became harder under the new Pharaoh. There is a medrash that says Pharaoh had leprosy, and would bathe in the blood of Jewish children to try to alleviate his condition. The Pharaoh who died was Thutmose II, whose mummy was found to be covered in lesions, evidence of a severe skin disease. He was succeeded by his teenage son Thutmose III, with Hatshepsut, Thutmose III’s mother (and Thutmose II’s wife AND sister) serving as regent. Hatshepsut quickly displaced her son and ruled as Pharaoh in her own right, the only woman ever to do so. To help solidify her rule she erected many monuments to herself which depicted her as male – monuments built by slaves.

The Pharaoh Moshe went to to demand the Jews’ freedom was Hatshepsut. Pharaoh didn’t die during makos bechoros, despite being a firstborn, because only the firstborn males died. Firstborn women did not.

In the early 1800s a document from about the same time as yetzias Mitzrayim was discovered in Memphis, Egypt. Called the Ipuwer Papyrus after its author, an Egyptian named Ipuwer, it described violent upheavals in Egypt: famine, drought, and slaves escaping with the Egyptians’ wealth.

After Hatshepsut’s death, Thutmose III had her monuments destroyed and all mentions of her chiseled off walls and steles. We only know of Hatshepsut because of the accidental discovery of her tomb. The popular theory is that Thutmose III had her memory erased as revenge for her displacing him as pharaoh. Might it also have been to erase the memory of an embarrassing defeat at the hand of the Egyptians’ former slaves? Could this mass erasure program also account for the lack of Egyptian records of the Jews living in Egypt?

About a century after Thutmose III, Amenhotep IV, who renamed himself Akhenaten, built a new capital city from scratch, and forced Egypt to adopt the monotheistic worship of Aten, the sun-disc. (When he died, Egypt quickly reverted to worshiping its entire pantheon of gods, and Akhenaten’s new city was abandoned.) Was Amenhotep/Akhenaten inspired to monotheism by the recent display of power by a monotheistic god?

What I found made me feel confident that my frumkeit rested on solid ground. Even then, I wondered what an Egyptologist would make of the parallels I found, but it made me feel that my religion was rooted in historical fact.

Yet there were things that didn’t quite fit. According to the same timeline, the pyramids had been built a couple of centuries before the mabul! Some poking around online led me to one article that claimed the Great Sphinx, built about the same time as the pyramids at Giza, had horizontal weathering patterns consistent with flood damage. There was my answer: the pyramids HAD been built before the mabul – and had survived! I speculated that their size and heavy stone construction were what had saved them from the floodwaters. Happily, the same principle could be applied to other ancient monuments.

And yet…

The history of Egypt is not interrupted by a world-changing flood in the centuries after the construction of the Great Pyramids. There is no sudden gap in the record, no rediscovery and adoption of an ancient culture by new people such as would be expected to if nearly all of humanity was wiped out. Instead, Egyptian history flows smoothly, year after year, millennium after millennium, a continuous culture that lasted for some three thousand years.

Even yetzias Mitzrayim, the event for which I’d found plausible evidence, seems to have left no mark on Egyptian history. The reign of Thutmose III was not marked by a period of rebuilding from the devastation of the maakos and the shock of losing a huge number of slaves that must have been essential to a large part of the Egyptian economy. It was instead a period of conquest and increased prosperity.

Worse, if we are to take midrashim at face value, as I had done for many of my points above, we also had to take at face value to medrash that says that Hashem killed four-fifths of the Bnei Yosroel during maakos choshech. That would mean that Hashem killed some twelve million people for the crime of not wanting to leave the only life their families had known for generations and follow an Egyptian prince into the desert.

In the long run, I’m not sure if this particular foray into biblical historicity was a net gain or loss for my religiosity, but this way of relating to biblical stories – expecting them to conform to other known facts about the world – was terribly harmful to my emunah. There is something to be said for the approach that non-Torah knowledge is to be avoided and that the Torah is right and everything that might contradict it, up to and including our own senses, is wrong. Such an epistemology is maddening to anyone who doesn’t already accept it, and is based on circular logic, but it is effective at keeping people within the fold. For me, trying to make the Torah fit with the world we know was what eventually led me to conclude that it is best understood as mythology rather than history.

An Anniversary, an Index, and a Proposal

2011-04-05T11:51:00.000-07:00

Here we are again, another year gone by. Tomorrow is two years since I put up the first post on this blog. I looked through the last year’s worth of posts just now, and I found to my surprise that they comprise not even a quarter of the total. A lot has happened in the last year, but day-to-day I haven’t really gotten any busier. Just lazier, I suppose. Or less enthusiastic.

On an unrelated note, I’ve been wondering if it might be useful to create a central index for the blogosphere. There are only a couple of dozen Jewish skeptic blogs at any given time, and the old ones tend to disappear, either because they’re taken down or because no one links to them anymore. What do you think?

Year Two Index

Best of
Bias and Rationality
An exploration of whether biases influence reasoning and whether those biases affect the validity of conclusions.
Corrupting Influences
Which is more dangerous – licentious material or dissenting information, and the use of the fear of the former to ban the latter.
Jewish Music
By far my most popular post. A side-by-side comparison of some mainstream “Jewish” songs and the pop tunes that they copied.
Eisav HaRasha?
A straight reading of the Chumash shows that Eisav wasn’t quite as evil as he’s made out to be, and Yaakov was no paragon of virtue.

Theology/Philosophy
Bias and Rationality
The Force Behind Nature
Just Shoot Him!
Euphemisms, Shema, and Paradigms
“God Himself Couldn’t Sink This Ship”Eisav HaRasha?
With Gratitude to Hashem…
Suicide is Painless…
The Celestial Bank

Response to articles / things read / events
Big Brother is Watching You…
Debugged Kashrus
Tiferes Yisroel Update
When Humans Become Gods

Reminiscing / culture
I Have Met the Other, and He is Me
Corrupting Influences
Jewish Music
Frummer Than God

Holidays
1st Century Spin Doctors

Search Judaism
Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Four, section four I
Unfortunately, the last in the series. Maybe someday I’ll go back to it. Probably not. After a while it went from being fun to being annoying.

For Fun
Shaped Like a BLOGG!

Frummer Than God

2011-03-30T15:43:00.000-07:00

I recently received an invitation to a family wedding. The invitation was unremarkable, except for one interesting coincidence: both of the bride’s grandfathers had married women named “rayuso.”

The recent practice of omitting women’s names is ostensibly because printing a woman’s name is untznius. Yet even if we take it as a given that tznius is a legitimate concern, this practice makes no sense.

1) In regards to this particular case, it seems that it would be far more tznius to write “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” than it is to write “Mr. Smith and his beloved.”

2) The stated rationale of tznius rules is to avoid anything erotic. It follows that anything avoided due to tznius concerns is (at least somewhat) erotic. I find it hard to believe that even the most sex-crazed guy would find the name of a grandmother printed on a wedding invitation arousing. Yet it seems there are people in the Chareidi world who believe that even mentioning a woman by name is erotic. (Either that, or they never thought through the implications.) Which brings us to:

3) There are women’s names all through tanach. Here is a community that sincerely believes that God wrote every word in the Torah. God clearly thought there was no problem with referring to women by name. And yet, they have the chutzpah to try to be FRUMMER THAN GOD!

Go figure.

Suicide is Painless…

2011-03-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

I sat at one of the long tables in the dining room, idly munching on potato chips while I listened to the bearded man at the front of the room. It was motzei Shabbos, and like every week when Shabbos ended early enough, the yeshiva had a melave malka after night seder. The man at the front of the room was a guest speaker, a rebbe at one of the other high schools in the city.

I’ve long since forgotten most of his drasha, but one story that he told stuck with me. A couple had bought a house and discovered that part of the floor in the attic was broken. They called a contractor, he came the next day, and after a few hours of work it was repaired. A few days later, they went up to the attic to put some boxes away and found that the floor was broken again in the same spot. They called the contractor back. This time he spent an entire day reinforcing the floor. A week later it was broken again.

A few days later the couple was discussing the problem with a neighbor. “I’m surprised you bought the house at all.” he said. “After that boy hung himself in the attic, the house was vacant for years.”

“That was why the floor was breaking.” The rebbe declared. “The neshama of this boy was barred from gan eden, and even from gehenom. With no place to go, he kept returning to the place where he had killed himself. And every time his neshama visited, the floor broke. If he had only known what would happen, he would never have killed himself!”

In retrospect, it sounds like the kind of ghost story ten year olds tell around a campfire to scare each other. For some reason, though, it brought the afterlife into sharp focus for me. This boy, who had killed himself hoping to end it all, was instead living on and suffering for his misdeed. I, too, would live on after I died in this world. I too would be judged. I no longer saw Olam Haboh as a fairytale, but as a real place that I would one day go to. I, not a character in a story called “my neshama.” For years, I would periodically have dreams in which I stood before the Heavenly court.

It’s the association with that sudden insight, rather than any inherent quality of the story, which made me remember it.

When I took Abnormal Psychology in college and learned about major depression and suicide I was reminded of the story. This time, instead of bringing a religious concept into focus, it raised some disturbing questions. Nearly everyone who commits suicide does so because they are clinically depressed. The only exceptions are terminally ill patients who wish to end their pain and religiously-motivated people such as suicide bombers or the Jonestown Massacre. A clinically depressed person who dies by suicide was killed by his illness no less than someone who dies of cancer. Could a person be held morally responsible for dying of an illness, condemned because of it to exist in limbo for all eternity?

It turns out that the rabbonim today agree that a clinically depressed person is not responsible for committing suicide. The family sits shiva for them, and they may be buried in a Jewish cemetery. But what, then, of all of the suicide victims of the millennia between matan Torah and advent of modern psychology? How many families of clinically depressed suicide victims were denied the opportunity to mourn their loss and to give their loved ones a Jewish burial (something that I assume would have caused them pain). And why would Hashem dictate a halachah that He knew would be improperly applied until the modern rise of psychology?

It would be a long time before I came to the obvious answer: He didn’t. The severe condemnation of suicide reflects a time when there was no recognition of mental illness. Perhaps it was a way of punishing someone who murdered himself: after all, he couldn’t be executed for his crime, so denying him a proper burial and condemning him in the afterlife was the next best thing. Perhaps the knowledge that they would be denied mourning and burial in a Jewish cemetery served to dissuade some people from committing suicide. But the divine mandate of an all-knowing God it was not.

[Inspired by this post from Onionsoupmix]

The title, of course, comes from this:

The Celestial Bank

2011-02-24T20:53:00.000-08:00

It’s been a while since I last posted. I recently moved to a different state, and I’ve been busy packing, then unpacking.

DovBear had a post today about an email he received asking women to light candles five minutes early on Friday as a z’chus that a sick woman should get better. He asks, “the creator of heaven and earth be swayed if a lot of women light candles a few minutes earlier?” and waxes philosophical about how people can relate to God. I commented,

“This woman is from the group of people who, when they think about it at all,see s'char as currency. There’s a celestial banking system, where mitzvos and miracles have prices. So, say the recovery from disease costs $1000, and lighting candles early is worth $1 a minute, all you need to do is get 200 women to light candles five minutes early and donate their celestial money to pay for the miraculous healing.”

It’s interesting that learning Torah is contrasted in the mishnah with a carpenter’s work. The analogy to money goes way back. Of course, as my rabbeim were fond of pointing out, we don’t know what any given mitzvah is worth, which means we have no way of knowing if we have enough money to pay for miracles, or for a good seat in Olam Haboh. And we have to constantly worry about using up our money on mundane stuff here on Earth, like having a good parnassah, or having a near-miss with a car.

Midrashim describe many characters in tanach as worring about using up their z’chusim in Olam Hazeh. I wonder why, though. A dollars a dollar, right? Whether I spend it in this world or the next, I should get a dollar’s worth of benefit from it. So why the concern about using z’chusim in olam hazeh? It must be that to spend in this world the celestial z’chusim we earn by doing mitzvos, we first have to exchange them from olam habo z’chusim to olam hazeh z’chusim, and there’s a lousy exchange rate. :-)

More seriously, perhaps it’s the difference between buying something consumable vs. something permanent: a loaf of bread in this world vs. real estate in the next.

Then there are the Chassidishe stories about the horrible person who is wealthy because he is being paid off in this world for the single mitzvah he once did. So maybe the exchange rate isn’t so bad after all.

I think in the popular imagination, the celestial banking system works something like this:
* S’char/z'chusim = $
* Mitzvos pay s'char
* Extra mitzvos/chumros earn more s'char over the mitzva’s usual payout
* Kulos earn less schar than the mitzva’s usual payout
* Basic necessities cost some schar, but most goes into an account for Olam Haboh
* “Miraculous” events, like avoiding a car crash or recovering from a serious illness, cost extra s'char
** Sometimes one doesn’t have enough schar in his account, or Hashem decides to save the s’char for Olam Haboh instead of spending it on avoiding the car crash/healing the person.
** One can donate s’char to someone else to buy a refuah, usually by doing something extra specifically to earn s’char for that purpose. This can be used to buy someone’s health if the sick person’s account is inadequate or if Hashem doesn’t want to draw on the sick person’s account.
** If the sick person dies, it’s because either not enough s’char was collecte for him or Hashem decided that it was time for him to go, and the refuah simply wasn’t for sale. The s’char donated on the sick person’s behalf goes into a communal account that can then be drawn on the benefit other sick or needy people.
* Aveiros don’t really figure into the s’char balance, but doing a lot of aveiros may raise the cost of a miracle and/or make Hashem less inclined to sell you one.

When Humans Become Gods

2010-12-16T10:23:00.001-08:00

Last night I watched a National Geographic documentary, “Inside North Korea.” A reporter and her cameraman went into North Korea as part of a humanitarian doctor’s team, and filmed under the pretense of making a documentary about his work. The doctor and his staff performed a thousand surgeries in ten days to remove cataracts from blind patients.

The documentary describes how North Korea is ruled by the whims of the Beloved Leader, Kim Jong Il, who enriches himself while his people starve to death by the millions. There were interviews with North Koreans who had defected, including one young man who had been a guard at one of North Koreas concentration camps. Miles square, these camps house the people who express dissatisfaction with the government – and the dissidents’ parents, siblings, children, cousins…

My gut reaction was that the world would be a better place if Pyongyang went up in a mushroom cloud. Of course, that’s not practical, but if even half of what was described is accurate, living in North Korea is nearly identical to living in Nazi Germany.

What was astonishing was the end of the documentary. The blind patients are all gathered in an auditorium, and one by one they have their bandages removed. They shout and cry with joy as they discover they can see, and immediately go to the front of the room and kneel before large pictures of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. The crowd waves their hands in the air as the patients shout praises of Kim Jong Il and vow that their children will venerate him, that they will work harder for him, that they will help wipe out America (despite some of the equipment used in the operations having been donated by America and other Western nations).

It hit me. This is where gods come from! North Koreans worship Kim Jong Il as a god. His pictures are everywhere, just like any religious icon. Children are indoctrinated from an early age, just like in any religion. Kim Jong Il knows all, is infallible, and all good comes from him. Just like God. They even have a better theodicy than most religions. All bad things are the fault of the outside world, especially America.

Rulers in the ancient world were often worshipped as gods or the children of gods. The cults of the pharaoh or of the god-kings of Mesopotamia were probably very like the cult of Kim Jong Il. And the cults of dead god-kings were probably very like the cult of Kim Il Sung. In the ancient world, where history was mostly oral and prone to embellishment, how many centuries would need to pass before stories of the late god-kings became stories of the creator gods?

With Gratitude to Hashem…

2010-11-25T15:47:00.000-08:00

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a very long time. Perhaps it’s appropriate that I finally got around to it on Thanksgiving.

Among the many mildly insulting things I’ve been told by people trying to explain to me why Judaism is the Truth is the charge that I’m ungrateful. God created us, the argument goes, He provides for us, and we should be grateful to Him and follow His rules, which are themselves only meant help us live better lives.

I’d like to take this argument apart. First, the claim that we should be grateful to God because He created us. This implies that he did so at least partly for our benefit. Yet that is impossible. According to Jewish belief, before God created the world, there was nothing. Not even souls waiting to be born. We, whatever that word may imply, simply did not exist. Therefore the only Being that stood to gain anything from creation was God.

In my experience, many people have trouble with the concept of their own non-existence. They have a fuzzy notion that their consciousness was waiting off in the wings somewhere, waiting for God to call it into existence. With such a model, existence is clearly better than non-existence. The non-existent are condemned to wait forever in the wings while the existent get to fulfill their purpose.

Of course, this model makes a mockery of the concept of non-existence. A consciousness that is waiting must already exist. If God created us, then He was not merely moving us from one state of existence to a fuller, more meaningful state of existence, but was calling us into being ex-nihlo. Had I not been created, I wouldn’t miss my existence. I simply wouldn’t be.

Some concede the point, but then say that although only God stood to gain from my creation before I was created, now that I was created I should be grateful that I exist. But this is missing my point, which is that God did not do something that I need to be grateful for. That once I exist I prefer existence to non-existence has no bearing on whether I was created for my own benefit. And as I showed above, it is impossible that I was created for my own benefit.

To use an often-cited analogy, does a child have to be grateful to his parents because they were feeling frisky one day and got themselves pregnant? They weren’t having sex for his benefit, but for their own. Even in the perhaps more analogous case of a couple who desperately want a child and are deliberately trying to conceive, they aren’t doing so for the benefit of the unborn child, but for their own benefit – to fulfill their need to have a child.

So why do we expect children to be grateful to their parents? Because parents provide for and nurture their children. Someone who was abandoned at birth and adopted is not expected to show gratitude to his birth parents, but to the couple who raised him.

This brings us to the second part of the argument, that we should be grateful to God for providing for us. Even though God created us for His own benefit, now that I exist I stand to benefit from continued existence and should be grateful to God for maintaining my existence and providing me with everything I need.

Our gratitude for what others do for us is usually in proportion to the effort they expend. If someone donated a kidney to save my life, I could be expected to be grateful to that person for the rest of my life. The person who passed me the juice at dinner, not so much.

We are expected to be grateful to our parents because of the enormous effort that goes into raising a child. Yet for God, everything is effortless. Perhaps despite the complete lack of effort, we could be expected to be grateful to God because we are benefiting from his beneficence, but the gratitude expected would be on the level of the gratitude towards the person who passed the juice, not the one who donated the kidney.

Literary Narcissism

2010-11-24T15:57:00.000-08:00

Inspired by DovBear’s post of an old meme, I’ve done something purely narcissistic and complied an arbitrary list (under a pretentious post title) of the first hundred fiction books and series I could think of that I’ve read so that I can feel more cultured than anyone who hasn’t read all of the same books.

1) The original 14 "Oz" books by L. Frank Baum
...........1. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
...........2. The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904)
...........3. Ozma of Oz (1907)
...........4. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908)
...........5. The Road to Oz (1909)
...........6. The Emerald City of Oz (1910)
...........7. The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913)
...........8. Tik-Tok of Oz (1914)
...........9. The Scarecrow of Oz (1915)
...........10. Rinkitink in Oz (1916)
...........11. The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)
...........12. The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918)
...........13. The Magic of Oz (1919)
...........14. Glinda of Oz (1920)
2) “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C.S. Lewis
...........1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
...........2. Prince Caspian (1951)
...........3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
...........4. The Silver Chair (1953)
...........5. The Horse and His Boy (1954)
...........6. The Magician's Nephew (1955)
...........7. The Last Battle (1956)
3) The “Psammead Series” by E. Nesbitt:1.
...........Five Children and It (1902)
...........2. The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904)
...........3. The Story of the Amulet (1906)
4) The “Magic Series” by Edward Eager
...........1. Half Magic (1954)
...........2. Knight's Castle (1956)
...........3. Magic By the Lake (1957)
...........4. The Time Garden (1958)
...........5. Magic Or Not? (1959)
...........6. The Well-Wishers (1960)
...........7. Seven-Day Magic (1962)
5) The “Harry Potter” series by J.K. Rowling
...........1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
...........2. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
...........3. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
...........4. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
...........5. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
...........6. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
...........7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
6) “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe
7) “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson
8) “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson
9) “The Swiss Family Robinson” by Johann David Wyss
10) “Anne of Green Gables” series by Lucy Maud Montgomery
...........1. Anne of Green Gables
...........2. Anne of Avonlea
...........3. Anne of the Island
...........4. Anne of Windy Poplars
...........5. Anne's House of Dreams
...........6. Anne of Ingleside
...........7. Rainbow Valley
...........8. Rilla of Ingleside
...........9. The Blythes Are Quoted
11) “Little House on the Prairie” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
...........1. Little House in the Big Woods (1932)
...........2. Farmer Boy (1933)
...........3. Little House on the Prairie (1935)
...........4. On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937)
...........5. By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939)
...........6. The Long Winter (1940)
...........7. Little Town on the Prairie (1941)
...........8. These Happy Golden Years (1943)
...........9. The First Four Years (1971)
12) The “Talent” series by Anne McCaffrey
...........1. To Ride Pegasus (1973)
...........2. Pegasus in Flight (1990)
...........3. Pegasus in Space (2000)
13) “The Black Stallion” series by Walter Farley
...........1. The Black Stallion (1941)
...........2. The Black Stallion Returns (1945)
...........3. Son of the Black Stallion (1947)
...........4. The Island Stallion (1948)
...........5. The Black Stallion and Satan (1949)
...........6. The Blood Bay Colt (1951)
...........7. The Island Stallion's Fury (1951)
...........8. The Black Stallion's Filly (1952)
...........9. The Black Stallion Revolts (1953)
...........10. The Black Stallion's Sulky Colt (1954)
...........11. The Island Stallion Races (1955)
...........12. The Black Stallion's Courage (1956)
...........13. The Black Stallion Mystery (1957
...........14. The Horse Tamer (1958)
...........15. The Black Stallion and Flame (1960)
...........16. Man o' War (1962)
...........17. The Black Stallion Challenged (1964
...........18. The Black Stallion's Ghost (1969)
...........19. The Black Stallion and the Girl (1971)
...........20. The Black Stallion Legend (1983)
14) “The Little Princess” by Frances Hodgson Burnett
15) “The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett
16) “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott
17) “Little Men” by Louisa May Alcott
18) “Arabian Nights”
19) “The Iliad”
20) “The Odyssey”
21) “The Epic of Gilgamesh”
22) “The Foundation Trilogy” by Isaac Asimov
...........1. “Foundation” (1951)
...........2. Foundation and Empire (1952)
...........3. Second Foundation (1953)
23) “Farenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury
24) “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein
25) “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells
26) “The Invisible Man” by H.G. Wells
27) “The War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells
28) “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” by Mark Twain
29) “The Prince and the Pauper” by Mark Twain
30) “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer“ by Mark Twain
31) “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain
32) The “Redwall” series (those published before I got too old for the series)
...........1. Redwall (1986)
...........2. Mossflower (1988)
...........3. Mattimeo (1989)
...........4. Mariel of Redwall (1991)
...........5. Salamandastron (1992)
...........6. Martin the Warrior (1993)
...........7. The Bellmaker (1994)
...........8. Outcast of Redwall (1995)
...........9. The Pearls of Lutra (1996)
...........10. The Long Patrol (1997)
33) “Pollyanna” by Eleanor H. Porter
34) “Starship Troopers” by Robert A. Heinlein
35) “WorldWar” and “Colonization” series by Harry Turtledove
...........1. Worldwar: In the Balance (1994)
...........2. Worldwar: Tilting the Balance (1995)
...........3. Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance (1996)
...........4. Worldwar: Striking the Balance (1996)
...........5. Colonization: Second Contact (1999)
...........6. Colonization: Down to Earth (2000)
...........7. Colonization: Aftershocks (2001)
...........8. Homeward Bound (2004)
36) “Mary Poppins” series by P. L. Travers
...........1. Mary Poppins
...........2. Mary Poppins Comes Back
...........3. Mary Poppins Opens the Door
...........4. Mary Poppins in the Park
...........5. Mary Poppins From A to Z
...........6. Mary Poppins in the Kitchen
...........7. Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane
...........8. Mary Poppins and the House Next Door
37) “Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates” (1865) by Mary Mapes Dodge
38) Roald Dahl’s children’s books
...........1. James and the Giant Peach (1961)
...........2. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
...........3. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972)
...........4. The Twits (1982)
...........5. The BFG (1982)
...........6. The Witches (1983)
...........7. Matilda (1988)
39) “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series by Douglas Adams
...........1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
...........2. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
...........3. Life, the Universe and Everything
...........4. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
...........5. Mostly Harmless
40) “The Martian Chronicles” by Ray Bradbury
41) The “Tripods” series by John Christopher
...........1. The White Mountains (1967)
...........2. The City of Gold and Lead (1968)
...........3. The Pool of Fire (1968)
...........4. When the Tripods Came (1988)
42) The “Dragonriders of Pern” series by Anne and Todd McCaffrey
43) The “Chrestomanci” series by Diana Wynne Jones
...........1. Charmed Life (1977)
...........2. The Magicians of Caprona (1980)
...........3. The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988)
...........4. Witch Week (1982)
44) “Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov
45) “Tom’s Midnight Garden” by Philippa Pearce

At this point I got tired of looking up the authors names and the individual books in each series. Maybe I’ll finish it another time.

