Now what?
Along with Richard Dawkins, Dr. Sagan (“Sagan” from here on out), is caught on a fence. The fence is on one side a very strong expressed belief that statements or beliefs that cannot be tested are meaningless. That is, there are no practicable ways to check for or demonstrate falsity. (Take a look at the Wikipedia entry for “logical positivism”.) The other side of the fence is the netherworld where all kinds of things that cannot be tested do, to huge numbers of people, seem meaningful. Where the fence should get uncomfortable are in regards to the untestable statements or beliefs in their own lives that clearly are taken as meaningful. “All men are created equal”, might be one of these. “Crime doesn’t pay”, is another, as well “what goes around, comes around” or “love conquers all”. If the reader believes none of these … believes in the sense of such a statement upon occasion guiding her or his own actions, or suggesting that another should consider the statement as a guide … the reader is among the more cynical humans on the planet. That’s not a personal attack or an “ad hominum” argument, but a sincere evaluation. Something as grand as a complete ethical code based on Judeo-Christian scripture, or even Aristotle’s Ethics could be hopelessly unverifiable.
While Dawkins may mercilessly attack fluffy unverifiable things like a religious faith, Sagan mostly confines his attacks to current “problems”; alien abduction, miracles, tabloid articles where “Scientist finds …”, and that kind of thing. I’ll add nutritional claims about the latest vitamin or food “secret”. He points out that the frequency of spontaneous remissions or miracle cures at Lourdes (those verified) is a bit short of the general population’s rate of experience of medically verifiable spontaneous cures. You’d be well off to find some other justification if you want to visit France. It is not to say that visiting Lourdes is bad for you; proving that would require a much more rigorous test. The statistics he cites are not based on any reliable comparison with that in mind. Sagan does, in the book mentioned, have several things to say about religion. He seems not to be in an anti-religion camp, but has issues with many practices and beliefs which he sees as bordering on willful gullibility. In fact willful … or lazy … gullibility generally comes off as his primary target, in all its manifestations.
The cure for the problem is knowledge of, and application of the scientific method. In this method, you clearly state the hypothesis, imagine and select tests that might show it false, conduct the tests, and put out for public critique all of the above so that others can check it out. One might shout, “But how do you prove things TRUE?!”. Well, you don’t. But continuous failure to prove a statement false (i.e. the experimental results repeatedly agree with the predictions) earns the proposed hypothesis acceptance for the time being and within the conditions of the tests actually conducted. While not proven false, Newtonian kinematics (bullets, cars, planets, gyroscopes, footballs, fluid flow, et cetera) was shown theoretically in the early 20th century to disagree with expected results for things very, very fast, very, very heavy, or very, very small. Thus was born relativity and also quantum mechanics, which no one applies to bullets, cars, gyroscopes, and so on. Both relativity and quantum mechanics have survived all experiments with colors flying.
You can also apply the scientific method to reports of alien abductions. Where’s the evidence?
“The Value of … “ ; of what? I mean the value of belief in things not provable in the ordinary sense of the word. Here’s a situation. Imagine you are trying to test whether the Judeo-Christian ethical framework is more true, more effective, more “pragmatic” (as C. S. Peirce would define pragmatically true) than an atheistic ethical framework. A statement is “true” when it agrees with experience, or when it “is of a piece” with the rest of your fabric of truths, or when it works. If a new football coach has a radically different way of managing and training his team, and it is shown to be really effective … he wins lots of games … we might want to say his method is more correct than the ones presently used. If this goes on for a couple decades, and others adopting his style have similar success, from a pragmatic viewpoint his methods are true or more true. But how would this work for a culture’s ethics?
This begins to look like the survival of the fittest. The more successful species triumphs where others are failing. Is it because of a bigger brain, or just having opposing thumbs? Could it be the greater oiliness of the fur, or a thicker layer of surface skin fat? Was it improved articulation of pelvic fins or better buoyancy? With dedicated study and familiarity with thousands of related comparisons among other animals, it may be possible to get a grasp on some of these.
