Complexity Redux

Let’s consider a modified version of the usual “Who designed the designer?” response to the fine-tuning argument.   Suppose that someone argues that because God is complex, he too requires an explanation. The typical theistic counterargument is to argue that God is a simple being by virtue of being an immaterial mind that has no physical parts.  Therefore, God is not complex.  But now suppose that the critic pushes his response, arguing that the very immaterial mind of God is complex.   Incidently, this was the strategy pursued by AIGbusted in our debate.  The theist can respond in several different ways.

1. It’s not even clear what the idea of something being complex and immaterial is supposed to mean.  Complexity has always been understood in reference to physical systems.  A computer, for example, is complex because it contains a large number of intricate and highly ordered parts.  Accordingly, how do we make sense of immaterial complexity?  What does it even mean?  Unless some adequate understanding of it can be provided, it just seems to be a category mistake to apply complexity to an immaterial being.

Perhaps the critic can define complexity in terms of having many different mental states or thought processes.  But I see several problems with this.  Firstly, it’s not intuitively obvious — at least to me — that this type of complexity requires an explanation.  Second, it’s not clear how this should be considered “complex.” Mental states and processes are had by a mind, they aren’t exactly “parts.”  They thus don’t contribute to the complexity of a mind.  Suppose that I have a power strip.  Would it be any more complex if I plugged something into each outlet?  No.

2. Writes Robin Collins: “[W]e have metaphysical reasons for thinking that minds, do not, by their inherent nature, require high levels of internal complexity… Perhaps the strongest argument for this thesis is that we normally experience our own conscious self as a single, unified center that is aware of the world and can act in the world.   For example, I am currently simultaneously aware of the hum of the air conditioner, the sound of my hands typing and the letters on my computer screen.  I cannot explain this experience by supposing that my self has three parts and that one part is experiencing the hum, the other my typing, and the other is seeing letters on the computer screen, for then there would be three separate experiencers, one corresponding to each part.  But there seems to be only one experiencer — I — that perceives all things.  Thus, it seems that I must suppose there is one unified experiencer that cannot be reduced by a bunch of parts.”¹

What Collins is saying that the mind is composed of only one part, the “I” which is aware of everything.  It would be a mistake to think of my mental life as a bunch of parts, as that would be supposing that there is a different “I” which corresponds to each part.  He further writes: “Indeed, if one thinks that the “I” — that thing behind the scenes that is conscious, that does the thinking and the like — is simple, as we have been suggesting, then it follows that a person’s power to perform what philosophers call basic actions must be simply and thus without any further structure.”²

3. God is thought of as a necessary being.  Even if it were true that God is complex, it does not follow that he requires an explanation.  Philosophers have long considered God to be necessarily existent — that is, his non-existence is impossible.  To assume that it’s even possible that God has an explanation for his existence is to presuppose that God is a contingent being.  But such a supposition makes no sense.  God is by definition the greatest possible being (That’s simply what we mean by the term “God”).  As Keith Ward  has said, “To fail to grasp such an idea is to fail to grasp what God is.” What could God’s existence be contingent on?  Nothing, which is one of the reasons why God is thought to be necessarily existent. To say that God is contingent is to say that there is something greater than God which he owes his existence to — but then we’re not really talking about God anymore.

1. Robin Collins, “Hume, Fine-Tuning, and the ‘Who Designed God’ Objection” in James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothius (eds), In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-Humean Assessment (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity 2005) p.196 [↩]
2. Ibid, 197 [↩]

Tags: Complexity, fine-tuning argument, Richard Dawkins