Well, thanks for your compliments and your upvote.
I don’t say openly that I disagree with PhilGoetz, but I guess to the extent that my disagreement shines through anyway, it’s because I think the particular law he’s chosen is only very weak evidence against religion, whereas he claims it’s very strong evidence.
Granted, an omnipotent, omniscient God could certainly have done far more useful things for the Bronze Age peoples of the Middle East than simply advising “Don’t charge interest;” I like some of sci-fi author David Brin’s remarks along those lines:
Why not open a small trade college and teach our ancestors to pour cement? Well thanks a lot, you alien gods you! Thanks for neglecting to mention flush toilets, printing presses, democracy, or the germ theory of disease! Or ecology, leaving us to ruin half the planet before finally catching on! Hell, if someone had just shown us how to make simple glass lenses, we could’ve done the rest. How much ignorance and misery we’d have escaped!
If a deity were to suggest a ban on commercial interest, though, such a suggestion would hardly be worthless, let alone incorrect, as PhilGoetz appears to claim. A minimally powerful god who could predict the future might have bothered to warn that commercial lending would be required in the future, or she might have figured that it was too much hassle to explain why and when it would be required to a tribe with little concept of scientific history or economics. There is no evidence in the text of the Old Testament that the law against commercial interest was meant to be perpetual; Jewish legislators could and did change it as the basis of the economy changed.
And a great Brin quote (edit: found the link!), too—and on a similar subject, though I wouldn’t normally recommend this book: one of the things I found interesting about Sheri S. Tepper’s novel The Fresco was that it rather undermines several kinds of theodicy by having not-all-that-powerful aliens intervening in a number of quite huge terrestrial problems.
Well, thanks for your compliments and your upvote.
I don’t say openly that I disagree with PhilGoetz, but I guess to the extent that my disagreement shines through anyway, it’s because I think the particular law he’s chosen is only very weak evidence against religion, whereas he claims it’s very strong evidence.
Granted, an omnipotent, omniscient God could certainly have done far more useful things for the Bronze Age peoples of the Middle East than simply advising “Don’t charge interest;” I like some of sci-fi author David Brin’s remarks along those lines:
If a deity were to suggest a ban on commercial interest, though, such a suggestion would hardly be worthless, let alone incorrect, as PhilGoetz appears to claim. A minimally powerful god who could predict the future might have bothered to warn that commercial lending would be required in the future, or she might have figured that it was too much hassle to explain why and when it would be required to a tribe with little concept of scientific history or economics. There is no evidence in the text of the Old Testament that the law against commercial interest was meant to be perpetual; Jewish legislators could and did change it as the basis of the economy changed.
Fair enough!
And a great Brin quote (edit: found the link!), too—and on a similar subject, though I wouldn’t normally recommend this book: one of the things I found interesting about Sheri S. Tepper’s novel The Fresco was that it rather undermines several kinds of theodicy by having not-all-that-powerful aliens intervening in a number of quite huge terrestrial problems.