Especially good at clarifying "How do we know Hashem exists?" to a young adult

I must add my two sense.

Actually it is not my idea, I just happen to love it.

Reb Matisyahu once (or many times!) said, you will almost never find a boy that is learning, davening and enjoying his yiddishkeit, and one day he has some question OR problem, and goes off the derech.

You probably never met someone that stopped eating because they have ‘a kasha’

It all stems down to not enjoying yiddishkeit.

(yes, there are many problems etc, but if they are matzliach in their learning etc, they are usually can overcome the problem)

Therefore, says Reb Matisyahu, when we daven every day, we say “Veha’arev na hashem elokenu es diveray sorascha befinu, uvephiyos amcha beis yisroel”

Please HKB”H make the words of Torah sweet in our mouths and the mouths of ALL OF KLAL YISROEL.

If the words of Torah are sweet, we can overcome almost anything that gets thrown at us.

Reb Matisyahu ends off by saying we have the opportunity to daven for all of klal yisroel when we say this brochoh every morning.

chalilavchas: I’m so sorry to hear that. That must be so very difficult. Would the young adult ever agree to you setting up a debate? Is there another idea out there?

Maybe someone here has one (without just seeking to show us how their shitta… is correct).

May I pry? Is there something pulling this YA away, like a b/f-g/f, using them?

chalilavchas; Just want to send you my wishes for hatzlacha and koach. I have been in this parsha a long time and dealing with one who also can “shoot holes” through all of the arguments, until people are afraid to have a dialogue with him. I have been very disappointed in the results of all of our appeals to mechanhanchim and other leaders , but I think there is some truth that maturity will help. Hopefully they will arrive at a time when that “leap of faith” is no longer impossible to justify; they can give some slack on the demand for proof in a scientific way. Unfortunately, it can take years, and in the meantime those closest to these young adults are suffering right along with them. One point about following rules, in my experience these people can and do follow rules when the rules make sense to them, in their chosen career for example. But they definitely balk when the rules don’t make sense. I don’t mean to pry and you may not want to answer, but is your young adult academically gifted?

Yes. The yeshivas have a long way to go in identifying and helping these kids, in the meantime it’s hard to keep them on the derech; also hard for parents and close ones to stay focused on their amazing talents and qualities while doing battle in their defense. Too bad we don’t have a way to speak privately.

sm29

those are comforting thoughts for those who already believe in Hashem, but easily disregarded by anyone with a little cynicism and a dash of creativity.

For example:

we are still here by chance.

and it’s not as though every scientist ever completely disregards that issue, I am sure they have many methods of dealing with it that the kiruv professional who gave you this “proof” left out. I have confidence in the principle of bechirah chofshi that Hashem provided a possible explanation for them.

Again the shittos here.

(If however, this young adult is unfortunately feels upset at Yiddishkeit, it may speak to their brain, but not their heart. And its the heart that needs the jolt, when upset and hurt)

Truth be Told

Someone who does not already want to believe will cling to that minuscule possibility. That is the point. Improbable, yes, impossible, no.

yid.period: That’s what i wrote in the parentheses at the end.

I once heard, Rav Yaakov Emden swears, that our continuous existence in exile, is greater than all the miracles of our exodus of Egypt.

No because it can be purely intellectual. There are many improbable things we believe in, or choose not to believe in.

One might be bold enough to ask you about a invisible, omniscient, eternal being(?) that has the powers to do anything and everything and create matter out of nothing. When have you ever encountered such a being before in your experiences? Ever seen anything like it before? It seems illogical to automatically come to that conclusion because you’re having difficulties explaining our existence otherwise.

It’s difficult, but to relate to these kids you need to try to step out of one’s personal biases they grew up with.

yid.period: You’re now taking sm29’s words a lot further and deeper than he intended, and are asking questions on that. Let me quote him.

Another interesting point is that how is it possible that we Jews after being persecuted for many centuries are still here? Someone must be protecting us

Further discussions on new, but related topics, are just that. They don’t detract from this one.

chalilavchas:

Huh? Just two people can bring about hundreds in a relatively short time. In thousands of years, despite persecution, millions easily come about from only two people. Kal V’chomer if we start out with way more than two. After thousands of years of reproducing, how would zero remain?

Maybe zero wouldn’t remain. But as a nation? A nation without being able to be home (oh boy, did I start a new topic now), and still flourishing?

Where are all the other nations of fifteen hundred years ago and further. All gone.

I did not at all mean it as an attack on this young adult, or their family. Once this thread was pulled here, I added my two cents.

