Sago Boulevard

Via Keith Burgess-Jackson, here’s a transcript of the famous 1948 BBC radio debate on the existence of God between Father Frederick C. Copleston, a Jesuit Catholic priest, and philosopher Bertrand Russell. The debate has a level of sophistication rarely seen. Read the whole thing; it’s terrific.

R. Jonathan Sacks, A Letter in the Scroll (via Hirhurim):

Can we really know whether faith is justified? Do we, citizens of modernity and post-modernity, not take for granted what Hume, Kant and Nietzsche labored to establish, that the existence of God cannot be proved? And do we not as Jews–always inclined to rationality, and now chastened and chilled by the Holocaust–have more reason to doubt than most? Yet I have to admit, even as a professionally trained philosopher, that I am unmoved by this whole trend of thought, rendered trivial by its own circularity. Of course it is possible to live a life without God, just as it is possible to live a life without humor, or music, or love; and one can no more prove that God exists that one can prove these other things exist to those who lack a sense of humor, or to whom Schubert is mere noise, or love a figment of the romantic imagination…

Jewish faith is not a metaphysical wager, a leap into the improbable. It is the courage to see the world as it is, without the comfort of myth or the self-pity of despair, knowing that the evil, cruelty and injustice it contains are neither inevitable nor meaningless but instead a call to human responsibility–a call emanating from the heart of existence itself

David Novak has an excellent review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Already in the first paragraph Novak sets a scholarly tone by taking Dawkins argument seriously and by addressing the important philosophical issues without resorting to the dismissive rhetoric so common in today’s religious debate.

Being an argument (however badly presented), the basic assertions of this book deserve a reasoned response, even though its overall tone is more likely to elicit an emotional reaction–either a positive reaction from those who love Dawkins’ atheism or a negative reaction from those who hate it.

Novak indeed provides a reasoned response. In doing so, he articulates a key philosophical problem with Intelligent Design and offers an alternative view that I think is much more in line with traditional Judaism. (more…)

R. Natan Slifkin points outs a key problem with intelligent design in his Jerusalem Post article (via Hirhurim). It’s quite good and I think he’s right.

The “randomness” of Darwinian evolution is no more antithetical to religion than the superficially chance events of the Book of Esther, which we ascribe to God’s salvation, or the randomness of a lottery, about which it states in Proverbs 16:33, “When the lot is cast in the lap, its entire verdict has been decided by God.”

For as long as I’ve been blogging, I’ve been commenting on the seemingly endless array of “Torah & Science” posts, as well as writing some of my own. But in none of my previous comments or posts have I really expressed my thoughts in a comprehensive way. So for what it’s worth, I want to lay out what I think is the real dilemma evolution presents for religion and offer an approach I find compelling, even if incomplete.
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In the comments to her post about her son’s atheism, Dr. B writes:

I think that the argument that we should believe in god in order to make ourselves be good is really rather blasphemous. God ought to be an end, rather than a means, by definition.

She’s responding to a commenter who doubted the sincerity of a boy that young professing to be an atheist, but the context here is secondary. I’m more interested in the statement itself. I think the idea that God must be an end is motivated by an aversion to ulterior motives. There is, perhaps, something unsettling about acting as though God is real merely because it motivates us to behave in a socially responsible way. That would reduce God to merely a useful fiction. But that doesn’t mean there’s a problem with viewing God as a means to an end; there’s a problem with viewing God as the wrong means to an end.

Belief in God and Torah is, in fact, a means to an end, but to a far more loftly end: a life of holiness. Believing in God because we want to share in His holiness isn’t an ulterior motive. It’s the whole point.

R. Soloveitchik in The Lonely Man of Faith:

[M]an is faced with an exasperating paradox. On the one hand, he beholds God in every nook and corner of creation, in the flowering of the plant, in the rushing of the tide, and in the movement of his own muscle, as if God were at hand close to and beside man, engaging him in a friendly dialogue. And yet the very moment man turns to face God he finds Him remote, unapproachable… enveloped in the cloud of mystery, winking to him from the awesome ‘beyond.’ Therefore, the man of faith, in order to redeem himself from his loneliness and misery, must meet God at a personal covenantal level, where he can be near Him and feel free in His presence.”

R. Marvin Fox, in “Heschel, Intuition, and the Halakhah”, is critical of what he considers an over-reliance on intuition in R. Heschel’s philosophy of religion. The common objection to any intuition-based theory, as Fox argues, “is that we have no reliable way to distinguish between those experiences which are genuine perceptions of a higher reality and experiences which are delusions or hallucinations.” Perhaps more important, though, is Fox’s second objection. The kind of awe-inspiring, life-changing experiences that Heschel has in mind are limited to prophets and, at best, the great religious personalities of each generation. “A conception of religion which is rooted in such experiences automatically restricts the realm of faith to a small group of the spiritually elite.”

