I spent a few months sharing an office with Elisha Kally after he had been demoted from TAHAL's chief engineer position. At that time, he was marginalized and exiled to the Latin American Dept. He was introverted and I was, as always, super-busy with my personal projects, so we never really had a conversation. In the seventies, he had been the head of the Nicaraguan mission and my boss for a whole year, but he left me alone totally unmanaged. I remember that he was not appreciated by the locals, who said he may be a good engineer (they were not sure) but shouldnt be allowed to have any managerial position. He gave me his short book "The Battle for Water" where he describes Israel's largest and most exciting project - the National Water Carrier - so boringly that I could never finish it. He died a few days ago at 84.
I discovered that on Oct.7, 1995 he wrote a letter to HaAretz, of all things, about the existence of God. I translate:
The God of the Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yoseph created the world in six days during he worked hard day after day creating plants (the Second Day) and animals (Third and Fourth Days). The God of Professor Leibovitch created a mechanism that brought about all the above with no haste (in millions of years) - automatically. Without deciding which of the two is more sensible, Prof. Leibovitch's automatic creation mechanism is more sofisticated, more interesting, and more godly. It has only one problem: it makes God superfluous.
Since Newton we know that God is not necessary in physics, and since Darwin we know that the origination of species takes place without the intervention of God. In other words, if God exists, he set the management of the world on "automatic pilot" making his intervention unnecessary and probably impossible. The question of the existence of God has no practical meaning, it demands no solution and can be left unanswered forever.
8 comments:
Kally draws the wrong conclusion - just because the existence of God has no "practical" meaning does not mean that it demands no solution. Much of mathematics, for example, has no practical application and yet people devote their lives to proving obscure theorums. The American founding fathers were wise men and they styled themselves agnostics rather than atheists. Rather than denying whether God existed, the said that they did not know whether He exists and that no man would be able to find out in this life. This is close to Kally's position but without the nastiness toward religion.
PS Only a Jewish atheist would bother writing to a newspaper to deny the existence of God.
PS Now that Kally is dead, perhaps God could write a letter to HaAretz to deny the existence of Kally.
K
Typical of his original logic, Kally ridicules religion (six-day creation) from the engineering point of view: the least efficient way of creating of world would be to do it in six crowded days and then rest. We know that the end result was a failure and God himself wanted to destroy it and start creating all anew. God let it continue but it permanent attention and frequent interventions. A self creating machine would have been more ingenious, more satisfactory from an engineer's point of view.
PS Only a Jewish engineer would give advice to God on how to create a world.
If memory serves, the founders weren't agnostics but deists. Professor Leibovitch seems to be one as well. Neither Newton nor Darwin, were atheists. Newton was actually quite religious. I think he devoted some of his later years to figuring out the geography of hell.
Apparently (I never talked to him on the subject) Elisha Kally was neither deist nor agnostic, he dismissed the issue as irrelevant.
Your friend was not thinking logically - neither deist nor agnostic - resolves to agnostic. If he claims to be detached about the existence of God, he is adopting an agnostic position. If he doesn't believe in God that makes him an atheist, in which case why bother giving Him advice.
Agnostic means that he doesnt know. Elisha said the question was superfluous, there was no need to deal with it.
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