Last week Ronen posted a video response to my post. Here is that video as well as my response.
For Lubavnomore - faith and dovening
Reb yid, you caught me somewhere between 3 and 20 years too late. Once upon a time I was with you 100%. Now I think a little differently.
I've transcribed sections of your words (to the best of my ability) below. Any mistakes in the text are my fault. I've left out bits that I thought were unnecessary. I will try to avoid jumping on specific verbage of yours because that wouldn't be fair. I will try to stick to responding to your points.
The need for faith:
"Without axioms of faith the intellect would be useless. If you don't take it on faith that 1 = 1 then you have no mathematical system.. faith is that by which you can start to develop from intellect into theories [so] you can develop societies you can make political science... but you have to have faith in something."
In theory you are correct. I have no proof the sun will come up tomorrow. I believe it will because it has every day of my life and I have faith that the laws of physics (orbits, gravity, etc.) don't arbitrarily change. But, the reason I have faith in those things is that my experience has been that the rotation of the Earth, and gravity, and physics don't ever change. Further, I have never observed them changing. In theory this doesn't make my faith in physics reliable but as people we have been designed (by god or selection) to operate under the assumption that our past experiences can accurately help us predict future events. For example: if I touch a hot stove I get burnt, I don't touch it again because I expect to get burned again.
"Faith" that I will burn my hand on a hot stove is not comparable to faith (no quotes) that god exists. I have no experience with god. I have never seen him, nor seen evidence that anything that happens in this world is a result of his action.
You say that "Without axioms of faith the intellect would be useless." Where you say "axioms of faith" I say "previous experience".
"[W]hen you start to consider that the miracle that is life and the miracle that there is life on this planet. That we are in an atmosphere that traps water... and we can survive and we can live here..."
We are looking at two sides of the same coin. Where you see "cause" I see "effect". You believe that it is amazing that we live on a planet that can sustain life like ours therefore it must be that we were put here by an intelligent being. I believe that we (human beings) are a function of our environment. We can live here because we have adapted to our environment.
If you think about it, how much of Earth is really hospitable to human life? Far less than half. 70% of the world is covered by water. We need water to live, but we can't live in, on, or under it. Our poles (and surrounding area) have such extreme temperatures that we can't live there either. Earth is big, but mostly it is inhospitable to human life.
"[T]his theory that everything came from the amoeba... and it mutated and kept mutating randomly... and we have all these beautiful creatures"
Not to jump on specific words, but I want to point out that science doesn't say that creatures (or amoebas) mutate randomly. Mutations happen randomly but only mutations which help a creature survive or reproduce are selected for.
For example take bugs that look like leaves. The bugs that looked more like leaves were less likely to be eaten. With each passing generation of bugs the more they looked like leaves the more likely they would survive and make more bugs that look like leaves. Each helpful mutation would survive to the next round. Eventually you get creatures that look like the bugs in these pictures.
"[B]ut ultimately the concept that the giraffe and the hippopotamus and the human being have the same source is so ludicrous to me. That takes faith! To me, that takes faith to believe."
I think you say it takes faith because you haven't seen the evidence. In the book The Making of the Fittest author Sean Carroll talks about some of the DNA evidence for shared ancestry. The basic gist of it is that we have chunks of DNA that are exactly the same as the DNA found in other creatures. With creatures we are more closely "related" to, like chimps, we share a significant amount of identical DNA. And not only DNA that we use but also DNA that no longer serves any purpose! Further, with life that we are distantly related to, like the tomato, we share a lot of the same DNA but the total is significantly less. But still we all share the same DNA!!! The evidence shows that we all started from the same original blueprints and then modifications were made. All life on Earth carries tell-tale signs that we all are variations off those original blueprints!
So either we all came from a similar plan, or god is not very original from creature to creature.
"Why can't HaShem just make [the Earth] with bones inside? So that later on it is a test on faith."
Ah! If this were true then why did god bother giving us an intellect in the first place? If anything we observe can (should?) be explained away as a test then how can we trust anything?
Davening:
"A man is generally an arrogant creature. And God gave him a beautiful intellect. So it's not in his nature to praise something. Especially something that is infinitely greater than him... it doesn't make sense to a man to do it. But we are still commanded to do it."
I like this vort. It may be true. But I still don't know that god exists. Just because I may be too proud to bow before an all-powerful being doesn't make said all-powerful being exist.
