Evil gods and another question.

This is a forum for worshippers of idols?
The Torah is full of prohibitions against worshipping other gods and you ask “if necessary”?
Regarding psychopaths, there is a special law in the Torah that specifically precedes the punishment of this person even before he has even sinned, a rebellious and disobedient son. And you also ask whether someone like this should be punished after he has sinned?

Period,
This is not a forum.
There is no discussion here about idolatry.
A disobedient and disobedient son is not a psychopath.

Josphon,
Socrates asked in the dialogue Euthyphro whether (a) God commands actions because they are good, or (b) they are good because he commands, but this is a false dilemma. It imagines the good as part of a world of ideas that exists independently of God and in fact inserts it into some entity or being that logically precedes God and determines his knowledge, which is impossible. God perceives the ideas (including the good and the supreme) not as something objective that exists outside the perceiver and his knowledge depends on them, but because he perceives his essence, he also perceives everything that necessarily follows from his essence (the world of ideas, the laws of logic and mathematics, all possible worlds, etc.)

Therefore, there is justice in what Punt says. To worship a God who observes the world of ideas as something independent of him is idolatry, since such a God is not the first cause of reality. On the other hand, the Creator does not invent the idea of good at random, as Muslim theologians who decided on the second side of the above dilemma claimed (and against whom the Maimonides came out indignantly).

God cannot act contrary to his rational nature, or in other words, his action is perfect, for all his ways are from God's judgment to faith and there is no injustice. He is righteous and upright. However, this is not a question of his omnipotence, as some theologians thought, since from the beginning his omnipotence meant the ability to create any possible world. However, a state of affairs in which God acts contrary to his nature does not represent a possible world.

Copenhagen,
There is still an assumption here that his nature is imposed on him (which I agree with). That is, the status of the good does not depend on the decision/command of the Almighty (but on his nature). The question of whether he could have had a different nature is Josephus' question. If his nature is imposed on him, it means that his nature is something that preceded him (not necessarily chronologically). But this is really a discussion that is a bit difficult to conduct.

For Rabbi,
In my understanding, the very necessity that rules out a possible world in which God does not exist is the one for which it is impossible for God and the laws of mathematics and logic and the concepts of goodness that stem from His nature to be different from what they are. But I will have to “philosophize” a little to show this.

The question “could the nature of God be different” swallows up a possible distinction between the ’I’of God or His self’ and His nature, but in classical theistic thought (Duties of the Hearts, Rambam”Aquinas and others) this is a false distinction. What allows a distinction between the individuality of an object – or if we follow Aristotle, its matter – and its form is precisely what makes the object in principle amenable to cloning or duplication. From matter comes the principle of individuation, the particularity of the thing, due to which it is a matter of this specific entity and not another entity of the same species. Form, on the other hand, represents a principle that is subject to endless replication on its own. And indeed, every form that we know in nature that is clothed in matter is always in principle replicable (this is to be distinguished from the question of whether it follows from the laws of nature that someone by chance has or does not have the ability to do so).

The Rambam seems to have believed that immaterial objects such as angels do not have a Cartesian “I” or some other principle of individuation (such as Aristotelian matter) that is distinct from their essence, and therefore he argued at the beginning of the Foundations of the Torah that their essence must differ from one another according to the number of angels. In other words, each angel is identical to its form (each “*who* is* this angel” is identical to “*what* is* this angel”).

In our case, the claim is even stronger because in either case it has been proven by various evidence that there is no possible more than one necessary being. That is to say, there is no possible world in which the principle of individuation of the necessary being is realized in a different essence, or a possible world in which its essence is clothed in a different principle of individuation. God is identical with his form. The nature of God is God himself. And therefore it follows that it is inappropriate to speak of relations of precedence or tardiness between them.

The fact that the ideas arise necessarily and are therefore “forced” may, in my opinion, be misleading. For, as noted earlier, there is no other element in God that is distinct by nature, for which his nature appears as a prior given, and secondly, it is not a question of compulsion but of will: God, as it were, perceives his nature and knows that he represents the highest good in essence and immediately desires this and it is impossible to desire otherwise.