46) “The Boxcar Children” series
47) Little Lord Fauntleroy
48) A Logic Named Joe
49) The Machine Gunners
50) The “So You Want to be a Wizard” series
51) The Devil’s Arithmetic
52) The Lord of the Flies
53) The “1632” series
54) Peter Pan
55) Morte de Arthur
56) The Bobbesy Twins
57) The Three Investigators
58) Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
59) “The Hatchet” “The River”
60) Charlotte’s Web
61) The Phantom Tollbooth
62) Mrs. Piggle Wiggle series
63) The Death Gate Cycle
64) A Tale of Time City
65) Gulliver’s Travels
66) The Time Traveler’s Wife
67) “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens
68) The Three Musketeers
69) The Scarlet Pimpernel
70) Johnny Tremain
71) The “Xanth” series by Piers Anthony
72) “Peter Rabbit” series
73) Dr. Suess’s books
74) “Harold and the Pruple Crayon” by Crockett Johnson
75) “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L'Engle
76) Stuart Little
77) The Rats of NIMH
78) Beverly Cleary’s children’s books
79) Alice In Wonderland
80) Through the Looking Glass
81) “The Trumpet of the Swan” by E. B. White
82) Black Beauty
83) “The Borrowers” series by Mary Norton
84) “The Littles” series
85) “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”
86) “Journey to the Center of the Earth”
87) “Heidi”
88) "The Door in the Wall" by Marguerite de Angeli
89) “Dr. Doolittle” series
90) “The Indian in the Cupboard” series
91) “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm”
92) Aesop's Fables“The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas
93) “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw
94) “Planet of the Apes” by Pierre Boulle
95) "Tarzan of the Apes" by Edgar Rice Burroughs
96) Jurassic Park
97) The Lost World
98) How to Eat Fried Worms
99) “My Teacher is an Alien” series
100) The “Tom Swift” series

It was harder than I thought it would be to come up with a hundred books. I don’t remember the titles of most of what I’ve read, and I haven’t read fiction regularly in years. It was a fun trip down memory lane.

So, how superior do I get to feel? ;-)

Eisav HaRasha?

2010-11-07T16:32:00.000-08:00

I have a vivid memory of a poster of Eisav that hung in my Kindergarten classroom. Eisav, built like an ogre and covered in squiggly red hair, stands at the head of his four hundred men, a murderous scowl on his face. I was afraid of that poster, and would try to avoid looking at it.

The commentaries paint the picture of Eisav as an evil brute, and, in contrast, Yaakov as pious and saintly. Yet these seem to be informed attributes. Eisav never does anything truly evil, and Yaakov never does anything righteous. Quite the opposite. Eisav cares for his father while Yaakov sits in the tent. The commentaries assume that Yaakov was in some sort of early-day kollel, but the chumash never implies that.

When Eisav comes home, hungry after a day out in the fields, Yaakov refuses to feed him until Eisav parts with something of value. Sure, Eisav is rather callous towards his birthright, but that’s hardly evil. Yaakov’s refusal to feed Eisav, on the other hand… Imagine two brothers, living in their parents’ house. One is cooking dinner when the other comes home half-starved from a long trip and asks for some of the food. The cook refuses to part with the food until his brother hands him the title to his car. Which brother is virtuous? Which is evil?

There’s a midrash that tries to make Eisav extra-evil in this story by explaining that Eisav had just come from committing a murder. And who was it that he had killed? Nimrod, the man who had tried to burn his grandfather Avraham alive, a man who is himself portrayed as evil. Killing Nimrod may not have been good, per se, but it was hardly as if Eisav was out slaughtering innocent children for the fun of it.

Later Yaakov lies to his father to get the brochos. The commentaries scramble to explain why it wasn’t really a lie, but the justifications are laughably weak. When Eisav finds out he is murderously angry and Yaakov flees to his mother’s family. It isn’t good that Eisav wants to kill Yaakov, but it’s hardly unmitigated evil. Eisav is justifiably angry over having his inheritance stolen. Yet somehow, Yaakov is the virtuous one and Eisav is the evil one.

Years later when Yaakov is returning to his father’s house, he is told that Eisav is coming to kill him. Again, not a good thing, but it is understandable. Yaakov sends Eisav gifts and Eisav, far from what we would expect of a thoroughly evil man, accepts Yaakov’s apology and welcomes his brother home with love. The commentaries vilify Eisav by claiming he didn’t really accept the apology and that he was trying to bite Yaakov rather than kiss him as the pasuk says, but this runs counter to the plain meaning of the text.

If we weren’t told early on that Eisav is evil and Yaakov is good, I think we would see both characters as having at best a grey morality. Eisav is violent, but Yaakov is an extortionist, a liar, and a thief. Yaakov is hardly a righteous tzaddik, and Eisav is not an evil rasha.

[I wonder if the characterization of Yaakov as good and Eisav as evil might reflect a moral system that abhorred violence as evil but saw clever trickery – such as getting Eisav to part with the birthright, or fooling Yitzchak into giving Yaakov the brochos – as amoral or perhaps even as an admirable skill.]

“God Himself Couldn’t Sink This Ship”

2010-10-31T09:21:00.000-07:00

According to legend when the Titanic was launched a White Star Line employee made the claim that God Himself couldn’t sink the Titanic. Of course, the Titanic famously did sink. On April 15, 1912 during her first trans-Atlantic trip she hit an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic. Over 1500 people drowned or froze to death before the nearest ships could reach them.

I remember hearing the story of the Titanic in school. The part about the claim that God couldn’t sink it was always told with grim self-satisfaction. The message was clear: don’t challenge God, or He’ll show you who’s boss. We the believers were a superior group, and the people who had flippantly challenged God with an unsinkable ship had gotten what was coming to them.

The story itself is probably apocryphal, and to be fair, I don’t think that any of my teachers and rabbeim really thought that the Titanic sank just because of what one person said. They probably never really thought about it at all; it was just a cute story to illustrate a point and make us all feel righteous about our belief in God.

The implications of the story, however, are not flattering to God. God apparently gets upset when a mere human challenges His power. Upset enough to kill 1500 people in a fit of rage. This is comparable to a father who gets upset when his three-year-old proudly claims that, “Not even Daddy could break my fort!” and in a fit of rage smashes the cardboard fort and seriously hurts the children playing inside.

Why is it that so many people don’t realize that stories like this one portray God as a petty, vindictive megalomaniac?

I suppose I should just be happy that at least in the Titanic story, God is acknowledged as the Cause of the iceberg. Usually the disaster is attributed to bad luck while those who managed to survive praise God for the miracle of their rescue.

Tiferes Yisroel Update

2010-10-21T20:00:00.000-07:00

I objected strongly when Tiferes Yisroel implemented their policy of mandatory monitoring of student’s families’ internet usage, so it seems only fair that I should note that they seem to have thought better of it. I’ve been told by people with kids in the yeshiva that the policy hasn’t been enforced. Many of the parents never signed up for Web Chaver, and many of those who did are now letting their accounts lapse. It’s outrageous that the policy was ever implemented, but at least in practice sanity has won out.

Debugged Kashrus

2010-10-07T13:34:00.001-07:00

A few months ago ( I think while the fish-worm nonsense was going on) I half-jokingly predicted in a comment somewhere that pretty soon the only food that would be considered kosher would be vegetables grown in cleanroom-like greenhouses. I’m sad to say that over yom tov I saw an ad for what may be the first step towards that eventuality.

“Eden”, a company that markets vegetables to the kosher market, ran an ad in Jewish newspapers that reads in part:

“Cauliflower, broccoli, and many other vegetables are home to tiny insects that are nearly invisible to the untrained eye, and are quite impossible to remove. That’s why Eden doesn’t just try to get rid of insects; we keep the insects out, from the moment of planting.…

“Eden keeps insects out by growing its vegetables in greenhouses… So if you want to keep the food in your home truly kosher, trust the brand that has… a greenhouse –that keeps the tiniest intruders away.”

Now this is an advertisement, not a halachic ruling, but much like pre-washed vegetables, I can see greenhouse-grown vegetables becoming a widespread convenience bought “just in case;” then a communal norm; and finally a standard to be kept without which the vegetables may not be eaten.

And so Orthodoxy becomes ever-more restrictive. Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

Euphemisms, Shema, and Paradigms

2010-08-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

Nothing groundbreaking here, just something that’s been rattling around inside my head for a while.

When I was a kid, my mother would say Shema with my brother and me before we went to sleep each night. When my wife puts my daughter to bed, she does the same. Lately, my daughter has been asking me to say Shema with her when I put her to bed (which is most nights).

Shema has a central place in Jewish prayer. It is one of the first tefillos we learn as children, and it is supposed to be the last thing we say before we die. Along with Shemoneh Esrei, it’s what daily davening is built around. It is generally taken to be a statement of Hashem’s monotheistic supremacy. Yet anyone who takes a moment to read it literally can see that it makes little sense as such.

I think most people in the frum world, perhaps even in the religious Jewish world, never read Shema literally. As a kid I was taught that Shema translated as, “Hear Israel, Hashem is Hashem, there is one Hashem.” But this is not what it says. It says, “Hear Israel, Yahweh is your god, Yahweh is one.”

It’s read the first way and not the second way because Yahweh and elohim are thought of as synonyms for “Hashem” when in fact Yahweh is a name and elohim is the equivalent of the English little “g” god. Shema is not monotheistic statement about the singular magnificence of God, but a monolatrous definition of a god named Yahweh. It is telling the nation of Israel that Yahweh is their god, and that Yahweh is only one god despite the widespread practice of worshipping his different aspects under different names.

This is something that would never have occurred to me when reading Shema with a frum worldview. It was only after learning about ancient religions that I realized how strangely Shema is worded – which then led me to the realization that it’s not strangely worded at all if you accept that it means exactly what it says.

You may not have noticed, but the post’s title forms the acronym ESP. Too bad I couldn’t think of a clever way to relate that to the post’s subject.

Big Brother is Watching You…

2010-08-17T21:09:00.000-07:00

I first heard about Yeshiva Tiferes Yisroel’s new policy a little over a week ago from a friend who has a kid in the school. I wanted to write a post about it, but didn’t get around to it and let the idea go (as I do too often with ideas for posts). Yesterday DovBear posted about it, and I’ve become fixated on the outrageousness of it. I tried today to get supporting documentation from my friend for this post, but he said he’d have to look for the letters I want, and I figured I should write a post before this becomes old news in the blogosphere.

For those who may not have heard, Yeshiva Tiferes Yisroel (the Brooklyn branch of the Chofetz Chaim yeshiva system) sent a letter to their students’ parents about a week and a half ago explaining their new internet policy. (Scans of the letter can be seen at DovBear’s post.) As of at least last year, the yeshiva’s policy has been that students are not allowed to access the internet for any reason, or even to look at the computer screen when someone else is online. (citation pending) Their new policy demands, on pains of expulsion, that parents install filtering and tracking software. The letter is careful to point out that the yeshiva doesn’t have access to the logs of your web browsing: these are instead to be sent to a “chaver” of the parent’s choosing. The yeshiva does, however, receive a list of families that have purchased the tracking service, and demands that parents buy and maintain a monthly subscription if they wish their sons to remain in the school.

Given the yeshiva’s already-standing draconian internet ban for its students, this new policy can only be predicated on the premise that parents are hopeless at maintaining good relationships with their children and at monitoring their children’s activities. Only the yeshiva is able to ensure that their students don’t stray, by enforcing a policy that imposes parenting practices on their parent body. This is a gross overstepping of bounds.

A school's job is to educate children, not to raise them. We send our kids to school to learn their ABCs and Aleph Bais, math and chumash, literature and hashkafa. We do not abdicate our responsibilities or rights as parents when we enroll our children. What happens in our homes is none of the school's business.

That said, yeshivas have been intruding into their student’s home lives for years. The schools dictate where our kids can hang out on motzei Shabbos, forbid them to go to theatres or video stores, and forbid us to have TVs in our homes. I remember a story a few years back of a couple of girls who were expelled from a Bais Yaakov because someone reported to the school administration that they had been swimming at a Florida beach during their vacation in non-tznius (that is, typical) bathing suits.

As outrageous as all of the above restrictions are, Tiferes Yisroel’s policy forges into new territory.

This goes beyond dictating what students may do. This is the yeshiva reaching into the homes of their students and setting a system in place to monitor the family’s activities. This is reducing the parents of their students to children who need a watchful paternal eye and a firm hand to guide them. This is only a step or two removed from the yeshiva inspecting student’s homes the same way they inspect the dorms. This is nothing short of an invasion of privacy dressed up as the yeshiva virtuously saving us from ourselves.

The whole thing reeks of Big Brother, from the monitoring of the family’s internet activity to the problem the monitoring is meant to prevent: that students may see porn. And why is porn evil? Because in the yeshivish world, any semi-erotic thought is a thoughtcrime. Perhaps more ominous is the thought that blogs like this one represent exactly the sort of subversive ideas that the Thought Police guarded against in Nineteen Eighty Four.

This is just the latest of the outrageous policies that routinely come from the right wing of Orthodoxy. Normally when I read or hear about what some rov said or some yeshiva did, I may find it distasteful or ridiculous, but I don’t identify with it. It’s something THEY do: the fanatical Chareidim is Israel, the chassidim in Williamsburg or New Square, the ultra-yeshivish in Lakewood. This hits much closer to home. I know people who went to Tiferes Yisroel, I know people who have kids in Tiferes Yisroel, and had things gone a little differently fifteen years ago, I might have gone there myself for high school. The insanity is knocking at my door, and I find myself wishing I had better locks.

Jewish Music

2010-07-28T06:34:00.000-07:00

Recently a friend of mine was telling me about a new (for him, anyway) song from Ohad. In his words, the tune is, “Mamish beautiful. It’s so moving…” He played the song for me, and after a few bars I started singing along – with the original words. The song he thought was such a beautiful niggun was this:

If you don’t recognize it, this is the original:

Now my friend is right, it is a beautiful tune. But it’s not exactly the holy yiddeshe niggun he thought it was.

As a kid, I never listened to “goyishe” music. Both my parents listened to all kinds of music as kids, and my mother has a collection of records from the ‘60s and ‘70s of groups like the Bee Gees and the Mammas and Pappas. For some reason, though, once they were married they stopped listening to music on the radio and never played anything except “Jewish” music. (That is, music produced by Orthodox groups.) As a teenager, I was told by my rabbeim that goyishe music consisted of lyrics about sex and tunes that aroused unholy feelings in one’s body. Not having any firsthand knowledge of non-Jewish music, I believed them.

In my early twenties I started listening to music online, and I discovered that what my rabbeim had told me just wasn’t true. Most songs aren’t about sex, and many of the tunes were beautiful, moving, stirring, and/or happy. It wasn’t all sex and jerky dance tunes.

Then I discovered that many songs passed off as “Jewish” are actually covers of pop songs. In itself, there’s nothing wrong with that. What makes it odd is that many of the people who like the Jewish versions of these songs would never dream of listening to “goyishe” music. And it’s not just the lyrics. Many of these same people won’t listen to Jewish groups that explicitly create parodies of pop songs, like Shlock Rock and Variations. According to my rabbeim, groups like Shlock Rock were only for kiruv or kids who nebech listened to goyish music. It wasn’t good, but it was marginally better than listening to the songs with their original lyrics. Clearly, they believed there was something unholy about the music itself.

Later yet I discovered that what I had heard from malcontents in yeshiva was true, that many traditional songs were adaptations of folk songs and that there really is no such thing as “Jewish” music as wholly distinct from “goyishe” music.

All pretense of there being a clear separation between Jewish and non-Jewish music vanished when I davened in a Lubavitcher shul one Rosh Hashanah and heard them sing one of the tefillos to the tune of the Marseilles. I asked someone I knew there why they were singing the French national anthem, and he told me that one of the Rebbes had taken the tune and stripped it of its tumah so it could be used for the elevated purpose of Rosh Hashana davening. My reaction was, “Riiiiight.” It remains one the most ridiculous and unnecessary justifications I’ve ever heard.

Just for fun, I put together a side-by-side comparison of some of the songs circulating in the Yeshivish community that are widely accepted as authentically Jewish next to the original versions. I know that there’s a lot of original music produced by Orthodox groups, and I’m not trying to suggest that it’s all or even mostly co-opted pop tunes. It’s just that I find these really funny. It’s probably the unexpectedness of hearing a completely different version of a song I grew up with and knowing that version is the original.

Yidden / Dschinghis Khan

Asher Bara / Land Down Under

Kol Hamesameach / Simarik

Baruch Hagever / I Will Follow Him

Dip the Apple / Darling Clementine

Mishenichnas Adar / Pick a Bale of Cotton

Im Lavan Garti / Cinderella

Deaf Man in the Shteeble / A Blind Man In The Bleachers

Mama Rochel / I Can Go The Distance

Umacha / Snows Of New York

Rabbi Nachman / Numa Numa

D'ror Yikra / Sloop John B

Russian folk songs in contemporary Jewish music:
http://onegshabbat.blogspot.com/2011/09/blog-post_05.html

If anyone knows of more, put them in the comments and I’ll try to find videos to embed in the post.

Corrupting Influences

2010-06-30T20:14:00.000-07:00

I was sitting on my bed in the dorm, reading a book when I heard someone moving in the other room. I stuffed the book into a desk drawer and went to see who it was.

I was expecting one of my roommates and was surprised to find the principal, Rabbi X. He seemed just as surprised to see me. I was taking different classes than most of the other students in my grade and so had a different schedule than them. Rabbi X had come to make his semi-weekly inspection for contraband and had apparently forgotten that I might be there.

“Hello.” He said.
“Hello,” I answered.
“How are you?”
“I’m good.”
“Please go back into your room until I finish in here.”
“All right.”

I retreated into my room and listened to the rustling of papers and banging of drawers as Rabbi X riffled through my roommates’ belongings, looking for contraband like radios, magazines, tabloid newspapers, and non-Jewish music and books. (“Non-Jewish” was defined as anything not published by Feldheim, Artscroll, or CIS.) When he was finished he knocked on my door. I opened it and stood in the doorway.

“Excuse me,” said Rabbi X, “Please wait in the other room while I look through your room.”
I squeezed by him, and he turned around to stand in the doorway.
“Do you have anything in here I should know about?” he asked.
I hesitated a moment, my urge to avoid trouble warring with my (naïve?) conviction that one should always be honest, then nodded. “Yes.”
“What is it?”
“Books.” I answered, and then added quickly, “Just some novels. They’re harmless.”
Rabbi X looked at me, a sad smile on his face. “How can you say that? If you were a shtarker boy, maybe I could believe that reading novels is harmless. But you, with all your questions…”
He shook his head. Clearly, reading these tumadike goyishe books had damaged my neshama.

Rabbi X objected to my reading novels because, as he told me at my admission interview, they often contained passages that were inappropriate for and harmful to a yeshiva bachur. By which he meant sex. To protect students from the irreparable spiritual harm caused by exposure to such licentious entertainment, all non-Jewish books were banned. Magazines were banned because they might have pictures of scantily-clad women and titillating articles. Radios were banned because students might tune in to shows that discussed sex.

(In reality, I chose books based on their entertainment value, not on how likely they were to get me aroused. My roommate often annoyed me by listening to baseball games on his contraband radio at full volume while he was in the shower, but I never heard him listen to anything to which I thought Rabbi X might object.)

In the frum world at large, media are banned almost exclusively because of their potential to expose innocent yidden to wanton licentiousness, thereby staining their neshamos and damaging their ability to properly relate to divrei kedusha. Denunciations of television and movies inevitably include diatribes against the appearance on the screen of the worst kinds of giluy arayos and shvichas damim. The central issue of the war against the internet is the easy availability of online porn. Even newspapers, the staid old maid of mass communication media, are frowned upon because they may contain untznius pictures and articles.

The yeshivish world holds that popular media are damaging to emunah and kedusha. And the yeshivish world is right.

But not for the reasons they proclaim. Exposure to media is not harmful because representations of sexuality damage our non-existent souls. It is damaging because these media present information not available within the confines of the frum world. It is damaging because it presents people who are different than the frum norm as people instead of as “goyim.” It is damaging because, in sufficient quantity and quality, such information can shatter a lifetime of sheltered indoctrination. Truths once heard from respected teachers can crumble in the face of solidly supported counter-evidence. Sacred cows are led to the slaughter one by one by outsiders who see them only as hamburger.

If I were cynical, I might say that the leaders of the yeshivishe velt have deliberately sold their followers on the idea that one should avoid exposure to the outside world because of that world’s sexual immorality in order to maintain control of the masses. I might even charitably say that they sincerely believe that they are doing a good thing: preventing people from going off the derech, something which the leaders beleive would adversely affect both those people's individual cheleks in Olam Haboh and the collective fortune of Klal Yisroel in this world.

I think, though, that that may be giving the community leaders too much credit. Separating ourselves from the depraved nations of the world is an old, old theme in Judaism and is undoubtedly one of the things that sustained the Judaism meme through millennia of persecution. The blocking out of the outside world because of its sexual immorality, and thereby preventing access to information that may cause people to stray, is just the latest iteration of an age-old adaptation.

Shaped Like a BLOGG!

2010-06-29T18:15:00.000-07:00

I found this while reading my daughter her bedtime story. It’s from The Shape of Me and Other Stuff by Dr. Seuss, published in 1973.

1st Century Spin Doctors

2010-06-28T09:39:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is Shiva Assur B’Tammuz, a fast day which commemorates the day four Roman legions breached the city walls of Yerushalayim. It begins a three-week period of mourning for the destruction of Yerushalayim, ending on Tisha B’Av, the day on which the Bais HaMikdash fell.

It is traditionally held that Yerushalayim fell to the Romans because of sinas chinim, hatred between Jews. For once, the traditional explanation is right. The Jews of Yerushalayim were split into numerous political factions, all of whom were fighting with one another. Although the citizens of Yerushalayim were initially able to repel the legionnaires, the fighting between the factions took a heavy toll. Supplies were needed to withstand the siege were destroyed and fighters who could have been used to repel the Romans were instead killed defending territory from rival factions. Even at the very end, when the Romans had taken all of Yerushalayim and the last of the Jewish fighters were desperately defending the Beis HaMikdash from legionnaires in the neighboring Antonia Fortress, the three factions holding the Beis HaMikdash each held distinct areas and fought each other at the same time they tried to hold off the Romans.

The basic outline of this history is well known in the frum world. What’s interesting is the spin it’s given. For one thing, the fighters are presented as impetuous, almost evil people as compared to the pacifist Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai, but that’s to be expected given that the version of events recorded in the gemara was written by people with the same values as Rabbi Yochanan. More interesting is that the cause of the destruction of Yerushalayim and the Beis HaMikdash is seen as metaphysical. Yerushalayim didn’t fall because of the practical consequences of sinas chinim: that Jewish factions were fighting among themselves, weakening each other and eroding their collective ability to stand up to the Roman legions. Rather, Jewish people were hating each other and creating a miasma of sin that hung over the nation, therefore as a punishment Hashem sent the Romans to destroy the Beis HaMikdash.

Why was a metaphysical explanation hung on what would seem to be a mundane progression of events? Why the unnecessary metaphysical spin on the idea of sinas chinim, when the simple interpretation that intra-Jewish hatred and fighting destroyed the ability to resist the Romans is adequate?

I think that the spin given to the fall of Yerushalayim and the Beis HaMikdash was both a response to the political reality in which the Jews at the time of the gemara lived and an attempt to maintain Hashem’s stature after the destruction of the Beis HaMikdash.

Were the story to enter Jewish mythos as one of military defeat, it might inspire other Jews to attempt an armed rebellion against Rome. After all, Yerushalayim’s defenders failed because they were divided! If we stand together, maybe we can beat back the Roman conquerors! To the Rabbis concerned with preserving Jewish traditions and maintaining social order, this was unacceptable. A revolt would (and several times did) bring the might of the Roman Empire down on Judea. There was little hope of Jewish rebels defeating the Roman legions, and a very real chance that rebellion would bring harsh sanctions from Rome. Far better to vilify the fighters of Yerushalayim as thugs and to present the battle as one that they were divinely decreed to lose because Hashem was punishing the Jewish people for sinas chinim.

Perhaps even more important than maintaining social order was explaining how the Romans could have destroyed Hashem’s house on earth. Framing the incident as a military defeat would mean acknowledging that the pagan Romans defeated the holy followers of the One True God and destroyed His city and His temple. Better to present the fighters as undeserving thugs who would not have merited Hashem’s help. Even more, the idea that Hashem used the Romans to punish the Jewish people for the sin of sinas chinim implies that not only didn’t the pagans defy Hashem and defeat His fighters, but that Hashem is so great and powerful that Rome, the most powerful empire in the world, exists only to be used as Hashem’s tool for chastising His chosen people.

Just Shoot Him!

2010-06-15T09:02:00.001-07:00

I came across this cartoon yesterday. It illustrates a question I’ve had for a long time now about the David and Goliath story.

