I have two unresolved questions.
First, if you acknowledge that His thoughts are composite and that He is composite at least to the degree of the composite things He created, why doesn’t He have a component? Just because regress sounds strange to us doesn’t give us license to stop it wherever we please.
Second, how do you know that the rule that every composite thing has a component also existed before the Big Bang? How does it make sense that all the laws that lead to the theistic God are דווקא always true regardless of the laws of nature in this world? That sounds suspicious to me, very much so actually.

Ohad,
An infinite regress doesn’t just sound strange to us, it is a fallacy (there are many thought experiments and mathematical proofs of this).
The rule that every composite thing has a component is a priori, a basic concept in logic, and what follows from it is an analytic truth. It does not depend on our universe (it is not learned from observation; see Hume’s remarks on the principle of causality). That is, you can say, “Maybe there is a universe in which there is no causality,” but that is a meaningless sentence. (A sentence gets meaning when it excludes its opposite, and a sentence stated about a non-logical framework is meaningless. A full explanation would be a bit long, and space is limited.)

If it’s a fallacy, then please explain why. If we reached a failure such as regress, it is much more rational to assume we made a mistake in the calculation than to escape the regress by an illogical move that says there was a first cause without a cause. That contradicts the principle of causality that you claim is always true, and it is not justified merely because the other possibility is a logical failure.
As for Hume, I read what he wrote and he says unequivocally that the principle of causality is derived from our experience and from previous experiences we have seen. There is also agreement that if we lived in a world where balls just flew around for no known reason and laws of nature were violated from time to time and then maybe returned to normal for no reason, we would not assume causality. Obviously the principle of causality is not derived from observation; you cannot observe a “cause.” There is no such physical thing. Just as probability is derived from “observation,” even though I am not picturing a tangible thing when I think about it. We simply see that nature behaves in accordance with probability and causality and therefore assume they are true—true in the nature known to us! Hume was skeptical about causality in the sense that he suspected it might not be true even in our universe, certainly not that it is “always true” or some kind of logical law.

The fallacy of infinite regress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_infinite_descent

I’d be glad if you proposed another solution—point out the mistake along the way. Of course, it is possible that the physico-theological argument goes wrong somewhere along the way, but because of that doubt, I would not reject the argument. A judge has only what his eyes can see, and that is how everyone operates.

It seems you stopped halfway through Hume’s remarks; he is criticizing precisely what you are saying in his name (that is the fallacy of induction). The structure of his arguments is such that he first presents the view he wants to criticize, and apparently that’s where you got confused.
P.S. Your remarks about the impossibility of deriving causality from observation are very puzzling; it’s like saying you can’t derive gravity from observation (you can of course argue that, but not for the reasons you give).

What you shared talks about a fallacy in a certain mathematical situation. I’m honestly not sure that tells us there is a logical fallacy in an infinite regress of causes. In any case, I agree that it is not rational to accept such a regress. In my view, what is truly rational would simply be to acknowledge that the argument collapses. There is a series of arguments called the “homunculus fallacy” that always lead to an infinite regress, and Wikipedia explains: “Homunculus arguments are always fallacious unless some way can be found to ‘stop’ the regress.” Of course, to posit a primary homunculus with no cause is not really a way out; otherwise, there would never have been a regress or a question to begin with (the homunculus known to us would simply be uncaused).

I’m not going to propose another solution, and I don’t need one in order to reject the argument. It is enough that, in order to justify it, we need to do something unsupported (like assume that at some point there was a cause that has no cause) in order to understand that something in the argument is wrong.
What I’m getting at, personally, is that the principle of causality really is not true in every possible reality. I even have scientific evidence for this (I can point to something in quantum mechanics that is without a cause), but let’s not get into that. I’d first like to understand why you think the principle of causality is always true just because it is true in this universe.

I don’t think I missed anything in Hume. I’m copying to you from English:
Hume was an Empiricist, meaning he believed "causes and effects are discoverable not by reason, but by experience". He goes on to say that, even with the perspective of the past, humanity cannot dictate future events because thoughts of the past are limited, compared to the possibilities for the future.
That is exactly how I understood him: he was skeptical of the principle of causality in this reality. And you infer from his words that this principle is always true?

