Complexity Doesn't Work As An Argument For Atheism

A fellow named Onid argues that we should be atheists because of Occam’s Razor. The idea that a universe with God is more complex than a naturalistic universe. If you think that simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complex ones, (which sounds plausible though I can’t think of a proof) then the allegedly greater complexity of a universe with a God would be an argument against the existence of God.

For the sake of argument, we’ll define “complexity” as Kolmogorov complexity, henceforth “K Complexity.”

Onid explains K Complexity:

Kolmogorov complexity (or simply just K complexity), which roughly defines the complexity of a thing as the length of the minimum code required to program it (in some programming language). Intuitively, it’s basically just a measure of “how hard is it to explain how to make the thing?”

Some of the people reading this may already be familiar with K complexity, as it’s basically the foundational concept of a field called algorithmic complexity theory. For the rest, there’s a nice little easy-to-understand intro on Wikipedia. The example they use are the strings abababababababababababababababab and 4c1j5b2p0cv4w1x8rx2y39umgw5q85s7. The first one can be coded as ‘ab’ * 16, since it’s just the same two letters repeated 16 times. The second one, however, has no structure and can’t be simplified, so the only way to generate it is just code that spits out 4c1j5b2p0cv4w1x8rx2y39umgw5q85s7. From this we can see, in a way that hopefully matches our intuition, that the first string is much simpler.

The purported argument for atheism is:

1. A universe which contains God has more K complexity than a naturalistic universe.

2. Hypotheses which require more K complexity are less likely to be true than hypotheses which require less K complexity.

C. Therefore a naturalistic universe is more likely than a God universe.

I grant premise 2. I think premise 1 is false.

Do physical objects exist?

First, right off the bat I think my theory of the universe may be less K-complex than Onid’s. I don’t believe that physical objects exist. I think that there are people’s minds and God’s mind and God puts sensations in people’s minds. When I look at a house, God puts the various colored patches which compose the image of the house into my mind. When you look at the house, God puts the image of the house in your mind. God causes our visual sensations to synchronize and work out as if there were a physical house there, just as a game engine causes two players to see the same house in a video game. But the house is not a physical object. It does not exist outside of your mind and my mind and God’s mind. The “processing power” which God requires to cause our sensory experiences is no greater than the “processing power” which the physical universe requires to work according to natural laws.

So I’m committed to the existence of minds and qualia. Onid is committed to the existence of minds, qualia and a vast number of physical objects. Right off the bat it seems that Onid’s theory has greater K-complexity.

Complexity of God’s Mind

Now Onid will want to respond that God’s mind is vastly more complex than a human mind. He would say that real scoreboard is:

Onid: human minds, qualia, physical objects

Simon: human minds, God-mind, qualia

If the God-mind is more complex than the entire physical universe, then my universe theory still may be more K-complex than his.

In fact, he thinks that all minds are extremely complex.

I have to say, from my experience, minds are very very complex things… They are deeply multifaceted, they have pieces and those pieces have pieces.

But wait a minute. Onid is a physicalist so he thinks that brains cause minds and that necessarily means that brains are more K complex than minds (the most concise representation of the information of an ordinary physical object is the object itself).

Now I don’t know exactly what God’s mind is like, but I think it’s roughly similar to a human mind - at least a human mind is a good starting point to understand God’s mind! I think that God has visual qualia, has thoughts, believes things, etc. God has extraordinary abilities, such as omniscience and omnipotence, and I’m sure there are other aspects of God’s mind that I can’t even imagine, but it’s hard to see how the K-complexity of God’s mind could be greater than the K-complexity of the 8 billion human brains on Earth, let alone the entire universe.

The K-complexity of God’s mind is very likely less than the K-complexity of the physical universe, so the argument from K-complexity sketched at the beginning of this article should actually be an argument against atheism, not for it.

Generating Rules

Now Onid has a way around this. He’s not talking about how you would specify how to create the universe immediately in its current form. He’s talking about a description of the fundamental laws of physics that could be played out by a gigantic computer to simulate the entire history of the universe from the Big Bang to the present.

All known laws of physics involve only a couple equations that could be written in only a few lines of code. These laws may be hard for our human brains to wrap our heads around and even harder to discover, but they’re all quite simple in terms of K complexity. Yes, you’d obviously need incomprehensibly large amounts of memory and compute power, but our setup already gave us all that for free. The code itself would still be short - the universe would not be especially hard to describe.

So he doesn’t need to specify the size, shape and position of every subatomic particle in every object. He just needs to specify a set of physical-universe-generating rules.

But I can specify a set of mind-generating rules!

We can easily specify rules like:

1. Start with a very simple mind capable of experiencing one qualia

2. The original mind has the ability to cause itself to be able to experience one more qualia.¹

3. The original mind can cause other minds to exist and can increase or decrease the number of qualia they are able to perceive.

4. The original mind has the ability to put qualia in the other minds.

A simulation running these simple rules could generate a huge universe filled with billions of minds with rich sensory experiences, all controlled by a single infinite mind.

Conclusion

Atheist theories of the universe aren’t any simple than theistic explanations. In fact, the atheist explanations may be more complex since they require the existence of physical objects while some theistic ones don’t.

1. Important: I am NOT saying that God actually came into being this way. The concept of K-complexity refers to how one could write computer code to describe how to make something. It doesn’t matter whether the thing was actually made that way.