When I was a little kid, I learned the story of how David, a boy with no military experience, went up against Goliath, a giant warrior. David hit Goliath with a stone from his “slingshot,” which miraculously hit the giant Philistine in a vulnerable place right between his eyes and killed him.

The picture I formed was of a Dennis-the-menace like kid with a toy slingshot going up against an ogre. For the kid to win was certainly a miracle!

The actual story as related in nach is somewhat different.

David was a young man, not a little boy, and he used a sling, not a slingshot. I suppose my first-grade rebbe can be excused for not knowing much about obsolete weaponry, but the difference between a slingshot and a sling is enormous. Even a real slingshot (as opposed to a toy made with a forked twig and a rubber band) propels a projectile with about the same force as a BB gun. A sling, on the other hand, is a deadly weapon. From Wikipedia:

A sling is a projectile weapon typically used to throw a blunt projectile such as a stone. It is also known as the shepherd's sling.

A sling has a small cradle or pouch in the middle of two lengths of cord. The sling stone is placed in the pouch. Both cords are held in the hand, then the sling is swung and one of the two cords is released. This frees the projectile to fly on a tangent to the circle made by the pouch's rotation. The sling derives its effectiveness by essentially extending the length of a human arm, thus allowing stones to be thrown several times farther than they could be by hand.

The sling is very inexpensive, and easy to build. It has historically been used for hunting game and in combat.

Until the invention of firearms slingers were used in combat in the same way as archers. Unlike a bow, though, slings were easy to make and fired stones or cheap lead bullets instead of expensive arrows. This was not a toy. As a shepherd, David would have had experience using a sling to defend his sheep from predators. In the hands of an expert, a sling was as deadly as a pistol.

The encounter, then, was not a little kid with a toy challenging the Philistine champion. It’s more like the scene from Indiana Jones where Indy, confronted by a large man who is clearly an expert swordsman, pulls out a revolver and shoots him. All of a warrior’s skill counts for nothing if the other guy has a gun – or a sling.

So why is the incident treated as a miracle?

One reason might be that, until very recently, it was assumed that the outcome of combat depended, not on the skill of the soldiers and generals, but on the will of God. As recently as the American Civil War, General Robert E. Lee, after ordering an assault on the center of the Union line at Gettysburg (despite the protests of his subordinates), said that the result was “In God’s hands.” Lee, a master tactician, felt that tactics mattered for nothing when compared to God’s will. This sentiment was even stronger in the ancient world. Thus the outcome of a battle was seen as nothing less than the manifestation of God’s will – a miracle. The unusual circumstances of a shepherd defeating a seasoned warrior (and the shepherd boy going on to become king) are what made this particular encounter memorable.

Another possibility is that the unusual aspects of the encounter are themselves the reason the incident is considered miraculous. Even today, someone who survives a situation where he might have been killed often calls his survival a “miracle” even if there was nothing supernatural about it. Even though there was nothing supernatural about David shooting Goliath in the head, the fact that David came through the encounter in one piece might itself be reason enough to call the incident a miracle.

So, would we consider it a miracle today? If a teenaged farm boy armed with the pistol he uses to shoot at coyotes faced off against a master swordsman in single combat and won by shooting the swordsman between the eyes from twenty feet away, would that be a miracle?

I Have Met the Other, and He is Me

2010-06-10T19:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve been having a case of writer’s block lately. Or more accurately, a lack of inspiration. I used to have an idea for a post pretty regularly, every week or two. Lately, nothing.

I suppose part of the problem is that I want my posts to be original and unique, and most of what there is to write about has been written. I can write about my own experiences, but unless my anecdotes tie in to some bigger point, posting autobiographical accounts just seems narcissistic.

That said, I finally had an idea. It occurred to me that I instinctively feel uncomfortable around people who dress the way I do now.

The yeshivish world is obsessed with how people dress. For girls there’s tznius; for boys, there’s the uniform of black hat, pants, shoes, socks, and yarmulke and the white shirt. Even little kids starting in in 4th or 5th grade have to wear an approximation of the uniform, though their dress shirts are usually allowed to have patterns and they can wear all-black sneakers instead of shoes. I remember going shoe-shopping as a kid and having trouble finding sneakers without a trace of other color. Even a white Nike swoosh on an otherwise all-black shoe was a problem.

While it might be permissible to wear a polo shirt on vacation or while playing ball, dressing “like the goyim” was completely unacceptable. To this day, when I shop for clothing I inevitably imagine the clothes for sale on the stereotypical boorish "goy" caricature and have to quiet the voice in the back of my head that asks how I could wear the same things as one of them.

The ultimate goyish clothing is the jeans-and-t-shirt outfit that has become ubiquitous in the US and around the world. T-shirts might be tolerated in camp during the summer, but jeans, especially blue jeans, are evil. I still instinctively react to a frum guy in jeans by assuming he must be a bit of a bum. Which is odd, because a guy in jeans and a t-shirt is what I see most of the time when I look in the mirror.

I was sixteen when I realized that judging people based on the way they dress is silly. My epiphany came one afternoon when I was passing by a shul and was asked to help make a minyan for mincha. As I stood in the back looking around at my fellow congregants, I noticed one who was dressed in jeans, a t-shirt, and sandals with a leather yarmulke on his head. I instinctively judged him to be less-than: less frum, less of a decent person, not as worthy as a refined yeshiva bochur like myself.

Then I realized how absurd that was. This guy had voluntarily come to shul in the middle of the day to daven mincha with a minyan. On the other hand, I, had I not been dragooned into helping make the minyan, would have happily not davened mincha at all.

And I was thinking that I was frummer than him? Because I wore a white shirt and he wore jeans?

We judge people based on how they dress because it’s convenient. We can tell at a glance what a person is wearing; it takes hours of conversation to learn about someone’s personality and beliefs. Because we judge people based on what they wear, clothing can be a strong group identifier. In the yeshivish world, wearing the yeshivish uniform declares that you’re One Of Us – and not One Of Them. Unfortunately Them is seen as the evil Other.

I have no problem with clothing as a group identifier. The indoctrinated belief that someone who dresses like One Of Them is the evil Other… that still affects me. Even when those who dress like the Other dress just like me.

The Force Behind Nature

2010-04-28T00:11:00.001-07:00

In my last post, I asked why the author of Search Judaism had devoted so much effort to debunking evolution. This isn’t his personal crusade: delegitimizing and ridiculing evolution is common in the frum world, and attempting to disprove it is a Creationist obsession. Last night I came across a short lecture by Daniel Dennet that helped me understand why.

He made the point that absent an alternative, it seems foolish to assert that something that shows every sign of being carefully planned and designed in fact arose by itself. We live in a world with a coherent explanation of how that can happen, so to us it seems obvious that even if evolution were to turn out to be the wrong explanation, we would find a different, naturalistic explanation for the appearance of design in nature. In a world that had never had such an explanation presented, accepting the Watchmaker Argument seems the more rational position.

The universe appears designed. We must account for that. It makes more sense to say it was designed then to say that design arose accidentally, by itself. Sure, there are problems with the Watchmaker Argument, but most people aren’t interested in philosophy and don’t know about them. Even for those that do, it still may seem more reasonable to assume some guiding force designed the universe. In the absence of any alternatives, that force was assumed to be some sort of deity.

What the theory of evolution does is posit a guiding force that is wholly materialistic, mechanistic, and devoid of intelligence or intent.

The debunking of evolution, then, is never intended to “prove” God’s existence. It is instead meant to remove evolution as a viable alternative. If evolution is not the cause of the appearance of design in the universe, then that design must be accounted for. There must be some force that caused that design. In the absence of any alternatives, that force is assumed to be some sort of deity.

That there is still no evidence for God’s existence is beside the point. The point is that there must be some guiding force, and we intuitively assume that such a force must be intelligent. Intelligent force designing the universe = God. To the theist making the argument, the alternative seems to be that it all just happened randomly, which is clearly ridiculous. The argument that there might be some other, wholly physical force at work which accounts for the design we see seems to be just a placeholder. In his mind, the atheist is saying, “I have no idea why the universe seems designed, but I refuse to believe in God, so I’m just going to say that somehow it happened.”

[An interesting thing about framing the argument as a debate over what the force that produced design in the universe is is that it sets up evolution as a direct rival to God, which may be one reason why the religious see it as so threatening.]

*****************************************************
I came across the following paragraph in The Evolution of God by Robert Wright, and I think sums up nicely what I was getting at in this post:

Darwinians who are atheists have been known to celebrate the failure of Paley’s explanation. They love to note how futile this attempt to empirically argue for the existence of God turned out to be. What they tend not to emphasize is that Paley was half right. The complex functionality of an organism does demand a special kind of explanation. It seems clear that hearts are here in some sense in order to pump blood, that digestive systems are here in order to digest food, that brains are here in order to (among other things) help organisms find food to digest. Rocks, in contrast, don’t seem to be here in order to do anything. The kinds of forces that created a rock just don’t seem likely to be the kinds of forced that would create an organism. It takes a special kind of force to do that – a force like natural selection.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Four, section four I

2010-04-26T12:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve finally gotten around to continuing my critique of Search Judaism. I find that I’m only able to handle small doses of the misrepresentations and faulty reasoning before it goes from entertaining to frustrating, so I’m breaking up the current section into smaller parts.

Evolution (Chapter Four, section four)
The author begins by saying, “The theory of evolution is based on several assumptions.” He promises to objectively evaluate these assumptions and to see if the theory is based on science. So far so good.

Once again, though, one has to wonder why he is putting so much effort into “debunking” evolution. Evolution merely describes how biodiversity developed. It says nothing about the existence or non-existence of God. And, also again, if evolution were proven to be incorrect, all that means is that we would have to answer, “We don’t know” to the question, “How did biodiversity develop?” “We don’t know” does not equal “God did it.” The “God did it” hypothesis would need positive evidence in its favor to be accepted, not merely the refutation of other explanations. The implicit assumption seems to be that God is the default explanation, from which we deviate only when we have other theories.

Assumption 1

The author says that Darwinian evolution claims life evolved slowly, a step at a time, and asks if this is true. He cites the Burgess Shale, a large collection of fossils in the Canadian Rockies discovered by Charles Walcott that date back to the Cambrian period and one of the few to preserve impressions of the soft parts of specimens.

The author claims that Walcott was dismayed to discover, “that all these species were simultaneously present. In other words, there was no evolution over time. This posed a real problem for evolutionists because these fossils contained representatives from every phylum except just one of the phyla that exist today. No new phyla ever evolved after the Cambrian explosion.”

To begin with, while “phylum” sounds all sciencey, it’s actually an ill-defined term and according to Wikipedia, “…"phylum" may be a misnomer indicative of ignorance. Consequently the number of phyla varies from one author to the next.” So the claim that, “No new phyla ever evolved after the Cambrian explosion,” may be a matter of interpretation.

The author then claims that Walcott hid the specimens he collected in the Smithsonian’s archives, implying that he wanted to keep them out of sight so as not to challenge evolution, and that they weren’t “rediscovered” until 1985. Yet Walcott himself published detailed descriptions of his findings in 1908, hardly the action of a man concerned about keeping his discovery from the world, and there were digs at the site every few decades by various scientists to collect new specimens, including ongoing work from the mid-60s through the mid-80s. While Walcott’s specimens may have been “rediscovered” in 1985 as the author claims (I didn't find any information one way or the other), they clearly weren’t hidden away as part of a cover-up and many thousands of specimens from the Burgess Shale were definitely available to scientists in the intervening years.

Furthermroe, this wasn’t the stunning unexpected blow to evolution that the author makes it out to be. Darwin actually devoted an entire chapter of The Origin of Species to the sudden appearance of animal groups with few or no similar ancestors.

The author cites Stephen Jay Gould’s book on the Shale as claiming that scientists were wrong about Darwinian evolution, and that life did not evolve slowly, bit by bit, but that “diverse species emerged and evolved simultaneously.” The author here gives the false impression that the Shale thus proves that biological evolution is false. What he neglects to point out is that:
1) Stephen Jay Gould was a proponent of punctuated equilibrium, the theory that species remain more or less stable for long periods, then undergo sudden, rapid evolution in response to sudden changes in the environment.
2) Even if punctuated equilibrium rather than traditional Darwinian evolution is the more common form evolution takes, it is still the evolution of one species from another, not creationism ex nihlo by an omnipotent God.
3) There are various explanations proposed by scientists for why many of the animals preserved in the Burgess Shale appear without antecedents. Walcott proposed that the period in which the Cambrian animals found in the Shale evolved did not lend itself to fossilization and so the animals from that period are absent from the fossil record. Less speculatively, there are scientists who argue that many of the forms found in the Cambrian period are similar to types that evolved well before then, and there is debate as to whether the Cambrian period really represents an “explosion” of species.

Bias and Rationality

2010-04-25T13:13:00.000-07:00

In the debate between believers and skeptics, each side often accuses the other of holding their positions for reasons other than the unassailable rationality of their worldview. To be blunt, each side accuses the other of holding the position they do due to a failure of character. The skeptic accuses the believer of being intellectually lazy and dishonest, of holding onto his belief because it is comforting, or because of his biases and upbringing, or because he has too much invested in his religion, or, most often of all, because the believer has simply never given his beliefs any real thought. The believer accuses the skeptic of denying the existence of God and the truth of his religion because the skeptic is angry at God, or because he has too much invested in being a non-believer, or, most often, because by denying God and religion the skeptic is then free to live a amoral hedonistic lifestyle.

It is interesting to note that the believer’s accusation is more vicious than the skeptics’ equivalent. The skeptic accuses the believer of wanting to hold onto his culturally-indoctrinated beliefs and of never bothering to challenge beliefs that he was taught to regard as self-evident. We all have unexamined beliefs, and most of us have neither the time nor the interest to investigate them all. You might even think of it as pragmatic laziness. While unexamined beliefs may leave one with an inaccurate perception of reality, assuming that the world is as our culture teaches us it is is not a moral failing.

The believer on the other hand accuses the skeptic of being an amoral hedonist, blinded to the Divine Truth by his base desires. What’s more, this is not the empirical consensus of the believing community, arrived at through their interactions with skeptics. It is instead a religious dogma that dictates only an immoral person would deny God’s existence. It can be found in sayings and anecdotes: One must be a slave to God or to his desires; There are no kashyos, only teirutzim. The skeptic, then, is a disgusting person who wallows in the base fleshly pleasures of the material world and tries to fool himself into believing there is no God so that he can indulge himself without feeling guilty. Such a person should be shunned, cast out of the community to protect the innocent and pious, and kept away from our precious impressionable children.

As insulting as the believer’s characterization of the skeptic’s motives is, I thought that it might be prudent to investigate whether the core claim has any merit. Stripped of its invective, the believer’s accusation is that the skeptic rejects God and religion not because he has come to the conclusion through rational inquiry that God doesn’t exist, but because he desires to do things which if God existed would be unwise. Rejecting God is therefore a direct result of the skeptic’s desires and a necessary step for his fulfillment of those desires.

In this conception of the skeptic’s motivation, the skeptic’s method of reaching conclusions mirrors that of the believer. The believer accepts on faith that God exists, and then rationalizes that belief. The skeptic “accepts on faith” that his desires should be fulfilled, and then rationalizes away God. (All right, it’s a little more subtle than that, as the claim is usually that the skeptic’s desires are unconsciously influencing him rather than an explicit statement that his desires must be fulfilled, but the parallel stands.)

Is there any merit to this? Might my desires be influencing me and blinding me to the existence of God and the Truth of Judaism?

I like to think of myself as rational, but I am all too aware that people, as a species, are not nearly as rational as we think we are. We all like to think that we’re the exception, but objectively I must admit that I’m probably not. While I was in school from time to time professors would present examples of how our minds trick us. In the back of my mind I always assumed that I would be able to see through the trick, that I was in some way superior to the plebes who suffered from the illusions of their own minds. Again and again, I was dismayed to find that I was as susceptible as anyone else.

Objectively, then, I cannot claim that I am wholly rational. As much as I may try to approach everything rationally, inevitably I am limited by the same human frailties as everyone else. I have my biases and preconceptions, my culturally-influenced worldview, and yes, my desires.

So, is my rejection of God’s existence wholly rational?

Surprisingly, I have to conclude that it’s not.

This is not to say that it is irrational. I think I have a sound rational basis for my skepticism. But had I been perfectly happy with all aspects of frum life, I would never have gone this route. My rejection of Judaism’s truth-claims does not stem wholly from a dispassionate evaluation of the religion, but from a base that includes a distaste for certain communal norms and the related desire to disregard them. This was one of the many factors that contributed to my skeptical stance, and I cannot disregard the likelihood that it influences my judgment.

Does this mean my conclusions are invalid? Not at all. To quote Philip K. Dick, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” Do my biases, my “desires,” lead me to favor certain conclusions? Yes. Does that mean that those conclusions are wrong? No. I try to remain aware of my biases and to examine all arguments objectively, even though my instinctive reaction may be to dismiss theistic arguments out of hand. What we must all remember, believer and skeptic alike, is that whatever our desires, whatever our biases, reality is what it is. Brute facts are care nothing for our desires. And it is upon the facts that we must base our conclusions.

So while I didn’t arrive at my current worldview wholly through dispassionate rational inquiry, I think I am justified in rejecting the believer’s characterization of the skeptic’s motives. My conclusions, while undoubtedly influenced by my desires and biases, do not rest upon them but upon the facts.

Index

2010-04-13T13:08:00.000-07:00

Belated Anniversary Post

2010-04-13T12:59:00.000-07:00

It’s now been over a year since I started this blog. I meant to post on the actual anniversary, but I was away for Pesach and have been busy or not in the mood since I got back.

A year’s a long time. I may not post frequently, but I usually write every couple of weeks, and for a while I was writing every day. Since I’ve started following the blogosphere I’ve seen some good blogs (and some not-so-good ones) start up, run for a few months, then stand abandoned when their authors disappear from cyberspace. So, congratulations to me!

(Why thank you, me.)

When I started writing I thought I would record some of the incidents and insights in my life that have brought me to my current position on religion. I’ve done some of that, but I’ve also found myself writing frequently about theology, morality, and philosophy. I’ve found that writing out my ideas helps me to understand my own position better, as it forces me to lay out the ideas and arguments and explain them rather than leave them as a confused jumble in my head. Feedback from other people helps to refine ideas, either by modifying or discarding mistaken bits or by making me better define and explain them. So, thank you to all the commenters.

At this point, I suppose I could write about the purpose of the blog, perhaps about what I hope to accomplish. Except that it doesn’t really have a purpose. It’s just a hobby. Sure, blogs are what helped me realize I wasn't unique, that there are other people who grew up frum who think the same way I do, and it’s great to be able to communicate with like-minded people (and even with people who vehemently disagree, as long as they are interested in polite discussion). If reading this blog helps someone else connect with an online community, great! But I wouldn’t make too much of it. Mostly, it’s entertainment.

The following are posts that I somewhat arbitrarily decided to include in a “best of” list. The next post is a categorized index of the last year’s worth of posts. I hope you all enjoy them as much as I do.

The Rasha
My first post. A brief explanation of my point of view.

Wild Mass Guessing
A discussion of why so many religious explanation seem so convoluted, with references to TVtropes, a favorite site of mine.

Objective Morality, or, God’s Classroom Rules
Why we’re so hung up on morality and its failure as a proof for religion.

Duex Ex Homo Sapiens
Possibly my favorite post, it references all of my favorite intellectual pursuits: theology, philosophy, psychology, and history. It’s also particularly well-written, if I do say so myself.

Does Being Wrong Make Something Wrong?
What is a valid way to evaluate the truth of a religion, and does the morality of a religion’s tenets have any bearing on its truth.

Search Judaism critique
The first post in the series, serving as a stand-in for the series so far. (I’ll be continuing it in the near future. Really!) Writing the critique has finally given me a practical use for all the bits of trivia I’ve picked up, and is basically a game of spot-the-error. That said, at least the author tried to approach religion rationally, something that the majority of people never do.

For the full index of posts, click here.

For Want of a Nail…

2010-03-08T23:21:00.000-08:00

For a long time, my personal understanding of miracles and God’s role in the world was that God was a subtle manipulator of events, effecting small, unnoticeable changes that had big consequences. I’m a history buff, and I was often fascinated by how the smallest things could change the course of history. As the nursery rhyme goes, for want of a nail the kingdom was lost…

For example, it can be argued that the allies won WWII in part because a couple of Luftwaffe pilots got lost and bombed London. Early in the war, the Luftwaffe had been hitting RAF airfields and installations as part of the preparations for the invasion of Britain. The Germans knew they had to disable the Royal Air Force if the invasion was to succeed, and their plan was working. German bombers were destroying British airfields and planes faster than they could be repaired.

Then one fateful night, a pair of German pilots on a bombing raid got separated from their group and accidentally bombed London. The British retaliated by hitting Berlin. Hitler, who had promised that bombs would never fall on the German capital, was furious. He countermanded earlier orders that had prohibited the bombing of civilian targets and ordered the Luftwaffe to hit London and other British cities. London suffered the Blitz, but the change of targets took the pressure off the RAF and gave them time to build up their fighter bases. Without this needed reprieve, it is likely the Luftwaffe, not the RAF, would have won the Battle of Britain, and Operation Sea Lion, the German invasion of Britain, would have been carried out. At the time, the British were the only nation actively fighting the Nazis. Had Britain fallen, there is a good chance Germany would have consolidated its hold over Europe.

History changed because a tired young German driving a plane got lost over England. Who’s to say that God didn’t subtly manipulate events by making the pilot a little more tired than he might have otherwise been, or causing him to be distracted at the crucial moment when he got separated from the rest of his group?

This is hardly an isolated case. During WWI, a young corporal in the Bavarian army named Adolf Hitler often volunteered for the most dangerous missions. How might history have played out had he been standing just a bit to the left and had stopped a French bullet? Was it God who made sure that didn’t happen?

Had a German u-boat captain not mistaken the Lusitania for an auxiliary warship, the United States may not have entered WWI.

Had a Union scout not discovered a cigar box containing the order of battle for Confederate army, the US Civil War would have played out differently.

Had someone thought to load solid shot aboard the ironclad CSS Virginia the day she met the USS Monitor at Newport News, she would have punched holes through the Monitor and continued to devastate the Union’s fleet of wooden warships.

Had Captain Nolan gotten along with Lord Cardigan, the British Light Brigade wouldn’t have tried to charge the Russian guns.

And so on.

History hinges on the smallest things…

Such a conception of God bypasses the obvious fact that we don’t see nature-changing miracles, and meshes with the idea that Hashem works through nature. He gives a nudge here to a seemingly random event, a tweak there when no one is looking, and things work out as He planned. Easy enough for an omnipotent omniscient Being, right? Sometimes I would marvel at the awesomeness of a Being who could keep track of all these minute details and Who was able to so subtly yet magnificently effect the world.

Together with the evidence-for-God-ruining-free-will argument I discussed in the last post, the conception of God-as-manipulator explains both why we don’t see obvious evidence for God and how He is in control of the world despite the lack of obvious signs of His interference.

Unfortunately, as attractive an idea as it is, it relies on the a priori acceptance of God’s existence. It is also pure speculation. Even if we were sure God exists, there is no reason to say that God affects the world through subtle manipulation other than it being an attractive idea to someone trying to build a rationalist version of religion.

Free Will at Gunpoint

2010-02-27T22:38:00.000-08:00

An often-repeated explanation for why we don’t see conclusive evidence for God’s existence is that such evidence would take away our free will. Let’s ignore for the moment the question of whether or not we actually have free will, and examine whether the claim has merit.

I wrote in my last post that if God commanded us to do something, we would be best advised to comply because we don’t have the ability to successfully defy an omnipotent omniscient being. I think this is what is meant by the claim the evidence of God’s existence would take away our free will.

Defying God is not like defying a human power. People break the law all the time, but that’s because they think there’s a good chance they won’t get caught. An omniscient Being knows everything that you do. People can rebel against governments. How do you fight an omnipotent Being? Even someone with a gun to his head might defy his assailant. After all, the worst the gunman can do is killing him, sending him to oblivion or, even better, a hero’s welcome in heaven. How could we defy a Being who has the ability torture us for all eternity?

Were God to reveal Himself to us, there really would be no rational choice but to do as He says. However strong our desire to, say, rob someone might be, our certain knowledge that God was watching us and would punish us would keep us from doing so. It would seem, then, that this is a good argument. There is no evidence for God because such evidence would effectively leave us without free will.

The problem with this argument is that, while it explains why the world is as we see it (with no obvious evidence for God), it violates Ockham’s razor. We could more simply say that there is no evidence for God because there is no God. Adding a God who refrains from proving His existence because such proof would ruin free will is an unnecessary complication. Further, the argument asks us to accept the lack of evidence of God’s existence as evidence that He exists. After all, if there was a God, and He wanted us to have free will, the world would look exactly as it does now!

