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.
Showing posts with label theodicy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theodicy. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Sunday, October 31, 2010
“God Himself Couldn’t Sink This Ship”
According to legend when the Titanic was launched a White Star Line employee claimed, "God Himself couldn’t sink this ship!". Of course, the Titanic famously did sink. On April 15, 1912 during her first trans-Atlantic trip she hit an iceberg and went down 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.
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.
Monday, June 28, 2010
1st Century Spin Doctors
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.
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.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Mechanistic Metaphysics
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.
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.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Three, section four
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}
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}
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Why is Faith a Virtue?
Once again, I find I am prompted to post in response to something I read over Shabbos. This time it is an article about Holocaust survivors and what we can learn from them. The article was well written and quite moving. As I read it, though, I noticed two implicit assumptions made by the author.
The first was that suffering has a purpose for its own sake. This was expressed in with a quote from a rav who said that he did not say Kaddish for relatives who had died in the Holocaust because they were already sitting next to God and did not need any more merits. I think this idea probably owes a lot to the human need to find purpose. If everything has a purpose, and the victims’ suffering served no obvious purpose in this world, it must have served them in the next world.
The second was the assumption that faith is a virtue, perhaps the greatest virtue, and that the more unreasonable it is to hold onto faith the more virtuous it is to do so. The conclusion of the article was a statement that we must learn from the remaining survivors what it means to have faith, particularly what it means to have faith in nightmarish conditions.
But why is this a virtue? Faith is trust, in this context trust in God. It is often compared to the trust a child has in his parents. Even if the parent forces the child to do something unpleasant, the child still trusts that the parent loves him and knows best. I see this with my own daughter. If I let her she would eat cookies all day. When I tell her she can’t have any more cookies she gets very upset. Sometimes I have to force her to do things that are good for her, like changing her diaper when she wants to play. Yet she seems to quickly forget these indignities.
For most children, this faith in their parents is justified. Their parents really are doing what is best for them. It is often argued that God, like a parent, must sometimes do things to us that are unpleasant but are what is best for us. We are like children compared to God and shouldn’t question His judgment. This works if we assume that a) God is all-knowing and b) God is a loving parent Who wants what is best for us.
What if God is really an abusive parent? Children who are abused often also love their parents. They take the blame for the abuse on themselves, claiming that they deserved to be hit because they were bad. Similarly, when bad things happen to people they often say that it is because of their sins, and God is justified in punishing them.
Several years ago my cousin was killed in a car accident. A rav from the community who came to be menachem avel told my aunt and uncle that she had died because they had not tried hard enough to do the mitzvos properly, that she was a korban for klal yisroel’s aveiros. My uncle found comfort in this. I was horrified. This rav had just told grieving parents that their daughter’s death was their fault!
It seems that God fits the abusive parent profile better than that loving parent. Yet holding onto faith in Him, especially in horrific conditions, is considered a virtue.
I think part of the answer is evolutionary. In general, we consider virtues those things that have helped our species survive and develop complex civilization. Not killing those close to you is a virtue. Helping those in your family and community is a virtue. These things help your family’s genes survive and help to build a community. Trusting your parents also helps you to survive, and similarly becomes a virtue. Trusting those who are close to you, your family and close friends, is usually considered a virtue. This trust is extended to the Parent in the sky, God.
Part of the answer also relates to the first assumption in the article, that all suffering ultimately has a purpose. This strengthens faith under adverse conditions. For one to lose faith while suffering means that one’s suffering has no purpose. So suffering can actually increase faith.
So faith becomes a virtue through evolutionary programming and is strengthened because it gives people’s suffering purpose. Faith is a virtue because it allows people to endure hardship and helps to build society. The greater the evidence to the contrary, the stronger faith can become and the more virtuous it is.
[The question of why faith is a virtue really needs a much longer discussion, but this was inspired by a particular article and mostly addresses the points brought up by that article.]