"More likely to get your request answered if you praise first."
I never understood this. Flattery will get you everywhere? What does god need with my flattery?
"I'm not trying, I, you know, actually I AM trying to sway you to get back into davening"
I love it! ;)
I enjoyed your video. I hope you had a good Yud-Tes Kislev.
32 comments:
There is really nothing new in Ronen Segal's video. He uses the same tired arguments that have been made by countless other OrthoFundies (many of which reflect a gross misunderstanding of scientific principles, e.g., claiming that C-14 is a technique that is used for dating objects millions of years old). I find it endlessly interesting how Chabad needs to take a literal 6000-year approach to the age of the universe because God forbid that R. M.M. Schneerson was wrong in his views! This is - in Dovid Gottlieb's words, the God is a Mafia Boss approach.
Nevertheless, one can see why Chabad has been so successful; Segal's warmth and sincerity is typical of many shluchim and Chabadniks.
"Reb Yid, you caught me between 3 and 20 years too late."
Exactly. I agree.
I have written about the problems of evolution. It violates the laws of nature and contradicts the fossil record. Otherwise, it’s a sold theory. I have also written about the Anthropic principle. However none of this will matter to a sexually compulsive person who is in deep denial. Therefore, I would never try to convince an atheist to return to Judaism. It’s a lost cause.
you know he may look at a hippo, giraffes and humans and they look very different to him, but to me they look so similar...they all have some kind of heart, have a digestive system, have a skeleton, have some kind of hair or fur, blood, muscles, they have eyes and a nose and a mouth and ears on their head, they all have a head, etc. The shape and form has variations, yes, but the basic components are all the same.
JP_ you would never try to convince an atheist to return to judaism, aye? So why do you keep hanging out on atheist blogs? You just love to taunt them or something? How do you reconcile that with your religion?
"So why do you keep hanging out on atheist blogs?"
It's kind of like hanging out at a rock concerts and handing out anti-drug literature. I don't think I'll cure the hard core addicts, or stop the pushers, but I might discourage someone from becoming addicted.
"You just love to taunt them or something?"
Maybe just a little. ;-)
"How do you reconcile that with your religion?"
Very easily.
And by the way, if you feel like a hippo, check out this site. It's never to late.
JP, where does all this hatred come from?
Good post. I think it's kind of funny when every two-bit BT tries to "prove" Judaism. These guys ought to actually learn something before they open up their mouths... sigh.
Ronen, if you're reading, bite on this: the proof that the Torah is post-Mosaic comes from this week's parsha.
As usual, Candyman is ultra sweet. I'm curious, when someone is ignorant in something or innocently mistaken or whatever, is it usually the way to be a jerk to them? Shouldn't those that profess better wisdom and facts be a bit more gracious in reaching out to the less informed? Well, but then again, this IS Candyman.
"contradicts the fossil record"
Paleontologists everywhere will be so upset they didn't catch that one...
Lubab No More:
Is this how Ronen found me? I have to admit, I was secretly kind of scared - me, in my little corner of compromised internet anonymity. But it's okay, thanks for the shoutout :)
PS Friday January 16. Please tell me you can't wait, either.
>>God forbid that R. M.M. Schneerson was wrong in his views!
If only this was the ONLY thing ins which R. M. M. Scheerson was wrong in!!!
@HH,
As usual, Candyman is ultra sweet. I'm curious, when someone is ignorant in something or innocently mistaken or whatever, is it usually the way to be a jerk to them? Shouldn't those that profess better wisdom and facts be a bit more gracious in reaching out to the less informed? Well, but then again, this IS Candyman.
This from the guy who penned not one, but TWO posts entitled "CandyMan: Shit of the Nation"? Practice what you preach, Hyrax.
This shit is all fun and games until your family starts cutting you off. Hence my tough love.
"It's kind of like hanging out at a rock concerts and handing out anti-drug literature. I don't think I'll cure the hard core addicts, or stop the pushers, but I might discourage someone from becoming addicted."
Jake-- Has it ever occurred to you that you might be having the opposite effect?