By the way, I’d be happy for a reference to this “agreement about a world where balls are flying around”; I’d like to see who is saying that and in what context. Because I simply cannot imagine a world without causality. In such a world, even if the laws of nature somehow decided (by chance, without any connection to causality) to proceed in an orderly way, we would not assume causality—nothing could cause that. I cannot even imagine the first seconds of a baby in such a world, and that powerful intuition is enough for me to assume causality as an a priori factor.

Good thing what “seems to you” doesn’t indicate anything about reality, otherwise causality really would certainly be always true.
The thing with the flying balls is just my own example. I was referring to one of the comments on Rabbi Michael Abraham’s summary post about the debate with Aviv. Someone wrote that if all sorts of causeless things were happening, he would seriously consider not believing in causality, and Michi replied: “I agree with the first part of what you said (that if causality were contradicted by observation I might perhaps throw it out. Or I would suppose that I just hadn’t found the cause).”

Sorry for using intuition—how dare I. One can always be skeptical; I’m not trying to get to certainty, but to probability—to something that feels right to me to live by. And even if that isn’t scientific or whatever, that’s how everyone operates.
As for the concept of “God,” I have an initial assumption that He would be outside my cognition and outside my causality, and therefore I accept stopping the regress even more easily. It helps me define Him.
I think that the above summary of Hume (what you copied in English) is simplistic, and it’s not even the summarizer’s fault, because these are very complicated topics. After all, all of us—including Hume, of course—behave as though causality will continue to exist in the future despite the inductive fallacy. And that behavior is not logical, and according to Hume, if I remember correctly, it stems from an a priori assumption—which, as stated, is not derived from other laws of logic. In any case, from Hume I take only the denial of causality as a product of logic and observation (the problem of induction), not his broader skeptical empiricist outlook. He did not claim that causality specifically does not exist, but rather, as I understand him, that nothing exists in that sense—everything is our induction from experience.

For some reason my comment isn’t showing up. I hope you can see it.

No problem on my end, your comment is showing up.
Basically, I didn’t mean that you’re forbidden to use intuition or be skeptical, God forbid. Be skeptical. Whatever you want—and it’s even rational. The point is that not everything that “seems to us” is true. What can you do, reality doesn’t work according to our brain. I’ll give you an example so we can close the issue: our logic tells us that something can’t be in several places at the same time, and we really can’t think how such a thing is possible. Yet it is possible, and there are particles that are simultaneously in different places. Yes, you read that right, the very same particles. I read this in the words of a physicist. In any case, our intuition is often right, but I do not agree that one can derive certainties, or even probabilities, from it.
Hume did not claim that causality does not exist, but that it cannot be proven and we cannot know that it will occur in future cases—you know, the familiar example with billiard balls. Therefore causality comes from our experience, and it truly is not certain that it will continue to be true forever in our reality or in any other reality.
In any event, even if it is always true, I do not find any justification for stopping the regress in a way that includes contradicting the principle’s eternal validity. If that sounds reasonable to you, then health to you, as Michi says. Personally, I believe that if there is a God, it ought to be even clearer to us than this, beyond philosophical arguments of this kind.

I don’t have time to keep discussing the issue, and certainly I’m not going to start explaining superposition and how it is not a good example and certainly does not contradict logic—at most it contradicts our experience at large scales. (You wrote: “our logic tells us,” so no, it does not say such a thing. I can easily imagine a thoroughly logical universe with superpositions galore; I’m sure Hollywood has already commercialized the idea.)
Instead, I’ll leave you with this:
Despite everything you wrote and despite your position, you will continue making decisions and conducting your life according to what seems reasonable and right to you. Even if necessarily you are sometimes wrong, bringing examples of mistakes proves nothing new.
That’s what you do and that’s what I do. It’s “the best we’ve got.”

P.S. I have to note that we are discussing a specific philosophical argument. It is by no means the only reason that causes me to believe in God, although I don’t know why you think God would have to be clearer to us in order to exist. I believe in things (and probably you do too) on the basis of much weaker arguments—for example, the existence of minds other than my own.

You’re right on the point about logic versus things that contradict it; my wording wasn’t accurate. I meant more our assumptions. Our reason assumes that an object cannot exist simultaneously in several places or in several different states, but in practice that is not true, and there is superposition. Similarly, it would not be wise to listen to what “seems to you” or to your intuition regarding causality, because despite what is known to us in this universe, that is not necessarily true in it at all times and certainly not in other universes. In that respect, superposition is a good example.

