Following your conversation with Daniel Doshi

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asked 12 months ago

Hello Rabbi Avraham,

Thank you very much for the conversation with Daniel Doshi, it was interesting.
I wanted to ask a question about the physico-theological argument, there is a point there that I feel is almost always overlooked.

Before that, a quick note, in the parable you gave about 14 letters being chosen at random and coming out “to be and to be and to be,” it’s a bit strange that you brought up the weak counterargument of “each time a letter is fixed as soon as the draw is successful and move on to the next letter.” There are much stronger arguments in the style of the typing monkey or things along the lines of Kolmogorov’s 0-1 law, but I’m sure you know all of these, and in any case, entire libraries have been written about these things.

The main thing that bothers me is this: My impression is that every argument in the physico-theological style (except for an argument such as the argument from tradition, which is also unconvincing to me) is almost always formulated in the following way:
Suppose there is no God (some alternative explanation/everything is coincidental) we will reach a contradiction (say how can you explain the complexity) and therefore you are obliged to conclude that there is a God – what is called a proof by negation, say A, a contradiction, therefore NA (not A).

For some reason, everyone is preoccupied with the question of whether A leads to a contradiction, and there is a real arms race between the school that perfects A and the one that perfects the argument that leads to the contradiction of A.

But something else entirely bothers me. A is not a single hypothesis that says “there is no God.” It is a class of infinite hypotheses. The hypothesis “everything is random” is not really well-defined either. It can be defined concretely in an infinite number of ways (or at least many fundamentally different ways). And even if A is a single hypothesis, NA is an infinite class that also contains various and strange explanations that we cannot imagine.

For me, this is not an intellectual stunt. At the age of 16, all my thoughts were given to these questions. A lot of time has passed since then, but it still seems like a big gap to me. Let’s say you went to the trouble of precisely defining a hypothesis that does not assume the existence of God and you came to a contradiction. The conclusion that this leads to is the only explanation that any child can imagine (I don’t mean to ridicule you, I’m a believer, God is simply a hypothesis that can still be imagined, and as far-fetched as it is, it is simple in a certain sense). To me, it is equivalent to claiming that you understood this entire system called existence and therefore understood that the God hypothesis is the only one that can be an explanation for NA that does not contain a contradiction that will be discovered one day.

Another important point, usually at this stage in the discussion I get a response similar to the one you’re likely to get in the following scenario (bad example, I don’t have one handy): A man has been working at a stable company for 15 years, everyone was happy, one day he writes an angry and not at all liberal post, the kind that management really hates, a month later, by chance, they call him into the office and say that his performance has deteriorated recently, and they’re forced to streamline, is that really a coincidence?
The average response would be, possibly, but no one believes it.

When I present my argument to people, I will usually also receive a response along the lines of “Okay, so maybe there’s some other fanciful explanation that could explain what’s happening, but after all, if this were a dilemma in your personal life, you would never bet on it because it’s so unlikely.”
This is not an argument, it is intuition, and there are countless examples of how bad intuition is when we move slightly away from the world of standard experience. There is no reason to think that when we move completely away (what is completely in this sense anyway) our intuition is worthless.
In my opinion, defining a “probability space” for different hypotheses and saying what is very likely and what is extremely unlikely also contains the pretense of understanding the system to the end, with all its infinite hypotheses.

By the way, there is one argument that I am omitting here.
It could be argued that “who said the cosmos obeys the rule: something is A or NA but not both at the same time”, I have a few explanations for why I avoid it but I’ve taken up enough of your time.

Thank you very much,

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מיכי Staff answered 12 months ago

