Complicated things can arise from simple rules in lots of ways.
E.g. the Mandelbrot set [1]
arises from very simple rules and gives rise to
The pattern of birds flying in formation similarly arises from simple rules and is quite complex.
Agent based models can mimic complex patterns such as traffic jams with very simple rules.
Stephen Wolfram in A New Kind of Science showed how cellular automata can give rise to very complicated patterns indeed. Earlier work in this realm was done by James Horton Conway in the famous game of life, whose rules are prepsoterously simple but lead to amazing behavior.
In addition, while it’s true that the key thing that started the whole evolutionary bush has not been fully explained, it was not that complicated and steps towards explaining the first replicator have been taken. Once you get replication with error (but not too much error) the whole thing takes off.
Footnotes
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The basic issue is whether something so complicated can occur randomly and the basic answer is YES! Science has shown this over and over, but it took many centuries for them to figure this out.
One of the best examples of how complexity can arise from random interaction of simple components came from some early specialists in economics (I believe it was Adam Smith), although they were trying to answer a different question, namely whether an economy could thrive if it lacked central governance. The example used was this: consider the city of Paris, France as it existed in, say, 1800. It had no central governing entity that controlled everything that happened. There was a rudimentary governing structure (by today’s standards) but it certainly didn’t control all the details and those details were not designed to be that way. Yet somehow a collection of many hundreds of thousands of people had their daily needs met for food, shelter and clothing in a system that arose from each individual person looking out for his or her own self interest. Someone decided he could make a living by bringing food to the city from a farm, someone else decided he could make a living by repairing shoes, and so forth and so on. Each individual did what was best for him or her self but somehow the net effect was a complex system that enabled a huge number of people to survive and, indeed, most would thrive.
The point of this example and of many others that have been devised since, is that it is quite possible for a very complex entity to arise out of the activities of a large number of less complex entities, without a significant amount of central planning and control or design.
A more modern example is the internet and the internet economy. The internet was designed to be a very simple communication system and is “controlled” in a very limited way, but the larger internet economy is certainly not controlled, nor was it designed, nor did it arise from any sort of intelligent designer. Note also that the designers of the original internet are far from “almighty” when it comes to the internet. They do not control how it is used or misused and most of the consequences of the internet are things they never imagined would happen.
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First, the laws of chemistry aren’t random - there’s no Ferric Aluninate. Changes in environment - what natural selection takes advantage of - occur at random (no one could have predicted the Chicxulub meteor much before it struck), but changes in molecules aren’t random. A combination that can’t exist, even if the two chemicals come together, won’t form a compound. There are rules (not rules set up by a god, but an electron-provider can’t form a compound with another electron-provider - that makes as much sense as “getting taller by walking up a hill” does), and chemicals follow them (why? because that’s how things work).
Environments don’t. If Chicxulub hadn’t wiped out the remaining dinosaurs (and if they weren’t already on their way out, which they were) we might have evolved from therapods. But we still wouldn’t have Ferric Aluminate in our bodies.
Considering the number of planets in the Goldilocks Zone that have oxygen atmospheres (and we’ve barely started to look), either life just occurs where conditions are right (there are amino acids on icy comets - why would a god put them there?), or God had a lot of fun creating life on tens of thousands (millions? billions?) of worlds. “It happens” is the much simpler explanation. Adding a god, with all the contradictory assertions about it, just complicates things unnecessarily (which is exactlywhat Occam warned us about).
(I still want to know why any god would create life on icy comets.)
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Why isn't life enough proof for atheists that God exists?
Because order does not imply a creator. Otherwise we would have to assume that snowflakes were carved into little blocks of ice by snow fairies with little chisels.
How can something so complicated occur randomly?
How the first, very simple life came into existence up to today remains one of the big questions of science. We have some ideas but so far were not able to come to a convincing conclusion. From the moment the first simple life existed the rest was evolution. The Volkswagen metaphor, that somehow billions of parts fell into place and a human came to life, is a silly, deliberately oversimplified thought experiment to favor the god claim.
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Life on earth is indeed mindbogglingly complex.But,consider the fact that life originated on earth around 4 billion years ago.The earliest evidence for life on Earth comes from fossilized mats of cyanobacteria called stromatolites in Greenland that are about 3.7 billion years old.