This reminds me of a story posted on DovBear about a month ago. A woman was told her baby was breech, and went to a kabbalist for a segulah to make the baby turn. He told her of a segulah to make the baby turn, with the caveat that if the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck the segulah wouldn’t work. The woman went to the place the kabbalist had told her and did what was needed for the segulah… and the baby didn’t turn. When the baby was born, it was found that the umbilical cord was wrapped around its neck. Had it turned, it would have strangled. This was hailed as a miracle! The segulah, guaranteed to work unless the umbilical cord was around the baby’s neck, had worked exactly as expected! The baby hadn’t turned!

As I commented there, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that NOTHING happened, and nothing happening was considered a miracle.

Similarly, while the evidence-ruining-free-will argument adequately explains why God might not prove His existence, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is no evidence, and no evidence is being presented as an argument in God’s favor.

As best, the evidence-ruining-free-will argument shows that the lack of evidence cannot be taken as proof that God doesn’t exist, because there is at least one plausible explanation for the lack of evidence that includes God’s existence. It is a way for the rationalist believer to explain the lack of evidence. It does not, however, in any way demonstrate that God does, in fact, exist.

Does Being Wrong Make Something Wrong?

2010-02-25T23:36:00.000-08:00

That is, does being morally wrong make something factually wrong? Specifically, does a religious demand for an immoral action or religious sanction of an immoral attitude show that the religion is false?

A little over a month ago, Hedyot posted one of his “Better Know A Kofer” interviews, this one with a woman who calls herself Derech Acheret. The interview implied that she had rejected Orthodox Judaism because she found its inherent misogyny immoral. My initial reaction was that this is not a valid reason to reject Judaism’s truth-claims.

About a week later I read a post by Brooklyn Wolf in which he discussed whether it is halachicly permissible to violate Shabbos to save a non-Jew’s life (and whether he would be able to adhere to halacha in that situation). Wolf asked if one witnessed a car crash on Shabbos, would one permitted to save the non-Jewish driver and his small child? According to a strict interpretation of halacha, it would seem not. (The consensus among the commenters was that there are sufficient loopholes to allow for saving the driver and child, and that practically speaking one should do so, but that’s somewhat beside the point.) Here, my instinctive reaction was, “This halacha is immoral! Another strike against Orthodoxy!”

A moment later I realized that my reaction ran counter to the position I had taken in the discussion on Hedyot’s blog. And so I began to think more about whether the immoral aspects of a religion is reason enough to reject its truth claims.

To begin with, there is the question of what makes something moral. Religion takes the stance that we can know what is moral by following what God tells us to do. The Euthyphro dilemma, the question of whether God’s commands are moral because they are what God commands or if God commands that which is moral by some other, objective standard is not relevant to this discussion. I am not concerned with how the morality of religious directives is derived. It is enough that they are assumed to be moral. Given that the religion is assumed to be moral, our personal sense of morality, influenced as it is by the culture into which we happen to be born, is irrelevant. If it is true that the religious dictate is moral, then our sense that it is immoral is simply wrong.

It is not enough, then, for our personal sense of morality to be at odds with religious teachings. After all, if it is true that an omniscient God handed down these commands from on high, who are we to disagree? Rather, it is necessary to deal with the underlying assumption that religious dictates are inherently moral. To do this, we need to address the basis for that assumed morality, the religion’s truth-claims about God.

Before I get to that, I want to address why we have the instinctive reaction that tells us that immoral (by our personal standards) religious dictates are proof that the religion is wrong. I think it comes from an assumption that religion teaches us what is what is good, and when its teachings outrage our moral sensibilities, we see that as evidence that the religion is wrong. The implicit argument can be laid out like this:

Premise A: Religion always teaches and commands us to do what is good.
Premise B: Therefore, a religion that demands something immoral cannot be true.
Premise C: The religion dictates something that is bad.
Conclusion: The religion is not true.

As I stated above, though, it is entirely plausible to argue that the religious teaching in fact embodies a timeless moral truth that we, unfortunately influenced by the culture we live in, wrongly perceive as immoral.

It is therefore necessary to address the foundations of the assumption that religious dictates are moral: The claim that they were handed down by God, Who only commands us to do that which is moral. This can be broken down into three premises:

1) God exists.
2) God handed down these religious commands.
3) God only commands that which is moral.

If any of these premises are false we have a valid reason for rejecting the religious commands. I think that 3 is largely irrelevant in a practical sense. Even if God were sadistic and commanded us to act immorally, we would be well advised to do as He says. We simply do not have the ability to defy an omnipotent Being and have it end well for us. You could argue that trusting such a Being to be good to us if we follow His commands is foolish, but I think trusting Him to make us miserable if we don’t is a safe bet. Practically, we would have no choice but to do as we’re told and hope for the best.

For the theist who objects to a given religious dictate, attacking premise 2 is the best way to go. If one can make a good argument that God never commanded the particular practice you object to, or that his commands were misunderstood, or that society has warped the true intention of the command and piled layers of unnecessary, objectionable practices on top of it, then the particular practice can be altered or abandoned without rejecting the overall religion.

For the atheist, showing that premise 2 is false in all cases would disprove a religion. Showing that Matan Torah probably wasn’t a historical event, for instance, and that the Torah was compiled later from extant mythology would be a valid reason for rejecting Judaism’s dictates. The lack of evidence for premise 1 would similarly be a valid reason for rejecting religious commands.

It seems that some people who reject religious claims do so because they find certain religious beliefs or practices immoral. Before recently noticing and giving thought to this tendency, I also often took immoral religious commands as evidence that the religion is wrong. But, to answer the question in the post’s title, that I think something is morally wrong doesn’t make it factually wrong. It could be that I’m mistaken about morality. It could be that I’m correct, but that God demands the immoral action, in which case it is in my best interest to comply.

I think that rejection of religion should rest upon rejection of its truth-claims, not on objections to its morality. At best, showing that religion is immoral only disproves one of its claims, the claim that religious dictates are good and guide one in leading a moral life. Far more important are the questions of God’s existence and His will. To reject a religion simply because you object to the demands it makes of its adherents or the culture it supports is an appeal to consequences: I don’t like it, therefore it’s not true.

Haman’s Ingratitude

2010-02-22T20:38:00.000-08:00

The following is something I wrote almost a year ago, when I was still playing with the idea of starting a blog. It’s the first piece I ever wrote with the intention of posting. Now it’s finally the right time of year to put it up.

3/10/09

The Artscroll Kol Dodi on Megilas Esther is “adapted from the shiurim of R’ Dovid Feinstein.” It has the Hebrew text of the Megillah, Artscroll’s English translation, and a semi-detailed explanation that draws on midrashim and meforshim and follows the Megillah almost word-for-word. This morning during megillah reading I was flipping through my copy reading entries at random. Some were interesting, some I had issues with, and one particular entry was an incredibly convoluted piece of illogic.

“…explained Haman’s animosity for her [Esther’s] people. Saul had waged war against Amalek and killed most of the Amalakaites, the nation of Haman. On the other hand, Saul had spared King Agag, and it was only because of that misplaced mercy that Haman had come into existence – where was his gratitude? Haman represented an extreme example of a familiar, if unpleasant, aspect of human nature that people resent those who help them.” (7:5, p.119)

Stop and think about this a moment. Saul “waged war” on Amalek and wiped out nearly the entire nation, men, women, and children. (Even the farm animals were killed, just in case any of the Amalaikim had magically transformed themselves into livestock to escape the sword.) It would seem perfectly natural that anyone who survived what can only be described as genocide would be justified in hating the nation that had destroyed his ancestors. But no, here we learn that Haman hated the Jews because Saul had been kind to his great-great-etc.-grandfather. And what was this great kindness Saul did for Agag? He let him live!

This reminds me of one of Aesop’s fables. A wolf got a bone stuck in his throat. Desperate to get it out, he asked a bird with a long beak to pull it out for him. The bird understandably did not want to put his beak down the wolf’s throat, as this would put his head between the wolf’s jaws. “You have nothing to worry about,” the wolf assured him. “I’ll even give you a reward.” Enticed by the promise of a reward, the bird pulled the bone from the wolf’s throat. Free of the painful bone the wolf started to trot away. “Wait,” the bird called after him. “What about my reward?” The wolf stopped, turned back to him and replied, “I let you stick your head in my mouth and didn’t snap it off. Isn’t that reward enough?”

Much like the wolf in the fable, the author of this megillah seems to feel that if one could have killed another and doesn’t, it is a gift bestowed upon the spared party.

[Incidentally, the moral usually paired with this particular fable, called “The Wolf and the Crane,” is: “In serving the wicked, expect no reward, and be thankful if you escape injury.”]

Defenders of the Faith

2010-02-21T22:33:00.000-08:00

I recently had an interesting, if unpleasant, experience after commenting on Matzav.com. Someone left a link on XGH’s blog to an article there by Rabbi Fingerer, the author of Search Judaism.

Here I feel I should mention that I have nothing against him. That I got a copy of his book as a gift is purely a coincidence. Since I started critiquing Search Judaism I’ve been noticing articles in frum newspapers by Rabbi Fingerer. On the whole, he seems intelligent, tolerant, and well-meaning. That he happens to often get his facts wrong is almost beside the point. I truly think that if more people in the frum world took his approach, tolerating questions and genuinely trying answer them, the society would benefit greatly.

I left a comment on the article at Matzav explaining what he got wrong. I had a hazy notion that Rabbi Fingerer might respond and we might have an interesting discussion. At the very least, I could have an intelligent discussion with other commenters. To my dismay, I was instead subjected to vicious personal attacks by the commenters there. It rattled me enough that I responded in defense of myself, something that I realize now I shouldn’t have done. I have no desire to be a troll, especially not accidentally.

I did notice a few interesting things about the comments people left. In no particular order: they assumed that there was something wrong with me for disagreeing with them. They seemed to think that words and phrases could be used for emphasis regardless of their actual meaning. They think that typing in all caps makes their point stronger. They seemed unable to believe that there could be more than one person in the world who disagreed with them, claiming that I and two other commenters who also expressed disagreement must all be the same person. One commenter even claimed that he knew me from yeshiva – apparently he was in school with someone who had questions, and assumed I must be the same person.

Worst of all was that no one bothered addressing the arguments. The conversation went something like this:
Article: A, and B are true, because of C.
Me: B isn’t true, and A is because of Y.
Commenters: You’re a poopyhead!

Of course, they didn’t actually call me a poopyhead. What they said was far more viscous. I finally understand the jokes about atheists eating babies. Here was a group of people that knew absolutely nothing about me, yet assumed I was a horrible, vile person they couldn’t let their children near simply because I disagree with their religious views. Okay, a detail that’s fundamental to their entire worldview, but still, that’s hardly a basis for judging someone’s character. Even the person who found my blog (and he seemed very impressed with his “research,” as though figuring out how to use Google was a major accomplishment) didn’t bother to do more that skim a post or two, as evidenced by accusations that were at odds with what I have actually written.

What surprised me the most about all this is how much it bothered me. Here was a group of random strangers, whose opinion could in no way affect my life, even if they by some chance found out who I am, and yet the barrage of vitriolic comments and insults shook me. Social censure by an entire group is a powerful thing.

After giving it some thought, I realized that they weren’t reacting to me personally. They were reacting to a perceived attack on the foundations of their worldview. They were attacking a caricature, the ATHIEST, who they were free to tear down in defense of their beliefs. The particular person who triggered the defense, or even that there was a real person they were attacking, was irrelevant.

I also realized that the mass insults were sophisticated defense mechanism evolved by the religious meme. Questioners are to be insulted, taunted, and shunned. By these means they can be forced to agree with the group, at least outwardly, thereby nullifying the threat to the meme’s continuation.

Lastly, thinking about the social dynamics of my experience made me realize that I don’t actually know any people like those commenters. I’ve lived in a frum community all my life and nearly all of my friends are believers. All of them know, more or less, my opinions on religion. Some enjoy discussing it with me, and some don’t, but none of them hold it against me. The commenters on Matzav are those whom all the frum people I know think of as the right-wing crazy people.

I’ve come to see this episode as a learning experience, a first-hand taste of just how central religion is to some people’s worldview and how unpleasant they can be when that worldview is threatened.

A Little Miracle

2010-02-02T19:26:00.000-08:00

When we drove to the hospital this morning, it was just the two of us. A few hours later, there were three of us in the recovery room.

Births are surreal. We knew for almost nine months she was coming, but it wasn’t real until the moment the nurse handed her to me. Now, at home with my older daughter while my wife is in the hospital with the younger one, it’s still not quite real.

Holding her while the doctor finished his work, looking into her tiny face… knowing that my life had suddenly changed, was suddenly fuller, that there was another person in the world whom I would be important to… it’s surreal and wonderful and awe-inspiring. That I know why I feelthe way I do, the evolutionary reasons and nuero-chemical reactions that caused me to instantly fall in love with that red-faced little girl, lessened the miraculous feeling this morning not one bit.

I thought about writing about my reactions today compared with those I might have had ten years ago, or those a true believer would have. Perhaps another time. For right now, I’m going to enjoy my little natural miracle, oxymoron and all.

The Kollel Meme

2010-02-01T21:13:00.000-08:00

I had one of my younger brothers as a guest last Shabbos. He recently started dating, and the conversation soon came around to his plans for the future. To my surprise, he said that he’s planning on learning in kollel for a year or two before getting a job. This is a guy who just finished college, is in yeshiva right now mainly because all of his friends are, and who had no problem skipping Friday night davening. He could be eligible to work in his chosen field in few months. Yet he expects to stay in yeshiva until at least a year after he’s married, whenever that may be. Why?

Orthonomics had a post yesterday about the entitlement felt by some members of the kollel community. (Some commenters pointed out that the post she linked to may be a parody. After re-reading it, I’m undecided. I hope it is.) While commenting on her blog, it hit me that the kollel lifestyle is a meme. In retrospect this is rather obvious, but I was struck by how this realization made so many things suddenly made sense.

Back in June I had a post about the condescending attitude the yeshivish world has towards those that don’t sit and learn. Those who work are considered less-then, nebachs who couldn’t make it in yeshiva or were unfortunately forced by their circumstances to earn a living. “Baalei baatim” is only a hair above “am haaratzim.” Even among the less extreme in the yeshivish world, among those who are willing to grant that ballei baatim can be as righteous as yungerleit, those who sit and learn are seen as the ikker. Their learning sustains the world, and the wage-earning baal habayis should consider it his honor to support those who learn full time.

Never mind that the lifestyle is unsustainable. Never mind that many people in their mid-thirties, with too many kids and no marketable skills, suddenly find themselves struggling to make ends meet. Never mind that the society encourages a myopic, insular, xenophobic, narrowly-defined world view. Yeshivas are full of very smart, kind, warm-hearted people who firmly believe that the best policy is cutting themselves off from the world as much as possible and demeaning everything except talmud torah and everyone (to varying degrees) who doesn’t share their full-time obsession.

Viewed as personal opinions, the attitudes of the yeshivish world are insulting to anyone not in yeshiva. The attempt to brand all “secular” knowledge as pointless at best and trief at worst seems short-sighted, even foolish. The attempts to isolate themselves from the rest of the world and to brand new technologies as a sakana seem misguided, even counter-productive to maintaining their society.

When the kollel lifestyle is viewed as a meme, all of these things suddenly make sense. The veneration of the full-time learner and the pity for the nebach who has to work keeps people learning. The lack of opportunities keep people from finding jobs that might take them away from the yeshiva. Banning the internet and related technologies keeps people away from opinions that might cause them to leave the lifestyle.

Even when people do leave kollel under financial pressures and get jobs, they teach their kids that learning is the ikkar, and the kollel life is the ideal. They work because, nebach, they are no longer able to sit and learn. The meme passes on to another generation.

My brother, despite the ability to start his career in the near future, despite reading the yeshivish Yated only so that he can complain about the ridiculous things they write about, despite having no great love of learning, is planning on living the kollel lifestyle, if only for a year or two. Viewed as an independent decision, this is irrational. Viewed as the perpetuation of a meme, it makes perfect sense.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Clearing up Contradictions

2010-01-28T03:25:00.001-08:00

It occurred to me that there may appear to be a contradiction between two positions I’ve previously taken:

“As for the implication that the possibility God may be proven by science in the future is a good reason to believe in Him now, well, anything is possible. It’s possible I’ll sprout wings and learn to fly. But until I do, I’m not going to jump off any tall buildings.”

Contrast this statement with my dismissal of the improbability of spontaneous abiogenesis as a good reason for rejecting a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life. Might not the religious apologist also say, “Sure, anything is possible, but for life to spontaneously arise is so unlikely that I’m going to reject it until proven otherwise. If life didn’t arise spontaneously, it must have been created, which in turn implies a Creator – God. QED. ”

On the face of it, this seems to be a very good argument. But saying God created life leads to the question, “Who/what created God?” The apologist is assuming that God’s existence is more likely than spontaneous abiogenesis. Note that the hypothetical apologist in the above argument can’t say spontaneous abiogenesis is impossible, only that it is extremely improbable. While I don’t really know what the probability is that God exists (or even how to go about calculating the probability of God) I do not accept a priori that God is the more likely of the two explanations. I think that God is, in fact, the less likely option. If spontaneous abiogenesis were impossible, we would be forced to concede that there must be Creator. If it is merely improbable, it may still be more probable than an improbable deity. Still, given that we have no real numbers, I suppose we can agree to disagree.

The above argument aside, the real difference between the two statements is one of epistemology. In the first case (claiming that science may one day prove God, therefore we should now assume He exists) there is no way to distinguish between true and false beliefs. Any belief can be justified, because the chance always exists that some future discovery will show it to be correct. This is not about the probability of a premise being proven true. It is assuming the premise is true because it isn’t impossible that it will be proven true at some point in the future.

In the second case (claiming that the small probability of spontaneous abiogenesis is not in itself a refutation) I am not assuming that because it’s possible, it’s true. I’m merely saying that it’s improbability isn’t in itself proof that it’s false.

In the first case, the apologist is saying, “We have no scientific reason to say this is true, but we may in the future, so accept it as true right now.” In the second case, I’m saying, “We think that this is what happened, we have some evidence that it’s possible, and while it may be improbable it is the best explanation for the facts.”

(I also went on to show that it’s not nearly as improbable as it was made out to be, but that’s beside the point.)

Live and Let Live

2010-01-26T14:27:00.001-08:00

Every now and then I get into theological debates with friends or family members. It never really goes anywhere, and I never push things past a certain point (which differs depending on whom I’m talking to), but it’s made me think. Do I really want to convince any of these people that I’m right?

I’ve decided the answer is no. I don’t see that “deconverting” the people in my life would be a good thing. It almost certainly wouldn’t make them any happier, and for many of them convincing them that their religious beliefs are wrong would be devastating. So why argue with them? The truth is that I argue mostly because it’s fun or because I found something someone said annoying. But if I were to give my debates a deeper meaning, they’re an attempt to get these people to acknowledge that I might be right.

Religious people are convinced that they are absolutely right and anyone who disagrees with the tenets of their religion is absolutely wrong. While I have no interest in convincing anyone that they should abandon their religion, I would like to convince them that maybe it isn’t such a sure thing. I’d like them to acknowledge the possibility that their beliefs are mistaken than that there are good reasons why someone would disagree with them.

Once we reach the point where we’re not dealing in absolutes, perhaps we can go one step further and agree that we can each have our own worldview without imposing moral values on those views. Perhaps we can agree to live and let live.

There are some people out there who want atheism to spread, who hope for the day when religious beliefs will have the same status as the belief the world is flat. I’m not interested in convincing people. I don’t care if belief is good or bad for humanity. I don’t care if universal rationalism would make the world a better place. In the big picture, it just doesn’t matter.

I figure I’ll be around for about a century, give or take. While I’m alive I’d just like to be reasonably comfortable and happy and for other people to let me be. (I realize that I’m very fortunate to live in a time and place where I can have both.) Further than that, I don’t care. As long as it doesn’t adversely affect me, if someone wants to believe in an invisible man in the sky, that’s fine with me. Just don’t bother me because I don’t.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Four, section three

2010-01-24T23:04:00.000-08:00

Did the Universe Self-Create? (Chapter Four, section three)

I took a look at the rest of the section headings, and it looks like Chapter Four, the “Scientific Evidence for God,” is going to be based entirely around Intelligent Design and disproving evolution. Oh well.

While I’ll go through each of his arguments, I’d like to note that it’s mostly irrelevant to the question of whether or not God exists and whether or not He created the universe. Firstly, as I keep saying, disproving evolution just means evolution is not the correct explanation for biodiversity. It doesn’t mean that God did it. Secondly, he seems to be making all the classic creationist mistakes, including conflating the Big Bang, abiogenesis, and evolution. Whether or not evolution is correct has nothing to do with how the universe came into being or how life originated. Finally, this is all pretty much irrelevant because of the inherent problems with the Argument from Design that I discussed earlier.

The author begins by describing a number of complex animal abilities, such as time-sense and the ability to navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field as a guide. He then says that it is statistically improbable that these happened through “chance mutation and natural selection.” He even cites the, “Tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a 747” analogy.

From TalkOrigins.org regarding the tornado analogy:

1) This claim is irrelevant to the theory of evolution itself, since evolution does not occur via assembly from individual parts, but rather via selective gradual modifications to existing structures. Order can and does result from such evolutionary processes.
2) Hoyle applied his analogy to abiogenesis, where it is more applicable. However, the general principle behind it is wrong. Order arises spontaneously from disorder all the time. The tornado itself is an example of order arising spontaneously. Something as complicated as people would not arise spontaneously from raw chemicals, but there is no reason to believe that something as simple as a self-replicating molecule could not form thus. From there, evolution can produce more and more complexity.

In citing statistical imporobability the author here is displaying a lack of understanding of how probability works. To use the standard analogy, any given hand in a game of cards is statistically very improbable. Yet each player does in fact get a group of cards. The reason this works is because while a player is unlikely to get any specific set of cards, they must get some set of cards. Similarly, the extremely unlikely probability that our specific form of life would form is not really relevant. What is relevant is the likelihood of any self-replicating form arising. That our form of life happened to be the lucky one is no more to the point than that I happened to get a pair of fours, a seven, and two jacks in a hand of poker is relevant to the probability that I would get some combination of five cards.

Further, the unlikelihood of a particular event happening is irrelevant once it actually happens. It is extremely unlikely that any particular person will win a Powerball lottery, yet to claim that the winner actually didn’t win by chance and must have been selected deliberately is silly. So even if the formation of self-replicating forms is vanishingly unlikely, we must accept that they formed. To say that the unlikelihood of their formation is proof that they formed due to the intent of a Creator is as silly as maintaining that the lottery winner must have been deliberately selected. As long as something is possible, it can happen, no matter how unlikely it is.

But we don’t even need to resort to pointing out that a one-in-a-ridiculously-high-number chance is still a chance. The staggering improbability of life occurring spontaneously holds only if we assume consecutive trials. The author quotes a claim that the chance of a bacterium evolving is 1 in 10^39,950. Leaving aside for the moment that we are really discussing the likelihood of a simple self-replicating form, not a more complex bacterium, we are not talking about 10^39,950 trials one after another. We are talking about many (trillions?) of simultaneous trials here on Earth. If we include the rest of the universe with all of the stars and planets, we can run through 10^39,950 trials pretty quickly. If you’re a one-in-a-million kind of person, there are six thousand other people just like you. When the number of trials is in multiples of the probability coefficient, the formation of a self-replicating form isn’t just not unlikely, it’s nearly inevitable.

Lastly, the author seems to be confusing the probability of complex abilities evolving slowly through tiny incremental changes driven by natural selection with the probability of those complex abilities arising spontaneously fully-formed. That everything should line up perfectly by chance to give animals these complex abilities is staggeringly unlikely. The probability of a single small change is much higher, and combined with a high number of simultaneous trials (every birth is a trial) and the (non-random) pressures of natural selection to filter for useful changes the emergence of complex abilities becomes much more likely.

The author goes on to cite the opinions two chemists. The first is quoted as saying, “The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms could have been generated by accident is zero!” That may well be true, but evolutionary biologists do not claim that “organic structures” and “harmonized reactions” were “generated by accident.” At best, abiogenesis could be characterized as an “accident,” but that is merely the formation of a self-replicator, which would have very simple with few structures or precisely tuned functions. It is through the process of evolution by natural selection, a non-random process akin to careful breeding, that the complexity arose.

The second chemist, Charles-Eugene Guye, is claimed to have proven “through probability calculus that the formation of even one molecule of living matter by mere chance is as good as impossible.” This is more to the point, as it addresses the simple forms that would have arisen through abiogenesis. Yet the phrasing is strange. “Molecules” are not living matter. Complex modern life is made of molecules that are not themselves alive. (Exactly what is and isn’t alive is an interesting question. Are our cells alive? The mitochondria in our cells? Are individual proteins alive? The atoms which form the proteins?) What the author probably meant are organic molecules.

