Q&A: A Rational God
A Rational God
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I listened to the wonderful debate with Aviv about the rationality of belief in God.
I wanted to ask: shouldn’t the principle of causality apply to God too?
The only solution I know is to say that He is eternal, and then He was never created.
The problem is that then there also can’t be any change in Him, such that He suddenly decided to create a world.
And I think the last solution is to assume that He creates in an eternal cycle.
Another assumption we need to make is that God is complex enough (intelligent) to create a world, and despite being complex He is eternal and uncreated.
If we agree up to this point, then why not say that there is something physical and eternal, like mass or energy, that unfolds in some kind of cycle, and is at just the right measure to create a world?
After all, the preferred conclusion is the minimal one, so why increase the attributes of that eternal thing? Moreover, in our world complexity grows from simple forms into more complex ones, not the other way around, so it seems more likely that whatever preceded the Big Bang was as minimally complex as possible.
Answer
It seems to me that I already explained this. Of course, in my book The First Existent you’ll find answers to all of this.
At the beginning of the chain there must be a link that is its own cause, otherwise you end up in an infinite regress. True, that probably implies that it is eternal. But what does that have to do with the question of whether it can change or change its desires and decisions? Even an eternal being can decide to create a world at some point. Eternal and unchanging are not synonymous. Beyond that, it is possible that from all eternity it decided to create a world at a particular point in time. That was the plan from the outset.
In principle, that energy you’re talking about is God. The philosophical arguments do not get into the question of who or what that entity is; they only prove that such an entity exists. But I explained that the cause that created the world has to be an intelligent, volitional entity; otherwise it is a machine, and it itself requires explanation (who created it?). And a cycle of worlds or a multiverse also requires a generator of universes, and the question is who created it (or whether it itself is God).
Discussion on Answer
Absolutely not. The razor chooses between two options that are equally plausible. You choose the simpler one. But here there is no plausibility to the option that this is a non-intelligent mechanism, for the reasons I explained, so it doesn’t matter that it is simpler.
I saw that the Rabbi wrote that if it’s a non-intelligent mechanism, that itself needs an explanation—who created it?
I’m asking why not say that this mechanism is eternal, just like God, and then I gain that it’s also less wondrous than God and simpler.
Even if it is eternal, the principle of sufficient reason still requires a reason for its being the way it is (I explained this in the book). It is not plausible that a machine with a specific structure just happens to have always been here.
Beyond that, I don’t see why, in your view, the machine is a simpler solution. The fact that the entity is intelligent makes it a different kind of entity, but I see no necessity to say that it is more complex. On the contrary, an intelligent entity does not have to be complex. Its judgment creates the complexity of the world it creates. But a machine that creates something complex must itself be very complex.
In addition, we have a tradition that God revealed Himself to us, and there we learned that He is an intelligent entity. That itself means that the entity we arrived at through the philosophical argument is apparently a personal and intelligent entity, not a machine.
Again, thanks for the detailed response; that really isn’t something to take for granted.
I’m trying to understand why the principle of sufficient reason doesn’t apply to God as well. Meaning: if there is something eternal and uncreated, why is it more reasonable that it has consciousness rather than not, given that it always existed and was never created at all?
As for the complexity of the generating mechanism, I think it would be more accurate to define such a machine as very precise in terms of the desired result from our perspective—namely, our universe.
But it isn’t really complex; it’s actually very stupid in that sense.
By contrast, attributing consciousness and will to it seems more novel to me, even though it’s possible.
As for tradition, that’s a discussion in its own right, and maybe it can be joined in principle.
Personally, I have difficulty accepting the tradition mainly because up until the Second Temple period they believed in many other gods as well, so I don’t think the mystical interpretation they attributed to God is any more correct than their interpretation of Baal, Molech, Asherah, and so on.
Haim, if the eternal machine has no will and no consciousness, how did it create us, beings with will and consciousness?
Second, isn’t something without will necessarily contingent?
Third, if it is a machine without a teleological purpose, why did it create us only at a certain time? (You asked this about God and the Rabbi answered that; I’m asking it about the theory of mechanical energy—what would you answer there?)
Fourth, energy too is a created thing that requires explanation beyond our knowledge and has a different essential type; otherwise it would require explanation just as our creation does.
Think about our laws of nature. They are built with exactness and fine-tuning that alone make chemistry, biology, and life possible. Is it enough for you to claim that the laws of nature have simply always been that way? Doesn’t their uniqueness require explanation? Why are they specifically like this and not otherwise? Especially because of their uniqueness and complexity. That is the principle of sufficient reason when applied to something that always existed.
God is the lawgiver, and He can be the explanation or reason for the laws. The laws are not their own explanation.
Since there must be something at the beginning of the chain that is its own cause/reason, I assume it must be different from the things familiar to us that are not their own cause. Machines are not plausible candidates for that.
I have no way to explain it better.
I just want to sharpen the point.
The Rabbi writes:
“Since there must be something at the beginning of the chain that is its own cause/reason, I assume it must be different from the things familiar to us that are not their own cause. Machines are not plausible candidates for that.”
I think maybe we didn’t understand each other.
To the question of who created the universe/God,
there are, in my opinion, two possible answers: A) it came to be / began suddenly without a cause; B) it always existed, what you might call a static state. (There is also the answer of an infinite regress of a chain of universes; in my view that’s not a good answer.)
Coming into being without a cause is strange and contradicts the principle of causality.
(By the way, the expression “its own cause” or “created itself” seems, on the face of it, logically impossible—a kind of “get and give as one.”)
By contrast, a static state is something that seems possible to us, and until not long ago the scientific world thought the universe was static. But the signs indicate that it began at some point… so we have no choice but to say that before it there was something else static from which it developed.
Here it seems to me there is a big difference between us.
I’m not claiming that there is anything here fundamentally different from what we know. I also don’t think it’s right to define it as a mechanism or a machine; it’s more like some quantity of matter or energy, and possibly a combination of several such things that in a certain constellation cause or develop into the Big Bang.
This is a process that, even if we don’t fully understand it, is similar to processes we know today, and we have no problem saying that the basic matter is static.
An intelligent God, by contrast, is already something completely new, not similar to anything known to us, and therefore much more novel.
As for the complexity of the Bang, it’s no harder than asking how life developed from the Big Bang; if that can be understood (and in my limited understanding it can, and the evolutionary explanation seems more plausible if we see God as something novel),
then the question of how the Big Bang happened shouldn’t bother us either.
Maybe it would be more accurate to focus the discussion this way: I thought the Rabbi was arguing for a first cause specifically because of the Big Bang.
What I’m claiming is that Big Bang theory can be understood well enough just like the theory of a static universe.
It may be that the Rabbi means to argue, regarding all theories, along the lines of the blind watchmaker analogy; if so, that’s a different discussion.
Thank you for the detailed answer.
I really hadn’t thought about the direction of a decision made from the outset.
Yes, what I meant to ask was that a sudden decision seems to contradict the principle of causality, but this answer addresses that.
On the substance of the issue, I assume there is a God in the sense of some basic eternal thing that does not require a cause, from which the universe developed.
The question now is what the properties of that eternal thing are.
I’m starting from the assumption that the more developed something is—for example, if it has consciousness and will—the more novel and wondrous it is.
I also think that the two options, God or something physical without consciousness but precisely tuned to the right level for the Big Bang, explain the universe equally well.
Therefore I think Occam’s razor should be applied here, and we should go with the minimal claim: that it is blind energy.