Complexity and Creation

This post is an extension of my previous comments on Emergent Complexity. In the aforementioned post, I talked about how sets of simple laws (or rules) can be combined to produce complex things. One of the implications of Emergent Complexity is that complexity itself does not necessarily suggest the existence of a designer - no single entity has to have a complete model of the object being produced in order for the object to exist. Individual laws and rules can produce amazing things without "knowing" anything about what they are doing.

For example, in Conway's Game of Life, collections of cells can form complex objects like gliders and pulsars. While these objects look like they were designed by someone or something, they really weren't. No entity inside the simulation knows that a glider was produced. No cell knows that it is part of a glider. It just happens that the rules of the simulation combine in a fashion that makes gliders and pulsars stable objects.

The real-world analog is that the existence of, say, a tree, does not necessarily suggest that the tree must have been designed by something intelligent. Like a glider in the Game of Life, a tree is a stable structure whose existence is made possible by the combination of a set of comparatively simple rules.

There is a common argument favoring Creationism that says that if something is complex, there must have been a designer. We stumble into a tree and say, "this tree is complex and ordered. It is hard to conceive that it is an 'accident'. It must have been designed. There must therefore be a God." The concept of emergent complexity demonstrates that there is a plausible alternative explanation. As marvelous and mind-boggling as it is, there needn't be a designer.

Let me clarify that I am not attacking Creationism itself. I only attack the arguments in its favor that simply don't hold water. My own religious views will surface in later posts, I'm sure.