Q&A: A Question About the Cosmological Proof and Infinite Regress
A Question About the Cosmological Proof and Infinite Regress
Question
I still (unfortunately, really very much) can’t bring myself, for now, to be convinced by the cosmological proof, and I’ll explain why:
In “The First Existent,” you assume that a sufficient explanation must necessarily reach the final cause in the chain, and that an infinite explanation is not an explanation. To illustrate this, you bring three examples: our seeing, the slap, and the pile of turtles.
The two examples I identify with are the slap and the seeing, but I think they do not demonstrate what we are trying to prove. If I ask someone why he slapped me, I actually mean a very specific stage in the chain of causes. It’s as if I asked him: “What was the consideration you had in mind right before you slapped me?” If he explains to me that he got angry at me because he had a chemical composition in his brain that caused anger, which was influenced by what he ate yesterday, because that’s what he had in the fridge, because that’s what his mother bought at the grocery store, because that was the merchandise available there, because that’s what the greengrocer decided to bring, and so on and so on—he isn’t wrong. All of that is indeed a chain of causes that occurred and caused him to slap me. It’s just not what interests me in the question. In the question, I meant a very specific stage in the process, as I defined earlier, and likewise with the example of seeing.
That is, it could even be that there is an infinite regress of causes that led so-and-so to slap me, and that does not bother me at all, because it is not what I was aiming at in the question.
So too, if we look at the turtle example (which I didn’t identify with, unlike the other two, and it seems to me that that is exactly the explanation), it depends what my question actually is. If I want to ask a question similar to the question about seeing or the slap, then I ask about a very specific stage in the chain: which turtle is the one the world stands on? To that there is a clear answer: turtle number 1. But if I ask which is the bottom-most turtle and get the answer that there is no such turtle because there is an infinite regress, that is a different question from the question of seeing or the slap, and therefore it would not bother me for the reason those bothered me.
At the end of the day, I was not convinced—neither intuitively nor by the examples—that in order for the turtle explanation to be an explanation, we must know what is at the bottom. I would be very, very glad if the Rabbi could change my mind.
Answer
It does not depend on what you mean by the question. Consider hypothetically: if you meant explanation in the philosophical sense, would an infinite chain count, in your view, as a sufficient explanation? I think not. If there is no bottom turtle, then this is an infinite regress and it is not an explanation. True, if you are not interested in an explanation and are asking a different question, then you may get an answer to that. But that is not relevant to our discussion.
Discussion on Answer
If you cannot grasp it, then it is not an explanation. To say “I have an explanation that I cannot grasp” is an oxymoron.
I think I explained there quite well why this is not an explanation (through the discussion of the concept of infinity). I have nothing to add beyond that.
Just remember that the cosmological proof is not necessary as a path to faith. There are other proofs as well.
The truth is that part of the problem is that I did not understand what the discussion of infinity adds (maybe that is where I am missing something). I understood that there is no meaning to “the beginning of the infinite chain,” like in the infinite hotel, where when there are no corridors you can’t move all the room numbers over. From that, it is clear that there is no meaning to “there are turtles all the way down,” because there is no down. But all of this depends on the assumption that explanation = what is underneath, and that is the claim I am challenging. I do not understand why the mere knowledge that under every turtle there is a turtle, or that above every cause there is another cause that is its cause, is not a good explanation.
It’s not that it’s not a good explanation. It is not an explanation at all. You are only claiming that there is an explanation without presenting it.
That is exactly my problem: I do not understand (not even intuitively) why an infinite regress does not constitute a sufficient explanation.
Certainly I do not understand why it is not an explanation once we are talking about entities that exist outside our universe. It’s not that I manage to grasp an infinite chain of them, but it’s like I also do not manage to grasp a necessary being that always existed, or entities of that kind at all. In fact, in that sense I have no problem accepting an infinite regress as the answer to the question of why someone slapped me, because that itself would be the same answer—he would arrive in his chain at the Big Bang, and from there to that same infinite chain of entities outside the universe that created one another.
What I was trying to say earlier was only that the intuitive identification aroused by the examples of the slap and seeing (at least for me) did not stem from the fact that I find it hard to accept an infinite regress as an explanation.
Again, if the Rabbi has an answer, I would be very glad