On Responses to the Ami Orthopraxy Article

"He just started asking questions and looking for answers in books. And like others before him, he could not find any that had any basis in his religious beliefs...Even though these people are not ‘missionaries’ about their atheism, when asked they are very effective at arguing their case – pointing to various internet sites that support their views...

If we are intellectually honest and have ever thought about some of the issues raised by science and other disciplines those questions have at least entered our minds. Most of us reject them immediately as our faith is stronger than our doubts..but there are a large number of people who cannot so easily dismiss those questions."

-R' Harry Maryles

"The intellectual challenges to Judaism are very real. Fortunate are those of us whose sense of Divine providence in Jewish history, and whose appreciation of the nature and role of the Torah, as well as other factors, enables us to maintain belief in revelation; but if we are honest, we will acknowledge that there are nevertheless intellectual challenges to which Judaism presently does not have a good response. Can we really be hostile towards those who consider the challenges overpowering?"

-R' Natan Slifkin

"They simply left their emunah behind, following instead a nonsensical thought process [editorial: I think that's Yeshivish for "logic"] into the thicket of apikorsus."

-The Ami Article

Goodness. No wonder Ami feels so intimidated by the orthoprax. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that if you actually follow logic and scientific knowledge where they lead you, they lead away from orthodox dogma.

Wired for Religion...At the Expense of Science?

In this excellent article, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom discusses some psychological origins of religious and supernatural beliefs. It nicely summarizes and expands on a number of ideas I have discussed elsewhere on this blog.

While I highly recommend the full article, I found one idea particularly noteworthy. To give some background--Bloom describes how we seem to have two separate innate systems for reasoning about inanimate or animate objects. This makes sense: inanimate objects are acted upon by causal forces, whereas animate beings can move on their own, so it is useful to divide the world into these categories. However, we naturally essentialize this difference, treating them as two distinct categories of things--matter and mind--and we thus become natural dualists. In Bloom's words:

First, we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. This helps explain why we believe in gods and an afterlife. Second, as we will see, our system of social understanding overshoots, inferring goals and desires where none exist. This makes us animists and creationists.

Our animacy detection is so hypersensitive to finding agents that we see intention and goals where there are none. This gets to the striking point in the last sentence above: it means that we are not just intuitive dualists--we are intuitive creationists as well. Bloom quotes Richard Dawkins as saying that it often seems "as if the human brain is specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism." (Spend five minutes in a blog thread with creationists and you will know what he means.) In a way, Bloom suggests, this is actually true--natural selection runs counter to innate intuitions about agency:

When we see a complex structure, we see it as the product of beliefs and goals and desires. Our social mode of understanding leaves it difficult for us to make sense of it any other way. Our gut feeling is that design requires a designer—a fact that is understandably exploited by those who argue against Darwin.

It's not surprising, then, that nascent creationist views are found in young children. Four-year-olds insist that everything has a purpose, including lions ("to go in the zoo") and clouds ("for raining")... And when asked about the origin of animals and people, children tend to prefer explanations that involve an intentional creator, even if the adults raising them do not. Creationism—and belief in God—is bred in the bone.

I have previously blogged about psychological roots for supernatural beliefs. Bloom points out, though, that these may actually come at the expense of scientific understanding. At least, I would add, in those who do not work past those gut reactions and understand the ideas involved. Finally, we can see yet another reason why gut intuitions about the universe are of very limited weight when discussing its origins and workings.

"Skeptics Are Third-Graders"

I get tired of reading that "skeptics only attack their third grade notions of God and Judaism. They think it's all as they were taught back then, or it's nothing."

Rubbish. When I was still 'dox, I was a rationalist. I argued for the Rambam's position of treating outrageous stories in Tanach as allegories. I argued for the Maharal's style of decoding outrageous statements of Chazal as hidden, coded, allegorical wisdoms. I went through "the Torah is not a science textbook," followed by "the Torah is not a history textbook," and so on. I did everything you could expect from a Modern Orthodox intellectual trying to make Orthodox Judaism rational and understandable.

I reject that. Don't tell me Breishit is metaphorical: tell me what the metaphor stands for, and why I should accept that as true. Tell me why I should believe in any supernatural claims whatsoever, including dualism. Tell me why I should believe any form of Divine revelation occurred--not just the sort they teach you in third grade. Tell me why I should accord any intellectual authority to Chazal, not just simple belief or disbelief in their sayings.

And so on.

Vaccine Scare Doctor Exposed as Fraud

Andrew Wakefield, the shamed doctor behind the discredited vaccine scares, is at last being shown to be a complete fraud. His paper claiming a link between MMR vaccines and autism was already retracted for sloppy methods and undisclosed conflict of interest; his license to practice medicine was already revoked for ethical breaches; his results, which examined exactly 12 children, have not only never been replicated, but have been disconfirmed repeatedly. At last, though, new investigations have shown that his study apparently actually faked data:

A new examination found, by comparing the reported diagnoses in the paper to hospital records, that Wakefield and colleagues altered facts about patients in their study.

The analysis, by British journalist Brian Deer, found that despite the claim in Wakefield's paper that the 12 children studied were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems. Deer also found that all the cases were somehow misrepresented when he compared data from medical records and the children's parents.

