Q&A: A New Crushing Refutation of the Physico-Theological Argument
A New Crushing Refutation of the Physico-Theological Argument
Question
What does the Rabbi think about the following enormous and terrible refutation, with no answer to it, that shatters faith?:
"An indirect refutation of the argument can be found in obviously human systems such as large economic systems. Even though there is no directing force from above at all, countries, continents, and the entire globe, with all six billion of its inhabitants, operate as though coordinated in pursuit of economic ends. In order to produce one simple product like a pencil, thousands of people all over the world join together and cooperate in an astonishingly complex mechanism, which seems to have arisen on its own through the selfish interests of all the people participating in production, without there being any single coordinating and directing factor for the whole process other than the natural mechanism of self-interest."
Should we say goodbye to faith?
Answer
Nonsense. Beyond the fact that the argument itself is silly, one can also say about this very thing itself that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world in such a way that this would happen. The “invisible hand” is yet another proof of His existence.
Discussion on Answer
I didn’t say that the proof requires you to believe in His responsibility for the invisible hand; I was just offering a refutation of your refutation. Read it again. This is simple logic.
And what exactly is the problem with the argument itself? Why is it silly?
Because it didn’t arise on its own, but through people and their interests. There are very clear mechanisms that explain it. There’s nothing mystical here, the way people tend to see in Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
I’m reading your book on evolution now, and I think you brought a pretty similar example from statistical physics (the behavior of a collection is different from the behavior of a single individual item, but in fact it follows from the existence of the statistical collection, and it can be predicted from the properties of each single item in the collection).
I didn’t understand the claim.
The honored Rabbi wrote that “one can say.” That is, in order to refute the refutation, the Rabbi is saying that there is a possible world in which God intervened in this state of affairs. But at the heart of the physico-theological proof there is an assumption about the probability that complex things would happen without planning, not an assumption about the logical possibility that complex things would happen without planning.
And indeed, yes, it is logically possible that God intervened in this world, but how does that help in a discussion about the probability of it? What does the logical possibility that something happened have to do with the probability that it happened? After all, it is logically possible that complex things happen without planning, but that neither raises nor lowers the probability assumption the Rabbi makes about the likelihood of complex things coming into being without planning. If an atheist were to say that this logical possibility undermines the Rabbi’s position, we’d take that as just more hair-splitting from a desperate atheist.
As I understood the refutation brought here, it tries to look at the world as our eyes see it, in order to arrive at an informed estimate of the probability that complex things happen without planning. How does the logical possibility of the economic world as described here, in which God intervened in the economy, help? It seems that logical possibility belongs to a completely different plane in the philosophical discussion.
I didn’t understand the refutation; after all, the example is taken from human systems…
That is, teleological ones.
You lost me. Please formulate precisely, clearly, and as briefly as possible what I argued, and what the refutation of it is.
Hahaha… do you mean to say that you believe God intervenes in global commerce? Very rational…
If, as someone who believes in the physico-theological argument, I have to believe something like that, I think I’m out.