Just because you cannot conduct an imagined experiment does not mean that a related statement is meaningless. It took many years for experiments to be devised for aspects of relativity. So, hot off the press, relativity was in a practical sense untestable. The meaningfulness comes from understanding what practical consequences one might expect, even if experiments to test it cannot be conducted for reasons that are wholly practical.
Are biological systems or cultural ethics more complex? It may not matter as long as we admit an almost ungraspable complexity to both. In both these cases, even if a society lasts longer than another, or a species multiplies like they have nothing better to do, how can we arrange testable situations that will say for sure that it was the family or tribal structure, or maybe the quantity of time each week spent praising a creator, which enhanced their longevity? It’s almost like an experiment to test the multiverse hypothesis, if we’ve imagined a test where the result will appear in another universe. The conceptual test itself may be valid even if without a discoverable conclusion.
We are edging towards the idea that the meaning of some statements may be so far from testability that it becomes cloudy whether it’s a matter of practicality or whether an experiment can even be imagined. I’d like to think it’s only a practical problem, but Sagan and Dawkins may say that where no experiment is suitable, the mantle of meaningfulness must be withdrawn. So what is meaning? (That’s just a quick question for the reader, not a segue to the next paragraph.)
If Sagan has a rabid materialistic agenda, I don’t see it. He’s arguing the value of the scientific method to eliminate muddled thinking. If I’ve told him, “Carl, there was a spider on your head not but five minutes ago”, though the statement can no longer be tested, it could have been at the time. It was testable, so I’m not guilty, in this case, of muddled thinking.
In Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, written by Arthur C. Clarke, the earliest hero in the movie is a proto-hominid named Moonwatcher. A monolith (no way to explain if you don’t know) gives Moonwatcher what we’ll call visions of a better future based on things he’d never thought of doing. Grab an old thigh-bone and beat back those threatening night-time carnivores! He doesn’t stop there. (Cue a Richard Strauss waltz.)
Let’s put four concepts on the table: knowledge, belief, hope, and faith. We may allow that knowledge can be gained from the scientific method. Belief is a near conviction without the certainty of knowledge. (I refer you to Plato’s “Meno” dialog.) A map will let you believe that by following a drawn course, you will reach a desired destination. When you have knowledge on which you can depend, mere belief is displaced, and hope would be out of place as well. Now if a map which may be out of date nevertheless shows a new highway planned, you can believe that the route will get you there, while you’ll hope that the road is complete.
I’ve been heard to say that faith is the deliberate exercise of hope. Maybe I should change that to, “the deliberate exercise of belief”, but maybe not. Faith is what we call upon when we, with great conviction, believe that a particular result is needed, but have only a tenuous connection of beliefs or hopes showing a way to get from where we are (in any sense of the word) to where we need to be. We can only proceed on faith that we can get there, and that we’ll somehow overcome dangers on the way. A seer says to you, “There will be an invisible bridge on your path”. “Well, it better be right here where I’m putting by foot!”
Here’s what I find interesting. Faith is necessary to continue on that particular path. While having little basis for belief, but hope by the bucket, you choose to act as if what you hope for is true.
Isn’t this like someone asking you where the moon is, in response to which you raise your arm to point, and instead of following your pointing finger, they look at your arm in utter confusion? Your pointing arm is not the moon. Nor is the use of faith the same thing as what you seek. Actually that bridge wasn’t even there and the seer knew it, but in order to get you to take the step (leading to the fall into the torrent running through the cave where the beautiful princess was trapped), he had to sell you a misconception. But it was your faith that was a keystone of the whole successful trip. You may look back years hence and say, “Oh, yeah. In a sense there really was a bridge”, while your once-more-pregnant princess bride brings you a beer. Faith, baby!
Moonwatcher’s evolution (hope that word is okay with you all) was based on a vision. The first time he faced the saber-tooth tiger with only a thigh bone in hand he must have exercised faith. Too, here we see the scientific method at work. The hypothesis is that with a club, Moonwatcher and his family have a way past the fear of predators. Moonwatcher performs the experiment and survives. The rest of his clan verify his results in their own tests. Eons later, in the same story, a monolith on the moon points us, a newly spacefaring species, to a locale near Jupiter. This time it’s curiosity that gets us going; we aren’t relying on a cultural memory of the first monolith.
