Q&A: Casting Doubt on General Philosophical Arguments
Casting Doubt on General Philosophical Arguments
Question
I wanted to ask about philosophical arguments like “every composite thing has a composer,” and similar ones. Isn’t it a bit of a stretch to apply our everyday rules to things we have no experience of whatsoever? Suppose the world is composite (even though the definition isn’t really clear). Isn’t it exaggerated and questionable to say that the whole world has a composer, when the only intelligent compositions known to us are those made by human beings? In other words, suppose hypothetically, with no particular reason, that the idea that the world has a composer would also necessarily mean that all the reality perceived by our senses is false, that exactly 888 unicorns exist behind my back at the moment I’m typing, and all kinds of other bizarre things that are obviously very unlikely to be true. In that case, how likely would it be that the world has a composer? Not likely at all. Now what I’m claiming is that the very fact that the world is so huge and could not have been created by a human is strong enough to pretty much automatically invalidate these arguments. The issue with the unicorns corresponds in reality to the fact that if the world has a composer, then that composer must necessarily be more powerful than anything known to us (because he created the whole world), and necessarily not any one of the biological living beings ever known to us. If so, I don’t understand how one can make this calculation: is it reasonable to say there is a composer because of the assumption that every composite thing has a composer?
After all, if the existence of a composer would also imply many additional bizarre things that are obviously unlikely to be true, then it would not be likely that there is a composer. So I’m asking: why is the very fact that the existence of a composer necessarily contradicts all our acquaintance with intelligence not enough to rule it out as implausible?
Answer
Several points:
- Even in the scientific context, when we discover some law of nature here in our own surroundings, we assume it is true throughout the rest of the universe even though we haven’t tested it there. That is a completely reasonable assumption, even if not a certain one. If it is disproved, then we’ll give it up, but it is the common-sense assumption. The same applies on the philosophical plane. By the way, the assumption of causality is an assumption of science, not only of philosophy.
- The assumption of causality is not the result of observation but an a priori insight (synthetic a priori, in Kant’s terminology). Therefore, in principle it is always applicable and applies to anything, not specifically to a certain kind of things that we have experience with, unless proven otherwise. This applies both to composite things (not only objects in our world) and to their composers (not only human beings).
- That every composite thing has a composer (that is, that it did not create itself) is a very sensible statistical-mathematical consideration, and therefore it is clearly reasonable to apply it everywhere and to everything. Mathematics is always true.
As a result of all this, there is indeed no certainty in these assumptions, but the burden of proof is on whoever claims otherwise.
Discussion on Answer
What is there to go into depth about? There’s no depth to it. A composite thing is unlikely to have come into being without a guiding hand. There’s an explanation in The First Existent, if one is even needed. That’s the basis of the second law of thermodynamics.
I believe that a composite thing is unlikely to have come into being without a guiding hand, but that’s words, not mathematics and statistics. Did the Rabbi explain the mathematics and statistics in the section on thermodynamics in The First Existent?
Is Newton’s second law too—that a body with no force acting on it continues moving at constant speed in a straight line—just words and not a law of physics? This is entirely mathematics even if you have no way to make an exact calculation. You can make a calculation on a model and ask yourself what the probability is that a certain thing would come into being by chance, and become convinced by that mathematical idea. I explained it there, but you won’t find advanced mathematics there, and there’s no need for it either. Some people think mathematics means formulas, but they’re mistaken. Mathematics is ideas, which in many cases are expressed in formulas.
I agree, but still, translating the words into mathematics gives me another check on how justified the view is. That’s why I want to understand exactly what statistics and mathematics you meant.
I remember that in The First Existent there were calculations of the probability of a protein chain of such-and-such a length. Is that the mathematics you meant?
Yes
The assumption that every composite thing has a composer is reasonable, but not when we are certain that the composer is different from anything ever known to us. That is exactly my problem and that is the claim.
It applies to laws of nature as well—it’s true that we assume they hold everywhere in the universe, but if we are given that together with the truth of a certain law there would be a very significant and extreme change that we have never observed in some particular place, I don’t think we should assume that this change really occurs. What I’m saying is that one has to prove that something so different from our acquaintance with reality can even exist before assuming that the whole world has a composer, if that composer is necessarily very different from any composer known to us. Even mathematically—the more the implications of a law for a certain point contradict our acquaintance with the world, the less likely it is that the law is true at that point.
Fine, this is just stubbornness. I have nothing to add.
Ohad,
Your assumption that there is “something so different from our acquaintance with reality” is based on the assumption that there is “reality” (the universe), that there is what lies beyond it, and that you yourself are capable of crossing the boundary line between the two and evaluating the logical relation between the two arenas. And then you arrive at an agnostic conclusion—we have no ability to assess what the thing beyond reality is.
That is, you place yourself in exactly the same position as your opponent, who also claims to understand the relation between the two arenas (he assumes it is a causal relation between creator and created), but unlike him you refuse a priori to commit yourself to the existence of any a priori knowledge. To my mind, that is a paradox.
That’s not stubbornness. There’s no doubt that mathematics is always true. The problem comes when it says something that completely contradicts all our experience. Do we just accept it?
But yes, it definitely leads to agnosticism.
Where does the Rabbi go into depth about the statistical-mathematical consideration?