"The Designer must be more complex than the design"?

Question

What are your thoughts on this argument?

Answer 1

xanthrop's presentation is great! The people who gave him the thumbs down show a great lack of respect for his effort.
I am sure he could have even given more information that is more precise yet than what he presented if he deemed it to be necessary.

Bravo to Silver for the short but concise answer.

A better way of saying what Eleventy was trying to say could be that God's creation is so complex that it proves His superiority to created beings because not one of us has ever done anything close to what God has. Further His creativity is so complex that it clearly shows evidence of who He is and what He can do as far as He wishes to reveal Himself to us.

We need to be reminded over and over again that humans are very finite (limited) and God is infinite (unlimited). To believe that we can somehow understand or know Him apart from divine revelation is absurd! II Corinthians 1:14

By the way, Nobody designed the designer. God is the only uncreated being in the universe. He never had a beginning and He will never have an end. Infinite - Remember?!

I never cease to be amazed at those who come in here with their intellectualism and try to phase God out of existence because they have somehow found a way to rationalize what they believe. God works beyond human reason and rationale
because he far exceeds the human mind in scope! The more
people try to intellectualize God the farther they go from the truth. God will never be understood by your human ramblings
irrespective of how learned you may believe yourself or others
to be. He is revealed by faith only! Your intellect can't grasp faith because it doesn't fall into the human realm of understanding apart from a revelation of God Himself!

Ramble on until you drop dead from exhaustion, study until your mind is a blurred wasteland of useless data that refutes God, and in the end you will find you are less wise than the smallest child who simply believes "Jesus Loves Me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so."

Answer 2

First some definitions: By complexity I mean what mathematicians call Kolmogrov Compexity ( The minimal size of the description needed to uniquely generate a system ).

If a designing system A uniquely generates a system B. Then A constitutes a description of B. so yes A must be at least as complex as B. The key word here is uniquely System A could use trial and error and provided you had a selection mechanism you could end up with a more complex system B. This is how evolution works or neural network programming for that matter.

The problem with theism is that the more complex a system is, the more ways it could be other than it is, so in the absence of an external contextual mechanism the less likely it is.

So unless your designer worked by trial and error, presupposing a designer just leads to a bigger problem than one has to begin with.

In the real world complexity must therefore ultimately arise not from design but from trial and error. Reality must be vast and chaotic and the selection mechanism which selects the wonderful region we find ourself in is our own existence.

An example of this is the Wolframs rule 110 which is extremely simple since it can be defined with one line of computer code. Yet within that output it has been mathematically proven that one can select infinite local complexity. The finding of that complexity however requires trial and error and a selection mechanism.

Answer 3

First, you may have noticed that this section "religion and spirituality" comes under the general category of "Society & Culture", not Science, Scientific Thought, Science & Reason, or Scientific Studies. With that in mind, you might want to look at things like the complexity of a tornado, a quartz crystal, patterns of cracks on the dry bed lakes of many desert like areas of the world, a spider's web, a geode, or the intricacies of cobwebs that accumulate in the corners of a dusty room, and compare them with the large scale structure of the universe, designs of some of the greatest architects in the world, some very intricate islamic designs and walls, or the output of the computer program "Chaos" (the mendlebrot set for example) which is simply the design made by plotting out a mathematical formula on paper. There are such rich & deep similarities, yet, are all of these things the result of a 'personal designer' that had a specific design plan in mind that he or she worked out, or are some of them just the random result of principles and forces at work in the universe when certain conditions are met in the natural world ? Order and design come out of both minds planning them and randomness. Therefore to say 'design implies a designer' is incorrect.

Answer 4

It sounds like it needs proof. On face value, it sound reasonable but as far as I know there is nothing to dictate that a designer must be more complex than the design, not to mention that it doesn't define what the designer is more complex in.

Answer 5

That's not so much an argument as an assertion. It would be an argument if you showed how one can arrive at this premise. Otherwise, it's just an unsupported statement.

Is there any reason to necessarily think that a "designer" must be more complex than a "design?"

Answer 6

We have invented super-computers that can process millions of instructions at a time; multi-threading is a marvel of electronics - yet for all their processing power the best computer cannot beat the best human chess player.

The computer, and the universe, for all their complexity are examples of organized systems. Logic and science tells us that all organized systems eventually fail. Do you quit "working" or "being" when something you make fails ?
No. Therefore, you must be more complex.

Psa 102:24 I said, O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days: thy years [are] throughout all generations.
Psa 102:25 Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens [are] the work of thy hands
Psa 102:26 They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed:
Psa 102:27 But thou [art] the same, and thy years shall have no end.

Answer 7

Obviously, if it's a design we're talking about.

Whether the universe was designed or not is a philosophical question, but if it was, it begs the question of who designed the designer, and so on. The further you look, the deeper the mystery.

Answer 8

This tells us nothing that can't be applied to an endless list of comparable items/entities. Obviously the man who makes a watch is more complex than the watch.

Tautologies. The final refuge of the clueless.

Answer 9

Yeah But in here people would rather follow the

DESIGN rather than the DESIGNER

It's been prophesied Rm 1:25... they will follow the
design (man) rather than the DESIGNER (GOD)

Answer 10

The design is a mirrored image of the designer.