But suppose we do have a cultural memory that we as a related group of twelve tribes were saved from slavery quite a long time ago by what is credited as divine intervention. And say that a code of law was given us at about that time, and that our adherence to this code is our obligation if we are to continue receiving the divine blessings and protection.
For now let’s not quibble about whether we Israelites were saved by divine action, or whether there is any simple mechanism by which our following the code earns divine blessings, like a child to parent. But do attend to the fact that as a nation we seriously believe in the validity of our part of this bargain, and believe that we dismiss it at our great risk. If our leader at the time of our exodus from slavery needed a behavioral code so that we would survive a gargantuan trip, great in terms of time and distance and number of all kinds of people (young and old, strong and feeble, moral and im-), one can certainly see the wisdom there. Don’t steal; don’t accuse others falsely; don’t murder; don’t even think about wanting what’s not yours. Sure, we can see the justification, and such a code is not much different from laws in force in other nations at the time. Even athiests would accept these. We might call them natural laws.
But that is not all. You are required to believe that the entity on the other side of the bargain is the supreme lord of creation, that you will hold no other gods before “him”, nor create any images to worship, nor use his name in any but true reverence, and that every seventh day be devoted to him by refraining from productive work. By a stretch of the imagination you might call the last a natural law, but certainly not the prior ones mentioned. If these additions separate your code of behavior from that of other nations, how do we test their value? How can we show that faith of this sort is more beneficial, more true, than its absence?
I call this faith because throughout most of the history of the Jewish people, the real examples of divine action in their most impressive form were tens of generations or longer in the past, and there is only the word of the forefathers. Further it is faith because we either decide to accept it or not; any current proofs laid before us … the beauty of the earth, or each other, or love, or events by which some might demonstrate divine blessings or their withheld absence … can be as easily dismissed as accepted. Last, it is faith because we believe (with no easily discoverable proof) that accepting the code in all its articles will be good for us, and we have decided to conduct ourselves and believe accordingly.
Recall that this discussion is in the context of whether this particular statement of belief is meaningful. And that depends, for Sagan, on whether one can conceive of a test. If, however, the statement clearly is meaningful without any conceivable test, then should we say that testability is not the only criteria for meaning?
Two problems lurk. First, what does it mean to decide to believe something? Second, are we testing whether there is a God (good luck with that: “You shall not put the Lord thy God to the test”), or the benefits of the entire behavioral framework?
Deciding to believe something, like the invisible bridge, is not a problem. You act “as if”. If someone holding a big sword tells me to believe in Allah, I could maybe do this by acting as if. But it’s not likely that my acting “as if” would satisfy him if his version of Islam required my satisfactorily killing other infidels.
It is generally held throughout the world today that disbelief in God is not the same thing as disbelief in a round, rather than flat, world. No normally experienced physical or sensible or logical proof exists that cannot be logically surmounted by a dedicated atheist. Flat-worlders and folks believing that landing on the moon was faked, are largely without hope. On the other hand if Jesus returned in the next hour in precisely the manner predicted by the most literal of Bible-believers, proof would be right in front of us. But we are powerless to bring it on. As a matter of meaningfulness, “God exists” may be no less meaningful than some astrophysical hypotheses upon which scientists must just wait until the proper conditions are witnessed. “God exists” has meaning (while we, for now, are not asking for proof), but what about the tribes’ side of the bargain? We restate our problem. “Is there testable benefit in what appear to be the seemingly impractical articles of what we all recognize as the Ten Commandments?”, and which I’ll call to stand for the entire Judeo-Christian ethic.
