We know what God does, because we can see the effects of His actions. We know something about what God knows, as you demonstrated that He must know everything, and that He must also the differences between the many individual parts.
What we don’t know is the nature of how He does these actions, or how He knows these facts. Despite the facts that His actions are complex and that His knowledge is complex, it could be that His nature, in and of Himself, is a simple one.
I think that was the point of CMKeller’s analogy. The hearing man and the deaf man both know that this key produces a high note, and that key produces a low note, but they arrive at this knowledge through totally different methods. In fact, whereas the hearing man is able to understand the deaf man’s method (watching or feeling the vibration of the string), the deaf man will find it difficult or impossible to understand the hearing man’s method of distingushing between high and low notes. Totally different methods of arriving at the same knowledge.
But let’s take it further. Let’s not forget that the deaf man will need to open up the piano to see the mechanical connections which cause the pressing of the key to make a hammer strike the string and cause the string to vibrate. This is a relatively complex Rube Goldberg device, if you think about it. In contrast, the hearing man merely needs to press a button on what is literally a black box, and a musical note is heard. Even a child can do it. A very non-complex method of determining whether this key produces a high or low note. Just listen.
If you want, you can argue that the hearing person has a complex set of auditory organs in his head, and that argument will indeed destroy this whole post. I’m just trying to show that since we do not know God’s internal workings, we really can’t presume that He is complex, merely because His manifestations are complex.
The point of my previous post was to say that the way something is perceived is irrelevant to the complexity of the being if the way the knowledge is represented to the being in its own brain/spirit is complex. God may have a very simple way of perceiving the world, i.e. obtaining knowlege of the world, but he will be complex if he “stores” that knowledge in a complex way. So I was really arguing that perception was irrelevant. I wanted to focus on knowledge.
The piano player and the deaf man both have the same fact in their brains. The fact is equally complex in their brains, regardless of their respective means of obtaining information of the world (although, obviously, the justification of their claims to have knowledge of the world would be different). So it would seem that God too, even if he has a totally different method of obtaining info on the world, would have knowledge of the world that would be as complex as that in the head of a human. If not, why so? — This question must be addresssed in terms of the way God KNOWS, i.e. represents knowledge to himself – not in terms of how he PERCEIVES/FINDS OUT about the world. This, again, is because a fact is the same fact regardless of HOW we come to believe it.
Now, could God represent knowledge in his brain/spirit/way-of-thinking in a simple way? See next post. Gotta run.
Suppose God created the universe through the big bang. He planned it though and through.
Now suppose his way of representing this plan to himself was a simple formula of set of formulas. A simple recipe that creates complexity from seemingly simple set of rules. Can we really get complexity from this formula? Can we get a universe that has variety and non-uniform parts? NO.
There have to be random elements in the “explosion” in order for the explosion not to simply expand out in all directions uniformly. This would create a perfectly smooth universe. If these random elements apply to the whole explosion, they will apply equally in all directions and then won’t really be random after all. They will apply everywhere. There has to be some difference in the way the explosion works in particular directions. There have to be at least some particular facts that are not present in a universal rule, or there can be no explanation for why the rule applies in one part of the explosion and not another. There has to be some particularity in the recipe to get particularity in the result.
Which random elements are built into the initial bang will determine the kind of universe we get. If God can be said to know and intend the kind of universe he gets from his creation, he must know what the random elements will do to the creation. He must somehow see the result. Maybe he perceives the result in an intuitive way – he does not have to run through every change in his head; rather, he immediately and instantaneously knows the result just by seeing the recipe. But then he does know the result. If he does not know the result, then his creation of the world is just an arbirary thing on his part. He just picks a formula, throws in a few random elements, and a world pops out. What is the difference between God doing this and a unthinking computer doing this, unless the results were important and chosen by a thinking being?
But I got side-tracked. The point of the random elements is this: each random element is different from the other. Each can be distinguished. Each has a different value. Each acts in a different direction. So there is some complexity, i.e. non-uniformity to the plan God makes. And accordingly, some non-uniformity in God.
I follow what you are saying. I simply disagree, that’s all. Maybe God can create variety despite being simple Himself. I’m not so sure it’s impossible.
Now, just to maintain some perspective and make sure that our terms are defined clearly, I had written (based on the standard Jewish philosophers)
Now, if you want to say that there is a contradiction between these concepts of “oneness” and “perfection” on the one hand, vs. the ability for such a God to create a complex universe, that’s your prerogative. Me, I’m not smart enough to say that it is impossible for these ideas to be compatible. Nor am I claiming to say that it makes a whole lot of sense either. It’s just not a big enough problem (to me) to make a noticable dent in my belief.
