Question

Hello Rabbi,
I saw Roy Tsezana’s article on the Tapuz site in response to the Rabbi’s remarks in the second booklet – “the cosmological proof.”
I will quote selected parts of his article, and I would be happy to hear the Rabbi’s response to these points:
 
…”The first approach to solving the parable (turtles all the way down) was presented in recent days in the teaching of Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham, who argued that the series of turtles cannot be infinite and must end somewhere. There must be solid ground on which the lowest turtle places its feet. There must be a foundation, even if we do not understand its nature. And how could we understand it? After all, all we know are turtles! Therefore, the foundation must be incomprehensible and beyond the laws of nature familiar to us, and that is God.
This is one solution to the problem of the first cause, but it contains two major flaws, both resting on the fact that during the solution we ‘cheat the rules’ and add external factors that we do not know and are not sure exist.
Turtles up to here
The first flaw is expressed in the failure of the original turtle parable. This parable, like many others, is meant to convey a certain point to readers. The author of the parable scoffs at the attempt to attribute the first cause to natural processes that we have known for a long time. He refers to that first cause as a necessity, and hints that it must be based on some external factors that are not ‘turtles’ or physical laws known to us.
But what if there is no first cause?
This question seems to run against the intuition familiar to us from the world around us. And yet, many proven scientific theories run against the mode of thought we have formed for ourselves. Seemingly random processes of evolution create order and logic. Objects of quantum size (and recently evidence has begun to be accepted that larger objects as well) can be present at two points in space at the same time. The world, it turns out, is more complex and more wondrous than anything we imagine.
So why shouldn’t it also be eternal?
This is cheating, of course. We are giving an answer to the parable that departs from its original rules. But it is no different from the previous solution through which we ‘proved’ the existence of God. In order to assume the existence of God as the creator of something from nothing, we are forced to invent circumstances and physical forces that we do not know and do not understand. There is nothing wrong with that – the science of physics has been discovering such new forces almost every decade over the past century, and we learn to understand them and harness them for our benefit. But if we allow ourselves to ‘cheat the parable’ and solve it by adding a factor that bypasses all the forces of nature, then logically we can just as well accept another ‘symmetry-breaking’ explanation, according to which the universe is eternal. After all, if all we know is turtles upon turtles, how can we know that they really have an end or a beginning?
This answer receives support from some physicists. Recently a new model of the Big Bang was proposed, according to which there exists a huge number – perhaps infinite – of universes, each of which expands for tens of billions of years, and then begins to contract in agonizing slowness until reaching a state of a singular point, a cosmic egg containing within it all the energy and mass of an entire universe. Sound familiar? This point will expand again in an explosion of enormous magnitude and create the universe in which we live, fight, and love. Our universe too is expanding, but when the day comes it will reach the point at which the elastic sheet will stretch to the limit of its ability – and then it will begin to contract back to a new singular point, which will also explode in turn. A world without end, without beginning.
You can relax: our universe will not begin to contract before another few tens of billions of years pass. An immense stretch of time, by which all the suns will have gone out and entropy will rule in black space. Human beings will become extinct long before that.
This, then, is the eternal expanding and contracting universe. But here one can ask again: who created this universe? This question, as we already explained, is irrelevant because the very formulation implies that there is a creator, and there is no reason to assume that. In fact, if we decide that logically it is possible that a creator exists, then we must decide that by the same logic it is possible that the universe is eternal and was not created by anyone.
God of the gaps
The second flaw is expressed in our reliance on ignorance – lack of knowledge – in order to determine the existence and identity of God. Even if there must be a foundation for the turtles (and that is still a claim requiring proof), that still does not prove that this foundation is the almighty God, or even half-almighty or quarter-almighty. Logicians give a name to this type of logical fallacy, in which we take the unknown and call it ‘God.’ This is the God of the gaps.
This term was coined in the 19th century by the evangelical Christian lecturer Henry Drummond, who rebuked believers who exploited every point of uncertainty and lack of knowledge in the scientific explanation of the world in order to claim that God was present there. We are not sure how the world was created? God created it. We are not sure why one person is sick and another remains healthy? God did it. Drummond called on Christians to accept all of nature as one great God, ‘…the God of evolution, who is infinitely greater than the old theological God, that hasty wonder-worker.’
Even if we choose to accept the existence of some kind of God on the basis of the lack of knowledge in our possession, the idea of God as the foundation for all the turtles and the physical laws does not answer the persistent question about God’s character. Just as Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religious people choose to determine that the foundation for the turtles, that first cause of all first causes, is the good and beneficent God familiar to us from the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), so any stubborn fool can declare that Satan created the whole world (as Yazidi religious believers in fact do), a cosmic cow licked the universe into its present form (as the Norse believe), or that behind the Big Bang stands the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who created the world with its eternal tentacles (as the Pastafarians believe). Of course they are all mistaken: Falaf-El is the one who created the world (and you are invited to join his small but high-quality church on Facebook). And yet, it is easy to see how the logical argument for the existence of Falaf-El is taken here out of all context and reason.
Finding God
From all this we learn that there is no good reason to attribute the Big Bang to divine initiative.” etc.