Topics Religion

Question Is the following situation a logical and rational reason to believe in G-d?: Judaism, unlike any other known religion, claims that G-d gave the torah not to just one person but to an entire nation. The whole nation of Israel, which numbered over a million people witnessed Moses receiving the ten commandments and heard G-d tell them what the torah was. Unless the above really happened, there is no logical way to explain the tradition that over a million people heard G-d speak. The generation it was supposed to happen to would not be able to be convinced that they saw something they really didn't. And if the "lie" tried to be started a few generations later, the people would ask why they had never heard this claim before. Therefore, it must have really happened and the torah and all it contains is divine.

Accepted:
July 28, 2008

Comments

Are you looking for independent evidence for God's existence, as described in Judaism? If so, I don't think the argument you offered does the trick. I suppose if we really had over a million people testifying to Moses' receiving instruction from God, then perhaps that should make us pause. But as you've told it, the story of the million witnesses is itself a part of the tradition we are looking to find evidence for. Imagine yourself trying to convince someone who didn't already believe what the Torah reports, didn't already believe what's in the Jewish tradition.

Now even if we did have independent evidence for the existence of a million witnesses, should we be convinced? Well, we might want to know a lot more about those witnesses. After all, we do know that people can make mistakes, can be misled, even very large numbers of people.