The first was that suffering has a purpose for its own sake. This was expressed in with a quote from a rav who said that he did not say Kaddish for relatives who had died in the Holocaust because they were already sitting next to God and did not need any more merits. I think this idea probably owes a lot to the human need to find purpose. If everything has a purpose, and the victims’ suffering served no obvious purpose in this world, it must have served them in the next world.
The second was the assumption that faith is a virtue, perhaps the greatest virtue, and that the more unreasonable it is to hold onto faith the more virtuous it is to do so. The conclusion of the article was a statement that we must learn from the remaining survivors what it means to have faith, particularly what it means to have faith in nightmarish conditions.
But why is this a virtue? Faith is trust, in this context trust in God. It is often compared to the trust a child has in his parents. Even if the parent forces the child to do something unpleasant, the child still trusts that the parent loves him and knows best. I see this with my own daughter. If I let her she would eat cookies all day. When I tell her she can’t have any more cookies she gets very upset. Sometimes I have to force her to do things that are good for her, like changing her diaper when she wants to play. Yet she seems to quickly forget these indignities.
For most children, this faith in their parents is justified. Their parents really are doing what is best for them. It is often argued that God, like a parent, must sometimes do things to us that are unpleasant but are what is best for us. We are like children compared to God and shouldn’t question His judgment. This works if we assume that a) God is all-knowing and b) God is a loving parent Who wants what is best for us.
What if God is really an abusive parent? Children who are abused often also love their parents. They take the blame for the abuse on themselves, claiming that they deserved to be hit because they were bad. Similarly, when bad things happen to people they often say that it is because of their sins, and God is justified in punishing them.
Several years ago my cousin was killed in a car accident. A rav from the community who came to be menachem avel told my aunt and uncle that she had died because they had not tried hard enough to do the mitzvos properly, that she was a korban for klal yisroel’s aveiros. My uncle found comfort in this. I was horrified. This rav had just told grieving parents that their daughter’s death was their fault!
It seems that God fits the abusive parent profile better than that loving parent. Yet holding onto faith in Him, especially in horrific conditions, is considered a virtue.
I think part of the answer is evolutionary. In general, we consider virtues those things that have helped our species survive and develop complex civilization. Not killing those close to you is a virtue. Helping those in your family and community is a virtue. These things help your family’s genes survive and help to build a community. Trusting your parents also helps you to survive, and similarly becomes a virtue. Trusting those who are close to you, your family and close friends, is usually considered a virtue. This trust is extended to the Parent in the sky, God.
Part of the answer also relates to the first assumption in the article, that all suffering ultimately has a purpose. This strengthens faith under adverse conditions. For one to lose faith while suffering means that one’s suffering has no purpose. So suffering can actually increase faith.
So faith becomes a virtue through evolutionary programming and is strengthened because it gives people’s suffering purpose. Faith is a virtue because it allows people to endure hardship and helps to build society. The greater the evidence to the contrary, the stronger faith can become and the more virtuous it is.
[The question of why faith is a virtue really needs a much longer discussion, but this was inspired by a particular article and mostly addresses the points brought up by that article.]
Monday, April 20, 2009
Is God Good?
The following is an excerpt from something I wrote nearly eight years ago. I was more of a believer back then…
… Yet despite all this, there is no real evidence that Hashem is good. He told us He's good, but according to His own rules one cannot bring aidus on himself. Before we can really discuss whether or not He's good, though, we have to establish what "good" is.
One very problematic definition of good is that whatever Hashem does or tells us to do is good. It is good because Hashem is the ultimate good in the universe. How do we know this? Because everything He does is good. Why is everything He does good? Because He is the ultimate good in the universe. And how do we know this? Because everything He does is good. . . This is circular reasoning, and as such is simply ridiculous.
A major problem with defining what good really is is that it is very subjective. If there are two stores competing for business, and a customer chooses store A, that is good for store A, but is bad for store B. Thus when Hashem says that He is good, He may be telling the truth from His point of view, but what is good for Him is not necessarily good for humanity. We assume that He means that He is good for us, and this is what we need proof for.
