See What I Mean?
In a discussion over at "Three Jews, Four Opinions" (which, considering that two seemed to have dropped out, should maybe change to "One Jew, Four Opinions"), my friend Bruce discusses James Kugel, who wrote How To Read The Bible.
In the comments section, Bruce notes:
If we break the link between history and divinity, then the divinity of the Torah must be evaluated by other criteria. That is, we have to make a judgment about it. And [...] Kugel, and I [...] agree to a large degree: Judaism has come up with some pretty spectacular things. Maybe this means that it is divine by definition (as in Beethoven's 7th Symphony is divine), or maybe it is circumstantial evidence that it is divinely inspired in a more rigorous and supernatural sense, or maybe nothing is divine in the same sense as Torah from Sinai but Judaism is good. In any case, one can still have a robust and meaningful Judaism.
Bruce realizes this is not an airtight argument, but does he earn the conclusion? Isn't this a bootstrap argument? There are billions of people out there who believe in one religion or another, and are also quite impressed by their religion. This may (or may not) make for a robust experience, but I don't quite see how it should necessarily lead to anything meaningful, unless meaningfulness is simply caused by believing something is meaningful.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:18 AM
4 Comments:
The bigger question may be is there any objective concept of what is meaningful?
What does meaningful mean?
A priest I know likes to say that the fastest way to ruin a nice picnic with a friend is to ask yourself, "Is this event meaningful for us?"
As far as your main point, Beethoven's 9th Symphony actually is a counter-argument. If all the composers since Beethoven's death had said, "This symphony must have been inspired by God himself, since no human could have written it," I would be persuaded by their claim. I certainly can't imagine how one could write it, and it is awesome (in the literal pre-California sense of the word). Yet in fact, there seems to be universal agreement by music historians and theologians that the 9th Symphony was indeed written by a human being.
That should seriously make us question any argument of the form "X is so wonderful that God must be responsible." Unless X is more wonderful than the 9th Symphony, the argument would appear to be flawed.
(Ironically, I actually think this argument is sometimes valid, but that's a digression.)
(And it's not insignificant that I replaced Bruce's 7th Symphony with the 9th. Many people love the second movement of the 7th, but to me it sounds like it was written by a computer. It's almost a mockery of taking a theme and running through all the mathematical permutations of it.)
I meant that the 9th is a counter-argument to Bruce's argument, not to yours.
Wow- logical fallacies run riot. Something appears greater than anything else so it is ascribed to thing that human society (some parts at least0 has defined as being greater than everything else. This snake ate its tail
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