The word “righteous” is suited to a person who follows this ethic, again including one’s relation to God, not just being respectful of my neighbor and his wife. Where is the meaning in saying that righteousness is better than not being righteous? Is there a test? Words like “bless” and “holy” and “righteous” are used widely without definition; you are just supposed to have absorbed the meanings. However, “righteous” basically means living the right way. If this is within the Judeo-Christian framework it means living in a way pleasing to God. I want to separate its pleasingness to God from its value to the culture or to an individual. Let’s say that if my daughter lives in a way pleasing to me, I am pleased solely because she is living a way that is good for her. Let us then not imagine that a creator is doling out blessings and curses based on his happiness on a given day, but that how we live may bring the blessing or curse by a different mechanism. What makes living by a particular code right? And can its rightness be demonstrated even when parts of the code are beyond the practical?
First, like a test for the simultaneous existence of multiple universes wherein the proof is manifest in a universe other than the one in our scientists have executed the test, while eternal salvation should certainly be of high, high value, we won’t see that benefit in this world. We’ll ignore that kind of test. Now if the first commandments are the ones most particularly dealing with a person’s eternal existence in God’s presence and we’ve agreed for the sake of methodology not to count such a test, does that leave us without a test? No. Not necessarily.
For reasons of social order, I am certain that most people on earth will agree that stealing, murder, and false accusation are to be avoided, and preserving the integrity and foundation of the family while curbing sexual license are to be encouraged. You may quibble about the interpretation, but we all agree on their importance.
How are we to propose testing the value of faithfulness to the one God, not worshipping representations of our own making, reverence for the name of God, and keeping a seventh day separate during which we prohibit gainful work? For reasons of clarity in this pursuit, let’s skip the 4th that deals with a Sabbath. First, #4 is more easily justifiable on a humanistic basis, and second, reasons why the first three may be beneficial should not be hard to extend to the fourth.
Proposing a test, we should expect that a culture following this path of rightness will demonstrate some kind of success. If we see nothing remarkable about them, well it may be no more worthwhile than just taking 250mg of ascorbic acid every day; it can’t hurt, but in most cases it’s not clear it does any discernible good. But we cannot deny that the Jewish people (not even counting their Christian brothers) have survived as an identifiable people for around 40 centuries. Are they happier? I don’t know. Do they live longer? I don’t know. Still there is no other culture or people with a single identity that has been around as long.
By comparison the Hindu Bhagavad Gita was written when the sons of Israel already had a 1,500 history. The Vedas may pre-date much of the Torah (the five books of the Bible manifesting the law of Moses) when it comes to religious writings. I won’t try to argue whether there is a Hindu “people” (like on Trinadad) with the same strong identity as the sons of Israel. If there is a contest for identity or longevity, we may wish to look into comparable points in Hindu theology. That is, maybe “the same thing” is going on. We must grant that a people who’ve lived under a code highlighting a faithful relation to God (whether or not they were faultless in their conduct) have won this particular contest.
Leading into further tests, what will we expect by way of behavior from a population that is ever conscious of the first three commandments? Do these behaviors bestow advantages? We’ll look at them one-by-one.
• “I am the lord your god. You will have no other gods before me.” Crediting this, I’ll take it that I myself am not the greatest being in the creation. Thus I am not free to do precisely whatever I want. More interestingly, this also will apply to kings and all other manner of earthly lords. A king proclaiming to be God is thus making a huge error. Everyone earns a measure of humility, a proscriptive against pride. Though not usually quoted in a list of the ten commandments, the Hebrews are directed to love God with their whole heart and whole soul and strength. This underlines for them the importance of this directive. Nor should the Hebrews go about looking for a god of the sun or of the earth or of beauty or of punishment or of a particular geographic region or anything. He’s all just one god. I admire the efficiency and simplicity of this concept.
• “You shall not make a graven image.” Islam may interpret this more strictly, but Judaism and Christianity take it to mean that we shall not create anything that we’ll worship as God, even if it’s meant to represent or stand for God … like “0” stands for nothing. (If my capitalization of “god” seems inconsistent, where god is used as an impersonal noun, or a thing, just as one might say “window”, it is not capitalized. When used as a personal name, I capitalize it.) This keeps one off the slippery slope of confusing God with anything we have created. Thus, no matter the beauty of a cathedral or the benefits of my iPhone, it’s a thing made by man and has little to do with God. Can any of us say that we could even build the simplest of animals? Any object, even one made to “show” God, must not be confused with God, lest we come to worship our own creations.
