Irreducible Complexity

[kilczer15]

The main problem I have with understanding the concept of a God, an omnipotent, all knowing being that created the universe, is that he would have to be pretty complex himself.

Let me back up. If the universe is so complex that it needs a creator, wouldn't God be so complex that He also needs a creator?

[juliod]

What you have written is a common arguement against creationism. But we are a little thin on creationists here at the moment, so don't be disappointed if you don't get much reply.

DanZ

[Cathar1950]

I was reading this book and two questions came up.
Who was God's daddy and who taught God?

[4gold]

The main problem I have with understanding the concept of a God, an omnipotent, all knowing being that created the universe, is that he would have to be pretty complex himself.

Let me back up. If the universe is so complex that it needs a creator, wouldn't God be so complex that He also needs a creator?

This is a common argument. Let me quote to you a passage from "Why I am not a Christian", a famous atheistic point-of-view on the apparent flaws in Christianity:

Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God. That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality that it used to have; but apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man, and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question, Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant, and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.

So the argument is set between the Buddhists/atheists and the Christians/Muslims/Jews. The former believes the universe is, and always has been, cyclical. There was no beginning, and there will be no end (there will be an end for the earth, but not for the universe). The latter believes the universe must have had a beginning and will have an end.

Please excuse for making this into science, even though this is not a science subforum. But I take what I know from science about the universe and apply it to other areas of my life. The way I figure it, what we know about science must reveal the truths of nature.

At the moment the Big Bang evidence was collaborated and all other theories found wanting, we knew this universe had a beginning. So, the debate turned to three different arguments: (1) Could all life have begun through natural processes from one Big Bang some 15 billion years ago?, (2) Could there have been multiple universes?, (3) If the answers to 1 and 2 are no, then what other possibility could there be (read: Creationism, which is really nothing much more than a default than an interpretation of facts)?

Chet Raymo, the atheistic astronomer, once calculated that if the energy to density ratio just one second after the Big Bang had been different by one part in 1 x 10^15 (that's a one with 15 zeroes after it), advanced life could not have existed. To Raymo, these odds were acceptable. Raymo would have been for argument #1.

Leonard Susskind, a leading scientist on String Theory, took a look at the odds and decided it "seems absurdly improbable, and nothing in fundamental physics is able to explain why." He, and his fellow scientists, are attempting to discover whether other universes exist. String Theory provides for very interesting mathematics, but the biggest problem with it is that it can never be proven, at least not in a direct way. Susskind would have been for argument #2.

So where does that leave the rest of us? You can believe we won the most incredible lottery ever, but then who's taking the leap of faith? You can believe we are part of a system of multiple universes

[harvey1]

The main problem I have with understanding the concept of a God, an omnipotent, all knowing being that created the universe, is that he would have to be pretty complex himself. Let me back up. If the universe is so complex that it needs a creator, wouldn't God be so complex that He also needs a creator?

Actually, the opposite is the case. God would need to be extremely simple because any being possessing infinite number of attributes would possess this odd property of being exceedingly simple. For example, if Cantor was right by saying that an God is aleph-omega, then an infinite number of God's attributes would be an infinitesimal (zero) percent of God's attributes. Therefore, God is infinitesimally simple--yet God is aleph-omega complex.

[Grumpy]

harvey1

Actually, the opposite is the case. God would need to be extremely simple because any being possessing infinite number of attributes would possess this odd property of being exceedingly simple. For example, if Cantor was right by saying that an God is aleph-omega, then an infinite number of God's attributes would be an infinitesimal (zero) percent of God's attributes. Therefore, God is infinitesimally simple--yet God is aleph-omega complex.

Nice sophistry, no real meaning. Sorry, try again.

Grumpy

[1John2_26]

harvey1

Quote:
Actually, the opposite is the case. God would need to be extremely simple because any being possessing infinite number of attributes would possess this odd property of being exceedingly simple. For example, if Cantor was right by saying that an God is aleph-omega, then an infinite number of God's attributes would be an infinitesimal (zero) percent of God's attributes. Therefore, God is infinitesimally simple--yet God is aleph-omega complex.

Nice sophistry, no real meaning. Sorry, try again.

Grumpy

Lot's of smart people have contemplated "God."

Einstein's Theory of Relativity

Special Relativity proposed that distance and time are not absolute. The ticking rate of a clock depends on the motion of the observer of that clock; likewise for the length of a "yard stick." Published in 1915, General Relativity proposed that gravity, as well as motion, can affect the intervals of time and of space. The key idea of General Relativity, called the Equivalence Principle, is that gravity pulling in one direction is completely equivalent to an acceleration in the opposite direction. (A car accelerating forwards feels just like sideways gravity pushing you back against your seat. An elevator accelerating upwards feels just like gravity pushing you into the floor. If gravity is equivalent to acceleration, and if motion affects measurements of time and space (as shown in Special Relativity), then it follows that gravity does so as well. In particular, the gravity of any mass, such as our sun, has the effect of warping the space and time around it. For example, the angles of a triangle no longer add up to 180 degrees and clocks tick more slowly the closer they are to a gravitational mass like the sun. Many of the predictions of General Relativity, such as the bending of starlight by gravity and a tiny shift in the orbit of the planet Mercury, have been quantitatively confirmed by experiment. Two of the strangest predictions, impossible ever to completely confirm, are the existence of black holes and the effect of gravity on the universe as a whole (cosmology).

In embracing Einstein our century took leave of a prior universe and an erstwhile God. The new versions were not so rigid and deterministic as the old Newtonian world. Einstein's God was no clockmaker, but he was the embodiment of reason in nature—"subtle but not malicious." This God did not control our actions or even sit in judgment on them. ("Einstein, stop telling God what to do," Niels Bohr finally retorted.) This God seemed rather kindly and absent-minded, as a matter of fact. Physics was freer, and we, too, are freer, in the Einstein universe. Which is where we live.

But a lucky chance God?

And after the rest of Albert Einstein had been cremated, his brain remained, soaking for decades in a jar of formaldehyde belonging to Dr. Thomas Harvey, the Princeton Hospital pathologist. No one had bothered to dissect the brains of Freud, Stravinsky or Joyce, but in the 1980's bits of Einsteinian gray matter were making the rounds of certain neuropsychologists, who thus learned . . . absolutely nothing. It was just a brain—the brain that dreamed a plastic fourth dimension, that banished the ether, that released the pins binding us to absolute space and time, that refused to believe God played dice, that finally declared itself "satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence."

Einstein had nice ideas.

[QED]

We once had a debate on how intelligence might exist without it being evolved. Careful definitions are required due to there being different kinds of intelligence. But one thing seems certain; to create a universe like ours requires a fantastic amount of knowledge. It does make one wonder where God went to school. I think it's interesting to note that designs evolved through Genetic Programming generate knowledge within the system -- with knowledge being the results of what works and what doesn't in a "trial and error" form of experimentation (to put it as simply as possible).

It's hard for me not to see all this in an Anthropic light; if we contemplate the word "existence" then I think it offers a tantalizing glimpse of the goal, the ultimate selection criteria, acting on an arena of trial and error. Fancy terms coined by creationists such as "Complex Specified Information" might be just as applicable in distinguishing the sort of knowledge built-up in a system capable of creating a region of space-time as it is in the realm of biology. To me this looks like the most realistic way of arriving at the incredibly well-optimised physical conditions that permit our existence.

[kilczer15]

John, what does that even have to do with what we're talking about?

Just answer the damn question.

[Cathar1950]

John, what does that even have to do with what we're talking about?

A pickled brain is proof?
Just because smart people think about God in not proof. Einstein had a very different view of God then the one John presents.