Q&A: Related to the Debate
Related to the Debate
Question
A Facebook user named Idan Hadash posted this about the debate:
Is it rational to believe in God?
In the recent debate of Aviv Franko with Rabbi Michael Abraham (link in the comments), Michi defined the “rules of the game” for the discussion by setting a “modest” goal: to show that belief in God is rational. For that purpose he defined God in the minimalist sense: the first cause (the cosmological argument, in the foreign term).
According to him, since the principle of causality is a principle of reason that is not learned from observation (an a priori principle, in the foreign term), the assumption that there exists an *additional* cause above the laws of nature is a rational assumption. And then there is a need to stop at that step, just before entering an infinite regress, because of the question of what is the cause of the first cause.
What Aviv answered him, and what I want to sharpen, is that it is not rational to compare apples and oranges. I want to say much more than that: this is an attempt to compare oranges and stones.
“The observed laws of nature” are the cause of all the phenomena of the universe, from the Big Bang and the formation of galaxies to the form of the human body and its diseases. Behind all these stand the four forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force.
These natural forces or laws of nature are *not* part of nature; rather, they constitute a *human explanation* of phenomena in nature. The fact that the Earth revolves around the sun is *explained to us* by means of the force of gravity. But gravity is not nature itself. It is an organizing principle, which helps *us, as people who want to navigate the world,* understand nature and arrange it in our minds.
There is no such thing as “the shape of a triangle” by itself in nature; rather, the triangle is an abstract idea that can be applied to triangular cheese and triangular pizza, which really do exist. There is no such thing as the number 0 in nature; rather, it is a number that represents *for us* something that does not exist. So too, the force of gravity does not *exist in nature*; rather, it is an abstract idea that can humanly be applied to natural phenomena such as the Earth’s rotation or pens falling.
Therefore, just as no one would claim “what is the cause of the existence of the triangle,” because the abstract triangle does not exist in nature, so too no one can claim “what is the cause of the existence of the laws of nature,” because they do not truly exist in nature, but only in our minds, which give an abstract name to natural phenomena.
The belief that there is a cause for the laws of nature is not rational. Since the laws of nature are a human abstraction, which does not need a cause, and it is not even logical to look for a cause for them. Just as we would not look for a cause for the existence of the digit 0.
What do you think?
Answer
A typical and mistaken dodge. I’ll explain step by step:
1. In Kant’s terminology, this is the physico-theological argument and not the cosmological one (which is only appended to it). It is based on complexity and not on existence as such.
2. The question whether the laws of nature exist or are only our way of arranging the world is disputed among philosophers. I tend toward the view that they do exist in some sense. Not that they are objects, but that there really are such laws in creation, and we did not invent them as an organizing principle and could have invented others. See a clear argument about this in column 426.
But as I’ll explain immediately, it is not really important for our discussion.
3. First, I do not assume that if the writer were now to encounter an object with mass that remained suspended in the air and did not fall, he would relate to it with indifference. He would probably assume that there is some mistake here or something he is missing for some reason. That is, he assumes that the law of gravity is correct and not merely a temporary organizing principle for the facts we have observed. Of course that does not mean it is certain, but in order to refute it, a great many experiments would be required to convince us that it was indeed only a temporary methodological principle. As Kuhn argues against Popper, a single experiment will not cause you to abandon it. If so, even if the laws of nature are organizing principles, I claim that they are correct organizing principles and not something accidental.
4. Therefore, even if the laws of nature are only organizing principles, still, when reality is organized for us in such a special way, the rational assumption is that at the root of the matter there is someone/something that sees to it. Laws require a lawgiver. Nature could have failed to organize itself for us within any such coherent framework, and the fact that it is organized this way is special enough to ask why and who did it. If you insist that the laws exist only in our consciousness, then do not ask this about the laws; ask it about the reality that behaves according to those laws: a reality that behaves this way is special, and that raises the question of who is the engineer that created it.
5. As for the comparison to the digit 0, such an argument actually came up in my debate with David Enoch, and there I explained why it is nonsense. See also column 456 on this. Briefly, I will say that if all of reality were organized in the form of triangles, I would indeed look for an explanation for that too. In our context, I was not looking for an explanation for the abstract form of the law of gravity, but for the fact that our entire nature operates according to this law (it is entirely triangular).