Faith and Its Meaning – Lesson 9
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- The transition between proofs according to Kant and the definition of “God”
- The formulation of the cosmological proof, Thomas Aquinas, and the distinction between “ground/cause” and “cause”
- The concept of causality: time, logical condition, and physical causation
- Causality, distance, and long-term processes
- Logical determinism, Aristotle, and the issue of retroactive selection
- Necessary and sufficient condition, Yuval Steinitz, and the physical component
- David Hume, empiricism, and intuition as the “mind’s eye”
- The problem of “what caused God” and repairing the argument through a minimal exception
- Rejecting infinite regress: “turtles all the way down,” infinity as a negative notion, and Duties of the Heart
- Hilbert’s Hotel, paradoxes of infinity, and the distinction between concrete and potential infinity
- The eternity of the world, Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, and the connection to the physico-theological proof
- “God is not an explanation” versus “proof of existence,” and the footprints example
- Quantum theory and coming into being “from the vacuum”
Summary
General Overview
The text presents a move from the ontological proof to the cosmological proof in Kant’s classification, and distinguishes between proofs based on conceptual analysis and proofs based on a factual premise, while placing the physico-theological proof as a third type grounded in complexity and design in the world. The cosmological proof is first formulated simply as an argument that everything that exists has a cause or ground, things exist, and therefore there is a cause for the existence of the world called “God”; but it is emphasized that the conclusion defines “God” only as the creator of the world, without tying this to religion, revelation, or moral command. The text then examines the justification of the argument’s premises through a broad discussion of causality, David Hume’s critique, and the mistakes that come from confusing correlation with causation, and then repairs the argument so that it includes a rejection of infinite regress and a minimal exception to the principle of causality. Finally, additional challenges are raised, such as the eternity of the world and quantum theory, and answered by distinguishing between concrete and potential infinity, by means of Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, and through the claim that the quantum vacuum is not “nothing” but a state governed by laws that themselves require explanation.
The transition between proofs according to Kant and the definition of “God”
The text states that Kant divides the proofs for the existence of God into three: the ontological proof, the cosmological proof, and the physico-theological proof. The ontological proof relies on conceptual analysis and definitions, whereas the cosmological and physico-theological proofs rely on a factual premise: the cosmological proof rests on the mere fact that something exists, and the physico-theological proof rests on the complex and coordinated character of what exists. The text insists that every argument for God’s existence must include some definition of God, and in the cosmological proof it sets that definition as “the creator of the world,” in contrast to the physico-theological proof, which speaks about a designer/engineer of complexity. The text sharpens the point that the cosmological argument proves nothing about God in the religious Jewish/Christian sense, but only about an entity that created the world, without determining whether it wants anything from humanity or whether it revealed itself at Sinai.
The formulation of the cosmological proof, Thomas Aquinas, and the distinction between “ground/cause” and “cause”
The text attributes the philosophical formulation of the argument to Thomas Aquinas, although it also appears in midrashim, and offers a basic formulation: everything that exists must have a cause/ground for its existence; things exist; therefore there must be a cause/ground for the existence of the world, and that cause is called God. The text argues that the term “cause” is problematic and prefers something like “ground” or “agent-cause” in order to emphasize that we are talking about a producing entity and not an event, as in the example of kicking a ball, where the kick is an event and the kicker is an object. The text states that in terms of logical validity the structure is valid: whoever accepts the premises must accept the conclusion, and the discussion therefore shifts to whether the premises should be accepted.
The concept of causality: time, logical condition, and physical causation
The text argues that a causal relation between event A and event B is made up of three components: temporal priority, a logical condition of the form “if A then B,” and physical causation. The text shows that temporal priority by itself is not causality, and that even combining logical correlation with temporal priority is not enough, by means of examples like “if there is rain then there are clouds,” which does not make rain the cause of the clouds, and Leibniz’s example of two clocks that are coordinated without any causal relation between them. The text argues that correlation allows predictions even without physical influence, and cites Raymond Smullyan to illustrate the possibility of a correlation between the state of the stars and events on earth without a direct causal connection. The text expands by saying that common media thinking-errors arise from confusing correlation with causality and confusing the direction of causality, and illustrates this with examples about higher education and GDP and about smoking and cancer, alongside the possibility of a third explanatory variable.
Causality, distance, and long-term processes
The text argues that causal influence is not action “at a distance,” and that in physics mediating factors are required, such as information passing between bodies; this is presented in connection with gravitation and gravitational waves. The text interprets historical or long-term processes as things that look causal only at coarse resolution, while on closer inspection one gets a continuous chain of causal links. The text mentions that Greek philosophers struggled with the problem of time gaps between cause and effect because of the component “if the cause, then the effect,” and suggests that the difficulty is resolved through a continuous sequence of intermediaries.
Logical determinism, Aristotle, and the issue of retroactive selection
The text presents the argument for logical determinism through Aristotle’s question, “Will there be a sea battle tomorrow?”, and concludes that supposedly the statement is already today either true or false, and therefore the future is necessary. The text rejects the argument by saying that assigning a truth-value to a statement is not a physical event and therefore not a causal relation, but rather a logical definition that can “work retroactively” with respect to a future event. The text reinforces this through the saying “there is nothing that is not hinted at in the Torah,” and by referring to the topic of retroactive selection and to the case of a bill of divorce saying, “for whichever of my two wives goes out first through the doorway tomorrow,” with the claim that according to the opinion that says retroactive selection exists, this can count as “for her sake” even though the determination becomes clear only in the future. The text concludes that the failure in the determinism argument comes from confusing logical and temporal connection with causality.
Necessary and sufficient condition, Yuval Steinitz, and the physical component
The text describes a dispute over whether a cause is only a sufficient condition or both a necessary and sufficient condition, and cites Yuval Steinitz in his book Tree of Knowledge, who argues that causality cannot be necessity and sufficiency, because a causal chain would lead to a contradiction in the units of the condition. The text replies that Steinitz’s argument confuses “condition” with “cause,” because necessity and sufficiency can be symmetric at the level of conditions but do not determine physical causation, and what comes later in the chain cannot be a cause because of time and causation. The text argues that a necessary and sufficient condition can include both what comes before and what comes after, while the cause itself remains an earlier and producing factor, and therefore a causal chain can be long.
David Hume, empiricism, and intuition as the “mind’s eye”
The text argues, following David Hume, that one cannot “see” the causal connection itself, but only the sequence of events and their regularity, while the element of causation is inaccessible to observation. The text concludes that Hume presents the principle of causality as something that comes “from home,” not as a product of experience, and from here reaches skepticism regarding causation in the world itself. The text argues that the cosmological proof can still stand even without the component of physical causation in the strong sense, if one is satisfied with requiring an arranger/producer in a broad sense; but the author states that he does not agree with Hume and that one can make claims about the world beyond what is observed. The text presents intuition as a faculty of cognition of the world analogous to a sense, “with the eyes of the intellect,” in Maimonides’ phrase at the beginning of The Guide, and offers this as a justification for holding the principle of causality to be rational even if it is not observational.
The problem of “what caused God” and repairing the argument through a minimal exception
The text raises the central objection: if everything has a cause, then God too should have a cause, and this leads either to infinite regress or to abandoning the principle of causality. The text formulates the objection as a reductio argument: the assumption “everything has a cause” leads to infinite regress and therefore is not correct in its sweeping form. The text proposes a corrected formulation in which the principle of causality is accepted as a rational rule, but at least one exception at the end of the chain is required in order to avoid infinite regress, and the exception should be minimized as much as possible. The text uses an analogy of lex specialis from Jewish law, with the example of the prohibition of murder versus the duty of stoning, to justify preferring a general rule with a specific reservation over abolishing the rule entirely. The text states that at the end of the chain there is an entity that “exists by virtue of itself,” not subject to the principle of causality, and that this entity is identified as God in the minimal sense of “the first link.”
Rejecting infinite regress: “turtles all the way down,” infinity as a negative notion, and Duties of the Heart
The text adds a further premise to the corrected argument: the rejection of infinite regress, and cites a tradition of debate-rules in Indian philosophy as taught in a course by Shlomo Biderman, according to which infinite regress disqualifies an argument. The text presents the parable of “turtles all the way down” (William James) and argues that infinite regress is not an explanation because it requires presenting all the links, which is impossible. The text defines infinity as the negation of a finite number and not as some gigantic number, and brings the metaphor “as much as you want” and the distinction between potential infinity and concrete infinity. The text cites Duties of the Heart, in the Gate of Unity, which argues against the eternity of the world on the grounds that one cannot “arrive” from minus-infinity time to a finite time, adding that this is not a mathematically defined process in the sense of “starting at minus infinity and walking to the right.” The text concludes that infinite regress is equivalent to saying “I have no explanation,” and rejects presenting it as a satisfactory alternative.
Hilbert’s Hotel, paradoxes of infinity, and the distinction between concrete and potential infinity
The text presents Hilbert’s Hotel to demonstrate the problematic nature of concrete infinity, through examples such as vacating room 1 by shifting guests, fitting infinitely many guests into the odd-numbered rooms, and even accommodating infinitely many buses with infinitely many passengers by assigning them to powers of prime numbers. The text concludes that such a hotel is “obviously, to all of us” not something that exists, and therefore one should be careful not to infer ontological possibilities from formal manipulations involving infinity. The text adds a joke about Hershele to illustrate the feeling that “everything rests on something else” without ever paying the explanatory debt, and returns to the claim that infinite regress is not a solution.
