Q&A: The Cosmological Argument: An Own Goal
The Cosmological Argument: An Own Goal
Question
Rabbi, as is well known, likes to argue that the laws of nature can be understood in a teleological and purposive sense (Snell's law, etc.).
Likewise, as is well known, the cosmological argument proves that there is a primary entity that led to everything we see, but we do not know what its nature is.
A simple understanding of the kind of entity involved is that it is some sort of personhood, since we are not familiar with much teleological reality that does not operate either under *will* on the one hand or *chance* on the other.
But insofar as the Rabbi shows that the laws of nature, and in fact nature itself, operate in a teleological and purposive way, there is nothing to prevent the first cause from being some initial state prior to the Big Bang that developed on its own.
Just as nature itself "strives" to carry out its activity.
Best regards,
Kobi
Answer
Quite the opposite: my claim is that even the laws of nature are the product of an entity that has teleological plans. I wrote that this is apparently the reason many atheists are uneasy with these theories, even though they are better grounded than the causal ones. One should remember that the principle of causality is not the result of observation but of an a priori logical intuition. Therefore it is reasonable to apply it everywhere (that is, to assume that everything must have a cause).
Discussion on Answer
You already wrote everything I would have written. It seems my words are unnecessary.
First, I have already remarked more than once that these two arguments complement one another. What I wrote above indeed touched on the physico-theological argument, because your question also dealt with it (even though you phrased it in relation to the cosmological one).
But beyond that, a cause has to be an object, not a law. A law is not the cause of anything. As far as I'm concerned, let it be a causal object and not a teleological one. So what? That's what the cosmological argument proves.
Many thanks,
Regarding point 2: if the Rabbi assumes that the laws are teleological, and in his view the laws also only describe a relation between objects (otherwise they would be God), then he is in any case also assuming that the object itself behaves in a purposive way. So in my remarks, wherever I speak about a law, it can be translated as an object, and vice versa.
In any case, what do you mean, "so what"???????????
The average person is not willing to accept obedience to a stone! And the Rabbi too, in the book, assumes that this is a personhood on some level or another without any reasonable explanation…
It's not for nothing that the Christians succeed… and the Maimonidean conception was not accepted among the Jewish people. And especially since, from the little I've heard, the Rabbi is a heretic like in the parable of the elephant, because I heard that he assumes positive attributes about God… and believes in the wrong God…
I didn't understand. The laws describe relations between objects that were determined by the Creator, who thought teleologically.
Who spoke about obedience? The cosmological argument proves the existence of a being that created the world. That's all. I explained this very well in the notebooks and in the book.
Exactly the opposite: that assumption, that all of natural reality is the product of an entity with will, does not come from the cosmological argument.
The cosmological argument by itself shows that there is a teleological entity at the beginning, but a natural-material factor could also serve perfectly well in this case, and as I showed in my question above, that even fits very well with our familiarity with the laws of nature….
Rather, from this stage the Rabbi will have to use the physico-theological argument, which in this case would be built on the basis of a narrowed Leibnizian causality principle called the principle of sufficient reason, which applies even to infinite primary entities.
But the physico-theological argument uses it only with regard to complex realities, and therefore limits it on the one hand and seemingly strengthens it on the other (and this is related to column 144).
And so it will try to get around the Big Bang with the famous question of whether the initial energy point is a necessary existent or contingent. And thus it will try to push through to an entity at the beginning that is a necessary existent and is not the world.
But here too you run into new difficulties, because insofar as there is a primary entity that is *a necessary existent*, you can close off the probabilities, and again it is impossible to make a statistical calculation whether this is free will or rather a mechanical teleological entity.
Unless, of course, you make a theological assumption using a combination of claims such as Occam's razor, that an entity which is a necessary existent is probably without any definition or limitation at all, but rather completely free (why? just because), and therefore probably acts under free will.