Question

With God's help,
Hello to the Rabbi, the philosopher, may he live long,a0
I wanted to ask a question that I may already have asked briefly, and if so I apologize. I’m simply dealing with this issue again. And since I think it is not discussed enough, I’ll lay out the matter.
There are many proofs for God; for the purpose of this discussion I will focus on the simplest one, namely the cosmological argument of the Kalam type. The reason is that unlike the Leibniz style and the PSR, where critics tend to challenge things, here anyone who challenges most parts of the discussion would be considered as contradicting the assumptions of scientific thinking and also its conclusions (even if we accept an eternal Big Bang, in the end we have still received some single primordial thing). The famous weakness of this argument, which many tend to point out, is that it does not really prove much beyond a first cause. I seem to recall that the Rabbi also wrote this. So it is precisely on this issue that I want to focus here. I have some feeling that the modern person is not prepared to accept that the Big Bang had independent thought, and so here I am trying to work things out and examine whether, if one combines the approaches of body and soul together with the cosmological argument, one gets a good argument or not. “Good” is defined as establishing the existence of a personal God.
1. As I understand it, when we assume that there is a cause for a certain phenomenon, then seemingly there must be some property in the nature of the cause, or some capacity in the cause, to bring about the result before us. As I understand it, this is part of the definition of the concept of “cause.” It sounds to me like this is almost a logically necessary way of thinking. (A kind of something-from-nothing issue.) What does the Rabbi think?a0
2. Now, if we see in this world things like consciousness, and we adopt an approach of consciousness-particles, something like panpsychism, then seemingly one can make peace with the idea that the material first cause (hereafter: the Big Bang) supplies the existence of consciousness in us. And then, just as the world passes from one state of aggregation to another, so too the particles of consciousness pass from one state to another. This sounds like a pretty strange approach—that matter and stones have consciousness. (And where exactly does the feeling of one object end and a new feeling begin? After all, we feel only the body, so if that is so, does a stone lying on a wooden shelf feel only itself? Or does that also include the wood? And where is the boundary? Perhaps there are several levels of feeling, higher and higher, until one reaches something like a world-soul… It seems to me that if one does not accept this, that requires assuming some prior world of ideas that distinguishes between entities in order to bridge the conceptual gap.) But since at this point anyone who holds this approach is not impressed by the fact that matter has feelings, it does not seem that we have gained any particular advantage in this “proof.”
3. But if we adopt the more solid, and no less difficult, approach of emergence, would we here too be forced to argue that the Big Bang had consciousness? Was the original consciousness actually destroyed after the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe, and did it take on new forms throughout the stars and evolution until the qualia passed from potential in our bodies into actuality? Even though the emergentist approach claims that it is indeed capable of leaping across the gap from the micro level to the macro level, it still seems to me that they absolutely do not mean that this is an ability that is a “logical” necessity—that in every possible world, a state of affairs of matter in such-and-such a form would lead to just this consciousness and not another.
So can it still claim that the Big Bang had no self-consciousness? And that it was created only in us—human beings?a0
4. If we adopt interactionist dualism, then one can accept a primordial material Big Bang and that our souls are primordial. But it sounds, by Occam’s razor, preferable to argue that the souls too had one single first soul. Although one can challenge that by the very principle of causality that underlies the Kalam argument, and claim that it is not the kind of thing that requires a cause. Seemingly, from this perspective, it is specifically dualism that makes the argument much more difficult. But on the other hand, it greatly improves the physico-theological argument by giving serious support against the challenge from the lone sniper fallacy, and it significantly improves the internal plausibility of the hypothesis that God exists. It also allows another use of analogy from the most primary thing we know—which is ourselves.a0
5. By contrast, if one adopts another kind of dualism that does not allow a response from soul to body, but only from body to soul (such as epiphenomenalism), combined with primordial souls, it sounds as though this argument will not be able to overcome it.
6. By contrast, if one adopts parallel dualism, which does allow responses from soul to soul (or together with the body to the soul), then one can remain with Occam’s razor.a0
7. There is the possibility of idealism, but there it seems there is not much more to elaborate on, since in any case there are mainly personal entities.
8. If we assume that there is free will, then as I understand it the common view is that one jumps directly to interactionist dualism (4). But even if someone is prepared to reconcile free will in one way or another within a different framework, would we still have to say that the primordial matter had free will as well (as in 1)?
9. Up to this point everything has been worked out with respect to “qualia,” which is a “relatively” more basic feeling. But if we look within ourselves, we also have reason and thought, and even reflective thought, memory, and more. Seemingly these things are not identical, even though people tend to connect them. And so one can work out whether the primordial material state would also have to be rational and not only existentially sentient.
Sorry for the great length; the points are relatively simple, but I was not able to describe them more briefly. And on the other hand, they also receive almost no direct treatment anywhere…
Best regards, and I hope someday to create (if someone else does not do it first) a table or flowchart that will gather all the proofs into one diagram, because that is what the moment demands, and I have not heard of anyone who has done this. An example would be: can an atheist who denies the existence of objective morality complain to the religious person, “Where was God in the Holocaust?” Perhaps he can raise a question, but it would be much softened. And if so, the believer has a migo, or a whichever-way-you-look-at-it argument. On the other hand, if he holds a descriptive ability to identify the good, then perhaps he would still indeed have a bit more force to the question—but even that would be less than in the case of prescriptive morality.
Kobi