The eternity of the world, Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, and the connection to the physico-theological proof
The text presents the eternity of the world as an Aristotelian objection: if the world always existed, there is no need for a cause for its creation. The text replies that at least according to observational science the universe has a finite age because of the Big Bang, even if there are hypotheses about previous universes. The text adds that Leibniz formulates the “principle of sufficient reason,” according to which even something eternal requires a sufficient reason for its specific character, and illustrates this with a shaped glass ball in a forest: even if it had “always” been there, the question would still arise why it is the way it is. The text states that moving from a claim about cause to a claim about sufficient reason already relies on the complexity and character of the world, and therefore brings us closer to the physico-theological proof, suggesting that there is a mutually reinforcing connection between the second and third arguments.
“God is not an explanation” versus “proof of existence,” and the footprints example
The text rejects the claim that God “is not an explanation” by distinguishing between giving an explanation and proving the existence of an entity. The text compares this to Winnie-the-Pooh seeing footprints and concluding that someone passed by there, even without knowing anything further about him, and argues that here too one can prove that there exists some entity responsible for the existence of the world without providing a full description of its nature or aims. The text states that the accusation of “evasiveness” is wrongly directed at the argument, because the alternative of infinite regress is itself an avoidance of explanation.
Quantum theory and coming into being “from the vacuum”
The text presents an objection according to which quantum theory includes spontaneous events and particles are created from the vacuum, and therefore things can happen without a cause. The text responds that this coming-into-being is conditioned by the quantum character of the world, and that in a world with different laws of nature the phenomenon would not occur, so here too there is at least a cause in the sense of a law-governed framework that allows the coming-into-being. The text argues that the quantum vacuum is not “empty,” and the proof is the paired appearance of a particle and an antiparticle with properties canceling in accordance with conservation laws, so there is a lawful system ensuring balance. The text concludes that even quantum theory does not dismantle the basic assumption that things do not arise without an explanatory framework, and the discussion stops there.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I need to show it to him. Here. Now I just need another three-year-old child to explain to me what to do with ChatGPT and how to show it something with the camera. Okay, last time we finished the ontological proof. I’ll just remind you of Kant’s division. The ontological proof is a proof based on conceptual analysis, on definitions and conceptual analysis, with its advantages and disadvantages. And I want to move on to the second type in his classification, which is the cosmological proof. The third type is the physico-theological proof. These two proofs are based on a factual premise, unlike the ontological proof. The difference between them is what that factual premise is. The cosmological proof is based on the fact that something exists, a world, whatever, something exists. And the physico-theological proof is based on the character of what exists, that what exists is complex, designed, coordinated, things of that sort. So right now we’re dealing with the cosmological proof, and I’ll maybe begin with a simple formulation of it, which doesn’t really hold water, but I want to start with it because that’s usually how it’s presented. So before I present the formulation, I said that every argument for the existence of God has to assume some definition of God. Anselm’s argument, for example, the ontological proof, assumes the most perfect being. God—it doesn’t just assume, it defines God as the most perfect being—and that definition is actually the basis for the proof that He exists. Other proofs too, even if they begin from facts, in the end when they prove the existence of God, we need to define for ourselves who this God is whose existence we’ve proven, what the definition is. In our case we’re talking about God as the creator of the world. Okay? If the previous argument dealt with the perfect being, here we’re talking about the creator of the world. So let’s say, just to sharpen it a bit more, the physico-theological proof, for example, which is based on the character of the world—that it is designed, complex, coordinated, and so on—it speaks not of a God who creates the world but of a God who engineered it, who planned it, who is responsible for the complexity and the special structure the world has. Here we ignore the structure; we assume that a world exists, something exists, and the claim is that the one who created it is God. How do we arrive at the conclusion that God exists, that there exists someone who created this? So he says the following. This argument was presented by Thomas Aquinas, I think, for the first time in its philosophical formulation. You can also find it in midrashim, but in its philosophical formulation it’s usually attributed to Aquinas. And it goes like this: the first premise is that everything that exists must have a cause for its existence. “Cause”—the term “cause” here is a bit problematic; maybe it would be more correct to use the term “ground” or “agent-cause.” By that I mean someone who created it, because a cause can also be an event. Say, the cause of the ball’s flying is that I kicked it, but the one who produced the ball’s motion is me. The kick is an event; I am an object. Okay? When we talk here about the ground of the world’s existence, we’re talking about God as an object, as an entity, not as an event. So everything that exists has a cause or a ground for its existence. Second premise: things exist. The world, I don’t know what—something exists, without referring to or aiming at something with a particular character. Something exists, the world before us. Therefore, there must be a cause for the existence of the world, or for the existence of things, and we call that cause God. Now notice carefully that this argument basically assumes that God is the cause or creator of the world, but pay attention: that’s all it assumes. In other words, don’t connect this to God in some religious, Jewish, Christian, or other sense. God who gave the Torah at Sinai, or God who wants moral behavior from us, or God who—I don’t know—whatever other definitions you want. What this argument is trying to show is that there exists an object that created this world here. Who is that object? Does it want something from us? Does it not want something from us? Irrelevant. That’s why very often people immediately jump to: wait, wait, but who told you He revealed Himself at Sinai and gave the Torah? No, nobody told me that. I’m not talking about that at all. I’m talking about a philosophical question. Does there exist some entity that created this world, that brought this world into being? What is the nature of that entity? Does it want anything from us at all, and if so, what does it want? Does it want the Christian Torah, the Jewish Torah, or no such Torah at all, but something else and all of us are mistaken? Anything is possible. I’m not getting into that question at all. In a philosophical discussion it’s very important to focus the scope of the discussion, the scope of the topic. That’s what we’re dealing with. Okay, so if this argument is indeed based on the premises—really two premises: that everything that exists has a cause for its existence, and that something exists. Right? Those are the two premises. As a result, there must be a cause for the existence of the thing that exists here. We call that cause God. Notice: the claim is not that this is God—that’s another claim. I’m talking about a definition. Meaning, the entity whose existence we proved in this argument is what I call God. That’s what we proved. Don’t connect it to other meanings of the term God. Okay? What is God’s cause?
[Speaker B] If you say everything has a cause…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, we’ll get to the objections—there are several objections. I just want to go slowly, step by step. Now, where do the premises come from? Of course, every argument—the ontological proof purported to create an argument without premises, right? Just from definitions and conceptual analysis. This argument does proceed from premises. So we have to ask ourselves: okay, what do we think of the premises? If you accept the two premises, the conclusion is necessary, right? The argument is valid. That is, you can’t really argue about whether the argument is valid. You can argue about the premises. You can say, I don’t accept the premises. But whoever accepts the premises also has to accept the conclusion. So there’s no problem in terms of the logical structure of the argument. The discussion is about what we think of the premises.