A quick Google search turned up the following from Wikiquotes:

…which claims that the odds are 1 in 10^243 against "two thousand atoms" (the size of one particular protein molecule) ending up in precisely that particular order "by accident." Where did Jelenik get that figure? From Pierre Lecompte du Nouy... who in turn got it from Charles-Eugene Guye, a physicist who died in 1942. Guye had merely calculated the odds of these atoms lining up by accident if "a volume" of atoms the size of the Earth were "shaken at the speed of light." In other words, ignoring all the laws of chemistry, which create preferences for the formation and behavior of molecules, and ignoring that there are millions if not billions of different possible proteins--and of course the result has no bearing on the origin of life, which may have begun from an even simpler protein. This calculation is thus useless for all these reasons, …and is hugely outdated (it was calculated before 1942, even before the discovery of DNA), and thus fails to account for over half a century of scientific progress.

So we see that Charles-Eugene Guye’s calculation is not valid and therefore irrelevant. Quoting these two chemists is yet another appeal to authority. We are to accept these chemists’ conclusions because they are scientists. Yet at the same time we are expected to ignore the opinions of all the scientists the author did not see fit to quote. Are we to believe that all of these other scientists, presumably as competent as the author’s examples, did not know of these men’s work? And that the author, himself not a scientist, is privy to conclusive proofs of which the experts are unaware? We are left with two equally unlikely possibilities. Either all of the scientists who believe evolution to be accurate and that abiogensis occurred are indeed ignorant of these decades-old conclusive “proofs” and would immediatly change their position if only the mathematical proofs were brought to their attention; or that those scientists who hold evolution to be the truth are deliberately ignoring these proofs and are deceiving themselves and others in a massive conspiracy. (Amazingly, I think the author leans towards the latter. We’ll see a little later when I get up to his discussion of why scientists “believe in” evolution.)

The author now discuses the Miller-Urey experiment which showed that organic compounds will spontaneously arise out of a “primordial soup” containing water and other elements necessary for life when electricity is applied to the mixture. This and subsequent experiments have shown that abiogenesis is a plausible explanation for the origin of life. The author calls this a “…“proof” of the theory of evolution.” Of course, the experiment was about abiogenesis, not evolution, and it and similar experiments, while they don’t tell us how life actually arose on Earth, are certainly valid as proof-of-concept. The author puts the word “proof” in quotes, implying that it is in fact no such thing, yet doesn’t bother to explain why the experiment was invalid.

Instead, he makes the strange statement that, “More than fifty years since the original experiment… scientists have still not been able to create the basic elements – such as carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen – that went into making the experiment work.” What does the creation of elements have to do with how life arose? The creation of elements in stars though fusion is a well-understood process. I don’t know if anyone has managed to create elements in a lab, but even if it’s never been done, so what? We know how the elements necessary for life formed. Whether or not humans have managed to recreate the process is irrelevant.

The author now quotes yet another chemist, Harold Urey, (of the Miller-Urey experiment) as saying that the more scientists learn of the origins of life, the more impossible it is for them to accept it as the result of “accidental evolution”, yet they cling to evolution as “an article of faith.” The origin of the quote is the Christian Science Monitor (January 4, 1962).

TalkOrigins has this quote in their quote-mining section and provides the relevant context:

Here is the relevant text:

"Dr. Harold C. Urey, Nobel Prize-holding chemist of the University of California at La Jolla, explained the modern outlook on this question by noting that "all of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel that it is too complex to have evolved anywhere.

"And yet, he added, "We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great it is hard for us to imagine that it did."

"Pressed to explain what he meant by having "faith" in an event for which he had no substantial evidence, Dr. Urey said his faith was not in the event itself so much as in the physical laws and reasoning that pointed to its likelihood. He would abandon his faith if it ever proved to be misplaced. But that is a prospect he said he considered to be very unlikely."

I bet you are just dying to know what the question referred to in the first sentence is, aren't you? The preceding section was on panspermia vs abiogenesis:

"This theory had been proposed before scientists knew how readily the organic materials of life can be synthesized from inorganic matter under the conditions thought to have prevailed in the early days of the earth. Today, Dr. Sagan said, it is far easier to believe that organisms arose spontaneously on the earth than to try to account for them in any other way."

This is a misquote, pure and simple. With the reporting style used, you can't string together the items in the quote marks and assume he said those things in order.

Dr. Urey’s remarks were taken out of context (and I suspect that the version quoted in the book (which is slightly different from that cited on TalkOrigins) is a tweaked version of the misquote, as this version explicitly mentions evolution and more strongly implies that evolution is a dogma). He was not talking about evolution, but about abiogenesis, and he was not talking about faith in a religious sense but of a conviction that the scientific method is the best way to discover the way the world functions.

Further, even if it were true that evolution is a religious belief, accepted on “faith,” that would only serve to put it on an equal footing with other religious beliefs accepted on faith. If the argument is that evolution is an invalid claim BECUASE it's a religious belief, the implication is that all religious beliefs are inherently invalid, an argument that is antithetical to the book's thesis.

I’ll give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that he lifted the quote from a Creationist source without bothering to check its veracity. This would merely make him unreliable. To assume that he actually did the research and used the quote anyway would imply that he’s dishonest.

Shabbos Reading

2010-01-23T23:09:00.000-08:00

I came across a few interesting things in my reading over Shabbos, and I figured I’d write them down before I forget them.

There were two interesting articles in this month’s National Geographic. The first was about the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, a group that broke with the Mormon mainstream over the issue of polygamous marriage. According to the article, members of the FLDS believe that their purpose in life is to have as large a family as possible, as this family will be with them through eternity.

What struck me were the similarities between the FLDS society and Orthodox Jews. Not the polygamy, obviously, for all that polygamy is technically muttar. Nor are the societies really similar overall. It was more the small things, like the notion of proper women’s roles as homemakers, the tznius dresses the women wore (though it seems their wardrobe is far more restricted than even the most machmer OJs), and the pictures of FLDS “gedolim” in a picture of a family’s living room, complete with a large portrait of the FLDS prophet that would compare favorably with the pictures many Chassidim keep of their Rebbe.

The article raises some interesting questions, such as whether society at large has a right to object to the FLDS lifestyle when its members seem to be happy and leading fulfilling lives. The same question could be asked of any religious group. It’s just that polygamy is further outside our society’s accepted norms than other differences between religions.

The second article was about nomadic blacksmiths in India who keep five-hundred-year-old social restrictions like not using lamps after dark in remembrance of their ancestor’s defeat at the hands of the Mongols. While many of the people said they would settle down if given the opportunity (despite another restriction against living in villages) there is no outside force compelling them to keep these traditions. Nor are these traditions religious. There is no fear of divine retribution for lighting a lamp. Yet they maintain these traditions, bound to them by a centuries-old sense of honor and internal social pressure. It occurred to me that this was a pure example of a meme, a tradition that is self-sustaining, which has no utilitarian purpose and is in fact restrictive, and which continues to exist only because it is passed down as a norm.

I’ve also been reading “Breaking the Spell” by Daniel Dennett. While he gets a little preachy at times, on the whole I’ve found the book to be well-written and impeccably rational. There are many interesting points that the book discusses, but as I read a few jumped out at me.

Dennett puts forward a theory that the group worship found in many religions is a means for ensuring the accurate transmission of the religion. If many people are worshiping together, no one has to remember the whole thing perfectly because it is very unlikely that everyone will forget exactly the same bits, and parts that any one person forgets will be filled in by the majority of people who remember them. He describes this transmission as a mesh rather than a chain. It occurred to me that this would be a much better argument for mesorah than the lists of those who held Torah knowledge in succession from Moshe to the present. (Of course, this wouldn’t act as a proof of Torah miSinai, merely as a better argument for mostly accurate transmission once the Divine origin of the Torah is assumed.)

A few pages later he writes about how the inclusion of incomprehensible elements in religious worship enhances the fidelity of their transmission. If we understand something, we are likely to try and modify it or to paraphrase. Instead, he writes, we are told to, “Say the formula exactly! Your life depends on it! (If you don’t say the magic word just right, the door won’t open…)” It’s striking how similar this is in form to the shiur I wrote about last week where the speaker admonished us to stick as closely as we possibly could to the nusach hatifilos handed down to us by our parents and grandparents.

Lastly, he writes about a distinguishing feature of “folk religions,” the religious beliefs of aboriginal populations as opposed to those of organized religions. Members of folk religions aren’t aware of being religious and don’t spend time thinking about their faith. The deities and demons that populate their world are taken for granted, known to exist in the same way as trees do. When asked, they are unable to describe any tenets of their faith, often coming up with flimsy and vague explanations clearly concocted on the spur of the moment in order to answer the strange question put to them by anthropologists. Their metaphysics is just the way the world is, and it never occurs to them to think about it. I think this may be true not just of philosophically unsophisticated folk religions, but of religions in general. While many yeshivas and Bais Yaakovs have rudimentary hashkafa classes, in my experience only a small number of people really think about their faith. The majority just assume that the world, metaphysics and all, is as their parents and teachers describe it.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Four, section two

2010-01-21T07:27:00.000-08:00

Proving God’s Existence (Chapter Four, section two)

The author brings up Antony Flew, the famous atheist philosopher who, at the age of eighty one, became a believer. The author claims that it was Dr. Flew's “objective scientific research which caused his transition from atheist to believer.” What the author neglects to mention is that many of Dr. Flew’s colleagues felt that his change of heart was brought on by the infirmity of old age. Further, the belief Dr. Flew espoused was a kind of deism, a Divine force that shaped the world and does not currently interfere with it in any way. This is not the omnipotent omniscient micro-managing God of modern Judaism.

Surprisingly, Dr. Flew’s stated reason for changing his mind “is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species.“ This single problem led him to accept Intelligent Design (which we will discuss at length in a moment). While I have not read through Dr. Flew’s arguments and am not a biologist, this would seem to be an argument from ignorance. There are a number of theories that describe how abiogenesis occurred, and while a lot more work needs to be done to determine which, if any, are correct, it seems strange that a noted philosopher would make such a flimsy argument.

Next comes a sub-section titled, “Newton’s Intelligent Design Argument.”

We are treated to a story in which Newton’s “atheist friend” marvels at a clockwork model of the solar system and reacts in disbelief when Newton tells him that it just “fell together.” Newton then asks him how he can insist that the model must have a maker when he believes that the real solar system has none. The author also quotes Rabbi Akiva who said, “As a house implies a builder, a garment a weaver, and a door a carpenter, so does the existence of the universe imply a creator.”

The theological argument that design implies a designer (Argument from Design) is usually referred to as the “Watchmaker Argument” after it’s most famous form devised by Reverend William Payley in 1802. He wrote:

“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. (...) There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. (...) Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.”

The watch in Payley’s hypothetical anecdote serves the same purpose as Newton’s clockwork solar system in the example given by the author.

The argument from design was refuted by the philosopher David Hume decades before Payley expressed it as his famous Watchmaker Argument. From Wikipedia:

“[Hume] argued that for the design argument to be feasible, it must be true that order and purpose are observed only when they result from design. But order is observed regularly, resulting from presumably mindless processes like snowflake or crystal generation. Design accounts for only a tiny part of our experience with order and "purpose". Furthermore, the design argument is based on an incomplete analogy: because of our experience with objects, we can recognize human-designed ones, comparing for example a pile of stones and a brick wall. But to point to a designed Universe, we would need to have an experience of a range of different universes. As we only experience one, the analogy cannot be applied.”

While someone might try to counter the first argument by claiming that snowflakes and crystals are designed by God, this would be begging the question. It assumes God exists and is responsible for all design, therefore we see that everything that appears designed has a designer, therefore the universe, which appears designed, must have a Designer – God.

Ultimately, unless we can conclusively show that all things that appear to be designed have a designer, claiming that because one thing that appears to be designed (the watch) has a designer, another thing that appears to be designed (the universe) has a designer is a non-sequitur.

There is no answer for the second argument (not even a fallacious one). The analogy comparing the watch to the universe is powerful because it speaks to our experience. But that in itself is the rebuttal. We expect that watches are made by watchmakers because in our experience all watches come stamped with a manufacturer’s brand name. Before mass production a person could go to a watchmaker’s shop and see him put the watch together. In our experience watches are manufactured objects, so if we come across a watch we assume it is like all other watches we have seen up till that point.

On the other hand, we have no experience with universes being created. It doesn’t have any obvious manufacturer’s mark, and we weren’t around to witness it come into existence. The findings of our investigations into the origin of the universe, while they don’t rule out the existence of a Creator as the Prime Motivator, also don’t make such an assumption necessary.

So while assuming watches have creators based on our experience makes good sense, we have no similar reason to say the same for universes.

Hume goes on to point out that if “a well-ordered natural world requires a special designer, then God's mind (being so well-ordered) also requires a special designer. And then this designer would likewise need a designer, and so on ad infinitum. We could respond by resting content with an inexplicably self-ordered divine mind but then why not rest content with an inexplicably self-ordered natural world?” (Wikipedia)

As the famous joke goes:
“A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!" (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time)

The Argument from design is, ultimately, “turtles all the way down!”

I hope that tired old arguments that were refuted hundreds of years ago isn’t the best the author can do to “scientifically” prove God exists. If it is, reading through the rest of his “proofs” is going to get annoying very quickly.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Four, section one

2010-01-20T13:13:00.000-08:00

Scientific Evidence for God (Chapter Four, section one)

The author begins by saying he has shown in part one that a person, “is not a sophisticated animal but a lofty personality with unparalleled value.” I strongly disagree with the claim he has proven any such thing, but fine. Now let’s see if he can indeed, “present evidence that there is a God,” and, “explain why so many scientists adamantly negate God’s existence.” (Incidentally, that last sentence doesn’t work. It sounds like he is trying to say that many scientists adamantly deny God’s existence, which is true enough. What he said means that the existence of scientists in itself proves God doesn’t exist. Once again, this is a nitpick, but I believe it is important to be precise.)

I try to maintain a neutral tone, but what the author says next is so monumentally stupid that it makes me want to bang my head against the wall. He says that if we assume that the universe (the Big Bang) and the beginning of life (abiogenesis) were random chance, then humans are, “accidents: impersonal statistics… A statistic should have no hurts or disappointments. …even the most die-hard atheist, feels hurt and disappointment.”

How does one respond to such a statement? He is trying to say that because the universe came into existence randomly, we are all statistics, and statistics are unfeeling. Yet we do have feelings, so we can’t be statistics and the universe can’t be random. Let’s try to respond without screaming in frustration.
1) “Statistics” is a branch of mathematics used to analyze the frequency of given phenomena. A “statistic” is not a thing, it’s a data point.
2) Regardless of whether the universe “randomly” came into existence or was created by God, we would still be “statistics.” The number of humans alive right now is a statistic, as is the number of people living in the USA, France, and Nigeria, or the number of people who own blue shirts. These are statistics regardless of how the universe or the people who own blue shirts came into existence.
3) “Statistics” don’t have feelings because, like I said, a statistic is a data point, a number arrived at by counting up the occurrences of a given phenomena or the result of applying a mathematical function to a set of data. It is not a thing, it’s an idea. This is an example of the worst kind of equivocation fallacy. That we are “statistics” in the sense that each person is an occurrence of the phenomenon, “human,” does not mean that we are statistics in the sense that we are abstract concepts without the capacity for feeling emotion.
4) Since we are not abstract concepts but rather are physical beings with a nervous system, the fact that we can feel emotions has no bearing on how the universe came into existence.

He goes on to say that,”in a self-created world, there is no order.” I’m not sure how he knows this. It is entirely plausible to say that a world with physical laws could self-organize. This is in fact what many scientists believe to be the case in our universe. Not having had the opportunity to observe both known created and known spontaneously-occurring universes, we have no way to know what to expect each to look like.

He claims that in a spontaneously-occurring universe, there should be no sense of justice, no, “objective laws or truths.” He seems to be talking about moral laws and truths, in which case I completely agree. There is no objective morality. As for a sense of justice, the universe has no sense of justice. People have a sense of justice. People are an infinitesimal fraction of the universe, a vanishingly rare bit of order in an expansive void of entropic chaos. That humans want things to be fair should not be extrapolated to the universe at large.

On a related note, the author now cites the Anthropic Principle, the notion that the universe is fine-tuned for life. First of all, the Anthropic Principle in a scientific sense merely states that it is not a coincidence that we observe the laws universe are conducive to life, becuase if they were not, we would not be here to observe them. It is only as a theological argument that this is extrapolated to mean that the universe was deliberatly fine-tuned for our existence. Second of all, the universe as a whole is most certainly not fine-tuned for our kind of life. Most of the universe is inhospitable to humans. Most of our own planet is inhospitable to humans. Seventy percent of the Earth in covered in water. Of what’s left, a sizeable fraction is frozen wasteland or arid desert.

Thirdly, the Anthropic Principle has things the wrong way around. The universe is not fine-tuned to us; we are adapted to the universe. As Douglas Adams wrote:

“. . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

(Incidentally, I thought of a similar analogy, marveling at how well water fits inside its glass, on my own before I ran across Adams’. But his is better.)

The author quotes two physicists who say that were the laws of nature any different, life would be impossible. This is true, but as I said above, we are adapted to the universe, not the other way around. Were the physical constants different, life would be different. Perhaps there would be no life at all. But the fact that the physical laws allow for our kind of life in no more surprising than the fact that the puddle fits perfectly inside its hole.

Perhaps the argument is that the fact our specific form of life does occur shows that the universe was designed to produce it. After all, there could just as well be no life. That we sentient humans exist must mean that there’s a reason for our existence, right?

Unfortunately, teleological arguments fail because we could just as easily say that there is no reason humans or sentience exist other than chance and natural selection. This is not a thought we’re comfortable with, but so what? Our discomfort has no bearing on whether it’s the truth.

The author says that Judaism has always espoused the view that the Universe was created for Man. This is no doubt meant to mesh with the Anthropic Principle and the quoted physicists. Is it really surprising, though, that the same people who thought that the Earth was the physical center of the universe also thought that the same universe was created solely for themselves? In their worldview, the universe was a flat Earth with a hard dome over it in which hung the sun, the moon, and the stars. In this little universe humans were clearly the most advanced – and therefore important - beings, so it made sense to them that everything had been created for people. Today, when we know just how vast the universe is, to claim that the universe was created just for people, or even worse, just for Jews, is the height of arrogance. If intelligent extra-terrestrials were ever to visit Earth, how could we justify our implicit claim that they are merely part of a complicated web of interactions designed to produce and maintain the human race? (Undoubtedly, were we to actually meet aliens and establish relations with them, religious dogma would be reinterpreted to mean that the universe was created for intelligent life rather than specifically humans. But I digress.)

The author now quotes the Alter of Slobodka and, oddly, James Madison, whose quote is merely an appeal to people to behave in a manner consistent with the Ten Commandments. The Alter says that people are worthy of respect because they are formed by God in His image. I think this is a disturbing line of reasoning, and that it is our biological predispositions and social conditioning are what make us value human life, but in any case this line of reasoning is at best an appeal to consequences.

The author candidly admits that he hasn’t proven God, but claims to have, “established a need for God.” Given the failure of his ridiculous attempt with the word “statistic,” the failure of the Anthropic Principle, and the rather disturbing notion that without God people have no value, I don’t think that he has done even that much.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Part Two (III)

2010-01-19T22:19:00.000-08:00

Finally, let’s address 3, the implication that at some point in the future science will discover that God does exist (and presumably that Judaism is the One True Faith). We must also address the secondary implication that the chance that science may in the future prove the God hypothesis correct is sufficient justification for a current belief in God.

There’s no reason except for wishful thinking to think science will one day find only God could have been responsible for biodiversity. It’s not as though there are currently two popular debated scientific theories, evolution and God, and the evidence currently leans somewhat towards evolution. In such a case, a person could reasonably say that he finds the God theory more likely despite evolution being favored by many experts. He would have to justify why he finds it more likely, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable for him to think further work in biology might show the theory he favors is in fact correct.

But that is not the case. What we have instead is one scientific theory – evolution - a theory about as well established as any other scientific theory; and a tradition stretching back to antiquity that claims God

created all the animals as they are now. There are many traditions that stretch back to antiquity, among them that the Earth is flat; the Earth is the center of the universe; and that everything is made of the four elements fire, earth, wind, and water. We have abandoned those traditions because they are counter-factual. We do not hold Aristotle’s elements and the modern elemental table to be equally valid theories. We do not propose that in the future, we might discover that everything is indeed made of earth, fire, wind, and water.

The phrasing also, once again, presents evolution / God-did-it as a dichotomy. There is an assumption that one of these two must be right, and that if evolution is proven wrong, the God theory is right by default. In reality, were evolution to be proven wrong it would be replaced with another scientific theory. In the history of scientific inquiry, never once has something which was once thought to be caused by supernatural phenomena and shown by scientists to be instead caused by wholly natural phenomena reverted back to being explained by the supernatural. While this doesn’t mean that it will never happen in future, it does mean that there is no good reason to assume that it will. No reason other than wishful thinking.

There is also the fact that evolution says nothing about the existence of God. It merely makes Him unnecessary for explaining biodiversity, just as the germ theory of disease made demons unnecessary for explaining illnesses. The most likely outcome of the religion / evolution debate is that religions will adapt and fit evolution into their theologies. Many moderate religions have already done so. Most fundamentalist religions acknowledge that diseases are caused by germs, yet still maintain a belief in demons. I think it may be only a matter of time before they adapt to theologically acknowledge evolutionary theory.

To scientifically prove God exists, it is not enough to disprove theories that provide naturalistic explanations of the world. There must be actual, positive proof of God’s existence. To prove God is responsible for biodiversity, for instance, it is not sufficient to disprove the theory of evolution and then point to a book that claims God did it. Independent positive evidence of God’s involvement must be provided. Alternatively, if one could scientifically prove God exists, prove God authored the book, and prove that God tells the truth, then we could accept the book’s testimony as to how biodiversity came to be.

As for the implication that the possibility God may be proven by science in the future is a good reason to believe in Him now, well, anything is possible. It’s possible I’ll sprout wings and learn to fly. But until I do, I’m not going to jump off any tall buildings. Using this epistemology it’s impossible to determine what it’s reasonable to believe in. After all, even if right now we have no reason to believe something is true, future discoveries may show that it is. The only rational approach is to look at the evidence we have right now and determine whether, in the light of current evidence, it is reasonable to believe something is true or false. That we might be wrong is an inevitable side effect of our being unable to see the future, but that possibility is not a justification for abandoning reason and arbitrarily declaring things true because, after all, we don’t know the future and maybe someday…

To make things worse, it may actually be impossible to scientifically prove God exists – at least, the idea of God most people hold. Before a premise can be scientifically investigated, it must be rigorously defined, and it may be hard to find a less well-defined concept. Ask ten people for finely-detailed definition of God, and you’ll get ten answers. Even we’re one to come up with a generally-agreed upon definition, nearly all definitions include non-falsifiable characteristics.

For instance, the claim that god always answers prayers. If you get what you prayed for, God answered, “Yes.” If you don’t get what you prayed for, God answered, “No.” It is impossible to test whether God answers prayers by looking at the outcomes because whatever the outcome, it is assumed God heard and responded to the prayer. Therefore it is likely that God cannot ever be scientifically proven. Not because His existence is “beyond the reach of science,” with the implication that science just isn’t up to the task; but because the concept of God is structured in such a way that it is impossible to point to something as a disproof. Yet the impossibility of proving this definition of prayer false is not proof that God answers prayers. After all, the same argument could be used to “prove” that a rock answers prayers, or a chair, or absolutely anything. It’s not right or wrong, it’s not even wrong. Without a concrete definition and falsifiable attributes, we can no more scientifically investigate the question of God’s existence than we can investigate the question of whether the rock answers all prayers with “yes” or “no.”

I think that in the coming chapters the author is going to try to scientifically prove the existence of God. That should be interesting. Maybe I read too much into the title of part two and its accompanying quote and have been tearing down straw-men. I sincerely hope so, but I have a feeling that I’m going to be disappointed.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Part Two (II)

2010-01-17T22:14:00.000-08:00

Let’s now address 2, the implication that because scientific theories change they are unreliable. This is usually contrasted with religious doctrine, which remains unchanging. We generally perceive someone who constantly changes his mind as fickle and unreliable, while the person who can always be trusted to be true to his word and not change his mind is steady and virtuous. But claims about how the world functions are not people, and this is not a question of loyalty. This is instead like the person who insists that the sky is purple because that’s what his parents told him, and when you take him outside to show him the sky is blue squeezes his eyes tightly shut.

Scientific theories are our current best guess as to how the world functions, and so are subject to change as we uncover new evidence. Religion, on the other hand, as the revealed wisdom of the Creator cannot change. For religious doctrine to change implies that God was wrong. At the very least, it implies that generations of pious, learned paragons of faith misinterpreted God’s message. This rigid adherence to tradition is not a strength. While we all crave certainty, an unwillingness to change which produces the illusion of certainty is not the same as actually having certain knowledge of how the world functions. The reluctance of religion to change in the face of scientific discovery has led to some strange confrontations. The most famous is Galileo’s run-in with the Catholic Church, and while this was mostly his own fault (he insulted the pope and was notoriously rude towards those who disagreed with him) it, and the even more severe treatment of some of his predecessors, stands as an example of the difficulty of changing doctrine and the lengths of suppression organized religion will go to in order to avoid doing so.

