Evidence from morality
Greetings to Rabbi Michi,
I was thinking about proof of God’s existence from morality:
1. Morality is ancient, has always existed (moral objectivism).
2. Morality talks about humans (because a frog swallowing a mosquito is morally neutral).
3. Humans were created after morality already existed.
Hence:
Morality spoke about man even before they were created.
Does morality know the future? The conclusion from this is one of two things: either morality is an omniscient personal being (God as the idea of good) or it was created by someone who knew the future would happen.
What does the rabbi think about this?
Thank you very much and have a nice day.
Discover more from הרב מיכאל אברהם
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Discover more from הרב מיכאל אברהם
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Thank you very much for your response!
The rabbi said: “Morality is such that if there were creatures like humans, it would oblige them”. So, morality is not dependent on a particular time; even if there had been a planet of human beings a hundred trillion years ago, morality would oblige them. Therefore, morality is as ancient as mathematics and logic.
And I would be happy to clarify the sentence “It is not necessary to assume that morality exists”. I am not sure I understood it. After all, we assume that morality does not depend on our feelings.
Just like logic. Therefore it does not necessarily exist. The laws of logic are also always valid but do not “exist”. Search here on the site for a distinction between the laws of logic and other systems of laws.
As for the comparison with morality, see column 457.
If morality does not exist, why should I assume that God created it or gave it validity?
And with your permission, I would like to clarify my point:
Mathematics is true even without the existence of objects to which it applies: 4=2+2 is true even before the world was created. Mathematics is simply indifferent to the objects to which it applies!
Therefore, I have no problem with the fact that mathematics existed before the objects that I can count, because they came later.
On the other hand, the statement that ”It is forbidden to murder a person” is meaningless before man was on earth. And since we assume that morality preceded man (whether he is an ancestor or not), then there is here ”knowledge” of the future to be created.
Even if morality does not exist, it is not necessary to create it, but it is necessary to give it validity. I referred you to column 457.
The statement that if there is life, it has value does not depend on the existence of life. Just like logic.
And yet, to say "if there is life, it has value," I must first know what life is, even if it doesn't actually exist.
Mathematics states that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180, and for this you don't need to know what a triangle is. The mathematical rules exist regardless and independent of this.
Why don't you need to know what a triangle is? How is a triangle different from a circle and a square, whose angles sum to 360? Without a triangle, there is no sum of the angles of a triangle.
The sum of the angles in a triangle is a result of the axioms of geometry alone. They do not require knowing what a triangle is. As soon as triangles were invented, it follows that the sum of the angles in them is 180. The same applies to the value of life and the rules of morality.
Interesting. Thank you very much and good luck!
Leave a Reply
Please login or Register to submit your answer