To determine what is classified as good we must establish a baseline of what is normal. Anything above the baseline is good; anything below it is bad. For example, when it comes to food, having enough to eat is the baseline. Having extra food or especially tasty food is good, not having enough food or having unappetizing food (moldy, etc.) is bad. Establishing such a baseline is absolutely necessary. Without a baseline, a person may be tempted to claim that merely having enough to eat is good. Yet, because good is generally accepted as something better than normal, this would mean that not having enough to eat was normal. A world were this is the case is horrific. (The world actually was like that for the majority of the population for millennia, but we'll discuss that later.) So we will establish the baseline as being reasonably comfortable (healthy, fed, clothed, etc.).
When discussing whether or not Hashem is good, most people tend to glorify what appears to be good and discount what appears to be bad because it was done by Hashem. This is unacceptable. Although He is not human, for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not He is good we must hold Him accountable as one. Thus if He afflicts someone with a fatal illness and then cures the person, instead of praising Hashem that the person got well we should look at the situation as it really is. It is much like someone purposely burning down a house and then paying the owner. Not only wouldn't we praise him for paying, we would say he is a terrible person. It is no great thing that Hashem cures a sick person. After all, it is His fault the person got sick in the first place.
We have established that for something to be defined as "good," it must be above the baseline, be something that would be called good regardless of the being responsible, and can not be merely a fix for something bad perpetrated earlier. Let us now examine the evidence regarding Hashem's nature in regard to His goodness. In doing so, we start with the assumption that He is perfectly neutral, then determine His level of goodness based on the evidence.
Let's begin at the beginning. Hashem creates Adam and Chava. A few hours later they have eaten from the eitz hadas and are expelled from Gan Aden. Less then a day after the world's creation, and the first murder occurs. After a millennia and a half, the situation has gotten so bad that Hashem decides to wipe the world clean. The only survivors are Noach and his family. After a year, the water goes down and they can finally leave the taevah. Immediately, Noach, the tzaddik of his generation, gets drunk and passes out on his bed. His grandson comes along and castrates him.
This is, I'm sure you'll agree, a horrible record. Most people would place the blame on the humans. Such consistent failure to follow even basic laws, though, seems to indicate a terrible flaw in humanity. The flaws in a product can only be blamed on the maker of that product, in this case Hashem. This being the case, why are humans so horribly flawed? Only two possibilities present themselves. Either the flaw was accidental or intentional. If the flaw is accidental, that implies that Hashem is incompetent. If it is intentional, that means that Hashem is a sadist who wants His creations to fail so that He can blame then for that failure then punish them accordingly.
A few years go by, and we come to Mitzrayim. The most wonderful thing Hashem has ever done for us, supposedly, is to take us out of slavery. But Who's fault is it we were slaves? Hashem told Avraham that his children would be slaves in Mitzrayim, and we know that had Yaakov and his sons not come willingly, Hashem would have arranged to have them dragged there in chains. That is the justification for allowing Yosef to be taken to Mitzrayim; so that he would be in a position to make his extended family comfortable when they arrived. What is more, the Jewish people hadn't committed any aveiros that this slavery could be blamed on. So what we really have here is Hashem putting the Yiden through almost a century of torture so that when He came to take them out, they would be extremely grateful. Yet apparently this didn't work out, because four fifths of the Jews didn't want to leave Mitzrayim. The Nazis murdered six million Jews over the course of five years and we revile them as monsters. Hashem murdered twice as many in five days, yet the three million Jews who left Mitzrayim extolled His kindness and mercy.
What follows is a bloodbath as the nations who had lived in what would become Eretz Yisroel more or less forever were systematically driven away or butchered. The one nation which managed to trick the Jews into allowing them to stay in their homes is reviled as sneaky and underhanded. Granted, Hashem created the world and so may have the right to allocate it as He chooses, but being G-d He could certainly have done so in a less brutal manner. He can't even use the excuse that He doesn't like to perform overt miracles, because he performed a miracle when He caused the walls of Yericho to sink into the ground.
