Q&A: Free Choice and an Atheist
Free Choice and an Atheist
Question
With God's help,
Hello Rabbi,
You usually want to say that there is no moral atheist, but I wanted to ask whether an atheist who feels that he has free choice is coherent. After all, the concept of choice is created in the intermediate state between the desire to follow value X and the nature or some other factor that drags one to go with act Y. And as Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto wrote, and as you write, a servant of God alone is free.
So I wanted to ask whether one can derive belief in the existence of external values (and perhaps from there also belief in God by way of the moral argument) from belief in free choice, even for someone who verbally denies morality.
I think there is not a complete identity between the two things, because he can admit that perhaps we have the ability to act by choice on the potential level, but that it is never actualized, because we are always dragged after our urges. But if so, it is not clear why he assumes this ontological assumption about the existence of a capacity for choice that has never been exercised…
Because I don’t recall seeing you write this explicitly in one of the notebooks.
Answer
I’m not sure I understood the question. On the philosophical level, it is hard for me to accept an atheist with values. Clearly in practice there are such people, and therefore in my opinion they are covert believers (or unconscious ones).
Values are not a condition for choice, but without values choice has no meaning or importance (the Switzerland model that I usually use).
Therefore, there can be choice even in an atheistic world, but it will have no meaning. And perhaps that itself is what you wrote about a choice that was never exercised (I didn’t fully understand).
Discussion on Answer
Do you accept that there is a good atheist and a bad atheist? That there is a good religious person and a bad religious person?
What does belief have to do with values?
There is a good religious person and a bad one. In the case of an atheist there is good behavior, but not values. A moral atheist is inconsistent. I explained this in the fourth notebook (the fourth conversation in my book The First Existent), part 3.
The notebook won’t open for me. I don’t know what you wrote, but I don’t understand why.
A moral atheist is moral because he upholds life.
You can see this as a “command” of being, if we were to say that it has a will.
Or love of God in the sense of nature.
Thank you. I meant that if choice was never exercised, then how does he know that he has choice? From the standpoint of Occam’s razor, it would be preferable not to accept that. But I just thought of several objections to the proof:
A. Choice without meaning (Switzerland) is not really choice according to your view, right? It is somewhere between randomness and picking. So this still is not a refutation.
B. If an atheist lives with the conception that he has values and that this has nothing to do with God, can he choose? Seemingly yes. Then the proof falls.
C. But let us suppose that after reading your book he decided to abandon objective morality and began to accept morality as an unwritten social convention. But deep down he relates to that convention as not arbitrary at all, but as “objective” (though of course from an ideological-ontological standpoint it is subjective, so as not, God forbid, to be a believer… 🙂 ). Does this still count as his being able to actualize choice? Seemingly yes, even though it’s a bit messy.
D. Can the atheist rely on a believing person who, in his view, has objective values, and that believing person claims that he has free choice, and outwardly also appears to struggle with the evil inclination and transgressions? On the other hand, he can press much harder on weakness of will and so on, but would it be correct for him to bring proof from the religious person and believe in his own potential for free choice?
A-C. It was exercised, because he has values. But my claim is that this means that such a person is not an atheist but an unconscious believer. And indeed such a person chooses in the full sense.
D. The proof from the believer is dubious. He can attribute the believer’s feeling to an illusion, just as belief in God is an illusion in his eyes. There is certainly no proof here.
Okay, thank you very much. Indeed, if so, the proof is problematic, even if it can be a nice fork, and an auxiliary consideration.
Just regarding A: I didn’t understand why that is choice, since in Switzerland seemingly there is no choice at all, right? Picking with RP etc.
Choice does not require RP. Choice is the potential that if RP arises, one can overcome it and impose a veto on it.
A lot of the time this is confusion between the concept of value and the concept of emotion. Nowadays they also define the desire to help a person one loves (as a close friend or family member) as a value… even though most of the time it isn’t a value at all but just a natural sense of belonging.
K