Their process of production isn’t within our experience…
If so, then God too is something within the religious person’s experience… and would also need a creator.

What here is being produced? Are the laws entities? If so, then that is God. I am speaking about the basic existent that created the world. In my view, the laws describe a mode of operation, but then you still need someone who legislates and operates them. But it seems to me the points have been clarified, and each person will choose what seems right to him.

I’m asking from the side of the physicotheological argument, if the Rabbi didn’t understand, and not from the side of the cosmological argument.

A. It seems to me that the matter was not clarified enough in the booklet.

B. The Rabbi strongly supports the principle of sufficient reason, and since if we apply that principle to God as well we arrive at an infinite regress, it is therefore preferable to stop at God, who is His own reason, unlike the laws of creation. And I’m asking: why? After all, the cause of both is not within our experience.
B1. Is the assumption that God is His own cause an assumption that comes out of the desire to get rid of the infinite regress of reasons?
B2. And why bring in an unknown factor in order to explain creation rather than remain with the dilemma?
————–

C. The Rabbi often uses the fine-tuning argument, but the creation of the laws is not known to us.
So why seek a reason for it at all?
D. Why does the Rabbi think the laws describe a mode of operation (like in a factory) rather than being an arbitrary factor!?
E. Why does the Rabbi think that the idea of a machine that creates worlds and laws is a weaker claim than God?

Thanks in advance, have a good week and a happy Lag BaOmer :=)
I’d be glad if the Rabbi would answer a bit more expansively than usual, because usually I feel that many discussions just go in circles because each side doesn’t understand the other. So maybe it’s better to expand a bit… instead of grinding through messages.

I understood very well, and I answered.
The regress argument has to stop at an object that does not need a cause outside itself. That object is called God. If the laws are an object, then as far as I’m concerned they are God. And if they are a description of a mode of operation, then an object is still needed. And if there is a machine that creates laws, then it is God. What is unclear here?

That is regarding the cosmological regress argument.
But not regarding the physicotheological argument. Right?

The physicotheological argument does not deal with regress. When you talk about regress or about an existent that is its own cause, you are dealing with the cosmological argument. And there we are speaking of an existent that is not within our experience.
The physicotheological argument deals with the complexity of the laws. Whoever is responsible for that is God. And if the laws are entities (preferably intelligent ones), I don’t care if they are God. Either way, there has to be an existent that is responsible for them. And this has nothing to do with our experience, but rather with an a priori intuition that there are no laws without a lawgiver.
By the way, the two arguments (the cosmological and the physicotheological) are joined into one. The separation between them is mainly didactic.

Okay, thanks, so let’s leave the issue of regress aside for a moment.

The part of your answer saying, “the a priori intuition that there are no laws without a lawgiver,” was the point of the original discussion.
So I’d prefer to focus only on that part:

A. I didn’t understand why claim that there are no laws without a lawgiver. Aren’t the laws arbitrary?

B. The Rabbi often uses the fine-tuning argument, but the creation of the laws is not known to us.
So why seek a reason for it at all?

Thanks in advance!

As I wrote, even the principle of causality is not known to us from experience, and yet we still assume that it is true. We have a priori intuitions, such as the intuition that nothing exists without a cause, and certainly if we are speaking about something complex.
Therefore, when there are laws, reason tells us that there is someone responsible for them, who created them and/or operates them. When you see a factory whose divisions all work in perfect coordination, you assume that there is a manager who determined the methods of operation and coordinates among the parts. The fact that there are rules describing how the factory operates and instructing each division and/or person what to do is not an explanation that makes the existence of a manager unnecessary. On the contrary, it shows that there is a manager and that these are the rules he established. The same is true of a washing machine. The fact that there are laws that govern its operation does not mean that no one created it. On the contrary, the existence of a machine that operates in a coordinated way leads us to conclude that someone planned and created it and the laws that govern its operation. The same is true of the world.

Okay, thanks,
if so I have a few more questions.
A.
Are the laws really that special? I think the way to check how special they are is to notice
what result they leave behind.