[Speaker C] So that everything that exists has a cause for its existence—where does that come from? Or doesn’t it come from anywhere? I mean, does it sound reasonable to you, or not? You’d say from experience. In other words, it’s the result of observation. Okay. Agreed? Yes. When was the last time you saw something that caused something else being its cause?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, when you throw a stone and it rolls. So who told you that throwing the stone is the cause of its rolling? Logic—it’s not observation. We’ve already changed the thesis. Okay? I kick a ball and the ball flies. David Hume already wondered about this. Let’s say I know—my senses I trust, we won’t go too far into skeptical territory. Okay? So I know I kicked the ball, and I know that afterward the ball flew. That I accept. The question is: what is the connection between these two events? Why do I assume that kicking the ball is the cause of the ball’s flying? I know that first I kicked, and I know that afterward it flew. But who said the kick is the cause of the ball’s motion? I did it many times. That only means that many times after I kicked, the ball flew. So that only means there is temporal succession, or a logical condition, or whatever you want to call it. But who said there is a causal relation here? That the kick is what made the ball fly? Maybe a few words about the causal relation, because it’ll accompany us here a lot. A causal relation between event A and event B consists of three components. First component: event A is the cause, event B is the effect. The first component is the time component. The cause precedes the effect. There are a few challenges in modern physics—people try to talk about causes that come after the effect—but for now, in my opinion, that’s hallucinations of crazy people. I don’t think one can really talk about such a thing yet. So it’s commonly thought that the cause has to appear before the effect. But of course that’s not enough. A certain event appearing before another event is not enough for the first to count as the cause of the second. What else is needed? The second thing is a condition—let’s call it a logical relation—that if A occurs, then B occurs. Okay? Now even if we add the logical connection to the temporal connection, we still haven’t obtained the concept of cause. Think, for example, about the claim: if there is rain, then there are clouds. A true statement, right? There’s no rain without clouds. If there is rain, there are clouds. Does that mean that the rain is the cause of the clouds? No. In this case the clouds may actually be the cause of the rain. And the fact that there is some connection or correlation between two things does not mean that one is the cause of the other. Or alternatively, Leibniz’s example, when he spoke about body and soul: look at two clocks. And let’s say they’re accurate, okay? If one clock shows three o’clock, the other clock also shows three o’clock. So I can say that if clock A shows three o’clock, then clock B also shows three o’clock. That’s a true statement. A logical condition exists. Does that mean clock A is the cause of clock B, or vice versa? No. Meaning, the fact that there is correlation or a logical connection between two events does not mean there is a causal connection between them. But on the other hand, if there is a causal connection, then there is a logical correlation, right? Meaning, if A is the cause of B, then if A happened I can tell you that B will happen. Right? So the logical connection does emerge from, is included within, the causal relation, but it doesn’t exhaust it. In other words, to define the causal relation it isn’t enough to talk about temporal connection and logical connection. What else is missing? A physical connection. Causation. Right? Meaning, why isn’t clock A the cause of clock B? Because there is no relation of causation between them. The logical relation exists, yes. Okay? But there’s no causation, no relation of causation, between A and B. Once there is no causation, it’s not a cause. So we reach the conclusion that the causal relation between event A and event B—if I say there is a causal relation between them—then I’ve said three things. Three things have to hold in order for me to say that A is the cause of B. A precedes B in time—that’s the temporal relation. If A then B—the logical conditional statement holds, what’s called if A then B. Okay? And there also has to be causation. Meaning A produced B, caused B. Okay? Yes, I once saw—you know, there was an American Jewish logician named Raymond Smullyan. He died at a very advanced age, I think a few years ago, over a hundred. He was still doing logical stand-up comedy in his nineties. He wrote all kinds of amusing books, he was a clever Jew. In any case, he wrote something about Tao—I don’t remember anymore—something trying to explain what Tao is, maybe The Silence of the Tao, I don’t remember exactly. And there he talks about astrology. He says that physicists often wrinkle their noses when they hear about astrology. Why? Because an event that happens in the stars can’t influence what happens here on earth in real time, meaning simultaneously. There’s a speed-of-light limit; that’s the time it takes an influence to pass, constrained by the speed of light. Of course the objection is no objection, because what we see now in the stars is something that happened a very long time ago, so the state of the stars then influences what happens today, not the state of the stars now. But his answer is better than the objection, so I’ll mention it anyway. What he wants to say is that this claim is no claim at all. Why? Because there could be a connection between the state of the stars and what happens here on earth that is not a causal connection, but a correlation. There is some correlation between what happens in the stars and what happens here on earth. If such a correlation exists, once I see a state in the stars, I can draw conclusions about what will happen on earth, assuming there is such a correlation. Even though the time of influence would be immediate, which means there cannot be a physical influence. Correlation is enough to make predictions; you don’t need causal production. For example, right? If you insist that there has to be a cause—if you don’t insist, then not—but even if you insist that everything must have a cause, that still doesn’t mean that between these two there is a causal relation. There may be some third thing that caused it. For example, in Leibniz’s clock parable, the clockmaker who synchronized the two clocks or created them according to some universal synchronization is really the one responsible for the connection between them. And there is no causal relation between the two, right? There are all kinds of jokes about why it’s a bad idea to diet. Because everyone who diets is fat. So be careful about dieting. Meaning, that only tells you that the direction of the correlation is not always from A to B; sometimes it’s from B to A. First of all. But Leibniz argued not only that—sometimes it could be that C causes both A and B. Yes, that reminds me, I once saw a letter to the editor in Haaretz, back when I still read them before I got fed up with them, from some professor at the Technion, who said that the State of Israel should invest much more in higher education, because in countries that invest in higher education, GDP is higher. What do you say about that argument?
[Speaker C] Higher, and therefore they invest?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, at least possibly, okay? You can’t rule out the opposite direction either. Countries with higher GDP can invest more in higher education; they have enough money.
[Speaker E] Does it necessarily come together? What do you mean together? If investment in higher education is relative—meaning, if higher education gets a much larger share relative to the other things the state invests in, and they also have higher GDP, then that does indicate something, no?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, if in the countries, according to the investment, that’s the state of higher education, and that’s the state of GDP—if there’s some monotonic graph.
[Speaker E] It could be that they invest much more money than we do, but relative to other things they invest the same. Then it really doesn’t force anything. But if we discover that they specifically invest in higher education and indeed their GDP is higher—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It could be that they don’t value higher education enough, and if they don’t have money they invest in other things. There can be many explanations. Again, there are ways to do regressions and try to figure out which is the dependent variable and which is the independent variable. But you have to do regressions. In other words, it’s not enough to point to a correlation. You only need to open the media—I don’t think I have ever in my life seen a media report that didn’t suffer from this fallacy. Never existed, I think—not a single media report in the world. Again, I’m not such a big consumer of media, but it’s just unbelievable. Many times I at least want to hope that in the original articles being quoted there they did do the work properly. But the media reporting just drives me up the wall every time anew. They explain to you, look, see what a connection there is between this and that, therefore clearly it’s because of such-and-such. When on the face of it there’s no problem at all generating opposite explanations by the dozen, cheaply and easily.
[Speaker D] You can generate opposite explanations, but the question is what validity they have in the real world. If in the end economists sat down and did research—an intuitive study, or whatever—and said that based on enough experience it sounds reasonable to them that this correlational connection is a causal connection, then it’s not so far-fetched.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I didn’t say it’s far-fetched. I’m saying that from the data they presented there, the conclusion doesn’t follow. I said: in the original article I at least want to believe that proper scientific work was done. But in the media reports on all the articles—by the way, in some articles, no, but maybe in many, yes—the reports love to tell you: look, the percentage of deaths from smoking, I don’t know, from cancer among smokers is much higher than among non-smokers. That of course could also be explained by the fact that people who have cancer have a tendency to smoke. Meaning, the cancer causes in them some desire to smoke. Theoretically that could be the case too, as a reversed conditional probability, Bayes’ theorem. So there are many mistakes in this matter, but those mistakes concern the direction of the correlation, who is the dependent variable and who is the independent variable. What Smullyan basically says—or Leibniz, same idea—is that it’s not just about the direction of the correlation. It could be that neither direction is right. There is a third factor that times or creates the connection between these two variables, and both are dependent variables. There is another independent variable that determines both of them. What does this mean? That when we see a connection between two things, it doesn’t mean there is a causal relation between them, and it certainly doesn’t tell us the direction of causality. Okay? By contrast, if I say there is a causal relation between two things, then of course there will also be correlation between them. In other words, if A is the cause of B, then there will be a correlation between the appearance of A and the appearance of B. So yes, that is a feature of the causal relation. But if that feature exists, we still can’t know for sure that there is a causal relation here. Okay?
