Q&A: Following Your Conversation with Daniel Dushi
Following Your Conversation with Daniel Dushi
Question
Hello Rabbi Abraham,
Thank you very much for the conversation with Daniel Dushi; it was interesting.
I wanted to ask a question about the physico-theological argument. There is a point there that I feel is almost always ignored.
Before that, a short comment: in the parable you gave about 14 letters being chosen at random and yielding “to be or not to be,” it was a bit strange that you brought the weak counter-argument of “each time, you lock in a letter the moment the draw is successful and move on to the next letter.” There are much stronger arguments in the style of the typing monkey, or things with the flavor of Kolmogorov’s 0-1 law, but I’m sure you know all of those, and in any case whole libraries have been written about these matters.
The main issue that bothers me is this: my impression is that every argument in the physico-theological style (excluding something like the argument from tradition, which also does not persuade me) is almost always formulated as follows:
Suppose there is no God (some alternative explanation / everything is random); we reach a contradiction (for example: how can you explain the complexity?), and therefore you are forced to conclude that there is a God — what is called proof by negation: assume A, contradiction, therefore not-A.
For some reason everyone deals with the question of whether A leads to a contradiction, and there is really an arms race between the school that keeps refining A and the one that keeps refining the argument that leads to A’s contradiction.
But something entirely different bothers me. A is not a single hypothesis saying “there is no God”; it is a class of infinitely many hypotheses. Even the hypothesis “everything is random” is not really well-defined; it can be defined concretely in infinitely many ways (or at least in many substantively different ways). And even if A is a single hypothesis, not-A is an infinite class that also contains all kinds of strange explanations that we cannot even imagine.
For me this is not an intellectual stunt. At age 16 all my thoughts were given over to these questions. A lot of time has passed since then, but it still seems to me like a huge gap. Suppose you went to the trouble of defining precisely a hypothesis that does not assume the existence of God and you reached a contradiction — the conclusion that this leads to the only explanation every child can imagine (I’m not trying to be mocking; I am a believer. It’s just that God is the kind of hypothesis one can at least imagine, and however complex it is, it is simple in a certain sense) seems to me equivalent to the pretension that you have understood this whole system called existence, and therefore understood that the God hypothesis is the only one that can serve as an explanation for not-A that does not contain a contradiction that will be discovered one day.
Another important point: usually at this stage in the discussion I get a response similar to what one would probably get in the following scenario (bad example, I don’t have one ready offhand): a man works at a stable company for 15 years, everyone has been satisfied, one day he writes an angry and very non-liberal post, the kind management really hates, and a month later, coincidentally, they call him into the office and say his performance has declined recently, and they need to streamline things. Bottom line — that’s just a coincidence, right?
The average response would be: possible, but nobody believes that.
When I raise my argument to people, I usually also get a response along the lines of: “Fine, so maybe there is some other bizarre explanation that could account for what is happening, but practically speaking, if this were a dilemma in your personal life, you would never bet on that, because it’s just so far-fetched.”
That is not an argument; it is an intuition. And there are countless examples of how poor intuition is once we move a little away from the world of standard experience. There is no obstacle to thinking that when we move completely away from it (whatever “completely” even means in this sense), our intuition is worth nothing.
In my view, to define a “probability space” for different hypotheses and say what is very likely and what is exceedingly unlikely also contains within it the pretension of understanding the system completely, with all its infinitely many hypotheses.
By the way, there is one argument I am omitting here.
One could argue: “Who says the cosmos obeys the rule that something is either A or not-A, but not both at once?” I have a few explanations for why I avoid it, but I’ve already taken enough of your time.
Thank you very much,
Answer
Hello,
Thank you for your comments.
I elaborated on this argument more fully in my book The First Existent, and obviously in a conversation like the one I had with Dushi it is not really possible to present it precisely.
1. I was not dealing there with the “to be or not to be” argument; I brought that version as an example of weak arguments. The typing monkey is an entirely different matter, and it assumes a very large number of attempts. I dealt with that as well there and in my book God Plays Dice. I would just note that in my view this too is a rather weak argument.
2. I do not know why you chose a cumbersome and inaccurate formulation of this argument. The assumption that there is no God definitely does not lead to a contradiction. It is simply not plausible (because the complexity is not explained that way, and the assumption that it arose without a guiding hand is implausible). Contradiction is too strong a logical term, and it is incorrect to use it here.