• “You shall not take the name of the lord thy god in vain.” The name of the Hebrew god, as he introduced himself to Moses, is “I am the one who is”. (Is this in contrast to other ”gods” who simply are not?) He might have said, “I’m the one talking to you”. Anyway, that’s what Moses quoted back to the people of the exodus, and that is what stuck. The acronym is “YHWH”, and if pronounced that comes out “Yahweh”. The people, then, never even pronounced the name. If “holy” means “separate”, even if not carrying it to the extreme of completely avoiding the name, it means that only in the greatest reverence may the name be used. If one asks oneself, “When am I entitled to use the proper name of God?”, it’s hard to be sure, isn’t it? It’s almost as if the name as we would pronounce it might be a “graven image”, and likely to be misused by us humans. OMG!
The god of Israel emphasizes that, no matter how we might try to pin him down, we are wrong. He is totally outside of our experience. The miracles of the plagues in Egypt, and the parting of the Reed Sea are nothing. The remarkable thing was that the miracles of the exodus were for the benefit of the sons and daughters of Israel. What is not conveyed in these commandments, but is revealed in the Jewish tradition is that (1) they are a chosen people, (2) the gratitude owed God is almost without limit, and (3) all they can do for their part is try to walk in his ways and praise him.
How much does it matter if the miracles did not happen, there really is no God, and the cultural memory is merely legend?
From many, many perspectives it matters a great deal. So, let’s simplify the point. In the book of Joshua, Israel’s god wondrously intercedes as the exiles, acting as a unified body, clear Canaan of the peoples who live in the promised land where they will be settling. Jericho is an example. In the book of Judges, there are little of these miraculously won battles, and much more of each of the twelve tribes trying to get control of their piece of the land by whatever means might work. This could be battles pursued only by one tribe, battles helped by other of the tribes, or just getting a toe-hold and trying to live by agreement with anyone already there. But the selling point is that God mightily helped the tribes clear the promised land, and that is the cultural memory, even if the real process of settling may have hardly been like that at all.
If you look at this alternate, possibly more realistic history, you are looking at my arm while I am trying to get you to look at the moon. Now, does this help us actually get to the moon? Does the Judeo-Christin code of ethics, embodied in a vast cultural matrix (the Bible, being a great part of that matrix), confer advantages that strict adherence to “the facts” does not give. If we can say, “Yes” to that, then the question of whether statements that are viewed as lacking in strict testability are meaningful, is also answered, “Yes”.
I’ve shown already that the Jews are, if not completely unique in the world, remarkable and close to unprecedented in having a continuous identity for at least forty centuries, despite having been dispersed and displaced time after time. Is it because of a written cultural history, or because of beliefs in statements that some want to call unverifiable and meaningless? Or is it because of diet, or maybe circumcision.
What may be more interesting is that in most ways, the Jews do not act like a chosen people. The Bible documents, and other sources and archaeology support, that the first three commandments were not followed all that well. Thus the prophets continually admonished their brothers and sisters that Israel is not living up to their end of the covenant. Other gods received popular worship, and graven images related to those gods were common. One must either conclude that God was not paying enough attention (the Babylonian captivity like being sent to bed without dinner), or He is infinitely more faithful to His side of the arrangement than are His chosen people. Or does it even matter if the Jewish (and Christian) god exists? Do these beliefs provide benefit (however it is they do) independently of correspondence to vulgar reality?
Here I’ll take a moment to reflect that the sons and daughters of Israel did not appreciate how utterly radical are the central tenets of their belief. The One-God-who-Is cannot and must not be reduced to any single article or aspect of the physical world. One god; that’s it; no saints for praying to; no blue-shaded aspects of the deity; and all and everything is this one god’s creation. Having a little shrine in your house with little god figures would be laughable if it weren’t a malicious failure to apprehend just what the claimed nature of God is. In other words, they are just like the rest of us, today.
