Review of the 36 Arguments for the Existence of God # 26. THE ARGUMENT FROM THE SURVIVAL OF THE JEWS

[Pastor Jennifer v2]

26. THE ARGUMENT FROM THE SURVIVAL OF THE JEWS
(by R Goldstein)
1. The Jews introduced the world to the idea of the one God, with his
universal moral code.
2. The survival of the Jews, living for millennia without a country of
their own, and facing a multitude of enemies that sought to destroy
not only their religion but all remnants of the race, is a historical
unlikelihood.
3. The Jews have survived against vast odds (from 2).
4. There is no natural explanation for so unlikely an event as the
survival of the Jews (from 3).
5. The best explanation is that they have some transcendent purpose to
play in human destiny (from 1 and 4).
6. Only God could have assigned a transcendent destiny to the Jews.
7. God exists.
FLAW:
The fact that Jews, after the destruction of the Second Temple by the
Romans, had no country of their own, made it more likely, rather than
less likely, that they would survive as a people. If they had been
concentrated in one country, they would surely have been conquered by
one of history’s great empires, as happened to other vanished tribes.
But a people dispersed across a vast diaspora is more resilient, which
is why other stateless peoples, like the Parsis and Roma (Gypsies),
have also survived for millennia, often against harrowing odds.
Moreover, the Jews encouraged cultural traits—such as literacy, urban
living, specialization in middleman occupations, and an extensive
legal code to govern their internal affairs—that gave them further
resilience against the vicissitudes of historical change. The survival
of the Jews, therefore, is not a miraculous improbability.
COMMENT:
The persecution of the Jews need not be seen as part of a cosmic moral
drama. The unique role that Judaism played in disseminating
monotheism, mostly through the organs of its two far more popular
monotheistic offshoots, Christianity and Islam, has bequeathed to its
adherents an unusual amount of attention, mostly negative, from
adherents of those other monotheistic religions.

[Brock]

On Feb 23, 8:58 pm, Pastor Jennifer v2

<jennifer.s.jo...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 26. THE ARGUMENT FROM THE SURVIVAL OF THE JEWS
> (by R Goldstein)
> 1. The Jews introduced the world to the idea of the one God, with his
> universal moral code.
> 2. The survival of the Jews, living for millennia without a country of
> their own, and facing a multitude of enemies that sought to destroy
> not only their religion but all remnants of the race, is a historical
> unlikelihood.
> 3.  The Jews have survived against vast odds (from 2).
> 4.  There is no natural explanation for so unlikely an event as the
> survival of the Jews (from 3).
> 5. The best explanation is that they have some transcendent purpose to
> play in human destiny (from 1 and 4).
> 6. Only God could have assigned a transcendent destiny to the Jews.
> 7.  God exists.

Again, the same limitations apply to this treatment:

* there is no one "THE ARGUMENT ...", rather it refers to a general
category of arguments, thus to defeat one specific example is not
adequate to dismiss the category
* the argument, to the degree it is a paraphrase, doesn't adequately
represent (either intentionally or accidentally) the argument as put
forward by a proponent, and faces the danger of being simply a straw-
man

Regards,

Brock