[Speaker B] What about causality that stretches over time? Say, in historical processes, where it’s not like kicking a ball and seeing it immediately. For example, people will say that the beepers operation caused a change in history.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you look at a higher resolution, you’ll have a whole continuum of causes and effects. In physics this happens a lot, you know. When you look at two bodies with mass, they attract each other, the law of gravitation, right? But physicists aren’t willing to accept action at a distance. Meaning, it’s not that these two bodies stand far away from each other and pull one another. If they pull one another, that means some kind of information passes from one to the other. Gravitons, right, gravitational waves. Otherwise there wouldn’t be attraction. In short, a causal relation is never carried out from a distance. Causal influence doesn’t happen from afar. There are always mediating factors that carry things from the cause to the effect. And the processes you described are simply ones you looked at in too coarse a resolution. If you look at a finer resolution, then from the first stage you’ll see the next result, and then the next result, and then the next result, until in the end you reach the final result. Okay? But it’s supposed to be continuous in some way. Greek philosophers already noticed this. Because if there’s a time gap between the cause and the effect, then before the time arrives when the effect happens, the cause has occurred and the effect has not occurred. And that can’t be. Because there’s a logical component to causality: if the cause is there, then the effect occurs. So there can’t be a time gap. They struggled with the opposite question, though. If it’s always simultaneous, then how can there be causes whose effects happen later than the cause? They didn’t have infinitesimals, meaning they didn’t… so they got tangled up in the opposite question. In any case, for our purposes, what this means is that the causal relation between things is made up of three components: time, logic, and physics. Okay? In brief. Maybe I’ll give you another example that sharpens this point. There’s a well-known argument in favor of determinism called logical determinism. Familiar? Do you know it? Logical determinism says this. Suppose I ask: will there be a sea battle tomorrow? A question Aristotle asked. Will there be a sea battle tomorrow? Now, we can’t determine whether that statement is true or false. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow. But when tomorrow comes, we’ll see. If there was a sea battle, then it will become clear to us that the statement was true, and if there wasn’t a sea battle, then it will become clear that the statement was false. Okay? Meaning, that statement is already today either true or false; we just don’t know. Right? If there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then the statement “tomorrow there will be a sea battle,” which I say today, is a true statement. I don’t know that yet because I haven’t gotten to tomorrow, but the statement is true. The truth or falsity of a claim is not a function of time. If the claim correctly describes the state of affairs in the world, then it is a true claim, even if that state of affairs will occur in the future. I won’t know that the claim is true, but the claim is true by definition, because what it describes matches the state of affairs in the world. Right? So if that’s the case, then this claim is already now true or false; I just don’t know which. But suppose it’s true. A sea battle happens tomorrow, so it turns out the claim is true. And it turns out that it was already true yesterday. But if it was true yesterday, how could it be that tomorrow there won’t be a sea battle? So if there was a sea battle, it was necessary; it could not have failed to happen. Which is what was to be proved. What do you say to that proof? Netanel, you’re doubtful about it. What? And it’s always true. Okay. That’s always the nature of paradoxes. You know for sure it’s not right, but the question is where to put your finger. What do you say? Assigning a truth value to a statement is not a physical event. I can’t say that the event that occurs tomorrow is the cause of the fact that the statement today is true. It’s because of the event that occurs tomorrow that it is true, but that is not the cause of the fact that the statement is true. This is not a causal relation. How do I know that? Because in a causal relation, the cause can’t appear after the effect, right? So it’s not a causal relation. Rather what is it? It’s a definition. Meaning, if a statement correctly describes the state of affairs in the world that it describes, I define it as a true statement. That’s just a definition. There’s no problem with a definition working retroactively along the timeline. I’m allowed to condition the definition of something now on a future event. How do we know this? There is nothing not hinted at in the Torah, right? The topic of retroactive clarification. That’s exactly what it does. “He writes the bill of divorce for whichever of my two wives will leave through the doorway first tomorrow.” There’s no problem; this is considered written for her sake. Fine, okay, this is a disputed question in the Talmudic text in Gittin, not important now, but according to the view that there is retroactive clarification, at least. It may even be so according to the view that there is no retroactive clarification. According to the view that there is retroactive clarification, this is certainly a bill of divorce written for her sake. But the woman will only leave through the door first tomorrow. So how can it already today be considered written for her sake? Because I define the bill of divorce as written for whom? For that woman who will leave through the door tomorrow. Already today I write it for her sake. Her leaving through the door tomorrow will define who the woman was for whom today I wrote the bill of divorce. But her leaving through the door tomorrow is not the cause of why the bill of divorce is valid. Since assigning a truth value to a statement is not an event. It’s just a definition. Events have causes. But to say that a certain claim is true or false is not to make a factual claim. It is simply to define it, to define it at the logical level: this claim is defined as a true claim. Logical definitions do not have causes. Causes belong to events. Okay? Therefore, the claim that the fact that tomorrow there was a sea battle means that already today this statement is a true statement—that’s correct. But it does not mean that tomorrow it could not turn out otherwise, that there won’t be a sea battle. If tomorrow there won’t be a sea battle, then already today the statement is false. It will turn out retroactively that already today the statement is false. Okay? Meaning, the assumption that if already today it is true then tomorrow cannot be otherwise is an assumption that presumes a causal relation. But there is no causal relation here; it’s just a definition. So the definition depends on the future. If the future turns out differently, then the statement today was false. If the future turns out this way, then the statement today was true. But the status of the statement today has nothing to do with what will happen tomorrow. What will happen tomorrow will determine the status of the statement today—determine it, not causally. It’s not a cause. A cause does not go backward in time. It will determine it definitionally; that’s how I define a true claim or a false claim. Okay? So here you see an example of a philosophical fallacy—and quite a lot of ink has been spilled over this argument—that stems from confusing a logical and temporal connection with causality. If you understand that this thing is not causal, even though there is a connection between whether the statement is true and whether there will be a sea battle tomorrow—there is a connection—but that connection is not causal. And therefore the whole argument is baseless from the outset. Okay? So in the end, these three components of causality—the logical component of causality, of “if A then B”—there’s a dispute about that. Here I’m just closing these parentheses of the discussion about the concept of causality; we’ll need it later too. There is a dispute among analytic philosophers—again, there are those who are right and there are also others—whether the cause has to be a necessary and sufficient condition, or only a sufficient condition. Does it have to be necessary as well, or not? Meaning, is the condition— is a cause a sufficient condition for the effect, or is the cause a necessary and sufficient condition for the effect? Okay. Yuval Steinitz, in his book The Tree of Knowledge, I think that’s what it’s called—his book has three essays. The middle essay deals with causality. And he claims that it cannot be that the cause is a necessary and sufficient condition for the effect. He has a logical proof that this is impossible. Why? Because a necessary and sufficient condition is unique. There aren’t two necessary and sufficient conditions. Okay? Now if A is necessary and sufficient for B, and B is necessary and sufficient for C, because there is a causal chain—A causes B, B causes C, and so on—every causal link is a necessary and sufficient condition according to that thesis. Since we’re attacking it, we assume it and show that it can’t be. So if we assume it’s a necessary and sufficient condition, that means A is necessary and sufficient for B, and B is necessary and sufficient for C. Right? Now there’s another property of necessity and sufficiency, namely that it reverses. Meaning, if B is necessary and sufficient for C, then C is necessary and sufficient for B. If B is necessary for C, then C is sufficient for B. If B is sufficient for C, then C is necessary for B. Think about clouds and rain, okay? Rain is a sufficient condition for clouds; necessary and sufficient? Are clouds a necessary condition for rain? Yes. Are they a sufficient condition? No. There can be clouds without rain. Meaning, it’s not enough to say that there are clouds in order for there to be rain. But clearly it is a necessary condition, meaning without clouds there is no rain. Now what does that mean? Is rain sufficient for clouds, or necessary for clouds? Or both? Rain is sufficient for clouds; it is not necessary. Right? Necessary means that if there are clouds, then there must also have been rain. If you say there is rain, that is sufficient information for me to define that there were clouds beforehand. It’s enough to know there is rain in order to say there were clouds, right?
[Speaker E] Okay, I’ll change the sentence. Again. There is rain, right, there is rain? That’s a sign—it’s enough information for me to know there were clouds.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right? Therefore rain is a sufficient condition for clouds. But it is not a
[Speaker E] necessary
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] condition. Because if there are clouds, it’s not necessarily…
[Speaker E] If there is rain… what would it look like for it to be necessary for clouds?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying, that’s why I reverse the perspective. You can’t look… you don’t want to, but you can’t look at it from that angle. I’m saying, because here causality also involves time—the clouds preceded the rain. So you can’t reverse the perspective. You have to look at it like this. You ask yourself: can there be a situation where there are clouds and there is no rain? And the answer is yes, right? Meaning that rain is not necessary for clouds. There can be clouds without rain. Okay, so rain is not… it is not necessary for the state of there having been clouds; it’s sufficient. But clouds are necessary for rain and not sufficient. Meaning, if A is necessary for B, then B is sufficient for A. If A is sufficient for B, then B is necessary for A. Okay. Now if A is necessary and sufficient for B, then B is sufficient and necessary for A, because I reverse the order, but it’s still both, right? Therefore necessary-and-sufficient is a symmetric relation. Meaning, if A is necessary and sufficient for B, then B is necessary and sufficient for A, right? And it’s also unique. Meaning, if A is necessary and sufficient for B, then only A is necessary and sufficient for B. Now you understand that if there is a causal chain—A causes B, B causes C—then what does that mean? That A is necessary and sufficient for B, and B is necessary and sufficient for C, right? Now if B is necessary and sufficient for C, and necessity-and-sufficiency is symmetric, then C is also necessary and sufficient for B. But then it turns out that both C and A are necessary and sufficient for B, and that can’t be, because there is uniqueness.
[Speaker E] Why is there uniqueness?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A necessary-and-sufficient condition is a unique condition.
[Speaker E] Let’s go back to the example of the clouds and the rain—maybe because the climate isn’t suitable for some reason.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, because that really isn’t necessary and sufficient. Find a condition that is necessary and sufficient. A condition that is necessary and sufficient means that only that causes it—there can’t be…
[Speaker E] Are A and C the same thing?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’d have to assume that A and C are the same thing. But they’re not the same thing. Fine, so you say there is no C, there is A. A caused B—I know it caused B—but there is nothing further along the chain. Therefore he says it cannot be that the causal relation, the logical component of the causal relation, is both necessity and sufficiency together. Because if it were, then a causal chain would have length two, no more. There could not be a causal chain with three links, with two successive causal processes. Is he right?
