by Splendid Elles

Ah, air travel. It’s the fastest mode of transportation we have, and manages to make itself seem like the slowest. Having spent hours lying or sitting in uncomfortable airplane seats or on airport Rows of Seats We Can’t Squish Together to Make a Comfy Bed, I feel I have enough Pure Evil stored up to do a post relating to atheism. I give you: Why God Almost Certainly Does Not Exist: Part II. 

It seems some theists have finally actually read The God Delusion. Good for them. Unfortunately, as Captain Kirk once said “You’ve managed to read just about every other book, but like a theist you keep. Missing. The point.” For anyone wondering, he later beat Khan using the Argument From The Mutara Nebula. 

The point that seems to be consistently missed is that god does not actually exist. I suppose it’s understandable why it’s been missed - Dawkins does leave his section on why a creator god must be as complex if not more so than its creations a bit lacking. I’ll fix that. 

Let’s start with binary. 0,1. On, off. We can do amazing things with these two numbers, but we do use these two numbers. Over, and over, and over. We measure the information these numbers encode in terms of often trillions of these. We store these in hard drives, and they can be found in millions of PCs wordwide (Macs don’t count). 

You’re probably wondering “where is he going with this?” or “he? Thrawn has a defined gender?”, so I’ll address the first one. My point is that computers contain quite a bit of information. Newer computers can contain more information than older ones. This information is encoded in electronic 1s and 0s, which are essentially parts. Using a simple definition of complexity, a newer computer is far more complex than, say, a Commodore 64. 

How this relates to brains and from there thought is obvious. A brain is an extremely advanced computer with a dual core processor, built in sensory processing suites,  a GUI thousands of times better than Windows XP, and a hard drive with a capacity in the insertlargemetricprefixhereB. 

A human brain is more complex than a troglodyte brain, with the single exception being myxoma’s brain (see “Internet Infidels All Over Again”. No, I’m not going to stop mocking her.) A human who creates something has the units of information pertaining to that creation stored in their brain (I am aware that “their” is not a gender neutral English pronoun. I’m making it one. Adapt or die. Resistance is futile.). 

This information may be deleted at some point in the future to make room for other information, but the capacity to store the information remains. 

Let’s apply this reasoning to a god. This god needs to create the universe, everything in it, design it such that it develops in precisely the way we observe it to be today, and have extra brainpower left to spare to develop an individual “plan” for all six billion of us, somehow maintain our “free will” it somehow gives us, and make the whole thing look like it happened naturally. If we add in omniscience, god has infinite complexity. If god is not omniscient, god is only as improbable as the sum of her actions, the informational complexity of the universe, plus god’s intentions. 

If god is not omniscient, god’s complexity is equivalent to the sum of the complexities of all her actions plus an additional amount of complexity greater than 0 which accounts for god having a consciousness of some sort. This possibility is still more complex, and therefore less likely than the universe existing naturally. 

If god is omniscient, then her complexity is infinite. A being that knows all things is aware of all things, of knowing all things, of knowing of knowing all things, etc. ad infinitum. Infinite complexity is infinitely improbable. Compared to something of finite improbabilty, an infinitely complex being spontaneously coming into existence is essentially impossible.