Is Atheism the Future of Humanity? Not So Fast...

What’s said in this shiur

The opening of this shiur, in Rabbi Shais Taub’s own words — taken from the captions, so names and Hebrew terms may be approximate.

Christopher Hitchens said something that really got me thinking. He said, it's very simple. The future of humanity is atheism. And he says, I I'll prove it to you. I'm paraphrasing. He says, man used to believe in many gods. Then he came to believe in one god. Right? So, first most primitive cultures were polytheistic and then monotheism came along. And ultimately, they'll just narrow it down one more god and humanity will be atheistic. And I love the simplicity of that argument. I I have a special affinity for any argument will take a complex idea and recognize some consistent underlying pattern. And so the argument or the formulation of the argument was very compelling to me. I I I enjoyed it. Now, obviously, I didn't agree with the conclusion, but I was forced to figure out why I'm why I would reject the conclusion. You follow what I'm saying? So I thought about it and I realized while his argument was very elegant, he omitted and I don't think it was malicious or willful on his part. He omitted he omitted a very important part of the formulation which causes the entire trajectory to be off and then the conclusion is off. It's not accurate to say that man used to believe in many gods. Period. Full stop. That's not a complete sentence. It's more accurate to say man looked at a world full of many things, many forces of nature, the the sun, the rain, whatever it is. [snorts] And as I'm sure Hitchens and other atheists would agree with me, all of the mythologies that primitive people came up with were to explain these very diff various different phenomena. And therefore, they came up with for each phenomenon of nature, they came up with

Jump to a moment

1. 0:00Christopher Hitchens said something that really got me thinking. He said, it's very simple. The future…
2. 1:01would reject the conclusion. You follow what I'm saying? So I thought about it and I…
3. 2:32different things were ruled by one god. So it's not a different god for the sun…
4. 3:33they want to get it down to one so the trend the trajectory is further simplicity…
5. 5:08And that's what we refer to and we're meant to think of when as Jews we…
6. 6:43than any of the spiritual plains. In other words, you will see godliness more in the…
7. 7:44If you give me more than 5 seconds, I'll start to tell you a condensed version…
8. 9:17solid as you take it for granted as being. It's really all in flux. It's divine…
9. 10:20cause and effect, which is all part of free choice. And [snorts] that's really sort of…
10. 11:54and that I believe with full confidence that if human beings continue to look at this…

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