Following on from the previous question
Is this how you will make a living from Avram Hevri’s criticism?
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Avram El-Hevri amazes me every time with his ability to combine arrogance with shallowness.
I responded to him with the following, for the benefit of the public:
Well, maybe you understand the Bible very well (I don't know), but in philosophy (or whatever you call such a discussion), you are really babbling nonsense. In light of this, the confidence and arrogance oozing from your writing are incomprehensible to me.
I will briefly address your arguments, unfortunately I probably won't be able to respond, certainly not in the coming days:
1) You wrote: “But a quick look at the diagram on the left will make it clear that both sides share exactly the same problem – except that the religious have ‘outsourced’ it: While atheists admit through gritted teeth that as of now we don't have a scientific answer to this question, the religious have transferred the problem to an external factor: God”. This is of course not true. To say that everything has a cause leads us into an infinite regress. Therefore, we argue that at least everything that was created has a cause, except for some first link that was not created. This was also agreed upon by those who claimed the pre-existence of the world, and the pre-existence of the world is precisely the solution to the problem of the creator. But when it was discovered that the universe was not pre-existence, the need to add a previous link arose, and it had to stop.
2) You wrote: “The main problem of religion (any religion) with evolution is not in what is in the diagram, but in what is not in it. Religion tends to perceive time as an ’arrow’ that progresses towards some purpose (the coming of the MessiahJesusthe Mahdi, as the earliest of them), but in the process in the diagram the two components God are missing.”
a) Creature 1.1 is not “progressing” any more than Creature 1 or Creature 1.2 – he simply survived to tell” – there is really the desired assumption here. Perhaps the primitive religious person you present denies evolution, but evolution in itself does not deny progress in any direction. And here, of course, there is an argument of what you think: if the fact that we have arrived at a creature as complex as a human with immense intelligence is a result that will be obtained with a high probability in an evolutionary process, then an evolutionary process by definition is a process with direction, the natural selection that filters out non-surviving creatures causes complex creatures to develop (also). If so, although the religious person will not accept evolution, it in itself will indeed do a wonderful job with the fact that there is a planner for the process, who created the laws within which a process is conducted that leads with a high probability to a complex creation.
And if the fact that we have arrived at a complex creature is a rare result even within an evolutionary process, there is again a rare progress here, which the believer will of course claim is the intervention of God who wanted to reach man and was not satisfied with bacteria, and therefore precisely determined the initial conditions in a precise manner so that complex creatures would develop from them.
b) Purpose – yuck! The evolutionary process has no purpose – it is simply a process that happens on the timeline” – ??? Who said the evolutionary process has no purpose? (Assuming the desired… are you paying attention to what you are writing?) What does it have to do with the fact that it happens on the timeline (like any process, by the way… a real novelty), after all, the question is whether someone stood at its end and intended to reach a purpose through evolution. Even a stone flying through the air is a process that occurs across the timeline, and the question is still whether someone threw it and intended to reach some purpose, or whether it flew away from the wind. Any process in the world can occur in order to reach some purpose. And if the process is rare and special, it is likely that someone wanted it and planned it.
3) I am even ashamed to respond to the criticism against Rabbi Michael Avraham. In his book, he explicitly came to establish the existence of a deistic God and not the God of Judaism, so what are you accusing him of? That he has not yet written a book about the God of Judaism? (By the way, he is currently writing a book about the God of Judaism.)
If he has proven that there is some entity that created or governs the world, even though it is some entity (and not necessarily a yellow demon), even though it is not certain that it is one, he has essentially proven that atheism is wrong. This is a rather honorable goal and not as modest as you are trying to present.
You wrote: “He believes that if there is an intelligent designer, then there is a purpose for creation – and this purpose is none other than man!” – He wrote explicitly that the physico-theological evidence does not claim a purpose in creation, certainly not for the “monk of creation”.
I laughed my head off when I saw that your problem with man being the “monk of creation” is: “This is exactly the view that led several scientists and intellectuals to blame Judaism – along with its stepdaughter, Christianity – for the ecological disaster that the Western world has brought upon the world.” Indeed, it is an insurmountable problem.
In any case, I expanded on this point in my article on the evidence from design, and I quote here:
“Here is the place to address a common mistake according to which the physico-theological argument includes the claim that the entire universe was created for life.
Against this understanding, atheists point to the fact that most of the universe does not support life and therefore it is impossible that it was all created for life (and in any case the argument for the existence of God fails).
When you look closely, you see that this claim is not in the argument at all. The argument only says that someone wanted to create life / special natural laws, and does not claim anything beyond that about the universe. To clarify this, I will give a drawing (even if it is somewhat distorted) in which you can see that the argument does not say that the universe was created for life.
It is possible that God interfered with the devil who creates a larger universe. God prepared the singular point for expansion, and a moment before it decided that if he is going to create a universe, then at least it will not be all desolate, and there will be one interesting point in it, and therefore adjusted the constants of physics so that they would allow and create life, and from there the universe supported life expanded, and eventually life evolved in it.
