Is complexity an argument against design?

Hi, thanks, will do.
The name's actually from world of warcraft, my avatar has no chin, and the name just stuck
sorry bout the off topic.

Every experience I have, every day screams to me that IF this existance was designed, it is a total botch job, the designer arrived at his OAD (Omnipitance Aided Design) Station with a stinking hangover from the Night (eternity?) before.for instance... just now I was taking a dump.. and I thought to myself: If I'd have designed this process I would have designed it such that sealed little pellets came out, making no mess, No Smell and requireing little or no processing.. perhaps instantaneously breaking down.. in fact I would have designed us so that all nutrients were used fully, with no waste whatsoever.Ahh! I hear you say.. our excretions tell us a lot about our health. well.. how about a 'magig eight ball' type affair, a little poo-pellet, with a window that tells you what's wrong? or perhaps a colour code.after all, Adam and eve were created intelligent, with understanding and awareness of themselves, and language (at least spoken..)
So what is the need for a stinkng pile of crap?Side question: did adam and eve shit? Edited by Creavolution, : speling heh!

Is complexity number then? I mean, the only difference between the rock and the cube is that the rock requires more measurements to define it, whereas the cube requires only three (one if it's a perfect cube).The thing is, the design of the object is a piss-poor argument for a Designer no matter how you look at it. It may be unlikely that it would form that way (a cube), but it is equally unlikely that it would form the way of a regular rock. We simply recognise the cube as being simpler to us because it has a significant shape, but the regular rock does not.Of course, if we are talking about likely hood of something forming in its current form, then we are saying that it had a shape it was meant to be. However, many rocks change over time (even if we DO accept a 6000-year old Earth), the rocks we see now that we are either using for or against design, don't look like they did when they would've been formed or designed. Thus, assuming design based on any of the dynamics of the object is, like I said, rediculously piss-poor thinking.Jon

Your avatar also has no cheeks that a loving grandmother could pinch.It reminds me of HAL in that film 2001: A Space Oddity.

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Your avatar also has no cheeks that a loving grandmother could pinch.

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It reminds me of HAL in that film 2001: A Space Oddity.

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I would say it IS HAL

This is why I don't do the lottery - my numbers are 123456, so I can't really see them turning up at random, even though they are a the easiest set to describe. I don't know - accidental experiments in stability can bring seemingly unlimited results.All the best.

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Human Evolution in 42 Steps

It may be that a rock is very complex, but it is random complexity. It has no context - it is just noise - so does not indicate design. In the same way, a random page of text, while complex in many ways, would be less indicative of design than a short sentence in an understandable language.On the other hand, the full works of Shakespeare are very complex, but also are in context, so the people of the 17th century would infer design. While they are equally complex in binary, they could not infer design from those patterns without knowledge of binary systems.So, it would be reasonable to conclude that neither simplicity nor complexity alone imply design, but something else comes into play - the context. There is a difference between syntactic information and semantic information.

What about a galaxy or a hurricane? Do their beautifully complex paterns of spiralling arms imply a designer? (The complexity in this case isn`t random)

But "context" is very subjective, isn't it? One man's noise is another man's music. One sees organization where another sees randomness.With a rock, there are an finite number of "steps" that gave it its present shape, even if we can't infer all of those steps from its present shape. Those steps constitute the "information" about the rock's shape. The more steps, the more information.If those steps produced Mount Everest or Michaelangelo's David, what's the difference?-------------Welcome to EvC. Edited by Ringo, : Shpelling.

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What about a galaxy or a hurricane? Do their beautifully complex paterns of spiralling arms imply a designer? (The complexity in this case isn`t random)

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But the complexity doesn't mean anything beyond its own structure (at least that we know of).

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But "context" is very subjective, isn't it? One man's noise is another man's music. One sees organization where another sees randomness.

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Very much so. That is why it - information - can never be a fundamental physical quantity.

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With a rock, there are an finite number of "steps" that gave it its present shape, even if we can't infer all of those steps from its present shape. Those steps constitute the "information" about the rock's shape. The more steps, the more information.

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If those steps produced Mount Everest or Michaelangelo's David, what's the difference?

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The difference is purely in the eye of the beholder. David represents something (from our learnt experience, we can see other people and we can read of biblical history, so due to what we have been exposed to, we can infer design), whereas a mountain does not represent anything other than itself.This is the danger of trying to infer design just based upon gut assumptions. It is entirely subjective, and one person will see meaning and others won't.

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Welcome to EvC.

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ThanksEdited by Doddy Curumehtar, : Saying thanks.Edited by Doddy Curumehtar, : No reason given.

Until a few years ago there was a mountain formation we called "The old Man of the Mountain" Old Man"David" or just Mountain?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

It occurs to me that we infer "design" in David because it is a copy of something found in nature. In that example, we are inferring imitation, not true design.David and Everest are made of similar materials using similar methods. The only distinction between the two is that the "designed" one is a fake and the "undesigned" one is an original. Not much of a testimony to the "designer", anyway.

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Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
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Yes, but a pattern in the mountain may not have been the intended design. We humans have evolved to make Type 1 errors (noticing a pattern where there is none) more than Type 2 errors (failing to notice a pattern where there is one). Simply because jumping at every shadow is better for survival than walking into an ambush all the time.Yet another reason why we can't be trusted to infer anything.Edited by Doddy Curumehtar, : Fixed [quote] to [qs]. Stupid BBcode

So are you saying that there was an intended design?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Did the computer and equations have a designer? Or did this happen by accident? Or both?