There were then several hundred years of relative peace, culminating in Dovid HaMelech's expansion wars and the prosperity of Shlomo HaMelech's reign. Then the Babylonians sack Yerushalayim and destroy the Bais HaMikdash. What did the Jews of the time do to deserve such a tragedy? They followed only the letter of the law and didn't go lifnim mishuras hadin. Such a reason could only be given by a sadist looking for any reason to punish.
Except for a short time after the Chashmonaim drove out the Greeks, from that time on for nearly two thousand years Eretz Yisroel was a province of one empire or another, none of which were very kind to Jews. The Jews were scattered over the Earth, ending up in hostile countries. There isn't a square inch of Europe or Asia that the Jews haven't been expelled from at one time or another. When we were allowed to live somewhere, it was under heavy taxation and with the constant fear of pogroms. True, we are nonetheless ridiculously prominent in world affairs relative to our small numbers, but that hardly makes up for two millennia of suffering.
Perhaps one could argue that the Jews, being Hashem's nation, have stringent standards and these standards were violated in some way severe enough to justify the horrors visited upon us. But then what of the rest of humanity? From the fall of Rome until well into the Renaissance, the majority of the population were starving, lived in tiny, filthy accommodations, were constantly swept with diseases, and worked from dawn to dusk trying to grow enough food to live on. The majority of children died before they reached adulthood. Women died in childbirth as often as not.
Then there are the incidents that stand out as being particularly horrible, such as the Black Death that wiped out a third of the population of Europe. Not to mention the repercussions to the Jews. How can such wanton murder be justified?
Even today, arguably the best age the world has ever known, the majority of humanity lives in abject poverty. The AIDs virus is an epidemic in Africa. Cancer cases are on the rise. . .
… Yet despite all this, there is no real evidence that Hashem is good. He told us He's good, but according to His own rules one cannot bring aidus on himself. Before we can really discuss whether or not He's good, though, we have to establish what "good" is.
One very problematic definition of good is that whatever Hashem does or tells us to do is good. It is good because Hashem is the ultimate good in the universe. How do we know this? Because everything He does is good. Why is everything He does good? Because He is the ultimate good in the universe. And how do we know this? Because everything He does is good. . . This is circular reasoning, and as such is simply ridiculous.
A major problem with defining what good really is is that it is very subjective. If there are two stores competing for business, and a customer chooses store A, that is good for store A, but is bad for store B. Thus when Hashem says that He is good, He may be telling the truth from His point of view, but what is good for Him is not necessarily good for humanity. We assume that He means that He is good for us, and this is what we need proof for.
To determine what is classified as good we must establish a baseline of what is normal. Anything above the baseline is good; anything below it is bad. For example, when it comes to food, having enough to eat is the baseline. Having extra food or especially tasty food is good, not having enough food or having unappetizing food (moldy, etc.) is bad. Establishing such a baseline is absolutely necessary. Without a baseline, a person may be tempted to claim that merely having enough to eat is good. Yet, because good is generally accepted as something better than normal, this would mean that not having enough to eat was normal. A world were this is the case is horrific. (The world actually was like that for the majority of the population for millennia, but we'll discuss that later.) So we will establish the baseline as being reasonably comfortable (healthy, fed, clothed, etc.).
When discussing whether or not Hashem is good, most people tend to glorify what appears to be good and discount what appears to be bad because it was done by Hashem. This is unacceptable. Although He is not human, for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not He is good we must hold Him accountable as one. Thus if He afflicts someone with a fatal illness and then cures the person, instead of praising Hashem that the person got well we should look at the situation as it really is. It is much like someone purposely burning down a house and then paying the owner. Not only wouldn't we praise him for paying, we would say he is a terrible person. It is no great thing that Hashem cures a sick person. After all, it is His fault the person got sick in the first place.
We have established that for something to be defined as "good," it must be above the baseline, be something that would be called good regardless of the being responsible, and can not be merely a fix for something bad perpetrated earlier. Let us now examine the evidence regarding Hashem's nature in regard to His goodness. In doing so, we start with the assumption that He is perfectly neutral, then determine His level of goodness based on the evidence.