This was the serpent's cunning claim that God knows good and evil. And to avoid confusion in the meaning of this, we will have to translate Onkelos as קרברבין חכמים (see Nietzsche).
And against this background, we need to understand what is meant by “And God saw that it was good”, simply put, that good preceded God. Alternatively, we can be less specific about the matter, and say that in general, the Torah spoke in the language of humans. Or perhaps, it is good for humans.

But in truth, there is certainly nothing to talk about at all about the nature of God, and it is not appropriate at all to subject God to any intellectual, moral, rational, logical, or X-like laws or rules. Every God with a nature is a different God.

Copenhagen, that's interesting, you really think you're analyzing the nature of God, and that you're allowed to do so because you're talking in abstract terms.

In reality, you're just talking about yourself. About the ”I”. And with all due respect, I don't recognize your divinity.

Period,

On the contrary: what I argued is that the standard analysis *cannot* be applied – which distinguishes between an individual and his nature – to God, that it *cannot* be spoken of as having a prior or posterior relationship, that there is no possible world in which there is more than one God, and that it is incorrect to say that he could have been different from what he is.

What remains to be asked is, how exactly did you manage to deduce from the above that ”in practice I am only talking about myself”.

Copenhagen,
Even after these arguments, you ultimately assume something, which Josephus asked about. You assume that God is forced into a certain nature, but you explain that it is not a force in the usual sense because He and His nature are one. That does not matter. The question of whether He could have been different remains. You answer no, but your explanation is not an explanation but a repetition of your assumption in different words. Instead of saying that He cannot be different, you say that He cannot be defined as something else. But Josephus himself asked whether this is indeed the case.

As for your argument itself, I do not really understand it. I do not understand the meaning of the expression that He and His nature are one. The nature of something is its character. If He and His nature are one, then there is no nature but only He. Either way, it is an empty expression. In essence, you are saying that there is a nature that is forced upon Him and you are just presenting it in different words.
As for the angels, I am not sure that it is even possible to talk about their nature and about them. Some have defined angels as forms (as opposed to objects in our world that are form and matter). This brings us back to my first comment. When they say that He and His nature are one, they say that He is a form and not a being. But this is not clear to me, for in what sense can it be said that He exists and acts. The same is true of angels, of course.

To the Rabbi,

There were thinkers who claimed that the ”compulsion” on man to desire happiness is not a compulsion, is this a groundless claim?

The prophets say that God is bound by His promises, He cannot break them and He cannot change His mind. Theologians will explain that this stems from some necessity of the impossibility of doing evil, that it is the opposite of what is found necessary. What is the problem with this? In principle, it seems that if we have proven that we have reached logical necessity, this satisfies any need for additional causal explanations and paralyzes any rational possibility of further raising the question “why” – we have essentially reached the ultimate explanation.

The statement “He and His nature are one” Relies on the Aristotelian assumption that the nature of a thing is an actual *component* of the thing (and not some idea that the thing takes part in), even though it does not reflect the reality of the thing as a whole. The humanity of Socrates and Aristotle is an actual component in Socrates and Aristotle themselves, which is particularized through the various bodies in which it is realized and through their contingent private properties. If he and his nature are one, then what remains is only a self-actualizing nature without any other principles participating in it (or one could say that there is only an individual absolutely identical to his nature and there is no logical connection between them).

When looking at nature as an actual component of the whole thing, there is no problem in saying that there may be a limit case in which only nature exists without the addition of additional ontological aspects. As with angels as forms, the question of how they can exist and act is relevant only within the framework of Platonist metaphysics, but not with regard to Aristotelian metaphysics, which sees form as a real component in the existence of concrete objects with causal action capabilities.

Regarding coercion for something I would have done anyway, this is a dispute between the first and the last. See Banzi”t a’ ‘rape’. But for me it is a semantic question (depending on whether you define rape as coercion to do something I would not have done or as the application of coercion and that is it).

There is no problem with it being coerced by what is in its nature. I agree with that myself. It is also coerced by the laws of logic.

It is not for nothing that in Aristotelian metaphysics there are no ideas (they are not applicable but perhaps categories).