Faith – Lesson 17

Table of Contents

• Formulating the cosmological argument and correcting it
• Infinite regress, potential infinity, and concrete infinity
• God’s infinite duration versus an infinite chain of causes
• The limits of the definition of “God” in the argument
• “Explanation” versus “cause,” and what the argument actually needs
• Objection: maybe the basis is a law, a mechanism, or an event like the Big Bang
• Objection: spontaneous emergence and quantum theory
• Anaximander, prime matter, and the “conservation of being” law
• Objection: the scope of the causal principle and the world as a whole
• An organic whole, soul, and the analogy to a king
• The whole does not act on its parts, and the example of the electric field
• Conclusion and the question of “explanation” as plausibility

Summary

General overview

The cosmological argument begins with a simplistic formulation according to which everything has a cause, and from the existence of the world it infers the existence of a cause that is God. It then deals with the objection, “And what is the cause of God?” by correcting the principle to “every contingent thing has a cause,” and concluding that the chain must stop at a necessary being that is not contingent. The text presents infinite regress as a failure not because it is “very large,” but because it uses a concrete infinity that is not coherent, and it distinguishes between a legitimate potential infinity and a concrete infinity that produces nonsense. It goes on to argue that the purpose of the argument is not to identify this God with the religious God or with other definitions of God, and that its goal is only to prove the existence of a certain kind of being, not necessarily to “explain” the world in the psychological sense of giving satisfying understanding. It then brings objections such as “maybe the cause is a law / mechanism / Big Bang” and “maybe the world came into being spontaneously,” and argues that laws are descriptions, not causes; that quantum theory does not establish the complete absence of cause; and that denying the causal principle pushes one toward an irrational position. Finally, it argues that applying causality to the world as a whole is reasonable, because the world is nothing more than the collection of its components, and that talk about a “whole” acting as a separate entity really smuggles in an intuition of God.

Formulating the cosmological argument and correcting it

The simplistic formulation says that everything needs a cause, the world exists, therefore it must have a cause, and that cause is God. The claim, “If everything has a cause, then God also has a cause,” is meant to lead to an infinite regress of causes. The text says that infinite regress is perceived as dodging explanation, because it promises an explanation “if we go far enough” without presenting any foundation.

The formulation is corrected so that the assumption is not “everything has a cause” but “every contingent thing has a cause,” or every kind of thing that in our experience needs a cause. The argument then proceeds like this: the world has a cause, and if that cause is contingent then it too has a cause, and if it is not contingent then it is a necessary link that stops the chain. The text argues that since infinite regress is not a coherent option, the remaining conclusion is that there must be within the chain a being that is necessary in its existence, and that is God, in line with the formulation, “After you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains is probably the truth,” attributed to Sherlock Holmes.

Infinite regress, potential infinity, and concrete infinity

The text presents the problem by saying that an argument that depends on infinite retreat does not provide an explanation, but postpones it forever. The claim is that the concept of infinity creates conceptual problems, because infinity is not “the biggest thing,” but “more than any size we can conceive,” and therefore one cannot make positive assertions about it, only at most negative descriptions, similar to “Maimonides’ doctrine of negative attributes.”

The central distinction is between potential infinity, where one speaks of a limit or of a process that never ends but is well-defined, and concrete infinity, where one treats infinity as a complete object and thereby falls into nonsense. The mathematical example is the series one-half plus one-quarter plus one-eighth plus one-sixteenth, about which it is said that the sum does not “equal one” but rather “approaches one,” because any number smaller than one can be passed with enough terms, but one itself is never reached. The example of Achilles and the tortoise is presented as the same structure of infinite division that leads to correct understanding only in the sense of a limit.

The text states that an infinite chain of causes requires us “to present the explanation from the bottom up,” and therefore it uses infinity in the concrete sense, because one never arrives at the “bottom” from which the explanation begins. The example from Duties of the Heart against the eternity of the world is described as a mistake that comes from treating “the moment of formation” as though it were just a very distant point at minus infinity, whereas a process that begins from minus infinity is not defined, and one cannot point within it to a time of arrival at any given point.

God’s infinite duration versus an infinite chain of causes

The text presents an expected counterclaim according to which someone who stops the chain at God is also using infinity, since God exists for “an infinite amount of time.” The answer is that there is a major difference between an infinite chain of causes, which is a concrete infinity, and a statement about existence extending infinitely in time, which is a potential infinity. The text stresses that the claim is not “He existed at time minus infinity,” but “you will not find a time at which He does not exist,” that is, a negative statement that is well-defined.

The causal chain remains finite on the logical level even if there is infinity in time, and therefore there is no parallel logical problem like that of an infinite regress of causes. The text argues that moving from an infinite chain to a single cause that does not depend on a prior cause is not wordplay, but a change in the kind of infinity being used.

The limits of the definition of “God” in the argument

The claim, “What does this have to do with the God who gave the Torah at Mount Sinai and wants us to put on tefillin?” is presented as a misunderstanding of the aim of the cosmological argument. The text says that every argument proves the existence of an object defined by the argument itself, and therefore there is no attempt here to identify immediately the being proved by the argument with the religious God or with other concepts of God. The text lists examples of different definitions: Anselm’s argument defines “the most perfect being that can be conceived,” the physico-theological argument defines “the perfect engineering being,” and the moral argument defines a source that gives validity to moral laws.

The text says that at this stage the cosmological argument deals only with a being by virtue of which the world exists and which does not need a cause to bring it into existence, without integrating that with the other definitions. The claim is that both the minimum and the maximum of the argument are just the existence of a primary basis for the world’s existence, and not religious, moral, or metaphysical properties of perfection beyond that.

“Explanation” versus “cause,” and what the argument actually needs

The criticism that the argument “doesn’t explain” because it grounds what is familiar in an incomprehensible object is presented as a double misunderstanding. The text says that the cosmological argument is not looking for explanations but for causes, and its goal is to prove the existence of some being, even if that does not dissolve mysteries or calm anyone down. The example of footprints in the sand shows that concluding that someone passed by does not require knowing who he is, and still it is proof of his existence as a cause.

The text adds that in a certain sense there is an explanation here as well, similar to a scientific theory that grounds familiar phenomena in unfamiliar theoretical entities such as the force of gravity. The claim is that a scientific explanation can be fruitful in that it provides a cause for phenomena and unifies a wide range of facts under a single principle, and therefore grounding things in the unfamiliar can also count as an explanation in the sense of simplification and generalization. At the end of the discussion it is argued semantically that explanation is connected to plausibility and probability, and the answer given is that the cosmological move does not pretend to be an “explanation” in that sense but rather a causal proof.

Objection: maybe the basis is a law, a mechanism, or an event like the Big Bang

A common claim is that even if there is a cause, it does not have to be an entity; maybe it is a system of laws, a mechanism, or an event like the Big Bang. The answer is that laws and mechanisms are not a cause but a description of how a cause operates, and a law “doesn’t generate anything” but only describes processes. The example given is the distinction between “the law of gravity” as a mathematical description of attraction and “the force of gravity” as something that acts on a body, together with the claim that a law is not an entity and therefore cannot be a cause.