To be honest, I can't claim that you, personally, have had any effect on me at all (perhaps mild irritation and, on occasion, amusement, but no long-term effect). That said, I've met other people who are as similarly one-sided in their thinking as you, and it is one of the things that has pushed me further away from Judaism. People who dismiss every contradictory opinion as evil, degenerate or foolish usually strike me as frightened of actual thought. As a rule, I tend to avoid people like that. I doubt I can learn much from them, and I'm certain they don't want to learn anything from me.
>This from the guy who penned not one, but TWO posts entitled "CandyMan: Shit of the Nation"? Practice what you preach, Hyrax.
I learned this technique from the gay activists. Answer hate with hate.
>This shit is all fun and games until your family starts cutting you off. Hence my tough love.
uh huh
And why did a nice rabbi (unless he is your daddy) deserve a "bite on this" remark?
Somehow, LNM was able to counter him and be respectful of it end it with a nice comment.
My hatred of atheists come from my love of God. Naturally I hate His enemies.***************************
What makes you think that atheists hate God ? I dont hate anybody not even God, I just find it difficult to believe in a God that does not mean that I hate him. Just show me who he is, or what he is without all the fairy tales....Avi
In fact Jewish non philosopher I will even debate with you. Of course then you take the risk of becoming an agnostic yourself. Just E mail me and we can get started. We can make it public or private, thats up to you......Avi
If someone says that God doesn't even exist, he is God's enemy.
JP said:
"My hatred of atheists come from my love of God. "
And thus the utter misanthropic immorality of your position, which claims to speak for god and places his "needs" and "wants" above those of humanity.
JP you have exposed the ludicrousness of your philosophy for all readers to see. I can imagine any ambivalent reader teetering in his belief will read your comment and say "wow, that is really enlightened, I want to adopt that belief, too!!"
Let's put it like this. I don't like gays, atheists or Muslims. These people are destroying the world and it's time for normal, decent, family oriented people to fight back.
As Sam Harris has so eloquently said
"The very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss."
Amen to that.
Avi-- I would be happy to be the moderator of the Great Debate!
I've been debating for the last three years. See my blog.
I have found that atheists believe:
- Our universe is one bubble in an eternal, infinite sea of universes.
- We and all life developed spontaneously from a huge pool of water and minerals.
- We are souless meat machines.
- The Torah is basically no different than the Illiad. It was fabricated by King Josiah, Ezra the Scribe and a few other people.
- Atheists will generally be kinder people than Orthodox Jews, since people are instinctively kind and Orthodox Judaism teaches hatred of anyone professing different beliefs.
- Atheists will generally be happier than Orthodox Jews, because an atheist is free to have sex with any willing partner and to abort any unwanted child, while Orthodox Jews are limited to sex with their spouses and do not practice abortion.
I think that atheists are generally delusional psychopaths who are a danger to themselves and others.
I think the Darwinian theory of evolution is one of the greatest pseudo-scientific hoaxes of all time.
JP, it seems that you haven't listened very closely. That's why I don't talk to you. I made this exception to call you out on your anti-social behavior. You've made the basis for your behavior perfectly clear. The people you insult can judge for themselves.
Happy Holidays to all!
"That's why I don't talk to you."
Is there any reason I should want you to?
"You've made the basis for your behavior perfectly clear."
Thank God for that.
You've been tagged for a meme Here.
you've been tagged.
Both sides are wrong because both sides are conflating one thing with another, things which are separate from each other.
Faith: Belief freely chosen irrespective of any conscious aware justification and not subject to debate or disproof.
Example: I believe in G-d.
Opinion: Belief somewhat freely chosen somewhat irrespective of any conscious aware justification and subject to debate but not disproof.
Example: Lime green leisure suits in the 70s weren't that bad in retrospect.
Fact: Belief not freely chosen and totally dependent upon conscious aware justification and subject to debate and disproof.
Example: I gained weight when I went off my diet.
All societal constructs, communities, cultures, societies, organizations, etc. exist to facilitate interaction between people who hold sets of one or more of the above, and whose sets overlap to a sufficient degree for them to feel the need to interact and share those things with each other and engage in debate and even disproof.
G-d is faith, not open to debate or disproof. You either believe or not. If you predicate this belief on facts, you put it into the third category and by the very nature of the idea of G-d, it is not provable. Disproof wins by default.
You want to do that, fine, but you're subjecting G-d to the same thing as when you forget yourself with your kids and let them draw you into a debate over your parenting decisions. Ultimately their reasons and rationalizations are unimportant. You are in charge and YOU SAID SO.
