References:

Michi,
where did you answer the whole issue of the analogy and the problems I mentioned in the post Moshe quoted? I’d be very interested to read what you wrote about it.

Here’s mine:
Let me give an example to illustrate the nullity of Athologica’s argument.
His argument could just as well refute the design of an “artificial” factory created by man.
I enter a huge structure with billions of rooms (the universe full of stars). Throughout the building there prevails a list of rigid laws that are a necessary condition (though not sufficient) for the production of sophisticated robots (the parallel in the universe: the fine-tuning constants). In one of the rooms the rest of the necessary conditions for creating the robots prevail (that is planet Earth, at the right distance, with water, etc.), and indeed in that room robots are produced from simple to complex (parallel to abiogenesis and evolution). In all the other rooms and in the corridors there are things that only endanger the complex robots, like flames that are found in all the rooms (parallel to black holes or places without oxygen, etc.), so that the overwhelming majority of the building does not seem adjusted to producing robots that came into being in some negligible room out of the billions of rooms in the building.
According to Athologica one should conclude that there is no designer for this building, including the room inside it, because the output in this building is unclear, and most of the building only “wants” to destroy the robots; they look like a byproduct of a random process. Mark this well.
Your mistake is that you understand the argument as an analogy, but it is not.
The analogy comes only to illustrate certain points (such as the irrelevance of the existence of laws of physics (or evolution) to the philosophical question), and nothing more.

Maybe you should do a video here on Skype or something that preserves the video. So we can compare claims? :)??

No need for video, I’m a prophet and I’ll tell you how the discussion here is going to develop.
Athologica will continue to argue for the existence of various differences: we know about human beings who build buildings, and not about gods, etc., and then I’ll ask him what he would say about the above building if he wandered all over the world and found no other living creature besides himself, and this building was the only one in the universe, etc. Obviously he would “invent” some unfamiliar entity never observed before that built the building. So in the final analysis, one must understand that the analogy is not the argument, and the argument is a logical syllogism.

It seems to me that Ido Hadi is one of the most instructive examples of the existence of symptoms of becoming religious again, among atheist ex-religious people.
Seeing everything as black and white, a worrying lack of listening to the other side, and adopting a whole set of values just because the religious side sees them as wrong values. Just imagine: how many intelligent ex-religious people are deists? Very few, because until today it still seems to him that God-Judaism are 100% correct, and now he finds holes in Judaism/God intervening in the world, so obviously the whole package is wrong.
Ido’s articles reflect, unfortunately, the level of knowledge of an average religious person about Jewish theology in many fields, and it is enough to see the article on the Oral Torah to understand the extremism he has gone through.
The article whose sheer force amazed me was the article in which he claims there is nothing surprising about a result of 1000 dice throws all landing on 6, because the probability of that is equal to any other result, and he even demanded that Michi go back to studying “statistics.” What can you do — the readers of his blog are not sharp enough to put him in his place about that mistake, and for a long time I wanted to respond to that nonsense, but for now I’ll make do with a thought experiment for Ido: you come to a computer program that simulates a random letter drawing, except that time after time the sentence “Bibi the King” comes out. Before the result is emitted, you see on the screen that the program is indeed running letters, but in the end it always stops on “Bibi the King.” What would our friend Ido say? After all, clearly the probability that “Bibi the King” would come out 50 times is exactly equal to the probability that there would come out “Bachai Lagtzav” “Bamgel Lekhachar” “Levamar Chabtzar” and 47 more pairs of meaningless words.
Obviously he would assume with overwhelming probability that the program was intentionally programmed to output “Bibi the King” 50 times.
The same would be true if time after time a combination like “AAAA AAAA” came out. (So that this will be exactly similar to the case under discussion: the same number a thousand times, 6.)
So we have reached the conclusion that the claim that with a die one should not infer cheating even after 1000 consecutive throws of 6 stems from pale hidden assumptions that the die is certainly fair (or almost certainly fair), or that there are no people who know how to cheat a die throw so that it produces a special result.
And what if we were not familiar with dice, and this were the first die we had ever seen? Then yes, we would infer that a die is an item biased in its result, even though the chance of a thousand 6s is exactly equal to any other random thousand-digit sequence.
Note that I did not give a formal justification for the argument, but only exposed that even Ido thinks differently from what he says with his mouth (I’m not accusing you of lying, but of being mistaken by not recognizing your own assumptions).
I’m willing to bet thousands of shekels on the claim that if you were offered to participate in a wager that if the die that fell thousands of times is biased (or the thrower knows how to fake throws), if it is rigged you take 100,000 shekels from the pot, and if it is fair you lose 10,000 — you’d grab that bet with both hands. Will you claim otherwise? I don’t believe you.

