Absoluteness with God
Hello there. I’m pretty convinced that the world has a creator-planner and I’m not a materialist either. But I don’t know how to proceed from here:
Let’s say the designer created me for a specific purpose. What makes it “real” so that it is now truly my purpose and not just a goal that my creator wants me to do? After all, a robot doesn’t “have to” do what its creator says. What makes me “have to” do what the Creator wants?
The same goes for good and evil. If in God’s eyes one thing is good and the other is bad, what makes it really good and bad? And what if in God’s eyes what he thinks is good is bad and vice versa?
In short, the question is what makes the Creator of the world a conceptual and moral fulcrum, and in fact: can there even be such a fulcrum by definition? After all, things like good, evil, and purpose are in someone’s eyes and cannot float around in a vacuum. What makes this someone capable of determining that this is the situation objectively and not just in his eyes?
Thank you very much.
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So killing Amalek is good because that is how God arbitrarily determined, since there is no true good. God decides and this will be the new good, even if it hurts, will it be considered good?
In fact, the concept of good is being emptied?
Absolutely not. If God decreed that Amalek should be killed, then he should be killed because that is what is right. But that does not mean that this is the moral good. The Torah has additional values beyond moral values, and it demands that we uphold all of them (as much as possible). See column 15.
If you want details, I have a series of video lessons on Torah and morality and you can see a well-organized Mishnah there.
So the good comes before God?
This is Euthyphro's dilemma. I tend to think that goodness is like logic. It is imposed on God in the sense that he cannot decide that something else is good. But the validity of goodness stems from the commitment to a divine command.
What does it mean that goodness is forced upon God?
1. Does it mean that His essence is forced upon Him. For example, His being is one or His very existence. That this is not given to Him to choose. And according to this, He could equally have a will to evil and we would define evil as good?
2. Or that by the very desire to be good He forces Himself on the side of goodness, but goodness as an absolute value also exists without Him?
I explained that it is like logic. Good is defined as a benefit to another. God cannot determine that killing is good because killing is bad. This is the definition of good. Just as He cannot determine -2+3=8 or that the sum of the angles in a triangle will be 254 degrees.
I have explained here more than once that submission to the laws of logic is not really submission, since the laws of logic are not really laws.
See for example here: https://mikyab.net/%D7%9B%D7%AA%D7%91%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%9E%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%94%D7%90%D7%9D-%D7%90%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%94 -%D7%91%D7%A1%D7%AA%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%92%D7%99 %D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%99%D7%90-%D7%90%D7%A4%D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%AA1
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