Q&A: God as a Causal Agent
God as a Causal Agent
Question
Hello, Rabbi. I saw the debate and didn’t quite understand whether one can distinguish between belief in God as a causal agent in itself and clarifying the concept of divinity. That is—if one defines the Creator as knowing everything that will happen in the future, that comes out as pantheism, which is not essentially different from atheism (as you noted there). If one defines the Creator as not knowing what will happen in the future, there are two possibilities: a) the Creator is not “God” in the simple sense, since He has the deficiency of not knowing. b) the Creator gave man free choice, and therefore this is not a deficiency (as the Rabbi wrote in his book No Man Rules the Spirit). Obviously, if one says according to option b, that is based on the fact that man is commanded to fulfill the command of the Creator (as you noted there). In short—if one assumes that the Creator is a causal agent, one is implicitly assuming an obligation to the Creator’s command. What do you think?
Thank you. Shabbat shalom
Answer
How did you jump from foreknowledge to pantheism? Regarding the connection between His knowledge and free will, there is a series of columns of mine here on the site. You can search for “knowledge and choice.”
Discussion on Answer
And this strange bit of pilpul brings you to pantheism? If I know something will happen, does that make that thing me?
Maybe one has to distinguish between human knowledge and the Creator’s knowledge: human knowledge is not a sign that the thing is “me,” but divine knowledge is different because of the unity of attributes with respect to the Creator (and in the language of Aristotle and Maimonides, “He is the knowledge, He is the knower, and He is the known”). And specifically regarding divine knowledge, the assumption that the Creator’s knowledge includes the future means a reality whose necessity derives from the Creator’s knowledge, so that there is no contingent event in reality, and Spinoza’s assumption is upheld that “whatever exists—exists in God”?
And now everything is just fine. After a piece of pilpul that doesn’t hold water, with odd distinctions and bizarre differentiations, you managed to raise a difficulty. You just needed to open with the immortal introduction: “And one may press the objection with difficulty.”
Isn’t knowledge of the future an expression of a prior necessity of everything that happens in creation, such that everything that occurs is an act of God, and de facto nature and human actions are part of divinity?