| // but this won't make the core belief (here, belief in a god) any more rational, no? I'm interested in your take on this. I actually really enjoy this kind of discourse and happy to connect in some direct way if you are interested. But here's one train of thought. A rabbi and an atheist are debating whether there is a creator. The atheist says "there isn't. The universe just randomly happened to be." The rabbi asks if the man reads the NY times and the man says yes. The rabbi says "you know how that got printed, right? In the morning, a paper truck collided with an ink truck and it just happened to come out as the times". The man says there's no way that happened, the NY times is too complex to come out as an outcome of the accident. The rabbi replies: if the times is too complex to occur randomly, how much less likely that the universe, which is infinitely more complex "just happened" to be. That's just the flavor of the ideas. An animal does not contemplate the origin of the world, neither does a simple man. A lightly educated man can be told that the universe just is, and can accept that. A deeply questioning man is not satisfied with that explanation. If you are genuinely interested, you can look into Jewish views on science and how much of what for a long time seemed like fairy tales in religion is actually aligned with scientific thought. Eg on the topic of creation. Science did not know until the 20th century that the universe did not exist one moment and existed the next (the big bang) but religion knew it all along. In fact big bang was first theorized by a Catholic priest. That doesn't prove the existence of G-d as that's a matter of faith, but it speaks to the intellectual rigor of advanced religious thought. |