A Legal Viewpoint Of The Moral Consciousness Of The Deity And Free Will In Theistic Context Of Vedic Jurisprudence

By Author: Premkumar Nadarajan.
Total Articles: 26
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A course of purely metaphysical reasoning has led us up to the idea of
God--that is to say, of a conscious and rational Mind and Will for
which the world exists and by which that world and all other spirits
are caused to exist. I have passed over a host of difficulties--the
relation of God to time, the question whether or in what sense the
world may be supposed to have a beginning and an end, the question of
the relation in which God, the universal Mind, stands to other minds,
the question of Free-will. These are difficulties which would involve
elaborate metaphysical discussions: I shall return to some of them in a
later lecture. It must suffice for the present to say that more than
one answer to many of these questions might conceivably be given
consistently with the view of the divine nature which I have contended
for. Vedic legal foundations insist on these following premises namely;

That God is personal in the sense that He is a omniscient,
Omnipresent transcendental Authocrat of fullness of original Being, distinguishable from each ...
... and all
less perfect intellects and subtle egos. That all other minds are in some sense brought into being by the
divine Mind, while at the same time they have such a resemblance to, or
community of nature with, their source that they may be regarded as not
mere creations but as in some sense reproductions, more or less
imperfect, of that source, approximating in various degrees to that
ideal of Personality which is realised perfectly in God alone. In
proportion as they approximate to that ideal, they are causes of their
own actions, and can claim for themselves the kind of causality which
we attribute in its perfection to God. I content myself now with
claiming for the developed, rational human self a measure of freedom to
the extent which I have just defined--that it is the real cause of its
own actions. It is capable of self-determination. The man's actions
are determined by his character. That is quite consistent with the
admission that God is the ultimate cause of a self of such and such a
character coming into existence at such and such a time.

I will not say that the conception of those who regard the human
mind as literally a part of the divine, so that the human consciousness
is in no sense outside of the divine, is necessarily, for those who
hold it, inconsistent with the conception of personality both in
God and man: I will only say that I do not myself understand such an
assertion. The Vedic law principles regard the human mind as derived from The Absolute, and yet separate due to being deprived of the Tree of Life of Eden so to speak and subservient to God’s will though to a limited extent man may choose to disobey the Absolute’s reign.

We have led up to the idea of God's existence. But so far we have
discovered nothing at all about His character or purposes. And it is
clear that without some such knowledge the belief in God could be of
little or no value from any religious or moral point of view. How are
we to learn anything about the character of God? I imagine that at the
present day few people will attempt to prove the goodness or
benevolence of God from an empirical examination of the facts of Nature
or of History. There is, no doubt, much in History and in Nature to
suggest the idea of Benevolence, but there is much to suggest a
directly opposite conclusion. Few of us at the present day are likely
to be much impressed by the argument which Paley bases upon the
existence of the little apparatus in the throat by which it is
benevolently arranged that, though constantly on the point of being
choked by our food, we hardly ever are choked.
The argument from design, though it testifies to purpose
in the Universe, tells us nothing about the nature of that purpose.
Purpose is one thing; benevolent purpose is another. Nobody's estimate
of the comparative amount of happiness and misery in the world is worth
much; but for my own part, if I trusted simply to empirical evidence,
I should not be disposed to do more than slightly attenuate the
pessimism of the Pessimists. At all events, Nature is far too 'red in
tooth and claw' to permit of our basing an argument for a benevolent
Absolute upon a contemplation of the facts of animal and human life.
There is but one source from which such an idea can possibly be
derived--from the evidence of our own moral consciousness.

Now, the question arises--'Can such an objectivity be asserted by those
who take a purely materialistic or naturalistic view of the Universe?'
Whatever our metaphysical theories about the nature of Reality may be,
we can in practice have no difficulty in the region of Physical Science
about recognizing an objective reality of some kind which is other than
my mere thinking about it. That fire will burn whether I think so or
not is practically recognized by persons of all metaphysical
persuasions
When we say that things are right or wrong
whether I think them so or not, are we saying that that the Moral Law exists outside me
and independently of my thinking about it? Where and how does this
moral law exist? The physical laws of Nature may be supposed by the
Materialist or the Realist somehow to exist in matter: to the
Metaphysician there may be difficulties in such a view, but the
difficulties are not obvious to common-sense. But surely (whatever may
be thought about physical laws) the moral law, which expresses not
any matter of physical fact but what _ought_ to be thought of acts,
cannot be supposed to exist in a purely material Universe. An 'ought'
can exist only in and for a mind. In what mind, then, does the moral
law exist? As a matter of fact, different people's moral judgements
contradict one another. And the consciousness of no living man can
well be supposed to be a flawless reflection of the absolute moral
ideal. On a non-theistic view of the Universe, then, the moral law
cannot well be thought of as having any actual existence. The
objective validity of the moral law can indeed be and no doubt is
_asserted_, believed in, acted upon without reference to any
theological creed; but it cannot be defended or fully justified without
the pre-supposition of Theism. What we mean by an objective law is
that the moral law is a part of the ultimate nature of things, on a
level with the laws of physical nature, and it cannot be _that_, unless
we assume that law to be an expression of the same mind in which
physical laws originate. The idea of duty, when analysed, implies the
idea of the Absolute.

lecturer at a private learning institution ( UTAR).