Dani,
I’ll leave your last message for another opportunity. I’ll focus on what is relevant to what Moshe wrote in the original question.

The point that seems most central to me is that the analogy discussed in the post mentioned here “is not the argument, and the argument is a logical syllogism.” Please formulate that logical syllogism explicitly. Why? Precisely because you are repeating the same mistake that this post criticizes in the analogy you gave. In your first message, you gave a situation supposedly analogous to the universe (I cut out the point of comparison):

I enter a huge structure with billions of rooms […]. Throughout the building there prevails a list of rigid laws that are a necessary condition (though not sufficient) for the production of sophisticated robots […]. In one of the rooms the rest of the necessary conditions for creating the robots prevail […], and indeed in that room robots are produced from simple to complex […]. In all the other rooms and in the corridors there are things that only endanger the complex robots, like flames that are found in all the rooms […], so that the overwhelming majority of the building does not seem adjusted to producing robots that came into being in some negligible room out of the billions of rooms in the building.

Notice your choice of words. The building you describe is described as a building we all know from everyday life — a structure, rooms, and I assume there are also doors, tables, and the like. Robots are definitely something we know to be built by man (what jumps to my mind is R2D2 and C3PO, though that may not be universal). Your wording automatically arouses in the reader associations of a standard human factory, though one that, in the scenario you described, also destroys a significant portion of what it creates. If I were to enter the factory that comes to mind when I read your loaded description, you would not find anyone who would jump faster than I would to the conclusion that this factory was designed — and not merely designed, but probably the handiwork of George Lucas himself. After all, he too destroyed most of what he made (Jar Jar Binks is the seed of Satan).

How does this “admission” from me help you? It doesn’t. Your description is loaded, loaded with terms from the world of human experience that automatically evoke associations of design behind the phenomenon you describe. The analogy you gave suffers from the same problem as the analogies I analyzed in the post Moshe brought. They are all phrased in a loaded way, one that sneaks associations of “intelligent design” in through the back door.

Why is that a problem? Well, remember the question under discussion: is the universe designed? Choosing an analogy loaded with “design” associations gives the universe an aura of “designedness,” but does not show that it was in fact designed. That is a fair point. The universe is not a building. It has no rooms. Certainly no doors. It does not really look like a “factory” in any shape even close to factories we know from the world of human experience. There is no structure, rooms, doors, or tables. These are, at best, weak images, and it is not at all obvious that conclusions should be drawn from them.

In fact, it is not clear why an analogy is needed at all, certainly not one so loaded. We are grown people. We are capable of describing the universe without dubious analogies. We can say that there is a rather small region in the universe in which there is life. We can describe that region in the appropriate scientific terms. They are not that hard to understand. We can describe life as a phenomenon — give an introduction to metabolism, an introduction to biological diversity, and end with singing Hakuna Matata when we learn about the circle of life. To complete the description, we can clarify that in most of the universe visible to us, life as we know it cannot exist, and we can point to the physical factors responsible for that.

When the world is described in those terms, it is possible to discuss it without fearing that we are misleading ourselves by using loaded analogies. I understand that you have your own argument showing that this world was designed. Present that “logical syllogism” you mentioned and we’ll discuss it. Good luck.

