Reply To: torah, bechira, choice

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yitayningwut
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gavra_at_work –

I do not believe the Rambam had any of these explanations in mind. This seems clear from the countless times he says that we cannot possibly comprehend God’s essence. We can only truly speak of negative attributes, not positive ones. Not even the “possibility” of positive attributes.

One of many examples:

We must blame the philosophers in this respect more than any other persons, because they demonstrated that there is no plurality in God, and that He has no attribute that is not identical with His essence; His knowledge and His essence are one and the same thing; they likewise demonstrated, as we have shown, that our intellect and our knowledge are insufficient to comprehend the true idea of His essence. How then can they imagine that they comprehend His knowledge, which is identical with His essence; seeing that our incapacity to comprehend His essence prevents us from understanding the way how He knows objects? For His knowledge is not of the same kind as ours, but totally different from it and admitting of no analogy. And as there is an Essence of independent existence, which is, as the philosophers, call it, the Cause of the existence of all things, or, as we say, the Creator of everything that exists beside Him, so we also assume that this Essence knows everything, that nothing whatever of all that exists is hidden from it, and that the knowledge attributed to this essence has nothing in common with our knowledge, just as that essence is in no way like our essence. – Guide 3:20

Italics are mine.

By saying any explanation whatsoever, even if you admit that you cannot visualize it, you are acknowledging that there is an explanation for the coexistence of God’s knowledge and our free will, when in fact it is impossible to correctly say that God has what we call knowledge.

By the way, the Rambam in the YaD is a short version of what he explains at length in the Guide.