Why would anyone want to worship an entity simpler than themselves? If that’s your predilection, why not worship a black stone?

So not only would God have to be more complex than the Universe as it is now, God would need to be more complex than the universe at every point in its history combined.

I was just stating what the minimum requirements were for the argument from design to fail. That is, God just needs to be harder to explain than that which it was invoked to explain.

I suspect that most Christians don’t give a shit about the rest of the universe and if it turns out that God just let it collect dust while He (and this god really is a ‘He’) focuses on humanity, they would be happy. This also ignores the belief that much of the universe could develop with just a little tweaking from God – it certainly doesn’t need God to be more complex than the universe. That’s arises only from the ‘omniscience’ claim and isn’t necessarily tied to the ‘creator/designer’ arguments.

Each argument for the existence of a god points to a different god and what’s worse, different people will accept one argument and reject another. Even the sophistumicated theologizing hasn’t found any reason to link them all together. An no wonder – there are theories for the origin of the universe which involve the collision between two string theory membranes so any creator that has more intelligence than an elementary particle is exceeding what is required.

Something to think about: you could literally have more power and intelligence in your fingernail than God has in its entire incorporeal non-body.

Actually, this argument (made as a part of the “Ultimate 747 from a scrapheap”) doesn’t require that God is more complex than the entire universe but that God is more complex( & ordered!) than the start of the universe, since it was only the origin of the BB that the theists invoked God to explain.

No, the theists invoke God to explain the design of the universe, that is that the Universe as it was at every point in its history is exactly how it was intended to be by God. So not only would God have to be more complex than the Universe as it is now, God would need to be more complex than the universe at every point in its history combined.

The Mandelbrot set (and other fractals) is so complex that mathematicians had to describe it using fractional dimensions, yet it arose from an equation with only three terms. The area of a triangle has a more more complex formula.

There are many examples of order and complexity arising spontaneously because of simple rules being applied to the results of the last trial, much like evolution: reproduce, try to survive, repeat.

The problem is that none of those have any understanding. If you want to claim that God is just blind rules governing the cosmos, that essentially God is the laws of physics and nothing more, then I guess you can do so, but that is not the sort of God anyone here is talking about. We are talking about a God that designed the universe, that has specific intentions about how the universe will unfold, that has complete understanding of every aspect of the universe. Simple rules can give rise to complex phenomena, but simple rules cannot understand complex phenomena.

The Mandelbrot set (and other fractals) is so complex that mathematicians had to describe it using fractional dimensions, yet it arose from an equation with only three terms. The area of a triangle has a more more complex formula.

There are many examples of order and complexity arising spontaneously because of simple rules being applied to the results of the last trial, much like evolution: reproduce, try to survive, repeat.

Great analogy. It seems like the rules of quantum physics may have just such a complexity-out-of-simplicity property. (at least, “simple” in terms of there being a small number of rules to define it)

If someone wants to define the word “God” as being “the very simple phenomena that gave rise to the complexity of the universe,” that’s valid I suppose, but… why not define the word “God” as being “cheese-flavored puffed corn snacks”? Then we agree he definitely exists!!

There are many examples of order and complexity arising spontaneously because of simple rules being applied to the results of the last trial, much like evolution: reproduce, try to survive, repeat.

We don’t have much evidence of designers being less complex than their designs.

And that’s why Natural Selection is such a powerful explanation. It cuts the Gordian knot. There just is no conundrum about a designer less complex than its designs, because there is no design. There is a different mechanism, and away goes the problem.

Makes sense to me. That doesn’t entail, however, that a designer must be more complex than its design. (Does RD ever define “complex“?)

Define “design.” Spiders create very complex webs, but they don’t really “design” them, and even then, the spider is still more complex than the web. No human being has ever designed anything more complex than a human being. We don’t have much evidence of designers being less complex than their designs.

It seems to me that if you’re “designing” then you must at least have an intended goal. If God’s intended goal was to create human beings, it would seem to me he needs to be at least as complex as a human being, which is not at all simple.

Nice.

BenSix@43:

See Deen @39. QED.

I submit that an immaterial mind is a contradiction in terms just as “married bachelor” is. The mind is an organ. That is a fact. It consists of working parts. That is how it is able to perform the functions it does. End of argument. These “philosophers” could make philosophically plausible an “immaterial (simple) liver”.

If a god existed then the complexity we observe in the Universe would be explained by the god so you shouldn’t be adding the two together, rather looking solely at the preconditions. At this point we would ask whether a designer god helps answer questions or just introduce more, bigger ones. If God really is simpler than the order in the universe, then we’re better off; if not, then God isn’t merely unnecessary but makes things worse.

@74

That’s true and indeed a designer can easily be far less complex that its design. Why RD and others argue that God needs to have at least as much information as the universe (meaning not just complexity but order). He uses the ‘omniscience’ attribute here, arguing that if God must know where every particle in the universe is, then God must be at least as complex as the universe. Actually, this argument (made as a part of the “Ultimate 747 from a scrapheap”) doesn’t require that God is more complex than the entire universe but that God is more complex( & ordered!) than the start of the universe, since it was only the origin of the BB that the theists invoked God to explain.

I didn’t think that was the argument. I understood the argument to be (universe + creator) must be more complex than (universe without creator). So complexity alone is no proof of the existence of a creator.

it’s like Gutting is reading from a Gospel he found somewhere, that the rest of us don’t know about – Peter N

We know where he got it; he stole it from George Lucas.

May the Force be with you!

Dawkins, like most scientists, knows that you need a brain to have a mind. As result when theists describe an entity with a towering intellect, he correctly expects to find something with a great many moving parts. The theological intuition that minds can be either simple or immaterial is demonstrably wrong (see: http://www.jackasterisk.com/j_a_c_k_/2007/12/maxwells-materi.html). Of course most people believe they will continue to have a mental life long after their brains have decomposed, so it’s easy to see why they find Dawkins’ scientific assumptions objectionable.

Also, the god that Gutting is describing quite different from the one described in those other Gospels and the rest of the Bible. With the exception of his fellow UCC’ers and possibly the Unitarian-Universalists, I would think the billions of other adherents to the Abrahamic religions would take exception to his ideas. To put it mildly. Before he tries to persuade us of his notion of God, maybe he should try to persuade them.

They can go on and on about their ‘DDS’ and how God embodies all these tautologies, while not being embodied (as though contradictions are insightful instead of a cheap literary tactic), but they never explain how they know this.

Really, it’s not like the Bible supports it, and unless there’s a whole field of empirical theology they’ve been concealing for years, they’re just making stuff up that sounds good.

Laplace said it best: There is no need for the God hypothesis.

And quite so. I certainly have absolutely no sense that I know all about the universe – the idea is laughable. But as Hitchens said in that interview with Goldberg, in response to Martin Amis’s rather preening claim that agnosticism is more reasonable, what I am sure of is that the pope knows no more about the putative god than I do.