Let’s look again at “all men are created equal”. A quick look around says, “No way!” Then it’s added, “ – in the eyes of God”. Doing a quick re-think, I say, “Okay, compared to a celestial standard, I can accept that.” Two things happen here. First I take it that for the sake of us all, I must act as if I believe that we are all created equal. Second, I accept that there is a “gold standard” to which I don’t have access, but by which this equality is validated. I act in a way that should be beneficial to all, based on a non-verifiable standard. Often I don’t act accordingly, even though I accept the standard.
Most of the Ten Commandments are what we might just take for common sense or natural law. But my commonsense may not be yours. When we were little, our parents or responsible adults removed from us the option of choosing the rules to be obeyed. In civil laws today, the majority of us regard obeying the laws to be what we owe to the rest of the citizens, while some of us act more like teenagers (who we would have hoped had gotten past that). Victimless crimes (like “Thou shalt not covet …”) may be especially hard for some of us. Still, there is an implied contract between us and our fellow citizens. The authority, in loco parentis, is the police and the courts. Not many of us see our society’s laws as a gold standard; rather closer to paper, though they aren’t supposed to be negotiable.
If I totally reject that we are all created equal, will my behavior change? Can there be a doubt? Remember slavery? Rejecting the standard is entirely different than accepting it while not following it very well.
There have been humorous references to sets of rules that have as the first or last rule, “You will obey all the rules”. One might be tempted to say, “Well, that’s really quite like the first few commandments”. I don’t think so. Okay, well some people think all rules (no matter their origin, or objective) should be obeyed, so for them, maybe it’s the same thing.
The first commandments set the context and establish an eternally unchangeable standard. These laws are from the creator of the universe, who is unlike anything you yourself might create, and you can’t even access their authority for your own purposes (as in swearing by their authority). If you believe this, even though your actions are imperfect in fidelity to the belief, the accompanying laws are immutable. Lord knows that Jewish scholars have been unpacking these laws for tens and tens of centuries, but interpretation is neither invalidation nor amendment.
Regardless of the actual practice, if you are of the Judeo-Christian culture (i.e. not just a member of such a society, but in-cultured by your elders) there is a respect you hold for the practical commandments, and even if you are a committed atheist, the first three laws are the cultural anchor. First year philosophy classes discuss Plato’s Cave and the heaven of paradigms for circles and horses and men and beauty and all that. In a sense these also are celestial standards, but true Platonists do not endure as a society. The ten commandments, and the culture incorporated in the Bible, have.
Can it be that given two cultures with similar laws about property and family and society, the one that perceives the laws as divinely written will survive while the other will pass? That is not all. You may wonder about the wisdom of the practical laws. Certainly over forty centuries bad laws would have caused the culture to fall apart. So they work well enough. The hypothesis is that the impractical first three commandments are a necessary component for the longevity of a culture.
There is yet another step. We must not stop here. We must wonder what it’s like to claim by faith that there is one god who is, and only one. This reminds me of St. Anselm’s proof for God’s existence. Which god is greater, the one believed in by a culture but who does not exist, or the one believed in by a culture, and who does exist. Truly, I don’t want to go there. On Mount Sinai He said, “I am the one who is”, but if that is just legend, it carries no weight. Is it possible that the Israelites could be merely acting “as if”, and thereby gaining the advantages? That strains my imagination. On the other hand if they have genuine belief, for them God exists. Now we go back to the scientific method. And it gets interesting.
We of the 21st century are not the first sophisticates to posit the non-existence of God. There have been tens and tens of centuries wherein the best minds of humanity have addressed this question. So far it’s been nearly a draw when it comes to rational argument. The atheists have recently placed their faith (yes, “faith”) in the claim that science will explain it all for us, because a strong claim of the theists (people believing in one god) has been that there are wonders or aspects of our existence that cannot come about by other means. It’s come down to a war of the gaps. “Science can’t explain this.” “Oh, but it will !” I’m reminded of the admonition, “Never argue with a fool, because someone else might not be able to tell the difference.” (For my two cents of foolhardiness, how did purposeful behavior arise from chance chemical activities?)
