Dawkins, Functional Complexity & Divine Ideas

I just returned from a great little talk at the Oxford Graduate Christian Union, being held at the Mitre Pub on High Street, where a Reverend Dr. Patrick Richmond gave a talk entitled "Swinburne vs. Dawkins: Is God Simple or Complex?" The talk was quite fascinating, as it covered Dawkins' argument against the probability of there being a God of any sort. The basic argument is this: any mind that could create the immense complexity in the world must itself be immensely complex. And we know from the world that any immensely complex thing cries out for an explanation as to how it was constructed, due to the fact that the more complex something is, the more improbable is its existence. Compare: the probability of complex molecules being created is quite low, due to the fact that millions and billions of elementary causal interactions between more fundamental particles could occur without such molecules being created.

In short, the argument is pretty bad. As Swinburne points out, God is not complex at all - He is actually infinitely ontologically simple. Not only this, but Dawkins' argument only extends to the statistical improbability of various material things coming together to create some materially complex thing. Any attempt to extend this to some sort of complexity in the Divine Mind (think: God's infinite knowledge of all possible worlds) yet seems rather ad hoc. As Richmond nicely pointed out in his talk, God's accumulated mass of ideas isn't a kind of complexity that seems to cry out for analysis - not, at least, by Dawkins' standards. According to Dawkins, only 'functional complexity' is in desperate need of explanation - things like watches and the human eye - but things that are complex but nevertheless functionally inert do not. Richmond's insight was to hold that the Divine Ideas are complex, but not for all of that forming a kind of system that cries out for explanation of their design; although, calling them 'non-functional' is probably quite the misnomer.

But I did ask a question of Richmond that I thought to be particularly sanguine to the discussion, one that may put the leverage back on the Dawkins side of things. To be clear, the original argument that Dawkins proposes is ghastly unacceptable. But if we explain things in the manner that Richmond and Swinburne opt for, we may yet be in a position that is open to more "But who designed that!?"-type criticisms. Consider, for example, the account that the Theist needs to give of God's knowledge of the possibilities of things. Presumably, this will come about in the classical form of God's knowledge of the essences of things - that is, God knows all of the possibilities of things in virtue of having a perfect knowledge of the essences of all things.

But although this is a seemingly acceptable answer, consider what kinds of things essences must be. They must be the objects of Divine Thoughts - or, alternatively, just the Divine Thoughts themselves. They must be simple things. But they must also somehow contain an exhaustive list of the entirety of the possible properties of the thing whose essence they are. For instance, God peers into the essence of me and notices that I could have been a fisherman or could have died in my infancy and the rest of the lot of potential world-careers I might have pursued or not pursued. Now all of this is fine, theologically speaking.

But there may yet be the further worry that although we have posited a simple object of Divine Knowledge, we have yet introduced another kind of complexity that itself cries out for explanation. For the essences of things are not only infinitely complex, but they also involve certain limits for possible values. Consider the essence of Adam - that is, the first man. Is it not part of the essence of Adam to eat of the fruit of the tree? Perhaps someone will deny this. But then, why do they deny it? It can only be denied on pain of a certain criteria for the essence of Adam. But then, we are still at the same problem - namely, the essences of things have certain innumerable facts about them that are somehow considered primitive; not just facts about possible futures, but also potential futures, possible pasts and -importantly - the limitations of all of these.

Essences, as objects of Divine Thought, on the face of it, seem to be both complex and functional in an attenuated sense - for they contain all kinds of specifications on which values are acceptable, which are not and which values will produce which values in which situation (cf. Molinistic 'Middle Knowledge'). But that kind of functionality is certainly functionality enough for the inquisitive atheist to question further: "What then, explains this precise (functional) complexity?"

An obvious move - and the one I eventually favour - is to opt for Primitivism. To ask why an essence is as it is is to ask a fundamentally misguided question - essences are themselves the things which explain why any contingent state of affairs is as it is, but they are no such state of affairs in need of explanation. However, there is the further nagging worry that this explanation is worth all the weight of Anslem offering the Fool the Dictionary entry for "God"; ie. arguing that "It's just in the very Definition of 'God' that He necessarily exists" is just not a very good argument for God's necessary existence. And if that's the best the Theist can do, he isn't doing very well at all.

But, as Quine once remarked, "there are primitives, and then there are primitives". Ontology must bottom-out in primitives, to be sure. But it's well to remember that the Theist still has the problem of arguing for primitives. Maybe he has argued away the primitiveness of Design in physical systems, but he hasn't, for all of that, done away with his need to find a better, more suitable primitive.