Related to debate
A Facebook user named Idan Hadash posted this on the debate:
Is it rational to believe in God?
In Aviv Franko ‘s recent debate with Rabbi Michael Avraham (link in the comments), Michi defined the ‘rules of the game’ of the debate by setting a ‘modest’ goal: to show that belief in God is rational. To this end, he defined God in his minimalist sense: the first cause (the cosmological argument in Bil’az).
According to him, since the principle of causality is a principle of reason that is not learned from observations (the a priori principle of Bilhah), the assumption that there is an *additional* cause above the laws of nature is a rational assumption. Then it is necessary to stop at this step, just before entering infinite recursion, due to the question of what is the cause of the first cause.
What Aviv answered, and I want to clarify, is that it is irrational to compare apples to oranges. I want to say much more than that: This is an attempt to compare oranges to stones.
The “observable laws of nature” are the cause of all phenomena in the universe. From the Big Bang and the formation of galaxies to the shape of the human body and its diseases. Behind all of this stand the four forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces.
These natural forces or laws of nature are *not* part of nature, but rather they constitute a *human explanation* of phenomena in nature. The fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun is *explained* to us through gravity. But gravity is not nature itself. It is an organizing principle, which helps *us, as people who want to navigate the world* to understand and organize nature in our minds.
There is no such thing as a “triangle shape” alone in nature, but the triangle is an abstract idea that can be applied to triangular cheese and triangular pizza, which really exist. There is no such thing as the number 0 in nature, but it is a number that represents *for us* something that does not exist. Similarly, gravity does not *exist in nature*, but is an abstract idea that can be humanly applied to phenomena in nature such as the rotation of the Earth or falling pens.
Therefore, just as no one would argue “What is the reason for the existence of the triangle,” because the abstract triangle does not exist in nature, so too no one can argue “What is the reason for the existence of the laws of nature,” because they do not truly exist in nature, but only in our minds, which give an abstract name to natural phenomena.
The belief that there is a reason for the laws of nature is not rational. Since the laws of nature are a human abstraction that does not need a reason, it is not even logical to look for a reason for them. Just as we would not look for a reason for the existence of the number 0.
What do you think?
A typical and incorrect evasion. I will explain it gradually:
1. In Kant’s terminology, this is the physico-theological argument, not the cosmological one (which is merely an appendix to it). It is based on complexity, not on the very existence.
2. The question of whether the laws of nature exist or are just our way of ordering the world is a matter of debate among philosophers. I am inclined to believe that they do exist in some sense. Not that they are objects, but that there are indeed such laws in creation and that we did not invent them as an organizing principle and could invent others. See a clear argument on this in column 426.
But as I will explain immediately, this is not really important to our discussion.
3. First, I do not assume that if the author were to now encounter an object with mass that remained standing in the air and did not fall, he would treat it with equanimity. He would probably assume that there is a mistake here or that something has disappeared from it for some reason. That is, he assumes that the law of gravitation is true and not just a temporary organizing principle for the facts we observed. This does not mean that it is certain, of course, but in order to unravel it, a great many experiments are needed that will convince us that it was indeed only a temporary methodological principle. As Kuhn argues against Popper, a single experiment will not make you abandon it. So, even if the laws of nature are organizing principles, I argue that they are correct organizing principles and not just a coincidence.
4. Therefore, even if the laws of nature are only organizing principles, when reality is organized for us in such a special way, the rational assumption is that there is someone/something at the root of the matter who takes care of it. Laws need a legislator. Nature could not have organized itself for us in any such coherent framework, and the fact that it organizes itself this way is special enough to ask why and who did it. If you insist that the laws exist only in our consciousness, then don’t ask this about the laws, ask this about the reality that operates according to these laws: a reality that operates this way is special, and this raises the question of who is the engineer who created it.
5. Regarding the comparison to the number 0, such an argument actually came up in my debate with David Enoch, where I explained why it is nonsense. See also column 456 on this. In short, if all of reality were organized in the form of triangles, I would indeed be looking for an explanation for this as well. In our context, I was not looking for an explanation for an abstract form of the law of gravity, but for the fact that our entire nature operates according to this law (it is all triangular).
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