As for the Big Bang, it is argued that when it is proposed as the cause one may still ask who generated the event, and that sometimes the hidden intention is that the laws of nature “do” it without any generating object. The text illustrates this with a chain of explanations in the style of “Why did you slap him?” where beyond descriptions of physiological processes, an answer is still required about the generating factor; and from this it argues that causes that answer the question “who did it” are not laws but beings.

The text also shows a tendency to prefer “someone” and not just “something,” in the sense of an agent with judgment and discretion, and presents this through an analogy to a computer that performs an action in a way that can be described engineering-wise, while the real responsibility is attributed to the programmer or to whoever designed it. The claim is presented as plausible rather than necessary, and it is said that the alternatives of infinite regress or of “something happened without a cause” are less attractive for rational thought.

Objection: spontaneous emergence and quantum theory

The possibility that the world came into being without a cause is presented as an objection that undermines the principle of causality. The text says that the principle of causality is the default of rational thought, and whoever claims otherwise bears the burden of proof, so that casting doubt on rationality itself takes the discussion out of the realm of philosophy. It then argues that relying on quantum theory as proof of coming into being without a cause is mistaken, because the “spontaneous” formation of particles occurs only while preserving conservation laws, such as the formation of an electron together with a positron so as not to violate conservation of charge.

The text concludes from this that what is called a “vacuum” in quantum theory is not absolute nothingness, but a state with a defined character in which the laws of physics and the conservation laws are “there,” and so there is no creation ex nihilo without any framework whatsoever. The claim is that the absence of a cause is at most the absence of a local cause in time and space, but there is still a non-local cause or principle regulating the possibilities. At the same time it is again argued that laws are not causes but descriptions, and therefore here too a generating entity is required, not “quantum theory” in and of itself.

Anaximander, prime matter, and the “conservation of being” law

The text brings a passage from Anaximander in Shmuel Sambursky’s translation: “The unlimited is the beginning and foundation of all that exists… from where being comes to all things that are, there too destruction goes according to necessity… according to the order of time.” The text interprets this as a theory according to which the diverse world was created from an initial state resembling formless prime matter that splits into offsetting properties, similar to the cancellations found in quantum formation. The difference emphasized is that Anaximander speaks of emergence out of prime matter and not out of vacuum, because as a philosopher he is interested not only in the conservation of properties but in the question of how there are things at all.

The text argues that physics deals with properties and charges, and therefore is not troubled by the question, “Before there was nothing, and now there is something,” whereas philosophy deals with “the thing itself.” It presents a distinction between the reversal of properties, which can be offset, and existence, which has no “anti-existence,” and from this it argues that there is a philosophical “law of conservation of being” that is not part of physics’ mandate. The text concludes that physical proposals are not competitors to the cosmological argument, because they answer “how” and not “who / what” generates.

Objection: the scope of the causal principle and the world as a whole

The objection that causality applies only to things within the world and not to the world as a whole is rejected on the grounds that the world is nothing more than the collection of the things that compose it, and therefore if every component is contingent, the whole is contingent as well. The text compares this to Spinoza’s pantheism and presents the identification “God = nature” as a rewriting of materialism in another word, while claiming that it is “just words” and “nonsense.” The text argues that a claim according to which every individual part has a cause but the whole has no cause is unintelligible, because the whole without the parts is not a separate thing.

An organic whole, soul, and the analogy to a king

In passing, the text mentions the rejection of vitalism in modern biology, and raises a philosophical intuition according to which the organicity of a living being hints at a soul that unifies its parts into cybernetic functioning, including an image from the Talmudic text in Berakhot 10 that compares the soul in the body to the Holy One, blessed be He, in the world. It concludes that someone who speaks of the world as an organic entity that is more than the sum of its parts is hiding behind that an intuition of God, because only something of that kind could turn the collection into “one.”

In response to a question about “the whole of reality,” an analogy is brought from the Bible, “One of the people nearly lay with your wife,” where “one of the people” means the king, who unifies the people into being one. The claim is that if the whole is only a collection of particulars, then we have gained nothing; and if the whole is an entity with independent existence that acts on its particulars, then we have simply returned to God.

The whole does not act on its parts, and the example of the electric field

The text rejects claims in neuroscience that “the collective influences the individual” as nonsense in the philosophical sense, because the whole is not some additional thing beyond the particulars. An example is brought from field theory: an electric field is created by all the particles, including the particle itself, and when the field is described as a sum one gets infinities, because the particle is at zero distance from itself, and therefore its self-contribution must be removed. The conclusion is that the whole does not act on the individual part; rather, the particulars act on one another, and talk of “the whole” as an independent factor is a linguistic confusion.

Conclusion and the question of “explanation” as plausibility

In closing, it is argued that explanation is connected to “plausibility and probability,” and that it has a subjective dimension of producing a change in the listener, and the response is that the cosmological argument does not pretend to be an explanation in that sense but a proof of the existence of a generating being. The lecture stops before continuing to further objections, and ends with “Have a peaceful Sabbath.”