The structure of the cyanobacterium doesn't seem too complex, does it?Now,it is still fairly complicated,mind you,but compared to human beings,it's heaps simpler.(Due to its fairly complex biological structure scientists think life must have begun much earlier. In fact, there are hints of life in even more primeval rocks: 4.1-billion-year-old zircons from Western Australia contain high amounts of a form of carbon typically used in biological processes.But cyanogenbacteria work for my argument as well.)
And this is where Darwin's theory of natural selection comes in.We,humans and all other beautiful and complex life on earth are the result of billions of years of evolution.Now,it's highly improbable for bacteria to evolve into a humans in a single step.But,there have been millions of intermediate life forms,each slightly more complex than the previous.Each of these small steps are slightly improbable but not prohibitively so.When,each of these steps are stacked together the end products are exceedingly improbable,seemingly impossible for us to understand the eons of evolution that has gone in creating these life forms.
The beauty of Darwin's theory of natural selection is that it allows the creation of complex life forms from simple life forms.And that eliminates the need of intelligent design and hence,God.
References
- The God delusion by Richard Dawkins
- How Did Life Arise on Earth?
- Structure of Cyanobacteria (Blue Green Algae)
You’re in luck, because someone has actually written a detailed and closely researched book explaining how the numerous and varied forms of life came into being. Here it is:
I know that it’s only been around for 150 years, but if you manage to fit it into your reading list you’ll find it very informative and useful.
You’ll also learn why, when you frame questions about evolution and the origin of life using words like ‘randomly’ and ‘chance’, most people reading your question will assume immediately that you have no genuine knowledge of the subject, and that you are unlikely to be worth debating.
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Two questions here.
Why isn't life enough proof for atheists that God exists?
Because life isn’t enough proof of anything than life itself.
But even if it were proof of anything else, why should be it proof of your god? Why not proof of any other other god? Or proof of aliens from a higher dimensional universe?
Does life have a copyright mark anywhere that says “God did it”?
Until we find that copyright mark it is safe to assume that God didn’t did it, even if he did it.
How can something so complicated occur randomly.
Ah, but it didn’t occur randomly. That’s what you believe. That’s what some people made you believe. That’s a lie.
But life didn’t occurred randomly. It occurred following the precise and unrandom laws that rule chemical reactions.
The closer thing to your statement is that the chemical reactions needed for life to occur are highly unlikely to happen if are not given certain precise particular environmental conditions.
Which were these precise particular environmental conditions and why they happened on Earth are to questions nobody has the answer yet. But scientists have pretty good guesses that could serve as provisional answers and none of these provisional answers involve a deity of any kind and all of them involve physical and chemical reactions of some kind.
So unless you find the copyright mark saying “God did it”, assuming a deity as the origin of life is the laziest option, since it is an antianswer that stops any search, any discussion, any human curiosity.
“God did it” is a satisfactory answer for a rock or other inanimate object. Anything else with more brain power than a rock isn’t satisfied with “God did it” as an answer, because lifeforms are curious and want to know the truth and they are not happy with an antianswer like that.
Because that is what we call an argument from incredulity. A person’s lack of knowledge on a subject has no bearing on the any other proposition as an explanation on said topic.
You, apparently, don’t seem to understand the theory of evolution. You might not be well versed on various fields of science and if you are like many creationists you probably don’t even know what the definition of a “theory” is when it comes to science.
Biology isn’t random. It in fact is very ordered. If it wasn’t we wouldn’t be around. Even changes that get propagated through the generations don’t tend to be random. What is random is mutation. But what how that happens isn’t even always “random” either.
Life has had over 3.5 billion years to evolve on this planet. The evidence for evolution is as solid as the evidence for gravity. To boot many of the mechanisms for evolution are known and well understood. The same can’t be said for gravity. Yet I don’t hear any creationist complain that gravity couldn’t exist with out any gods. I’m sure some would try but really…
In stead of listening to clergy that don’t have any real expertise in the subject, and obviously have a bias against the reality, I would suggest you do one of 2 things. Learn about biology and evolution. Learn what the theory actually says. Learn the evidences we have for it. Then if you have a problem with a portion of the theory come up with a better explanation with evidence to back up your explanation. Do it in a manner that that others, independently from your world view can test your explanation. Then you’ll be doing science. Or skip the learning if it doesn’t interest you but then you need to just accept the current mainstream theories as the current best explanation for the current observations. Before anyone complains that is an “argument from authority” fallacy it isn’t. It isn’t an argument from authority if it is the consensus of the experts in the relative field.