According to Fox, Heschel offers three ways for achieving such intuition. He paraphrases Heschel as follows: “Man can come to a knowledge of God by sensing His presence in the world, in things… sensing His presence in the Bible… [and] sensing his presence in sacred deeds”. The problem with the first two, as Fox points out (I think, correctly), is that they are only available to the already-believing individual (again, the spiritually elite). (more…)

Marco, at El Blog de Marcos (via Philosophers’ Carnival), entertains the possibility of God-dependant morality while avoiding the Euthyphro dilemma. (I don’t really like Wikipedia’s summary but it’ll suffice for now. I’ve also written on the topic here and here. Even better, read the dialogue and decide for yourself.) Here’s Marco’s suggestion:

[W]hat if we see God as decreeing the particular laws he does for non-moral reasons (i.e. reasons other than those like ‘… is wrong)? This avoids the dispensability-of-God problem as well as the arbitrariness problem.

In fact, it avoids neither problem because it fails to account for God’s motivation for “decreeing the particular laws [H]e does for non-moral reasons”. Let’s say God decrees a law for non-moral reasond r. Did God choose non-moral reason r by throwing dice or is there a deeper motivation? If the former, arbitrariness stares us in the face. If the latter, non-moral reason r becomes irrelavent and the original dilemma returns.
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In an interview with AlterNet, atheist Sam Harris makes a point that’s worth addressing (via Piny).

[Y]ou have people talking about just wanting meaning in their lives, which I argue is a total non-sequitur when it comes down to justifying your belief in God.

If I told you that I thought there was a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in my backyard, and you asked me, why do you think that? I say, this belief gives my life meaning, or my family draws a lot of joy from this belief, and we dig for this diamond every Sunday and we have this gigantic pit in our lawn. I would start to sound like a lunatic to you.

He’s right that he would sound like a lunatic but I think the analogy is off. There’s no reason to for me to believe in a giant diamond in my backyard and the kind of satisfaction one may draw from this kind of belief is superficial. No great mystery is solved by positing its existence.

Yet, most of us naturally recognize meaning and purpose as inherent in the world. We recognize that despite the disasters and tragedies we read about daily, the world is good and goodness is not something that can result from a string of random genetic mutations and mysterious explosions. As I’ve argued before, if morality is to have any force, it must be, in a deep sense, built-in to the fabric of the universe.

None of this requires a leap of faith or belief in the irrational. The basic claim of religion responds to a very powerful human intuition that goodness is not random. When a religious tradition provides a compelling explanation for the role of goodness in the world and our relationship with that goodness, the rational individual ought to take notice. Is it the only explanation? Of course not. But I think it’s the best one.

Over Shabbat, I decided to reread R. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man. I think it’s been two years or so since I last read it (aside from referencing passages now and then). While The Lonely Man of Faith may still have a special place in my heart, Halakhic Man is an absolutely mind-blowing account of how the religious personality uses the Halakhah as a lens through which to behold the world. In fact, these two seminal essays should probably be read in light of each other and I may explore that possibility in a later post. The essay’s stated aim

is to penetrate deep into the structure of halakhic man’s consciousness and to determine the precise nature of this “strange, singular” being who reveals himself to the world from within his narrow, constricted “four cubits” [Berakhot 8a], his hands soiled by the gritty realia of practical Halakhah [see Berakhot 4a].

Later in Part I, R. Soloveitchik introduces his protaganist more fully:

When halakhic man approaches reality, he comes with his Torah, given to him from Sinai, in hand. He orients himself to the world by means of fixed statutes and firm principles. An entire corpus of precepts and laws guides him along the path leading to existence. Halakhic man, well furnished with rules, judgments, and fundamental principles, draws near the world with an a priori relation. His approach begins with an ideal creation and concludes with a real one. To whom may he be compared. To a mathematician who fashions an ideal world and then uses it for the purpose of establishing a relationship between it and the real world…

R. Soloveitchik often emphasizes the indepedence of religious or halakhic concepts and the danger of “translating” such concepts into the respective languages of science and philosophy. He believed, and I strongly agree, that many conflicts between science and Torah (evolutionary theory is the most popular but there are many) stem from misunderstanding this point. In The Halakhic Mind (pp. 47-50), the Rav offers the concept of time as an illustration.

There is the question of God in His full transcendence beyond time, and God in His immanence in time. This problem does not only bear upon the idea of God but also upon the idea of time. God in the temporal world presents the composite of time and eternity; it implies the intrusion of eterninty upon temporality…

In this connection, the problem of the calender bears some investigation. The division of time into days, weeks, months, and years is quite incongruous with the time concept of the scientist for whom time is a continuum with no milestone. The seasons of the year or the astronomic phenomena of sunrise and sunset do not, in the least, determine the character of time. On the contrary, like other phenomena they occur in time. The religious type, in his experience of this category, indentifies the incessant flux of the chronos with the artificial form of the calender… He sees God not only in eternity but also in time quantified and measured by the calender.