We really do conduct our lives according to what seems reasonable and right to us. In the case of God, we are dealing with a disputed issue, and what seems right to me is unequivocally to check whether the rational conclusion from the evidence is His existence or non-existence. So far I lean toward atheism, although I really would like there to be gods. The thought of injustice that may exist in a world without a God who judges and punishes horrifies me.

Regarding the P.S., it isn’t really possible to live properly if you cast doubt on every tiny thing, like the minds of others besides your own. But when it comes to a subject for which some claim there is very strong evidence and others claim it is absurd from the ground up, and it is so relevant to my life and in fact to everyone’s life, I have no choice but to examine how reliable it is so that I can live accordingly. Even if everything is an illusion and the consciousness of others does not exist, it simply isn’t relevant to me. In any case, I have no way out of this illusion or this simulation, so I just leave it be and keep living in the best way for me. In the case of God it is different. I’m still a teenager and want to know whether I will believe in Him and live by that for the rest of my life. You have to agree with me that this is an important question, one that I simply cannot let a feeling of “it seems to me” determine my belief about.
By the way, in the end I did not say that God would have to be clearer to us in order to exist—not at all. After all, deism may be true. What I meant was that if the theistic, intervening God exists—or more specifically, if the God of Abraham who wants us to believe in Him exists—then there should, in my opinion, be far more evidence, to the point that I would not turn to philosophy as a last opportunity to prove Him (unfortunately, God did not pass the test of scientific theory, nor did the Torah pass it as a historically reliable book). Philosophy really is the believers’ strongest weapon.
Hope I was clear. Thank you very much for the discussion.

That’s not our reason either—it’s experience, and superposition still isn’t a good example. Reason deserves to be listened to much more than experience. But never mind, we’ve exhausted the point.

I agree with you that this is an important decision, and I hope you reach a conclusion you’ll feel whole with. Good night, and thanks for the discussion.

Reason deserves to be listened to much more than experience? I’m very, very doubtful about that. My reason manages to imagine a world without causality (and of course things like balls flying with no kicker; that’s very easy), yet we believe that my experience in the world—according to which everything I have encountered had a cause—is probably right. Superposition tells me that even though it is not part of my experience for something to exist in several places at once, it is still true. Therefore, I cast doubt on my experience and on what seems right to me in matters where the truth is decisively important for me.
Good night, appreciate it.

The beginning of your remarks repeats views we discussed at the start of the conversation.
It is very easy to imagine a ball flying without a kicker, but not more than that. I very much doubt that you really manage to imagine a universe without causality. What causes the ball to float? One moment it floats and the next it doesn’t, and in the third moment it should disintegrate. Or else you are imagining some other metaphysical law that is not essentially different from causality holding that universe together.

Reason sometimes tells you that you should prefer experience over reason—but only in places where reason is limited, where you are not sure you know all the variables, but you do know the result from experience. Then you work from the end back to the beginning: you act according to the known result and try, through it, to learn about the causes. If all the causes were clear to you from the outset, obviously reason would be preferable. It is experience that is refuted every day and every moment, and that is precisely the inductive fallacy: things happen for the first time all the time. The sun may disappoint one morning; reason will not disappoint one morning.

Do relations of cause and effect really seem to you like laws of physics (the kinetic energy of an object is mass times velocity squared divided by 2)—just some local thing learned from experience?

For me at least, the brain shuts down completely when I can’t ask “why” (what do we have besides that?), and without causality you don’t ask why. In a universe in which the brain shuts down, you can’t engage in the way I began explaining in the first comment (learned from the law of non-contradiction).

I haven’t intervened so far, but I’ll make just one comment on the latest discussion. The fact that one can imagine a ball flying without a cause is of course true. But the criterion that if one can imagine something then it must therefore be a posteriori is not correct. It only means that there is no logical contradiction here, that is, that the principle of causality is not logically necessary. But no one is claiming that the principle of causality belongs to logic. The claim is that the principle of causality is not learned from experience but is an a priori principle. Not everything that is a priori is analytic (or logical).