Perfection is a value judgment. There is a fact/value distinction. This means that no conclsusion regarding value can be logically derived from a set of premises that contain only fact statements. There must already be a value statement among the premises for the value conclusion to be derived from the premises. So the conclusion that God is perfect cannot be derived from facts about God alone – there must already be a premise that places value on simplicity for one to conclude that God can be perfect only if he is simple. The value placed on simplicity must be subjective, since the value statement to the effect that simplicity is good cannot be derived from facts about the world or God…
I agree totally. Perfection is not a conclusion which can be reached by looking merely at the facts.
But, logically speaking, God’s perfection can be an axiom which is accepted as a starting point, from which other conclusions can be drawn. One such conclusion can be this idea of simplicity.
Any individual can choose to accept or reject that axiom. I’m just suggesting where it fits into the logical scheme of things.
Certainly (in the Orthodox Jewish understanding) G-d knows about the differences in our world. How G-d interacts with the physical world is something that is beyond our ability to fully understand. However, the issue of time is another one that makes our understanding of G-d’s nature difficult. According to (Orthodox) Jewish belief, G-d is timeless as well. So how he perceives our time-dimensioned existence is something that our time-limited minds are not structured to comprehend.
But I did think of another analogy (I seriously hope you’re not getting tired of these) that might do a better job of demonstrating the simplicity within the complexity (so to speak). You know that the theory of relativity states that space is warped by mass. Light always travels in a straight line across space, but the presence of mass makes space itself bend. This gives us the perception that the light itself bent around an object of great mass. The path of the light thus seems complex to us. However, to the light beam itself, the path is not complex. It is a simple, straight line.
By the same token, the complexity that is apparent in the physical world is due to the way physical senses perceive it. To a non-physical being, the “warping” effect of physicality (and physical time) gives a simple, but still correct, perception.
I have no problem with the idea that God exists outside of OUR time. That is, that he can see all events in our universe’s history, from beginning to end, as one thing, as a “block universe” (Einstein’s term??).
But surely he must exist in some time, albeit not OUR time. After all, the world is the effect of God’s cause. God’s plan, design for the world is CAUSALLY explanatory of God’s creating the world in one way rather than another. The design is the cause, the world created is the effect. I cannot fathom how cause and effect could exist without time. That is not to say that causes must always precede effects, since, as I have argued elsewhere, reverse temporal causation is not always paradoxical or problematic and could even exist in limited forms in our world. But what I mean is that cause and effect are always seperated by time, whichever direction (past to future of future to past). I don’t see how we can explain God’s creative activity without positing a time for God to act in, even if it is a time outside of our time.
We could say that we just don’t understand God and his ways, but the less we understand about the worg "“God” when we utter it, the less meaningful the concept is to us. So we aren’t really making much of a claim when we posit the existtence of God if we know nothing about it. We are not doing much more than saying there is something about the world that is real big that we don’t understand. And this is beyond dispute.
You examples remind me that when I posed the original question I had serious qualms about the concept of complexity. Is complexity an objective, measurable, thing, or is it just subjective, i.e. perspectival? How does one quantify complexity? If complexity is not measurable, how can it be used meaningfully in the argument from design?
My instinct tells me that there is such a thing as complexity, but all I can say is I know it when I see it.
If you can show that complexity, life, arise automatically from the nature of the universe…
If you can show that everything that we think, feel, experience arises from the physical interactions of different pieces of our brain and input from the environment…
If you can show that at the sub-atomic level, simple, elegant mathematics gives rise to, in fact demands the sort of universe that we ulitmately experience…
If you can show that the UNIVERSE is in fact so vast, split into so many pieces that things that appear arbitrary in fact are arbitrary. That every possible scenario is in fact played out somewhere…
Then where is God? Where is the personal God who knows your name?
As we start to understand how things really are, perhaps we should spend our time thinking how we want to affect the world, not about who designed it or how.
You’re 100% right. That’s why Judaism says nothing about the subject of G-d other than that which is written in the Torah, which (Orthodox) Jews believe our ancestors heard (more or less) from G-d himself at Sinai. If not for what G-d himself revealed to us (or so we believe), his nature would be entirely unknowable and unknown to us. Instead, we are left with certain facts about himself that he revealed to us, and within those parameters, we must either find our answers to our wonderings about him or accept that some understandings about the divine are simply not attainable by beings of physical limitations.
We may be touching upon a reason for why Judaism places comparatively more emphasis on actions, and comparatively less on beliefs:
It is possible (at least in theory) for one to do all the correct actions and avoid all the incorrect ones, but it is not possible (even in theory) to achieve a complete and accurate understanding of that which is above us. We can - and should! - try for as much as we can in those areas, but we must also realize that there will always be areas where our understanding is lacking. As G-d told Moses, “I’ll show you My back, but you cannot see My face.”