The specific religious apprehension of time as cyclic motion or as an eternal repetition (Kierkegaard) is likewise utterly unintelligible to the scientist who measures spatialized time or to the metaphysician who views time as a directed flow. The experience of time as repetition is rooted in the typically religious time-awareness and is closely associated with the concept of the calender that is indeed pure repetition.
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[Here, R. Soloveitchik works out the details of how the religious ideas of Creation, Revelation, and repentence bear out this theory of time]

It must be understood that these time concepts are not mere fantasy. They are inherent in the religious consciousness which apprehends time in its own fashion.

In his review of R. Soloveitchik’s The Emergence of Ethical Man, Haim Watzman (via Hirhurim) puts his finger on the most irritating part of the evolution-vs-intellegent-design debate.

The lines in the case of God v. Darwin could not be clearer. Counsel for the party of the first part claims that the principle of evolution by natural selection cannot be transcendentally true because it reserves no place for God. Counsel for the party of the second part does not dispute the fact that there is no place for God in biology. However, it draws a different conclusion—God at best simply does not exist; at worst, He is responsible for error and superstition.

Like a lawsuit, a public debate doesn’t encourage subtle reasoning. To win over public opinion, each side needs to present its case clearly and simply. Ambiguities are dangerous because they can be read as weakness or uncertainty.

For R. Soloveitchik, there is no contradiction between “divine creation and mechanistic evolution as such”. The problem, rather, is the seeming irreconcilability of “man as the bearer of the divine image with the equality of man and animal-plant existences.” It’s this subtle distinction that is lost in the public debate and it’s worth thinking about seriously. As R. Soloveitchik argues in several places, our rabbis were well aware of the tension between man-as-animal and man-as-divine-being. Watzman summarizes R. Soloveitchik’s approach as follows:

[T]he puzzle is that we are ethical beings. We encounter the physical world just as plants and animals do—that is, we have physical needs, desires, and instincts. Yet, unlike other beings, we can think about the world and consider our actions. We can resist our instincts, understand them, understand the desires and actions of other human beings. It is this difference that Rabbi Soloveitchik seeks to understand, through a consideration of our biological characteristics, the biblical creation story, and the halakhic tradition.
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[The Emergence of Ethical Man] takes you directly into a great mind as it considers arguments, analyzes concepts, and strives to develop a cogent account of how a transcendent God can act within a physical world that runs according to a set of natural laws that can be deduced through scientific activity.

I linked to the Swinburne-Dennett exchange in a previous post. Jeremy Pierce, at Prosblogion, points out an interesting move that Swinburne makes in response to the so-called multiverse theory. Typically, the multiverse theory is used to rebut a version of the argument from design that points to the fine-tuning of the constants of nature. Here, Swinburne offers what Pierce calls a “meta-teleological argument”:

Some sort of multiverse theory might well be true. My point was that if there is a multiverse, it’s a multiverse of a kind which will produce at least one universe which will produce humans. But it’s logically possible that there might instead have been other quite different kinds of multiverse, or just one universe, not productive of humans. So why are the most general laws of the multiverse as they are? Why do all particles behave in exactly the same way as each other, so as together ultimately to produce human life? This enormous coincidence in particle behaviour requires explaining.

Atheists often pose the question, “Why do you only believe the miraculous accounts of your own religion?” The implication is that I have no more reason to believe in the biblical miracles than those described in the Koran or the Gospels. But the question fails to appreciate how the religious personally approaches his faith. I didn’t sit down one day, consider whether or not God split the sea, and decide to believe it. If I did, the question would be a good one. Rather, I consider the theological explanation of the world presented by the Bible and the rabbinic tradition and conclude that the story it tells is compelling. If miraculous events are part of that story, then I accept them as well because of the role they play in the general theological account. It is this theological account that I believe best explains the world and humanity’s interaction with it.

Alvin Plantinga rips into Judge John Jones’ decision in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District (via Mr. Grouchypants). One of the things I find most annoying about the ID debate is the argument that ID isn’t science because the claims it makes aren’t testable and falsifiable. To which Plantinga responds:

For example, the statement “God has designed 800-pound rabbits that live in Cleveland” is clearly testable, clearly falsifiable and indeed clearly false. Testability can’t be taken as a criterion for distinguishing scientific from nonscientific statements. That is because in the typical case individual statements are not verifiable or falsifiable.

As another example, the statement “There is at least one electron” is surely scientific, but it isn’t by itself verifiable or falsifiable. What is verifiable or falsifiable are whole theories involving electrons. These theories make verifiable or falsifiable predictions, but the sole statement “There is at least one electron” does not. In the same way, whole theories involving intelligent designers also make verifiable or falsifiable predictions, even if the bare statement that life has been intelligently designed does not.

Daniel Dennett and Richard Swinburne debate the issues surrounding Dennet’s recent book, Breaking the Spell (via Bill Vallicella). I’d like to echo Alan Rhoda’s note regarding the article’s subtitle: “A philosopher and a theologian debate the correct approach to the study of religion.” Swinburne is indeed a theologian but, given the context, it’s misleading. He is a leading academic philosopher of religion and philosopher of science.

