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billswift comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong
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IMO, it is perfectly reasonable to object with: "Who designed the Designer?".
The logic being objected to is: it takes a big complex thing to create another big complex thing. Observing that Darwinian evolution makes big complex things from scratch is the counter-example. The intuition that a complex thing (humans) requires another complex thing to create it (god) is wrong - and it does tend to lead towards an escalator of ever-more-complex creators.
Simplicity creating complexity needs to happen somewhere, to avoid an infinite regress - and if such a principle has to be invoked somewhere, then before the very first god is conjoured seems like a good place.
Checking with the "common sense atheism" link quite a few people are saying similar things in the comments.
More specifically it is completely rational to use that argument against theists, because one of their arguments for god is that the world is too complex not to have been designed; so in that circumstance you are just pointing out that their claim is just pushing the complexity back one step. If the world is so complex that it needs a designer, then so is god.
I think tighter definitions are needed here, some theistic traditions consider all existence to be 'god' etc.
Unless God is too complex to be designed :P
Or God is in the first Quine-capable level of some designer hierarchy, like a Universal Turing Machine among lesser models of computation.
Ooh, I like that one. Call it the "sweet spot" theory of intelligent design - things of high enough complexity must be designed, but only if they are under a certain complexity, at which point they must be eternal. (And apparently also personal and omnibenevolent, for some reason).
At any rate, this would all be nice and dandy were it not completely arbitrary... Though if we had an agreed upon measure for complexity and could measure enough relevant objects, we might possibly actually be able to devise a test of sorts for this.
Well, at least for the lower bound. Seeing as we can't actually show that something is eternal, the upper bound can always be pushed upwards a-la the invisible dragon's permeability to flour.
Well, if it's eternal and sufficiently powerful, a kind of omnibenevolence might follow, insofar as it exerts a selection pressure on the things it feels benevolent towards, which over time will cause them to predominate.
After all, even humans might (given enough time in which to act) cause our environment to be populated solely with things towards which we feel benevolent, simply by wiping out or modifying everything else.
The canonical Christian Hell might also follow from this line of reasoning as the last safe place, where all the refugees from divine selection pressure ended up.
Granted, most Christians would be horrified by this model of divine omnibenevolence; the canonical version presumes an in-principle universal benevolence, not a contingent one.
There is an upper bound to the complexity of things designed by humans, but why would there be an upper bound on the complexity of things that are designed, in general?
If God is complex, then I guess he's not real :-)
ObNitpick - actually, R is a subset of C, so this doesn't follow.
God = 3.