Okay, we’re in the cosmological argument. Let me just summarize where we’re holding right now. I started with a simplistic formulation of it, which says that everything must have a cause. Everything that exists must have a cause. The world exists, therefore it must have a cause. That cause is God. Against that I raised the argument that always gets raised, the obvious argument: if everything must have a cause, then what is His cause? God’s? He too should have some kind of cause, and of course you can keep going from there. Then I said: what is this challenge really doing? It’s trying to show me that I end up with an infinite regress. I need an endless retreat, I need to explain yes, turtles all the way down, and that’s illegitimate, so the atheist claims. An infinite regress is really an evasion of giving an explanation or describing a cause, not actually an explanation in its own right. Then I said that there’s a formulation that turns this very principle itself into the basis of the proof, because I’m basically saying, okay, let’s go with you, atheist, that infinite regress is a failure. Now what exactly are you proposing? One of two possibilities: either all the way along there is a cause, and it has a cause, and that cause has a cause, and so on ad infinitum, and that’s illegitimate because it’s an infinite regress. The second alternative is that the chain stops at some point, and that has to be some kind of entity that is not contingent; its existence is not accidental, rather its existence is necessary. And regarding it, we don’t need to assume that it falls under the assumption that everything has a cause. And in fact I corrected the formulation and said this: the initial assumption from which we start is not that everything must have a cause, but rather every contingent thing, or everything in our experience, must have a cause. And now we can continue in the same direction, saying okay, there is a world, so the world has a cause. Now I ask about that cause: is it the kind of thing that is contingent? Then it too must have a cause. If it is not the kind of thing that is contingent, then it is the first cause. If it has a cause, I will ask about that cause too—again, one of two possibilities. Since the option of continuing to infinity does not exist because that’s an infinite regress, we are left with the second alternative. As Sherlock Holmes said, after ruling out the impossible, what remains is apparently the truth. And therefore the claim is that somewhere in the chain, I don’t care where, there must be some link that is a necessary existent. It is not contingent, and that is God. Okay, and therefore that is the proof of God’s existence. After that I tried to show, or demonstrate, illustrate, what exactly the problem is with infinite regress. On the one hand, we saw that it is the basis for the atheist’s objection, but after the change in formulation it’s not only not the basis of the objection—it’s the basis on which the proof is built. Meaning, the cosmological argument is built on the idea that infinite regress is a failure. So what exactly is the problem here? I tried to show that in fact an argument that depends on infinite regress is an evasive argument. It doesn’t actually present an explanation; rather, it says there is an explanation—if you go far enough, you’ll find it. But it’s not enough for me that you claim there is an explanation; I want to see what the explanation is. You claim there is an alternative and therefore you don’t accept my explanation, but you’re incapable of presenting that alternative, so that’s not serious. To say that there is an explanation without saying what it is—that’s not a claim. I explained this through Hilbert’s hotel and so on, but bottom line, my claim was basically this: the concept of infinity is a concept that creates many intellectual problems. We usually tend to think of infinity as very, very, very, very large—some expression, some extension of the concept of size into something enormously large. But that kind of thinking is problematic, because it basically places infinity on the axis of size, just at the farthest end. Okay, it’s like turtles all the way down, assuming there is a down, that there is some place called down. So too with infinity: the sting in the matter is not that it is the biggest there is, but that it is more than any large thing we can manage to conceive of, and that is not the same thing. Because to say the biggest there is means saying something positive about it, saying that it is big. I cannot say anything positive about infinity. All I can say—like Maimonides’ theory of negative attributes. And I distinguished there between potential infinity and concrete infinity, and I said that usually it is accepted, at least among mathematicians, that using the concept of infinity is legitimate if one does so carefully. Meaning, you can speak about infinity as a potential concept and define what you are talking about—that’s fine. The moment you speak about infinity as a concrete concept, you run into problems; you are basically falling into nonsense, into some statement that has no meaning. When you talk about infinity as some additional kind of number—that’s not legitimate. When you talk about infinity as a limit, as something perhaps approached, it negates everything we encounter along the way, but I haven’t said anything about what it is positively—that is possible, that is potential infinity. I gave the example of that series of one-half plus one-quarter plus one-eighth plus one-sixteenth, every time multiplying the next term by one-half. About that series, people usually formulate it as though this sum equals one. One-half plus one-quarter plus one-eighth—it does not, of course. This sum does not equal one. This sum tends toward one. What does “tends toward one” mean? Any number, however close to one, that you give me, I can show you a number of terms in this series that will exceed it. There is no number less than one that one can say is the sum of the series. But on the other hand, we will never actually reach one itself. Therefore one functions here in a potential sense, not in a concrete sense. And that is exactly the point, because there are infinitely many terms here. I spoke about the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, the race between Achilles and the tortoise, which is also the same issue. And the claim is basically that when we give an explanation that is based on a chain of arguments, or an infinite chain of causes, that is really speaking about concrete infinity, not potential infinity. Why? Because when I propose an explanation for some claim or for the existence of some entity, I need to present the explanation from the bottom up. I need to say, okay, these are my assumptions, from these assumptions I derive these and those conclusions, from there I derive further conclusions, and in the end I arrive at the claim I want to explain or prove or whatever. I have to start from below. You can’t start from above and call that an explanation. If I say this thing is true because there is a prior proposition that grounds it, and what is that prior proposition based on? On an earlier proposition that grounds it, and so on ad infinitum—that doesn’t work. And as long as you haven’t reached the bottom there—turtles all the way down—as long as you haven’t reached the bottom, you haven’t really presented an explanation; you’ve only said that there will be an explanation if we keep going further, and of course we’ll never get there. So this is an evasion of giving an explanation; it is not really an explanation. I gave the example from Duties of the Heart, which says that the world cannot be eternal, as Aristotle claimed, because then if we had begun progressing from the moment of the world’s establishment or formation, we would never have managed to arrive at our own day, because the distance is infinite, so even by constantly going we would never get there. That is a mistake because he treats the moment of the world’s formation as a moment on the timeline that is just very, very, very far away, so that one can define a process in which we start there and advance toward our time. But that process is not defined. The indication that it is not defined is that in such a process you won’t be able to point to any point on the x-axis and say at what time I will reach it. These are just words. There is no such path; it describes no path at all. I was at minus infinity and remained at minus infinity and I will never leave there. Therefore talking about minus infinity in that sense is talking concretely, not potentially, and therefore it is illegitimate. Illegitimate meaning not coherent, it says nothing. By contrast, if I am at point zero and begin moving backward toward minus infinity, that is a well-defined process even though I will never reach minus infinity. And it is a well-defined process because I can define, for every point on the x-axis, at what time I will pass it or reach it. A completely defined process, only one with no end. The second process relates to minus infinity in a potential way and is therefore legitimate. The first process relates to minus infinity concretely and is therefore not legitimate. Okay, that is basically the claim. Now what I wanted to say is that when we talk about an infinite explanatory chain or an infinite chain of causes, we are basically… using infinity in its concrete sense and not its potential sense. And therefore it seems to me that philosophers regard infinite regress as a failure. By contrast, if for example I say that God is the cause of reality—I stopped the chain at the nine hundred and seventeenth link, okay?