Q&A: Free Divine Will
Free Divine Will
Question
The initial divine will, which preceded everything, is arbitrary and beyond any reason or purpose, and therefore it seems impossible to relate to it.
The fixed laws of nature in the world, the fixed attributes through which God was revealed in the Hebrew Bible, and also the eternal laws of the Torah that He brought down into the world, seemingly incline God toward necessary conduct, even if we do not always understand it. Such necessity becomes even stronger in Kabbalistic discussion of metaphysical lawfulness and higher powers.
So in what sense can God be regarded as having free will and choice? Or is it actually more correct to relate to Him as a kind of mechanism, a something and not a someone?
Answer
Even if you are right, He freely chose to create a deterministic world. Beyond that, there have been divine interventions in reality: miracles are violations of the laws. Before the giving of the Torah, there were no laws of the Torah. Etc.
Discussion on Answer
Thank you for the answer, but things are still not clear to me.
The divine interventions in the world are seemingly not really free. The miracles violated the laws of nature, but implemented fixed and perfect divine attributes. The laws of the Torah, assuming they have an autonomous meaning that is good and correct in relation to the nature of the world, are also not a real innovation. They appeared when the time and humanity were fit for them, but existed beforehand, just as the laws of nature also existed before they were revealed to man.
Only the initial act of creation remains free, but because it precedes all reason and purpose, it is not clear to me how one can relate to it at all as God. In what sense is He rational if He is not bound by any logic? Even the meaning of His will is unlike the meaning familiar to us, as free choice between given options, and it seems that this is a matter of completely blind and arbitrary randomness.
So where is there still room for God as a someone, between the blind arbitrariness of creating the world and the natural-moral necessity of the world?
I really do not understand the question. I answered that at the moment of creation and in all His interventions since then (and His involvement too is the product of His choice and decision). And perhaps He does other things about which I have no idea.
Rabbi, the point is that if you claim that the primary cause acted randomly, you run into the problem from column 144 about the physico-theological proof (and you cannot assume that the probability that the primary cause would create a world is 1, but only epsilon).
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On the other hand, the question arises, which the ancients once raised on the site against determinism in a cosmological form, that then you run into an infinite regress. Likewise, it is not plausible that a completely deterministic cause would create beings with free choice.
In any case, in my opinion what the questioner is writing is something like what the Rabbi famously distinguished at length between an action of the type of picking and choosing; and if so, God was "free" most of all, or perhaps even before He established moral values and values in general. How then could He create an action of the type of choosing? Like the extended discussion about the rabbinic man and the sovereign man, and "the servant of God alone is free"!
As for the question whether God is a something or a someone, I touched on that in the notebooks (in the first book of the trilogy). There I argued that a primary entity that explains creation has to be a "someone" (intelligent and possessed of will).