Unbelievable, it turns out I really am a prophet.
Good thing I administered the cure before the blow — it seems you didn’t read the relevant passage, so I’ll copy it here:

There’s no need for video, I’m a prophet and I’ll tell you how the discussion here is going to develop.
Athologica will continue to argue for the existence of various differences: we know about human beings who build buildings, and not about gods, etc., and then I’ll ask him what he would say about the above building if he wandered all over the world and found no other living creature besides himself, and this building was the only one in the universe, etc. Obviously he would “invent” some unfamiliar entity never observed before that built the building. So in the final analysis, one must understand that the analogy is not the argument, and the argument is a logical syllogism.
End quote. From here, an added clarification: I mean that we are in a world empty of people, and you are the only human being, and you have never seen any building in the world, because there simply isn’t one; moreover, you have no idea how a building is built (I think most people don’t know this). There are no doors there, and as far as I’m concerned instead of a building let’s speak of a cave with billions of niches, rather than a building carved from straight rectangular bricks. The building in my illustration was intended only to parallel the parable and the thing paralleled in terms of the applicability of the internal and external laws, and the distinction between them — that there are external laws that form a necessary envelope even for the special room.
As for the psychologizing you’re trying to do here to my words, I have to say I’m very angry with you. This is just cheap demagoguery. I tried very hard to describe the building in its plain form without any metaphors, or some devious desire to arouse one association or another in the reader; those are just conspiracies in your head. I just went over my description again three times (really), and found nothing in it from head to toe. Read it again and be honest and upright with yourself. Which words are problematic? “Billions of rooms”? “Sophisticated robots”? (a modest term compared to a human being), “flames in the corridors”? Is there a more fitting image than fire? (as an image for black holes and supernovas), or maybe the words “rigid laws”? Maybe “huge building”? Or “simple becoming complex”? What on earth did I write that could create in the reader feelings that would bias his thinking? Or in you the suspicion that I’m trying to manipulate readers? Here’s yet another demonstration of atheist zealotry that suspects the person he’s talking to as a preacher scheming to deceive people.

The syllogism is simple; here it is before you:
1. The universe, with its contents, is extremely complex (physics, chemistry, life, the tremendous human brain).
2. A complex thing is not produced from a simple thing randomly. (With the added assumption that life is not primordial.)
Conclusion: the universe was not produced randomly, meaning that special and rare laws governed it in comparison with the other possible sets of laws, and special laws require a lawgiver.

I have no interest right now in entering into a long discussion of the various challenges to this proof, but that is the syllogism, and it is completely valid.

And regarding the use of analogy.
Analogies are good for clarifying certain points or helping yourself sharpen points that are hard to define in the abstract.
If I remember correctly, the Rabbi’s factory analogy in the book was intended only to clarify that the existence of laws of nature does not make the Creator unnecessary, just as the existence of factory laws does not make unnecessary a manager who legislated them. It doesn’t matter whether in the details a factory is analogous to the universe or not. In my opinion, it’s obvious that it is not analogous, for the reasons you mention, and still the argument stands for two reasons:
1. The argument is a logical argument and not an analogy.
2. Even if we change the analogue to object x, which is more suitable and more similar (as you rightly demanded, and as I did), regarding that x too most of us would admit that it requires a designer, even with the drastic changes introduced into it (that most of the “factory” wants to destroy its products, etc.).

2. A complex thing is not produced from a simple thing randomly. (With the added assumption that life is not primordial.)

Could Dani/the Rabbi explain this part? And not just assume from the outset that it’s true.

Dani,

First, you didn’t like the “psychologizing” I did to you, to put it mildly. You thought I was accusing you of all sorts of things that never crossed my mind, some kind of conspiracy for the sake of heaven or a desire to deceive your readers. My message is simple: I think you’re mistaken.

Second, you said you had just gone over your original analogy again and found “nothing” in it, and I assume what you didn’t find were descriptions loaded with “design” associations, which is what I said is there. Here are the details.

Broadly speaking, the descriptions in your analogy can be divided into two categories: more concrete descriptions and more abstract ones. You described a building with rooms, corridors, and robots created in the rooms. Those descriptions belong to the more concrete category. Of course, I can imagine buildings, rooms, corridors, and robots that do not exist, that I have not encountered in the past and/or will never encounter anywhere. People do this all the time: Barad-dûr in The Lord of the Rings, Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back, the never-ending train station in Matrix Reloaded, and GERTY in the film Moon. Even when we do this, what we imagine shares common properties with buildings, rooms, corridors, and robots that are indeed familiar to all of us as human beings. Those properties cause us (or at least me) to identify them as things designed and built by man, or more generally by something that thinks and acts like a human being. I cannot manage to imagine buildings, rooms, corridors, or robots that do not evoke those associations in me. If I were imagining something that looked so unlike any building, room, corridor, or robot familiar to me that it did not evoke those “design” associations, I probably would not call it a building/room/corridor/robot. Such is language, and I very much doubt I am the only one whose perception on this topic “works” that way.