Let's begin at the beginning. Hashem creates Adam and Chava. A few hours later they have eaten from the eitz hadas and are expelled from Gan Aden. Less then a day after the world's creation, and the first murder occurs. After a millennia and a half, the situation has gotten so bad that Hashem decides to wipe the world clean. The only survivors are Noach and his family. After a year, the water goes down and they can finally leave the taevah. Immediately, Noach, the tzaddik of his generation, gets drunk and passes out on his bed. His grandson comes along and castrates him.
This is, I'm sure you'll agree, a horrible record. Most people would place the blame on the humans. Such consistent failure to follow even basic laws, though, seems to indicate a terrible flaw in humanity. The flaws in a product can only be blamed on the maker of that product, in this case Hashem. This being the case, why are humans so horribly flawed? Only two possibilities present themselves. Either the flaw was accidental or intentional. If the flaw is accidental, that implies that Hashem is incompetent. If it is intentional, that means that Hashem is a sadist who wants His creations to fail so that He can blame then for that failure then punish them accordingly.
A few years go by, and we come to Mitzrayim. The most wonderful thing Hashem has ever done for us, supposedly, is to take us out of slavery. But Who's fault is it we were slaves? Hashem told Avraham that his children would be slaves in Mitzrayim, and we know that had Yaakov and his sons not come willingly, Hashem would have arranged to have them dragged there in chains. That is the justification for allowing Yosef to be taken to Mitzrayim; so that he would be in a position to make his extended family comfortable when they arrived. What is more, the Jewish people hadn't committed any aveiros that this slavery could be blamed on. So what we really have here is Hashem putting the Yiden through almost a century of torture so that when He came to take them out, they would be extremely grateful. Yet apparently this didn't work out, because four fifths of the Jews didn't want to leave Mitzrayim. The Nazis murdered six million Jews over the course of five years and we revile them as monsters. Hashem murdered twice as many in five days, yet the three million Jews who left Mitzrayim extolled His kindness and mercy.
What follows is a bloodbath as the nations who had lived in what would become Eretz Yisroel more or less forever were systematically driven away or butchered. The one nation which managed to trick the Jews into allowing them to stay in their homes is reviled as sneaky and underhanded. Granted, Hashem created the world and so may have the right to allocate it as He chooses, but being G-d He could certainly have done so in a less brutal manner. He can't even use the excuse that He doesn't like to perform overt miracles, because he performed a miracle when He caused the walls of Yericho to sink into the ground.
There were then several hundred years of relative peace, culminating in Dovid HaMelech's expansion wars and the prosperity of Shlomo HaMelech's reign. Then the Babylonians sack Yerushalayim and destroy the Bais HaMikdash. What did the Jews of the time do to deserve such a tragedy? They followed only the letter of the law and didn't go lifnim mishuras hadin. Such a reason could only be given by a sadist looking for any reason to punish.
Except for a short time after the Chashmonaim drove out the Greeks, from that time on for nearly two thousand years Eretz Yisroel was a province of one empire or another, none of which were very kind to Jews. The Jews were scattered over the Earth, ending up in hostile countries. There isn't a square inch of Europe or Asia that the Jews haven't been expelled from at one time or another. When we were allowed to live somewhere, it was under heavy taxation and with the constant fear of pogroms. True, we are nonetheless ridiculously prominent in world affairs relative to our small numbers, but that hardly makes up for two millennia of suffering.
Perhaps one could argue that the Jews, being Hashem's nation, have stringent standards and these standards were violated in some way severe enough to justify the horrors visited upon us. But then what of the rest of humanity? From the fall of Rome until well into the Renaissance, the majority of the population were starving, lived in tiny, filthy accommodations, were constantly swept with diseases, and worked from dawn to dusk trying to grow enough food to live on. The majority of children died before they reached adulthood. Women died in childbirth as often as not.
Then there are the incidents that stand out as being particularly horrible, such as the Black Death that wiped out a third of the population of Europe. Not to mention the repercussions to the Jews. How can such wanton murder be justified?
Even today, arguably the best age the world has ever known, the majority of humanity lives in abject poverty. The AIDs virus is an epidemic in Africa. Cancer cases are on the rise. . .
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