Q&A: How Far Should One Search for Causality in the Big Bang?
How Far Should One Search for Causality in the Big Bang?
Question
Hello Rabbi,
In your notebook on the cosmological proof, you explain that the chain of causes must stop at an entity that is not subject to causality, and that entity you call God.
I wonder: how would you guide scientists who deal with the Big Bang in their search for the causes that brought it about? After all, your claim is that at some point in that process they will have to stop and say that there is no natural cause, because the next cause is God.
My question splits into 2:
- Is such a situation possible? Is it possible that if we keep searching, we will arrive at a link for which we find no natural cause? That is what follows from the cosmological proof. Try to imagine the situation. Isn’t it strange?
- From the standpoint of their work methodology, is it right to keep searching forever for more causes? Could there be a way to prove (scientifically?) that they have reached a cause that has no natural cause?
My question is not really an objection to what you wrote, just a hypothetical thought. I’d be interested in your opinion on the matter.
Answer
First, the Big Bang is not really the issue here. It is an event, not a cause. The causes are the laws of nature, which produced the Big Bang, or whoever set it off. In terms of events, you are talking about the time axis, not the causal relation. You can look for an event that preceded the Big Bang. Regarding that, the view many accept is that the Big Bang is the beginning of time and that there was no “before” it. Of course, many still look for things before it anyway (oscillating universes and the like). In any case, today many believe that time had a beginning and that there was nothing before it, so the difficulty you expressed in imagining such a thing does not trouble them.
As for the principled question: when do we know that we have reached the fundamental law for which there are no laws that explain it? It seems to me that the accepted assumption is that if we find a single law (the unified field equation that Einstein was looking for), we will stop. But in principle it may be that one must always keep searching, and either one finds something or one does not.
Discussion on Answer
Laws are not the cause of anything. They describe what happens. But the term “laws” is used in two senses: the law of gravity, which describes the attraction of masses to one another, and the force of gravity, which is an entity in the world that causes that attraction. The gravitational force causes events to occur; the law of gravity only describes them. When I spoke about laws as causes, I meant it in the sense of the forces that the laws describe. In any case, what I wrote is that an event, like the Big Bang, is certainly not the cause of anything.
When we imagine or talk about something, it is always a “something” or a “thing.”
You cannot imagine something that is not a “thing.”
And there is no thing that has no cause. In the spirit of:
He would say: Do not be scornful of any person, and do not be dismissive of any thing, for there is no person who does not have his hour, and there is no thing that does not have its place.
Therefore it is completely meaningless to speak about “things that have no cause.”
There is no thing that has no cause, and therefore it is meaningless to speak about things without a cause?
You haven’t built an argument here; you just declared it (“everything is a table, therefore everything is a table”).
And why is it meaningless? Maybe it isn’t true, but it certainly has meaning.
It has no meaning because every thing we talk about has a cause.
It’s like talking about a sentence without words, music without sounds, or a picture without colors.
That may sound nice in some poem and even stir emotions, but it’s nonsense.
With all due respect to the Rabbi, if I understand correctly, masses by themselves don’t do anything? It’s only the gravitational force that pulls between two masses? If so, I don’t understand how to picture it. Mass is mass because the gravitational force holds it together so that it doesn’t fall apart. You’re saying that the gravitational force creates masses and it is also what causes masses to attract one another. So can there be mass without the gravitational force? If not, then mass is only what the gravitational force does; and if so, why can’t we simply say that the mass is what pulls things and not the gravitational force?
Mass exerts a gravitational force that pulls the other mass. What holds the mass together is not the gravitational force. It’s much more complicated, but for that you need to study physics.
Rabbi Abraham, how do laws affect the world? When one atom collides with another, that event causes another event in which their direction of motion in space changes. In what sense are the laws of nature something that is here and does something causal between those atoms?