Q&A: The Physico-Theological Proof
The Physico-Theological Proof
Question
Hello Rabbi,
From what I understand from your remarks about the physico-theological proof, you argue that the formation of certain things in nature through a random process is plainly highly improbable, and therefore the only reasonable possibility is that behind all this there stands some intelligent factor that planned evolution, or the physical system within which it became possible.
My question is: why assume that an improbable event is necessarily the result of planning and thought?
After all, even if I draw a number between one and a million, and suppose the result is 400,234, the probability of that specific number coming up is very low, and still I do not assume that someone planned it, because that is like marking the target only after I have already shot the arrow.
I would be glad if you could please explain the difference between the cases.
Answer
I have explained this more than once. There is a difference between something exceptional and something rare. In the lottery you described, there is nothing special about the result you got. It is one out of a million possible outcomes, and I know that one of them will come up and that it will be improbable. So there is nothing here that cries out for explanation. By contrast, our world is not just one out of many possible worlds; it is an especially complex world.
Think of a situation in which some person wins the lottery one hundred times in a row. I assume the police would come knocking on his door to arrest him for cheating, even though that possibility is no less probable than the possibility that one hundred different people would win.
I once defined this as the difference between the exceptional and the rare. The rare does not necessarily require an explanation. The exceptional (or special) does.