Johnny-Dee argues that the existence of humor is better accounted for by theism than by naturalism. My philosophical interest in humor notwithstanding, I never thought of this before. Johnny-Dee himself admits that the argument isn’t very pursuasive on it’s own, but suggests that it may “add confirmation in an overall cumulative case for the existence of God.”

I’m generally inclined to believe that the great variety and intensity of human emotions is best explained by theism but I think this kind of argument often makes a false dichotomy. Johnny-Dee characterizes naturalism as the view that “the world is composed entirely of matter following laws of physics”. While many scientists and philosophers hold such a view, it is certainly conceivable to to reject it without embracing theism. That said, I’d prefer to limit the argument from humor to an argument against naturalism.

In trying to argue against the possibility of a secular ethics, Jewish Philosopher stumbles over a classic mistake:

Obviously, there is no “natural” morality. If there is no universal, eternal lawgiver then there is no universal, eternal law.

Anybody who’s ready Plato’ Euthyphro will immediately see the fallacy here. In fact, it’s not a mistake limited to philosophers of religion. Legal realists and positivists are often guilty of the same. But since Jewish Philosopher is trying to make a point about religion, we’ll stick to that for now.

The problem is as follows. Let’s assume that there is indeed no ethical law without a lawgiver. What is my obligation to obey the lawgiver? If you say it is because the lawgiver is God, who created the world and gave Israel the Torah, you walk right into a logical dilemma. How can I have an obligation to obey the lawgiver if my basic ethical obligations only kick in with the command itself?

Fortunately, the rabbis were better philosophers than so-called Jewish Philosopher. The fundamental Jewish answer to the question ‘why obey the lawgiver’ is found in the 13 Attributes of Mercy (Ex. 34:6-7). In short, God embodies goodness and thus imitating Him is imitating goodness. In order for divine goodness to validate, as it does, divine authority, we must take for granted that the quality of goodness itself precedes the divine command.

This is to say that divine authority cannot logically be identical to the specific command itself. It follows, then, that goodness - which ultimately generates that authority - is ontologically independent of the divine command.

Hirhurim links to an excellent essay by R. Ronnie Ziegler about the superfluousness of formal proofs of God’s existence. The essay a part of a whole series of commentary on R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy and I highly recommend it to anybody trying to work through the Rav’s writing.

[I]f a person experiences God in a direct and unmediated manner, what need does he have for abstract proofs? Both in “The Lonely Man of Faith” (p.52) and “U-vikkashtem Mi-sham” (p.133), the Rav approvingly quotes Kierkegaard’s pointed remark on this subject:

“Does the loving bride in the embrace of her beloved ask for proof that he is alive and real? Must the prayerful soul clinging in passionate love and ecstasy to her Beloved demonstrate that He exists? So asked Soren Kierkegaard sarcastically when told that Anselm of Canterbury, the father of the very abstract and complex ontological proof, spent many days in prayer and supplication that he be presented with rational evidence of the existence of God.”

Bill Vallicella is guiding us through Daniel Dennett’s newest book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. I think he’s right in pointing to the definitions of both “supernatural” and “religion” as the major weakness of Dennett’s argument.

Having yet to read Dennet’s newest attempt to rescue humanity from God, I can only base my admittingly premature evaluation on previous works. I recommend reading Vallicella’s posts on the subject regardless, as many of his key arguments stand alone.

Philosophers of religion are largely considered outcasts by both other philosophers and historians of religion. As a Judaic studies major (in addition to philosophy), I recall being frustrated that the most interesting questions seemed to be of little or no interest to my professors. We philosophers, I would try to explain, want to know about the ideas themselves, not just about the people who believed them. We’re not satisfied with merely knowing the cultural and historical context of a given religion, or how it developed over time, or how it influenced the political climate of a given age. All of that may be important but it’s only a means to an end. We want to know if the ideas are compelling, if they address and explain our most basic intuitions about the world. Bill Vallicella says it well:

[M]y interest in religion is not merely historical, or doxographical, or sociological any more than my interest in science is merely historical, or doxographical, or sociological. Science is more than a lot of opinions and practices. It is a route to truth. To put it bluntly, science gets at reality. I think of religion in the same way.

It is a favorite move of materialists and athesists to enlist scientific discovery for support. For the materialist, advances in cognitive science show that the human brain can give an adequate account of the human mind. For the atheist, evolution removes the need for divine creation.

Both of these moves are guilty of the same mistake. They attempt to draw metaphysical conclusions from what a given scientific inquiry does not show. In the case of the materialist turning to cognitive science, Darek Barefoot nails it on the head:

[Cognitive science] is beyond rational doubt a purposive enterprise, yet by restricting its inquiry to physical phenomena in the brain - as methodologically it must do - it necessarily will observe nothing but nonpurposive processes at work there. Which is more ridiculous, expecting beliefs and purposes to show up on EEGs and neurotransmitter scans or doubting their existence because they fail to show up there?

