Q&A: Several Questions About the First and Second Books in the Trilogy
Several Questions About the First and Second Books in the Trilogy
Question
Hello, our dear Rabbi, a few questions and thoughts (I’m in the middle of the second book of the trilogy)
- In your book you repeat the mantra, “Any divine intervention in nature is a miracle,” and that nature is deterministic, so God cannot enter the picture. But there is another kind of intervention, and that is in human decisions. The Holy One, blessed be He, can manage our interactions with nature according to His considerations (reward and punishment and other considerations). If, for example, a plane is going to crash, and the Holy One, blessed be He, who we already agreed is involved in our consciousness—otherwise the concept of repentance would not exist, because how can a person decide to change his values—decides that for His own reasons this person should continue living, He can cause the person to take the next flight.
- You write that you have no reason to assume from the outset that there is individual providence over human beings, and so you see no need to try to reconcile the words of the Sages on the matter of individual providence. But if the Holy One, blessed be He, left human fate to nature and to the decisions of created beings, then that is cruelty on His part. And we would expect the Holy One, blessed be He, to meet the moral standard reflected in the idea of morality that He created in His world. If a person lost his son in a car accident not because of a justified decision by the Holy One, blessed be He, but just like that, for natural reasons, then that person now has moral claims against God (even if the intention is to compensate him in the World to Come), and that is not coherent with the morality He created in the world. Why is such a consideration not sufficient in your view (at least as much as the consideration that says that if the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world, we would expect there to be revelation to His creatures)?
- I categorically oppose the term “service of God.” I think the only justified reason for accepting the yoke of Torah and commandments should be the good of created beings; otherwise the Holy One, blessed be He, is not moral. Even if I discover in the World to Come that one must keep the commandments, I will not be able to call those commandments “service of God,” because their purpose is not God’s good (at least that is not their exclusive purpose). Just as a person who brings a child into the world in order to enslave him is not moral at all, so too that would be the case with God and created beings—and that cannot be so in our world, because God created morality. I want to believe that the framing of Torah and the commandments as service of God in the Torah and the Prophets came as a reaction to idolatry, which then ruled the world, in the spirit of “These trust in chariots and these in horses, but we invoke the name of the Lord our God,” similar to Maimonides’ reason for sacrifices. What do you think?
Answer
Greetings to the gentleman, master of mantras, may he live long.
- This question has been asked here more than once. The Holy One, blessed be He, can also intervene in nature itself if He wants. But we see that He does not intervene, and from this it appears that He probably does not want to. By the same token, we see that He does not intervene in a person’s decisions. A person acts freely (at least one who is not a determinist assumes that a person acts freely, and that neither nature nor Heaven intervenes for him). Therefore I do not see any gain in the intervention mechanism you proposed (through human choices instead of through nature).
- This is not cruelty. There are reasons of its own for the setting of the laws of nature, and as part of that, unpleasant outcomes also occur. Those reasons justify the unpleasant outcomes, just as in surgery the result justifies the pain. Granted, one may ask why not make a nature that brings about the same results without the accompanying unpleasant outcomes, and to that I answered that in my view there is no such logical possibility. The laws of nature that govern our world also necessitate the accompanying outcomes. That is a logical constraint. True, the Holy One, blessed be He, can intervene every time there is a bad outcome, but then de facto there are no laws of nature here, and that is not a state of affairs He wants. But beyond all that, completely apart from my own claim: how do you, as someone who believes that He does intervene, explain the evil in the world? Does that not indicate His cruelty? I added nothing to what is already known from the facts. I only said we should not ignore them. That is all. It has no connection to the consideration about revelation. First, because there I have no indication that there was no revelation. And second, because even a priori there is no reason not to reveal Himself, but there is a reason not to intervene in nature.
- The author’s speech. I was glad to read your position, but of course I do not agree with it.
Discussion on Answer
I explained it. The freedom given to us is also His decision.
Michi,
I can’t manage to understand the logic of your claim that “the laws of nature that govern our world also necessitate the accompanying outcomes. That is a logical constraint.”
Aren’t you distinguishing between logical and a priori lawfulness (necessary) and laws of nature derived from empirical reality?
