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Q&A: An Upgrade to the Physico-Theological Argument

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Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

An Upgrade to the Physico-Theological Argument

Question

With God’s help,
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to suggest a slight upgrade to the physico-theological argument.
As is known from “From DNA Onward” (column 144), the physico-theological argument relies mainly on the assumption that, given that God exists, what is the probability that He would create a world.
And many questions and difficulties have been raised about this—either from the direction that the world’s complexity is no different from any other unique sequence (which that column tried to address and, in my humble opinion, failed badly…), or from the direction that the world is not sufficiently complex, by pointing to flaws in creation, and so on.
So I came to suggest that, in my humble opinion, the argument should come from the question of belief: insofar as there is a God of the “religious” kind, it is not all that far-fetched to claim that He implanted in human beings the capacity to believe in Him, or at least to try to believe in Him.
As we know, many of those who raise questions on the site ask about Him in connection with complexity, and in general many nations speak about Him.
B1 = theism
B2 = atheism
Therefore, even a slight increase in this sense has implications for this matter:
(P(A|B1)>P(A|B2)
Likewise, most of humanity accepts God as something self-evident, and therefore the above hypothesis fits well with human knowledge up to this point, or at least ought to be preferred.
P(B1) > P(B2)  
 

Answer

Chinese.
The physico-theological argument relies on the following question: given that a world exists, what is the probability that God created it—not the reverse formulation that you gave here.
I don’t know what A is. I don’t understand the inequalities you wrote here.\
An upgrade to the argument is always helpful, but even as it is, it deals well with the objections.

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