—and there sits a link before which there is no prior link, it doesn’t need something to produce it. Now I ask, okay, and how long has it existed? Infinite time. So people say to me: fine, so in fact you too arrive at using the concept of infinity. You accused me, the atheist says to me, of infinite regress, of using the concept of infinity; you too are using the concept of infinity. But instead of speaking about an infinite chain of causes, you are speaking about one cause that is infinite in time. What’s the difference? A very big difference. Because to speak about an infinite chain of causes is to speak about concrete infinity. To speak about one cause that is infinite in time is to speak about potential infinity. Because when I say that the Holy One, blessed be He, exists for infinite time, I am not claiming that He existed at time minus infinity. There is no such time. What I am claiming is that you will not find a time at which He did not exist. There was no such time, that’s all. That is a negative statement, a potential statement. I do not need, when I speak about God, I do not need to speak about infinity in its concrete sense, and therefore this is a better alternative. When you speak about an infinite chain of explanations or an infinite chain of causes, you have to present the whole chain to me in full in order for that thing to count as an explanation. And to present the whole chain in full is to relate to that infinity concretely, and that doesn’t exist—it’s nonsense. When I speak about the Holy One, blessed be He, existing for infinite time, that is potential infinity, not concrete. I do not know what was at minus infinity or whether there was such a thing as minus infinity. I only say that He always existed. Wherever you look in time, He is there. I am not saying that He exists for infinite time; rather I am saying that there is no time in which He did not exist. These seem to us like identical or overlapping sentences, but they are not. The second is potential and the first is concrete, and that is very important, because the first is undefined and the second is defined. Therefore, when I transfer the whole infinite chain of causes into one cause that exists for infinite time, it’s not just playing with words. There is something different here. Yes, on the logical level the chain is finite; on the temporal level the chain is infinite. So therefore, since on the logical level it is finite, I don’t have a problem with it. That is basically the basic claim. Now, one more point I want to make about this argument before I go a little into objections and things like that. Very often people say, when they hear this argument, the following claim comes up: fine, but what does this have to do with the God who gave the Torah at Mount Sinai, who wants us to put on tefillin? Who is this God anyway? Why say that this is God—maybe it’s something else? You proved that there is something like this, but who says that this is God? You want to prove God’s existence. There is a misunderstanding here, and I’ve already mentioned it more than once, because in the cosmological argument my intention is not to get the atheist to put on tefillin. That is not the cosmological argument’s mandate. The cosmological argument—or any argument, not just the cosmological one—every argument proves the existence of an object defined according to that argument. Meaning, every argument has to define who this object is that it calls God and whose existence it wants to prove. So Anselm’s argument defined the most perfect being that can be conceived. The cosmological argument says: the object that did not need to be created and did not need a cause to create it, and which created the world. The physico-theological argument defined God as the perfect engineer, the wisest being, the one with the greatest abilities. And so on. The moral argument says God is the source that gives force to the laws of morality, and so on. Each one of these arguments defines the concept of God in its own context, the one it is dealing with. Among other things, the religious God is also one of the definitions of the concept of God, and that too can be put on the table, but there is at present no claim identifying all these beings. We’ll get to that later. It defines the concept of God in its own context, the one it is dealing with. Among other things, the religious God is one of the definitions of the concept of God, and that too can be put on the table. But there is currently no claim identifying all these beings. That—we’ll get to later—the relationship between all these beings. Right now I’m engaged in proving the existence of an entity defined in our context. And in our context it is defined as the entity by virtue of which the world exists, and which itself does not need a cause to create it. Okay, that’s it. That’s its definition. The cosmological argument wants to prove the existence of that entity. And the cosmological argument proves the existence of that entity. That’s it. From here to get to the moral God, the religious God, Anselm’s God—I’m not interested right now; those are other entities, I’m not dealing with that at the moment. In the end I’ll do an integration, but right now I’m dealing with the cosmological argument, and therefore I am not dealing with the religious God, nor am I dealing with Anselm’s perfect God. I did not prove the existence of a perfect being. I proved the existence of a being that is the primary basis for the existence of the world. That’s it. That is the maximum and the minimum I’m talking about. No more than that and no less than that. Therefore there is no point in asking here about the religious God or about God of any other kind. Every such argument has to be judged in terms of the proof we are dealing with. One final point, still by way of introduction: yes, basically a lot of times the claim comes up that this thing is not an explanation. What you are proposing, people tell me, this thing is not an explanation. Why? Because you are basically explaining the world by means of an object that you do not understand, do not know, and cannot say anything about. So what have we gained with this whole explanation? Usually an explanation is supposed to tell you something—not to place something unclear on a basis that is itself clear. Therefore we explain this thing and that is why it’s called an explanation. We clarify something we don’t understand by means of something else that we do understand. So what does it help me that you take some object that you are now defining ad hoc? None of us knows what it is, knows how to say anything about it, or has encountered it. So what did you gain from this whole explanation? In what way is our situation now better than it was before we set out on the cosmological road? Here again there is a misunderstanding—or even a double misunderstanding, I would say. The first point is that the cosmological argument is not really looking for explanations. The cosmological argument is looking for causes. That is not the same thing. Meaning, I do not claim that when I present to you the cosmological thesis that there is a God who created the world, you will now understand the world better. That it will provide an explanation for some mystery or mysteries you have about the world. No. I am simply proving the existence of some entity. That’s all. Does this clarify anything for you, dissipate any clouds for you, make you feel better, worse? If not, take pills. That’s not my mandate; I’m not here to make you feel better. I’m here to put forward an argument by virtue of which I can prove the existence of some object. That’s all. If I proved the existence of this object, I finished the job. Whether from your perspective this counts as an explanation, whether it calms you down—that doesn’t interest me. I’m not here to provide an explanation. Not because explanations aren’t important, but because that is not the purpose of the argument. The argument does not offer an explanation. The argument comes to prove the existence of some object. That’s all. If I proved that, then I proved it. Whether it explains things to you or not is a marginal question as far as my discussion here is concerned. That’s all. Therefore I have no problem with the fact that this argument grounds the world, which is generally familiar to us, on some abstract object that we have now defined and that is unfamiliar to us. It doesn’t interest me. Because this argument’s goal is not to explain. An explanation should give me some benefit—more clarity, more understanding. That’s what is called an explanation. Otherwise the explanation is unnecessary. But here I’m not coming to give an explanation. Say I see footprints in the sand. Yes, like Piglet walking there with the footprints in the sand with Winnie-the-Pooh. So he follows the footprints and reaches the conclusion that there was someone there who impressed those footprints in the sand. Who is this someone? He can’t say anything about him. So what? Therefore there was no such someone? When he says there was someone who left those footprints in the sand, he is not coming to explain to you how the footprints look, or to dispel some mystery you had. He is simply proving the existence of someone who passed here, because otherwise there wouldn’t be footprints here. That’s all. Even without saying anything about the one who passed here, you cannot say that I didn’t prove his existence. There was someone here and he passed here. Who is he? What do I know to say about him? Nothing. So what? I still claim that there was someone here who created these footprints. That’s all. One more sentence: I said it’s a double mistake, because in a certain sense there is an explanation here. And I’ll tell you in what sense. There is, in the context of when we produce a scientific theory. A scientific theory explains facts that we have observed. Let’s take once again the law of gravitation, which is always dear to me in these contexts. So we all know the fact that objects with mass fall toward the earth. That’s clear, known to everyone; every child sees it and knows it. Now Newton comes and places all these facts on the explanation that there is a force of gravitation. Every two masses attract each other. Is that an explanation? On the face of it, no. Because the facts of objects falling toward the earth are very familiar to us; there is nothing more familiar and understandable to us than that. And in order to explain this, in quotation marks, we invent a theory with objects—a force of gravitation—which are objects and all sorts of things of that sort, which no one has ever