Q&A: Question about the Cosmological Argument
Question about the Cosmological Argument
Question
Hello Rabbi. Regarding the cosmological argument;
It is true that everything has a cause or a reason. But who says that this cause is a planner? (God)
Basically, the Rabbi is making a mistaken assumption here that this cause must be God. But who said that this cause has to be God? The fact that we don’t know what the cause is doesn’t mean we need to publicly explain it away and say that it ‘had to be God.’ It could also depend on things we don’t know, or things that the human mind is limited in its ability to understand. Therefore this cause could be something else entirely (that the human mind cannot fully grasp), and not necessarily some supreme planner.
Answer
I explained this היטב במחברת. There is a cause, and we call it God. I did not assume anything about who that God is.
Discussion on Answer
As I understand it,
the proof shows that there must be some teleological force behind them.. (randomness or choice).
The physico-theological proof shows that it is preferable to attribute this to choice, if those are the two options.
+(Then there is no longer a question of who created the planner, because he is his own cause.) And there is much more that could be analyzed here.
It seems to me that I did understand, and as best I recall this is explained in the booklet. Laws are not a cause unless they are entities. And if they are entities, then call them God. And science cannot discover them, since for any system of laws that stands at the base of the matter, I will ask who created it. The proof deals with the initial system, whatever it may be. Science will never explain things without relying on some system of laws.
I think you didn’t understand what I meant. It is true that everything has a cause or a reason. But we need to discover what the cause of the world is. So some will say the Big Bang. What is the cause of the Big Bang? Researchers don’t know. But who says that this cause must be God? It doesn’t have to be a planner / creator / rather, it could be ancient laws of the universe that caused it, and science, in its limitations, has not yet discovered them.