Why Complexity?

A variation of the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is the question, "Why is there complexity rather than simplicity?" Of course the point of the question is that complexity proves God.

No it doesn't.

The question has a hidden expectation: namely, that nature unaided would necessarily be simple. But why would anyone expect that? I've never heard an answer to that question. It's a completely arbitrary expectation, especially in light of the well-established concept of undesigned complex order, or spontaneous order, which is found not only in the natural world but also in the social world. (See the pioneering work of the thinkers who made up the Scottish Enlightenment.)

Regarding unwarranted expectations, Ludwig Wittgenstein once was watching the sun set with a friend, who commented that he could understand why people used to think the sun revolved around the earth. To which Wittgenstein replied: Why? How would you expect things to look?

You cannot find an impossible God in the shadows of ignorance. ("I can't figure out why there is complexity rather than simplicity.") Reason, philosophy, and science, not mysticism and theology, will dispel those shadows.


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