seen and no one knows all that much about. So in what sense does the theory explain the facts? And the answer is that I could say as before: it does not explain, but it proves that these theoretical entities exist, even if that explains nothing to you. Now I want to make an additional claim. I want to say that nevertheless this does constitute an explanation. Even though here I am grounding the familiar on the unfamiliar, whereas from an explanation I expect grounding the unfamiliar on the familiar—making a reduction of the unfamiliar to a familiar model—and then that would count as an explanation. I claim that in science, many times explanations are actually a grounding in the unfamiliar. I take familiar phenomena and ground them, or present them, as particular cases of something unfamiliar. Why does that count as an explanation? First, it counts as an explanation because it gives you some cause that produces all the phenomena you encountered. What is familiar to you in the phenomena is the phenomena themselves. That doesn’t mean you know why this is happening. Now I say: look, there is something that caused these familiar phenomena, so this does still add some understanding. Another thing usually required of scientific explanations, and explanations in general, is that they place many phenomena—and the more numerous and diverse they are, the more this is considered a fruitful and efficient theory—under one principle. The very fact that I simplify the picture, generalize it, has a kind of explanatory power. When I basically take infinitely many facts and ground them all on one principle or one entity, the force of gravitation, then this also constitutes an explanation. Similarly, I say here too. Meaning, you can talk about the world and all that is in it, about the laws of nature and all these things—these are all things that we know and experience ourselves all the time. These are familiar things. But we ground them on an unfamiliar object, and therefore the question is: in what sense is there an explanation here? So first I said there is no explanation here. So what? That doesn’t trouble me, because I’m not here to explain, I’m here to prove God’s existence. Now I want to add something else: it also gives an explanation. It gives a certain kind of explanation, because it basically says that behind all the detailed and complex diversity that we encounter there does stand one thing responsible for this whole story. And in that sense it also gives some added dimension—call it aesthetic, or clarity, or what we usually expect from an explanation. Therefore I think that here too, even though there’s no need for it at all, there is nevertheless some dimension, a dimension of explanation. Okay, that regarding the framework of the argument. Now I want to go into a few objections that arise regarding this argument. There is a common objection that says: even if I accept that there is a cause for every thing or every event or every object—by the way, that’s a difference; causes for events are what brings about an event, a cause for an object is what created the object, okay? Those are two different things. But I won’t go into that nuance right now. Who says that this cause is a kind of being, an entity, an object? Maybe it’s a mechanism, a law, or something else—the Big Bang. Meaning, it could be that even if I accept the assumption that everything must have a cause, that still doesn’t mean—now I’m no longer talking about the religious God or another God, that’s not the kind of objection I ruled out before—but the claim is that even so, the cosmological proof speaks about an object defined as God, whose existence one wants to prove. Who says it’s an object? Who says that… who says that what underlies all existence is actually some kind of being? Maybe it’s laws of nature, processes, events. Maybe they are what created the world? That is a very common claim. I want to touch on it a bit, because I think it is problematic. First of all, in general I want to say: events or mechanisms or laws are not an explanation of anything. They also cannot be the cause of anything. They are a description of the manner in which the cause operates. I’ll give an example. Say, let’s return to the beloved law of gravitation, yes, bodies fall toward the earth, and so I arrive at the conclusion—Newton arrived at the conclusion—that every two masses attract each other, the force of gravitation. That is what is called the law of gravitation. Now I ask myself why the body falls toward the earth. What causes it to fall? So many times people will say, as a matter of habitual phrasing, the law of gravitation. The law of gravitation is not the cause that makes it fall. What makes it fall is the force of gravitation. The law of gravitation merely describes the fact that there is a force of gravitation and how it operates and what it does. Laws are not causes of anything. Laws describe the mode of operation of the cause, or how it creates the effect, the event, the object, or whatever it may be. A law as such is not an entity, so it cannot be a cause of anything. The law merely describes developments in the world, but I am asking who makes those developments happen. The law is not an explanation of who makes those developments happen. The law is a description of how the thing happens, but when I ask who brought it about, who did it, the law cannot be the answer. And notice, many times people do not distinguish between saying there is a force of gravitation and saying there is a law of gravitation. Those are not the same thing. To say that there is a law of gravitation means that every two masses attract one another with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. That’s a description, a description of phenomena, and we know that every two masses indeed attract one another with such and such a force. But when I ask why this happens, the answer is the force of gravitation, not the law of gravitation. What is the force of gravitation? The force of gravitation is some kind of entity that exists in the world. When I ask myself what causes a body to fall toward the earth, the answer is that the force of gravitation acts on it, pulls it, and causes it to fall toward the earth. What is the difference between that statement and the earlier statement that I said was not an explanation? This statement speaks about an entity. The previous statement spoke about a law. A law is not an explanation; a law is a description. The explanation is what entity produced the thing I’m dealing with here. By the way, even with the force of gravitation itself, when I ask myself what its cause is, then once again one could answer me: the law of gravitation. The law of gravitation says that when there is mass, the mass creates a force of gravitation. But notice: the explanation is not the law of gravitation. The explanation is the masses that create the force of gravitation. Yes, in the attraction between two masses, one mass is the source of the force—it creates a force—and that force pulls the second mass toward it. So there are two causal processes here. Mass creates force, and force pulls the second mass. Every such step is a causal step. And what lies at the basis of this causation is an object, not a law. At the basis of the mass’s attraction stands the force of gravitation. At the basis of the force of gravitation stands that mass. But it is always an object. The object is the cause of the occurrence of things and the existence of things, not a law. A law is not a cause of anything. Therefore what I want to claim is that to say that the laws of nature created the world, or the Big Bang, or I don’t know what, all sorts of formulations of that kind—that is not an answer to anything. At most it can be a description of how the one who created the world operated. But when I ask who created the world or who is responsible for the fact that the world exists, the answer is not the laws of nature. I remind you of that fellow who slapped someone, and when the one who received the slap asked him, “Tell me, why are you slapping me?” he said: “Because my hand moved and struck your cheek.” Wait, and why did it move? “Because the muscle stretched and contracted.” And why did the muscle stretch and contract? “Because there is an electric current that contracts and relaxes the muscle.” And why was the electric current generated? “Because there is an electric field in the brain and nerves that generated a current in the nerves, and therefore…” Yes, one kid, one goat, all the way until in the end you arrive at the Holy One, blessed be He. So I didn’t understand—the Big Bang is not a law? It too is an event, it is real, it is… Right, as an event you can now ask who created it, and therefore I say there is… But that’s another question, but it’s not a matter of it not being… No, another issue, but it’s not a law. No, no, that’s not another question, it’s the same question. Because when people mean that the Big Bang is the cause—no, that gives no answer at all, because then I will ask who created it. Rather, what do they mean to say? They mean to say that there is some law of nature by virtue of which bangs occur. Meaning, basically in a hidden way, not always explicitly, what they really mean to say is that the laws of nature did it; there is no need to assume the existence of some object. And I say that is wrong. You are right that the Big Bang is not a law of nature; the Big Bang is an event. But someone brought about that event. There is something—or someone or something—that created it. Therefore, after all, whenever I ask you why you slapped me, I expect an explanation of why you as an object caused that, not the process, the chain of events that took place on the way to the slap. There has to be someone. I’ll say more than that—not only something, but someone. Meaning, usually that cause is supposed to be someone and not something. Meaning, it has to be some intelligent being, or I don’t know, with some kind of judgment or decision; these are very general statements, I don’t want to anthropomorphize. But still, it should not be a stone or a tree; that doesn’t cause anything. If