Q&A: Does the universe require a composer?
Does the universe require a composer?
Question
I didn’t really understand a certain point in the cosmological and physico-theological argument.
Rabbi Michael Abraham agrees that not everything has a cause, otherwise we end up with an infinite regress. The debate is only whether the causal chain ends with God or with the Big Bang. So why not simply say that the first cause is the Big Bang?
Likewise regarding the physico-theological argument — Rabbi Michael Abraham agrees that God has no composer, so why not simply say in the same way that the universe has no composer?
Answer
This question has already come up here dozens of times, in my opinion. And that is despite the fact that I already explained it in the discussion that dealt with these arguments. A bit exhausting.
Not everything needs a cause. Physical entities, or things that are within our experience, need a cause. If everything needed a cause, we would necessarily be dragged into an infinite regress. Therefore it is not reasonable to claim that our world does not need a cause, but one can say that there is another entity like that (= God). The Bang is an event, not an entity.
Discussion on Answer
They just do. Why does what I say need a cause?
What? I don’t understand your question. You said that physical entities need a cause. I don’t know why that is true, so I asked. I accept that it’s true, but suddenly I realized that I don’t know why.
What is the difference between things within our experience, which need a cause, and God, who does not need one?
That is, why is the criterion whether something is within our experience or not? Why should that affect causality? (After all, causality is not learned from experience.)
When I answer your "why," you can ask another "why" about that answer itself. Reason has a basic assumption that things need a cause. There is no further why here. That’s just how it is.
You can ask why I exclude God from this rule, and to that I answered that if I did not exclude Him, I would be stuck in an infinite regress. That proves that there must be at least one entity that has no cause. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that entities of the ordinary kinds require a cause, while God does not.
I did not say that things outside our experience do not need a cause, only that regarding them I do not see any necessity that there be a cause. Among them there can be things that have no cause (like God), unlike the entities familiar to us.
And all this despite the fact that causality is not the result of learning from experience in the usual sense (through the senses). It is the result of intuition, which is also a kind of observation of reality (I’ve explained this here several times in the past), but not through the senses.
Why do physical entities, or things that are within our experience, need a cause?