“God Was Not Good, Just on Our Side”

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.

The Celestial Bank

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

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…

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.

The Force Behind Nature

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.]




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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

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.

For Want of a Nail…

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

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?

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.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Clearing up Contradictions

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.)

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Four, section three

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.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Four, section two

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

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)

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)

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

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.

Search Judaism – A Critique: Part Two (I)

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

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}