Q&A: Atheists
Atheists
Question
Hello Michael, a few days ago I heard an argument between a certain Haredi baal teshuva one (with incredibly deep analytical ability) who went on air with Aviv Franco and another member of the team there, and honestly he really gave them a schooling. He presented the argument for the existence of the Creator as a compelling rational inference, as opposed to atheism, which is nothing more than blind and tendentious belief in the improbable.
Honestly, Aviv tried to trip him up, and I didn’t fully understand that Haredi man’s answer. Aviv argued that his whole claim is built on the assumption that there is order in the world, but since we are not familiar with any other world in which disorder reigns, we therefore cannot define what exists here in our world as order, because order is a relative definition. So the Haredi man asked him: in a world where there are no other shapes besides a triangle, would a triangle then not be called a triangle? Meaning, there are self-contained definitions and not only relative ones; so too with the definition “order.” Then Aviv argued back that with order it makes sense to say “more ordered, less ordered,” but with a triangle it does not make sense to say “this is more triangular than that,” so order is relative. Then he rejected Aviv’s words and said that there is no such thing as “more ordered”; either it is ordered or it is not ordered. You can say that in this arrangement the order is more evident, but even in an arrangement where the order is less evident, that does not make it less ordered, because in the end it is ordered and established, insofar as we do not recognize random order.
And here Aviv tripped him up, saying that this is begging the question. So the Haredi man argued that he is not assuming there is order, but proving that even in our world there is a state of entropy and disorder. In short, something like that…
My question is: do you agree with the Haredi man’s claim? And if not, what would you argue in response to this attempt to undermine the physico-theological proof, namely that perhaps there is no order at all, because we do not know any other world and therefore have no reference point by which to define order.
I’d be happy for an answer, תודה.
Answer
I’ve answered this more than once. This is a common mistake among atheists. There is an objective measure of order; it’s called entropy. Therefore the claim that our world is highly ordered and special is not connected to the question of whether we know of another world. If you had never seen a die in your life, and now someone throws a die before your eyes and you get 6 a hundred times in a row — is that not a special result because you’ve never seen any other result? You understand that it is a special result because it is clear to you that there could be other results that are less special, even if you have never seen them.
Discussion on Answer
Avishai,
after this is already the second time you’ve written to Rabbi Michi asking whether he agrees with “that Haredi man,” one gets the feeling that you’re not writing this as a joke, and that you really didn’t notice that the speaker there is none other than Rabbi Michi himself
Meir, no no, righteous man! You’re confused. It’s true that Michael had a debate with that creature known as Franco, on Ayal Yosef’s podcast, and Michael definitely gave him a schooling there too. But I’m referring here to a different debate that I heard between that same Aviv and some Haredi man, really a world-class genius, a baal teshuva from Bnei Brak, a former atheist (that’s how he described himself, declaring that he abandoned the art of atheism and adopted rational theistic recognition). It was last week on the atheist phone line — they do debates there over the phone with hundreds of listeners or more — and that Haredi man came on and gave Aviv a schooling.
I was only asking whether Michael, with all his impressive experience in this field, agrees with that Haredi man’s claim that the term order is not a relative definition but an intrinsic one, similar to a circle and a triangle
You don’t need to imagine anything. You need to calculate it (the entropy). Even without knowing or imagining a four-dimensional world, I can talk about it and analyze it. The same is true of the die that I mentioned earlier.
Avishai,
Interesting. Do you have a link?
It’s strange that Franco is recycling the same arguments that were already discussed in the debate with Michi
I’m a physics student, third year. At the beginning of thermodynamics, they told us that entropy is order, but they kept saying over and over that this is only a first approximation. After we learned the material more deeply, they also gave us examples that sharpened the distinction — cases where what looked more ordered to me actually had higher entropy, not lower entropy. So I’m not convinced that entropy really is a good measure of order. Maybe it’s a good approximation of “homogeneity,” which is one kind of order, but I’m not even convinced of that.
It doesn’t really matter for our purposes. If in your opinion they are different, then I’m talking about one of them (either entropy or order).
If for the sake of discussion we adopt the assumption that entropy and order are different, how are we to understand what you said earlier: “There is an objective measure of order; it’s called entropy”? Entropy can be measured objectively, but according to our assumption it is not an objective measure of order. Is there an objective measure of order? And if not, doesn’t that dull the force of the explanation you gave above?
Not at all. There is a measure of order, and it is entropy. Even if you found differences, so what? Entropy measures order by an objective quantitative metric. And as I wrote, as far as I’m concerned, talk about entropy rather than order and present the argument on that basis
So that means that even if I don’t know of a state of a world in which disorder exists, the very fact that I can imagine such a state gives me a point of reference to define what I see as order as order? (Nice parable with the die.) Did I understand correctly?
And I’d be glad to know whether you agree with what that person who debated Aviv said — that the term order is not a relative definition at all, but an intrinsic one, similar to a circle or a triangle, and there is no way to say more ordered or less ordered, because anything ordered is ordered just as every circle is a circle. In your opinion, is that correct?