Q&A: God and the Good
God and the Good
Question
I have 2 questions for the Rabbi:
- I wasn’t able to understand why you argue that a moral atheist is inconsistent. After all, even on your view the basis of moral obligation has to rest on some axiom (for example, God’s legislative authority), and he would maintain that moral obligation (according to the realist conception) is axiomatic even without reference to the status of a legislator. True, in your view it may be conceptually mistaken to speak about the validity of a law without a legislator, but I don’t understand why that makes it inconsistent or unable to stand up to logical scrutiny.
- The Rabbi bases God’s legislative authority on what he calls ontological gratitude. In the Rabbi’s view, is this gratitude based on the assumption of God’s free choice? After all, the Rabbi has emphasized in several places that without assuming a concept of free choice, the value of the agent’s action disappears. If so, then do we have any reason to feel gratitude toward God if this was forced on Him to begin with (even according to the perfection-based view that you hold)? And if so, where do we get this assumption that He indeed acts freely?
Answer
1. He accepts a law upon himself but does not accept the existence of a legislator. Since a law without a legislator is an error, as you wrote, there is a contradiction here. Of course, if you adopt a baseless assumption, you can construct a foolish framework here that is still logically consistent. That isn’t very interesting.
2. I don’t know about His freedom of choice. I am too small for that. It is quite clear that He has the freedom to do whatever He wants, even without proofs. I’m not sure whether He has a choice regarding the creation of man (perhaps that is a necessary result of His being perfect—see Column 170). But even if He has no choice, there still isn’t something or someone else who decided it in His place. At most, it is a product of His “nature” (to the extent that one can even speak that way). And as stated, if He created me, then He has a right over me.
Discussion on Answer
This is not a right that He receives, nor credit that is due to Him. Otherwise you arrive at ordinary moral gratitude. I am speaking about ontic gratitude, detached from any credit due to someone.
1. I simply got the impression from your formulations on this issue that unlike the question of God as creator, where you said that it is simply irrational to think that a complex system comes into being on its own, but it is still a tenable position if one does not accept that assumption—in the matter of morality, the atheist necessarily has to include the concept of God if he wants to speak about its validity. Meaning, there is a conceptual contradiction between atheism and moral obligation. But if your intention is as in the cosmological and physico-theological arguments, then fine.
2. Why should He acquire a right over me if it was forced on Him? After all, with regard to human beings, one does not grant them moral credit for actions that are forced upon them.