Expert: Jeffrey Eldred - 8/4/2010

Question
Hello,


we often weaken "God" explanation for the apparent design of this Universe by stating that He has to be more complex, and must be designed by another designer, ad infinitum...

But, theologians like Platinga and Swineburne argue that:

<< Complexity -as defined in design arguments- is a precise and smooth arrangments of parts (that chance alone cannot be responsible for) of a thing necessary for its function,

since the alleged Designer of Universe transcends space-time, He is immaterial =>so there is no parts in Him.
=>so there are no arrangement in Him
=>Therefore, He is not complex and thus doesn't require a designer. >>


That immaterial Designer has necessarly (if He exists) the ability to be very intelligent, to have self-cousciousness and to have volition.

But, does having those very abilities make Him functionally complex (and thus "possibly designed")? If it does, could you explain how?



sincerely


Answer
It seems to me that Platinga and Swineburne argument from this redefined complexity is nothing more than a bad pun [1]. In the definition, “part” means something that is a component that is distinct from the whole, but in the argument, “part” means a component of a physical object. Even if we grant that the property of “being immaterial” is a coherent concept, it should not follow that immaterial beings are without parts, that is, it does not follow that immaterial things can't be complex in a way that needs an explanation. Their argument can be simplified into “Physical things are complex, complex things need a designer, God is a designer and not physical => God is needed” and from this we can see the circular reasoning. Since this is a teleological (argument from design), Platinga and Swineburne furthermore would need to establish that the idea of a designer being immaterial comes from observation of nature – it is not clear to me how they would attempt to do that or if it is even possible.

But I think it would be unfair to limit my answer to that, especially in the event that I had misunderstood Platinga and Swineburne's definition of immaterial. You asked how we know God is complex (by a more sensible definition of the term) and I will explain my thoughts on it.

I believe it is the personal aspects of God that make him complex. If God interacts with the universe, the natural question is how. If he interacts in a fairly simple and regular way, than we don't call this a being, we call it a law of physics. What is wanted in a being is something that suggests some sort of an interaction with mankind, to name a few of such features typically ascribed to God: answering specific prayers, providing verbal guidance or visual signs, empowering holy men, granting blessing artifacts with powers, rewarding the good, punishing the wicked, creating ethical scenarios, judging the actions and beliefs of people for their afterlives, greeting the deceased, making prophecies, feeling pleased by devotion, feeling displeased by sin, etc. We conceptualize all of these in human terms and each of these require some sort of processing and memory. Mind you it can all be immaterial, but gears are turning and parts are interacting with each other (presumably believer's reconcile this with his permanent and unchanging nature, by holding the mind constant but the thoughts can change or by having God be always receiving simultaneously all the events throughout the whole of timeline of human civilization). I think we require God have greater competence than a human at observing and judging things, so he is more complex then the greatest of humans. If we want him to be omniscient, he has to have a mental representation of the entire universe in his mind (not to mention an analysis of the entire universe), which makes him by definition more complex than all the universe. This not only throws out the Occam's razor implicitly used in the teleological argument, but it leads us to the infinite loop you mentioned before).

If we make the deist God (that is, nonactive but apparently still with a lot of purpose injected into the universe), than presumably it takes even more complexity to consider the whole time-line of the universe in a single moment rather than over the age of the universe. But of course God is supposed to be outside of time, so this raises some bizarre questions right there (what is a moment of God's time?). Might God be really simple but just take a lot of time to build on what he's already though about (something like this[2]), it certainly doesn't make up the conventional image of an unchanging God, but it does the job. But if God can change, than the question of where God comes from is certainly on the table (actually I never thought it was off the table, but that is beside the point).

But even if God is nothing more than the tautological statement “God is God”[3], then this God is still too complex for me. This statement is superfluous in describing the universe: the system “Universe + God” is always more complex then the system “Universe + No God” if the God hypothesis[4][5] is not necessary to explain what we observe. The teleological argument came from a time before we knew most of our explanations for the processes of the natural world, and even then it was possible to come up with better ones[6]. For a more detailed AllExperts post on my thoughts on parsimony and the origin of the universe, see here[7].

Now there I did explain why I thought God would be complex because he interacts with the world in a complicated way, but actually we do have plenty of examples in which extraordinarily complex (we use the term “chaotic”) things arise from simple rules[8][9][10]. Here the definition of chaotic/complex that I am using means: 1) exhibiting patterns with a variety of different features; 2) being computationally difficult to predict. As you can imagine such examples in nature are of great interest to scientists and mathematicians – physicists are often heard describing simple ideas from which complicated features arise as “elegant” or “subtle” and mathematicians might call an equation “beautiful”. If there is a God, it would simply be beneath his nobility to be anything less then the grandest such elegance. (As an aside, here, there is a slight problem that most, but not all, of these systems get their behavior by being made of many identical simple parts, which means we can hardly a monotheistic, homogenous view of God). I have only witnesses one such example of someone (John Polkinghorne) claiming the nature of God[11] is to be elegant in that he exhibits complex behavior from simple rules. It is surprising that I don't hear this sort of rhetoric more often because it always seemed to be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition[12] for God's existence. There is just one problem, and that is we already have an extraordinarily complex object that works from simple rules – The universe is elegant. If the argument is made that God could be an extraordinarily elegant being in ways that we don't know about, than certainly the case can be made that the universe is just as elegant from ways we do know about. And if a Designer is so elegant that he does not need another designer, than the universe is so elegant it doesn't need the first Designer . The only way this sort of elegance argument could ever work is if someone could come up with mathematical constructs simpler than the universe, able to derive the rules of the universe, and able to derive rules for interacting from the universe from the outside.

In the meantime, physicists are actually engaged in attempting to find the simplest, most elegant, most fundamental explanation for the origin of the universe and the rules that guide it through time. If there is a teleological argument to be made, God won't be able to hide. (Tactless misnomers aside[13],) Its looking like there is less and less room left for Him to be hiding behind.

Links:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation
[2] http://xkcd.com/505/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am
[4] Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse (“I have no need of that hypothesis.” ) - Pierre-Simon Laplace: reputed reply to Emperor Napoleon I of France, who had asked why he hadn't mentioned God in his discourse on secular variations of the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter.
[5] http://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591024811
[6] http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/dnr.htm
[7] http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/9/x-17.htm
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem
[9] http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~comp4006/CxSys%20Readings/Antichaos/Antichaos%20and%2... (Cell Biology)
[10] http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/29524
[11] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jul/14/chaos-theory-polkingh... (Polkinghorne apparently thinks that he can assert that we are in the situation of a chaotic God that he ,describes without evidence, when the whole reason he can think it up is because of evidence we've gathered about existing chaotic system)
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_and_sufficient_condition
[13] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2007/08/06/the-god-particle/