If somebody started talking about the earth starting because of cheesecake, you'd wonder where the cheesecake came from. You'd look in a history book or a cook book and discover that the cheesecake has its origins in the roman empire, as a result of, well, people being hungry, and as a result of cows existing, and on and on, and you'd wonder how all those complex causes could produce a cheesecake predating the universe, and what sense it would make cut off from the rich causal net in which we find cheesecakes embedded today. Intelligence should not be any different. Agency trips up Occam's rasor, because humans are wired to expect there to always be agents about. But an explanation of the universe which contains an agent is an incredibly complicated theory, which only presents itself to us for consideration because of our biases.

You're right; yet no one ever sees it this way. Before Darwin, no one said, "This idea that an intelligent creator existed first doesn't simplify things."

Here is something I think would be useful: A careful information-theoretic explanation of why God must be complicated. When you explain, to Christians, that it doesn't make sense to say complexity originated because God created it and God must be complicated, Christians reply (and I'm generalizing here because I've heard these replies so many times) one of 2 things:

• God is outside of space and time, so causality doesn't apply. (I don't know how to respond to this.)
• God is not complicated. God is simple. God is the pure essence of being, the First Cause. Think of a perfect circle. That's what God is like.

It shouldn't be hard to explain that, if God knows at least what is in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, God has at least enough complexity to store that information.

Of course, putting this explanation on LW might do no good to anybody.