Q&A: A Question About the Watchmaker Argument
A Question About the Watchmaker Argument.
Question
Hello and blessings, Rabbi, have a good week 🙂
I recently saw your debate with Aviv Franco—
Is belief in God rational?
There is the famous watchmaker argument: every complex thing requires someone who assembled it = there is a God who assembled the world.
Now Aviv responded and asked, according to the argument—who created God?
You answered that you do not accept an infinite regress, etc.
First question: if infinite regress is a logical fallacy (I think), and you then need to make a fallacy of the “special case” type in order to say that in the end there is a God who exists by virtue of Himself, then why is that not a fallacy? And why can we accept this argument? Even though it is supposedly a fallacy of the special-case type, where specifically God at the end of the chain does not require an assembler, according to the principle of causality…
Question 2—even if this is not a logical fallacy, or even if it is, but there is still reason to assume that God (the last one in the chain) exists as His own cause, without any assembler…
Then wouldn’t an atheist simply argue the following:
I will just assume that the laws of nature exist by themselves without any assembler. If that is your principle, why specifically does God exist without any assembler? Maybe go one step before that and argue according to this principle that the laws of nature exist by themselves.
I would be very glad if the Rabbi could answer my questions.
Thank you very much, and have a good week!!
Answer
A debate like that cannot get into all the corners and details. I elaborated on this in my book The First Existent and elsewhere. So I will answer briefly here.
- Infinite regress is a fallacy. I explained in great detail why this is so in my book The First Existent, and I think also here on the site. That is also the accepted view among philosophers (until you back them into corners like belief in God). If that is the case, we are left with only two alternatives facing one another: 1. Everything needs a cause. Then the difficulty is: what about God? 2. Give up the rule that everything requires a cause—which goes against intuition. In such a situation, reason says to adopt the intuitive rule with the smallest possible concession/exception: make an exception for God. Terms like “the special pleading fallacy” are inventions of atheists in distress. A common technique when you have no answer to an argument is to invent some label X and declare that this argument is a fallacy of type X. In my view, it is better to argue than to make sweeping declarations.
- The laws of nature are not an alternative, for several reasons. A. Laws are not entities. The laws only describe the way the world operates. Therefore they cannot be the cause of anything. When there are laws, the question is: who legislated them? B. If the laws were entities, then indeed they could be God. The physico-theological argument does not address the question of who God is. It only proves that there is such a thing. You can call it the laws of nature or, if you like, chicken soup. C. It is very likely that the initial cause is not mechanical, because otherwise there really would be no good reason to exempt it from the rule that everything must have a cause. If there is a machine that created the world, the question would immediately arise: who created the machine? That solves nothing. The initial cause has to be an entity of a different kind, one that can be exempted. It is plausible that it has intention (intentionality) and is not mechanical. In that case it is not a machine, and with regard to it the existence of a creator is not necessarily required. The complexity of the world is the result of a decision by that entity and not its mechanical product.
The question
Discussion on Answer
Hi Rabbi, good morning.
I’ll probably actually buy your book, but until then just 2 more questions if that’s okay 🙂
1. If you go with the second option and say—instead of going against intuition and not following the principle of causality, I will follow it, just with one minimal exception—that God has no cause/purpose.
And then you have solved the problem of infinite regress…
My question is this: why assume that specifically God “came to be” without a cause?
Maybe, as before, let’s go one step back and assume that the world exists without a cause/purpose…
(We would make the minimal exception for the world, and not for God.)
Why specifically God? That is basically the question…
2. What does “entities” mean with regard to the laws of physics?
I did not understand what you meant.
That’s it, thank you very much for everything 🙏
I already answered that too, and I’ll answer again. God is that initial factor which does not need a cause for its existence. If in your opinion the world is such a thing, then it is God. The argument does not deal with identifying that initial factor.
Still, I think that is unlikely, because the world is made up of those same things regarding which we have experience that they do in fact need a cause for their existence.
Understood, thanks!