Frankl argues to our personal experience – especially our moral experience – being an encounter with God. Simplified, the argument is:
1.) Personal action and its proper sphere of existence cannot be reduced to non-personal forces.
2.) Conscience speaks within man’s personal sphere of being.
3.) Conscience is our awareness of being under an obligation that transcends us.
Therefore, conscience is our experience of a person placing us under an obligation. But such a person is clearly our Lord or Master.
Frankl does not need to deny that nature has a role to play in the determination of conscience, but following (1) he has to say that nature – at least so far as it is normative – is ultimately the instrument of a divine person. We say “divine person” because this voice is a person by (1) and divine by (3), since conscience transcends us not just as individuals, since it also measures societies, cultures and even any possible finite creature.
