Q&A: On the proofs for God
On the proofs for God
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I spoke this morning with an intelligent person, and I briefly presented to him the cosmological argument and the physico-theological argument. (He was familiar with them.)
Regarding the cosmological argument:
(Sorry for the less-than-perfect wording.)
I said to him this: In our world, which is a world of matter, everything has a prior cause, and therefore the world and primordial matter must also have a prior cause. So, in order not to fall into a regress of infinitely many causes, it is reasonable to assume that there is a cause that does not require a cause, and it is not material, and therefore does not require a cause.
He raised two objections:
A. What is the problem with regress? What is problematic about that answer?
B. We know only matter. So to speak of something that is not matter is like saying "something that is not something." In other words, I have defined nothing. And when I tried to tell him that it "exists," he asked: in what sense does it exist? We know only physical, material existence.
We also discussed the physico-theological argument:
I told him that I have an argument from the laws of nature: they operate, and by their power natural selection arises, with ordered results, until we arrive at something wondrous and organized like a human being. And if so, it makes sense to ask how the laws are so well suited that if you throw plasticine into them, after billions of years out comes an entire zoo. In other words, the laws could have been a million other options that produce nothing.
He objected to this as well:
He argued that the fact that I see an ordered result is an illusion.
Because if I had many examples of universes with other laws in which there is nothing, then there would be something to discuss. But when I have only one example, then even if a world with different laws had come about, perhaps completely different creatures or things would have been created there, and I too would have regarded them as ordered. He asked: who determined that this is ordered?
That is: how do you evaluate and define that something is ordered when these are the only laws you know?
Thank you very much.
Answer
The cosmological argument:
A. I explained this in my book The First Existent. An infinite regress is not an explanation but an evasion of explanation. Like the joke about "turtles all the way down." Such a regress assumes an actual infinity, not a potential one. See there in detail.
B. By that logic, one could not say that light exists, or various force fields, since they too are not matter. That is nonsense. The concept of existence is not tied specifically to matter. True, what we know directly is only material objects, but why should the concept of existence depend on that? It is like saying that an object with a shape we have not yet seen cannot exist. There is no such thing as "in what sense does it exist." Existence is not a matter of one sense or another. It is a fundamental concept and cannot be reduced to other concepts. Incidentally, even the atheist who claims that God does not exist assumes that, in principle, the concept of existence applies to such an object.
Physico-theological argument:
I also explained this there at length. There is an objective definition of order, by way of the concept of entropy. If order were a subjective matter, then entropy could not appear in the laws of physics. It is not measured against other worlds that you imagine, but against all possible worlds. In almost all of them, the degree of order would have been lower. I brought a nice example of this from the SETI project. See here: https://mikyab.net/%D7%9B%D7%AA%D7%91%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%9E%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%90%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%94-%D7%95%D7%9E%D7%93%D7%A2-%D7%97%D7%9C%D7%A7-%D7%95