[Avodah] how do you teach emuna?

[Yosef Gavriel Bechhofer via Avodah]

Is Avodah a kiruv forum or a high level Torah discussion group? I was 
not addressing how one approaches a questioner. I was making a statement 
for internal consumption.

KT,

YGB


On 8/8/2016 9:50 AM, Marty Bluke via Avodah wrote:
> This is exactly the kind of thinking that R' Benovitz was talking 
> about. When you make absolute statements like "there are no cogent 
> arguments against intelligent design" it can easily have the reverse 
> effect and turn people off. Imagine the following. Someone comes to 
> you and asks how does Judaism deal with evolution etc. and you answer 
> intelligent design and explain it. He asked a question you answered 
> it, great. He may accept your answer he may not, but at least he will 
> see that you addressed his question in a reasonable manner and gave 
> him an answer. However, if you take that extra step of adding on an 
> absolute statement like "there are no cogent arguments against 
> intelligent design", it will probably backfire. 5 minutes after your 
> conversation he will google "arguments against intelligent design" and 
> he will see that there are over 2.5 million results. Just from that 
> alone he may conclude that since you stated definitively that there 
> are no cogent arguments against it and google provides 2.5 million 
> results that you are wrong and not trustworthy. Even if he actually 
> reads some of the results, he will probably find arguments that at 
> least at first glance seem like cogent arguments and will again 
> conclude that you are not trustworthy and are deceiving him and that 
> Judaism has no real answers. So your absolute statement which you used 
> to show how strongly you believe in something will turn out to be 
> cause of his not believing you.
>

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