Does complexity require complexity? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
John Allen Paulos is a thoroughly dishonest individual.
As we saw when discussing the design argument, he argued that complex things need a complex designer. One would hope an honest individual would keep that standard. Alas, they might, but Paulos is not such an individual.
We are skipping chapter 12 in case you are wondering as there is nothing really in there counting as an argument that needs to be addressed. Before we get to this point, let’s look at something amusing Paulos says:
The obstinate blindness to contrary facts that confirmation bias induces in some religious people always reminds me of the little ditty by William Hughes Mearns: As I was sitting in my chair, I knew the bottom wasn’t there, Nor legs nor back, but I just sat, Ignoring little things like that.
Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 109). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
I can’t help but be amused when someone who makes basic mistakes about the other side and doesn’t address any scholarship at all talks to us about confirmation bias. Confirmation bias works both ways. I regularly engage with Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and atheists. I also ask them when the last time they read something that they disagreed with was and usually, I get absolutely nothing.
But moving on:
The last cognitive distortion I’ll discuss is a form of primitive thinking related to the availability error. It is best characterized as “like causes like.”
Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 111). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Got it, so it is a form of primitive thinking to say in order to cause something, the cause must be like the effect. Good to know.
It is perhaps not surprising therefore that people have long thought the complexity of computer outputs was a result of complex programs.
Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 111). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Okay. So you can have a complex output, and yet that doesn’t mean that the program that produced it was complex. Does that mean it could be simple?
Although it’s not a new idea, no one has treated the notion of simplicity leading to complexity with the thoroughness of Stephen Wolfram in his book A New Kind of Science. The book is twelve hundred pages, so let me focus on Wolfram’s so-called rule 110, one of a number of very simple algorithms capable of generating an amazing degree of intricacy and, in theory at least, of computing anything any state-of-the-art computer can compute.
Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 112). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Okay. So here Paulos is talking about the idea that simplicity can lead to complexity. Not only that, but apparently this is something scientific. Let’s keep going.
Simple programs, he avers, can be used to explain space and time, mathematics, free will, and perception as well as help clarify biology, physics, and other sciences. They also explain how a universe as complex-appearing and various as ours might have come about: the underlying physical theories provide a set of simple rules for “updating” the state of the universe, and such rules are, as Wolfram demonstrates repeatedly, capable of generating the complexity around (and in) us, if allowed to unfold over long enough periods of time. The relevance of the “like causes like” illusion to the argument from design is now, I hope, quite obvious. Wolfram’s rules, Conway’s Life, cellular automatons in general, and the Mandelbrot set, as well as Kauffman’s lightbulb genome, show that the sources of apparent complexity needn’t be complex (although they usually are).
Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (pp. 114-115). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
And this is how the chapter ends.
So apparently, a complex program can come about from something incredibly simple.
Unfortunately, when he talked about the design argument and the complexity of the universe, Paulos said the exact opposite. None of this simplicity stuff was there. There was no correction of Richard Dawkins at all.
Keep in mind as I pointed out, we have already observed that Paulos will lie for fun to trick people out of money. Paulos is not just ignorant of what he writes about. He is dishonest about it and has confessed to dishonesty for pleasure that leaves real victims before.
Have nothing to do with this individual. Do not buy his book. I am going through it so you won’t have to. If you meet anyone interested in his work, send them here.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)