I’ve been doing a lot of research into Judaism. They seem to encourage asking tough questions and taking the answers seriously, which is good.

After reading a bit of the Torah, it got me thinking, why aren’t there any references to people who could not have been known to its followers at the time? No mention of East Asians or Native Americans. Did God just forget about them when he talked through Moses? Or he thought they weren’t important enough to mention?

Then it got me thinking some more. What about science? Wouldn’t it be effective to convince followers of legitimacy if a religion could accurately predict a scientific phenomenon before its followers have the means of discovering it? Say, “And God said, let there be bacteria! And then there was bacteria.” But there is nothing like that. Anywhere, as far as I can tell. Among any religion.

I’m not a theologian and I’m always interested in learning more, so any insights would be helpful.

Edit: A lot of responses seem to be saying “people wouldn’t have had a use for that knowledge at the time” seem to be parroting religious talking points without fully understanding their implications. Why would God only tell people what they would have a use for at the time? Why wouldn’t he give them information that could expand the possibilities of what they were capable of? Why does it matter if people had a word for something at the time? Couldn’t God just tell them new words for new things? If God was only telling them things that were relevant to them at the time, why didn’t He say so? Also, how come he doesn’t come back and tell us things that are relevant now, or at least mention that he isn’t coming back?

  • Mr Fish@lemmy.world
    65·
    23 days ago

    I have a few thoughts on this. For context, I’m a Christian with equally big interests in science and theology.

    A. Remember that scripture wasn’t written to us 21st century people. It was written in a context, in a language, at a time, for a culture, all different from what we have today. So for us to understand scripture we have to understand the context surrounding when it was written. This means hypothetical differences also need to go through this filter. For your examples of Native Americans or bacteria, what would the early Israelites have done with this information? I’d say it would have been seen as a weird side detail likely wouldn’t have survived being part of an oral tradition. Especially the bit about bacteria, since they didn’t have a word for it.

    B. I don’t think that’s the point of the Bible. The way I describe it is “God’s biography”. A bunch of authors all wrote their part to try to communicate who God is and what he has done. These authors all had the chance to live close to God, and got pointers on topics to write about, then they all write about God.

    C. I’ve had a similar conversation with some of my friends. We were playing “that’s a question” (party board game about guessing what answer this specific player will choose), and the question of “would you prove God’s existence/nonexistence?” came up. We’re all Christian, so we were talking about proving that God does exist, and we basically came to the answer that God has clearly built the world in a way that does not absolutely prove his existence, so he must have chosen to not prove it for some reason. Our best guess was that if it was proven, a lot of people would follow him out of obligation instead of love.