[Speaker B] Can you give an example of how necessary-and-sufficient is symmetric? Can you give an example—your earlier example with rain and clouds, where it isn’t necessary…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Say, I don’t know, let’s say admission to a university requires a psychometric score of 680 for a certain department, suppose. Okay? And that’s the only way you get admitted to the university. Then the psychometric score is necessary and sufficient for admission to the university. A minimum psychometric score, okay? So that argument is not correct; it’s mistaken. It’s mistaken because, again, it mixes up the concept of cause with the concept of condition. He forgets that causality also has a physical component and not only a logical one. Now when you ask yourself whether C is the cause of B, obviously not. C could not have produced B. It comes afterward in time, right? Neither the temporal condition nor the physical one holds there. So that means that C is a necessary and sufficient condition for B, but it is not the cause of B. And what this basically means is that if you want to talk about a necessary and sufficient condition for B, then say this: a necessary and sufficient condition for B is that before it there was A and after it there will be C. That’s a necessary and sufficient condition for B—no problem—and it really is unique. Causes cannot be two, but these are not two causes. C is not a cause; only A is a cause. But a necessary and sufficient condition can be composed of A and C together. A and C: every time B happens, there was A before it and C after it. That’s it. And B cannot happen without that. And if that exists, then B exists too, yes? In both directions. If you combine A and C together, there is no problem. So you can believe that a causal relation is a necessary and sufficient condition and still understand that there is a causal chain with more than two links. No problem at all. He takes the requirements that apply to conditions and imposes them on causes, but that isn’t right. Those are requirements only for conditions. A cause is not exhausted by there being a dependence between the cause and the effect. There also has to be actual causation, temporal priority, and things like that. Therefore it’s simply a mistake. There are all sorts of philosophical mistakes that stem from the fact that people don’t notice that in a causal relation there are three components, and all three need to be there. Okay? In fact, you could say that physical causation is the only thing there is there, because once you speak about physical causation, then the temporal relation of course follows from it, because there cannot be causation from the future to the past, and the logical dependence also follows from it, because if there is physical causation then there is logical dependence such that if A then B. But it’s still important to understand that the first two are there too, okay? Because people do get confused as a result. So what exactly do I want to say here? Good question. I want to say that David Hume, when he discussed the causal relation, said—I asked earlier, when was the last time you saw a causal relation between event A and event B? The answer is: you never have. One cannot see the causal relation between events, as David Hume said, because all you can see is event A and then afterward event B. You can also see that always after event A, event B happens—or every time after event A, event B happens. But you cannot see that there is a relation of production between them. We do not see the physical dimension. How do we see that because I kicked the ball, the ball flew? We see that first I kicked and then it flew. We also see that whenever I kick, it flies. So we saw the time and we saw the logic, but the physics we cannot see. Absurdly, all the non-scientific parts are observational in the causal relation. The scientific part is דווקא the non-observational part. The physical component of the causal relation does not arise from observation. Physics is an empirical science. The physical component of the causal relation does not arise from observation. The temporal and logical components—logic is not an observational science—the temporal and logical components are accessible to observation. It’s an amusing business. In any case, David Hume argues that this assumption of the principle of causality, or the assumption that between two particular events there is a causal relation, is an assumption we bring from home. We do not learn it from observation; it is not learned from experience. I asked earlier: how do we know that everything has a cause? The answer is: not from experience. Experience doesn’t give us that. Experience does not even give us, in any particular event, the ability to see a causal relation between event A and event B, and certainly it cannot tell us that every event must always be preceded by a cause. Meaning, neither the principle of causality comes from observation, nor a causal diagnosis of the relation between two events—that event A is the cause of event B. Neither of these things is accessible to observation. And therefore David Hume, as an empiricist—he was a great skeptic; many times people think there’s a contradiction between those things, but there isn’t. Thoroughgoing empiricists are very skeptical figures, because anything you don’t see directly and immediately you cast doubt on, because you are an empiricist: you accept only things that are products of observation. So David Hume said, fine, if that’s so, then I cannot say that there really are such concepts as production, that event A caused event B. There is no causation. Causation is only a form of our thinking. We cannot really know that in the world itself there are relations of production. All we know is that there is a connection, a correlation, and temporal priority. That’s all. Now there are all sorts of attempts to deal with this through statistics and all kinds of things like that—they’re all mistaken. There is really no way to arrive observationally at the fact that there is a causal relation here. At most you can say that you can determine the dependent variable and the independent variable using regressions, but you cannot say that the dependent variable is caused by the independent variable in a causal sense, meaning physical causation. That you cannot say. You can only say that the independent variable causes the dependent variable, “causes” in a statistical sense—it comes first, it is the generator, and the other is what is generated. But that there is some physical relation between them—there is no way to determine that. We’re just used to thinking that way. Now if that’s really so, then the question is whether—if indeed that is so—can one still establish the cosmological argument? Its assumption is that everything has a cause, but maybe that is just a form of our thinking, this assumption that everything has a cause. Maybe it’s not true.
[Speaker B] I simply have no other way to think.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, think that way, but don’t draw conclusions about reality from the fact that you have no other way. I also have no other way to eat except if I have food, but maybe I won’t have food, even though I have no other way except to eat. What? “I have no other way” is not an argument that it’s true. So, two things. First, the argument can stand even without the physical component. Meaning, if I assume that every event must be preceded by another event that will cause it—“cause” in quotation marks because I’m speaking without the physical component—but yes, an independent variable that generates the dependent variable, that’s good enough. Right? I don’t need the relation to be one of production. If I say there are things in the world—if everything has to have a cause even in Hume’s sense—everything has to have a cause, meaning there has to be something that conditions this thing that happened here or that was created here, okay? Conditions it, not causes it in the physical sense. Fine, there still has to be something that conditions it. And that something is God. The argument can stand even without the physical component. In parentheses I’ll just add: I do not agree with Hume. Meaning, I think it’s obvious that there are causal relations in the world even though we have no sensory way to observe them. I simply don’t agree with Hume that only things observable by the senses can be said about the world. I can say many more things about the world even though I have not observed them with the senses. For example, the existence of God, which is what we’re dealing with here—I have good arguments for the existence of God, and therefore I am willing to say that as a claim about the world, even though I also agree that one cannot observe Him, and that this cannot be the result of observation. Okay? Fine, we’ll come back to that. In any case, for our purposes, I want to argue that intuition is a faculty that helps us know the world. It’s not just some subjective form of our thought. Yes, that is basically what Hume assumes. Hume assumes that anything non-observational is on us, so to speak. Meaning, it has no connection to what happens in the world. I say that’s incorrect. Intuition is also some kind of sense, like a sense. And if we grasp that this really is the situation, then that too is a kind of observation of the world—not by means of the senses, but with the eyes of the intellect, as Maimonides writes at the beginning of The Guide. In any case, the claim is that the argument exists even without the physical component, but of course even Hume, like all of us, understood that there is a physical component even though he denied it. Everyone understands this, and therefore I don’t need to arrive at it. Meaning, we all assume that there is causation, that the principle of causality is true, and that everything has something that produced it or caused it. And the fact that philosophers hairsplit about this shouldn’t bother me too much.
[Speaker G] That’s still your assumption. What? Maybe that’s your belief.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Could be, but that belief causes all of us to think this way. And someone who tells me he doesn’t believe it is, in my opinion, a liar. I don’t believe him. Okay? A good reason why he’s lying—we’d have to think about that—but in my opinion he’s lying. Fine, in any case, therefore this argument, this assumption that everything must have a cause, sounds like a good assumption. And if you say it has no observational source, still, you agree that every rational person assumes it? If every rational person assumes it, then you can no longer say that the argument for the existence of God departs from rational thought. At least that much I can claim. That a rational person ought to arrive at this conclusion. Okay? What’s the justification for that? Wonderful question. We can leave it for later.
[Speaker B] You said the world is eternal and therefore there’s no cause. What? An eternal world.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, those are reflections. I’ll get to the reflections. So that’s the basic argument. But now the problems arise. Why? Because if really everything has to have a cause, then the obvious question is: so what is the cause of God’s existence? If everything has to have a cause, then He too has to have a cause. Okay?
[Speaker H] Fine, then God prime, God tag, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Or else I accept an infinite chain of causes—but in philosophy it is accepted that this is a fallacy; it’s called infinite regress, endless regression. Or it’s simply not true that everything has to have a cause. Because if we assume that everything has to have a cause, we get trapped in an infinite regress. This is a proof by contradiction. Meaning, if I assume that everything has to have a cause, then we get trapped in an infinite regress, and therefore it is not true that everything has to have a cause. That’s how the challenge to the argument should be formulated. Meaning, the challenge to the argument basically says this: so what about God’s cause? You might say, fine, you’re right, it requires further study, I don’t know. It requires further study, but still you agree that everything has to have a cause, and therefore the argument is valid. He says no, I don’t agree that everything has to have a cause. Because if God too has to have a cause, then His cause also has to have a cause, and so on, and that means we get stuck in an infinite regress. If you get stuck in an infinite regress, that itself proves that the assumption that everything has to have a cause is incorrect, because it leads us to a contradiction, it leads us to a problem.
[Speaker E] Fine, why do you stop there? You could stop later in the chain.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but the burden of proof is on the one who wants to prove that God exists. Right, so that’s what I’m saying: then stop with the world itself. Fine, then there is no God. If it’s not true that everything has a cause, then the argument doesn’t stand. Its first premise is incorrect; it doesn’t hold. But still—we do believe in the principle of causality. What can you do? And this is always the issue with paradoxes. Meaning, as I said earlier, the conclusion is obviously not correct, but on the other hand you have to put your finger on what is problematic in the argument. Okay? And we do think that the principle of causality is true. Therefore I think it should be formulated a bit differently. The principle of causality—the simple assumption is that it’s true, except that you should minimize the exception as much as possible. Right? Now whom are we going to exclude? Okay? Exclude what, exactly?
