Q&A: Does the Uniqueness of the World Require a Designer?
Does the Uniqueness of the World Require a Designer?
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I accept that the probability of there being a world in which the creation of life is possible is negligible.
But I do not understand why that should surprise us.
After all, if a world with life were not possible, some other world would be possible. For example, a world in which there was only one giant inert star, or a uniform distribution of matter in space.
Why is our world more unique than any other world? Why does it require some additional reason? Why is a human being different from one giant stone, in a way that would require more explanation? I simply do not understand the desire for an explanation of the world. At most, we just would not be here and there would be some other world.
After all, the probability of any world coming about is 1/infinity….
Thank you for reading,
David.
Answer
There is a difference between a special world and a non-special world. I explained this in the third booklet.
When you roll a die and get 6 a hundred times in a row, are you surprised? Would you conclude that the die is not fair? Seemingly, the probability of that sequence is the same as that of any other sequence of results.
Discussion on Answer
I did not understand what would surprise you here. It seems to me like a regular, meaningless series.
If you check the die and it is fair, and you get 6 a hundred times in a row, would you not assume that someone arranged the falls? (That he has the ability to throw dice in a way that aims at a specific result, even though you do not know of such abilities?) Would you not prefer that explanation over the explanation that this is a random result?
That is the beginning of pi.
Of course I would tend to look for an explanation based on something familiar. I suppose that in my mind there would remain the doubt that perhaps there is some unknown force here (supernatural or something like that), or that it is simply chance.
Right, and between the two possibilities—chance or an unknown force—in my view, when the probabilities are so tiny, it is more reasonable to attribute it to an unknown force.
My question is that every world is special in its own way. One allows life and another allows some new chemical element. Who said that life is more complex than a world with a different chemical element?!
In what way do they require more reason?
Life has low entropy, and that means it is special by an objective measure. Exactly like a sequence of a hundred 6s. See the discussion in the third booklet or in the article; there is no point repeating this again and again.
It is obvious that there is uniqueness in the world. The question is why we should see the outcomes as divided objectively into two groups: the group of the complex, which is 99.999% of all universes, and the group of the regular, which is 0.001% of all universes.
After all, you can take any outcome and set it apart from all the other outcomes. For example, the probability of the outcome 38492948 on a die is negligible, as opposed to all the other outcomes whose probability is close to one hundred percent.
This question is not difficult regarding the die example, because there there is reason to assume why it landed on 6 a hundred times: we know beings who, psychologically, see something special in 666666, and not in the other outcomes. Here we are talking about objective uniqueness. But I do not know any supreme being who psychologically sees specialness in a complex world.
Unfortunately I have not found an answer to this difficult question.
Maybe Rabbi Michael Abraham will manage to answer me.
This "difficult" question is very easy. I referred you to the booklet. Your argument about psychology is, of course, self-contradictory. You say it is objective uniqueness and then build that on a psychological tendency.
That is not contradictory.
Since there is a psychological entity that sees something special in 6666, then the number 6666 is objectively special for the purpose of drawing our conclusions.
It seems to me that this is the time to part as friends. 🙂
Of course, people always part when they lose 🙂 .
Isn't the questioner right about this ??…
No
Excuse me, Rabbi, but what is complexity? (= uniqueness?)
If it is only an assumption based on psychology, then that is just assuming the conclusion.
It is not psychology. Entropy is a physical quantity. I explained this in the third booklet.
What would happen if, with a 10-sided "die," I got the results 3 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 … and so on for 100 digits?
Obviously I would be surprised, but I would have trouble thinking it was not accidental, because I have no other explanation (and I probably also would not think it was divine intervention). When you get 6 a hundred times, I have a simple explanation, and that is not similar to the world, where my explanation is speculative. It is similar to throwing a "fair" die—that is, a die that I have checked and that apparently has uniform density—and now I need to invent speculations to explain why it favors 6 a hundred times.