E said...
One thing I will say about my statement that there is reason to believe is that ultimately there are a number of intelligent people out there that have read everything you have read, know everything you know and still believe in the Torah. I am aware that there aren't that many people that fit this description. I am also aware that not all of them are intellectually honest. But, I hope we can agree on this, these people do exist. (That doesn't mean they're right. There are lots of very clever and knowledgable atheists and I'm not an atheist.) I presume these people have a reason for believing the Torah is more than just an interesting ANE text. I think you'd do better asking people that fit the above description rather than me why they believe. Reasons for believing exist, whether you find them convincing or not.
Before people jump on him, I want to say that E brings up a very important point. I personally have met people who know everything I do and have read everything I read and YET still believe in Judaism. I'll go one step further I personally know people who believe in the Documentary Hypothesis, agree that you can't prove God exists and STILL believe in Judaism (and keep it devoutly!). This is an extremely interesting phenomenon and seeing this phenomenon has led me to the conclusion that believing in Judaism or not believing in Judaism has very little to do with intelligence. Some people out there would expect there to be a direct correlation between intelligence and NOT believing in Judaism but that's simply not true, as we know some of the greatest Rabbis were simply geniuses, and STILL believed this stuff. And we're not just talking about brainwashed uneducated Rabbis, even Rabbis who knew all the facts and read all the literature buy Judaism.
So what's it all about?
Firstly I have to quote Michael Shermer on this one. In his book Why People Believe Weird Things: He makes a bold but insightful statement: "Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non smart reasons."
Michael Shermer in this pithy little statement has summed up a whole lot of human psychology. Generally speaking people arrive at their beliefs for non-intelligent reasons. Once they already have a belief they will prop it up with "explanations", "justifications".
Now, I'm not saying this is inconceivable, but I would be extremely interested to meet someone who grew up an atheist or agnostic, learned everything about the DH and proofs of God and everything us skeptics know, and then in spite of all this decided Judaism was correct. Now THAT would be a person worth talking too, because as far as I know most intelligent informed people who believe in Judaism despite knowing about skepticism and Biblical criticism etc. are Frum From Birth. (e.g. Louis Jacobs, James Kugel, etc.) In other words they believed in Judaism from the beginning, faced some challenges to it, and then summarily solved these problems with a bit of ingenuity.
This is important because it would add a degree of objectivity to the question. If Judaism was logically sound, as opposed to merely logically defensible, we would expect people to flock to it the way they do to Science and mathematics and other objective things. The fact that people don't, in my mind, shows that Judaism is defensible, but not justifiable, from a logical perspective.
More about this in another post...
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