The atheist, in pointing to evolution as evidence that the world appears to have no intrinsic purpose or design, commits the same fallacy. Evolutionary biology is the attempt to explain the origin and development of life according to the laws of nature. With Barefoot I ask, is it more ridiculous to expect the scientist to stumble upon God or to doubt God’s existence because the scientist didn’t find Him?

Yet another scientist misunderstands religious epistemology. Harvard biology professor emeritus Edward O. Wilson says about intelligent design (via Ektopos):

Unfortunately, no positive evidence exists for such a claim. No scientific theory has been proffered or even imagined to explain the transcription from a supernatural force to organic reality. This absence of the elementary requirements of science is why intelligent design is better taught as religion or science fiction.

But religion doesn’t need “postive evidence” in the way Wilson uses the term. In attacking intelligent design as unscientific, he assumes that so-called scientific evidence ought to have a privileged place in our thinking. He’s right about one thing. Intelligent design isn’t science and thus doesn’t belong in a science class. But Wilson’s claim goes further:

Religious conservatives risk a loss in credibility by signing on to intelligent design in the absence of a testable theory or positive evidence. Research biologists are in the business of uncovering steps for the autonomous origin of complex systems, and they have become very good at it. As the number of unsolved systems dwindles, so will the idea that a supernatural force intervenes in evolution.

Science is a legitimate and fruitful path to knowledge about the world. But it simply isn’t the only one. All Wilson points to is lack of scientific evidence.

The religious personality need not reject anything in science. What religion demands is the recognition that the prophetic encounter with God is also a legitimate and fruitful path to knowledge. This is what I think it means to think religiously or to have faith. I’m willing to debate this point on philosophical grounds but simply noting “the absence of a testable theory or positive evidence” misses the point completely.

Leibniz on Intelligent Design (via Kenny Pearce):

We know that while there have been, on the one hand, able philosophers who recognized nothing except what is material in the universe, there are, on the other hand, learned and zealous theologians who, shocked at the corpuscular philosophy and not content with checking it’s misuse, have felt obliged to maintain that there are phenomena in nature which cannot be explained by mechanical principles; as for example, light, weight, and elastic force. But since they do not reason with exactness in this matter, and it is easy for the corpuscular philosophers to reply to them, they injure religion in trying to render it service, for they merely confirm those in their error who recognize only material principles. The true middle term for satisfying both truth and piety is this: all natural phenomena could be explained mechanically if we understood them well enough, but the principles of mechanics themselves cannot be explained geometrically, since they depend on more sublime principles which show the wisdom of the Author in the order and perfection of his work.

Madeleine Bunting picks up on what I think is the most serious problem of Richard Dawkins’ brand of secular humanism. (via Mr. Grouchypants) It simpy “hasn’t generated a compelling popular narrative and ethic of what it is to be human and our place in the cosmos.” The misguided alliance of atheism and science further obfuscates the key issues. Science will never tell us why we are here and what our role is in relationship to the world that we perceive around us.

To be fair, many claims made by religious institutions may be and have been debunked by scientific discovery. But religion per se, humanity’s search for God and its subsequent relationship with Him, remains completely unscathed. When pushed against the wall, the secular humanist merely plays the skeptic’s card, seeming not to realize that it cuts both ways.

I’m still waiting for a positive atheistic-humanistic worldview that can hold its own with the great religious traditions of the ages, in both scope and depth, while maintaining the strict logical rigor that critics demand of theologians.

Clayton has an interesting discussion on Plantinga’s argument against the plausibility of evolutionary naturalism (how exactly you define the theory has philosophical implications that I want to avoid for now).

Plantinga’s argument reminds me of the one suggested by Bill Vallicella and cited by me here. I hope to post some thoughts on it after mulling it over for a little while. (I know I promised that already but it’s a tough issue and I’ve been applying to law school).

Stay tuned and, in the meantime, let me know what you think.

I’ve been thinking about a distinction between “‘al pi din’ [according to the law] and ‘metzius’ [physical reality]” cited and partially endorsed by Godol Hador in a post last week. GH already noted the similarities with Brisker study and R. Soloveitchik’s refrain about “halakhic reality”.

While flipping through an old issue of The Torah u-Madda Journal, I reread an article by Mark Steiner, “Philosophizing in Yiddish: Rabbi Reuven Agushewitz on Freedom of the Will”. In it, he describes how R. Soloveitchik used the techniques of contemporary philosophy in articulating the hashfakah for which he is famous. As scientific discovery continues to wreck havoc in the batei midrash of Orthodox Judaism, I believe we will find ourselves, in one way or another, turning to the Rav for support.