something comes out of a tree, then I’ll ask myself who caused that something to come out of the tree. I will not see the tree as the cause that does things, even though the tree is an object. Yes, but it is a non-personal object—again, not personal in the sense of two hands and two legs, but personal in the sense that it has judgment, decisions, it carries things out in some sense, it is an agent. Yes, so trees and stones are not like that. Therefore it seems to me that the explanations we expect, or the causes we expect, are usually supposed to be beings. Not events and not laws of nature. Yes, I don’t know, when you see a computer performing some action, okay? When I ask myself, okay, how was this action performed? You can describe explanations to me in terms of the computer’s circuits, or the computer’s block diagram, or whatever, that show why this action was performed. And you understand that this doesn’t really provide an explanation. In the end, after all, you will have to get to the programmer. And the programmer who built the computer and programmed it is ultimately the one who really created the action. In our ordinary manner of speaking we say no, no, the computer did it, the computer did it, but really, really we would not settle for the explanation: there was a computer here and it did it. No. We refer to the intelligent being who created this computer. He is really the one ultimately responsible for what happened. Therefore it seems to me that all sorts of other proposals—not an intelligent being standing at the base of this process—I think that does not suffice as a cause or as an explanation. Now, I’ll say again, what does it mean that it does not suffice? One can always say okay, if it doesn’t satisfy you then take a pill. Fine, perhaps—but still it could be that there is something non-intelligent that created everything. I say yes, but then I will ask regarding that non-intelligent being: who created it? Meaning, it will enter the chain for me. Where will I be prepared to stop the chain? To stop the chain and no longer ask, and who is responsible for this? That will happen only at the point where there is intelligence. Otherwise it seems to me we won’t stop the chain. And again I return and emphasize that I do not mean to make a necessary claim, but a plausible claim. I want to say that this argument offers an alternative that is more plausible than the other alternative, if there even is another alternative. The infinite alternative is not an alternative at all, and the alternative that something happened without a cause is indeed possible, but it does not fit our ordinary thinking, our rational thinking, and therefore it seems to me it loses in the final analysis. Let’s put it this way: if I showed that a person who thinks rationally must reach the conclusion that there is a God, and the argument against me is yes, but maybe it’s not right to think rationally, then I’m set. Meaning, I’ve done my part, because that basically means that the burden of proof is on the one who said there is no God. Explain to me why here you choose to be suddenly non-rational. Now true, rationality is not always a guarantee that you are right. But for me that is enough in a discussion of this kind, as in any other discussion; it is enough for me to say that rational thinking should lead us to the conclusion that there is a God. Now you can say okay, but I do not accept rational thinking. I have nothing to say to you. Other than that I think your alternative is less attractive. And if so, then it seems to me that I won this discussion. Maybe you were not convinced, but you came out with your hands on your head. Meaning, this says that you are being pushed into non-rational corners. Another argument that comes up in this context, or a continuation of the same argument, is the possibility of spontaneous generation. As I said before, spontaneous generation is generation without a cause. Not a cause that is an agent, or a cause that is a law of nature—no, without any cause at all. Meaning generation without a cause. Maybe the world came into being just like that, without causes? Why assume there must be some cause that created it? So here, as I said before, since in rational thinking we usually assume the principle of causality, then saying that the world has a cause seems to me to be the default assumption. Whoever wants to claim otherwise—that may be possible, one cannot rule it out, but the burden of proof is on him. Meaning, in the end I reached the conclusion that rational thinking leads me to God. If you want to be non-rational, I have nothing to say to you, but from my point of view that is enough. The goal of a philosophical discussion is to show where rational thinking leads. Whoever wants to cast doubt on the tools of philosophical and rational work, then the discussion should not be philosophy. I have nothing to say to him. Therefore this is not a relevant argument. Except that now people come and say, yes, but this isn’t such a far-fetched and irrational argument. We know of spontaneous generation also from the physics of our own time, of the last generation. Quantum theory allows spontaneous generation of particles out of the vacuum. Things simply come into being somehow, out of nothing. So if that is the case, then we already have scientific indications that it is not true that everything must have a cause that created it. There can be things that come into being spontaneously; there is nothing that created them. Here I want to argue that this argument too is incorrect. And the reason it is incorrect is… I’ll describe it this way. Let’s enter a bit into quantum theory. When we speak about spontaneous generation—say a particle is created, suddenly a particle pops out of the vacuum, an electron comes into being out of nothing. Okay? Quantum theory does not allow spontaneous generation unless the conservation laws are preserved. Say charge—for example, if there were an empty world and suddenly an electron popped into it. The total charge in the world is now minus e—e is the charge of the electron, yes? A certain negative charge. That violates the law of conservation of charge. Impossible. Therefore even if there is spontaneous generation, together with the electron there will also be a positron. The positron will offset the properties of the electron so that the total remains zero as it was before. Conservation laws cannot be violated in spontaneous generation. Now this is fascinating, first of all for the reason of who sees to it that the conservation laws are preserved or not violated? After all, we are talking about a vacuum, a world in which there is nothing. Suddenly an electron pops into it. So who makes sure that whenever an electron pops in, a positron pops in with it? There is nothing here inside the vacuum, right? That means that what is called in quantum theory the vacuum, or the vacuum state, yes, the lowest energy state—that is not really a vacuum in the way we use the word in everyday language. A common mistake, but incorrect. Obviously there is something in this vacuum. For example, the laws of physics. The laws of physics are there. It’s not empty. There is something there, or someone, who takes care to organize or regulate even spontaneous generations. So that means they are not spontaneous—or not completely spontaneous. There is no local cause, no local cause when the electron is created, for why the electron was created at that place and time. In that sense quantum theory is not causal. But that—you can call it causality, but not local and not temporal, not in space and not in time. But there is some cause that brought it about. That cause I can call quantum theory, say. If there were a real vacuum without laws of nature, without anything, simply absolute emptiness, then even if something could come into being there, I have no idea—and if something could come into being there, there would be no guarantee that the conservation laws would hold. There is nothing there. Meaning, the nature of the vacuum causes it so that even when the vacuum is breached, it is breached in very specific ways. So that means it is not a vacuum. There is something there. It is not something utterly without form, utterly without content. It is not just, okay, something completely empty, there is nothing. No. There is something there. We call that something the laws of physics, quantum theory, or whatever. But these already exist even before the first electron popped in. Because otherwise there would not be conservation laws governing the phenomenon. And this essentially means that when we talk about spontaneous generation from a vacuum, that is a major mistake. It is spontaneous generation from a world devoid of particles. But that world is not a vacuum. That world has a very well-defined character that is what allows the generation and also dictates the ways it happens—conservation laws and so on. In that world there cannot be two particles whose masses do not attract one another, because the law of gravitation also exists in that world. And it exists in that world even before there was a single mass in it. No, there is no mass in it whatsoever, and still the law of gravitation is there. Meaning, there are things there even though there is no particle, no entity I can point to as existing there. Therefore physicists call this a vacuum state, but it is not really a vacuum in the sense in which we use the term in everyday speech. And therefore when I ask whether a generation of this kind has a cause, my answer is yes. There is a cause. And what is the cause? Of course I will not say quantum theory. Quantum theory merely describes the mode of operation of the cause, because quantum theory is laws. We already said that causes have to be some thing or entity. Okay? I don’t know—the Holy One, blessed be He, if you want, or tell me whatever you like—but there has to be something there; it is what really causes the electrons to pop out of the vacuum, and it is what does so in the manner described by quantum theory. Therefore it does not really happen in a vacuum. Or in other words, truly spontaneous generation without any