Last Shabbos we read the Torah portion about Noah and the flood. A few days later I was posed a question in a private e-mail about my perspectives on that. I avoided the question at first because that is one of the more difficult theological questions I have. And I have no good answers for it. I received a follow up e-mail today that said the following:
'Looks like the general approach taken is the "all miraculous" route. I forwarded one of the responses I got on this issue with the chazzal perspective on the matter. The "naturalist within" loves to resist, but Hashem creating all from Ex-Nihilo creation can redirect the natural world as He desires.'
That generated the following thoughts.
By using answers like this we rely on Emunah Peshuta, simple faith. We say that God’s actions in the world as described in the Torah (e.g. the Mabul) are made to look contrary to the natural order for His own reasons.
To the rational mind, that immediately presents a problem. The Torah did not say the Mabul was unnatural. Without attributing the Mabul to some sort of miracle, it should be taken as an act of nature that God initiated to destroy the world.
Yet there is no evidence in nature that it ever occurred.
When an event of that magnitude is undetectable in nature it tends to force one to the ‘Emunah Peshuta’ answer. If we do not resort to that, there should be some geological evidence somewhere… anywhere… everywhere! Thus all we can say is that we don't know why God made it look as though it never happened, but we know that it did because the Torah tells us so.
This is Emunah Peshutah and there is nothing wrong with such thinking. But it is very unsatisfactory to those of us who see the lack of evidence of a Mabul. Just as it us unsatisfactory to say the universe is only 6000 years old.
It is not necessarily resort to Emunah Peshuta when it comes to contradictions between the Torah narrative and the age of the universe. The evidence of an ancient universe is overwhelming. We can therefore say that the Torah's narrative of creation is not literal. The six days of creation were not 24 hour days. It is acceptable to believe that the universe is ancient.
But… the same should be true for the Mabul. And in fact Rabbi Shubert Spero had postulated that very thing… that the Mabul in the Torah is an allegory. But that too is problematic as we shall see below.
There are differences between allegorizing the six days of creation and allegorizing the Mabul. The question is whether they are significant.
One difference between the age of the universe and the Mabul is the magnitude of the evidence about an ancient universe. It is pretty massive. Also, the case to be made against the Mabul is the opposite. There is a total lack of evidence about it. And what about existing cultures that can trace their heritage back for more than 10,00 years… if all of humanity was destroyed about 5000 years ago?
Another difference between the Mabul and the age of the universe is that there is rabbinic precedent for allowing the allegorizing of the days of creation and thereby allowing for the conclusion that the universe is ancient. There is no such precedent for saying the Mabul is just an allegory.
Yet, the reasoning is more or less the same.
That's the problem. My Rebbe, Rabbi Aaron Soloveichik, said that Rabbi Spero’s theory that the Mabul is only an allegory and never really happened is very close to heresy! (Although he did not say it crossed that line,)
If you use Emunah Peshuta to explain everything, then observing what nature tells you is discounted. All questions are irrelevant. God can do whatever He wants and if He wants to make us see the world as 15 billion years old even though it is only 6000 years old, that is His business. We must believe that the six days of creation were literal days and that it is 6000 yeas old!
Pure Emunah Peshuta doesn’t work for me. And therefore this is one of the most difficult theological problems I have. It makes no sense for God to tell us one thing is truth and place a multitude of facts before us that say the opposite. Why would He deliberately fool us? Why say the world is even 6000 years old? Say it is 5 minutes old and that he created us with memories, a sense of history, and evidence to make the universe look 15 billion years old!
The same argument should be able to be made about the Mabul. Yet there is no precedent and saying something like that is considered almost heretical!
I can understand rejecting the allegorization of the Mabul to a point. Once you start saying that every narrative in the Torah that is contradicted by evidence to the contrary makes it an allegory, you may as well just throw the whole Torah out. Maybe the events at Mount Sinai didn’t happen either! Saying that IS heresy!
So that is the problem I have.
Emunah Peshuta solves all these problems but it does not satisfy logical conclusions made by a rational mind based on empirical evidence. One must suspend rational thought completely and just… believe!
So how do I solve this conundrum? I don’t. I simply remain with a question.