[R. Soloveitchik] puts forward the idea that halakhic Judaism involves intrinsically an alternative description of the world to that of natural science.
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By reading the works of R. Soloveitchik, one gets an intuitive insight into the meaning of concepts like “freedom” as applied to halakhic man.

At the end of day, we may not need to work out a consistent understanding of Genesis and the natural sciences. The Torah describes creation in our language but from God’s perspective. As R. Soloveitchik himself writes:

There is a Bereishit-logic which reflects the wisdom of God embedded in nature.

I want to take up a question brought up by lamedzayin in a post at the newly formed (and high recommended) Maven Yavin. He’s asks “Does yahadut [Judaism], if practiced according to the rules, imply morality?” Obviously, this is a very complex issue with far more implications than I could cover in a blog post. That said, I want to suggest what I think is clear from Jewish sources and may thus serve as a starting point.

The closest thing Judaism has to a “definition” or a summary of God, if you will, is the 13 Attributes (Ex. 34:6-7). Hazal and the Rishonim (especially Rambam) understand God’s essential qualities as ethical models. With this in mind, consider that Hazal also understand Torah and mitsvot as either a manifestation or reflection of God’s will. If God is essentially good, then it is reasonable to conclude that His mitsvot reflect this goodness.

Returning to lamedzayin’s question, the answer is that it has too. How exactly this works out is, of course, the subject of centuries of debate. But the basic principle remains. Any imitation of God (which we understand to be a mitsvah) must include an imitation of His attributes of goodness. We are, after all, commanded to imitate He who is “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in kindness, and truth”.

Last week, Godol Hador wrote about the role of intuition in justifying theistic arguments. I responded:

In daily life, we don’t demand logical certainly. We believe certain things, and act accordingly, based on a combination of logic, observation, and intuition. For example, I just sat down on a chair. I assumed, justifiably, that the chair was secure enough to hold my weight. Although I would openly admit that from a purely logical perspective I had no good reason to believe that the chair would support, I maintain it was a perfectly reasonable assumption. It is unfair (and intellectually dishonest) to demand a higher level of evidence than the one we rely on so casually everyday.

Now the question is this: is the claim of God’s existence so extraordinary that it indeed requires greater evidence than other claims? Orthoprax claims (in the comments to GH’s post and on his blog) that “extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence”:

You see chairs every day. You sit in them all the time. They almost always support you. It doesn’t conflict with anything you regularly know about the world to assume this one will support you as well. It looks like it will and that’s all the ordinary evidence you need for such an ordinary belief. For claims that we know are possible, you need less evidence because all you need to prove is that it happened at a certain time and place. Claim: “There’s an asian elephant in the Bronx Zoo.” Very possible, very believable. Show me a recent advertisement of that and I have no real reason to doubt it.
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And then still there are other claims which we don’t think are possible, but hey, you never know. Claim: “The mansion down the block is haunted.” Wow, haunted, that’s incredible. I’ve never even seen a ghost or seen any reliable documentation of ghost sightings ever. Are ghosts even real? For this one claim, they claimant not only needs to prove that it is possible but that it did indeed happen.
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The claim of God fits somewhere along the lines of the haunted mansion claim and is far removed from “this chair will support my weight” claim.

Let’s say I grant Orthoprax’s point that I need “extraordinary evidence” to support the claim of God. I think I have it. I’ve never encountered a haunted house and don’t personally know anybody who has. But three times day I pour my heart out to God, I address Him before and after eating meals, when I lay down at night and when I arise in the morning. Furthermore, I have available to me a tradition that tells me in great detail how to approach Him, how to learn from Him. My teachers, whom I trust, reinforce this by pointing out nuances and insights in the texts of the rabbis.

For somebody who has that primal experience on a regular basis, God is very familiar. As R. Soloveitchik asks (paraphrasing Kierkegaard), “Does the loving bride in the embrace of her beloved ask for proof that he is alive and real? Must the prayerful soul clinging in passionate love and ecstasy to her Beloved demonstrate that He exists?”

Orthoprax responded:

Have you seen God? Spoken to him (meaning that he actually returned a response)? Has anyone shared your experiences with you? Have you sensed him in any way but the emotional? If not, then how can you know that you’ve actually experienced something real and external to yourself?

I suppose the same way I know that I ever experience something “real and external” to myself. But I think something else is going on here in his argument. By demanding empirical or repeatable evidence, he disregards a major theological claim out of hand. The fundamental experience that a religious person has with God is a real one. I have just as much cause to trust it as I do any other experience, if not more.