Deer previously found motives as well: two years before the study, Wakefield was hired to discredit MMR vaccines by a lawyer who hoped to create a class action lawsuit against drug companies. Wakefield was paid an undisclosed $750,000 over time to do so. In addition, Wakefield filed a patent for his own version of a vaccine many months before his study, through which he stood to gain if the other MMR vaccines were attacked. (A brief summary with details can be found here.)

Infants have died because of this man. Measles is on the rise and children are sick because he took advantage of the worst fears of parents to get rich. He should rot in prison.

Arguments from Personal Incredulity

Atomic Theory:

This theory actually claims that everything is made of the same subatomic particles in different arrangements. That's crazy! Try touching wood and then water. They are totally different! How could they possibly be made of the same subatomic particles? Obviously, each material on Earth has its own essence, made according to its kind.

Computer Science:

You're telling me that little gates opening and closing create Microsoft Word and me watching DVDs? That's ridiculous. How could one lead to the other? Obviously there's a typewriter and movie theater inside my computer.

DNA Theory:

You're saying the plan for our bodies is "coded" inside each cell? That's ridiculous! Who's there to read the code? Besides, different cells do different things--how would they know what to do if they all have the same instructions? Obviously, Someone tells each cell what to do.

What? Read a book? Why? Can't you just give me straight answers to these simple questions? Or would these theories only be believed by atheist scientists who don't want to accept the truth? Hmmmm?

Knowledge in Tradition or Modernity: Transmission vs. Production

Yet another way to conceptualize the problems between traditional Judaism and modernity, of which the Torah-Science issue can be seen as an example:

Knowledge in centuries past--say, pre-Enlightenment, for convenience's sake*--was largely conceived as a process of transmission. Students took in the words of their teachers, and passed them along. Think of the emphasis on tradition in Jewish education--"mesorah:" the word has its root in something being passed from one person to another. In this model, knowledge was achieved in the past, and people in the present can write commentaries, and then super-commentaries, and then marginal notes on anthologies of commentaries on super-commentaries. Even the medieval European academies were largely focused on passing down the works of Aristotle.

The modern scientific and epistemological framework, on the other hand, treats knowledge as something to be produced. If you have a question, run an experiment and create knowledge. This phrasing of it is an oversimplification--we certainly stand on the legitimate production of knowledge of those who came before us. (Contrast to the opening line of Pirkei Avot, in which it is received transmission all the way back to the beginning.) Besides which, experiments can also shed light on a greater area of ignorance to be explored. Nonetheless, the focus of modern pursuit of knowledge looks forward, not backwards. The idea is implicit in that very phrase of "pursuit of knowledge:" we pursue knowledge, not receive it.

Many books and blogs that try to square off specific issues in Torah and science miss this in treating it as a problem of discrepancy of facts. Whether or not Genesis is taken literally has little to do with how I determine what I know about the world.

*A gross oversimplification, again. Alhazen in the Islamic world and Roger Bacon in the European world were emphasizing experimental methods in the 10th and 13th centuries, respectively. But the Enlightenment is a nice time to point to when it really became a big deal.

A Proof for Textual Divinity...Right?

And if ye are in doubt as to what We have revealed from time to time to Our servant, then produce a Sura like thereunto; and call your witnesses or helpers (If there are any) besides Allah, if your (doubts) are true. But if ye cannot- and of a surety ye cannot- then fear the Fire whose fuel is men and stones,- which is prepared for those who reject Faith. (Qur'an 2:23-24)

Or do they say: "He (Muhammad^(P)) has forged it?" Say: "Bring then a surah (chapter) like unto it, and call upon whomsoever you can, besides Allah, if you are truthful!" [Qur'an 10:37-38]

(Culled from here, as is most of the following)

When Muhammad was challenged regarding the divine origin of the Koran, he pointed to the text itself as his defining miracle. Arab poetry at the time of Islam's origin had two styles: tightly constrained rhymed poetry with clearly set meters, and prose. On the other hand:

"The Qur'an is not verse, but it is rhythmic. The rhythm of some verses resemble the regularity of [rhymed prose], and both are rhymed, while some verses have a similarity to Rajaz in its vigour and rapidity. But it was recognized by Quraysh critics to belong to neither one nor the other category.^"

^{In other words, Muhammad offered a simple challenge: if the Koran was a fake, someone should produce Arabic writing--even just a bit of it--that approaches the linguistic majesty of the Koran, which is neither poetry nor prose, rhythmic yet meaningful. It was something as yet}

^{unseen in Arabic writing. But as scholar EH} Palmer admitted, "the best of Arab writers has never succeeded in producing anything equal in merit to the Qur'an." Oxford Arabist Hamilton Gibb similarly wrote: "As a literary monument the Koran thus stands by itself, a production unique to the Arabic literature, having neither forerunners nor successors in its own idiom. Muslims of all ages are united in proclaiming the inimitability not only of its contents but also of its style."

The point should be obvious. Mohammad claimed his work's style reflected its divine origins. Now, if he was wrong, no one should have believed him, right? How would you start a mass lie about the nature of Arabic writing? Or was it a mass conspiracy? Unlikely. If even one talented Arabic poet in the last fifteen hundred years could write in the same style, surely people would have heard about it and rejected what Mohammad said. But the very fact that the Meccans accepted Mohammad's point--along with the Koran's claim being upheld, with no one paralleling it since--shows that he spoke the truth. Therefore, the Koran must be divine.

Right, Kiruv Rabbis?