Thank you very much.
1. One could say that matter is not within our experience, for example prime matter. Is the Rabbi saying that this is God?
2. The Big Bang claims that matter was created? But wasn’t there something before the Bang, no?

As for the coming-into-being of time, I don’t understand it. Is time an entity?

1. So prime matter created the world by imposing form on itself? Who gave it the form that turned it into the world familiar to us? This is a jumble of words that I can’t make sense of. But even if it has some meaning, then let that be God. The argument does not enter into the question of what God’s nature is; it only concludes that there exists something (intelligent) that created the world.
2. In the accepted conception, “before the Big Bang” is an empty term. There was no time before the Big Bang, and therefore there is no “before the Big Bang.”
The question whether time exists or not is disputed among philosophers. But for our purposes it makes no difference. Whether it is an entity or not, it begins ex nihilo at the moment of the Bang. Even if time is our mode of perception and not something in the world, when one looks backward it begins with the Bang and stops there.

1. It’s not a jumble of words. It’s my lack of understanding, which I’m having trouble expressing clearly.
I’m trying to understand the claim that the cause of the world must be something intelligent. The Rabbi says that the argument does not enter into the question of God’s nature, and the Rabbi also says elsewhere that it is possible that the laws of nature existed from all eternity. So I’m asking: perhaps there was primordial matter in which the laws of nature existed—that is, which behaved according to the laws of nature; the laws are not entities—and from it the world was created. How do we get from the cosmological argument to an intelligent God?
2. Understood.
Just to note that in the booklet it seems that the Rabbi argues that the Big Bang proves that the world is not infinite, since matter was created in the Bang. Now the Rabbi is claiming more than that: that the Big Bang created time. Therefore there is no possibility at all of speaking about an infinite time.

To Rabbi Michi,
2. According to what you’re saying—that before the Bang there is no time and one cannot describe “before the Bang”—then why assume that there is a God who created it? After all, there was nothing at all before the Bang…
Moreover, if there is no time, then there is no change, and if there is no change, then there is no reason at all to assume that there is a God who caused it (because otherwise there is change).

Yoav,
1. As I understand it, the cosmological argument is that there exists a primordial being with teleological capacity, and every other entity with deterministic capacity will come after it in the chain. If so, even though this capacity does not necessarily have to be expressed דווקא by assuming free will, it could perhaps also be randomness, etc. The physico-theological argument completes this by making it reasonable to assume that that entity has free will and does not act randomly.
Because if you see a complex and intelligent world, it is reasonable to assume that there is an intelligent being behind it. (See the first chapter of the introduction to that booklet, where it is explained that we are dealing here with a statistical assumption.)
Also, in my opinion one should add that if you accept that the Big Bang shows that both matter and energy were created, then apparently the entity prior to it is not corporeal (matter and the like), and since the only entity we know that is not corporeal or material acts with free will—“the self,” the soul, and so on—then it is reasonable to stick with the familiar and attribute free will to that factor too, the one that created the world, certainly when combined with the physico-theological proof.

With pleasure,
Pseudonymous Srulik

Yoav,
1. I’m talking about the principle of sufficient reason (and some implication of the second law of thermodynamics), according to which when something complex and special comes into being, there is some intelligence that created it.

Srulik,
2. There can be changes even when there is no time, except that the way to describe them is not on the time axis. Beyond that, I also spoke about sufficient reason and not only about cause.

Rabbi,
In the booklet the Rabbi writes 3 answers to the question, maybe the world is eternal. The principle of sufficient reason appears only in the third answer. I’m asking about the first two answers, where the Rabbi speaks explicitly about the principle of causality.
Hope I’m not bothering too much. Thank you very much for the help.

I don’t think I speak about the principle of causality with respect to an eternal world. I’d be happy to see a quote.

In the second booklet, chapter 6, the Rabbi raises the objection that if the world is eternal, then it does not need a cause.
To this the Rabbi gives 3 answers. In the third answer the Rabbi says that even without the first two answers the cosmological argument is valid, and for that purpose the Rabbi defines the principle of sufficient reason, but in the first two answers there is no mention of this principle. There it is about the principle of causality.

