Fail, Rabbi, fail.
How sad and pathetic is this: Rabbi Adam Jacobs wastes acres of space over at HuffPo embarrasing himself and his fellow believers under the otherwise tantalizing headline “A Reasonable Argument for God’s Existence.” Really — I had to read that one, having just enjoyed all of Chris Hitchens magnificently snarky “God Is Not Great — How Religion Poisons Everything” not once, but twice over.
But we hadn’t even gotten past the first paragraph before the Rabbi apparently realized that he had set off on a fool’s errand. Since, predictably, he had no reasonable argument for God’s existence, he instead retorted to the sad old canard of placing the burden of proof on his adversaries: if those damn scientists are so effin’ smart, then how come they don’t have the answer to everything? Ignoring that his declared endeavor was to have been an argument for God, he instead tries to embarras his adversaries into believing by making the rather pedestrian, obvious and largely irrelevant point that science is imperfect. Alas, the rest of the article then consists of Jacobs rolling around in his own verbal manure with an excited grin on his face: “Look! RNA — how does that work, huh?” Like Bill O’Reilly with his tidal forces or the Insane Clown Posse with the magnets, Rabbi Jacobs sounds like he’s convinced himself that he’s nailed it here: God is really the God of Gaps, and faith the glue that must hold our world together in lieu of answers to all the questions that remain unanswered.
Such tripe. The fact that we don’t have the answer to this, that, or the other hypothesis does not in any way imply that an answer won’t eventually be found, nor does it imply that the current lack of an answer compels us to belief in the supernatural to explain it all. The boys at CERN are slowly but surely peeling their way into the very core of the world of quantum physics — who knows what they’ll find in there? It’s certainly infinitely more rewarding to watch them explore and investigate, methodically uncovering knowledge hitherto hidden from us by our inabililty to see, than it is to throw one’s arms up in dispair and declare that our temporary intellectual blindness obliges us to fantasize and speculate about our world instead.
Better luck next time, Rabbi — but if you do take another stab at it, please come up with a more apt headline, like “I think there’s a God, So You Should, Too.” Then at least your readers will know to move along and not waste their time.
