A Reply to Dennis Prager |
The Laws of God’s Universe Do Not Require a Belief in Him to Save a Stranger
What follows is adapted from the first chapter of my treatise, The OR Axiom, at https://zviosterweil.substack.com/p/the-ohr-axiom
Dennis Prager, in his book If There Is No God, poses a thought experiment that cuts to the heart of how we ground moral intuition.
Your beloved dog and a stranger you have never met are both drowning. You can save only one. Whom do you save?
Most people will say the stranger. At least, most people used to. Prager contends that the moral relativism of this generation has eroded even that clarity. Yet those who maintain moral clarity still cannot explain why. You love the dog. You have years of shared life, loyalty, devotion. You have no emotional connection to the stranger. If morality is grounded in feeling, the dog wins every time. And yet something deep in virtually every human being insists that the stranger’s life takes moral priority. Prager’s contention is that this intuition has no secular foundation—that without God’s declaration of human sanctity, in His likeness, there is no objective basis for placing human life above animal life.
I will argue that he is not—and that the answer, when it comes, will be grounded not in faith but in the structure of reality itself. But to get there, we need to understand something about how that reality is built.
The universe changes because energy is not spread evenly. Wherever there is a concentration of energy on one side and relative emptiness on the other, something can happen. Heat moves. Pressure equalizes. Motion slows.
But with every such flow of energy, there is a price—structure decays. An ice cube on a table does not become more defined, more itself. It melts. Its edges soften, its structure dissolves, its contrast with the surrounding air is steadily erased. This is not just energy dispersing. It is a thing ceasing to be a thing.
A drop of green ink in water tells the same story more vividly. It spreads outward, blurring its own edges, until the glass holds only a faint, uniform tint. The ink is still there, every molecule of it. But it is no longer something. It has become the same as everything around it.
This is the grammar of physical reality. It has a name—entropy—and it is perhaps the most universal law in all of science. Everything runs down. Everything spreads out. Everything moves from concentrated, ordered states toward dispersed, disordered ones. We age. Stars die. Empires crumble. The direction of time is the direction of dissolution.
This much, science has known for a long time. It is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But here is what is genuinely new in this argument. Science describes physical reality from the standpoint of measuring what is being lost: entropy. It has no formal parameter for what is actually being destroyed. I call that thing OR—the Hebrew word for light. OR, in the language of this axiom, is concentrated, ordered energy: the differential between a state of higher and lower concentration that makes any change possible. Without OR, nothing in the universe happens.
The feature of randomness that perpetually erases OR I call CHOSHECH—the Hebrew word for darkness. Entropy is a measurement. CHOSHECH is what I have designated as its cause—the ubiquitous, statistically inevitable process that ensures dispersal always wins. It blurs boundaries, erases distinctions, and pulls everything toward sameness. And sameness, pushed to its logical conclusion, is indistinguishable from nothingness.
The choice of these particular Hebrew terms is not accidental. The opening verses of Genesis, read with care, appear to describe exactly these parameters—OR and CHOSHECH, the primal pair, light separated from darkness as the first creative act.
OR is fundamentally contrast—and naming it uncovers the deeper truth at the center of this argument: contrast is the ontological precondition for existence itself—not merely for perception, not merely for change, but for the very being of things. A universe of perfect uniformity without contrast is functionally identical to a universe of nothing. A property shared equally by everything describes nothing in particular. A thing without a boundary is not a thing. A boundary requires a difference. A difference is contrast.
This claim—that contrast is the indispensable ingredient for anything to be anything at all—has, to my knowledge, never been formally stated as an axiom, in physics or in philosophy. The proof is in the treatise. It arrives not........