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.
Is he right?
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 through abstraction, but through a series of thought experiments so simple that by the end, the conclusion feels less like something argued into existence than like something you always knew and had simply never been shown how to say.
* * *
Return to that glass of water. The ink is dispersed. Equilibrium reigns. The ink will never spontaneously reconcentrate, just as shattered glass never reassembles itself.
But imagine a small creature alive in that water that could pull the scattered molecules back into a concentrated drop through its own metabolic effort. It has not broken the laws of nature. It has locally reversed dispersal—but only by burning energy, adding more total entropy to the wider universe than the local order it assembles.
This is what every living organism does. Life is the only known process capable of locally reversing the work of CHOSHECH—building pockets of extraordinary order from disordered surroundings despite the cost of increasing net disorder or entropy elsewhere. Life is not a denial of physical law. It is the most astonishing expression of what can happen within it.
* * *
And once human beings enter the picture, something new arrives.
We do not merely metabolize—merely produce physical order, as all living things do. We reason, compare, imagine what does not yet exist, construct arguments, compose symphonies, write laws, make art, tell stories. We create order in a domain where the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not extract its usual toll of entropy: the realm of ideas, meaning, and understanding.
This is not analogy. Claude Shannon demonstrated that informational entropy obeys the same mathematical formalism as physical entropy. Meaning is measurable as a departure from randomness—a state of low informational entropy. The step from physical OR to the OR of ideas is grounded in an established scientific discipline, not in metaphor.
And here the analogy to physical thermodynamics breaks down in a way that matters enormously. When a living organism constructs physical order, it does so by consuming other forms of OR, and the net result is always greater entropy. The Second Law cannot be escaped in the physical world. But when a human being creates a new idea, the substrate ideas are not consumed. A new scientific theory does not destroy the ones it subsumes. A new composition does not erase the works that inspired it. The universe of genuine knowledge grows without paying the entropic tax that every physical construction exacts. This asymmetry between physical and metaphysical creation is the key to everything that follows.
The OR Axiom reveals why meaning occupies such a central place in our lives. We are creatures who crave meaning. It is the thing that makes a life worth living. At its core, meaning is the act of transforming disorder into order—whether a chef fashioning a meal from raw ingredients, a composer creating a symphony from the infinite chaos of possible notes and rhythms, or a mind making sense of an experience that was once confusing. Every time a sapient being imposes structure where there was none, meaning is created by assigning purpose to that new structure and extracting metaphysical significance from it. Without disorder, there is nothing to transform. Without contrast, there is no structure upon which to confer meaning.
So contrast is not only the precondition for existence. It is the precondition for meaning. It is the precondition for a life that matters.
* * *
There is a civilization that has understood this and organized its entire way of life around it for thirty-five centuries. For most cultures, distinctiveness is a characteristic. For the Jewish people, it is the mission itself—the laws, the rituals, the calendar, the dietary practices, the structure of study and debate, all pointing toward the maintenance of contrast as a sacred obligation. A people engineered to preserve contrast was engineered, whether it knew it or not, to embody the most fundamental principle of existence—a civilization engineered to generate and preserve OR.
For the observant Jew, the OR Axiom does not challenge religious conviction—it offers a lens through which mitzvot, study, and the insistence on distinction become visible as aligned with the deepest structure of existence. The act of wrestling with sacred text is cosmologically continuous with the reality intentionally designed by Ribono-Shel-Olam.
For the secular Jew who feels Jewish to his core but cannot articulate why it matters, the OR Axiom provides a more principled answer than cultural nostalgia. Jewish continuity is not sentimental attachment to the past. It is the most sustained, deliberate embodiment of OR in human history—a thirty-five-century experiment in living as contrast in a universe drifting toward sameness. To walk away from that inheritance is, in the measurable terms of the axiom, an act that volitionally increases entropy.
* * *
There is a shadow that comes with this light, and it is the oldest darkness in recorded history. If CHOSHECH is proportional to OR, then a people whose foundational mission is the cultivation of contrast will invariably attract a uniquely ferocious resistance to it. The world’s oldest hatred is something more than historical accident. Why this people? Why this persistence? The OR Axiom has an answer.
And yet the same people that has attracted this shadow has outlasted every empire that tried to cast it. Why a nation built on the immortal Metaphysical OR of meaning rather than the Physical OR of territory has proven so much more durable is not a mystery the axiom leaves unanswered either.
The suffering of the Jewish people, however unique, points to a deeper question that belongs to all of humanity. Why should a reality structured to make meaning possible also contain so much pain?
The OR Axiom’s answer is structural: without CHOSHECH, there is no change, and without change there is no time, no growth, no meaning. A universe without entropy would not be paradise. It would be a frozen void, incapable of producing a single moment worth living. This may sound like the idea that we can only appreciate good because we know evil, joy because we know sorrow. But the OR Axiom reveals a deeper reason than merely needing evil to recognize good. CHOSHECH-driven entropy is a non-negotiable prerequisite for change and time themselves—and change and time are prerequisites for morality and meaning. The friction that makes us suffer is the same friction that makes everything we cherish possible.
This does not make suffering emotionally tolerable. It is not meant to. But it provides an account of why a reality capable of meaning cannot be a reality free of pain—an account grounded not in theology alone, but in the structure of existence.