Hello. Thank you for your consideration. I elaborated on this argument in more detail in my book ‘The First Place,’ and it is clear that in a conversation like the one I had with Doshi, it cannot really be presented accurately. 1. I did not deal there with the argument of being or not being, but I brought this version as an example of weak arguments. The typing monkey is a completely different matter, and it assumes a great many attempts. I also dealt with this there and in the books God plays dice. I will only note that this is also a rather weak argument in my opinion. 2. I don’t know why you chose such a cumbersome and imprecise formulation for this argument. The assumption that there is no God does not really lead to a contradiction. It is simply implausible (because complexity is not explained that way. And the assumption that it was created without a guiding hand is implausible). Contradiction is too strong a logical term, and it is not right to use it here. 3. I don’t know which infinite versions you are referring to. In my opinion, there is one and only one: there is no guiding hand at the basis of the creation of the universe and its laws. That’s all. In the same way, the hypothesis that there is a God does not have infinite possibilities, but only one: there is a guiding hand (it is called God, but that is just a name). 4. Logic is not the result of experience but is a priori. The assumption that it is unlikely that a complex thing could have come into being by itself is also not the result of experience. Furthermore, there is no reason to abandon it even in relation to the entire universe, if it operates on every part of it. 5. The employee’s example is really not successful. There are really two interpretive options there, and although there is a preference for the one that depends on correlation, this preference is not decisive. But the incredibly complex universe that was created in this case is a very unlikely hypothesis. 6. None of this has to do with intuition but with probability and plausibility. This is our way of thinking and it works. The claim that it might not be true is a skeptical claim and the burden of proof is on the one who makes it. Our intuitions also fail with respect to things in our world, and yet we assume that intuition works until proven otherwise. I never talk about certainty but about plausibility, so counterexamples neither add nor subtract. I don’t see why we wouldn’t act similarly with respect to the universe itself unless we insist on rejecting the physico-theological argument at all costs because of our biases. 7. Defining a probability space for such questions is problematic. For example, think about the values of the constants in the laws of physics (such as the speed of light, the gravitational constant, etc.). In principle, they can take on any value, and therefore the probability space is all the values on the real axis. The probability of any such value is exactly 0. And yet, if we assume that there is a lottery on the values of the constants (which also needs to be explained: who is doing this lottery? What is this mechanism and who is responsible for it?), the chance of any outcome is 0. And that’s only if you know in advance that the distribution is uniform (this is also a given that you have no way of knowing). And yet, in practice, these constants have a certain value that is very special (the fine-tuning argument), and it is unlikely that it was created by chance. This is an excellent argument without having a defined probability space. 8. As for the argument that you “omitted” here, you assume that the laws of logic are a contingent matter. But this is a mistake. These are necessary laws that are true for every reality and every situation. Regardless of our experience and cosmos. I have written about this more than once on my website and in articles, and there I claimed that even God Himself is ‘subject’ to the laws of logic (because they are not subordinations. The laws of logic are not laws in the same sense that the laws of nature are laws. This is just an unsuccessful linguistic routine). By the way, you can’t have explanations for why you avoid it, since these explanations themselves would be formulated within the framework of classical logic (meaning that if I accept them, I won’t accept their opposite). We can’t talk about something outside the laws of logic, even if we refer to a different and imaginary reality as much as we want. Happy holiday and good news,

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ס' replied 12 months ago

Thank you very much, I will think about it and when necessary I will respond through the reply system,
Excuse me but a brief reference to 2 points:

3. This is the crux of the matter for me, A is the assumption that there is no directionality (for lack of a more appropriate concept that I can think of right now), as if in the space of possibilities there is no preference between order and chaos, between certain forms and a uniform distribution.
Its negation, what you call a “directed hand” (after all, we didn't really define “hand”) is that there is directionality to existence, that we are not in a kind of random walk (please don't get attached to the example, it's just to illustrate the idea). This directionality does not indicate consciousness/spirit/will/intentions or something that we would define as an entity in the sense that we are used to thinking of.
This directionality is not a hypothesis, it is a vast collection of hypotheses.

8. You wrote “omitted” but I am not evading.
As you wrote, any argument will be based on the laws of logic.
Personally, I did not intend to write an argument in the formal sense at all, but rather a “moral” argument without any objective pretense.
A person is seen in his actions and hidden thoughts much more than in his speech and writing, and my life testifies to the fact that I believe in the laws of logic, to the point of betting on life itself, and therefore it does not seem “fair” to use this argument.

מיכי Staff replied 12 months ago

3. I don't know what directionality is. The question is whether there is something/someone who made the world or whether it was created in a random way. That is well defined in my opinion. There is no other possibility here, as long as we don't get into the question of what that something is.
8. I didn't understand what was unfair here. My argument is that there is no possibility of exceeding the ”laws of logic”, neither in relation to the universe, nor in relation to God, nor in relation to anything else. It has nothing to do with morality.