Judaism itself has been left with many, many examples of counter-scientific articles of faith, ranging from the age of the Earth to the creation of the Earth before the Sun. While many of these sorts of difficulties can be gotten around by using non-literal interpretations, if we take the great rabbonim of past generations to be infallible (as much of chareidi Judaism does) we’re forced to accept things like spontaneous generation and Aristotelian physics (particularly the four elements).

What's worse, religion's claim to be unchanging isn’t even true. Religion has changed, often radically, and often in response to social and scientific advances. At a certain point, the evidence is overwhelming, and religious texts are reinterpreted allegorically to fit with the newly-acknowledged truth. There are few people today who claim that the Earth is flat and has corners or that the Sun goes around the Earth. Those who do hold such views are rightly seen as the lunatic fringe.

The real difference between science and religion is that for a scientist, acknowledging mistakes is okay and, “I don’t know,” is an acceptable answer. For the religious apologist, changes to the religion have to be ret-conned so that they were part of the tradition all along, and, “God did it,” serves as a handy answer to any mystery. For the scientist, mistakes are opportunities for improvement and mysteries are exciting new areas of discovery. For the apologist, mistakes are at best a demonstration of the puniness of humans attempting to understand God’s will and mysteries are an opportunity to marvel at His greatness.

Mechanistic Metaphysics

2010-01-16T22:24:00.001-08:00

I went to a shiur tonight where the speaker discussed differing minhagim various communities have, particularly differing nusachs for davening. He said that it is brought down in kaballah that there are twelve windows through which prayers travel into heaven, corresponding to each of the twelve shevatim. If a member of one shevet attempts to daven using the nusach of another shevet, it will try the window dedicated to his shevet and will fail to pass through because it is the wrong kind of prayer for that window. Today no one knows which shevet he’s from, and further, no one knows the proper nusach for each shevet. Therefore it is important that we each keep the nussach we inherited from our forefathers, because that is the one most likely to be the proper match for the shevet we come from.

Leaving aside that the various nussachs we have today evolved slowly, developing regional differences (and to be fair, the speaker did address the various additions that have accumulated over the years), and that it is very unlikely that these differences have any real relationship to differences that may have existed between the prayers used by the various shevatim, this represents a very mechanistic view of the spiritual world. In this view, our prayers aren’t praise and pleas listened to directly by an omniscient Being, but rather are more like an email packet sent over the internet that must be encoded in the proper language and sent to an appropriate decoder to be unpacked and rendered so that the recipient can read it. If the teffilos are in the wrong nusach, they don’t get through, much like a corrupted email lost forever in cyberspace.

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across this idea of the spiritual world functioning according to rigid rules much like the ones that govern physical reality. Perhaps the most unfair halachos are those that apply to a mamzer, a child born of an adulterous or incestuous relationship. The child, through no fault of his own, is a spiritual pariah, denied many of the spiritual rights of other Jews and forbidden to marry anyone except for another mamzer. When I complained about the inherent unfairness of such laws, one of my rabbeim compared a mamzer to a crack baby. It’s not the baby’s fault that his mother used cocaine while she was pregnant, but he is still born with physical and mental impairments. Fair doesn’t enter into the equation. That’s just the way it is.

At the time, I really liked his explanation. It changed the halachos of mamzer from the punishment of an innocent to an unfortunate side effect of his parent’s actions. But it also, like the windows for davening, implies that the spiritual world is a place with natural laws. This concept is found, subtly and not-so-subtly, through much of Judaism. It is very different from the intuitive way we think about a spiritual realm. It implies that, were we able to scientifically investigate this realm, we would be able to form the same sorts of theories we do about the physical world, and perhaps even develop technologies. How about an auto-prayer, guaranteed to deliver your tefilos to the right place every time?

More importantly, it reflects a view that the way the world is, including the spiritual world, is the way it must be. The analogy between the mamzer and the crack baby could just as easily be posed the other way. Just as it is unfair that someone suffer spiritually for his parents’ actions, it is also unfair that someone should suffer physically for his parent’s actions. A mechanistic approach absolves God of blame only if He didn’t actively choose to make the world the way it is. If He did, then He is ultimately to blame for both the mamzer and the crack baby.

This in turn would bring us to a discussion of exactly what “omnipotent” means, but I’m already too far from my original point.

According to the speaker I heard tonight, davening is not a direct communication between a supplicant and an omniscient Listener. It is instead an incantation that must be precisely fitted to the individual in order to be effective; if it is not, God can’t hear you. It is a redefinition of “prayer” from the way we typically understand it to a ritual which, if not performed in a way properly fitted to our particular tribal heritage, we get neither credit for nor benefit from, regardless of our intentions or even of our ability to know the proper way to pray.

During the question and answer session that followed the speech, not one person addressed this point.

Effortful Thinking

2010-01-14T22:01:00.000-08:00

“But they’re so boring!’ I protested. I was talking to the professor who taught my Experimental Psychology class. We had just finished reading through samples of journal articles, and I found them entirely too dry for my taste. I could write better material, and I was all of twenty years old. These things had been written by people with Ph.D.s!

“I read journals all the time,” one of my classmates chimed in. “That’s how they are.”

I was unconvinced. It wasn’t just that the articles were boring. They were annoying. I had expected an interesting narrative about an experiment. Instead I read, in exhaustive, pedantic detail, about exactly what they were trying to determine, exactly how they conducted the experiment, the makeup of the subject sample, how the sample was chosen, how the sample was divided, how each segment of the sample was assigned various conditions, detailed descriptions of the props and equipment used, the precise details of what was done… on and on and on.

Since then I’ve read a lot of journal articles, and while I’ve found some that are well-written, for the most part they are the same sort of plodding, technical, detailed description and analysis. I’ve come to two conclusions: 1) Most scientists should have taken more writing classes in college, and 2) scientific thinking is not comfortably intuitive.

We’re used to hearing stories. People love stories so much that we’ve built huge industries around making up and presenting stories as books, movies, plays, and television. Anecdotes have a powerful effect on us, but we don’t usually analyze stories. We take away the main points and the interesting bits. If you hear a story about a boy who kicked a dog and got bitten, the take-away point is: don’t kick dogs. It’s not important how old the boy was, how old the dog was, where it happened, what breed the dog was, or what the boy had been doing before he kicked the dog.

For a scientist trying to determine under what conditions a dog is likely to bite someone who kicks him, all of those things (and many more variables) may be important. Trying to think scientifically is not natural, and more, it’s annoying. All those details to keep track of! Yet it is our best method of understanding the world. It is not enough to know that dogs may bite when kicked. By learning why they bite, in which conditions they bite, we increase our knowledge of animal behavior, knowledge which helps us to understand the world in which we live and to make better use of it.

The scientific method, critical thinking, formal logic – all of them are effortful and often counter-intuitive. These ways of thinking are not instinctive, but need to be learned. Unfortunately many people never have the opportunity to learn how to think analytically. Worse, they assume that they know how to think as well as anyone. After all, they think about things all the time! They make intelligent, rational decisions about all sorts of things.

They’re smart people, but they’re like I was that day in college. They find the fussiness of the scientific method annoying, they don’t have the training in critical thinking needed to evaluate a proposition, and they don’t know enough about logic to notice a flawed argument.

I realize this sounds elitist, and maybe it is. But it takes training to do anything well, even things we have a natural talent for. We can all run, but it takes training to run a marathon. We can all talk, but it takes training to be a polished public speaker. And we can all think, but it takes training to use effortful modes of thinking.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Part Two (I)

2010-01-11T12:36:00.000-08:00

Part Two: Faith in Science or Faith in God?

The author includes an unattributed quote before each chapter, and I have reproduced the one that begins part two of the book in full. It reads:

“If you were an intelligent, rational person living in the twentieth century then you believed in evolution. But as science continues to probe the secrets of the universe, it becomes clearer that believing in God is the more rational option.”

Judging by part two’s title and the quote with which it starts, the author is trying to do a number of things here. In no particular order:
1. He is implying that both science and God equally require faith.
2. He is implying that science is not reliable because scientific opinion changes over time.
3. He is implying that at some point in the future science will discover that God does exist (and presumably that Judaism is the One True Faith.)
4. He is mistakenly assuming that either evolution is correct or God did it. This is a false dichotomy, as it is entirely possible that some third, as-yet-unimagined explanation for biodiversity is in fact correct. Thus, if evolution was shown to be incorrect, the answer to the question, "How did biodiversity arise?" is, "We don't know," not, "God did it."

Each of the first three points deserves a lengthy discussion which is beyond the scope of this critique. Instead I will try to (relatively) briefly show why each one is wrong.

Let’s begin with 1, the implication that both science and God require equal faith. Before we can discuss this premise, we must first define “faith.” The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines faith as:

1 a : allegiance to duty or a person : LOYALTY b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions
2 a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust
3 : something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs

Definition 1 is not relevant to our discussion. Definition 2a is not useful to us because if faith is by definition belief in God we cannot speak of faith in science. Definition 2b cannot be what is meant here by faith, both because science is the attempt to build up a system of proven rules about the way the world functions and because the book is an attempt to prove the existence of God and various precepts of Judaism. This leaves us with definition 3, “something that is believed especially with strong conviction.”

Using this definition, it is reasonable to speak of faith in science or God; that is, the strong conviction that science is the best way we have to accurately explain the world or the strong conviction that God exists.
(I would like to note that this is not necessarily an either/or, and I frame it as such only to paraphrase the author's question.)

Unfortunately, when we speak of faith we usually think of definition 2b, “firm belief in something for which there is no [or inconclusive] proof.” The way the question is worded, “Faith in Science or Faith in God?” together with our usual interpretation of the word faith misleadingly implies that it is equally reasonable to trust that science accurately explains the world and to trust that religion accurately explains the world.

Even using definition 3, we must remember that a “conviction” is not proof of accuracy. That someone firmly believes in God does not show that God exists, any more than someone’s firm belief in the truth of a scientific principle means that principle is correct. Our beliefs must be justified. A detailed discussion of epistemology is beyond the scope of this critique, but let us briefly look at how science and religion each derive their principles.

Science begins by assuming we know nothing and our speculative hypotheses are considered incorrect until proven otherwise (the null hypothesis). We then painstakingly prove each premise through experimentation, observation, induction, and inference. Proven hypotheses that collectively explain observed phenomena form theories, which are then tested for accuracy by further experimentation and observation to see if the world actually behaves in the way the theory predicts that it will. Science is done by fallible human beings who may design flawed experiments, misinterpret results, and even come up with theories that seem to be accurate but are later shown to be false. A high demand for independent verification and the prestige that comes with new discoveries, especially paradigm-changing discoveries, ensures that experiments are repeated by many people, many of whom are often trying to prove the original experimenter wrong. This verification process assures that mistakes will eventually be caught and corrected.

In short, science moves from premise to proof to conclusion, and the proofs and conclusions of any given scientist are scrutinized by others looking for mistakes and are reinterpreted or discarded in light of new evidence.

Religion knows what is true not through the careful establishment of premises, but through revealed wisdom. Religion begins with the conclusions, does not require independent corroboration of those conclusions, and marginalizes or ignores all evidence against those conclusions. After all, there can be no greater Authority on how the world functions than its omniscient Creator. If God tells us something is true, it must be so, and any evidence to the contrary must be wrong.

Religion assumes its conclusions are true and immutable because they were handed down by the ultimate Authority, God.

The question is which is more justified? One of the problems with the religious approach is that it is essentially an argument from authority – the authority (God) said it, so we assume it’s true without bothering to examine the authority’s reasoning. Yet we can reasonably argue that an omniscient God is different than a human authority. We must examine a human authority’s justification for his statement because people can make mistakes, regardless of their stature. God is infallible and all-knowing.

This argument still leaves us with a problem. How do we know that God in fact exists, is omniscient, infallible, etc., and that a given book is indeed His revealed wisdom? That the Torah makes these claims is not by itself evidence that these claims are true. The only way to conclusively prove these premises is through experimentation, observation, induction, and inference. And now we’re back to science.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Three, section four

2010-01-10T10:32:00.000-08:00

The Global Kindergarten (Chapter Three, section four)

The author now addresses why God would have created us with the desire to do bad things. He is at this point assuming he has demonstrated the existence of free will, and says that only by having the opportunity to choose to do bad do our choices to do good become meaningful. This is a pretty standard line or argument, and is usually presented as part of a larger set of arguments that attempt to answer the Problem of Evil.

The author complicates it though with an emotional appeal by noting that little children are not allowed to make important decisions, and making decisions is a sign of adulthood. The implication is that if you’re denied the possibility of making choices (either because free will doesn’t exist or because God didn’t provide us with the option to do bad things) you’re functionally a preschooler. To which our reaction is supposed to be, “How dare you say that I’m like a child! Of course free will exists, and how kind God is to allow us to make choices!”
{emotional appeal}

The argument itself seems to make good logical sense. We can only make choices if there are options to choose between. Note though that this argument presupposes that the benefit of having free will outweighs the cost in evil acts people will commit.
If we were to grant that it is worth the cost, we then have to address why in many cases we seem to be programmed so that we are driven to commit bad acts. This goes beyond merely having the choice of good or bad.

For instance, people are predisposed to divide themselves up into little social groups and to see those outside the group as less-than-human. This predisposition has been the root cause of untold suffering. Yet it doesn’t seem that this particular tendency is necessary for free will. Wouldn’t it be sufficient if we felt neutral towards those outside our group? Then we truly could choose to be kind or cruel to them. Instead, we have to fight our nature (through socialization, education, etc.) just to see outsiders as fellow human beings.

Still, the basic premise that evil at least needs to be possible still stands, even if we can’t explain why God thought it was necessary to predispose us towards evil in some situations. This brings up another question. What is evil? Let’s define evil, in this context, as going against what God would prefer you to do. In that case, we could have free will without anyone having to suffer. God could have arranged it so that the only choices we had were whether to keep bein adom l’makom mitzvos like Shabbos and kashrus, while it would never even occur to us to steal or murder. This way free will could be maintained without the need for human suffering. That evil is necessary for free will is not a justification for the ability of one person to cause another to suffer.

That said, I concede that hypothetically speaking for us to have free will there must be options to choose from, and for us to choose to do “good” (defined as what God prefers) we must be able to choose to do “evil” (defined as not doing what God prefers). Of course, if free will is just an illusion, this is all irrelevant.

The author now quotes a rabbi who asserts that free will is what constitutes the self, and the author states that, “Just as the seat of hearing is the ears, the seat of free will is the soul.”

Firstly, the statement that free will is the self is rather strange. Surely there is more to the self than that! What about our thoughts, emotions, memories, and personality? Aren’t these what we usually mean by the self?

Secondly, why should we assume that free will is seated in the soul? Has the author forgotten his own argument from the beginning of the chapter, where he explained mechanistically how free will is made possible by the balancing of all influencing factors? If his theory is correct, there is no need to posit a metaphysical soul to explain free will, just a module in the brain that decides between options when all other influences are balanced. But then, the brain is a physical construct and therefore is itself influenced by the environment. Therefore such a brain module would itself merely be a product of influence, and such a choice could not truly be said to be free will. He may be right that we need something metaphysical, completely removed from all influences, if we are to come up with a scenario in which one could be truly said to be exercising free will. Yet this still:
1) Assumes free will is a real phenomenon, something that has not been demonstrated.
2) Redefines the soul as that thing which allows us to make uninfluenced choices in rare specific cases. This is in contrast to the traditional understanding of the soul as that which animates the body and defines the self. Showing that in a specific hypothetical case for a given hypothetical phenomenon to function there must be a metaphysical component, and then labeling that component, “the soul,” does not show that the soul as traditionally defined exists. It’s just playing with semantics. In short, an equivocation fallacy.
3) Positing a metaphysical component to make free will work doesn’t really explain how free will functions. All it does is take one thing whose functioning we don’t understand – free will – and replace it with another thing whose functioning we don’t understand – the soul. This is the fallacy of pseudo-explaining one mystery with another mystery.

The author now cites, “The Zohar (the authoritative, ancient book on mysticism),” as saying that man has two souls, a lower animalistic soul the same as that which animates all animals, and a higher soul that makes, “Homo Sapiens become human beings.”

Firstly, he might want to qualify his statement about the Zohar by adding, “Accepted by many Orthodox Jews as…” Textual scholars, many rabbonim at the time of its publication, and a good number of contemporary Orthodox Jews agree that while the contents of the Zohar may be based on extant kabalistic ideas, the book itself was most probably written by Moses De Leon, the man who claimed to have discovered it in 1270. If that is the case, the Zohar is old, but not ancient. It also probably shouldn’t be accepted as authoritative, as its claim to authority rests on its authorship by R’ Shimon bar Yochai.
{questionable historical fact}

The second issue is more of a nitpick than a problem with his point. The author is trying to say that the higher soul is what makes people different than animals, what elevates our physical bodies to become people. What he actually said is taxonomical nonsense.

From Wikipedia: “The word "human" is from the Latin humanus, the adjectival form of homo.” Thus the word “human” technically refers to the entire genus homo. Modern humans are Homo sapiens, a single species (although the only non-extinct one) within the genus homo. (If we want to be precise, all people currently living are Homo sapiens sapiens - members of the sapiens variety of the species Homo sapiens.) Thus earlier humans became Homo sapiens, not the other way around.
{incorect scientific fact}

The author ends the chapter by once again asserting that the soul is the seat of all virtues and that it must remain in control of the body, this time comparing the soul to a parent that must control their impulsive child. He says that neither the child nor the body are “bad” for desiring pleasure, but, “It is the juvenile nature to choose indulgence and pleasure.” This unsupported assertion is an emotional appeal that attempts to equate fulfilling one’s desires with a child’s insistence on eating candy for breakfast. Once again, we are supposed to react by shying away from any implication of childishness and proclaim that, of course, we have a soul and it is in firm control of our bodies. We are adults! I’m not disputing that a young child has little self control. But drawing an analogy between a child and the body to reinforce an assertion that the body is the seat of all desires and the soul is the seat of all virtues does not make it so.
{emotional appeal}

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Three, section three

2010-01-07T21:25:00.000-08:00

I don’t know how many people are reading these posts (though I noticed I’ve been getting more hits since I started posting every day), but there haven’t been many comments. I’d like to think that’s because my brilliant dissection of the book leaves you all speechless, but I must humbly admit that I do occasionally make mistakes. If anyone spots any flaws in my arguments, I’d appreciate it if you point them out so that I can correct them.

“The Twinkie Defense” (Chapter Three, section three)

The author cites several ludicrous defenses brought in real-life trials, then cites, “The Twinkie Defense.” A man who murdered two of his coworkers claimed that he could not be held accountable for his actions because he was hyperglycemic and had consumed a Twinkie and Coke on his way to work, causing his blood sugar to skyrocket and cloud his judgment. The jury bought it and lowered the charges from first-degree murder to manslaughter.

At least, that's the way the author presents it. In reality, the defense cited a recent change in the defendant's diet from very health-concious to sugary foods and drinks as a symptom of his overall downhill slide in the time leading up to the murders. Their defense was based on diminished capacity, a claim that the defendant was in an impaired state through no fault of his own and that this state, rather than malicious premeditation, was why he had killed his coworkers.

The author tries to use this case to show that people today get out of being held accountable for their actions by claiming they didn’t act willfully but were instead controlled by circumstances. This case shows no such thing. First degree murder is the malicious premeditated killing of another person. If the defense was correct, the defendant in this case didn’t commit murder, he committed manslaughter. And he was held accountable for manslaughter.

(Whether or not we should make such distinctions if all killings are equally the result of circumstances rather than our free will is a separate discussion. The facts in this case were judged to fit the technical definition of manslaughter, not murder, and so he was properly convicted of manslaughter.)
{unjustified claim}

The author now insultingly implies that scientists are deliberately interpreting data to discredit the concept of free will. He states, “…scientists gain a lot by denying free will: they can get away with the most outrageous actions and be held culpable of nothing.” For a book that is attempting to use rational arguments and scientific principles to support religious claims, this seems awfully close to the universal-conspiracy-of-scientists-intent-on-destroying-religion nonsense I was fed in elementary school.
(I realize that this in itself isn't an argument against his accusation, and that I am making something of an emotional appeal here, but this isn't the place to debunk the scientific conspiracy claim. That will come a little later, in part two of the book.)

He goes on to say that free will allows people to change and grow and denying free will reduces people to helpless automatons. This may be true. (Though I think it’s debatable – even if free will is an illusion, the illusion is so strong that treating it as real in some cases could be useful. The perception that we have free will may itself be a contributing factor among those that drive our decisions. Or maybe not, but it’s not a foregone conclusion either way.) But it’s an appeal to consequences. That acknowledging our lack of free will may rob people of motivation for positive change does not mean that we have free will.
{appeal to consequences}

It’s possible that he meant that people could change and grow ONLY if they had free will, and the fact that people do change shows that free will is a real phenomenon. But this isn’t true, because those changes could themselves be the product of the influences that drive a person’s behavior.
{unjustified conclusion}

I also think that the claim that a lack of free will reduces people to helpless automatons is an appeal to emotion. Most peoples’ reaction will be, “Of course I choose what I do. I’m not some kind of a helpless robot stuck with its programming!” The idea that our decisions are not the result of a conscious choice is very disconcerting.
{appeal to emotion}

This is followed by a story of a person who learned to control his temper and a poetic quote from a rabbi claiming that to be human is, “to ascend higher than angels and to descend lower than the vilest creature… Every day is… a new opportunity to climb… and climb we must.” Very touching, I’m sure, but not at all relevant to the question of whether we have free will. Anecdotes and assertions do not evidence make.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Three, section two

2010-01-07T09:01:00.000-08:00

What Does Judaism Say About the Subject? (Chapter Three, section two)

According the Judaism, the author says, we have a soul and, unlike animals which are driven by their desires, we can control our desires and choose our actions. This ability to choose is what makes us human. He claims that only humans can choose to do things like face their fears or return things they find. I’m not sure whether this is actually true, but even granting that it is, the author’s next statements are baffling.

He says, “Free choice operates only in the realm of morality.” He says that heredity and environment may determine what you like to wear, the kinds of things you buy, even major life choices like your career. But moral choices, those are different. Those are subject to your “free will.” Think about this for a minute. Is there any functional difference between the way in which we choose which shirt to buy or whether to return the extra change the cashier gave when we bought it? Choices, all choices, are made for a variety of intuitive, emotional, and rational reasons.

Perhaps the author means to say that choices that are in line with your desires, such as which shirt to buy, are driven by environment and genetics, while choices that go against our desires, like returning money, are products of our free will. (This seems to be in line with his statement that facing our fears is exercising free will, even though I’m hard pressed to see how facing one’s fear is related to morality. Is it immoral to avoid high places because of one’s acrophobia?) But this isn’t a distinction between moral and amoral choices. If I were to choose to buy and wear a shirt that I despised, is that a moral choice? Yet according to this definition, by making such a choice I would be exercising my free will. Similarly, if I were to return money I found because of the pleasure I get from seeing another person happy to get their money back, that is not a choice made using free will even though it is moral.

Keep in mind, also, that the entire premise is flawed. If I’m right about the author’s intended meaning, he is assuming that either we want to do something or we don’t, and if we do it despite not wanting to we are exercising free will. Our decision making is far more subtle and takes more than our immediate impulses into account. We drag ourselves out of bed in the morning even though we don’t want to because our desire for a paycheck is stronger than our desire to stay in bed. Similarly, any actions we take that go against our immediate desires are most probably prompted by other factors such as societal conditioning, later rewards, or emotional urges. Our decisions about whether to behave altruistically are even dependant on the exact conditions in which we find ourselves. There have been experiments that show that if someone thinks another person is waiting for him he is less likely to stop and help a person in need. Given all of these factors that come into play when we are making decisions, can we really be said to be exercising “free will?”

In the next paragraph the author acknowledges the influences on our decisions, and says that, “It [free will] kicks in only at the point (unique for every individual) where the scales are evenly weighted between the possibilities.” In the abstract, I have to agree that this makes a certain amount of sense. But given a mechanistic view of decision making, a scale (to use the author’s analogy) on which are weighed all the factors influencing our decisions and the heavier side determines our actions, isn’t it possible that those times when the scale balances perfectly are the times we find ourselves paralyzed by indecision? The author is assuming that we tip the scale by exercising our free will. Perhaps there is no such thing as free will, and a balanced scale leaves us deadlocked until something throws weight onto one side.

Granted, this is speculation on my part, but so is the author’s theory of scales and narrow bands where all influencing factors balance to allow for the exercise of free will. Without any evidence it is impossible to say which of our theories, if either, is correct.

