BLIND FAITH Vs. REAL FAITH:WHAT CONSTITUTES PROOF?

PROOF: Which is needed? I think that a study about just what constitutes proof is needed here, so here goes!

Yes, Judaism believes in emuna - faith - but that is limited to the fact that God keeps His word. But emuna is not what is requested of us to determine God's very existence. His Existence must be arrived at by proof. This is what the Torah commands in so many places, and precisely why we are creatures endowed with an intellect.

Too many unlearned educators are destroying the potential of fine, Jewish {And might I add Christians as well ?} souls through their ignorant teachings. Perhaps their approach secures them to have an "out", as one might feel if he searches and finds a proof for God's existence, then he must keep all His commands with no justification for his occasional defiance. Perhaps that heavenly yoke, that type of vice grip on his actions is intolerable. There are many emotions which contribute to the proliferation of this blind faith acceptance, but Judaism {Nor does the BIBLE ANYWHERE! } contains no support. The community leaders who promulgate this disease do so based on other uninformed leaders, not Torah texts. Based on the sources quoted here, and their reasoning, one realizes that "blind faith" is contrary to Judaism and God's goal in designing man with an intellect. Are we to say that in the most essential area of man's life - knowledge of God - man is to abandon his highest element of intelligence and simply believe? In business and other matters, man uses his mind as far as he can to secure his great wealth. But in knowledge of the Almighty, he wrongly assumes he fulfills his purpose with faith. How far from the truth and from the accepted opinions of all our great teachers this is.

It is much easier to shelter one's ignorance behind a claim that belief is superior to knowledge. This obviates the need to exert oneself and break his teeth on a Tosafos. But knowledge comes only to those who yearn for it and toil in study, "in accordance with the pain is the reward", "in accordance with the knowledge is the love of God". It is inexcusable that educators have not read the words of Moshe Rabbeinu, Rav Hai Gaon, Ramban, Maimonides, Ibn Ezra, Chovas Halevavos, Kuzari, the Vilna Gaon, Saadia Gaon, and even King Solomon's own words. "Wisdom laughs at the fall of the simpleton, scorner and fools"(Proverbs 1:26).

Some claim that proof is of no need, and that proof is only needed for the physical world, but not the "unlimited" world of knowledge and God. In other worldly matters, these same individuals engage reason, but not in their religion. Their actions contradict them. "Do they not see there is fallacy in their right hand?" {NOT TO MENTION THE FACT THAT THE SPIRITUAL IS A FAR DEEPER AND REWARDING MENTAL EXERCISE !}

Man cannot escape the function of reason, nor a world which functions by reason. Even the metaphysical world was created by the infinitely wise God. It too abides by systems of knowledge, as opposed to the wrongly professed assumptions where everyone conjures up his own view of how God manages the world. They have no concern for rational explanation. The self-aggrandizement achieved by discussing "lofty" subjects, and the emotional attraction to so-called "mystical" topics has deterred many unsuspecting Jews from the Talmudic study essential for clear thinking.

This type of "emuna pshuta" is contrary to mans' design, it is the opposite of God's goal for man, and is against how the universe functions. It destroys the critical thinking of man responsible for all the great achievements of these great men listed here. This faulty approach also deters the uninitiated from experiencing the true beauty of learning, with all of its consistent philosophy, halachik formulae, and perfectly structured verses.

Preaching fantastic, emotionally stimulating notions, many of today’s leaders present Judaism as a mystical, unintelligible collection of miraculous rabbi stories. Their inconsistency with the methodology seen in the writings of the men noted at right is apparent, and should awaken any intelligent person to the reality that they are not teaching Torah, as these men have taught.

None of these or any other of the Baalei Hamesora, the masters of Torah tradition, says that we are to simply have faith. This is Christianity. { I would interject here that this is an unconverted Jewish opinion of Christianity BUT I AGREE WITH HIS ASSERTIONS HERE WE CANNOT EQUATE TRUE BIBLE FAITH AS A "BLIND FAITH."} Don't be swayed by the large numbers of Jews who hold onto faith, for numbers is no argument for truth. We are taught to be convinced by reason, as these rabbis stressed.