Can you demonstrate for me how this works, for example, with respect to time? The arrow of time, for instance, is not a logical necessity, as Kant showed convincingly, but rather an a priori epistemic necessity. Therefore we can think of it (and probably also imagine it) as flowing backward, even though we will never encounter such a thing in nature. Wouldn’t such a change in the direction of the flow require a dramatic change in the physical lawfulness familiar to us? And if it is logically possible, then it is not “forced” on God, as you say.
I didn’t write that the laws of nature are a logical necessity. I wrote that if these are the laws of nature, then the accompanying outcomes are a logical necessity.
So according to your view, God can create whatever laws of nature He wants, so long as they do not contradict the laws of logic?
Indeed.
“Granted, one may ask why not make a nature that brings about the same results without the accompanying unpleasant outcomes, and to that I answered that in my view there is no such logical possibility. The laws of nature that govern our world also necessitate the accompanying outcomes. That is a logical constraint.”
Is it reasonable that out of infinitely many possibilities, our world is the most pleasant result?
Certainly. So go ahead and wonder. But as for the matter itself, nobody said these are the most pleasant laws of nature. So before wondering, It's worth reading again..
In light of your explanation, I think even more than before that Oren’s criticism of your position is basically correct. Your God is too cruel relative to what we would expect from His definition (including yours).
Even if it is true that from given laws of nature certain outcomes follow logically (and there is still room to discuss the question of how fine-grained a resolution you are going down to here), it would still be expected that God create different and more comfortable laws of nature.
As you yourself answered me, as long as there is no real logical impediment, from our limited point of view there is justification for doing so.
Since in practice this apparently was not done, an explanation is called for. One can assume that God nevertheless has hidden reasons that perhaps we cannot even estimate. That, in my understanding, is the reasonable explanation. By contrast, your explanation is that there are no such reasons—that is, God acts arbitrarily.
??
This is a question that stems from misunderstanding.
“Doron” could not have lived in a different place, at a different time, much less in a different universe. “Doron” is that same person who was born at that time in that place and grew up in a certain environment.
Had one of those things changed at the very early stages, then it would already be someone else. Proof? The rest of humanity are not Doron.
So to ask about other universes and why we do not live in one of them stems from misunderstanding.
In other words, a given person is the collection of his traits; he could not have been with a different collection of traits. Because then it would already have been somebody else, whereas the question is about this specific person.
Doron, I didn’t reply because everything had already been answered. You are putting words in my mouth that I didn’t say, and presenting things I did say as though I hadn’t said them. I wrote that He probably has reasons why the laws of nature are as they are. You yourself write that from your standpoint this is a sufficient explanation, so what here still requires explanation?
Thank you for the clear and prompt answers, as usual
2. “Those reasons justify the unpleasant outcomes, just as in surgery the result justifies the pain” — surgery justifies the pain only if surgery is the only option. If there is a more pleasant option, surgery is not moral. Indeed, I agree that it is not possible to create a different, more convenient nature, because that is not logically possible, as you wrote. But one can still ask: why not leave nature as it is, and at the same time manage our interactions with it through our consciousness? That is a completely logical possibility, and you yourself already innovated that the Holy One, blessed be He, is involved in the consciousness of created beings in order to make possible the concept of repentance. In choosing between the two possibilities—leaving our fate to nature or managing our interactions with nature—the more moral option is the second. As for your question, how do I explain the evil in the world—I don’t know. I am only trying to clear the Holy One, blessed be He, of moral blame as much as possible by explaining that every bad thing happens because the Holy One, blessed be He, specifically decided on it for His own reasons, as would be expected of a righteous judge who sits in judgment and goes into the details of every case brought before him before issuing his verdict. Indeed, you did not add anything to the known facts, but it seems that the interpretation you chose to give them (that the Holy One, blessed be He, has left the earth) is not coherent with the morality of the Holy One, blessed be He. It makes more sense to think that the Holy One, blessed be He, chooses to do evil because He has reasons for it, and not because He chooses not to intervene (and, as stated, nature does not prevent Him from intervening, because He can let nature continue on its way and cause a person to be protected from it)
3. Could you spell out where you think my error lies?