He now cites a study done at Princeton University in 2004. The researchers presented the subjects with a serious moral dilemma and observed their brain activity using an MRI machine. They found that in addition to the activity found in the emotional areas of the brain when subjects make simple decisions, there was activity in the abstract thinking and decision-making areas. The author interprets the extra activity to mean that they were making a free-will choice as opposed to one that was wholly influenced by other factors. This despite:
1) The obvious conclusion that complex dilemmas about hypothetical situations require input from more sophisticated areas of the brain to reach a decision than do simple questions.
2) This runs counter to his earlier argument that the point at which the scales balance and free will kicks in is unique for every individual. We would have to assume that all of the subjects in the experiment just happened to have the particular scenario presented to them fall in that narrow band where all the factors influencing their decision balanced and they were able to exercise free will. While possible, it is unlikely that a random scenario would fall into the free-will band for any of the subjects, let alone all of them, and we have no reason to say that it did in this case other than to lend support to the author’s theory.
3) The author writes that the neuroscientists running the experiment reached the conclusion that complex decisions take longer because they use more recently evolved parts of the brain. The author discounts their conclusion for no apparent reason (though I wonder if he might consider their reference to evolution enough of a reason). I’m inclined to give the neuroscientists’ interpretation of the experiment more weight than a layman’s, myself and the author included.

The author’s theory, with very little reference to Judaism despite the section heading, is that free will exists, albeit only in that narrow band where all other factors are evenly balanced. Strangely, he thinks that such balance only occurs in relation to moral choices. Unfortunately for his theory, the decision scales are likely to balance perfectly very infrequently, and I would guess that when they do the result is indecision, not an opportunity for free will. (This may be an unknowable, as it is likely impossible for us to ever measure ALL of the factors that influence a given decision.) The experiment cited is largely irrelevant to the author’s theory, and the conclusions he draws from it are unwarranted.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Three, section one

2010-01-06T10:34:00.000-08:00

Soul Properties: Are Our Choices Predetermined? (Chapter Three, section one)

The author begins with a story of an elderly man who, determined to conquer his fear of flying, boards a plane for his annual trip to his favorite vacation spot rather than take a train as he had been doing for years. (The author expresses his awe of this man, and I’m inclined to agree, insofar as this was something that took a lot of willpower. Conquering phobias by immersion is an extremely difficult thing to do. Fortunately, there are straightforward therapeutic techniques to cause phobias to cease, and the elderly man in the story would have been better off going to a therapist for a few sessions than risk a heart attack by forcing himself to fly. All of this is, however, beside the point.) The author asks whether we can doubt that this man made a conscious choice to board the plane and conquer his phobia.

The author here is conflating, “making a conscious choice,” with, “exercising free will.” That we arrive at a decision based on a conscious process does not mean that process wasn’t influenced in part or wholly by something outside our control. Our decisions are influenced by many things, not least of which is culture. Had the man in the story not lived in a society which saw conquering your fears as a noble endeavor it is highly unlikely he would have boarded that plane. He didn’t choose the society he was born into or the social norms he was indoctrinated with, yet those social norms had a profound influence on his “conscious” decision.

The influence of society alone doesn’t negate free will, but let’s engage in some speculation. Let’s suppose that this man was very close with his late father, and his father believed that conquering one’s fear was very important, to the point where he thought that someone who didn’t do something because he was afraid was a coward. Let’s further suppose that our elderly man is religious and believes he will see his father again in the afterlife. Now let’s say he had recently been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

This specific situation probably isn’t true of the man in the story, but hypothetically speaking, if it was, could we say that his belief he would soon be seeing his father again, and his fear that his father would see him as a coward if he died without conquering his fear of flying, forced him to board that plane? Would his conscious choice to conquer his phobia then be an act of free will, or the inevitable outcome of a confluence of circumstances?

The author now states that modern science says there is, “nothing non-physical about the mind,” and our choices are a product of biology. The physicality of the mind is what I’ve been arguing for all along, and I tend to think that free will is an illusion. It will be interesting to see how the author tries to show that the scientists are wrong. Let’s see if there’s anything other than appeals to consequences.

Ah, here we go. Appeal to consequences: “This theory is as preposterous as it is dangerous. If our choices are not ours… we can no longer be responsible for any of our decisions. …The theory exonerates most evil people, including even Hitler.”

That we would not be able to hold people morally accountable for their actions without free will, and that this idea makes us uncomfortable, has nothing to do with whether or not we actually have free will. Further, the author compounds his appeal to consequences with an emotional appeal when he states that a lack of free will exonerates even Hitler. We are supposed to react in moral outrage. Hitler was a monster! He was evil, and must be held morally responsible for his actions! Again, that we feel outrage at the idea Hitler may not be morally responsible for his actions does not mean that we have free will.

The author also tries to imply that denying free will leads to anarchy, as he claims that every lawyer can say his client committed the crime, but it can’t be held accountable because his lack of free will means, “it wasn’t his fault.” The real question here is what is the purpose of the legal system? The author seems to be taking the approach that the legal system is a way to balance the universe’s books. If someone does something wrong, they must be punished. If they don’t have free will, they can’t be held morally accountable for a wrongdoing, and so shouldn’t be punished. I would argue that the purpose of the legal system is to protect society. If a person is a murderer, they should be imprisoned because they represent a threat to society. If a person causes financially calculable harm to another, he should pay – not as a punishment to him for causing the harm, but so that those who are caused harm will be protected from loss. As the agent of that harm, he is responsible for making good the loss.

“Ah”, some might argue, “but that’s not fair! It’s not his fault! He has no free will!” True enough, but if someone is standing on a ladder to fix his roof, a stray dog wanders into his yard and knocks down the ladder, and he lands on and breaks his neighbor’s lawn furniture, he is still responsible to pay for the broken furniture even though he cannot be held morally accountable for the chain of events that led to the furniture’s destruction.

(Please note, I am not trying to make the legal system the basis of morality. Nor does the fact that at times not being in full control (crimes of passion) may be taken into account mean that my approach is wrong, because it is entirely possible that part of our legal system is built on the same supposition the author makes, i.e. that the law is meant to punish those who did wrong in order to balance the universe’s books.)

Further, the existence of consequences for given actions are themselves part of the circumstances that determine our actions.
{appeal to consequences, emotional appeal }

The author goes on to quote several scientists and philosophers as saying that while we have the perception of free will, we do not have actual free will. He quotes Einstein as saying, “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals.” I’m not sure why the author included the quote, except perhaps as a contrast to the next section where he talks about Judaism’s stance on free will.

I’m Psychic!

2010-01-05T18:44:00.000-08:00

This morning as I walked to my car I idly recalled how once as a teenager I had been waiting in the car for my mother while she ran into a store. The meter she had parked by ran out, and a traffic cop wrote a ticket and stuck it on the windshield as I watched.

As I got closer to my car, I noticed an orange envelope under windshield wiper. The city cleans the streets here on Mondays and Tuesdays, and I had accidentally parked on the wrong side of the street last night. I’d gotten my first parking ticket.

This must mean I have precognitive abilities, right? I was thinking about an incident involving a parking ticket, and then I discovered my car had been ticketed. I’m psychic!

Except… I’m not entirely sure whether I recalled the story before or after I noticed the ticket on my car. And then there are all the other times I’ve thought about incidents involving parking tickets when I didn’t get a ticket. I used to work for a place where part of my job was dealing with the company’s parking tickets. Back then, I thought about parking tickets all the time. But… I didn’t have a car then. So it doesn’t count, right? This can’t have just been a coincidence. It’s too weird. It’s spooky.

No, I’m sure of it. I’m psychic!

Am I A Zealot?

2010-01-04T16:04:00.000-08:00

Over the last week I’ve had an interesting conversation in the comment thread to Frum Satire’s post, Is the Torah outdated and irrelevant? I’ve found myself in a debate over the existence of God, arguing for the unlikelihood of His existence. Frum Satire’s blog is an interesting place to have conversations like these because he draws a diverse group of people, who range from strong believers to atheists and from educated intellectuals to… those who are not so intellectual.

I have to ask myself, why do I do this? Part of the answer is because it’s fun. I enjoy debating (especially winning). Part of it is that such conversations force me to think about other points of view and to articulate my own beliefs, which leads me to a better understanding of issues surrounding religion. But I had to ask myself: could part of it be the zealotry of a recent convert?

I’ve been a skeptic for as long as I can remember, always insisting that what I learned in school make logical sense. I’ve always tried to relate what I learned to the real world, and thought about the practical implications of the various things my rabbeim would teach me. I’ve had serious doubts about religion and God since I was sixteen. Yet I’ve always had this hazy notion in the back of my head that God was out there. There were a few arguments for the existence of God that I had heard as a teenager, thought were pretty good, and never really let myself examine. Everyone around me didn’t have any doubts. I couldn’t deny the basis of my culture. And yet, I remember writing papers in college for a writing class where I discussed arguments for various religions and concluded that Hashem was the Creator of the universe and Judasim was the One True Religion. And I didn’t buy it. (The professor, a frum woman, loved it. I got an “A” in that class.)

It wasn’t until I discovered the blogosphere that I realized I wasn’t unique, that there were other people out there who agreed with me, and that it was okay to think the way I did. I found myself drawn to the blogs of fellow skeptics, both those who had left the frum lifestyle and those who, like me, continue to live in the frum community. We all love to hear opinions that confirm our own, and I was eating it up. Very quickly, I came to identify myself as a skeptic and even as an atheist. All this within the last couple of years.

So while the skeptical mode of thought is not new to me, my interest in science, logic, history, and theology are not new, my self-identification as a skeptic is new. And maybe, just maybe, part of why I’m drawn to theological debates is a compulsion to defend my new identity.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Two, section three

2010-01-04T10:30:00.000-08:00

Your Space Suit (Chapter Two, section three)

The author draws an analogy between an astronaut’s spacesuit and the physical body. He states that the body is necessary for the soul to function in the physical world, much as a spacesuit is necessary for the astronaut to function in space. As I’ve discussed before, that we perceive ourselves as a disembodied conscious driving our bodies around is merely a quirk of our experience, and fMRI studies are providing increasingly detailed data on how our experiences are produced by our brains. Here the author is codifying that quirk of experience in a theological theory to explain the purpose of our physical body and its relationship to the soul. Interestingly, he doesn’t explain how the metaphysical soul interacts with the physical body. How, exactly, does the non-physical soul get the proper neurons in the physical brain to fire in order to wiggle it's body’s fingers?

Amusingly, the author speculates that if “an alien passing by in his spaceship” saw a human astronaut, he would assume that the suit was the actual creature he was observing, rather than the person inside. Unless that alien was made of far sturdier stuff than we are and was able to survive in the vaccum of space in nothing but its skin, any sentient being with technology advanced enough to build a spaceship would have to know that what he was looking at was a protective suit. Of course this doesn’t affect the author’s point about the real person being the soul inside the body, but as a science fiction fan I found it funny.

At this point it’s impossible for me to say whether he is right or wrong. We’ve moved passed discussing whether or not the soul actually exists. Assuming that it does, the description of the soul as “wearing” the body fits with what we experience. Not that that really matters, because once we’re assuming something that hasn’t been shown to be true and discussing aspects of it that are not testable, everyone’s theory is equally valid. It’s like assuming that dryads exist, and then discussing their relationship to trees’ growth. No one has ever seen a dryad, and there is no way of determining their effect on trees. It’s magic.

The author continues with another alien analogy. This one is about a creature who must have come from a colder planet than Earth, because he parks his spaceship on a frozen lake and wanders off for a month. When he comes back the ice has thawed and his ship is gone. The ice is analogous to the body which “is certain to “disintegrate” at the end of life.” Therefore, the author says, focusing our lives on our bodies is foolish.

This is only true if there is something else. If our bodies are all we have, then what else should we focus on? I am not advocating an irresponsible hedonistic lifestyle, but if we can responsibly indulge ourselves in physical pleasures, why shouldn’t we? In fact, one can argue that, absent the existence of an immortal soul, physical pleasures (including such ethereal forms of pleasure as happiness, satisfaction, sense of accomplishment, etc.) are the only thing of real value.

He then quotes psychologist Dr. Judith Mishell, who like him assumes the existence of the soul and that all positive human traits are to be attributed to it. She uses the analogy of a horse and rider, and explains that the rider must be in control, encouraging and caring for the horse, being considerate of its needs, but never allowing the horse to do as it pleases. Again, assuming that there is a soul, this seems good advice. If the soul is indeed the seat of all virtues, of all higher aspirations, then it is only right that it should be the rider and in control of the body.

But one could tell the same story without referencing a metaphysical soul. Using Freud’s theory of the subconscious, we could say that the Superego should be the rider and maintain tight control over the Id (and Ego) while being sensitive to its needs.

To move even further away from the metaphysical, we could say that the executive functions of the brain, the areas that produce rational thought and weigh pros and cons, should be the rider and maintain control over the emotions and instinctual urges.

Treating the soul as the person inside the body feels right intuitively, and that is why the description of it as wearing the body as suit, or of it controlling the body like a rider on a horse, is so compelling. But we must remember that our intuition is a quick and dirty system for dealing with the deluge of information with which the world inundates us, is highly dependant on past expirience, and in areas in which we are not experts is often wrong. We must refrain from attributing to the soul that which is accounted for by the physical brain (or attributing to the soul that which we don’t yet fully understand simply because of our lack of knowledge). And we must remember that when discussing metaphysical entities which no one has ever seen and which have no measurable effects, all theories about those effects and about the entity’s relationship to the physical world are equally magical.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Two, section two

2010-01-03T13:13:00.000-08:00

The Human U-Turn (Chapter Two, section two)

The author quotes Drs. Wade and Travis (who, coincidentally, were the authors of the textbook I used in my Intro-to-Psych class in college) as saying that our crowning achievement as a species is that, “We are the only species that tries to understand its own misunderstandings.” The author interprets this as meaning that only humans have the ability to think about their past behavior and try to correct what we did wrong. He then says that, “only the human soul has the faculty to choose between right and wrong.” He is guilty here of the equivocation fallacy, as understanding our misunderstandings and correcting them implies changing what we got wrong in the practical sense, not in the moral sense. Yet the psychologists’ statement doesn’t imply even that, and in point of fact other species are capable of learning from and correcting “wrong” behavior by trial and error. Rather they are saying that we are the only species that thinks about why we got it wrong in the first place.

Further, even if the quote was about moral right and wrong, our ability to determine which is which does not by itself imply a soul. I suppose that at this point the author is assuming that he has adequately proven the existence of the soul in the last chapter, and so I will have to put up with the constant leaps of logic assigning cognitions, emotions, and instincts to the soul.

In the very next sentence the author again commits the equivocation fallacy when he states that animals are capable only of genetically programmed changes while humans are capable of changes through introspection. The examples he uses to illustrate his point are tadpoles changing into frogs and caterpillars into butterflies. The pre-programmed physical changes these animals go through are not the same kind of change we are talking about when we speak about someone turning their life around.
{equivocation fallacy x2}

As an example of someone turning his life around we have another glurgy story, this one about an active KKK member who renounced his former racism and anti-Semitism as a result of, “the remarkable unconditional love of a local Jewish couple.” This is meant to illustrate the ability of the human soul to, “engage in self-examination and make unexpected U-turns.

What can I say except, once again, there is no reason to say this had anything to do with any supposed soul. What if far more likely is that the KKK member was put in the uncomfortable position of holding conflicting beliefs: 1) “Jews are evil.” 2) “A Jewish couple are the nicest people I know and have helped me considerably.” The psychological stress caused by holding two conflicting beliefs is called cognitive dissonance, and inevitably one of the beliefs is discarded in order to maintain a coherent perception of the world. In this case it was the anti-Semitic beliefs that were jettisoned, leading him to renounce his former attitudes in order to maintain his friendship with the Jewish couple. This is a well-documented psychological mechanism whose functioning does not require a metaphysical soul with a divine sense of morality.

I also want to point out that once again the story seems chosen to evoke an emotional response in the reader. Any tale of someone deciding what they had been doing was wrong and changing their life would have worked. What we get is the quintessential modern-day anti-Semite reformed through the love of a Jewish couple. Granted, the author is entitled to choose stories he feels would appeal to his readership, but at a certain point it crosses the line from interesting to manipulative.
{emotional manipulation, violation of Occam’s Razor}

The author ends this section by stating that only the human soul is, “driven to greater and greater accomplishments,” and then claims that Maslow said that, “no sooner does a human being fill a lesser need than he aspires to actualize the next level.” His use of “the human soul” when “human” alone would suffice is becoming annoying. And if I remember correctly, Maslow says that each level of needs has to be fulfilled before one can fulfill needs on the next level. That is, satisfying a lower level is necessary to attempt to satisfy needs on a higher level, but it is not sufficient. Not everyone aspires to fulfill all of the needs in the hierarchy. [There is also some research that shows people try to fulfill needs at multiple levels as the opportunity arises rather than fulfilling them hierarchically, but that may be beside the point]

The author has demonstrated that humans are capable of change through introspection, spurred along by psychological mechanisms. He also continues to claim that only humans are driven to accomplish as much as they can, a claim about which, as I’ve said previously, there is no real data. He has not demonstrated a soul is necessary to account for these factors, and at this point seems to be taking it for granted that all positive human traits are a product of the soul.

The Devil’s Dictionary

2010-01-02T22:06:00.000-08:00

The following are excerpts from The Devil’s Dictionary, a newspaper feature written by Ambrose Bierce in the late 1800s and published as a book in 1906. I quote it here with no changes to the original text.

ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

DEPRAVED – the moral condition of a gentleman who holds the opposite opinion.

FAITH – Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

HEATHEN, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.

IGNORAMUS, n. A person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.

IMMORAL, adj. Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to be considered wrong, wicked, immoral. If man's notions of right and wrong have any other basis than this of expediency; if they originated, or could have originated, in any other way; if actions have in themselves a moral character apart from, and nowise dependent on, their consequences — then all philosophy is a lie and reason a disorder of the mind.

IMPIETY – Your irreverence towards my deity.

INFIDEL, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does. A kind of scoundrel imperfectly reverent of, and niggardly contributory to, divines, ecclesiastics, popes, parsons, canons, monks, mollahs, voodoos, presbyters, hierophants, prelates, obeah-men, abbes, nuns, missionaries, exhorters, deacons, friars, hadjis, high-priests, muezzins, brahmins, medicine-men, confessors, eminences, elders, primates, prebendaries, pilgrims, prophets, imaums, beneficiaries, clerks, vicars-choral, archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, preachers, padres, abbotesses, caloyers, palmers, curates, patriarchs, bonezs, santons, beadsmen, canonesses, residentiaries, diocesans, deans, subdeans, rural deans, abdals, charm-sellers, archdeacons, hierarchs, class-leaders, incumbents, capitulars, sheiks, talapoins, postulants, scribes, gooroos, precentors, beadles, fakeers, sextons, reverences, revivalists, cenobites, perpetual curates, chaplains, mudjoes, readers, novices, vicars, pastors, rabbis, ulemas, lamas, sacristans, vergers, dervises, lectors, church wardens, cardinals, prioresses, suffragans, acolytes, rectors, cures, sophis, mutifs and pumpums.

KORAN, n. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

MYTHOLOGY – The body of a primitive’s people’s beliefs concerning its origins, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts it invents later.

PANTHEISM, n. The doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything.

PAST, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future.

PRAY – To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.

SCRIPTURES, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

Bloggers vs. Conformists Redux

2010-01-02T20:13:00.001-08:00

In this week’s 5 Town’s Jewish Times there was a Letter to the Editor from Rabbi Ginzberg, whose article I (and many others) criticized last week. The letter was meant as a response to the, “phone calls, email, and letters,” R’ Ginzberg received following the publication of his article.

Instead of admitting that he had made some indefensible statements, R’ Ginzberg instead offered a “clarification.” What is fascinating about what followed is how it contradicts the original article. In last week’s article R’ Ginzberg made it clear that he considered blogging an invalid venue for expressing opinions, bemoaning the fact his friend had chosen to write a blog post rather than deliver a speech at the Agudah Convention. He accused bloggers – all bloggers – of not being “doers” (whatever that means).

In this week’s letter R’ Ginzberg backpedals furiously, praising those “wonderful Yidden who truly care about Klal Yisrael and … offer suggestions and solutions… using their real names.” He has changed from claiming blogging is always the wrong way of expressing one’s opinions to claiming that blogging ANONYMOUSLY is the wrong way of expressing one’s opinions. He accuses those who use pseudo-names of “hide[ing] like cowards behind their computer screens.” Yet there is no acknowledgment of this change of policy. Nor does he mention either the anonymous bloggers who were instrumental in bringing long-ignored issues to the community’s attention or the social sanctions that would be leveled against bloggers who discussed controversial topics under their real names.

He decries those who dare attack community leaders, and ends by expressing the wish that those who sincerely want to help the community “join together in unity and offer positive chizuk to each other, not bitter attacks.” It is unfortunate for him that not everyone shares his implied vision of limiting the discussion of the areas in which the community needs improvement to leadership-sanctioned topics and those involved in the discussion to people vulnerable to their society’s reaction against them.

Is using a pseudo-name so that your neighbors don’t know your opinions cowardly? Maybe, but in the real world the reaction of your community to your controversial opinions is a real concern. Given the choice between anonymous bloggers forcing positive changes or the community continuing to ignore serious problems because no one is brave enough to risk his family’s standing, R’ Ginzberg would choose the latter. I think most bloggers and those affected by less-than-pristine elements of frum society would prefer the former.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Two, section one

2009-12-30T21:37:00.000-08:00

Soul Defined: The Human U-Turn (Chapter Two, section one)

The author begins the chapter by asking what exactly the soul is and how we can relate to it. To, “…give us a glimpse into the power and nature of the soul,” he tells several glurgy stories.

The first is again related to WWII, and is about two concentration camp inmates. In a bad moment one tells the other that God loves him and gives him a hug. The second man would later claim that hug saved his life. The author asks, “If human existence is limited to the physical dimension, how can something as ethereal as love stave off death?” Firstly, in this case I would argue that it was hope, shared experience, and sense of meaning that helped the man survive, not “love” per se. Secondly, love is not as “ethereal” as the author would imagine, but is instead an emotion generated by our brain through the release of the neurotransmitters oxytocin and serotonin, a process “limited to the physical dimension.”

The second story is about a sickly boy who, told by doctors he would not live to adulthood, ran away from home and became a circus strongman through, “will power… and the power of the mind,” and lived to be an old man. The author implies that it was his mind/soul that overcame his illness and allowed him to perform amazing feats. Leaving aside that circus acts are just that – acts – there are several possible explanations for the boy’s recovery. 1) The doctors may have been mistaken. 2) The training and bodybuilding he went through to become a strongman strengthened his weak body and allowed it to fight off the disease. 3) There really is something to the mind-body connection. The belief that one will get better causing actual improvement is a well-known phenomenon called the placebo effect, and it is the main thing that drugs are tested against for efficacy (that is, trials are conducted to see if the drug’s active ingredients produce improvement over the placebo effect produced by a sugar pill). It is entirely plausible that the boy’s, “strength of mind [could] counteract the weakness of the body,” especially when we remember that the mind, as an emergent property of the brain, is part of the body. Thus we can discuss the influence of the mind on the body without having to posit a metaphysical soul.

The author cites several other cases of people who overcame extreme physical limitations to have notable careers. These people are to be admired for the fortitude and hard work that it took for them to succeed despite their disabilities, but their success neither implies a metaphysical soul nor tells us anything about the soul if it does exist. Attributing their success to the 'power of the human spirit' is an emotional appeal that actually detracts from the credit they deserve for their extraordinary achievements. It is the equivalent of saying, “Yes, they worked hard, but their success is really due to their fairy god-mothers waving their magic wands.”

The author claims that, “The above examples suggest that an invisible, non-physical component can profoundly affect corporeal reality.” They do no such thing! In none of the examples given is it necessary to posit a soul to explain the reported phenomena, and if the author’s statement is taken to refer to the mind alone (though I have no doubt he means the soul) it must be remembered, as I stated above, that the mind is as corporeal as any other part of the body.
{incorrect scientific fact, emotional appeal, unwarranted assumption}

The author provides a quote from Rav Samson Rafael Hirsch in which Rav Hirsch explains that man’s body was taken from the earth, but that which makes him alive is the spirit breathed into him by God. He further explains that this spirit survives death.

This is reassuring to a species aware of its own mortality, but it is theology, not science.

The author states that the relation between the spirit and the body is now beginning to be investigated scientifically, and that new experiments have shown the spirit’s effect on the body. I have a feeling that “spirit” in relation to these experiments is a synonym for “mind,” not, “soul,” but let’s see what the evidence shows.

The first study he cites showed that patients who merely believed they had received surgery to reduce pain in their knee showed just as much improvement as patients who had actually received the surgery. While this is a good argument against continuing to perform said surgery, it is merely a demonstration of the placebo effect. This is not “groundbreaking” as the author claims, but merely yet another affirmation of a well-known effect. It is also not evidence for the power of a transcendent human spirit, but a fascinating insight into how our beliefs about a situation influence our experience of it.

In the second study he cites, one in which patients with Parkinson’s were given either a dopamine injection or a placebo, the author explicitly states that, “the placebo – or rather the patient’s expectations – caused the brain to release as much dopamine as the active drug!” These are very interesting results, but it does not show, as the author claims, “That thoughts, hopes, and expectations can produce such demonstrable physical effects reveals the power of the spirit.” Unless, as I speculated above, “spirit” here means “mind.” The results show how our mind, as an emergent property of our brain, can affect our brain and cause it to inhibit the activity that produces pain and increase the activity that releases dopamine. This is similar to how clicking on an icon on your computer screen – an image produced by software, an emergent property of the ones and zeros encoded on your computer’s hard drive – can cause the physical door of your disc drive to open.
{equivocation fallacy}

Duex Ex Homo Sapiens

2009-12-29T11:01:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading an excellent book, “Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable” by Bruce Hood. The book explores how the way our minds are wired leads us to intuit the supernatural. It’s concepts such as the ones in this book, the way our minds really work as opposed to our intuitive understanding of how our minds work, that kept me interested in psychology in college.