In the recent Edah Journal, Rabbi Dr. Alan Brill reviews the three collections of articles and speeches of Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein as a way of evaluating his thought in general and his role as a leader of “modern” or “centrist” Orthodoxy. There’s a lot to say about the article but I’ll defer to close students of R. Lichtenstein for the details of his approach. One point of Dr. Brill’s, though, stood out to me as somebody concerned with the appropriate method of doing philosophy of Judaism:

In the texts cited to prove his social views, we gain a window into R. Lichtenstein’s approach. He avoids the texts of Jewish thought of the last millennium except for those of the Eastern European beit midrash; he does not cite liturgists, midrash, medieval philosophers or kabbalists. Instead, he bases his corporate view of life on the legal texts that discuss the laws of sacrifice, property responsibility, and the four watchmen. His proof text on the need to work is a citation from Maimonides (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Gezeilah 6:11) that a dice player cannot be a witness because his vice places him outside of society. This case is paradigmatic of the way in which R. Lichtenstein takes a particular halakhah and globalizes it into a general idea about society.

It seems obvious that on this point, R. Lichtenstein takes a page from his rebbe and father-in-law. R. Soloveitchik devotes the last section of The Halakhic Mind to advocating the approach which Dr. Brill criticizes:

…There is only a single source from which a Jewish philosophical Weltanschauung could emerge; the objective order - the Halakhah… The halakhic compass would also guide us through the lanes of medieval philosophy and reveal structural standards by which to judge and evaluate the philosophical thought of the golden age… Out of the sources of Halakhah, a new world view awaits formulation.

Personally, I think the shift from medieval philosophical methods to what I’ll call “philosophy via Halakhah” is the most important treasure that R. Soloveitchik bestowed on the Jewish community (at least as far as Jewish philosophy goes). Of course, neither R. Soloveitchik nor R. Lichtenstein exclude biblical references, midrashim, kabbalistic sources, or medieval philosophic ones; but their focus is the normative Halakhah.

In traditional Judaism, the Gemera is authoritative in a unique way. Even biblical episodes are understood by the great rabbis through rabbinic lenses. More importantly, though, basic halakhic categories such as the four shomrim (watchmen) are considered to be unchanging and objective - which makes them suitable as the raw material for philosophy. The realities of space and time influence only the application of such halakhot, not their essence. Poskim may disagree about the status of a particular shomer (watchman) but none would deny the halakhic fact of four distinct kinds and their implications for compensation. The weight that Halakhah carries in governing the life of the traditional Jew, I think, stems from this basic assumption.

Halakhah is the window into the divine mind. In formulating a genuinely Jewish philosophical position, it makes sense to rely primarily on such foundational sources. It is the basic halakhic principles around which traditional Jewish life bases itself. If Jewish philosophy is to be grounded in the Jewish experience, it must focus on what motivates that experience.

In a previous post, I suggested that that perhaps science and religion don’t clash because each is concerned, at the end of the day, with fundamentally different kinds of questions. Apparently, Richard Dawkins disagrees, calling such a solution an “appeasement policy”:

I once asked a distinguished astronomer, a fellow of my college, to explain the big bang theory to me. He did so to the best of his (and my) ability, and I then asked what it was about the fundamental laws of physics that made the spontaneous origin of space and time possible. “Ah,” he smiled, “now we move beyond the realm of science. This is where I have to hand you over to our good friend, the chaplain.” But why the chaplain? Why not the gardener or the chef? Of course chaplains, unlike chefs and gardeners, claim to have some insight into ultimate questions. But what reason have we ever been given for taking their claims seriously? Once again, I suspect that my friend, the professor of astronomy, was using the Einstein/Hawking trick of letting “God” stand for “That which we don’t understand.” It would be a harmless trick if it were not continually misunderstood by those hungry to misunderstand it. In any case, optimists among scientists, of whom I am one, will insist, “That which we don’t understand” means only “That which we don’t yet understand.” Science is still working on the problem. We don’t know where, or even whether, we ultimately shall be brought up short.

The answer to “why the chaplain” isn’t because of his claim to some esoteric wisdom. If that were the case, Dawkins would be right to question the credibility of such a claim. The answer is that, unlike the scientist, the chaplan is presumably concerned with that kind of question. Interestingly, Dawkins’ conversation with the astronomy professor is evidence of exactlty that point. The professor simply wasn’t interested in the question.

I have no doubt that science will provide answers to questions we have yet to dream of asking. Much of what the we don’t understand about the world will likely be high-school science to my grandchildren. But there are certain kinds of questions that science won’t answer, not so much because it can’t, but because it isn’t trying to. Of course, religion may not have the answers either. But if you want to know, like Dawkins does, what “made the spontaneous origin of space and time possible”, I suggest you ask somebody who’s interested in the question.

When I started blogging, there were a few topics I decided I wasn’t going to touch. One was the subject of my thesis: Plato’s Euthyphro and Rabbinic Literature. I caved on that one last week. Another was the creationism/intelligent design vs evolution debate. Something about that whole issue really annoyed me but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. That is, until I read this post by Julian Sanchez.

For a lot of people, positing a deity is a pretty straightforward form of inference to the best explanation—and for a lot of our history, given the dizzying complexity of the natural world, it was scarcely an unreasonable hypothesis. Evolutionary theory is seen as a threat to religion precisely because, at least when they’re first forming their views, most people don’t rely on “faith” at all: They’re rational empiricists to a much greater degree than most secularists probably give them credit for.

