Complexity and it’s Relationship to Intelligent Design
One of the arguments for Intelligent Design is that something designed is easily distinguished from something random. Similar to art, you might not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it. This argument is developed in the article “How to determine creation vs. evolution“, by Charles Colson. Mr. Colson gives several examples of items that you would never mistake for a naturally occurring phenomenon.
Think for a moment of some common analogies. Imagine we are traveling through South Dakota and see a mountain with the faces of four presidents carved in it. Immediately we recognize the work of an intelligent agent. No one would mistake Mount Rushmore for a natural phenomenon.
I agree. However, it should be noted that it started as a naturally occurring mountain, was altered to serve man’s purpose, and undoubtedly began to erode from there. It seems that nature had some hand the mountain’s creation. I know this isn’t Mr. Colson’s point, but I believe that keeping it in mind makes the analogy more accurate than the mountain’s carvings alone.
Or imagine finding an arrowhead beside a stream. No one would attribute the shape to water erosion.
True enough, but again, natural laws participated in the arrowhead’s production and discovery, illustrating that the presence of intelligence doesn’t imply the absence of nature.
Mr. Colson appears to acknowledge this however, as he continues with examples of patterns you do find in nature, pointing out that if you found words within those natural patterns, you would immediately conclude that a person added the words to the pattern. The point of all of these examples is that whatever else nature can produce, “what nature cannot produce is complexity.”
As much as I agree with Mr. Colson that the earth was wonderfully designed by God, and could not produce the complexities listed without the will of an intelligent being driving it, there are unfortunately several problems with the argument.
One problem is that all of the examples are of things that we already attribute to people: Mount Rushmore, arrowheads, words.  Unfortunately for this article, complexities exist that are not directly attributable to an immediately intelligent cause, people or otherwise.Â
It is easy to identify a beaver’s dam or a bird’s nest… neither animal is particularly intelligent. It’s true that the tree didn’t produce the nest and the river didn’t produce the dam, but the tree did produce the tree’s fruit, and isn’t it more complicated than the bird’s nest? Of course, the fruit is one of God’s finest designs, but as far as an atheist is concerned, you might as well argue that fruit proves that the tree is intelligent; he’ll be no more convinced than if you attribute it to God.
But then, who created the bird or the beaver? or the tree? or even the person who carved Mount Rushmore or who is pondering these questions? I have no doubt that God did, but He not only created living beings who could produce complexity, He created non-living processes that could produce complexity as well.Â
A cave of stalagmites and stalactites is more complicated than the rocky beach that preceded it. A network of tributaries is more complicated than the spring they all flow from. Of course, these non-living examples are the result of wearing the earth down. Something simple wears down into something complicated, and continues to wear down until there is nothing left… a beautiful illustration of how the universe produces order on its way to chaos, in obedience to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and alas one less argument against Evolution. Even the modern flu is getting more complicated by getting worn down.
However, once we realize that order can increase within a closed system that’s ultimately approaching chaos, the mere discovery of increased order is no longer counter to nature but part of it. But then, why shouldn’t this be true if be if God created nature?
Given God’s existence, how can one tell the difference between natural increases in order and divine? One could argue that all order is of divine origin ultimately, but that misses the real point, because everything traces back to God. But then, how far back in the cascading tree of causes must one go before getting back to God as its ultimate cause? If you have to go all the way back to the Big Bang, then I think you’ve lost the argument because then you’ve admitted living in a universe that works no differently than an atheist would believe. No, you need to find God in the string of causes much sooner than that.
Must you find God at the first appearance of the complex order you are pondering, such as the first fish or goat? Well, if God is there to find then the answer is yes, but then that’s the real crux of it, isn’t it? How do you know He’s there, and can you prove it?
Consider again the non-intelligent complexities mentioned above: dams, nests, caves, stalagmites & stalactites, a more resilient flu. Every example was an increase in order, at the cost of order elsewhere. Most importantly, nothing new was actually created. The dam was just a rearrangement of pre-existing tree branches. Nests from brush. Caves from stone. The flu’s resiliency is from a loss of function. Nothing new actually resulted in any case. God therefore need not be invoked as the proximate cause here.  Yet, even while Natural Selection might appear confirmed, Evolution interestingly is not, and that I believe brings us closer to Mr. Colson’s real point.
Another article I read recently (forgive me, I lost the link) made the correct point that intentional design is easy spot, even among other increases in order. In that vein, I believe Mr. Colson’s examples nicely illustrate how one might approach the task of identifying where God acted and where he did not. Mount Rushmore was formed when the earth’s crust was broken and rearranged through naturally processes; the faces were clearly formed by intelligence; the erosion was clearly natural. Similarly for the arrowhead and words drawn in a field. Applying those to our other examples, intelligence would be suggested if we saw a bridge of 2×4s instead of a beaver’s dam, or a varnished birdhouse instead of nest, or a flu gaining resiliency through a new original function instead of through losing an old one… and at this point I hope Mr. Colson and I would be on the same page.
Now, apply this to the fossil record. It is futile to simply argue that an increase of complexity within modern and fossilized life is proof of Intelligent Design and therefore of God. The argument is true understand, just futile to present to a nonbeliever. This is especially true because of the amount of continuity genuinely present in the fossil record, suggesting (and perhaps correctly so) a chain of ancestor forms, each giving way to the next. Whether God micromanaged the process or simply tipped the first domino (in which case, God set up the dominoes!), it leaves an appearance like it happened on its own, as if God wasn’t necessary for it to occur. Therefore, for argument’s sake, I suggest we leave those examples alone, because we just don’t know what God did. But, there are gaps in the fossil record that everyone acknowledges, suggesting sudden leaps that could not have happened on their own. These might well be of God, but then again, they could just be waiting for additional discoveries that will fill the gaps in. Again, as far as the argument goes, I find it futile to pursue. However, there is one other avenue I haven’t seen pursued… and hopefully because I just haven’t found it yet!
One of the arguments of Evolution is that features tend to mutate from one function to a similar one. For example, the eye theoretically formed from a spot on some life form that was sensitive to light; the ear from a spot that was sensitive to sound. But, when did that sensitivity form? For that matter, when did the first feather form? The first nerve?  Bone marrow?  When we witness today increases in complexity, they result from erosion, the breaking down of something into something else, not the creation of function of that never existed. The problem is that we call this erosion evidence for Evolution, when Evolution is the mechanism by which the exact opposite would appear to have occurred. Of course the response to that is that there was a decrease in the universe’s energy that was greater than the order that was created, and for Evolution to occur that would have to be true.  However, at that point, we are no longer talking about Natural Selection, but fortuitous mutation, and our flu epidemic would seem suggest the exact opposite is what happens when God lets things happen on their own. In light of what we can observe, how does one consider the appearance of people over time from what started as algae in the sea? And without any help from God? The opposite seems easier to believe.