As a rule, this column does not respond to articles in the press, especially those published in the New York Times. However, a recent guest submission by Yoram Hazony, president of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Shalem Center
Is God perfect? You often hear philosophers describe “theism” as the belief in a perfect being — a being whose attributes are said to include being all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly simple, and necessarily existent (among others). And today, something like this view is common among lay people as well.
There are two famous problems with this view of God. The first is that it appears to be impossible to make it coherent. For example, it seems unlikely that God can be both perfectly powerful and perfectly good if the world is filled (as it obviously is) with instances of terrible injustice.
The problem of theodicy – justification of Divine judgement – has been discussed for hundreds of years. According to the Talmud (Berachos 7a), Moshe Rabbeinu himself asked Hashem to provide an explanation of these issues. The Biblical book of Iyov is, according to the commentaries of Rambam in the Moreh Nevuchim, Ramban, Malbim and others, a comprehensive treatment of this subject from many perspectives.
The starting point for any discussion, however, is the Biblical verse (Devarim 32:4-5): “The deeds of the Rock are perfect, for all His ways are just; a trustworthy God, without injustice, He is righteous and upright. Corruption is not His; it is His children's defect, you crooked and twisted generation.”
To assume, as Hazony does further in the article, that the Bible embraces a view of an imperfect deity and thus can accept the possibility – let alone the certainty – of “terrible injustice” is clearly absurd.
Similarly, it’s hard to see how God can wield his infinite power to instigate alteration and change in all things if he is flat-out immutable.
It is hard to believe that any serious philosopher would roll out this chestnut in the twenty-first century. This argument is rooted in an Aristotlean conception of the Deity whose acts follow of necessity from His essential nature. Thus, if His essence is unchanging, his works (i.e. the created world) should be unchanging. The Rambam has already noted (Moreh Nevuchim 2:25) that the Aristotelian view runs counter to the belief in miracles. But Judaism has never accepted this conception.
And there are more such contradictions where these came from.
Should we take Hazony’s word on this? Presumably he has chosen his best arguments for presentation. The ones he expects us to accept on faith cannot be better!
The second problem is that while this “theist” view of God is supposed to be a description of the God of the Bible, it’s hard to find any evidence that the prophets and scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”) thought of God in this way at all. The God of Hebrew Scripture is not depicted as immutable, but repeatedly changes his mind about things (for example, he regrets having made man).
But the Bible itself says (Bamidbar 23:19), “G-d is not a man that He should lie, nor is He a mortal that He should change His mind. Would He say and not do, speak and not fulfill?” Obviously, the use of the term “regret” in relation to G-d (Bereishis 6:7; Shemos 32:14; Shmuel I 15:11; Shmuel II 24:17) is merely a metaphor for a change in action in response to new conditions. (See Abarbanel, Bereishis 6:5 for an elaboration of this idea.)
He is not all-knowing, since he’s repeatedly surprised by things (like the Israelites abandoning him for a statue of a cow).
Look up the story at Shemos Chapter 32. There is absolutely no indication in the text that Hashem was caught off guard by the Jews’ worship of the Golden Calf.
He is not perfectly powerful either, in that he famously cannot control Israel
This is sheer nonsense. G-d wants man to choose good and reject evil of his own volition, as the verse states (Devarim 30:19), “This day, I call upon the heaven and the earth as witnesses [that I have warned] you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. You shall choose life, so that you and your offspring will live.” His non-intervention in our choices is not a contradiction to His omnipotence. (As to why our commission of evil is referred to as a violation of His will, see Rambam, Shemoneh Perakim Chapter 8.)
And so on.
We have already commented above on the undisclosed proofs.
Philosophers have spent many centuries trying to get God’s supposed perfections to fit together in a coherent conception, and then trying to get that to fit with the Bible. By now it’s reasonably clear that this can’t be done.
There is nothing in Hazony’s presentation that makes this clear at all. In fact, there is nothing that even challenges the traditional conception of G-d.
In fact, part of the reason God-bashers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are so influential (apart from the fact they write so well) is their insistence that the doctrine of God’s perfections makes no sense, and that the idealized “being” it tells us about doesn’t resemble the biblical God at all.
The reason they are so influential is because they are writing for the uninformed masses. But the claim that Dawkins and Harris have made the argument that the idealized being does not resemble the biblical G-d leaves me scratching my head. They are not proving their claims from the Bible and they are not embracing a new conception of an imperfect G-d. They are unabashed atheists.
So is that it, then? Have the atheists won? I don’t think so. But it does look like the time has come for some rethinking in the theist camp.
This is true. The time has come for some rethinking in the theist camp. But the question to be asked is not Hazony’s. Rather we should be asking the following: Why are we – as Jews – so unfamiliar with our own Torah, heritage, and philosophy that we should take articles such as this seriously?
(To be continued next week.)
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