Julian’s right. “Intelligent design” isn’t religion; it’s just bad science. And its handful of advocates misunderstand both. They mistake the Bible (the first chapter of Genesis at least) as describing a physical reality when in fact its focus is a spiritual one. As R. Heschel explains:

Science… describes and explains the way in which things behave in terms of casual necessity. It does not try to give us an explanation in terms of logical necessity - why things must be at all, and why the laws of nature must be the way they are (italics in original).

Science is interested in “what” and “how” questions: how did life as we know it develop into what it is? Or, what’s the structure of an electron? The answer doesn’t clash with religion because religion (mature religion, that is) addresses a different kind of question. A question about why things exist at all and what they mean.

The confusion comes in because the two kinds of questions sound alike and are easily confused. “How did life come to be?” for example. The appropriate answer depends on your perspective. Which kind of question are you asking? R. Heschel gives an analogy:

On a lovely summer afternoon an influential educator admired the sky. His little girl turned and asked: “What is there beyond the sky?” The father gave her a “scientific” answer: “Ether, my child.” Whereupon the girl exclaimed: “Ether!” and she held her nose.

I wrote my senior honors thesis on a hypothetical dialoge between Socrates and Hazal, focusing on the philosophical implications of ta’ame ha-mitsvot (rationalizing mitsvot). By the time I finished, I was completely exhausted by the subject matter. While blogging on related Jewish topics, I stayed far away from this one. That said, two bloggers whom I usually enjoy reading (Hirhurim and Not The Godol Hador) have sufficiently tempted me to jump back into the fray.

Any answer to the question “Why do we do mitsvot” short enough to fit on one page is almost certainly insufficient (although not necessarily wrong). Of course, the “because God said so” answer is popular but not enough. It begs the question “Why did God say so?” To answer that question with “just because” or “no reason” renders God’s will arbitrary and thus, lacking justification. In fact, the Mishnah (Makkot 3:16) is quite clear about why God commands mitsvot: “The Holy One, blessed be He, desired to grant merit to Israel.” As Kehati explains: “He multiplied warnings and prohibitions for them, even regarding things from which man naturally keeps apart, for since they stay away from them because the Torah has thus commanded, their merit is increased.” This implies, of course, that such actions had some merit to begin with. They are justified, at least in part, without being accompanied by the divine imperative. The act of God commanding, then, serves to somehow enhance the already righteous deed to a higher level.

Louis Jacobs captures this idea well:

Although God commands them it is not implied that the command is the reason for their observance, so that if God had commanded man to steal or to murder this would have been the right thing to do. On the contrary, the commands are announced in such a way as to suggest that they are already fully comprehensible to man as the basis for living the ethical life… Once God has commanded, however, the command itself is, of course, an additional reason for its observance.

In the context of a on-going discussion about the believability (for lack of a better word) of Judaism, Orthoprax writes:

I see the world as it is today. I don’t see water splitting into walls, I don’t see chariots of fire in the sky, I don’t see the sun stopping in its movement, I don’t see giants or witches or angels anywhere (well, in movies I suppose). I don’t see any miracles in life.

It’s important to point out here a significant difference of perspective. I’m looking at the world through halakhic lenses so the miraculous means something very different to me. See, for instance, the blessings before and after Shema. In R. Wurzburger’s words, “We must begin with refusing to let familiarity dull our sense of wonder.” Of course, though, this only makes sense if you are looking for God. You won’t find what you’re not looking for. You won’t see what you’re not prepared to believe. Orthoprax paraphrases me as saying: “So, if you believe then you will believe. If you are skeptical then you will be skeptical. Wowzers.” Well, no. If you open yourself up to the possiblity of God in a sincere and diligent way, then you may recognize Him the next time you see the sunrise. If you want a neat logical demonstration of why it is reasonable to believe in God before doing all of the heavy lifting that Halakhah requires, you won’t get it. It is in this light that the rabbis advise: “Do not believe an individual who claims to have found [spiritual treasures] without having toiled for them” (BT Megilah 6b).

Orthoprax expresses some genuine concerns about the so-called proofs for theism. If you’re interested I recommend reading through my comments on his post. I’ve addressed similar issues before (here and here) but I want to share a way of thinking that I personally find helpful:

It’s true that we can explain the complexity of nature without appealing to God. The same is true for moral intuitions, ontology, etc. But positing God’s existence is helpful in understanding how all these things relate to each other. Scientists (generally) aren’t interested in understanding the relationship between the origins of the universe and ethical dilemmas, even if they can explain each one individually. But the Torah is concerned with exactly those kind of issues; for example, the relationship between ethics and ontology. The Torah answers by appealing to God. It’s not deductive to be sure, but it’s very useful. In terms of accounting for the entirety of existence, I think the Torah-theory has tremendous explaining power. You’ll always be able to come up with a cogent naturalist explanation but it strikes me as much less compelling.