By Rabbi Professor Sam Lebens
“Do you really believe in all of that Judaism stuff? But you’re so clever!” I’m never quite sure if this is a compliment or an insult. But it’s a question I’ve been asked. To save me from the accusation of lying to others, people must think that I’m engaged in some sort of compartmentalization.
The religious scientist, when in the laboratory, puts nothing down to super-natural causes. Every phenomenon requires a natural explanation. And yet, the same religious scientist, when outside of the laboratory is willing to believe in miracles. Once again, the only explanation is that the religious intellectual must have erected an internal iron curtain between their religious persona, which they occupy in the synagogue and at home, and their worldly persona, which they occupy the rest of the time.
Professor Solomon Schimmel writes (https://www.thetorah.com/.../my-personal-struggle-with...):
For years, I have been studying Orthodox Judaism and exploring the question of how it is that modern, highly educated people can make unreasonable faith claims. Specifically, how is it that Modern Orthodox Jews, in the face of overwhelming evidence and logical arguments, believe that God revealed the entirety of the Pentateuch, word for word, to Moses at Sinai and/or in the wilderness?
Let’s examine his example: belief that God revealed the entirety of the Pentateuch to Moses. James Kugel, a leading contemporary Biblical scholar, claims that his discipline stands upon a number of assumptions; assumptions which are owed to Spinoza. According to these assumptions:
1. Scripture is to be understood on its own terms, rather than through the interpretative lenses of any particular church or religious tradition.2. We have to make efforts to understand the language of the Bible and its own world of ideas, without imposing later conceptions upon it.3. Consequently, we should assume that scripture means just what scripture says, even when its plain meaning contradicts contemporary values, mores, and conceptions, unless internal textual considerations force upon us a figurative interpretation.4. To understand the meaning of scripture, we first of all have to investigate how the books were put together. We have to construct biographies for the authors, based upon knowledge of their writings and their historical context, and understand their words in light of these biographies.5. In considering the words of the prophets, one must recognize that they frequently contradict one another. Hermeneutics of reconciliation are to be eschewed in favor of recognizing the multiple conflicting voices beneath the surface
But Orthodox Judaism rejects many of these assumptions. We think that the Torah is properly interpreted by the Rabbinic tradition; that God speaks to us through these texts; that God may have meant to communicate things to this generation through the same words that communicated other things to earlier generations; and that the words of the prophets are all true. It follows that their words must admit of a reconciliatory reading.
As Kugel sees it, what separates Orthodox interpretations of the Bible and contemporary academic scholarship is just:
the set of unwritten instructions that guide them in reading the biblical text. Accept the one’s, and the other’s interpretations appear irrelevant at best, at worst a willful and foolish hiding from the obvious. It is thanks to this crucial difference in assumptions that these two groups can read exactly the same words and perceive two quite different messages.
Perhaps an analogy will be helpful.
A key proponent of the Neville theory, John Casson, told the Guardian newspaper: “There are no letters from William of Stratford. His parents were illiterate, his daughters were illiterate: how do you become the greatest writer ever when your family are illiterate?”
Can you hear the prejudice in those words? The son of illiterate parents simply couldn’t have authored such majestic work. Accordingly, noted Shakespeare expert, Brian Vickers put the theory down to:
snobbery, and ignorance… They are unaware that the Elizabethan grammar school was an intense crash course in reading and writing Latin verse, prose, and plays – the bigger schools often acted plays by Terence in the original … Above all, he had a great imagination, and didn’t need to have been to Venice to write The Merchant of Venice, or Othello. What’s most dispiriting about these anti-Stratfordians is their denial of Shakespeare’s creative imagination.
If you resolutely assume from the outset that x is false, then you’re almost bound to find ‘compelling evidence’ that x is false. Likewise: if you assume that God wasn’t the principle author of the Pentateuch, then certain textual anomalies are bound to take on a different light than they would if you assumed that God was the author. But the anomalies in question really don’t serve as compelling evidence that God was not the author, unless you’re already assuming that God was not the author (just as the evidence for Neville only becomes salient on the assumption that it couldn’t have been Shakespeare who wrote those plays).
Spinoza’s assumptions are attractive to Biblical Scholars. They want their discipline to approximate the standards of a natural science. Even the most religious of scientists tend to adopt a stance that is sometimes called methodological naturalism. According to this stance, it is always inappropriate to appeal to the acts of God in coming to a scientific theory. Even if God exists, we should keep him out of the laboratory.
Methodological naturalism is not compartmentalization. God created a world that abides by natural laws. Science progresses as we try to discover what those laws and regularities are without any appeal to super-natural processes beyond the empirical data. But why come to this chaotic world with the assumption that its many varied phenomena should yield to one set of laws? Why think that the basic principles that govern the development of a fetus should govern also the birth of distance galaxies? Science operates in the hope that unifying laws will be found. But that faith is blind, unless you believe that the universe itself, with all of its varied phenomena, is the creation of a law loving God. In this way, theism can serve as excellent scaffolding for making sense of the sciences. But, scaffolding holds a building up from the outside. God is not welcome in the laboratory itself.
That’s well and good for the sciences. But if the question is whether or not God was involved in writing the Torah, then using a discipline that adopts a methodological naturalism is to beg the question. Methodological naturalism rules out any theories that use God to explain phenomena. So you can guarantee, before you start your investigation into who wrote the Bible, that methodological naturalism won’t discover a Divine author. But its failure to find a Divine author is not evidence that God wasn’t involved. It’s not a finding. It’s not a conclusion. It’s just an assumption. You don’t need to be a fundamentalist, or manifest a pathological compartmentalization, or show disrespect to the academy, to recognize the logical fallacy of petitio principia (i.e., of begging the question). If anything, it is the scholars who raise these accusations who show a basic disregard for the philosophy of science.
Samuel Lebens is associate Professor in the philosophy department at the University of Haifa, he is also an Orthodox Rabbi and Jewish educator. He is the author of The Principles of Judaism (Oxford University Press), and has a forthcoming book, The Guide to the Jewish Undecided, which is set to be published by Maggid in 2022.
First posted to Facebook 19 December 2021, here.
