Must one believe that God created the World? Is it an Ikkar - Dogma?

In the Sinai Journal volume 137 year 69, there is an interesting article by Rav Aryeh Leib Feldman, where he cites comments of Rabbeinu Nissim of Gerona (Rabbi Nissim ben Reuven (1320 - 1380, Hebrew: נסים בן ראובן) also known as RaN, in his Pirush on Torah, in which he defends Rashi against Ramban’s criticisms. The first one addresses the famous first Rashi in Chumash that quotes R. Yitzchak as asking why the Torah starts with Breishit. After all it is a book of laws rather than a history or philosophical treatise. Ramban is surprised by the question. He argues that the Torah has to tell us that God created the world because that is the basis of all our beliefs and anyone that does not accept it is a heretic.

Before I explain Ran’s answer it is necessary to understand Rambam’s position on this as it is the underlying argument in Ran’s exposition. As I have discussed many times in earlier posts and in my two articles in Hakirah, Rambam holds that there is only one thing that can be proven empirically in Jewish theology; the existence of God as the First Cause. By definition, once that is proven, His uniqueness, perfection and omnipotence are self-evident conclusions. Everything else that we as Jews believe about God, are ontological explanations based on revelation, the Torah and other theological considerations. That God has Will and that He willed existence and the universe at a certain time are not self-evident axioms. They are accepted by us because they fit our understanding of what revelation has taught us. The reason I say fit rather than saying revelations teaches us, is because Nevuah is an interpretable medium. Its use of language is flexible enough to allow it to be adapted to a broad range of ideas. The rule that governs how far we can interpret is quite simple; as long as the revelatory statement cannot be overturned by empirical evidence, it stands as is.

The fact that God is the First Cause of everything, that everything depends on His existence while His existence is totally independent of anything else, can be proven empirically without the need for revelation. That statement alone already forces us to accept His uniqueness, His singularity and thus His unknowability. In other words He is transcendent and nothing about Him, except the effects He caused, can be known. Man from time immemorial, in his quest for answers to his existential questions, has engaged in a search for this great unknowable entity that we call God. Revelation, a natural human capability that we learned with time how to use, teaches us that certain beliefs, ontological explanations, are helpful in that quest. That God has Will is the most fundamental and sine qua non of all religious experience. What we are saying is that for us to understand the existence we observe, had we been the ones who caused it to exist; we would have had to have willed it. As will to us is time dependent, at one time we had not yet willed what we are willing now, so too we say that God willed existence other than His own at a certain time. As God is perfect by definition, He exercised His will only one time. That allows us to accept that everything we experience is the result of that one time primordial Will that God exercised. Rambam makes this point very clear in MN 2:25:

“Know that with a belief in the creation of the world in time, all the miracles become possible and the law becomes possible, and all questions that may be asked on this subject, vanish. Thus it might be said: Why did God give prophetic revelation to this one and not to that? Why did God give this law to this particular nation, and why did He not legislate to the other? Why did He legislate at this particular time, and why did He not legislate before it or after? Why did He impose these commandments and these prohibitions? Why did He privilege the prophet with the miracles mentioned in relation to him and not with some others? What was God’s aim in giving this law? Why did He not, if such was His purpose, put the accomplishment of the commandments and the non-transgression of the prohibitions into our nature? The answer to all these questions would be: He wanted it this way; or His wisdom required it this way. And just as He brought the world into existence having the form it has, when He wanted to, without us knowing His will with regard to this or in what wisdom there was in His particularizing the forms of the world and the time of its creation- in the same way we do not know His will or the exigency of His wisdom that caused all the matters, about which questions have been posed above, to be particularized.”

When I say that God has Will is not empirically provable, I am saying that as the First Cause, we can understand God as an entity that is the underlying “concept” of the universe. He and the universe (existence) have eternally been there and will be so eternally. The idea that there is a First Cause is not a temporal statement; it is an explanation of how things exist. They have existed that way eternally. This understanding negates all religious experience as there is no possible relationship with such a God. What relationship can one have with an entity that has no will?

The idea that God having Will is the basis for all Jewish theological discourse is accepted by all the Rishonim. Their arguments are in its application in our analyses of our existence. When reading Rashi’s question, Ramban’s reaction was that once we accept that God has Will does it not include the belief that He created the world in time? Isn’t the belief that God created the world in time a necessary and fundamental idea that underlies the whole Torah and the laws it promulgates? Is it therefore not self-evident why the Torah introduces the idea of Creation before it proceeds to giving laws?

RaN in his Pirush on the Torah, excerpted in the above article, argues that we could accept eternal existence, that God is not the Creator; He can be seen as the First Cause, as long as we accept that He has Will. It is not necessary to assume that because He has Will he must have created. Will and Creation are not synonymous. Although there cannot be Creation without Will, there can be Will without Creation. As long as the Torah teaches us that God has Will and exercises it, the whole Torah makes sense. Rashi’s question is therefore why did the Torah choose to tell us that God has Will by telling us that He is the Creator? Why did it not find it sufficient to tell us this important idea starting with the Exodus? Why is the ontological understanding of that event not enough for the belief that God has Will and exercises it? Why is the Mitzvah of Hachodesh Hazeh Lachem which resulted from that experience not enough to teach that God has Will and exercises it?[1]

RaN then makes a very important statement. The fact that God created the world is not a dogma that we must accept on its own. As long as we accept that God has Will, the rest of the Torah would stand without a problem. An eternal uncreated universe does not negate Will to God. It therefore cannot be a dogma without which Judaism cannot stand. However once the Torah tells us that God did create the world in time, denying it makes one deny a statement in the Torah. That in itself is heresy.

This discussion gives us an insight of how RaN saw the Ikkarim and I believe is how Rambam saw them. They are not arbitrary stand-alone dogma. They are what Rambam understood to be fundamental ideas without which the rest of Jewish theology and practice have no meaning. When later Rishonim such as RaN followed by his pupils R. Hasdai ben Abraham Crescas (Hebrew: חסדאי קרשקש) (born in Barcelona, Catalonia c. 1340 - 1410/1411) and R. Yosef Albo (15th century Spain) argued against the Ikkarim, they were arguing that Judaism can be understood rationally with a smaller number of dogma. In other words they tried to show that the Torah can stand on its own independently of certain dogma. They were not denying the validity of the beliefs nor the fact that someone who does not believe in them is stepping outside the boundaries of Jewish theology. They just argued that if one does not accept several of Rambam’s Ikkarim the rest of Judaism does not crumble.




[1] This argument has implication on how we understand miracles. Rambam who does not see God exercising His Will all the time, just at Creation, sees the Exodus as the result of that original Will at Creation. Ramban and His school of thought see God exercising Will constantly. But this is a lengthy discussion for another time.