Q&A: Proofs for the Existence of God
Proofs for the Existence of God
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I’m in the middle of reading your book God Plays Dice, and the third chapter deals with proofs for the existence of God.
A. The cosmological proof starts from the assumption that an infinite regress is impossible, but the book doesn’t explain exactly why, only that “a commonly accepted philosophical assumption is that one cannot extend a causal chain to infinity, that is, that an infinite regress is a kind of failure (and certainly not an acceptable explanation)” (pp. 96–97).
My uncle once presented the cosmological argument to me and explained that if there were infinitely many little gods, each creating the next and so on until the creation of the world, we would never arrive at the creation of our world. In other words, we begin the infinite domino chain of the regress from the world, and so we never really reach one God who is outside the laws of cause and effect. But if we try to start the dominoes from some god somewhere along the infinite sequence of little gods and knock them down in our direction, we would never reach the last god who created the world, because there are infinitely many gods to topple before we get to him. According to this, it follows that the world would never be created, and certainly would not already have been created; and if so, the original question returns to its place, since the fact is that we exist. (I hope that was clear; if not, I’ll try to clarify again.)
Is this the failure you meant? And if not, then what is? And what do you think of the above argument?
B. The chapter presents three proofs for the existence of God (cosmological, ontological, and physico-theological. Pascal’s wager doesn’t really count, right?). I seem to remember hearing the Rabbi say in some podcast or lecture that there are seven basic proofs for the existence of God (and the others are versions of them), or something like that. What are they? (A general name is enough for me and I’ll look them up online. If the Rabbi has written articles about them or they appear in books, I’d of course be happy for specific references.)
Thank you very much!
Answer
A. Your uncle’s argument is a misunderstanding. Along the time axis, one can definitely speak of a serial chain of infinitely many gods. Think, for example, of a chain like this: God 1 creates God 2 in one second, God 2 creates God 3 in half a second, God 3 creates God 4 in a quarter of a second. The entire infinite chain of gods takes two seconds. And now the world itself can be created. Just like Achilles and the tortoise paradox. That is when moving forward from the first. You were talking about moving backward. That is completely irrelevant, because it starts from an existing world and goes backward down the line of gods that created it. There is no problem with that.
As for the actual problematic aspect, I explained there at length and in detail what the problem with infinite regress is. Read it again.
B. There is an initial intuition that there is a God (some would speak of a religious experience). There is tradition. There are the three Kantian proofs that you mentioned. There is the moral proof (also from Kant), and there is the extension to the proof from epistemology (which I developed into proofs that rely on revealing arguments rather than creating ones). Everything is explained in my book, and also in my lecture series on faith / belief.