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The laws of nature and the teleological argument

שו”תCategory: philosophyThe laws of nature and the teleological argument
asked 12 months ago

peace,
I will try to summarize the question.
Why assume that God, who is himself something special and specific, has existed all the time, and that the laws of nature, which are special and specific, cannot exist all the time?
Why assume that God doesn’t need someone to design him and the laws of nature do?
I heard you present two options for explaining the special rules:
Either someone created them or there are infinitely many random universes, so according to Occam’s razor, the option chosen is that there is a designer (God).
But what about the option that the laws of nature, like the designer, simply exist? According to this, we have saved one unnecessary assumption and it is better according to Occam.

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מיכי Staff answered 12 months ago

The laws of nature are not applicable. Therefore, there is no point in talking about their existence. And there is also no point in seeing them as a reason for anything. The laws describe reality but do not act in it. The law of gravity describes the attraction of bodies to each other, but it is not the law that creates the attraction but the force of gravity. Only applicable things create things, not laws. Laws have a legislator (the same one who created the reality that the laws describe).
Why assume that God does not need a reason? I do not assume that. I deduce it by the negative way: otherwise we reach an infinite regress.

תמיר replied 12 months ago

Same question, but instead of the laws of nature we will talk about an inanimate object whose behavior is described by the laws of nature. How will the answer change?

מיכי Staff replied 12 months ago

So he is God. Except that if he is mechanical and inanimate it is unlikely that he does not have a cause that created him.

ירון replied 12 months ago

As you said, the laws of nature describe reality. So we can assume that this reality has always existed.
Instead of saying that God has always existed and created the laws that describe reality
but claiming that the reality in which these laws exist has always existed
According to Occam's razor, the option without God is simpler and preferable

ירון replied 12 months ago

In the previous response, in the third line, but = possible

מיכי Staff replied 12 months ago

You are essentially saying that the world is ancient. We are back to Aristotle. It is indeed simpler but clearly implausible (because our world is made of things that are not eternal). Newtonian mechanics is also simpler than quantum theory and relativity, and it has only one flaw: it is not true. And of course physics also teaches us that the world is not ancient.

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