3. I do not know which infinitely many versions you are referring to. In my view there is one and only one: there is no guiding hand at the basis of the formation of the universe and its laws. That is all. By the same token, the hypothesis that there is a God does not have infinitely many possibilities either, but only one: there is a guiding hand (we call it God, but that is only a name).
4. Logic is not the product of experience; it is a priori. The assumption that it is not plausible for a complex thing to arise on its own is also not the product of experience. Beyond that, there is no reason at all to abandon it with respect to the universe as a whole, if it operates with respect to every part of it.
5. The example of the employee is really not a good one. There there really are two interpretive possibilities, and although there is an advantage to the one that hangs on that correlation, it is not a decisive advantage. But a remarkably complex universe that arose by chance is a very implausible hypothesis.
6. All this is not about intuition, but about probability and plausibility. This is our mode of thinking, and it works. The claim that maybe it is not true is a skeptical claim, and the burden of proof is on the one who raises it. Our intuitions fail even with respect to things in our own world, and still we assume that intuition works until proven otherwise. I never speak of certainty, only of plausibility, so counterexamples do not really add or detract. I do not see why with respect to the universe itself we should not behave similarly, unless one insists, out of bias, on rejecting the physico-theological argument at any cost.
7. Defining a probability space for such questions is problematic. For example, think about the values of the constants in the laws of physics (such as the speed of light, the gravitational constant, etc.). In principle they can take any value whatsoever, and therefore the probability space is all the values on the real number line. The probability of any such value is exactly 0. And still, if we assume there is a drawing for the values of the constants (which of course also needs explanation: who conducts this drawing? what is this mechanism, and who is responsible for it?), the probability of every outcome is 0. And that is only if you know in advance that the distribution is uniform (which is also something you have no way of knowing). Yet in practice these constants do have a certain value that is very special (the fine-tuning argument), and it is not plausible that it arose by chance. This is an excellent argument even without your having a defined probability space.
8. As for the argument you “omitted” here, you are assuming that the laws of logic are a contingent matter. But that is a mistake. These are necessary laws that are true in every reality and every situation, wholly independent of experience and of our cosmos. I have written about this more than once on my site and in articles, and there I argued that even the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself is “subject” to the laws of logic (because this is not really subjection. The laws of logic are not laws in the same sense that the laws of nature are laws. That is just an unfortunate linguistic habit).
By the way, you cannot have explanations for why you avoid it, because those explanations themselves will be formulated within the framework of classical logic (that is, if I accept them I will not accept their opposite). We have no ability to speak about something outside the laws of logic, even if we refer to another and as imaginary a reality as we like.
Happy holiday and may we hear good news,
Discussion on Answer
3. I do not know what directionality is. The question is whether there is something/someone that made the world, or whether it came about randomly. That seems well-defined to me. There is no other possibility here, so long as we do not enter into the question of what that something is.
8. I did not understand what is unfair here. My claim is that there is no possibility whatsoever of departing from the “laws of logic” — not with respect to the universe, not with respect to God, and not with respect to anything else. This has no connection to morality.
Thank you very much. I’ll think about what you wrote, and if necessary I’ll respond through the responsa system.
Sorry, but just a brief comment on 2 points:
3. This is the heart of the matter for me. A is the assumption that there is no directionality (for lack of a more suitable term I can think of right now), as though in the space of possibilities there is no preference between order and chaos, between certain forms and uniform distribution.
Its negation, what you call a “guiding hand” (after all, we did not really define “hand”), is that there is directionality to existence, that we are not in a kind of random walk (please don’t get hung up on the example; it is just to illustrate the idea). That directionality does not indicate consciousness / spirit / will / intentions, or anything we would define as an entity in the sense we are used to thinking about.
This directionality is not one hypothesis; it is a huge collection of hypotheses.
8. You wrote “omitted,” but I am not dodging.
As you wrote, every argument will rely on the laws of logic.
Personally, I did not mean to write an argument in the formal sense at all, but rather a “moral” argument with no claim to objectivity.
A person is evident in his actions and in his hidden thoughts far more than in his speech and writing, and my life testifies that I believe in the laws of logic — to the point of staking life itself on them — and so it does not seem “fair” to me to use that argument.