Now comes the physical-theological believer and claims that because of the special nature of the laws of physics, it is proven that someone adjusted them. Such an argument does not at all assume that the universe was created for life. The universe can have an independent reason for existence (interference with the devil), and life has a side goal (creating something interesting in our desolate universe).
This example demonstrates that a physico-theological argument does not necessarily include a claim that the universe was created for life, and in any case we have completely eliminated all bewilderment about the enormous size of the universe in relation to the amount of life in it (in terms of the argument).
The physico-theological argument does not assert anything other than the claim that life (or the special laws leading to them) was created by an intelligent being on purpose in order to create life. The argument does not even say that he had a reason for this creation, and in our terminology, we only assert the existence of an internal purpose for the creation of life.
But even if someone claims that the entire universe was created for animals, he does not do so from an a priori claim (according to which the universe seems to have been created entirely for life), but from tradition or verses, and therefore a refutation of the implausibility of such a thing does not really matter.
If God reveals himself to me and tells me that he created the entire universe just so that Yossi from Ashdod could play soccer every Tuesday, as long as I trust God, I don't care how big the universe is in relation to Yossi, because there is no reason why God would really create the entire world for Yossi from Ashdod's soccer games.
4) You wrote a series of questions: “Is it likely that an intelligent designer would take 15 billion years to create a human?
Is it likely that after so much trouble, the intelligent designer would destroy hundreds of thousands of his creations (= humans) in natural disasters + tens of millions in epidemics, every X years?
If we go back in time a little, is it likely that an intelligent designer would destroy most of what he built every X years? (Read for example the entry “Mass Extinction” on Wikipedia)
And if we go back even further in time, couldn't the intelligent designer have found a safer method than genetic differentiation, which is (relatively) full of errors and mutations, randomly changing without explanation and in the process producing about 95% genetic “garbage”?
And the crucial question – the most common species in the world is the beetle; why this repulsive creature?!?!…”
Even if it is not a priori probable (let's assume that the chance of this is 1 in a thousand, meaning that only one in a thousand creators would have produced a human in this way), then a priori (after we see a complex, special, and rare world like ours), this tiny chance becomes very high, since the alternative is much smaller than it (the chance of having a world like ours is less than 1 in a thousand). Conditional probability, not particularly difficult.
Similarly, if we find a factory that produces watches from pure gold using an assembly line that moves at a speed of 0.0000001 m’ per second, so that it takes two years to make a watch, and at the end of the assembly line he crushes them one by one and burns them and throws them into the sea, let's assume that there is a planner for the factory, even though the likelihood that a factory manager will do so is zero. (For every tens of thousands of factories whose manager wants the product to exist, there is only one manager who wants to destroy his products at the end of the assembly line, for no logical reason, just for fun). Although the chance of such a manager being there is zero, relative to the chance that such a factory was created on its own, it is billions of times greater, and in conditional probability (if we already have such a strange factory before us) the chance that there is a manager and planner for the factory and that it was not created randomly is almost 100%.
Regarding the ”Farchot” On the clock analogy:
a) The modern clock was not designed all at once, but in a distinct evolutionary manner that took hundreds of years. – ?? Well, then what? A breakdown is supposed to be relevant. The clock is also made of metal and man is not, so what? That is exactly what Rabbi Michael Avraham's book was written about, to show that the fact that it is about evolution does not change anything. The clock analogy comes to take one and only point: when there is something special and rare, we conclude that there was a designer. I expanded on this in my second article, see here: https://rationalbelief.org.il/%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%92%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%94-%D7%95%D7%94%D7%94%D7%95%D7%9B%D7%97%D7%94-%D7%94%D7%A4%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%95-%D7%AA%D7%99%D7%90%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%92%D7%99%D7%AA/
And also see my first article, which together with the second one removes several of the pitfalls of the physical view Theologically, and shines a new light on it:
https://rationalbelief.org.il/%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%92%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%94-%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%91%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%95%D7%94%D7%99%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D/
b) “Not one clock created the modern clock, but dozens of people.” – So if I were to compare man to the desert inscription (which one person wrote), would everything be okay?! I already wrote above that the analogy came to make a certain point. You could just as easily have written: “The clock was created in two weeks, therefore the world was also created in two weeks”, a very high level of argument…
Why in 2018, when humanity is so educated, do we still have to engage in such bizarre and worn-out arguments about this argument over and over again?
Regarding the polytheistic conclusion, here again there is an accusation against Rabbi Michi for not having written a book on the topics that interest you. Well, he doesn't work for you, and not everything he publishes is because he has nothing to say on the matter, and besides, I already said that he is writing books on this subject these days.
Wow, wow, you're bored.
Now you'll also have to answer his answer and so on.
Why bored? Is that how you see everyone who responds to arguments? Very immature.
No, that's how I see everyone who responds to people who are pointless to discuss with.
I don't know him well enough, maybe you know him better than me.
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