cause at all—there is no such thing, or at least we know of no such thing. Okay? Therefore I think that this objection too is a problematic objection. Let me perhaps add something else that I once wrote in some article. There is an ancient Greek philosopher named Anaximander. And he left a fragment—yes, we have a fragment—that the experts say is the first written fragment we possess from Greek philosophy. The earliest fragment. And here I copied it, in Samuel Sambursky’s translation. “The unlimited is the beginning and principle of all that exists. But this is neither water nor any other of the things called the elements”—here “elements” means the four elements—“but some other unlimited nature, from which the heavens and all the worlds in them came forth. From where beings have their coming-to-be, there too their passing-away occurs according to necessity. For they give justice and recompense to one another for their injustice according to the order of time.” What is he basically saying? In my language and briefly, he basically wants to propose a kind of theory that sounds a bit like a mystical theory, according to which the world was created—our world, very diverse, complex, with many characteristics and properties and so forth—the world was created from a state of what later came to be called prime matter, matter without form, kind of a lump like that, with nothing one can say about it, which splits into things whose properties offset one another. Exactly like I described earlier with spontaneous generation in quantum theory. Yes, there are many today who want to claim that the world was created in some quantum eruption, the Big Bang. Then there is no problem, because in quantum theory spontaneous generation can happen. Okay? But as I said. Anaximander says: spontaneous generation does not come from a vacuum. It comes from prime matter, matter without properties. Without form—that’s what “prime” means, yes?—or without properties, let’s call them physical properties. Now when it splits into particles, there will be electrons and positrons here. So that they offset one another and cause the total still to remain without properties, or with zero properties—not without properties. That’s the same thing, by the way. But it will remain such that the sum total of every property is zero. Okay? That is basically Anaximander’s claim, really anticipating, yes, the conception of the twentieth-whatever century by two and a half thousand years. But there is the addition of one more element that appears in him and to which modern physics does not relate, and that is the prime matter. Modern physics, as I described to you earlier, speaks about spontaneous generation out of a vacuum. He speaks about spontaneous generation out of prime matter. What is the difference? I’ll tell you what the difference is. Physics is bothered by conservation laws. Those are the laws of physics. It does not permit, it forbids deviation from conservation laws. And therefore, basically, from its perspective there is no problem with generation from a vacuum, so long as for every property generated there is an anti-property that offsets it. By the way, mass is also a property. A positron also has negative mass, and positive charge and negative mass, so that together with the electron all their properties sum to zero. But there is one thing physics does not answer and is not troubled by. A world in which there is an electron and a positron is still a different world from a world of absolute vacuum, right? You agree. None of the conservation laws were violated. Everything is preserved. Total charge is zero, total mass is zero. Everything is zero. Everything is fine, except for one thing. Before there was nothing and now there is. That you cannot say was preserved. The law of conservation of being, yes, was violated. Before there was nothing and now there are things. Okay? That was violated. Why doesn’t that bother the modern physicist? Because that is not his mandate. That is a question in philosophy, not a question in physics. Physics deals with the properties of things, not with the things themselves. From the point of view of physics, the mass of the thing—you might ask a person on the street and he’ll say that’s the thing itself; charge is a property, but mass is the thing. No. A physicist sees mass too as a kind of charge. Therefore from the physicists’ point of view, physics deals with charges, with the properties of things. It does not deal with the thing itself. Therefore the question of how the thing itself came into being when before there was nothing is not a question a physicist asks himself. It is a question a philosopher asks himself. The physicist asks whether the conservation laws were violated or not violated. And to that he gives his answer—they were not violated because there is an offset. Everything is excellent. But there is one more conservation law, which I call a philosophical conservation law, not a scientific conservation law. The conservation of being. Before there was nothing and now there are things—the positron and the electron—which are beings. It is not a being and an anti-being. They both exist. It is not that this exists and that anti-exists. There is no such thing as anti-existing. There is existing and non-existing. What is anti-existing? Existence has no opposite contrary, only the opposite of nothingness. Properties have a contrary opposite and the opposite of absence. Therefore the physicist does not deal with this because existence is not a property. The philosopher deals with that. But Anaximander as a philosopher asked himself not only how properties were created, but also how there are things. And for that you must reach the conclusion that there was prime matter at the base, and then of course one can ask, and who made the prime matter? And who split out from the prime matter all the things we know while preserving the conservation laws and the laws of physics and so on. This parallels what I described earlier, that ultimately when we deal with laws—physics deals with laws—we are not dealing with the things themselves. We are dealing with a description of how these things operate. But when I ask for an explanation in the philosophical sense, I ask what was there or who was there, not how it operated. Physics gives me an answer about how it operated. But I’m not asking how it operated; I am asking who is the one that operated in that way. Physics does not give answers to that. The one who seeks those answers and perhaps also gives them is philosophy. And therefore the fact that physicists offer an alternative to the cosmological claim is a misunderstanding of the field of discussion. Physics is not even competing on this field. Laws are not explanations. They may be explanations, but they are not causes. Laws do not produce anything. Laws describe. They help us understand how a cause that produces something operates. But physics does not ask who that cause is; it asks what the law is. For it, even what we call a cause in philosophy—mass, yes?—is a law, is a charge. It is not a thing. Okay? Physics does not deal with things; it deals with the properties of things. But philosophy asks itself about the things. And therefore I think this objection from spontaneous generation is also incorrect. Okay. Another objection is regarding the scope of the principle of causality. Who says that the principle of causality also applies to the world as a whole? Maybe it applies only to certain objects within the world, or certain events within the world. Let’s do this very briefly because I want to finish the cosmological argument today. So come on, I think this is a very strange statement. The world is nothing other than the collection of the things that make it up. There is nothing beyond that. And therefore if everything in the world is a contingent being, then the world as a whole is also a contingent being. It is a possible being, not a necessary one. Okay? There is nothing more in the whole. It’s like Spinoza’s pantheism, yes, which says that God—he identifies God with the natural whole. Mere words. You can call the natural whole God; I can call it Yankele too—what difference does it make? The natural whole is the natural whole. That’s not another conception of God. That is atheistic materialism that for some reason also uses the term God. That’s all. And so many words are spilled around these things and nuances and philosophical articles—it’s all nonsense, it says nothing. Just silliness. So in that sense I want to say that I find it hard to understand what those who say, “Look, the world as a whole doesn’t need a cause, only each and every component that makes up the world needs a cause,” are talking about. If every component needs a cause, then the world as a whole also had some cause. Because otherwise—what? If the world as a whole has no cause, then what existed there without all the components, which themselves do require causes? I don’t understand these statements. Therefore—or if you prefer another way—every particular in the world, if you trace the causal chain, after all it is indeed a contingent being. Trace the causal chain not of the world, but of a particular thing in the world. It does indeed need a cause—not the world as a whole. Well then, now return to the cosmological argument. Either go on infinitely or you will have to stop in the middle. Now if you stop in the middle, what will this stopping point be? To say that the world as a whole did it? The world as a whole does nothing. The world as a whole is a collection of things. It is not an entity in its own right. By the way, another incidental remark: in contemporary biology, the word vitalism is a dirty word. Yes, biologists are horrified when they hear such a thing. Vitalism means to assume that in the body of a living creature there is some substance of a different kind, not inert matter but living matter. Biology claims that it is all inert matter, and life is some form or mode of organization of inert matter. They are not willing to accept vitalism as a view. Now about that I think I once spoke; I don’t want to enter into that issue. What lies