Reply To: Why do you believe in Science?

Lakewood001,

That things usually fall when you drop them was not discovered by Newton or any other scientist. Science is taking those observations and formulating laws and rules that govern those observations.

If you to present me with a book and tell me that it just appeared out of thin air, I would examine the evidence on both sides of that proposition and evaluate it. Now if there was no practical difference I might not bother, but it would be incorrect to simply conclude without examination of the evidence that you were lying.

Now you presented a piece of evidence both in this thread and in the frum thread. Your evidence is that all other books that we know of are written by men, it therefore stands to reason that this book was also written by men. That is evidence because it increases the probability that this book (the Torah) was written by men.

Now if we examine the Torah we will find that it claims to have been written down by the command of G-d (I will use “authored by G-d” as shorthand). This is evidence that it was authored by G-d because that claim from within the document increases the probability that the book was in fact authored by G-d.

Now as far as I know there is no other book that even claims to have been written down by direct command of G-d, but even if there were they would now be in a small subset to be evaluated each on its own evidence. If we could conclude that each of these books (assuming they exist) were written by men then your evidence would still hold up. Either way, however, we now have evidence on both sides of the equation.

Here are three additional pieces (there are many more) of evidence (remember EVIDENCE, not proof) that the Torah was in fact authored by G-d.

1) The Torah predicts that the Jewish people will be thrown out of their land, will be in scattered around the world, will be persecuted, will be few in number, but will remain Jews until their eventual return to the land. The earliest copies of the Torah we have date back to the middle of the Second Temple before our long bitter diaspora and before our millenia of senseless persecution, before our lack of assimilation, and before our return to our land. This certainly makes it more likely that the Torah was written by G-d then by men.

2) The Torah predicates large segments of its laws on a state of ritual purity that requires the existence of a extraordinarily rare animal (the Para Adumah). It seems unlikely that humans would do such a thing (they could of course, people have good imaginations, but it is less likely), because they could not guarantee the existence of this animal thereby jeopardizing the whole Temple ritual scheme.

3) Jews for thousands of years have believed that G-d was the author of the Torah. This wasn’t questioned until Spinoza and it wasn’t questioned by a group, until the 19th Century. Now if it was written by men it means that at some time in the past, somebody fooled all the Jews into thinking it was authored by G-d or the Jews all forgot. It seems rather unlikely that someone could fool all of the Jewish people like that and therefore makes it less likely that the Torah was written by men.

Once again, none of these are proofs positive. If I was wedded to the position that the Torah was man-made I could come up with a dozen explanations for each point. But that doesn’t change the fact that each one makes increases the odds that the Torah was authored by G-d (imagine if each of these weren’t true, would the G-d authorship side be weaker, stronger or indifferent?).