[Speaker H] Some part you find good—to exclude part of it, yes, no, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s a principle in law called lex specialis. What is lex specialis? The priority of the specific, yes. So let’s say in Jewish law there is a prohibition against murdering human beings. Okay? On the other hand there is an obligation to stone Sabbath desecrators. So which prevails? The obligation to stone Sabbath desecrators, or the prohibition against murdering human beings? A clash between two halakhic / of Jewish law values. The answer is that the specific prevails. The obligation to kill Sabbath desecrators, to stone Sabbath desecrators, is more specific than the general prohibition against murder. And the specific always prevails. The logic is very simple. Why? Because if you assume that the broader rule prevails, then you have canceled the specific one entirely. Then that verse that says one must stone Sabbath desecrators has no application in any situation. By contrast, if you say no, the specific prevails, then the general principle remains true except for that reservation introduced by the specific principle. And then both principles exist. It is forbidden to murder, except for those cases where the Torah says one should kill. Okay? Therefore we always prefer the specific principle over the general principle. Because that preserves our intuition in the greatest measure—or however broad I can make it, yes? I want to give up as few of my intuitions as possible. Okay? Now if my intuitions tell me: look, there is a principle of causality. Okay? On the other hand, I also don’t want to arrive at an infinite regress, because that’s a fallacy. Those two things don’t fit together. You could say okay, then there is no principle of causality; I give it up entirely. I said no: there is a principle of causality, except for those things that would lead me to an infinite regress. Okay? Now what are those things? So let’s try to think logically. The things we know in our world—it seems to me it’s pretty clear to us that they have causes. Right? They belong to the class of things that have causes. Okay? A chair, a table, a star, whatever—material things that we know in our world. So apparently the world must have some entity that created this world, because this world is the kind of thing that has causes, and now we need to discuss it. Yes? Does it also require a cause? In the end, one way or the other, the claim is that at the end of this chain there is an entity that is not subject to the principle of causality, and that has to be so. Why? Because otherwise there is an infinite regress. That is really the claim. So this is a slightly more complex and subtle formulation, but it is more precise. And against it one can no longer raise the objection I raised earlier—who created God, what is God’s cause. God is not “the one who created the world,” but rather the first in the chain. It may be that the chain is ten links long, or 119 links long, or as long as you want. But in the end, at the edge, there has to be something that exists by virtue of itself; it has no cause. Because otherwise I arrive at an infinite regress. So that one at the edge I exclude from this principle of causality. He is not subject to the principle of causality. And that’s it; beyond Him I have no reason to exclude anything else. My assumption is that the principle of causality is true. And I’ll say more than that: since the principle of causality is not the result of observation, I think there’s something a little misleading in that formulation. I am not claiming that the principle of causality exists only with respect to things in our world. I am claiming that it exists with respect to everything, except what I am forced to exclude. And the things in our world are not reasonably excluded, do you understand? Because otherwise I turn it into an observational principle, and then I’m saying that if the principle of causality exists only regarding things that exist in our world, then basically you’re telling me this is the result of observation. I look at our world and see that our world operates according to the law of causality. Okay, but no—I claim it is not the result of observation. Okay? It is the result of an a priori principle, and an a priori principle is also valid; that’s what we assumed at the beginning. Okay? So what? True, but I still want to claim that obviously this principle must have at least one exception standing at the end of the chain. And I have no reason to assume—or no reason to carve out—additional exceptions to this principle because I don’t need them, and as long as I don’t need them I won’t introduce them. The only claim I want to make is that this exception at the end of the chain is probably not something that exists in our world, because things that exist in our world are not reasonably excluded from the principle of causality. In that sense there is indeed some experiential or observational connection here, or something like that. I am not claiming that the principle of causality is the result of observation. I am claiming that the things in our experience are probably subject to the principle of causality. And maybe many other things are too—but there is at least one thing that is not.
[Speaker E] If now many people here, say, come to the conclusion that quanta are something where we simply don’t need to explain the cause of why an electron is here and here—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll get to quanta. Quanta are also an objection. Add it to the list of objections.
[Speaker B] When I set myself a goal and strive to reach it, that isn’t causality, one thing leading to another? Teleology. What? It’s teleology. Teleology? So that somewhat contradicts the idea of causality.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you assume that you really can be moved toward a purpose without there having been a cause. You strive toward it, but what caused you to strive toward it?
[Speaker B] You see
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the goal, and that seeing arouses something in you that causes you to strive toward it, so that’s causal. Seemingly.
[Speaker B] I
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] think free will is the only place where there really is some beginning of such a process that is not rooted in a prior cause, but rather begins from the purpose and not by the force of a cause—but that requires a separate discussion. The will, basically—what distinguishes the will when, yes, when you choose freely—when you choose freely, what distinguishes that process is that it’s the only process in which the purpose replaces the cause, and you act toward a purpose and not by the force of a cause. And if you act by the force of a cause, that’s deterministic. Okay? If you are not a determinist—meaning if you think there is free choice; I think there is. Okay? Fine, in any case, that is basically the formulation of the cosmological argument, its more precise formulation. And here you can no longer ask who created God, because we excluded Him, and there is no question of who created Him. And basically the claim is that either you accept—if you do not accept the principle of causality at all, then you’re simply not a rational person. If you do accept the principle of causality, then you inevitably have an infinite regress, so you must exclude something from it. Since rationality means that we do adopt the principle of causality, we minimize the exception. Okay. Now I need to explain a bit more what exactly is bad about infinite regress. I said that infinite regress is a fallacy, right? And this is a necessary stage in building the argument, the corrected argument. The corrected argument contains an additional premise, namely the rejection of infinite regresses. That has to be added as a premise to the argument. And the question is where it comes from. Why not assume that there is an infinite chain of causes? What’s the problem? First of all, I once heard this when I was at Tel Aviv University—I did my bachelor’s there in engineering—so I went to sit in on all sorts of courses when I had free hours, and I attended a course in Indian philosophy by Shlomo Biderman. And he described something there that really surprised me: they have some rules in India, at least in a certain branch of Indian philosophy, very rigid logical rules for how to conduct a debate. They have very, very rigid rules. Usually we’re used to thinking of it as some kind of spirituality that isn’t formulated in arguments with premises and logic and so on. Over there there are extremely tough logicians, with logical principles such that anyone who deviates from them is disqualified—meaning, he loses. He loses the debate. It’s a kind of debate competition. One of the principles is to reject infinite regress. If you get caught in an infinite regress, you’ve lost. Okay? So that is true; it is accepted in many places in philosophy that infinite regress is a fallacy. The question why is not simple. I’ll try to clarify a little why. Here, in our context, it’s very important, because usually people say infinite regress is a fallacy. Here I’m using infinite regress constructively. For me, infinite regress is the tool by means of which I build the claim that God exists. Because if He did not exist, then there would be an infinite regress. Okay? So here it’s not just a question of who has been disqualified in the debate; it’s a premise in the argument. It is one of the premises in the argument that leads us to the existence of God. And the question is how I know that premise, or what it is based on.
[Speaker E] What other kinds of regress are there besides cause? I didn’t understand. You’re saying that in many places in philosophy—cause or explanation. So where else does this appear?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Cause or explanation—explanation, yes. Cause and explanation are not the same thing. Any explanation—even a purpose can be an explanation, for example. So I want to clarify this perhaps through a few examples. The first example, the best known one, I think it’s William James, who tells of a Greek physicist giving a lecture in physics. And he explains that the world sits on the back of a big turtle, Atlas, yes? So a woman in the audience raises her hand and says: and what does the turtle stand on? So he tells her: there’s another turtle below, and this turtle stands on that one, and the world is on the upper turtle. Fine—the categorical turtle, so to speak. Then she asks: and what does the second turtle, or the lower one, stand on? There’s a third turtle that the second turtle stands on. Fine. When he sees her hand the next time already, he says: look, you foolish woman, you don’t understand—there are turtles all the way down. Would you accept an explanation like that? It’s funny; everybody laughs. But in philosophical arguments, when we arrive at an infinite regress, people tell me: no, why? Infinite regress is also an option. Well, here you have an infinite regress—what’s the problem? What’s bad about it? There are turtles, infinitely many turtles all the way down, yes, all standing on one another. What’s wrong with that explanation? That’s a real infinite regress. What’s wrong with that explanation is that it isn’t an explanation. It explains nothing. What you’re really doing is saying “I have an explanation” without presenting it. Right? In order to present the explanation, you actually have to present the whole chain to me, because otherwise you’re saying: no, there is an explanation. You’re only claiming there is an explanation without presenting it. Thank you very much. To claim that there is an explanation without presenting it is not a legitimate move in a debate. If you have an explanation, present it. Here you did not present that explanation. Or in other words: what is this “down” exactly? Turtles all the way down—where is this “down”? Where is it located? What is “down”? There is no such down. Right? There is no bottom. It’s the same thing. That’s really another way of saying the same thing. And in order to see this as an explanation, you basically have to assume that there is some such bottom from which the turtles start and then continue until they get to the upper turtle, the so-called categorical turtle, and the world is on it. Okay? But there is no such thing as bottom. When you say there are infinitely many turtles, that’s a borrowed expression. The number infinity is not a number. People often think infinity is a very, very, very large number—much bigger than all the numbers. No. Infinity is not a number, and it isn’t large. Meaning, it simply says there is no number that describes it. That’s what it means to say infinity—that there is no number that describes it. Or I once saw another metaphor in Gadi.
