Debunking the Physico-Theological View | Lack of Religious Definition
In the SD
Hello Rabbi, what do you think about the following claim (taken from the heresy forums on the internet)
When the believer claims that there is a God as an explanation for the creation of the world, its beauty and complexity.
In such a case, I simply ask: Define “creator.” What is it? What is its essence? Where does it come from? What is it composed of?
If he starts telling me that the Creator is “spiritual,” I ask him, “Define spiritual.” He starts telling you about all sorts of other worlds that exist outside of space and time….and I ask him, “How do you know that this exists? What is the source of your knowledge about all sorts of “spiritual” worlds? Somehow we arrive at the conclusion that the source of all knowledge about spiritual worlds is someone’s imagination, past or present.
That is, the “Creator” and all the “non-physical” worlds are simply figments of the human imagination and nothing more!
What does the Rabbi think about this? Is there no problem in using this hypothesis without explaining its essential nature?
There is no problem with that. It is a common and baseless atheistic evasion. When I see a complex universe, I assume that it had some kind of creator. There is no need to say anything about that creator in order to assume that he exists. The conclusion about his existence is the result of observing the world and that is it. So when I see a painting, I assume that there was a painter in the background who created it. I do not need to know the name or the qualities of the painter to determine that there was one.
The problem is that when you don't provide details about the painter, then there is a problem in assessing the ratio between the likelihood of the painter's existence and the likelihood that remains in the understanding that the painting is its own cause - brute fact.
The case of painting is actually a bad dog for the physio-theological argument. Because the painting is simply much more than the painter. The reason we do assume that a painter exists is only because we know that paintings are not their own cause and that people paint them.
Not true. The existence of the painter is 1 minus the chance that the painting was created by chance. It really doesn't matter what or who the painter is. When I roll a fair die and get 6's a hundred times in a row. What is the chance that there is a mechanism that biased the result? 1 minus the chance of getting such a result by chance.
The argument that hinges the conclusion about the painter on our experience that paintings are created by painters is also a common atheist fallacy (the same fallacy that I explained in the previous paragraph), and I dealt with it in more detail in the last appendix to the book God Plays Dice (against an article by Elia Leibowitz).
This doesn't sound logical at all. (Although it is said with full self-confidence)
For example, when a random sequence of 12125412 is created with dice, the chance of this happening is 6^-8.
Therefore, the existence of a cheating thrower is one less than (0.999994046)…
To avoid such ridiculous absurdities, there must be an assumption that asks what the chance is that a cheating thrower who would want such a sequence exists. In the ridiculous case I brought up, the chance that a cheater exists is extremely zero. We know this by using the analogy that the human will does not care at all about such arbitrary things…
So, to use the physico-theological view. We need to calculate what the chance is that God exists as an abstract and unitary spiritual reality and a host of other unclear and not necessarily coherent concepts such as “above time” And so on. And after we have defined the chance of its own existence, we need to multiply this by the chance of God creating a world like ours with problems of good and evil, etc.
Good luck 🙂
Bonjour,
I never intend to use self-confidence as an argument. But your words are a complete statistical misunderstanding. There have been tiresomely long discussions about this here on the site and I will not repeat them here.
See, for example, column 144 and the discussions after it. There were several other places.
In one of the comments there, you mentioned that in your opinion, uniqueness is an objective parameter. Is this the conclusion of your statement?
Indeed. Entropy.
There is a difference between entropy and complexity. Also, it seems to say that it is a subjective description. Would you also see beauty as an objective attribute?
This is a more delicate question. If this beauty is based on order then yes. But no one will argue about a series of a hundred times 6.
“When I see a painting I assume there was a painter in the background who created it” – only because you know paintings and know that a painting cannot be created without a painter. But you know nothing at all about universes, however complex they may be, and what the variety of possible ways are for their creation. Therefore, the analogy that the universe is like a painting and therefore if there is a necessity for a painter there is also a necessity for a God, is extremely tenuous. You said “When I see a complex universe I assume it had some kind of creator” and indeed this is just an assumption, an axiom, that we have no way of knowing whether it is true or whether this complex universe was created in other hidden ways that we do not even think of due to our lack of knowledge or the limitations of our perception.
I have already answered this common question in several places (including in my books God Plays Dice).
This is simply not true. The second law of thermodynamics is based on the complexity of a situation, and claims that if something complex is created, there must be some external factor that intervened in the system and created it (in a closed system, order does not grow by itself). This is the type of logic I am talking about here (I already distinguished there between it and the scientific law itself). It has nothing to do with experience and different contexts.
Incidentally, this evidence claims that there was some factor that did this. When you talk about “other ways” do you mean ways without a factor? A mystical miracle? Who is that factor? This is a question that the argument does not address.
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