If it would survive all that, for a very long time, you wouldn’t be able to intellectually call it chance. The odds of the WTC surviving all this, are greater than were our chances of survival throughout.

Now you’re the one guilty of a false analogy.

The World Trade Center is in one place and therefore you only have to go to one place to destroy it. The Jewish people are not in one place. Had Hitler conquered all of Europe, he could not have succeeded in wiping out the Jews.

The World Trade Center cannot defend itself or run away. People can.

The World Trade Center cannot learn from previous attacks. People can.

But you’re still engaging in the Sharpshooter’s fallacy by stating that it is proof that God exists. By the same token, every single person on earth can make the same claim — after all, the odds of any one of the seven billion plus of us actually existing is infinitesimal — if any of our ancestors didn’t meet at the proper time, if any of the other of billions of sperm fertilized the eggs at *any* of those meetings, if any accident occurred to any of our ancestors before they had a chance to have kids, if any disease or accident might have sterilized them before they had children, and on and on. The odds against *you* existing are so remote that they are practically incalculable — and yet here you are. You may ascribe it to God — as do I. But that’s not proof, because anyone else can turn it around and attribute it to his or her deity.

The Wolf

The Wolf

i know someone who had this issue. it turned out that it was all stemming from an issue of anxiety and deppression over something else and yiddishkeit was taking the fall for it. this person got help for the deppression and was given books by r aryeh kaplan to read. they loved the books (and they usually dont go for something lke that) once the anxiety and deppression were being handles everything else fell into place.

PY: Not so simple.

Using the “sharpshooter’s fallacy” Wolf pointed out before, any changes in universal constants would have created a much different world than we have, if it would even have been possible to create life. Athiests will say the constants are random.

None the less, an athiest still needs to agree that those constants (whatever they may be) exist somehow without intervention of a being (which would be a god-like power which then is anti-athiest).

So an Athiest has to start even before the “ball of mud”, with how did the rules (whatever they may have been) come into existence?

Now, there is multiverse theory (idea?), but talk about completely unprovable! And that in of itself points to complexity, which points to a creator.

“You expect me to believe that G-d created matter because otherwise where would matter come from. But if you can believe that G-d always was, is and always will be, why can’t I assume the same for matter?”

I have been asked that question.

The proof is that since there must ultimately be something which was not created, it must be that that something is a supreme being. Since only a supreme being could exist having never been created.

Is she really comfortable thinking that matter had no creator?

I think that is rather compelling.

Gavra, I did not mention anything about life in my post. I also did not say that we are fortunate to have special constants. I simply said, knowing what we know about matter, is there anything in our world that leads one to believe a 747 may self-assemble? Even if we are fortunate to have the best constants possible, are our constants good enough that a laptop PC may spontaneously form out of mud?

Let me move onto argument #2.

Proving G-d exists is a rather complicated project, since we really can’t process the idea of an infinite being.

Let us try something much simpler. I will prove you have a soul. If I can convince you of that, then it follows there must be a G-d.

Claim: You feel pain, therefore you have a soul. If I take my laptop and bash it with a hammer, does it feel pain?

There was no “jump” in logic.

I posited that if there is something which existed without creation, we might be able to use logic to figure out what it was.

It makes no sense for matter to exist without creation.

It does make sense for a supreme being to exist without creation.

We might debate what makes sense and what doesn’t, but ultimately, I think everyone has to agree that it makes no sense for matter to exist without creation. So the question is what we could conceive might exist without creation.

thanks popa

that question never “bothered” me, but i thought about it.

and i couldnt come up with an answer

there probably is no perfectly rigorous answer but what you said, though quite simple, is a good answer to me.

Gavra what is the infinite monkey theorem argument? Is that the idea of a monkey typing Shakespeare if he bangs on random keys for enough time? I think that would require much more than 15 billion years.

Again, we probably cannot come up with a proof, because we don’t know what 15 billion years can do. However, the idea of anything self-assembling even in 15 trillion years is quite far-fetched.

As of this writing, we don’t even know how a single protein can self-assemble into its correct 3-D shape, EVEN GIVEN ALL THE ATOMS BONDED TOGETHER IN THE RIGHT ORDER (which is already 99.9999999999999% of the difficulty).

Popa, are you saying matter could be a supreme being?

I guess once we decide there is a supreme being, we will probably want to think about what form it might have. That sort of philosophy is way beyond me. There probably are rishonim who go down that road until concluding that it must have no form.

i have no proof that there is not a lion waiting just outdoor my house in the morning. but a reasonable person conducts her life by what is reasonable.

??? ??????

Check out my yiddish!