* * *
The OR Axiom arrives, in its final chapters, at the question of God—not as a premise imposed on the argument, but as a conclusion the argument reaches on its own terms. I will not preempt that conclusion here. But I will say this: the argument is honest with both the atheist and the believer. It does not demand faith. It does not dismiss it. It follows a single thread of reasoning as far as it will go and lets you decide what to make of where it leads.
This question of God, however, brings us back to Prager’s assertion that a belief in God is a necessary prerequisite for morality. This tethering is echoed by many philosophers because no alternative framework has adequately resolved morality without God. But what if the same framework that accounts for existence, meaning, Jewish endurance, and the necessity of suffering also resolves problems that have haunted moral philosophy for decades?
Here is one of the deepest.
Derek Parfit identified a consequence of utilitarian ethics that he himself found deeply disturbing. He called it the Repugnant Conclusion.
Imagine World A: one billion people, each living a life of genuine richness—deep relationships, creative fulfillment, real happiness. Now imagine World Z: one-hundred billion people, each living a life barely worth living. Not miserable, but drained of richness—reduced to a thin grey minimum. In World Z, the sheer number of people is so vast that the aggregate sum of their barely positive well-being exceeds the aggregate sum in World A. Standard utilitarianism says World Z is morally superior because the aggregate sum of well-being is greater. And this conclusion holds no matter how degraded the lives in World Z become, so long as you keep adding more of them. Parfit found this repugnant—and never escaped it within utilitarian logic.
The OR Axiom dissolves it by revealing that aggregate quantity is the wrong unit of moral measurement. OR, both physically and metaphysically, is a measure of concentration, not sum. To see how intuitive this principle already is, return to Prager’s thought experiment—but lower the stakes. A dog and a cockroach are drowning. You can save only one. No sane person hesitates. Now imagine a hundred cockroaches drowning alongside the dog. A thousand. A million. Does the moral calculus ever tip? It does not—because the dog’s concentrated, ordered biological complexity so vastly exceeds the cockroach’s that no quantity of cockroaches can collectively equal the OR of one dog. Moral weight tracks concentration, not magnitude. Apply this to Parfit: World A, with its fewer lives of concentrated genuine meaning, is a world of vastly greater OR than World Z—even if World Z’s aggregate happiness adds to a larger number.
* * *
Now return to the drowning dog and the stranger.
The OR Axiom meets Prager’s challenge without requiring God as a premise. The stranger takes priority because human beings are the only known entities capable of creating new meaning, new understanding, and new knowledge in the non-physical realm—a divine ability to create OR without increasing entropy somewhere else. A dog possesses extraordinary biological OR. Its life has real moral weight. But it cannot compose a symphony, formulate a theory, or wrestle with the question of whether it ought to be saved. The stranger can. Each human life is an entire universe of potential that, once extinguished, cannot be replaced by any other life. This does not make the answer emotionally easy. It makes it rationally grounded—grounded not in divine decree, though the argument is entirely consistent with divine decree, but in the structure of what things are and what they can uniquely do.
The likeness Prager attributes to God, elevating the moral weight of human life above all creatures, is indeed embedded in the structure of reality through the OR Axiom. Prager’s God can create Physical and Metaphysical contrast—OR—without adding any entropy to either realm, as He demonstrated by revealing Himself in a burning bush. No mortal creature can burn a bush without increasing entropy as the flames break the bonds of the plant’s structured organic molecules and disperse them into the smoke and ash of disordered, simpler forms of carbon. So when we compare the stranger to a dog in this physical realm, humans are no different from animals, even if they may be more sophisticated, because they too must always cause a net increase in entropy in order to produce local contrast and structure. But unlike animals, human beings are the only creatures that cause no entropy—in God’s likeness—when adding contrasting structure in the metaphysical realm of thoughts and ideas. A human’s ability to truly create Metaphysical OR, as opposed to every other creature’s ability merely to fashion Physical OR from an existing substrate, is what gives humans the quantum leap of Godly moral weight even without a belief in God.
One of the oldest objections to religiously grounded morality is the Euthyphro dilemma: if God’s command is the sole basis of moral obligation, then cruelty could become good if God commanded it. The OR Axiom offers a resolution: God did not decree that OR is good by fiat. He embedded that truth in the structure of the reality He made. His moral authority is continuous with the fabric of creation, not imposed from outside. For the atheist, morality is derivable from the nature of existence itself. For the believer, the argument does not compete with revelation—it shows how the wisdom of Torah and the architecture of creation rhyme.
* * *
You have seen Prager’s challenge answered—and along the way, through Parfit’s paradox, through the structural logic of antisemitism and the puzzle of Jewish endurance—what this framework can do when brought to bear on questions that other systems have failed to answer.
Why does anything exist as something rather than dissolve into undifferentiated sameness? Why does life push upward against a universe that runs downward? How can morality be embedded in the structure of reality when so many philosophers, working in good faith, have concluded it cannot be? Why are suffering and meaning so entangled that you cannot fully have one without the other? What transforms the raw materials of work, music, art, love, and ritual into vessels of meaning? Why is the world’s oldest hatred uniquely disproportionate, uniquely persistent, and uniquely immune to reason? What makes Jewish distinctiveness worth preserving rather than surrendering? And if all of these are connected by a single thread, what kind of reality are we actually living in?
These questions ask only that you consider the possibility that something as familiar as contrast may turn out to be one of the deepest clues reality has given us.
In Hebrew, the first thing God called good was light.
OR.
The rest is waiting for you inside.
The full treatise is available at https://zviosterweil.substack.com/p/the-ohr-axiom