That is the point of faith. Ultimately the only true freedom one has is self determination and if you allow every choice you have to be controlled by external circumstance, especially those that have no bearing upon anyone else but yourself, then what does that say about you?
Unfortunately, most on both sides forget this. Unfortunate for religious people for the obvious reason above. Unfortunate for the unreligious who nevertheless maintain an inherent need for chosen beliefs and frequently apply that mechanism to things which DO apple to debate and disproof, like the environment.
The Earth is warming slightly, but it has largely finished most of the warming since the end of the last glacial period. Humans are almost certainly NOT responsible for the recent warming and DEFINITELY NOT responsible for warming that occurred when they still wore animal skins. The nature of this is cyclical and we have mountainous scientific evidence to show it and document how it works.
Nevertheless, that hasn't stopped people from creating a dogma called Global Warming which is not debated or subjected to disproof, and held as fervently as any rebbe holds his beliefs on G-d. You cannot debate with the global warming fanatics. They've made religion out of science, but that doesn't make it less debateable or disprovable.
Likewise, making science out of religion doesn't make it more provable.
One is choice, the other logical process. One just happens, the other has explicit reasoning. Mix the two and you set yourself up for failure. Orthodoxy and atheism are going to destroy each other in the end.
Didn't have time to read all the comments, so I apologize if I'm repeating something that was already said.
"Without axioms of faith the intellect would be useless. If you don't take it on faith that 1 = 1 then you have no mathematical system.. faith is that by which you can start to develop from intellect into theories..."
LNM, you jumped from this to examples of the physical world. I think that math is a much better example because it isn't really in the physical world. Numbers are essentially abstract concepts - they exist as a human invention pretty much the same way G-d does. A better way to say it maybe is not that you have to have faith that 1=1, but rather that 1+1=2. Who's to say? We do, and therefore it is true. You're never going to win with the no-evidence argument, because religion has a dead lock response: if there were evidence it wouldn't be faith. And it gets into the whole free-will thing, and you know where all this goes because you've been there a million times before. You need to focus on a new angle. Their argument doesn't answer your question, but neither does your argument answer theirs. My point is, firstly, that it's a dead angle. And secondly, that you misinterpreted his point. This goes all the way back to Descartes, right? How do we know that anything in the outside world exists at all? We think it does, but we after all only exist inside our minds. We may never know for sure, but because we can't function that way, we need to take the fact that the world exists "on faith." I think that's closer to what he was trying to say. At some point, you need to take something on faith. Why is taking G-d on faith any different?
(Especially if you want to go quantum; one of my friends believes that if in a quantum universe every possibility is at some point actualized, then of course the world exists as one of those possibilities. He could be right - but why does this take less faith than G-d? The same lack of evidence applies.)
“But, the reason I have faith in those things is that my experience has been that the rotation of the Earth, and gravity, and physics don't ever change.”
We are not going to debate Hume-Wittgenstein arguments for the problem of inductive reasoning. Which philosophy has not yet resolved but your experience does not give you a reason to think that in the future it will happen. This is what we call the gamblers fallacy. Just because the coin flipped 100 times head does not mean that 101th time it will be tails because of odds. It’s 50/50. We have no reason to think the world will be the same tomorrow, none. It’s a priori.
“I say "previous experience"
Well that is why you are not a professor in Yale’s philosophy department. It’s a stupid statement. How do you know rationally that it will be so? What proof so to speak to you have?
“I believe that we (human beings) are a function of our environment. We can live here because we have adapted to our environment.”
Again you show your ignorance.
This topics have been debated a long time, and it does not mean I agree with all of them…….We need to laws of mathematics and physics not just biology to fit precisely for the possibility of life = anthropic principle. Again not saying I agree, but make informed arguments.
The rest I may or may not agree with. Since I believe in evolution but……..
http://www.princeton.edu/~grosen/puc/phi203/induction.html
Read the end. I think he sums up religion pretty well.
This ronenemenachem770 is a horrendous guy who says horrendous things. I suppose he's a newbie BT, in original enthousiasm, and no one can take him seriously...
It is no coincidence that the videos where he speaks about his views of psychiatry (psychiatry is not necessary, religion can fix it all) are listed in one row with scientology videos.
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