I asked about those answers. I’ll repeat my difficulties, because it seems they got lost as the discussion went on.

The first answer is philosophical in essence, and distinguishes between a first cause that does not need a cause—because it is not within our experience—in which case one can assume that it always was there, and this is a potential infinity; as opposed to a first cause that in principle requires a cause, and to exempt it from needing a cause we assume it was always there—in which case this is a concrete infinity, and that is impossible.

Here I ask: after all, one can assume a cause that is not within our experience but is not intelligent. Doesn’t the cosmological argument yield an intelligent God? And what value is there in positing a God who is not intelligent? What is the difference between that and saying that matter is God?

The second answer is that the Big Bang says the world is not eternal. I asked: does the Big Bang completely rule out existence prior to the Bang, or was there a singular point that perhaps always existed?

Thank you very much. And again, sorry for the trouble.

1. If the first cause is not intelligent, it cannot be the cause of everything we see here. That is the basic claim. What lies before us is complex and special, and therefore requires an intelligent creator. For this reason too, it is not correct to assume that matter is God.
2. We spoke about the coming-into-being of time. But even if there is some existence prior to the Bang, at some stage the universe before us came into being from whatever existed before, and it requires a cause. Who created that? This has to be an intelligent cause, as above in section 1.

It may be important to add here that the claim about the creator’s intelligence moves us over to the physico-theological proof. Within the framework of the cosmological proof, it indeed does not seem that the creator must be intelligent. I’ve already written several times that the two proofs do not really stand independently of one another.

1. So what I was missing was the understanding that the two proofs are really one.

2. And still, since the Rabbi wrote somewhere that the laws of nature may always have existed, can’t the world come into being deterministically from primordial matter behaving according to primordial laws of nature?
If we accept that life can come into being deterministically within the laws of nature, then inanimate nature can too.

That is, in the end, do we have to come to the principle of sufficient reason and not to the principle of causality?

Beyond the question of concrete infinity and the question of what caused the coming-into-being at the Bang (the laws of nature are time-symmetric), it is clear that if you posit the laws of nature without justification and posit that there is a natural explanation for the coming-into-being of the universe within that framework, then one can argue that no further explanation is needed. The question is how probable those two assumptions are.

The question of concrete infinity exists only with regard to something within our experience, but what if we assume the eternity of matter that is not within our experience (Plato’s eternity)?
And regarding the Bang, what does the Rabbi mean that the laws of nature are time-symmetric?

The question of concrete infinity is not connected to our experience, just as the question of a round triangle is not connected to our experience. The claim is that there is no such thing because it is self-contradictory.
The laws of nature do not distinguish between different moments in time (this is the basis of the law of conservation of energy). They are indifferent to time. In physicists’ language this is called time symmetry: shifting along the time axis changes nothing.

Regarding concrete infinity, I mean what the Rabbi says in the booklet: that with regard to God we do not have this problem because He is not within our experience, which means that the principle of causality does not apply to Him, and therefore one can relate to Him as a potential infinity—that’s what the Rabbi said, not me.
I asked: from this standpoint, Plato’s eternity, which assumes primordial matter—would prime matter count as a concrete infinity or a potential infinity? What is the difference between God and prime matter in this respect?

As for time symmetry, do you mean that because of the symmetry, the Bang cannot deterministically create time?

With regard to God, this is a potential infinity and not a concrete one. I’m not saying that He always existed, but that there was no time at which He did not exist. Since there is no need for a cause in His case, that is sufficient. But with regard to matter, if it did not always exist, then someone had to create it, and therefore in its case we are speaking of a concrete infinity. One must remember that without positing a first link in the chain, we are stuck without an explanation. Therefore there must be some first link that is exceptional. It is not reasonable that matter is such a link.

Prime matter cannot create a world, so it is irrelevant.

The Bang does not create anything. The Bang is an event, not an entity. If something was created, then there is an entity that created it, or created the laws within whose framework it was created.