Among other things the book discusses “essentialism,” the tendency we all have to think that there is a metaphysical essence attached to all objects and organisms that makes them what they are. The idea of essences goes all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy, and Dr. Hood quotes a Greek philosopher to make his point. He tells the story of the Ship of Theseus, a famous ship in the Greek world which saw years of service. Over its lifetime, parts of the ship were replaced as they became warped or rotten. Was it still the same ship at the end of its service as it had been at the beginning, despite having had many of its planks replaced? What if one were to take the cast-off planks and assemble them into a second ship? Which would be the real Ship of Theseus, the one that had parts slowly replaced, or the one that was made of the original, now cast-off planks?

A modern-day Ship of Theseus lies at anchor in Boston Harbor. The USS Constitution is an eighteenth-century wooden super-frigate, and is the oldest ship in the world to hold a continuous naval commission. Built during the “pseudo-war” between the United States and France near the end of the1700s, it became famous during the War of 1812 when its crew watched shot from the British frigate HMS Guerriere bounce off its sides and gave it the nickname, “Old Ironsides.” In the over two centuries it’s been in service, every splinter of the Constitution has been replaced at one point or another. Is it still the same ship that traded broadsides with the Guerriere?

That we still think of it as the same ship despite it physically being made up of entirely different material is because of our intuitive sense that there is some essence that defines an object as itself, an essence that is separate from the physical material it’s made of. We see the Constitution as an entity, not merely as a thing made of wood and steel.

Dr. Hood suggests that we have this sense because it helps us identify objects and people as having a continuous existence. He cites a rare neurological disorder in which patients are unable to identify people and objects as those they are familiar with, and instead insist that their parents have been replaced with exact duplicates; and that their closets are full of clothes that are the exact size and style as the ones they own, but belong to other people. Their sense of the essence of objects and people is damaged, and they don’t intuitively connect the beloved parents they spoke with before they became sick with the identical-looking people they’re speaking to right now.

The sense of essence then is extremely useful, as it allows us to intuit continuity. This is even more important with people than with objects. While the entirety of the Constitution has been replaced over the years, it still looks much as it did when it was first launched in the late 1700s. People, on the other hand, change as they age. My daughter today looks almost nothing like she did when she was born. Then she was a tiny, wrinkly, floppy thing that did nothing but eat, sleep, and cry. Now she’s nearly three feet tall, talks incessantly and loves to run and jump. Yet I intuitively see her as the same person.

This brings us to the soul. Our intuitive sense of essence, of a supernatural component to objects’ and peoples’ identity, lends itself to the instinctive assumption that there is metaphysical soul which animates our physical body. The sense of essence creates the illusion that there is something more to the people we interact with than their physical bodies, and together with other phenomena, such as our experience of our consciousness as existing in a metaphysical space somewhere behind our eyes; our sense that we occupy our bodies and drive them around like meaty vehicles; our difficulty truly conceiving of our own non-existence and a world that we are not a part of in some way; and the lack of obvious physical change at the moment of death, causes us to infer a metaphysical entity that animates the body and is the actual person we are interacting with – a soul.

Unfortunately for proponents of the existence of a soul, none of these things are evidence that a soul exists. Intuiting essence is useful to us because it lets us identify objects as having a continuous existence, but essences aren’t real in an objective sense – for either ships or people. Our sense of our consciousness as separate from and in control of our bodies is just a quirk of experience – our consciousness is an emergent property of our brains, and some of the brain areas responsible for various experiences have already been identified. Our consciousness is not any one of the experiences produced by discrete areas of the brain, but the sum of those experiences. Our difficulty conceiving of a world in which we do not exist is due to our complete lack of experience with our own non-existence – an experience that would be impossible to have. And the lack of an obvious change that turns a person into a corpse is because we cannot detect brain activity without sophisticated equipment. People die because their body breaks and stops working, much the same way a computer will stop working if a circuit board is cracked. There is no ghost in the machine that makes a computer work, just silicon chips, ceramic platters, and electric current. And there is no need to posit a soul to animate our bodies, just neurons, neurotransmitters, and bioelectricity.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter One, section four

2009-12-28T12:59:00.000-08:00

This is a milestone for me. Two posts in one day! I've rarely had two posts in one week.

Where Dwells the Self? (Chapter One, section four)

Before I even begin to read this section, I would like to try to answer the heading’s question. The self, if we define it as one’s personality and ability to think and make decisions, dwells mostly in the pre-frontal cortex. Let’s see what the author’s answer is.

The author cites black holes as a phenomenon that we cannot observe directly but whose existence can be inferred from its effects. He asserts that black holes cannot be detected by “any instrument whatsoever” because their extremely high gravity keeps anything from escaping. This is not technically true, as Stephen Hawking showed in 1974 that black holes do emit a form of radiation (which was named ‘Hawking Radiation’). Still, his point that we can know about things we cannot detect directly by observing their effects is a valid one.
{incorrect scientific fact}

The author asks why it is that both people and animals ingest the same sorts of food and the same sort of nutrients travel to their brains, yet only humans produce art. He asks, “…the outcome is so different. Why?” The answer is that the structure and capabilities of the brains of various species are different. The implication that some metaphysical soul must be responsible for transforming the base nutrients into human experiences ignores this basic physiological fact.

He seems to be again trying to use art as evidence of a soul. This is a bad argument because art can be adequately explained by brain function without the need to posit a metaphysical soul.
{argument from ignorance, ignoring known explanations}

He goes on to list a number of things in what seems to be an attempt to show that our sense of self is separate from our physical bodies. It is true that we tend to think of ourselves as something other than our physical bodies. Our consciousness seems to dwell in an abstract mental landscape and most of us think of ourselves as existing somewhere behind our eyes. But here he is putting the cart before the horse. The concept of a soul probably developed because of our perception of ourselves as disembodied consciousness “driving” our bodies around like meaty vehicles. That we have this perception is in no way evidence that our consciousness is actually that disembodied soul.

Consciousness is most likely an emergent property of the brain. That we don’t perceive our thoughts, emotions, or sense of self as coming from the brain has no bearing on whether or not they actually originate within our skulls. Work with fMRI has consistently shown that various areas in the brain are responsible for emotion and cognition.

The author brings news stories and anecdotes to demonstrate that “we” are not our bodies – that is, we are not our limbs, heart, skin, etc. (More accurately, the anecdotes show that we don’t think of ourselves as our bodies.) Again, this is because we perceive ourselves as a consciousness driving the body around like a vehicle. That we think about ourselves this way is an interesting psychological phenomenon, but it doesn’t demonstrate that consciousness is caused by something separate from the body.

He now attempts to show that “we” are not seated in our brains.

First he asks if, theoretically, your memories and knowledge (and presumably personality, though he doesn’t mention that) could be transferred to another brain, would that become you, and would your old brain, wiped clean of your memories, still be you? I’m not sure what his point is exactly, but in such a case the old brain would cease to be you and the new brain would be you. This is because “you” – that is, your consciousness - is not the squishy grey matter in your skull, but is an emergent property of it. Much like the software that runs on a computer isn’t itself chips of etched silicon but is an emergent property of the information encoded on those chips.

Next he asserts that someone with complete retrograde amnesia (he merely says "amnesia," but to cite antegrade amnesia in this context makes no sense) still has a sense of self. I think he is trying to show that our memories are not our sense of self. Amnesiacs, however, do not lose all of their memories. They usually lose only certain types of memories and most sufferers retain knowledge of who they are. Further, retrograde amnesia is often more of a recall problem than damage to the memories themselves, so that an amnesiac's memories may still influence him even if he can't explicitly recall them. Even if it were the case that amnesiacs suffered complete loss of all memories yet retained their sense of self, this only shows that memory is not the only component of our self-identity.

There is a rare type of amnesia called dissociative amnesia where the sufferer does lose his sense of self, further disproving the author's claim. In such cases if the patient does not recall his former identity he will develop a new one. If, as the author claims, the sense of self is rooted in the soul, the change of self in patients with dissociative amnesia would imply that they switched souls. Yet I don’t think that is what he is trying to suggest.
{incorrect scientific fact}

The author then suggests that identical twins, who have the same DNA (and, he mistakenly thinks, identical brains), should have the same personality and interests if raised in the same environment. He claims that the fact that each twin has a unique sense of self shows that self is a property of the soul rather than the brain. This is a bad argument because: 1) Twin studies have shown that even when raised apart in different foster families, identical twins develop remarkably similar personalities and interests. This shows that biology has a profound effect on things that the author is claiming are products of the soul. 2) The differences that do exist between identical twins are caused by environmental differences. Siblings raised together do not have exactly identical experiences. Even in the womb, nutrient and hormone levels will vary slightly between the fetuses. Once born, differences in experiences early in life will produce differences in brain development; and in general throughout their lives different experiences will help shape their identities.
{incorrect scientific fact}

His next example is just silly. He asks if a clone, which has identical DNA to the person being cloned, will have a distinct sense of self or just be a copy of the original. Contrary to their portrayal in science fiction, in real life clones are just babies with one parent. Creating a clone is not like putting a paper in a copy machine and getting an exact duplicate. The clone, while genetically identical to the parent, will have different experiences and therefore a different sense of self.
{incorrect scientific fact}

The last two examples show a lack of understanding of how the brain develops. While biological predisposition has a large effect on brain development, so does experience. The experiences we have are literally hard-wired into our brains. Memories are encoded in neuronal connections, and therefore our experiences affect the physical structure of our brains.

He now quotes a number of scientists who assert that the self is separate from the brain without telling us why they think this is so. Granted, the book is not primarily about neuropsychology, but quoting opinions without providing actual evidence is an appeal to authority. I also have a suspicion that he is engaging in quote mining. A quick internet search of some of the scientists he quotes shows that their research does in fact support the mind being a property of the brain, making it very unlikely that the quotes used by the author mean what he implies they mean.

As an instance of a misleading quote, the author cites a “scientist, Dr. David Chalmers of Australian National University and director of the Centre for Consciousness.” Googling Dr. Chalmers’ name shows that he is not a nuero-scientist as the author implies, and is in fact not a scientist at all. He is a Professor of Philosophy. While philosophy is an intellectually stimulating and interesting field, it is not science, and therefore Dr. Chalmers’ philosophical opinions on the physical laws governing the mind-brain relationship carry no scientific weight. According to his biography, Dr. Chalmers is a proponent of dualism, but many of the arguments cited in the admittedly brief summary of his work seem to be appeals to ignorance. His is also a minority view, and many prominent scientists and philosophers have refuted his thesis.

The one bit of research the author does cite is an experiment where parts of the brain were subjected to electrical stimulation. The experimenter was able to elicit vivid memories from the subject, but the fact that the subject knew that these were memories and that electrical stimulation could not produce decisions were taken to mean that the sense of self is separate from the brain.

The first part is silly, as anyone can produce vivid memories of the past simply by closing their eyes and calling up the memories. Yet we always know that these experiences are memories. There is no reason to think that the experience of a memory triggered by artificially stimulating the brain would be any different than the experience of a memory evoked in the usual manner.

The second part is more interesting, but work with fMRI has shown that specific areas of the brain show increased activity when subjects are engaged in decision making, providing evidence that decision making is a function of the brain. The inability to produce decisions through electrical stimulation shows that we have an incomplete understanding of how the brain produces decisions, but that in itself does not show that there is a metaphysical component to the process. To claim such would be an argument from ignorance.
{incorrect scientific fact (x2), spin, appeal to authority, possible quote mining}

The author has failed to show that the soul exists, whether by inference or otherwise. That we can produce art is not evidence for the soul. That we perceive ourselves as separate from our bodies is not proof of the soul. That science doesn’t completely understand consciousness is not proof of the soul. At best, he has shown that we can’t completely rule out that the soul exists (if we define soul as a disembodied sense of self), but the burden of proof rests on the one making the positive claim to prove his claim is true, not on everyone else to prove the claim is false.

Bloggers vs. Conformists

2009-12-28T09:29:00.000-08:00

DovBear put up a post this morning fisking the article, “Doers Vs. Bloggers” by R’ Aryeh Zev Ginzberg that appeared in last week’s 5 Towns Jewish Times. I read the article and started writing a comment, but when it got over two pages long I realized it would have to be a post. I’ve tried not to duplicate what DovBear already has up. I recommend that you read the article before you read this post, as the post doesn’t really flow on its own.

R’ Ginzberg is upset that we don’t play nice, that we challenge preconceptions and require logical consistency and accountability. Boo hoo for him.

> What has happened to us? Where is the Yiddishe compassion for a Jew, and for his wife and children? What makes one Jew spend his time attacking another Jew and judging him in the most brutal terms, all while hiding behind a computer screen?

In other words, whether he is guilty or not is irrelevant. He is frum yid, and we should all follow our instinctive emotional urge towards clan solidarity. If you actually think about the issue it means there’s something wrong with you! Not only that, but if you discuss the issues using a computer, instead of, say, a telephone or around the dinner table with friends, its extra evil.

> To read some of the comments on a blog (that have been sent to me) from Torah-orientated Jews who speak with such bitterness, hatred, and dismissal of so many wonderful people, organizations, and even, chas v’shalom, of gedolei Yisrael

Chas v’shalom someone should speak in a dismissive manner of a gadol b’Yisroel! Where is your kovod rabbonim? The gedolim are holy beyond our understanding, and it is not for us to criticize them. What, you want them to be accountable? You want them to justify what you think are unwarranted and frivolous bans? How dare you, you evil menuval!

> I wonder what the rosh yeshiva would say if he read some of the thoughts expressed in these anonymous blogs … In truth, he probably wouldn’t say anything; he would just tear k’riyah.

This is an emotional appeal. That negative comments about gedolim on blogs would, in R’ Ginzberg’s opinion, cause this R’Y to tear k’riyah, or even that these comments might be loshon hora, does not mean that the commenters are wrong. (Wrong in the factually incorrect sense. Obviously he thinks they are wrong in the moral sense.)

> While I have long been disturbed by this assault upon our Torah values by the infiltration of the “bloggers” in our community and the great harm that it has brought us

Such as…? R’ Ginzberg doesn’t specify. I suppose he may be referring to the above mentioned disparaging of gedolim, but while he might consider this to be morally wrong, I don’t see how it causes actual harm.

> I could not conceal my disappointment in both the choice of venue that he had made to express his thoughts

Here R’ Ginzberg shows his real bias. The problem isn’t with the thoughts expressed, but rather with the venue.

> and the great loss that the greater community has as a result of qualified people with so much to contribute, in word and in deed, having left the “world of doers” and entered into the “world of bloggers.”

Apparently speaking at the Agudah Convention is “doing” and contributing to the greater community, while saying the exact same things on a blog is to merely “create a venue for others to vent their frustration and hatred towards the individual and/or the community at large.” In R’ Ginzberg’s opinion, then, all dissemination of opinion should be strictly one way, from the authority to the masses. He probably pines for the days when news was controlled by the big media outlets and the average person’s opinions were restricted to his immediate acquaintances.

Additionally, if R’ Ginzberg’s worry is that the opinions of “qualified people” won’t reach a wide enough audience if they are published on a blog instead of delivered in a speech at the Agudah convention, the solution is to encourage people to read blogs more, not to ban them. For every qualified person who might speak at the Convention, there are others who won’t be invited but can express their valuable opinions in the blogosphere. I suspect R’ Ginzberg’s real problem with blogs is not that those he agrees with won’t get wide enough exposure, but that those he disagrees with get any exposure at all.

> What we desperately need are more doers. One thing we definitely do not need is more bloggers in our community.

What we do not need are more self-righteous people certain that their way is the only acceptable way, concerned that someone may express an opinion not approved by the gedolim or disrespectful towards them. For those used to living in a world where the gedolim are sacred, where communal norms are sacrosanct, and where disagreeing with tradition is heresy, the possibility that norms may be challenged and the leaders disparaged is frightening. Boo hoo for him.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter One, section three

2009-12-27T10:30:00.000-08:00

Plants, Animals, and Human Beings (Chapter One, section three)

The author begins this section by asking how to make a plant happy and (as a representative of animals) how to make a cow happy. Leaving aside for a moment that there are many types of plants and that cows are hardly representative of all animals (I excuse the arbitrary representation of all animals by cows because it is just meant as an example), the ingredients given for each organism’s “happiness” (assuming that plants or even cows have something analogous to emotional states) show a woeful ignorance of biology. The plant is prescribed “the right amount of light, air, and water” – no mention of nutrients or opportunities for procreation. The cow’s needs for food and to “propagate” (a word actually better suited to plants) are acknowledged, but the author also suggests hitching “him to a plow.” As if cows (and by the way, a “cow” is by definition a female, not a “he”) are meant for plowing and they need job satisfaction.
{incorrect scientific fact, teleology}

He goes on to say that providing a person with the same – nourishment, job, and exercise – does not guarantee that they won’t be depressed or commit suicide. (The author seems to be using depression and suicide as a barometer for happiness.) That is true, but that’s because people, unlike cows, seek both meaningful social interaction and purpose in their lives. We have the questionable blessing of being self-aware. I would also like to note that clinical depression and suicidal ideation is a mental illness, and not merely the result of dissatisfaction or unhappiness with one’s life. Mentally healthy people normally do not commit suicide no matter how awful their lives may seem, and clinically depressed people are not happy no matter how wonderful their lives are. Pointing to illnesses to show that a given factor does not provide happiness is misleading at best. The opposite of happiness is sadness, not depression (let alone suicide); just as the opposite of physical strength is weakness, not muscular dystrophy.
{incorrect scientific fact}

The author then writes: “There is obviously a drastic difference in how to define happiness when it comes to an animal versus a human being.” What he probably meant was that there is a drastic difference in how we go about achieving happiness in an animal versus a person. If it was a matter of definition it would be a meaningless point. After all, if the definition of happiness is arbitrary then we could call it happiness for animals when they are branded with a red-hot branding iron. Obviously, when he’s speaking about animals being happy he means something approximating what we mean when we talk about people being happy.

The reason that the means for achieving happiness are so different may have more to do with his choice of example than anything. He is continuing his mistake of treating “animals” as a monolithic category. It’s true that different things make cows and humans happy, but it’s also true that different things make cows and tigers happy, and there are yet other differences between tigers and slugs.
{incorrect semantics}

The author now cites Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. While Maslow’s hierarchy provides a useful rule-of-thumb, it’s not exactly on the cutting edge of psychology and was based on conjecture rather than on actual experiments or studies. Since then it has been confirmed by some studies, but it is still somewhat controversial and is useful mostly as a rule-of-thumb.

The author acknowledges only the lowest level of needs, the purely physical, as being shared by people and animals. Yet the next level, the need for safety, is also shared by both people and animals; and the third level, the need to belong and be recognized by a social group, is found in many social species besides humans. The author refers to the highest level of the hierarchy, the need for fulfillment of potential and self-actualization, as a uniquely human need. I don’t know how he reached this conclusion, as 1) there are many people who feel no need to self-actualize (that they may be derided by some societies as underachievers is beside the point, and is dependent on the society in which they happen to live), and 2) I don’t know of any studies that have tried to examine self-actualization in animals. Until it is studied, the most we can say is that we don’t know if there are any other species that feel compelled to achieve as much as possible.

He now states that, “No cow or chimpanzee will ever contemplate a Rembrandt painting, seek to learn something that has no bearing on his own personal existence, or join the Peace Corps.”

It is true that humans are the only species to produce visual art, but so what? What makes this particular quirk so ennobling? The emotion art can evoke? Emotion is just chemicals and electrical signals in the brain. That we happen to be wired to react emotionally to certain images, and that some people are capable of producing images that provoke emotional responses in others, does not make the production of such images an objectively ennobling activity.

It is probably true that animals don’t seek knowledge that has no bearing on their own existence, but again, so what? That humans do seek knowledge that isn’t immediately useful to us is just another quirk, albeit a more practically useful one in the long run than art. Is the author trying to make collecting trivia into the defining difference between people and animals? It is a difference, and one that has been influential in helping our species develop a growing body of knowledge, but it is hardly a metaphysically ennobling trait.

As for joining the Peace Corps, well, animals clearly do not have the social sophistication humans have achieved and do not form globe-spanning organizations. But altruistic behavior has been observed in other primate species, proving that the desire to help others in not a uniquely human trait.
{questionable scientific fact, false significance}

The author now states that the need for self-actualization is said to reside in the soul, and asks if “the existence of the soul can be proven?” If the need for self-actualization is real, it resides, as does everything we experience, in our brains. That this need is supposedly universal makes it all the more obvious that is must be part of our makeup. All typically-developing humans are born with needs, abilities, and predilections that are hardwired in our brains. These include reflexes, physical drives such as hunger, a liking for faces, a tendency to organize the world into patterns, a desire to avoid pain, and abilities such as learning to talk and walk. Neuropsychologists have identified the areas of the brain responsible for many of these inborn traits and continue to work to pinpoint which area does what. Perhaps someday they will identify the cluster of neurons responsible for our need to self-actualize. (Assuming, of course, that the need to self-actualize is a real phenomenon.) Perhaps not. Either way, there is no need to posit a metaphysical soul to explain what is basically an emotional drive.
{unwarranted assumption}

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter One, section two

2009-12-26T22:06:00.000-08:00

The Soul of the Matter (Chapter One, section two)

To frame the discussion of whether there is a difference between people and animals the author cites the fact that humans and chimpanzees share 99.4% of their DNA. He then asks, “If the singular difference between animals and humans is based on the mere fact that we genetically surpass monkeys by 0.6%, then we are only different in degrees and not kind. How dare we discriminate between animals and human beings?”

Here he makes the same mistake he did before when he cited Nazi Germany as an example of the evils of evolution. Evolution is not a ladder, and we do not “surpass” chimpanzees by 0.6%. We are merely genetically 0.6% different from chimpanzees. The author also mistakenly refers to chimpanzees as monkeys, when they are not monkeys but rather are great apes. Among other things, monkeys have tails, apes do not. This is a fairly common misconception, but again this speaks to the quality of the book’s scholarship.

He then is guilty of the equivocation fallacy with his use of the word “discriminate.” Discriminate can mean either: “to distinguish by discerning or exposing differences” or “to make a difference in treatment or favor on a basis other than individual merit” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). Chimpanzees and humans have clear differences, and to discriminate between them (first definition) is natural. However, the use of the word calls up the second, pejorative, definition and suggests that acknowledging the distinctions is a bad thing.

Lastly, he generalizes from chimpanzees to all animals. Perhaps, given their similarity to us, chimpanzees should be accorded special treatment. But that does not translate into equating people and all other organisms. This unwarranted generalization may stem from the human tendency to perceive the world in distinct categories. The author is using two categories here, “people,” and, “animals.” He is treating these categories as discrete and homogenous blocks. If these categories are an accurate description of the world, then they can be compared to one another. But the truth is that humans and animals are not separate categories. Humans, animals, even plants are all organisms, and each organism can be evaluated on a number continuums which might be relevant here, including complexity, intelligence, and sentience.
{incorrect scientific fact, equivocation fallacy, false distinction}

He then lists some animals that are in fact superior to humans in specific ways, including the, “blind bat, [which] through its sonar ability, can maneuver its way through the most complex obstacle course.” The bat is in fact not blind, and some can see about as well as humans. Bats use echolocation to navigate because they hunt at night, and, like humans, cannot see in the dark. This mistake doesn’t actually affect his argument, as bats do still have an ability (echolocation) that humans don’t, but once again this speaks to the book’s quality of scholarship.
{incorrect scientific fact}

The author quotes a Professor Singer who argues that people saw themselves as superior to animals in the Western world because the Bible states that God endowed people with a soul. Given that it is the soul that makes us superior, the author states that if he can prove the existence of the soul, even Professor Singer would acknowledge human superiority.

The author is conflating the professor’s conjecture as to why people do (in general) in fact consider themselves superior to animals with a claim that a soul is a valid justification for considering ourselves superior. (Note that I am endorsing neither Professor Singer's claim nor his controversial ethical theory.) Be that as it may, I am willing to concede that if there actually is a God, and He endowed humans with a metaphysical soul which other species do not have, then in the soul-bearing category we would be superior to animals. Further, depending on exactly what properties said soul endows upon its possessor, possession of a soul may be a valid justification for classifying people as a separate category from and superior to the rest of the animal kingdom.

I should note that there is no need to look to a metaphysical soul to find ways in which humans are superior to other organisms. Humans are far and away the masters of adapting the environment to suit our needs. While other species change the environment, build dwellings, create tools, even domesticate other species, none of them approach the scale on which humans use and create things for our own benefit. We are also the most intelligent species on the planet (as measured by problem-solving ability), and the only one capable of transmitting truly novel information and abstract concepts.