Complexity is an issue with which we humans have a bit of trouble. Well, okay, it's just ANOTHER issue with which we struggle - along with (for example) that whole Being or Not To Being thing - but it's enough to go on with for the moment. Anyone who has seriously looked into atomic theory and chemistry should be able to appreciate how complex things are at a basic scale, and anyone who has studied a bit of biology is likely to be amazed - and confused - at the complex interactions in even the simplest systems.

I've offered some simple experiments in previous articles, but I'm afraid that might not do the trick this time. Analogies are useful in their comparative powers, and the simplicity they can bring to complex issues, but this time we're going to explore the issue at hand directly.

Find a spot where you can sit a moment and look at people - the more, the better - walking or driving past and living their lives. Take a moment and think about your own past. Think about your second grade teacher, that time you got caught looking at the underwear section of the JC Penny's magazine by your parents, the taste of the first microwave burrito you ever ate, the smell of the lunch you had a week-and-a-half ago, the smell you associate with rain, the third best sunrise you can remember, a difficult decision you put off before being forced to go one way or the other. Try to grasp the changes you went through in your entire life, how much of a jerk you may or may not have been as a teenager, how well adjusted you may or may not be now, how you are going to grow old - if you're lucky - and die.

Got all that? nothing controversial there, and nothing controversial in the next step either.

Now look at the people walking past you. Remember the people who went by while you were busy mentally grappling with the entirety of your own life. Think about how many people had to have gone that way before you got there, and how many will pass after you go home for some lunch. They all have lives easily as complicated and complex as your own - many, likely, much more complex. Every single person there was born, had parents (biological, if not nurturing), will die. Every last person you saw - and didn't see - passing by is descended from a very long line of people, all of whom met people, made love, lived, died, ate, had bad gas sometimes, helped other people, occasionally did something out of spite, probably liked apple pie - if they ever tried it, hummed a ditty on their way home, and more than likely at one point or another ask themselves "why me?!". Every one of them has twisting and winding personal histories, intermingling with others' in a manner that we can only try to picture. Every. Single. One.

Not enough? I agree. Too much, you say? Tough, says I! You can take a break from people for a minute, though. Instead, take a real close look at your hand. See that line on your palm? Not that one, the one below it... yeah, there you go. Know what that line means? I do. It means your skin fold there often enough to form a crease! No, seriously, there's a point. Look a little closer at that crease. See the network of creases and folds, interacting with the natural, unique pattern on your palm? Try to focus on a single intersection of crease and natural ridge. How closely can you see? I'm having trouble focusing on a single intersection while typing, but that's just as well. Most of us have to rely on imagination from here on out. How many skin cells do you think are in that little crease/ridge intersection? I don't know either, but I'm sure it's a pretty big number - I know there are at least a few layers of skin, and each of those layers is more than a couple layers of skin cells deep. Now, how many atoms do you think are in those skin cells? I still don't know, but it's more than a couple million. I mean, think about a chromosome - made up of twisted DNA strands, which are themselves made up of of thousands of individual atoms. Each of those atoms, too small for us to have any more than a general analogy for what they really look like, are shaking and shimmying in their own unique way, surrounded by blurs of probable locations of electrons hula-hooping their ways around each atom like nothing we can truly picture. Now, lets keep that atom-idea and "zoom" our perspective out again, adding that level of complexity into the equation of skin cells, keeping the complication as we pull back to our visible world again. Our skin seethes and boils impreceptibly, while we live out our days in blissful near-ignorance.

Okay, now we're starting to get to the crux of what I mean by complexity. Take the two portions, the extrapolation out from ourselves and the interspective journey to the atom, and multiply them. Can you picture it? Can you see how the whole thing works together, bound up in our minute corner of the universe?

Neither can I.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I have a sense of it - so do you, probably. We can have an impression of what complexity means, but the accumulated knowledge of humanity isn't much more than an approximation of the extent of reality. It's all so complex, how can there not be something guiding it? Doesn't the expression go "god is in the details!"? It's just so tempting to put it all in his hands, isn't it?

No, it isn't.

The postulation of a supernatural entity that watches over all this is exactly what we don't need - a simplification. Claiming that a god did it all, and watches over it all, may have worked when humanity didn't really know what was going on, but we don't have that excuse now. We don't have the luxury of believing that there's some being more complex than the sum complexity of every atom in the entire universe - to say nothing of ideas of Dark Matter, alternative universes and extra dimensions  - that watches over everything, but still cares on which side your bread is buttered and intervenes to grant you (or the other person) help in pulling Scrabble letters. We have a responsibility to acknowledge the natural complexity of everything, explicitly or implicitly, by setting aside our egocentric postulations of a ever-present, overbearing know-it-all who at one time cared whether we ate bacon. It is a cop-out to claim that a supernatural agent is maintaining anything, let alone everything.

This isn't enough of a response. I can hear it now (mostly because I have heard it, many times): "How can you look at the complexity of it all, life and the universe and everything, and not see god's almighty hand?" For the short version, feel free to read my responses to the argumenst from improbability and incredulity, for the long version I can strongly recommend the collected works of Dennet, Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, Hawking, Gould, and many others. I have deliberately attempted to avoid their arguments in these little articles not only because they state their own cases better than I ever could, but also because I much prefer to write my own work, rather than rewording anothers' points. I do, however, have one final point to make on this subject - and you don't even have to go anywhere!

The central point of christianity is that god is responsible for everything - all of reality, life, etc. God's hand, otherwise undetectable by anything other than feelings and faith, can supposedly be seen in everything. So, on one side of an equation we have god, and on the other side we see god's hand working in everything, something like this

god = life*god + universe*god + everything*god

We can rearrange it thus:

god = god(life + universe + everything)

divide both sides by god, and we get:

1 = life + universe + everything

convert to precentages:

life + universe + everything = 100%

Ergo, no need for god. Q.E.D.

...What, it's the same thing you guys do with Revelations, isn't it?

(Originally posted at http://www.thisisby.us/index.php/content/argument_from_complexity )