[Speaker F] Here, I brought him in order to do compactification for your editor. What? Here, I brought him in order to do compactification for your editor.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe. If you know what you’re saying, I don’t know what you’re saying. Gadi, what’s his name, from that math blog? I forgot his name. I used to argue with him too. The name escaped me. “Not Precise” — that’s what his blog is called. Very interesting, by the way, worth reading. Some of it is a bit heavy, but really… So he says the best metaphor for infinity is: as much as you want. Again, it’s not a really, really huge number; it’s as much as you want. Meaning, there is no limitation — whatever you want, I’ll have. I think that’s a nice metaphor for the concept of infinity. It’s not a number that’s bigger than a thousand and bigger than a million and bigger than a billion. No, it’s not a number at all. There is no such thing. When I talk about infinity, I’m not really talking about a thing. I’m… this is the doctrine of negative attributes. I’m claiming that no finite number describes this thing. So what is it, then? There is no positive answer — there’s only what it’s not. No finite number describes this state, this thing. Okay? Now, in order to present an explanatory chain, you have to present all the links before our eyes, because otherwise it isn’t an explanation. But there is no concrete number of links that you can present before my eyes. You only say that the number of links is such that no finite number you find will describe the number of links. So what is the number of links? There is no answer; it’s simply not a legitimate question. There isn’t one. It’s like in Duties of the Heart, in the Gate of Unity, where he brings a proof that the world was created. Because if the world were eternal — apropos this question — if the world were eternal, then we could never have reached the time we are in now. We start from minus infinity and begin moving forward. So how much time passed until we got to our present time? We would never reach any finite time, right? When do we get to the year 1000 BCE or 1000 CE? How much time passed from minus infinity until here? A lot — infinity. And we never get there; it takes infinite time to arrive. Therefore, clearly the world is finite. That’s the claim of the author of Duties of the Heart. Of course, this process is not mathematically defined. You can’t start from minus infinity and begin walking to the right. There is no such thing; it’s simply undefined. You can start from zero and walk left forever and never arrive — that is a perfectly well-defined process. But there is no process in which you start walking from minus infinity to the right and then at every moment I can tell you where you are. You are at minus infinity and remain at minus infinity, and I don’t know what to tell you about where you are or aren’t. Okay? Therefore this is a process that is not defined at the mathematical level at all. I’m bringing up all these things to show you that when we talk about concepts of infinity, we have to be very careful with them. Usually mathematicians tend to treat the concept of infinity as a potential concept, not a concrete one. Meaning, there is no… it’s not a number, it’s not like the number one thousand or one million or something like that. It’s not some concrete positive thing; it’s something negative, something potential. Meaning, you strive toward infinity; you cannot be at infinity, you can strive toward infinity. Okay? Striving is always good. Like Leibowitz said, a messiah who has arrived is not the messiah. Meaning, an infinity that you have attained is not infinity. So the claim is that if you want to present an explanation that has a chain of infinitely many links, that explanation fails. It is a failure. Because infinitely many links… there’s no such thing as “it has infinitely many links.” You can say that it does not have a finite number of links. Meaning, in short, I have no explanation. That’s what you’re saying — I have no explanation. Because every explanation has to have a finite number of links, and you’re saying I don’t have an explanation with a finite number of links, or in other words, stop at: I have no explanation, period. What you are really saying is: I have no explanation. That’s all you’re saying. And therefore an infinite regress really is considered a failure. And when people say, no, no, what’s the problem? Yes, I’ve had many arguments with various amateur atheists and others, and I spoke to them about an argument of this kind — what’s the problem with an infinite regress? Infinite regress is excellent. Anywhere else, if someone said that to him, they’d hospitalize him. But in the one place where you need it and have no choice, then of course infinite regress is wonderful. But no — infinite regress is not wonderful; infinite regress is simply saying: I have no explanation. And then when you make this point clear to him — I already have a lot of experience — when you make the point clear to him, he says: right, so I have no explanation; I prefer to remain with the matter requiring further analysis. Someone says: I have an explanation. The alternative is that there is no explanation, and he says: I prefer to remain with the matter requiring further analysis. A little strange. Let’s see — wait, I’ll just mute this nuisance. Okay, never mind, I’m not going to do the whole screen thing here now, I’ll send it to you, maybe I’ll upload it in Moodle. There’s a very nice video about Hilbert’s Hotel. Hilbert’s Hotel is a nice illustration of the problematic nature of the concept of infinity. But I’ll tell it to you by heart, without videos. What? No, I know, that I can do, even at my advanced age, but I don’t have the energy to start lowering the screen and connecting the cables and the… okay. Think of a hotel that has infinitely many rooms, countably infinite, and each room has a number: 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, right? The natural numbers from one upward, the positive integers. Now the story begins with all the rooms in the hotel occupied. Okay? Every room has a guest. Okay? Now one more person arrives and wants to rent a room. Okay? So the hotel owner says to him: no problem at all. Every guest moves to room n plus one. The guest in room n moves to room n plus one. Okay? Meaning, the guest from room 1 moves to 2, 2 moves to 3, 3 moves to 4, and so on. Then room 1 remains vacant, and into room 1 he puts the new guest. Is there any citizen or guest who doesn’t have a room? Everyone has a room. Everything is fine. Okay? Now infinitely many buses arrive with infinitely many passengers, okay? And they ask to stay in the hotel. No problem at all — the hotel owner says, excellent, you are welcome to stay with me. Every guest in a room moves — room n goes to room 2n. The guest in room 1 moves to 2, the guest in room 2 moves to 4, the guest in 3 moves to 6, and so on. After everyone moves, only the even-numbered rooms are occupied. Right? The odd-numbered rooms are all empty. How many are there? Infinitely many, right? All the bus passengers are invited to enter the odd-numbered rooms that were vacated. Fine. The world does not stop abusing that miserable hotel owner, and now infinitely many buses arrive, each one with infinitely many passengers. And they too want to stay in our hotel. No problem, everything is excellent. What do we do? We take the passengers from the first bus and place them in the powers of the first prime number. Let’s say the first prime number is 2: so 2, 4, 8, 16 — all the powers of 2. How many such rooms are there? There is a true theorem in mathematics that there are infinitely many prime numbers. Meaning, the number of prime numbers is not finite. That is to say, not that there is an “infinity,” but that it is not finite. Meaning, there is no finite number of prime numbers; it is not finite. So therefore there are infinitely many rooms that are powers of 2. They are all integers and they are all in the hotel. Okay? There are infinitely many rooms that are powers of 3, also a prime number. Also of 5, of 7, of 11, 13, 17, yes and so on. All the prime numbers. Each bus will be placed in all the powers of one prime number, the next bus in the next prime number, and so on. And so infinitely many buses with infinitely many passengers in each of them enter, and I can tell you about every — therefore this process is well-defined. I can tell you about every passenger in every bus which room he will be in. I gave you a definite number. Tell me the 1000th passenger on bus 119, and I’ll tell you what room he’ll be in. Okay? Basically it’s 119 to the 1000th power. That’s the room he’ll be in. And so on. Therefore the process is perfectly well-defined. Okay? And that way I can house basically any number of people. Now, I don’t know whether to call this a paradox. Why is it a paradox? All right then, so in such a hotel you can house any number of people you want. Okay? But it is obvious to all of us that there cannot be such a hotel, and it is obvious to all of us that the whole process I just described is not a process that really exists. It cannot actually exist. And that’s a good demonstration of the caution required when we talk about the concept of infinity. There is no hotel with infinitely many rooms. There is no such thing as a hotel with infinitely many rooms. It’s not a hotel with lots and lots and lots and lots of rooms that I can’t grasp. No. A hotel with infinitely many rooms simply does not exist. There is no such hotel. Okay? Exactly as there is no chain of turtles that is infinitely many turtles all the way down. Fine, we can sail even farther with Hilbert’s Hotel, but in the end — yes, it reminds me, do you know the joke about Hershele? Hershele goes into a pastry shop. And he orders rolls. Two rolls. Fine. He gets two rolls and says: you know what? I changed my mind. I’m returning the rolls; bring me doughnuts instead. Two doughnuts for the same price. Fine. He finishes the two doughnuts and goes on his way. The pastry-shop owner runs after him and says: Hey, Hershele, you didn’t pay. Why should I pay? For the doughnuts you ate. I returned the rolls to you in exchange for them. But you didn’t pay for the rolls. The rolls I didn’t eat. So it seems to me that this is more or less, it seems to me, the explanation of turtles all the way down. Meaning, each one is built on the next, and that one on the next, and that one on the next. Yes, yes, everything’s fine, we have an excellent explanation. Down there, that one over there, he’s carrying all the… yes, it reminds me of verses of Jesus in Isaiah, he bore all their sufferings, something, I don’t remember exactly anymore. So the claim is that when you talk about an infinite regress, what you are really saying is: I have no explanation. That’s really what you’re saying. So “I have no explanation” is not an alternative. And if I say, look, the chain, the principle of causality and the rejection of infinite regress lead me to the conclusion that God exists, and someone else tells me: no, I accept the principle of causality, but I do not accept that infinite regress is a failure — then he is simply saying that he has no explanation. If someone says: I accept that infinite regress is a failure, but I do not accept the principle of causality — right? He can dispute any one of the premises. What do you mean, you don’t accept it? You don’t accept the principle of causality here too? No, here certainly yes, because it is a priori. So what? So you do accept the principle of causality, and it doesn’t come out as a result of observation. And that is not true only of our world. Rather what? You are right that preventing infinite regress requires me to exempt something from the principle of causality. Excellent — that is exactly my proof that God exists. And that there is at least one thing that deviates from the principle of causality. And therefore the atheist’s defense, or the atheist’s attack, is actually what builds the argument. He says to me: I arrive at an infinite regress. No, I don’t arrive at an infinite regress, because that is exactly what I’m claiming. Because there is no infinite