[...]... of the reality of God and/ or his revelation, and of the truth of beliefs and of the worthiness of faith based on these encounters and revelations They do not need reason to validate them Moreover, rational arguments that question or challenge the belief and the faith, and their grounding in God, are too weak to overcome the impact of the believer’s sense of having encountered the divine.10 A devout and. .. Judaism These Jewish, Christian, and Muslim ‘‘scriptural fundamentalist beliefs, ’’ and derivatives of them, are very implausible in light of current knowledge about the origins and contents of the Pentateuch and the rest of the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible (i.e., the ‘‘Old’’ and the New Testaments), and the Koran This knowledge comes from modern academic study of the Bible and the Koran, and from other... of an encounter with the divine, believe in the validity and truth of the claims of the believer? Believers offer several answers to these questions of the skeptics The individual believer’s potent personal experience of an encounter with God or of a revelation by him, coupled with the cumulative testimony of the experiences of many other believers over the ages, provide for the believer evidence of. .. reason and the Koran He quotes the saying of God the Exalted in the Koranic verse ‘‘Summon to the way of your Lord by wisdom and by good preaching, and debate with them in the most effective manner’’ (Sura 16:125) in order to prove the following: Demonstrative truth and scriptural truth cannot conflict Now since this religion is true and summons to the study which leads to knowledge of the Truth, we the. .. know that the accounts of God and of divine action in the Bible or the Koran are true?’’ The skeptic probes further and tries to understand why the believer believes in the authenticity of the scripture that he claims is divinely revealed How does religious socialization do its work, and what other factors may be involved in affirming the divine origin of scripture? Do not the contents of the claims—... comprehension of the divine will or command God’s right to command and our obligation to submit derives from the inherent nature of the divine-human 22 | the tenacity of unreasonable beliefs relationship God has created me and sustains me, and I owe all to him, my will, and my life if necessary Therefore whether or not his teachings and commands make ‘‘sense’’ to me is irrelevant when I consider whether or... unsophisticated masses On the other hand, the nonrationalist-oriented, or even antirationalistoriented, religious thinkers emphasized human limitations in the exercise of reason Most of these non- or antirationalists considered the existence of God to be self-evident and accepted without doubt the authenticity of their scriptures and core traditions Of concern to them (as it was, of course, to the rationalists... troubled Job—that the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper I was also influenced by James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, novels of coming of age and loss of Christian faith that described much of my own feelings and experiences Throw into this incubating cauldron of doubt the theory of evolution and an encounter with Hume on miracles,6 and other philosophers... aware that their ‘‘profound’’ insights and experiences are often reinventions of the wheel, I was unaware of the pervasiveness in Jewish society of my grappling with Orthodoxy and rejecting of its tenets I had not been too familiar with the literature of the nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment or of modern Jewish philosophy, which are replete with discussions of the theme of grappling with and eventual... reasoning, and they 20 | the tenacity of unreasonable beliefs enumerated various causes for these failures in the exercise of rationality It takes time to hone one’s intellectual skills and to acquire the knowledge to which they need to be applied The necessary tasks of life do not always leave room for one to engage in philosophical and logical activities to the depth required for the ascertainment of truth, . h0" alt="" The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs This page intentionally left blank The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth solomon schimmel 1 2008 1 Oxford. derivatives of them, are very implausible in light of current knowledge about the origins and contents of the Pentateuch and the rest of the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible (i.e., the ‘‘Old’’ and the. form, I have offended and I will offend many people. I will be disappointed if The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth does not provoke and anger religious fundamentalists