behind the vitalist conception—and in the philosophical sense I think it is more plausible, not in the scientific sense but in the philosophical sense—and this seems to me to be the conception that says, perhaps I should even say something more than vitalism: dualism. That is not the same thing. Dualism means the existence of a soul. Vitalism is a conception in biology that there is a different substance that is life-substance. Soul means that this is not material at all; it is something spiritual. So I won’t distinguish between these two right now, even though they are two different things. What I just want to say is that we relate to a body, which is a collection of cells and molecules and particles and organs and whatever you like, as an organic whole. Now, what turns this whole collection of particulars into an entity we relate to as one entity? What turns it into one entity, it seems to me, is the existence of a soul, which basically gives the organic dimension to this collection of particulars. Therefore it turns them into something that functions in a cybernetic way. Yes? There is some collective functioning of all these things in such a way that this is basically one entity. Yes, to the point that sometimes people refer to a herd of ants as one entity, an ant colony as one entity, a beehive as one entity—all the bees together—because they function in some organic way. Okay. So in that sense too a living creature is an organic entity, and that is the intuition behind it, because otherwise what is an organic entity? It’s the collection of particles that make it up. In what sense is that organic? Just our way of looking at it. So there are materialists who really will tell you: correct, it’s just our way of looking. But the intuition that says no, it’s not just our way of looking, there really is one thing here—that is an intuition that says there is some kind of soul here filling the whole body, yes, as the Talmud says in tractate Berakhot on page 10, comparing the soul in the body to the Holy One, blessed be He, in the world. And that is what I also want to do here, even though it sounds a bit mystical. I want to say that even if someone speaks of the world as an organic entity, the whole of the world as some kind of entity, not just the collection of particulars included in it, then basically what he means to say is that there is some kind of soul here that turns this whole into something organic, and therefore he is really speaking about God in a hidden way. Okay? Therefore I think all statements of this kind—and I’m doing this very briefly here; if you want, you can see it at greater length in the book—but all statements of this kind really do hide behind them a belief in God. Now I want to—you know what? I’ll still need a bit more next time, sorry, because there are still a few points here that I still don’t want to miss, because they are also important for what follows. So we’ll stop here at this stage. Does anyone want to comment or ask? Yes, Rabbi. I wanted to ask how we arrive at the whole of reality? Here, the whole of reality. What didn’t I understand? How do we arrive at the whole of reality? To say that this is the whole of reality and that at the end of the whole of reality there is God. No, what do you mean how do we arrive at it? Whoever sees reality as some kind of whole that has independent existence, that is not just the collection of things included in it, then in my opinion he is really hiding behind this some kind of intuition that there is a God. It’s like Scripture calling the king “one of the people”—“one of the people almost lay with your wife,” yes? What does “one of the people” mean? “One of the people” is the king. Why is the king called “one of the people”? Because he turns the people into one. Meaning, when you see a collection of things and relate to them as one collective object, then you are basically assuming that there exists an entity that is in some sense present in all of them, and it is what turns them into a collective. In the case of a people, it is a king, a central government—not necessarily the king as a person, okay? Some kind of collective organization, something is supposed to be there that turns this whole into one. The same thing with regard to the world. Whoever wants to make some kind of claim about the world as a whole, some kind of entity that is responsible for everything going on here—what does that help? Whichever way you look at it, if the world is only the collection of things, we gained nothing. And if this whole really is an entity with some kind of independent existence and it can act on things, then you are back to God. It reminds me of claims I hear many times in neuroscience, where in mathematics maybe it’s convenient to speak this way, but philosophically it’s bizarre. They speak about how sometimes the collective influences the particular within it, collective degrees of freedom of a complex system can lead a particular degree of freedom to behave in a certain way. The neural whole of the brain is some kind of collective perspective on our brain, and this creates some physical process or even has some mental expression. But that is of course nonsense. The whole does not act on the particulars included in it. The whole is not something other than the particulars included in it. The whole is nothing but the collection of particulars. Yes, and once I remembered—now I’m remembering—that after I finished a doctorate in physics, I heard about some Vizhnitz Hasid in Haifa—no, sorry, when I finished my master’s degree—I heard about some Vizhnitz Hasid in Haifa who had built an alternative theory of relativity. Chaim Scheffler. There was some newspaper article about it, so a friend of mine showed it to me and said, listen, go check it out, maybe there’s something interesting there. So I met with him, traveled to Haifa, met with him. He referred me to some professor from the Technion who had accompanied him a bit, and the professor gave me some things to read because I was considering maybe doing a doctorate with him. In the end I moved here. But among other things I read there about someone who wants—we’re speaking, say, about many particles in space, electrically charged particles. These particles induce an electric field in space. Okay? Now this field acts—we describe this field as a function, a function of x, y, and z, yes, of space. Now there is a particle, one of these particles, located at some point. We view the field as though it exerts a force on the particle and we describe the path of motion of the particle, its trajectory. But we don’t notice that this field is created as a result of all the particles, including that particle itself. Meaning, if we describe the field as the sum of the fields induced by each and every particle, we of course arrive at an infinite expression. Because the field of this particle goes like one over the distance from the particle. But the force it exerts on the particle itself—the particle itself is at distance zero from itself. Therefore the field is actually infinite, the field that this particle exerts on itself. And all the other particles exert some finite field. And that is the meaning—whoever knows, in field theory in physics there are always divergences. When summing the energy of a field or the magnitude of a field, we arrive at infinities and we do renormalizations and all sorts of things to get rid of it, but in fact we always arrive at infinities. And the claim of that physicist was—he was some American, never mind, his name was Gow or something like that, I think—his claim was that these divergences come from the fact that we are basically causing the particle to act on itself. You cannot speak about the spatial field acting on the particle when the particle is one of the sources of that field. And the particle does not act on itself. Therefore when we do this calculation, we always have to remove the contribution of the particle itself from the field, and only then can we let that field act on the particle. Which is really an expression of that same point: this whole is nothing but the collection of particulars that create it. Therefore the whole does not act on the particulars. A whole is the particulars. Whoever relates to the whole as something separate that can create the particulars, produce them, act on them, influence them—that is figurative language. The whole does not do anything. You can say that the collection of the other particulars, each one of them acts on this particular in some way, and you can sum all these contributions and arrive at some result. But you cannot speak of the whole acting on the particulars. The whole does not act on any particular. It is the particulars. It is the particulars, exactly. And this, it’s confusing because it’s so simple when you look at it this way, but it is very confusing when you are inside the story. For me it was really eye-opening to see that article, even though it sounds like something obvious. What is unclear about this? It’s obvious. Okay. During the explanation you tried to explain the difference between a law and an explanation, and you tried to say that an explanation creates some kind of change in the one who hears the explanation, whereas a law is only a description. Notice that “explanation” comes from “making probable” and “probability.” The role of an explanation is to make the explained thing more probable, the way “habit” makes something habitual. And in that way it introduces subjectivity, the need to affect the one who hears the explanation. On the contrary, on the contrary—that is exactly what I claimed. And therefore I say that what I’m offering is not an explanation. An explanation is increasing probability. There are such data—whether it explains something to you or not. I’m only commenting at the semantic level: explanation is identical with increasing probability, increasing plausibility. Agreed. And therefore exactly I claim that the cosmological move does not pretend to offer an explanation. Okay, forgive me, because I have another class that I’m literally starting right now, so I have to finish. All right? Sabbath שלום.