Q&A: Clarifying the Existence of God
Clarifying the Existence of God
Question
I have a hard time understanding why, on the one hand, God accompanies me regarding religious values (and probably moral ones), while on the other hand He does not make it clear to me that He exists and that He expects me to uphold them.
What is the advantage of it not being clear to me with 100% certainty that God exists? And that perhaps I am not really commanded?
Isn’t this itself a difficulty for the very claim that God does in fact command?
In other words, the difficulty can be formulated as follows: if God cares what you do and what you do not do, then at the very least He would make that clear to you.
Answer
There is a difficulty here, although quite a weak one. Perhaps if there were no good considerations in favor of His existence, I would take it more seriously.
Discussion on Answer
Apparently an essential part of a person’s purpose in this world is the very search for the hidden and unclear truth, and not only acting in accordance with it. It’s similar to a challenge in which part of the effort is finding the task, in addition to carrying it out.
I don’t know why God set it up this way, but it seems much more reasonable to me that this is the reality than to conclude that there are no values or purpose at all.
Moses,
if there were something important to you that someone should do, you would make clear to him what the details of the task are, and that it matters to you that the task be carried out. Especially if this is the most important task there is, for which he came into the world.
It’s true that there are very strong arguments for the existence of God (and somewhat less strong arguments that He expects us to keep commandments), but the lack of clarification seems to me the opposite of logic.
Since the purpose of the world is our choosing the good, when there is also another side to the choice, it makes sense that He hides Himself in order to increase our freedom of choice.
It’s not at all clear to me what you mean.
God makes clear what He expects—after that I choose.
Actually, the opposite: today there are people who have no choice because they do not even know what God expects of them. Clarification is דווקא what gives everyone a choice. It would be clear to everyone exactly what needs to be done; the question would be who succeeds, and does so consistently.
Jonathan,
Because I struggled with the question presented here, I reached the conclusion that the main task is not its performance but the investment of will, time, and effort on the way to it. That makes sense in light of the fact that God does not need the tasks to be performed at all, and the whole purpose of performing them is the challenge, so apparently a central part of the challenge is the search for the task.
This approach is expressed in the words of the midrash: “What difference does it make to the Holy One, blessed be He, whether one slaughters from the neck or whether one slaughters from the back of the neck? Rather, the commandments were given only in order to refine people through them.”
It’s still not clear.
Let God make it clear, and then test all the will and effort in the world. Why expect so much from me and leave me in uncertainty? And moreover, what is the connection between effort in the commandments and the uncertainty about the very binding nature of the obligation itself?
If God made it clear, I (and in my opinion many other good and serious people as well) would make much more effort.
Has the Rabbi found a way to weaken the argument?
Usually people answer this with, “we don’t know God’s ways,” but in my view that isn’t really a weakening at all, because it basically just means, “I don’t know.”
And another question: is the assessment of this argument as “quite weak” based on intuition and gut feeling? Because this difficulty bothers me a bit more.