David,
It really is hard to imagine a universe without causality in the sense of people living in the universe and doing everyday actions without causality. But a universe without causality does not necessarily exist that way (and obviously not that way). Relations of cause and effect are not like laws of physics for me, but דווקא there, in my opinion, is where the highest chance of causality breaking down lies. I understand that in quantum mechanics there are several things without a cause; personally I know only one of them (tunneling). And that’s where the world began.
At the point from which the Big Bang began, the energy was so high that there were laws whose operation we simply do not know.
I do not think reason won’t disappoint one day—again, superposition. It is not clear to me how it is coherent for you that something should exist in several places at once. Did it duplicate itself? Did it run back and forth quickly? What happened to it? Yes, one can imagine it, just as one can imagine a ball flying without a kicker.
Unfortunately, the fact that the brain shuts down and that we have no way to function in such a world has no easy implication at all for its existence or non-existence. In any case, you believe there was one point that had no cause—God, after all, since He is the primary cause without a cause.
The argument, in other words, could be: why not simply move that back one step and assume that the world itself had no cause?
Thanks for the remark, Michi. I didn’t say it was a posteriori, but that it is indeed logical. The point is that from a logical standpoint such a universe is possible, even if the example with the ball is not a good one, beyond the fact that rationally it doesn’t exactly work out.

Does superposition disappoint your reason? It took me very little time to get used to the knowledge that superposition exists. Explain it however you like—“it duplicates itself” or simply exists in parallel in two places—it in no way disappointed my reason. We’re repeating ourselves a bit here.
And by the way, I wrote that I wouldn’t explain superposition, and I’m really tempted to do so, so just a tiny touch on one aspect: your whole structure built on superposition rests on its popular interpretation. In practice, one cannot observe superposition directly, and with regard to almost every concrete application it almost does not exist (“collapse of the wave function,” “observer effect”). To bring it as an example of an anomaly in the simple sense is somewhat problematic. I know I’m leaving you many openings for argument here, but the topic really is vast as the sea.
The fact that one can imagine it does not mean much. It’s like my being able to describe paradoxes eloquently. The question is whether there is any possibility of understanding it. That is, can I ask you a question about it whose answer will not be: “That’s just how it is”?
I’m happy to inform you that the brain shuts down at the beginning of the sentence, before you assume the existence or non-existence of the thing. You cannot posit such a thing and then not engage with it, just as I cannot say there is a reality in which logic doesn’t work and then not deal with it, because the moment I posit such a reality, its existence does not exclude its non-existence, and therefore I have said nothing.
And finally: by all means, assume that the world itself (say, “the singular point”) is the primary cause. On that I build my divine theology 🙂

You’re saying that the singular point is the primary cause and your theology? The physico-theological argument says there is a primary cause and that it is not that. At least that’s what it deals with.
In any case, there are three possibilities that I can think of:
– An infinite regress of causes, and we are only one stage within it, or a “side branch” of one of them. Neither you nor I accepts regress, so we won’t go into that.
– The principle of causality is not always true. We both agree on that; we’re just arguing about the specific point. You claim it is God who breaks the principle; I see no reason to push it all the way to Him and simply assume that even the Big Bang may not have had a cause.
– Something else unknown to us. There are things in physics that are unknown and perhaps will remain unknown for the rest of the human race’s existence. Maybe a reality in which the principle is only partially true and there is only causal influence but not decisive causation. Or another kind of causes that we do not know.

At the moment I lean toward belief in the third option, although nothing is certain. It seems less problematic to me than the other two.
It is important to note that if the physico-theological argument is, in your view, a rational way to get to God, I very much agree, and I think Michi won that debate. But in the end it is also rational not to accept the argument.

I have a few remarks on points I disagree with or think are not precise. But I see that we agree on most things, so let’s drop the matter.
I of course agree that it is rational not to accept the argument. (Not to accept in the sense of not adopting its conclusions, not in the sense of claiming that it is absurd.)

No problem. Thanks.
Just what is the difference between not adopting the conclusions and claiming it is absurd? In both cases you don’t think it proves the theistic God, right?

There are simple analytic arguments that one cannot honestly evade, and there are complex arguments full of axioms such that even without refuting them, it is hard to say their conclusion obligates someone who feels skeptical about them.

And you think the physico-theological argument is one of those—the second kind, full of axioms?
What do you say, should I keep looking for another argument for God?

Of course—what else, the first kind?
But that is not a refutation of the argument, and you don’t throw it out and look for another. It simply is not, by itself, something you would expect all atheists to put on a kippah because of.
If it doesn’t persuade you to adopt its conclusion, put it in the chart and keep filling it with additional evidence and arguments for and against. I promise you that you won’t reach certainty, but perhaps you’ll reach the heuristic (and rational) conclusion you can feel calm with.

Excellent idea. Thanks for the advice.
I think I’ll read the first volume of The Foundationally Available soon if I can find it in a local library. Maybe something will move forward from there.