Q&A: The Argument from Order
The Argument from Order
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Thank you very much, Rabbi, for answering my question about the existence of entities. Now I understand the definitions in this matter a bit better.
I wanted to ask whether the Rabbi accepts Richard Swinburne’s argument from order?
The universe operates according to orderly laws. Everything we know that has order was designed, like musical notes or dancers dancing. If so, then apparently everything that has order needs a planner. That would indicate that the universe apparently has a planner.
I couldn’t understand at all why an orderly process needs a planner. Couldn’t there be a random process? (At the moment I’m not talking about the uniqueness of the process or the signature of the process, but about the process itself; and that also seems to be what Swinburne means.)
Perhaps the Rabbi could shed some light on the matter for me?
Answer
I didn’t understand what is unclear here. An orderly process is also unique (the number of such processes is very small relative to the total number of processes), and therefore it was probably not created randomly (because the probability of that is extremely small). That is the physico-theological argument. See the third booklet here on the site.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t understand the question. Special processes are processes that produce special results. Otherwise, in what sense is a process special?
I didn’t understand what cyclical laws of nature means.
Apparently I didn’t read your answer correctly.
What I mean is that Richard Swinburne (as I understand him) argues that there is uniqueness in a process simply by virtue of its being ritualized.
That alone already makes it unique, regardless of what its results are. (Whether destruction and ruin or a human being.)
By ritualized I mean, say, a fixed rhythm.
Unfortunately, I don’t read Chinese.
If the Rabbi could say which sentence is Chinese, it would be easier to translate 😉 .
In any case, my claim is that there are 3 kinds of uniqueness in the physico-theological argument.
Category A – order on the side of objects in space! For example: a city in which all the streets are perpendicular to one another, a card catalog arranged in alphabetical order. And in our world – human beings have low entropy, cars, etc. etc. (William Paley’s watch, Hoyle’s mistake).
Category B – order on the side of processes. A ritualized process that repeats itself and has a fixed “rhythm” is special. For example: dancers dancing a waltz according to rhythm, a song produced from musical notes. And in our world – the laws of nature.
Their uniqueness stems from the very fact that they have rhythm and are not “anarchistic.” (Swinburne’s argument, and this is the argument from order in the world.)
Category C – within rhythmic processes there are also processes (individual ones) that produce complex results. (Your argument.)
Of course, after evolution, Category A was erased. And we are left only with B and C.
My question is only about Category B. And therefore, to isolate the uniqueness of Category C, I’ll give an example:
what happens when there are defined laws of nature (not anarchistic) that bring only destruction and ruin and increase entropy.
A. Even in such cases would the Rabbi demand an explanation for them?
B. How can one talk about all the processes that could exist, in order to arrive at the conclusion that a process with rhythm is unique?
I hope this was translated properly by a simple machine 翻译. (translate)
What are ritualized processes doing here? What is that בכלל? Why are the laws of nature “ritualized”? Same for “rhythmic processes”? Google Translate isn’t helping me here.
You’re right, indeed that isn’t clear. It may be that the correct word is regularity.
That there are fixed processes — which supposedly “obey laws.”
When state X and state Y are given, state Z will occur.
And not arbitrary processes:
when state X and state Y are given: sometimes state A will happen, sometimes B, sometimes C, sometimes nothing, etc. etc.
So the argument is from the very existence of processes with fixed regularity.
I’m not sure I would derive an argument from the mere fact that the laws are fixed. Maybe. But even if so, it is not necessarily because of their uniqueness, but because the regularity points to a guiding hand. In fact, non-fixed laws are not laws at all. Fixed laws is just a redundancy.
(Of course “fixed laws” is just a redundancy, but for purposes of the illustration I didn’t have other words to use.)
So after the Rabbi understood what the argument I presented is saying — there are laws, and therefore apparently there is someone responsible for that.
I wanted to understand how this argument shows that there is a guiding hand.
Does it come originally from probability and statistics? Or perhaps from analogy?
The whole question of probability here is problematic. If there were a mechanism for drawing laws, then you could ask what the probability is that such-and-such a law would come out, and that would be a probabilistic question. In that case, by the way, a non-fixed law has no meaning at all (because it isn’t a law. There are stochastic laws governed by a distribution, and that is indeed a law in some general sense, but this is not the place to discuss it).
But since we have no indication that there is a mechanism that produces laws randomly and spontaneously, the analogy says that there is probably a lawgiver.
The atheists who propose that universes are created with different systems of laws move this into the probabilistic realm, but there is no real basis for that.
But the mechanism that produces laws randomly and spontaneously also has some mechanism behind it, so one could ask about it too.
In any case, what is the analogy the Rabbi is talking about? (Swinburne also wrote that this comes from analogy, but I didn’t understand what it is.)
That there are no laws without a lawgiver. Without a lawgiver there is usually chaos (here one can see a probabilistic consideration: not the uniqueness of the laws, but the uniqueness of the behavior).
I didn’t understand the distinction between the uniqueness of the laws and the uniqueness of the behavior.
A moment ago the Rabbi wrote that one cannot speak about probability here. Is the Rabbi retracting that?
One does not look at the uniqueness of the laws themselves (their mathematical structure, for example), but at the result — what happens by their force in the world itself (whether it is special or not).
Thank you!
This is not the physico-theological argument, because that speaks only about spatial uniqueness. That is, the number of possibilities for state X is significantly smaller than the number of possibilities for any other state. For example, the arrangement in which all the particles are in one corner is more unique than any other state.
But I’m speaking about uniqueness on the process level; the Rabbi does not discuss this in the booklet, and that is my question here.
What the Rabbi is introducing here is the claim that “the number of such processes is very small relative to the total number of processes.”
But it isn’t clear how one can talk about the total number of processes. It’s not like spatial possibilities. Isn’t that so?
And if I go back to the argument the Rabbi presents in the booklet, then in fact there are two kinds of uniqueness:
A. On the side of the laws of nature, which are cyclical.
B. On the side of the fact that the laws of nature cause uniqueness in space. That is, within the category of cyclical laws, they are unique.
In the booklet the Rabbi presents only B, and my question was directed at A.