In addition to those concrete descriptions, your analogy contains a more abstract kind of description. You wrote, for example, that in the rooms in question “there prevails a list of rigid laws that are a necessary condition (but not sufficient)” and so on. You also wrote that there are things there “that only endanger the robots,” and so on. Descriptions of this type are more abstract than the descriptions of the first type, and at least some of them add an element of “strangeness” to the analogy. Even so, they do not subtract from the associations of something “designed” that accompany the descriptions of the first type. The “design” associations are still there in your word choice.

Third, this brings me to the clarification you gave to your analogy (my additions in square brackets):

[Beginning]I mean that we are in a world empty of people, and you are the only human being, and you have never seen any building in the world, because there simply isn’t one; moreover, you have no idea how a building is built (I think most people don’t know this), there are no doors there, [End]and as far as I’m concerned instead of a building let’s speak of a cave with billions of niches, rather than a building carved from straight rectangular bricks

This clarification does not really get you anywhere. I have at least two ways of interpreting the beginning. One is that you are asking me to imagine a world in which I personally have never experienced what a building is. Sorry, I have no idea how to imagine such a thing. The moment I try, I have no idea what that “building” is that I am supposed to imagine. The second is that you are asking me to imagine that I experienced buildings in my past, but I arrived on some distant planet (“in the world”) where I encountered another “building” — again, one such that when I look at it I see that it resembles buildings familiar to me, for example in the shape of the building (say, rectangular with roof tiles), perhaps in its basic architecture (say, there are distinct doors and corridors), or perhaps in the process of its preparation (it is made of bricks or castings). There can be many differences between the buildings before my eyes and the buildings I know, but the greater the similarity, the more valid the inference that this is a building designed by designers fairly similar to human beings. The inference is tentative and not certain, but that is always the case, no matter what the inference is. What will you do with what I have just said? I have no idea. I already said something in this vein earlier, and it doesn’t seem to me that this advances the discussion anywhere.

In your ending, you gave the beginning of a much better analogy to the universe. Still, I wouldn’t bother developing that analogy too much. The analogy to a cave and niches is much better in my eyes because instead of terms from the world of human creation, it uses terms from the world of “nature.” And as such they do not raise “design” associations (at least not among someone who is not a devout creationist). Even so, caves and niches are among the kinds of natural objects about which we ask, “were they designed?” — the very question we are debating. So again, just as I suggested earlier, instead of wasting time with analogies, let’s simply describe the universe and begin discussing the question at the center of the discussion.

To conclude, I’ll touch on what I thought was your strongest argument. You said analogies are good for clarifying points, and claimed that Abraham’s factory analogy was intended to clarify that the laws of nature do not make the Creator unnecessary, just as the existence of the factory’s laws does not make unnecessary a manager who legislated them. You further added that the argument from design still stands, because it is a logical argument not dependent on analogy. (I’ll ignore your point 2.)

I agree that Michael Abraham tried to demonstrate in this analogy what you put in his mouth (I checked just to be sure, and that is indeed what he is doing). At its core, Abraham’s point is trivial: if we have shown that something is true, facts that have no power to change that conclusion will not change it. But do the laws of nature have no power to change the conclusion that the universe was designed in the syllogism you described? I think they do, because there are very deep differences between the universe and the factory in Abraham’s analogy.

In the case of the factory, we know human beings independently of our acquaintance with the factory in the analogy. We know what things they design look like. Most importantly, we know that human beings exist. Our prior knowledge allows us to identify things designed by human beings or by “entities” we assume are sufficiently similar to human beings, when it “seems” to us that they produced things similar to what human beings produce (think of the “building” in the second interpretation above).

None of those things is true regarding the hypothetical designer of the universe. We do not know that he exists. That is what we are trying to infer. Therefore, obviously, we have no prior knowledge about him. What he produced is not at all similar to anything we produce in terms of raw materials, scale, and the character of the things produced themselves. When was the last time we created a universe or designed ecosystems? To assume that the hypothetical designer is rational in the same sense that a human engineer is rational, and to try to analyze the universe in light of that assumption, still leaves enormous degrees of freedom that do not allow us to form expectations about what we would observe in the universe.