If you feel you must follow your peers and not these rabbis, then you must work on your independence of thought, and you must study these areas of knowledge of God slowly and carefully, confirming to yourself with 100% conviction in each idea as you progress.
Knowledge is unshakeable, belief sways.
Strive to comprehend what your mind tells you as truth. This is why we have been created by God with an intellect, to engage its use in the most essential of areas, knowledge of God." NOW I WOULD ALSO CAUTION YOU NOT TO SIMPLY RELY UPON AN UNRENEWED MIND AS ANY KIND OF PROOF EITHER AS THE MIND CAN BE EASILY DECEIVED BY EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENTS AND PRECONCEIVED NOTIONS- BUT OUTSIDE OF THAT HE WAS RIGHT ON WITH THESE COMMENTS ABOUT FAITH!
Remember we have already challenged the atheist's to present "PROOF THAT GOD DOES NOT EXIST" THIS IS SOMETHING THEY NOT WE MUST DO SENCE WE HAVE THE EVIDENCE LAYED OUT BEFORE THEM AND ALWAYS HAVE! It has always amazed me that the more evidence we present to them the uglier the hatred gets for God, THESE ARE THE ACTIONS OF DEFEAT NOT VICTORY! In one sense, we all operate every day on faith in many different areas of our lives. If you've ever eaten at a restaurant, accepted a doctor's prescription, or planned for the future, you have certainly been operating on a degree of "blind faith."
As C. S. Lewis said, most of the things you believe are believed on authority or on secondary evidence. For example, you may never have actually seen a living dinosaur, but you are confident that dinosaurs once existed. We are confident that things like gravity and the laws of logic exist even though we cannot see them. Of course, experience and rational investigation should increase your confidence in what is true.
Christianity is not mere blind faith. As emphasized by theologian D. James Kennedy, the claim that belief in Christianity produces an irrational, uneducated, unintelligent, or unintellectual view of life is completely false. And the statement that unbelief produces a rational and intelligent and enlightened view of the universe is equally false.
Blind faith is faith without evidence, which would be superstition. The Bible does not call us to blind faith. The Bible calls us to faith in evidence. We submit that various truth claims, including Christianity, should be evaluated on the evidence.
Yes, there will always be a step of faith for the Christian. But that step doesn't require a person to leave his brains at the church door. There are essentially three possibilities as to the origin of the universe and the implications about God: That the universe emerged from nothing. Little needs to be said about this notion. Nothing produces nothing. This premise is neither logical nor reasonable. That the universe is eternal. There are three strong scientific reasons why the universe is not eternal: (a) the big bang theory, (b) the abundance of hydrogen, and (c) the irreversible decay of the universe. The discovery by Edwin Hubble that the universe appears to be uniformly expanding in all directions leads to the conclusion that the universe had a beginning. Hydrogen is continually being converted into helium through the process of nuclear fusion. This process is irreversible, so the abundance of hydrogen in the cosmos belies the notion of an eternal universe. The second law of thermodynamics says that while the total amount of energy remains constant (the first law), the availability of usable energy in the universe is constantly declining (the second law). Apart from the intervention of a supernatural agent (God), the stars would have burned out and the universe would have run down like a clock with no one to wind it back up. The logical conclusion is that it cannot be true that an infinite amount of time has passed because the universe would have reached a cold and lifeless state of absolute equilibrium. That the universe was created by an eternal being. By process of elimination, the existence of an omnipotent God is the most reasonable conclusion for origin.

Common sense reaches the same conclusion. There is evidence of intelligent design all around us. If one sees a bird's nest, he concludes that a bird made it. If one sees a computer, he must acknowledge the evidence of an intelligent computer designer. The fact of a creation demands a creator.
There are numerous other scientific evidences for the existence of God. Even non-Christian Stephen Hawking, considered the best-known scientist since Albert Einstein, acknowledges "...the universe and the laws of physics seem to have been specifically designed for us. If any one of about 40 physical qualities had more than slightly different values, life as we know it could not exist: Either atoms would not be stable, or they wouldn't combine into molecules, or the stars wouldn't form the heavier elements, or the universe would collapse before life could develop, and so on...." I submit that the laws of physics could only have come from an omnipotent and rational God.

Science has many Christian roots. Most of the early scientists were Christians (Copernicus, Galileo, Pascal, Isaac Newton, Carl Linnaeus, Johannes Keppler, Robert Boyle, Louis Pasteur, Jean Henri Fabre, Michael Faraday, John Ambrose Fleming, etc.). These great scientists operated within a Christian framework.
An interesting fact is that the vast majority of all scientific development has come out of western civilization, which has Christianity as its basis. Christianity views God as rational and trustworthy, which implies that His creation is rational and orderly and thus can be examined. Nature in the Christian view (as compared to non-Christian worldviews) was no longer an object of fear and worship.
The idea of laws of nature came from Christianity. And the concepts of subduing nature and being stewards of nature are right from the first book of the Bible--Genesis.
As D. James Kennedy suggests, science could not have begun in the Buddhist or Hindu worlds. The essence of those religions is that the physical world has no reality. Scientific inquiry requires the assumption that the world is real. Nor could science have begun in the Muslim world because that worldview is dominated by fatalism, and fatalism is antithetical to the concept of progress.
Misconceptions about the Bible have been around for a long time. For example, one misconception is that the Bible teaches that the earth is flat, or that it is the center of the universe. A closer examination of Scripture shows otherwise. The idea of a flat earth from the Bible is rooted in the biblical language of "four corners" in Isaiah 11:12 and Revelation 7:1, and "four winds" in Jeremiah 49:36 and Matthew 24:31. The Hebrew and Greek words translated "corner" are also translated as "quarter" and are best understood as "directions" or "headings." The Bible's usage obviously refers to the four directions as measured from the particular focal point of interest and is the standard convention used in surveying and mapping to this day. Moreover, in Isaiah 40:22 the Bible uses the term the "circle of the earth," also translated "sphere of the earth" as is evident from the context.
It can be said that Christianity has produced more literate and educated people than any other movement in the history of mankind. In our own country, all but 3 of the first 126 colleges established in the United States were built in order to propagate the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The Bible was not written as a science textbook. But, when the Bible does reveal truths related to science, the Bible can be trusted. Indeed, the Bible demonstrates scientific knowledge and concepts far before mankind had developed the technological base for such knowledge. Biologist William J. Cairney discusses many such biblical pre-science evidences in the fields of human health, disease control, agriculture, etc. He states, "These rules of sanitation and diet stand on a foundation requiring considerable knowledge of epidemiology, microbiology, physiology, plant pathology, and animal pathology, all of which require a technological base not available until the last hundred years or so of human history."
Henry Morris lists numerous other pre-science evidences in the Bible.
So-called conflicts of science and the Bible are often conflicts between interpretations of the facts. Unfortunately, religion frequently invokes its own non-explanations as a means of holding its ground. Usually these involve the idea that God's power is so great that we can say with reference to anything simply that He did it and thus have an explanation that protects us. There's no need to look further or think further.