B. So when we look at their very “special” handiwork, we discover that they abandoned several billion galaxies! that exist in the universe, which are simply empty and not special at all, but wildly random.
In such a case, would the Rabbi still say that this shows a functioning factory?

How do you know they are random?
It may be that they are needed for some purpose that has not yet been explained.
If I’m not mistaken, the Rabbi explained elsewhere
that the formation of the rules does not prevent deviations from them,
for example the voice box in animals points to randomness in creation.

Beyond the point about randomness made above, I would say that definitely yes. Every factory produces a lot of waste (when you reduce entropy in one place, it necessarily increases around it). Thus a quarry produces stones and leaves destruction on the mountain from which they are quarried, and so it is with every production process. What matters is the fact that there is a special product.

That’s the kind of answer I was looking for,
could the Rabbi expand?

Is it impossible to create without waste? Is that a kind of logical law?
For example, in a Bamba factory I don’t think they have all that much waste…. after all, they use everything they put in. Same with most factories. But the Rabbi compares creation to a quarrying factory. Why?

Moishbbb, could you expand? I didn’t understand.

?

There is no factory without waste (that is the second law of thermodynamics). Sometimes the waste is located where the raw materials are produced (like the building stones of the factory, or the raw materials of the products).
My claim is that this is indeed a logical law. The same applies to the natural evil created in the world. It is a logical consequence of the decision to create a world that operates according to fixed laws. I have already written about this here in the past.

Does the Rabbi have an article on this that expands more?
With emphasis on the first part—the second law of thermodynamics?

P.S.
Couldn’t the Holy One, blessed be He, create a reality without the second law of thermodynamics?

I don’t have such an article. The second law (or at least this component of it) is basically the result of a probabilistic calculation alone. Probability is mathematics, not physics. Therefore another world would probably behave similarly in this respect.

What is the definition of waste?
Why is destruction on a mountain the waste? Seemingly that just shows the act of mining.

I would understand it if the waste were the energy invested in the drills, etc., for quarrying the stones.

But then it doesn’t really fit so well as an example for our factory—the factory producing the world.

The waste is the disorder. In physics this is measured by entropy. All of these are forms of disorder. When you build something, you create a small set with a certain order. Around it, you pay for that in disorder.

Just to sharpen the point: this is speaking about a natural process of formation. If there is an intelligent creator, he can do things without surrounding disorder (like gathering stones and arranging them). In that case he contributes his own information (and also energy) into the system, and information can create order. A random process cannot create order without paying for it in surrounding disorder.

A.
So that’s a sign that there was no intelligent being that invested additional energy into the system since the Big Bang, right? That is, we see that God did not intervene in the world since creation.

And therefore the Rabbi wants to claim that the laws are special because they created such a planet. Right?

B. The Rabbi wrote in the booklet that the order in creation is great—why? I understand that regarding life on Earth. But why claim this about the rest of the galaxies too?

C. The Rabbi had some proof mentioned in a note in the physicotheological booklet, that the order at the initial stage of the Big Bang (when space was the size of the initial energy alone) was smaller than the order found in space today. Why?

After all, it was simply denser… it could not have had any other order.

A. I didn’t understand where the sign comes from or why, and even if so—why that is important to the discussion.

B. The order in creation is that complex entities were formed here. Even inanimate matter is very complex and built with great sophistication. And life too is complex, although for now we know of it only on one planet.

C. The order after the Big Bang was smaller than the order of today because there was no life. Solid matter did not yet exist either. The whole reality as we know it did not exist then.

A. Because we see that the waste was not utilized. And indeed it’s not all that connected.

B. What is so complex about inanimate matter? Maybe the Rabbi can enlighten me.

C. Okay, but the change from energy to mass had to happen because of the Big Bang, no? That’s a sign it isn’t all that complex.

B. In your opinion, what do people study for so many years in the physics faculty if inanimate matter is so simple? If you want enlightenment on this matter, go and study physics and chemistry.
It doesn’t seem to me that one needs to be an expert in physics to understand that this business is astonishingly complex. Physics only describes the details, but anyone understands the complexity of atoms and molecules and elementary particles and the relations between them.
C. ???
It seems to me that this whole discussion is rather bizarre.