About God, and reward and punishment
Hello Rabbi, two questions:
- I watched your series “Faith” on YouTube (I admit not all 50 hours, but I watched it) and in the fifth and final step you say that if we saw that there is a God who created the world and designed it and expects moral behavior, etc., then apparently He is also supposed to be revealed (sort of, I assume you have some misunderstandings about my wording). But I didn’t understand one thing – in the previous parts you showed each of the arguments and you showed one of them proving or at least giving a very reasonable indication of the existence of God, when each argument defines Him differently (the cosmological as “first cause – creator” and the moral as “validating morality,” for example). But how do you reconcile them? How do you know that the Creator is the same entity that expects moral behavior? Etc. It is possible that you answered this and I didn’t notice.
- I saw an interesting argument for proving rewards and punishment and I wanted to know what you think about it:
First premise: Destroying the world is immoral (thought experiment – if you were given a button that, when pressed, would destroy all of reality, would you press it? Of course not)
Second premise: A world without justice (i.e. reward and punishment) is worthy of destruction. A world where everything goes to one place and the righteous perish with the wicked (without continuation) is worthy of destruction.
Assuming and agreeing with these two assumptions (and at least I completely agree with them), it follows that in this world there is justice, there is reward and punishment. And since we see that it does not exist, or at least not all of it, in this world, then there will be it in the next world (or in the future).
And don’t say that the only reason I won’t destroy the world is because I rely on the chance that there is reward and punishment (right now I don’t know), a. Because it’s equivalent to saying that there is justice for sure but not perfect, and b. Because the “emptiness” is indeed just and therefore is preferable to a world that might be just.
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