While there are questions for which there are as yet no explanation, there is no fundamental conflict between science and Scripture.
More importantly, while we live in a time of change and of great scientific discovery, what we discover about the human heart is that it has not changed at all. Matters of human nature, emotions, relationships, and ultimate meaning remain the same. It is in Scripture that we find enduring truths as appropriate for modern man as for ancient man. Students in our colleges and universities live constantly in a tension between two authority systems: one more or less vaguely associated with science and the other with religion. Both systems are "blind" in the sense that the edicts they impose on thought and behavior are never, for the vast majority of people, reduced to anything close to understanding, verification, or proof. Evolution offers no hope, and Religion offers no real answers so BOTH MUST BE ADHERED TO BY "BLIND FAITH"AND STUBURN CONVICTIONS!


The Darwinist begins with the assumption that God had nothing to do with the creation of the worlds and of life itself. Everything must be explained by natural process because the supernatural doesn’t exist. Evolutionary theory rests upon faith in a blind chance phenomenon which is capable of producing and sustaining life. Proponents of the theory of intelligent design point to observable laws, like entropy, and to the complexities of life and conclude that creation and life were designed by a higher power.

The theory of evolution has wreaked more havoc upon Western civilization than any other dogma of man. It replaced moral absolutes with moral relativism; purpose with emptiness; accountability with a false freedom; self control with self seeking; hope with despair; true freedom with an oligarchy; spiritualism with materialism; biblical authority with human authority which is Humanism; and the dignity of men with the abasement of animals. That such a contrary theory has come to reign as king in the academic world should cause us to pause; because the ramifications are far-reaching – and disastrous.

Many years ago, Abraham Lincoln aptly noted that the philosophy in the schoolhouse in one generation will become the philosophy of the culture in the next. The engine of our society was never meant to run on an empty philosophy disguised as science. John Adams said that, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Darwinism attempts to tear down religion and to the degree that it has, it has torn down the pillars of our culture.

No matter how you slice it, theories of origin require faith, not scientific proof. No one was there to see non-life evolve into life by a blind material process or to see God create the worlds and all living things by the power of his word. And insufficient evidence exists to produce an objective finding through the scientific method. The problem for Darwinism is that the limited observable evidence (and common sense) doesn’t lead people to the scientific conclusion that Darwinian evolution is true. For many scientists, the evidence tends to show that the theory is false. That’s why some have abandoned the corroding shipwreck of evolutionary "science," realizing that much more faith is required for this theory than for the theory of intelligent design.

So long as theories over the important question of origin require faith, scientists would do well to accept and promote a theory that is actually compatible and able to support our free society by providing hope, purpose and accountability for the citizenry (including the school children who are forced to learn it).

Darwinian evolution excludes the supernatural realm and then looks to unintelligible, lifeless matter for understanding. Intelligent design acknowledges the handiwork of an intelligent Creator. If the Creator is able to create and sustain all things, it stands to reason that he is able to protect and bless our land. What also follows is the fact which makes evolutionists cringe: men are accountable to God.

So I ask, is there any good reason for anyone to interpret the Bible allegorically, yielding to the doctrine of the mysteriously moving slime that needed to evolve? Of course not – that involves much more faith than God requires. Instead, exercise intelligent faith – trust your Creator and believe his word. If the pillars of creation and original sin are rejected, then the biblical truths which follow come crumbling down (in the mind of the unbeliever). At that point, God is not to be trusted and obeyed, but questioned.

Submitting to the rule of God is not something men naturally select. And that basic truth is not subject to evolution.