Finally it is VERY bad theology to claim evolution couldn’t happen. Not only is it denying observable facts but it is a pronouncement that your god isn’t good enough to have created this universe and have it unfold as it predicted without constant meddling. It would make your god weak and stupid.
Finally I’ll leave with my favorite Saint Augustine quote from over 1,500 years ago.
“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For them, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”
The original question is:
Answer:
Someone’s ability to ask a question about a complicated subject does not entail the universe to have physically created the avatar of that complicated subject, as if to justify the correctness of that question. Life exists. That fact does not of itself mean that something, called “God,” must have created it.
By the way, if “God” exists, then there must be something that must have created it. And if something that created “God” exists, then …
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A god doesn’t explain complexity. It only makes the problem greater. You certainly don't explain the existence of complexity by hypothesizing an even greater complexity which created it. That path leads only to either infinite regression or the insanity of that even greater complexity just existing for no reason at all, neither of which are logically appealing. Instead complexity is easily explained by selection processes, the selection of a complex part from a simple whole. What explains complexity is Selection in a multiverse. Selection is not random but the furthest thing from randomness.
Large sets are often far more simple than subsets. For instance the set of all integers is extremely simple. You can write a single line of computer code to represent them. Yet there exists single integers that would not fit on all the hard drives on all the computers on the planet. It is quite possible that all possible universes are the result of a simple rule yet the vast majority of individual universes are extremely complex.
Apparent complexity is the outstanding issue in explaining reality. The mathematical theory of Kolmogorov complexity tells us that a designing algorithm must be at least as complex as its output. Therefore a designer god can never explain the complexity we observe, it only results in even greater complexity.Now you have to explain a god which is even more complex than the universe you were trying to explain in the first place. You have made the problem bigger not smaller. On the other hand selection can easily explain the complexity we see. The mathematics of fractals and cellular automata ( see Wolfram’s Rule 110 as a simple example) shows us a infinite extremely simple set can have extremely complex subsets and a selection effect ( our existence for example ) can select one of those complex subsets, because only in one of those complex subsets can beings such as ourselves evolve.
Therefore the answer to the complexity conundrum is not a god, but an infinite and extremely simple reality which happens to have complex subsets which look like matter energy space and time when seen from within those subsets.
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Some atheists understand large numbers and probability. Given enough chances over enough time, even extremely unlikely things will happen. I wrote about this here.
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While complexity, and even life itself, might be consistent with some creative force or a creator, consistency alone is not proof of any particular cause, or of anything at all, really.
And bear in mind that the idea of complexity is a human concept. That we say something is complex, or orderly, or lacking in any order does not make it so. Basically, these notions refer more to our own capacity to understand than they do to the things we attempt to understand. The Pythagorean theorem may be beyond the comprehension of a pre-schooler, but completely within the comprehension of a junior high school student. Its the same idea, either way, even though it is understood differently depending on how much one knows about math.
The most any of us can say about the world around us is, “that it is what it is.” Even the idea of “enough proof” resolves to some individual idea about what is “enough.” You evidently think that the existence of life, or of ourselves, is “enough proof.” Some atheists obviously don’t agree.
This does not mean, and cannot mean, that the atheist view (that there is no God, or that there is insufficient proof of god) is necessarily any proof that there is no god; it simply means that many atheists say there is no proof, satisfactory to them. Lacking proof, satisfactory to them, they’re not buying it. A reasonable position.
I personally think that the existence of God is not less probable than my own existence. That might give some logical permission for God, but is far from proof; it simply means that whatever proof or evidence there is, which is satisfactory me, will run along other lines of thought. I personally don’t accept complexity or the appearance of design as evidence, because complexity and design are human ideas. They may indeed be “god-given” notions (and I believe that they are) but in and of themselves, they prove nothing.
All that said, it lies with each of us to determine for ourselves what constitutes “enough.” Many (by no means all) believers have considered enough of what they observe or what makes sense to them to conclude that god either is, or is probable. Many atheists have also run through the same deck and said either “not yet,” or “never.”
I think that’s about as good as it gets. The most we can hope for is to honestly and reasonably explain why we think what we think. At the same time, we should not imagine that others will be as impressed by our thoughts as are we.
Hope that helps.
