Q&A: God Compared to a Parent
God Compared to a Parent
Question
The assumption that the fact that God created the laws of nature that led to the creation of animals and human beings means that He necessarily also wants halakhic commandments from man is the logical leap that is hardest for me in your logical-philosophical line of thought, and I wanted to suggest another possibility and hear your opinion.
In one of the lectures, I think on the topic of why one should fulfill God’s will, you yourself argue that this can be compared to the presumption of parents over their children, or of an artist who has copyright over a song. Precisely in these two examples, the purpose is different from the conclusion you reached.
Parents usually “create” their children out of the most basic desire that their children be happy. True, there is also the parent’s thought that when he is old, the children will be able to help him, but to my mind that is not the primary reason parents bring children into the world.
What if God created us so that we would be as happy as we can? Why assume that He gave us morality in order to give further commandments afterward, and not assume that He gave morality as a social tool that would lead us to happiness?
All of our drive to try to enjoy life and be happy, and to make other people happy too, and to rejoice when we see other people happy, seems to me stronger and more deeply built-in than following commandments whose purpose is unclear to us.
It seems more logical to me that being happy and making other people happy also brings happiness to the Holy One, blessed be He, more than wrapping animal skin on the arm for an unclear reason. Between these two possibilities, I would prefer to choose the stronger and clearer intuition.
Answer
A parent who creates his child so that the child will be happy is an idiot. Don’t create him, and he won’t need to be happy.
Discussion on Answer
In short, you want children and you also want them to be happy. That is, the goal is not their happiness but first of all their very existence. That’s it. I’ve exhausted the point.
That is if you understand the goal as “all my children will be happy,” something that would be fulfilled in the best possible way if their number were 0.
But vacuous fulfillment, in our intuition, is not fulfillment (there’s a reason first-year students in discrete mathematics get annoyed by that concept). I don’t want the statement “all my children are happy” to be vacuously true; I want it to apply to real children in reality, and for that, well, you have to create them.
In the same way, one could say that God’s purpose is an increase of happiness in the world, subject to the fact that there is value (imposed on Him or not? See your column there, there) in its being created through free choice. If there are no creatures, there is no happiness.