It’s time for Moonwatcher, and the bridge that wasn’t there, and the arm pointing at the moon, again. Is the magic in the culture of the ten commandments that you believe in order to reap the benefits, and that this only comes about with a true belief? In which case you either, from the outside, see that God’s existence is not an issue, or from the inside that there is no question. I step out onto the bridge because it is the right thing to do. And if this is the case we are 99% of the way to showing that a statement of cosmic importance, that cannot be demonstrated except in a rather nebulous pragmatic sense, is of the greatest meaning.
This is in no sense an air-tight syllogistic argument of deductive certainty. I’ll briefly address counter arguments and weaknesses. There are many things which set our Jewish brethren apart besides the first three or four commandments. In the B.C. days of Israel many of the nearby peoples practiced circumcision. Notably the Assyrians, the Babylonians and the Philistines did not. They were their enemies. Since, however, Israel was not the only nation that circumcised, that cannot be the key. Their diet was different. Today Hebrew and Islamic dietary practices are quite similar. (I’m mostly a vegetarian, but the smell of bacon in a morning … mmmm. But I don’t prepare it and don’t generally eat it.) So, reader, you tell me. Does their diet account for four thousand years of being recognizably unique? I don’t mean the uniqueness, but the continuity. Could it be their literacy? While literacy was likely restricted to specialists and a ruling class before the Babylonian exile, seven hundred years later it appears that even Galilean peasants (e.g. Jesus of Nazareth) were able to read the Torah in synagogue. Today could we argue that literacy will account for a healthy continuation of any of the nations of the world? I doubt it.
Finally, as you’ve no doubt gathered, the emphasis is on the meaningfulness of things we take on faith. Without Moonwatcher’s faith, humans would be a lot more timid (well, in that story … maybe without nuclear weapons). Anyone addressing a problem must have a little bit of faith that there is a solution (even if she never finds it, exist though it may). What makes people climb mountains or drive Formula 1 racers? Passion. What I want to say is that it’s not only the passion or faith of one single lifetime that accompanies faith to a result; a conclusion that could not have been manifest without that faith. We can follow an idea which may appear to many as willfully stupid. Followers will agree to the willfulness, yet not to the stupidity. A culture that persists for four millennia believing in one god whose nature is both unapproachable and indescribable cannot be stupid.
Now, what if those first twenty centuries flowered in a messiah? Like the bridge that was not there, the believers in this messiah follow a person totally unlike the messiah that was expected. Like the bridge, the fulfillment took us someplace we did not at all expect. The first five books of the bible and all the writings of the prophets are like the pointing arm … to which everyone attended. But the arm pointed at the moon.
I think listening to some modern day prophet telling you about flitting to a comet and all you need to get there is the faith to put a plastic bag on your head and chug a fifth of vodka is stupid; willfully so. For what were they so desperate?
But of the first three of the commandments … one god who is, who shan’t be futilely represented, and whose name must also be regarded as sacred … what is the verifiability? The only accessible “proof” is the pragmatic argument from the notably rare longevity of the Jewish culture. One might then say that to gain this benefit for your own tribe, family, or society, just sign on and believe. Yet I don’t foresee that you can act “as if” if you don’t believe, and this will keep out all the honest people with a conflicting insistence on verifiability.
What do we lose if all mankind takes this view? We lose, really lose, a chance to evolve. If there is any part of the described mechanism of evolution of biology on earth that sounds true, it’s that we are ascended … not descended … from simpler life. If we remove, only for reasons of methodology, a process that strives for a future that is only poorly perceived, we give up a great deal for little gain. This pertains to any reasonable or necessary or passionately held faith, even if it can’t be expressed, and not just the Judeo-Christian faith in God.
Certainly the essential method of scientific hypothesis and verification has itself been responsible for an impressive evolution of a kind. But to limit our options to only what the mind of man can achieve seems a severe limitation.
The meaning is in what it might bring forth. Faith need not be proven.
dandelions are free 