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Try looking at this from another perspective: How can something so complex and complicated be designed? Have you ever read about evolution? No, not listened to some pastor or creationist lecture you about why creationism is right and evolution is a lie created by anti-religious atheists.
If you actually read and study about evolution you will soon see how viable this is as a logical explanation for where life came from. Are there gaps in the evolutionary chain? Of course. But once you really delve into the study and see what Darwin discovered you’ll start to see how all the parts of the puzzle come together.
Now think from the other perspective. Look at how amazingly complex life and the universe actually is. It isn’t even a possibility that anything this complex could have been created or constructed by anything other than natural processes.
Do we have all the answers? No, we don’t. Not even close. But just because science can’t answer a question doesn’t mean the by default it must have been created by some hyper intelligent being. That in and of itself is completely illogical and irrational.
Take a look outside and really look at the world we live in. Life is an amazing thing which evolved randomly over billions of years through natural elimination of poorly developed species allowing those with natural advantages to continue and flourish.
Our climate system is equally complex. So complex that the world’s greatest minds and most advanced computers still can’t fathom all its idiosyncrasies. Another example of nature working its own little miracles. Yet everything comes together to form a holistic environment which promoted life.
Thinking that some being created this is not only beyond the realms of probability but cheapens natures beauty and all the wonder that entails. For me life itself is actually proof that God doesn’t exist.
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Well, imagine that you hold the winning lottery ticket. And imagine that I’m a reporter, doing a poll of a hundred holders of winning lottery tickets. The first question I ask you, and every other lottery ticket holder is, do you hold a winner lottery ticket?
EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU ANSWERS YES.
Not one holder of a winning lottery ticket turns out not to hold a winning lottery ticket.
What are the odds? I mean, the odds against winning the lottery are nearly a billion to one, and yet not merely one of you, nor even two, but all hundred lottery winners has each won the lottery.
Imagine you’re a life form, sentient enough to ask the question, how can I be alive, when life is so rare?
The answer, in both cases is the same. We selected a group where the answer had to be yes.
It doesn’t matter what the odds are of something, once it has happened, that’s what happened.
There is a very nicely worked out theory for how life may have happened, and in particular how the degree of complexity we observe may have arisen out of simpler forms. But that’s not really important to answer your question.
Views · View UpvotesBecause we have this thing called science.
Particle+Astro physics explains how we went from nothingness to stars and planets, moons, asteroids, …
Chemistry explains how we went from basic chemicals like CH4, H2O, CO2, N2+high radiation+thunderstorms to the first aminoacids, then randomly trying a humongous sets of combinations until the first bacteria came to be.
The Theory of Evolution takes it from there. Until we have men, apes, horses, trees, …
Meanwhile you’re trying to shove it down our throats that since life exists, hence god exists.
Do you realize how arrogant you are ?
Do you understand that with your ignorant view of the world, there would be NO medicine, doctors, advanced agriculture to feed 7 billion people, electricity and the complete electrical grid. With god alone, we would be ignorant people killing each other every day cause there wouldn’t be enough food for us to live, there would be no medicine to heal us, no internet / public voice communications to talk, …
In 500 years the world went from hardly any scientific knowledge to understanding everything we need to know to substantially improve our lives.
Your faith is USELESS to the real world. It contributes NOTHING to allowing us to live better lives.
Go understand science and try again, and you’ll probably try creationism, which has been debunked a million times as it doesn’t fit scientific data in thousands of ways.
The universe is almost 14 billion years old. Earth is nearly 4 billion years old, there was at least a full billion years old from no life on earth to the first bacteria. Yep, a billion years is more than enough time for life to start our of basic organic compounds.
Religion kills people by the thousands every day. Look at the middle east and the very place where your Jesus was born. Its a basket case of senseless killing, cause from the old testament we got three conflicting religions, christiany, judaism and islam. They all must be talking about the same god, since their roots come from the same basic religious book, yet they all kill each other, cause each one of them think they’re righteous and the other isn’t.
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The problem is- how do you know specifically that god was the one who created life? Which god? Every religious scripture has its own life- creating deities, and every religious scripture is equal in proof in comparison to another religious scripture.
So how do you know it's not a unicorn, Zeus, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Cthulhu, or lord Kelzor, fifth son of the stars and third daughter of the galaxies?
Their are far too many “gods” that can be proven with this logic, and yet each religion states it is the truth and all others are a lie.
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