Accordingly, all in all, the argument from design will not rely on prior knowledge about the designer of the universe. After all, there is no such prior knowledge. The inference will rely on claims whose subject is the universe itself; their empirical content will come from the universe itself; and any philosophical analysis of them will be, and has to be, carried out in light of what we know about the universe.
The universe, unlike the hypothetical designer.

What are those claims? There is a whole genre of them: complexity indicates design, teleological behavior indicates design, order is created only by an intelligent designer, a complex thing is not produced from a simple thing randomly (your claim), teleological behavior does not arise by chance, and so on. It is entirely legitimate in these discussions to raise the laws of nature in particular and scientific discoveries in general. They have the power to show that claims of this genre are wrong, or at the very least to raise awareness that they have no empirical or philosophical justification. In practice, theologians’ responses to such challenges simply assume assumptions from the same genre. More or less all of chapter 3 of God Plays Dice is written that way. Usually there is no attempt to justify them, and when there is, it looks ridiculous to someone familiar with the issue (I wanted to give as an example Abraham’s use of the second law of thermodynamics, but then this comment would have reached more than two thousand words. Another time. Fifteen hundred words is overloaded enough as it is).

The situation in theology is even worse than that. Sometimes claims from this genre are vague or meaningless. Among the vague words responsible for this state of affairs are the words “complexity,” “chance,” and even “intelligent design.” We tend to think that “intelligent design” in general is merely an abstraction from the intelligent design that human beings do, but how many theologians have tried to grapple with the implications of that abstraction, tried to characterize what remains after making it? I ask seriously. I know only atheologians who have written on the subject.

Both you and Michael Abraham adopt such a vague claim: “A complex thing is not produced from a simple thing randomly.” Not only do I not have the faintest idea what you base this on, I do not even have the faintest idea what you mean when you say “randomly.” The use of this word in theology is as fashionable as it is meaningless. None of the meanings familiar to me from philosophy, mathematics, and science fits or is relevant here.

And to make matters even better, the worst theologians go even further and treat “random” as “uniformly distributed.” An enormous amount of ink has been spilled in order to ground conclusions of the following form: such-and-such a thing in the universe could not have been created by a process at whose core lies a uniform distribution. Abraham too “discovered” quite a few such conclusions in God Plays Dice. Whoop-de-doo. We discovered America. And now for the important question: are processes devoid of design necessarily processes at whose core lies a uniform distribution? These theologians assume yes. Why? I do not know. This is another claim from the same genre of claims that range from unsupported to absurd.

In summary, there are very deep differences between inference about intelligent design by human beings and the inference to intelligent design that theologians try to make in the argument from design. As a result of those differences, the laws of nature in particular and scientific theories in general are very relevant to analyzing the argument. We can no longer say about the universe the message behind Abraham’s factory analogy. And still, the use of this analogy creates the impression that we have reasons to think the universe was designed that depend on some prior knowledge about designers, just as we do when we infer conclusions about objects designed by man.

Want to see how this discussion would proceed without such loaded analogies? So do I. Please. Try to justify the truth of premise 2 in your syllogism. First, explain what you mean when you say “randomness.” Second, show that the claim is indeed true. Good luck.

Regarding the proof from design: if we summarize what Athologica is saying, it is that a person, by virtue of being a person, will not be able to come up with an analogy from which one can infer something about the universe, because he will necessarily insert “human” elements that do not correctly represent the reality of the universe. By this, you (“Athologica”) pull the rug out from under the ability of any person to prove the claim — because necessarily it is a human being who will raise the claim. You’ve created a theory of “it is impossible to prove that the universe is designed” on the basis of the assumption that no proof given by a human being could prove it. So you’ve created a situation in which no one can ever persuade you.
As for the second premise in the syllogism: the only proof is intuition. It cannot be proven logically or empirically. Just as the validity of induction cannot be proven, except on the basis of intuition (but that doesn’t mean it’s not true, because in fact it is one of the foundation stones of science, so apparently we trust its validity enough), so too the proof that “a complex thing does not arise from something random” is also intuitive. Of course, each person has his own personal intuition and one cannot really argue against that. But I am prepared to say (intuitively) that something accepted by most people (“complexity indicates design”) is most likely the correct thing.