Q&A: The Ontological Argument
The Ontological Argument
Question
Hello Michi,
I read the Notebooks of Faith and listened to your lectures, and I want to clarify something בעקבות that. You bring there an argument—I think the ontological or cosmological argument—that says something like this: the world is perfect and very complex, which indicates a creator and designer. And this proves the existence of some kind of entity (a mysterious one, it must be said).
But about that one can ask: this same logic also applies to that entity, so who created that entity, which is at least as complex as the world? You haven’t solved the difficulty, only postponed it by one step.
To that you say that in order not to be dragged into an infinite regress, and since in any case we have to end up at some starting point of a first being that exists without a cause, therefore you prefer to stop here and attribute that being to the entity you proved.
Here I don’t understand: why not apply that same first being to our world and thereby solve the puzzle of the world’s complexity without needing an entity? If you can solve the question of who created the entity by saying that there cannot be an infinite regress and defining it as the first being, then you can say the same thing already at the first stage—that our world is the first being.
Hope you understand me; I’d be glad to hear your answer.
Answer
I don’t think you actually read it. I explained this in detail.
Our world is not the kind of thing that doesn’t require a creator (or that is its own cause). It also did not always exist. So it is reasonable that the creator is another being that itself does not need a cause.
The world also operates within a system of laws, and the question is who legislated them. And even if they always existed, there is the principle of sufficient reason, which requires a reason even for something that always existed. Besides, laws are not a thing (= an entity) but rules.
Beyond that, the creator also is not necessarily complex. If it is intelligent, then complexity is not required in it. A mechanical mechanism has to be as complex as the thing it creates, but an intelligent creator does not.
Rabbi Michi,
It’s mostly semantics, but can one simply say, on the contrary: perhaps the world itself (say, the singular point) is God, and it necessarily has a mysterious layer “beyond our ken” because it is its own cause. I call that God, and go on drawing philosophical conclusions about it until the same old good God appears to us.
(This is how I once answered someone on the site who asked exactly this same question. Of course it’s just odd to stick all this onto the poor singular point, confused by its new title. When in any case everything is just conjectures and futile semantic games, instead of simply going one step further back and describing it plainly as “a necessary being—its own cause,” without forcibly tying any physical manifestation to it as one of its faces.)