From The Mailbag: The Fins-and-Scales Proof

A reader named David sent me the following email:

Dear Wolf,


I wanted to sincerely tell you how much I appreciate your website, a good example of the way the Internet can be used for the good.


I also wanted to ask you about a particular point that you make in your "Torah proof" section.


I appreciate the work done, and I should say that I came to pretty much the same conclusions about those "proofs".


Except for the animal signs; you write that it doesn't stand as a valid proof of the veracity of the Torah, because Chazal could have guessed it right.


What you don't seem to see is that the argument is so strong because if their statements had been shown incorrect in the future, the entire credibility of Chazal – the belief in their inspired way of reading the Bible, and thus Judaism itself, would have crumbled.


Moreover, these assertions were unnecessary, they seem to have been made only to prove the validity of torah shebeal peh ; and, seriously, what were the chances that no one would ever find something in the water that has scales but doesn’t have fins ?


I may be wrong somewhere, but I don’t see it.


Kol Tuv,


David

David was following up on a post of mine regarding one of the proofs to the divinity of the Torah.  The proof that David is referring to goes something like this:

The Torah mentions that in order for a fish to be kosher, it must have fins and scales.  The Mishna in Niddah goes on to point out that all fish that have scales also have fins.  The halachic inference from this is that if you find a fish that has scales but no fins, it is kosher, because all fish that have scales have fins.  Thus, if you find a part of a fish with scales but no fins attached, you may eat it since it definitely had fins at some point (which may have been removed by a predator or some other agent).

The proof* then continues in a similar vein to the four-animals proof:  How could Chazal have made such a statement?  Were they ichthyologists who knew every species of fish on the planet?  Since they made this statement, and it has proven to be true to this day**, surely the information must have come from a Divine source (from He who knows all the species of fish on the planet).

I addressed this proof by stating that making accurate statements are not proof of divinity.  The Mishna's author could have simply extrapolated from the sample of fish species that they had at hand and created the general rule that all fish that have scales also have fins.  Anyone can do this... including you and I.

For example, I'm going to state right now that all stars (except collapsed, dead stars) perform nuclear fusion at their cores.  And now let's suppose that 10,000 years from now, someone digs this statement up and, lo and behold, the rule still holds true -- every star that was ever found was powered by nuclear fusion.  Now, let me state up front that I am not an astronomer.  There's no way I could have known that all the stars that are out there.  Does the fact that I made such an accurate statement make me divine?  Does it mean that my wonderfully accurate statement was of divine origin?  The answer, obviously, is no.  I simply extrapolated a general rule based on the sample of stars that we currently know about -- something that could have just as easily happened with regard to the Mishna in Niddah and fishes.

This brings us to the point of David's letter.  He counters this by stating as follows:

What you don't seem to see is that the argument is so strong because if their statements had been shown incorrect in the future, the entire credibility of Chazal – the belief in their inspired way of reading the Bible, and thus Judaism itself, would have crumbled.

But here David is making assumptions that are not in evidence.  He's assuming that the author of the Mishna  was concerned that their statement might have been disproven in the future.  However, there are several other possibilities.  Perhaps the author of the Mishna simply thought they were right and that they didn't entertain the possibility that they were wrong (as I did in my statement about the stars)?  Perhaps he never considered the possibility that, even if he was in error, that it would cause Judaism itself to crumble (I don't think it would, but that's another post for another time).  Perhaps they were simply trying to offer advice to people regarding kosher fish and didn't give any thought whatsoever to the broader implications of such a statement.  In short, David is begging-the-question.  He's starting with the assumption that the statement is of Divine origin and that the author of the Mishna was, in fact, making a proof to the divinity of the Torah.

The Wolf


*Technically speaking, this proof cannot be used to prove the divinity of the Torah, but rather the divinity of this one particular statement of the Mishna.  But let's leave that aside for now.

** Well, not really, but, for the sake of argument, let's say that it is 100% true today.