regress, there must be a first link. If there were an infinite regress, then there would be no proof here of God’s existence. Everything that is often presented as a challenge to this claim is actually a misunderstanding. That challenge is the claim. That claim is the proof that God exists. Now, so there is now a challenge that says: fine, but what about God Himself? He too exists for an infinite amount of time. But is that infinity concrete or potential? After all, I just hid the problems with infinity inside God. So now God exists for the infinite amount of time that this chain was supposed to occupy. Not true — that is a mistake. Because when I speak about an explanatory chain, where each link explains the next link, I need to see all the links before my eyes for it to count as an explanation. Therefore it has to be concrete infinity, not potential infinity. But if I say that God existed all the time, that is infinity in the potential sense, not in the concrete sense. I do not have to assume that there was a starting point at which God began. On the contrary, I claim there was no such point. All I am claiming is that there was no time without God. Not that God exists for an infinite time. That is an incorrect formulation. There is no such thing as infinite time. Rather, there was no time in which God did not exist. Every time there is time, God exists in it. That is the claim. To say that, I use the concept of infinity in its potential sense, not in its concrete sense. That is okay; that can be said. Therefore it’s not that I hid the problematic nature of infinity. The problem with infinity is not that I am unwilling to talk about infinity. I am unwilling to talk about concrete infinity; I am willing to talk about potential infinity. Concrete infinity I am not willing to discuss. If an explanatory chain is infinite, it has to be a concrete infinity. A chain of — or not a chain, rather — someone’s lifespan, someone’s duration of existence, can be infinite in the potential sense. There was no beginning; he was always there. That’s all, that’s fine. I am not claiming that he existed for an infinite time — there is no such thing — only that there was no time in which he did not exist. That is one point. The same thing, by the way — or not exactly the same thing, actually — but a similar objection comes up from the eternity of the world, from what you mentioned earlier. The eternity of the world also seemingly challenges this argument, because if the world were eternal, then there would be no need for a cause for its existence. A cause for its existence is needed only because it was created at some point, and then the question is how it was created or who created it. But if the world was not created, it was always there, then there is no need to assume that there is something or someone who created it. Okay? Therefore many times the claim of the eternity of the world, the Aristotelian claim, is perceived as a challenge to this argument. But you have to notice a few things here. First of all, that too is potential infinity, not concrete infinity. The world always existed. That is not concrete, meaning the argument is a legitimate one, because I am only saying there was never a time when there was no world, just as I said about the Holy One, blessed be He. The point is this: first, physically today we know that the world did not exist for an infinite time. Meaning, the Big Bang and so on. There are various hypotheses about previous universes and so on, but I’ll get to that later. But at least from what we know at the observational level, the world has a finite age, meaning fourteen billion years or something like that. That is one thing. The second thing is what is called the principle of sufficient reason. Leibniz formulated it this way, and his claim is that even if there is something that existed for an infinite time, but it has a certain special character, it still requires explanation. He says: suppose you come to a forest and you see there some glass sphere with wonderful designs, beautifully made. You ask: who made this glass sphere? Someone answers you: it has always been here, nobody made it. Let’s say it has always been there for the sake of argument. Does that remove the need for an explanation? After all, it is still a very special sphere. There has to be some explanation. That explanation probably won’t be a cause — a cause in the sense of who made the sphere — but there has to be some explanation for why the sphere is as it is. This is what Leibniz calls a reason, not a cause but a reason. Instead of the principle of causality, he calls it the principle of sufficient reason. And special things require a sufficient reason even if they are eternal, even if they always existed. Why are they as they are? And therefore I still arrive at the Holy One, blessed be He, but notice: here I already need the complexity of the world. Because I say this is a special thing; if it is a special thing, it was not just produced for no reason — there must be a reason why it is as it is. Okay? This already leads me to the physico-theological argument, which is the next argument. So here I’m just completing the picture, but apparently these two arguments are connected, there is an affinity between them. The third argument strengthens the second argument, because you need the principle of sufficient reason in order to rule out the possibility of an eternal world. Of course, physically you can also rule it out, and then you don’t need the third argument. Simply because of the Big Bang — then the world is not infinite. Another claim that comes up — I simply have a lot of experience in these arguments — another claim that comes up is that God is not an explanation. You say there was something you don’t understand and don’t know what to say about, you know nothing about it, so that’s not an explanation, it’s just evasion. I said earlier that the atheist evades with infinite regress, and no — you’re the one evading. So why is that a misunderstanding? Because I did not try to offer an explanation. I proved the existence of God; I did not explain anything. Think, for example, of Winnie-the-Pooh wandering on the seashore and seeing footprints, which in the end turn out to be his own, and he sees footprints in the sand. So he reaches the conclusion that apparently someone or something passed here whose foot shape this is, right? That’s a logical conclusion. You don’t know how to say anything about that someone — who said there is even such a someone? What you’re saying now is not an explanation. Correct, it’s not an explanation. But I proved to you that such a someone exists, that he passed here. There is a difference between saying I proved to you the existence of God and saying that God explains the world or the creation of the world. I am not claiming that. I am not offering some explanation here. I am claiming that if a world exists and everything must have a cause, then I prove from this that there exists something about which I cannot say anything, and that there exists something responsible for the fact that the world is here, that created the world. And in that sense, even if I can’t say anything about Him, so what? I also can’t say anything about the one who left the footprints in the sand. But if there are footprints, apparently someone left them. And therefore the claim that God is not an explanation is simply a misunderstanding; it’s not true. There’s one more thing I wanted to say here — quantum theory. In quantum theory they talk about spontaneous occurrence. Things are created from the vacuum; particles are created spontaneously out of the vacuum. And ostensibly that means that even in our world, things of the kind we know can also occur without a cause, without a creator. Not true. The first premise of the argument — that everything must have a cause, or at least things in our world that I do not exempt — is supposedly not true. Here quantum theory shows you that things can be created without a cause. So here I’ll perhaps say one thing at this stage, because we already need to finish, so let’s say one thing. Look, things cannot occur without a cause. What happens is, suppose there were a world whose nature was not quantum in nature — after all, the laws of quantum theory are part of the laws of physics of the world, right? There could have been a world in which the laws of nature were different; there would have been no quantum theory there, everything would have been classical physics. Fine? One could have created a world governed by classical physics even in the small particles, governed by classical physics and not by quantum theory. In that world, things would not be created from the vacuum, right? Only in quantum theory do you have these crazy phenomena where things pop out of the vacuum. What does that mean? It basically means that there is a cause that creates these things; they do not come from the vacuum. And the cause is the quantum character of our world. That is not a local cause in the sense that there is not necessarily something here that created the particle, perhaps — and there are debates about that too in interpretations of quantum theory — but let’s say according to the accepted interpretation, there is no local cause for this thing, but certainly the quantum character of the world is what makes the formation possible. So who is responsible for the quantum character of the world? The question returns — I still arrive at God. Someone had to produce that. Why is the world specifically a world like this, with a quantum character in which things are created from the vacuum? I’ll formulate it differently: what we call a vacuum in quantum theory is not really a vacuum. And the proof is that whenever a particle is created, an antiparticle is also created with it, offsetting all its properties. Along with positive mass, negative mass is created; along with positive electric charge, negative electric charge is created, so that the sum total of charges and properties is zero, because there is conservation of charge and conservation of mass and conservation of all those properties. Now who makes sure that whenever such a particle is created, an opposite particle is also created to offset it? If it just comes out of the vacuum and there is nothing here connected to the matter, then who guarantees that all the conservation laws are always balanced? Clearly the character of the world is not an empty character. This world is not just a vacuum; it is called a vacuum state because there are no particles, but it is not a state empty of content. It contains all of quantum theory, which governs everything that happens within it. And the question of who created the world in this form replaces the question of who created the particle. So He created a world with quantum theory that allows spontaneous creation of particles — okay, but you still need someone who created that. It is not true that quantum theory shows there is no problem, things can be created without a cause — absolutely not. Things do not come into being without a cause. In a world that was truly empty, and where there were also no laws forcing what happens there or governing what happens there, things would not just arise out of the vacuum for no reason — that is the reasonable assumption. Okay? Therefore physicists too, when they search for explanations, always do so within the framework of quantum theory. Otherwise, what’s the problem? Just say it created itself — what’s the problem? Why do you need an explanation here? Clearly you do need an explanation, and the explanation is quantum theory, which means that in fact there is something responsible for these phenomena. It is not true that they just happen for no reason. Therefore I think that quantum theory also does not undermine this great premise, this first premise of the argument. Okay, we’ll stop here. Wait, there were a few — one second — there were a few who came in late. Aviad, that was you, right? I saw. Who else? And Matan, I think, right? What’s the name? Nevo? Up here.
[Speaker I] Dani? I was on reserve duty.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, what? Dvir Tarski. Yes. Okay.
[Speaker B] Elisaf Dan. Wait.