huckelberry wrote:Marg, I am refering back to your quote of Dawkins argument. Now I think Dawkins is a smart fellow and this particular observation I believe to be dead right.
" His argument is that simplicity precedes complexity in all our observations of the universe. We don't know the probability of our universe and of it being favorable to life."
Now instead of following Dawkins insight it sounds like you are proposing that simplicity and complexity all must follow from an even greater complexity. I do not think Dawkings would agree. Just because his observation was preceeded by leading Christian thinkers over the past two thousand years does not mean Dawkins is wrong. He is voicing an astute observation about the role of complexity.
At the time I wrote that I had thought Dawkins was including physics as beng complex, as I remember If I recall correctly him talking about our sun being only 2 elements hydrogen and helium but that heavier elements were made via nuclear fusion by hotter stars..at least that's my recollection. So I was thinking even at the atomic level..lighter weight elements are simpler than heavier ones and likely preceded heavier elements. However that may not be what he meant, because having read chapter 1 in The Blindwatchmaker in which he discusses what he means by complexity..essentially he is referring to biological matter and machines made by biological entities he's not referring to physics at the atomic level or smaller..he considers that simple as opposed to complex. So the following are some quotes and some paraphrasing from Ch 1 of the Blindwatchmaker on what he means by complexity. by the way as far as your comment that I'm proposing "simplicity and complexity follow from an even greater complexity", I have no idea where or why you picked that up, it isn't something I said.
Complexity defined and discussed by Dawkins in Blindwatchmaker ch 1.:
Things which have the appearance of design for a purpose..includes biological matter and machines made by biological entities..as opposed to the the raw physical material going into the entities..which do not have intricate working parts.
Paley understood complexity of living world demands a special kind of explanation.
A complex thing has a heterogeneous structure…a complex object has many parts, those parts being of more than one kind as opposed to a simple thing. This is a necessary component but not a sufficient component,
…”complicated things have some quality, specifiable in advance that is highly unlikely to have been acquired by random chance alone.”
Laws of physics are not violated in living matter at the cell level.
A complex thing not understood, can be understood in terms of looking at simpler parts which may be understood.
“The physicist’s problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist’s problem is the problem of complexity. The biologist tries to explain the workings, and the coming into existence of complex things, in terms of simpler things. He can regard his task as done when he has arrived at entities so simple that they can safely be handed over to physicists.
huckelberry wrote:Should I belabor this? Consider omnipotence. The only way such a bizarre power could be consider possible is if the potency underlay the very existence of all the complexity it is supposed to have power over. There is now way a being inside the universe is going to develope complexity to gain power over that universe. The very idea is absurd. Similarly no matter how complex a brain becomes it has no potetial of being all knowing. Complexity does increase power indefinately at some point complexity burdens function and limits power and does not increase.
I haven't suggested any entity in reality exists and is omnipotent..so I don't understand what you are saying.
