In his book “The God Delusion” Richard Dawkins argued that God would be unlikely because he would be very complex. The argument also know as the “Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit” goes like this:
- God must be very complex.
- Complex things are unlikely to arise spontaneously.
- The existence of God is unlikely.
This argument is like the role model of a bad Creationist argument. It starts of with two shaky assumptions and then leads to a conclusion that can’t be tested.
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God is complex. Well though I can imagine that the Christian God is complex because he has to answer a billion prayers a day and watch over billions of people theologians don’t agree with this assertion. But a more serious question is whether the term complexity applies to God. Is this really a scientific question?
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Complex things don’t arise spontaneously. This is basically true because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. While this is true for our universe this would assume that God has to obey the laws of nature. This is an assumption any theologian would disagree. The creator of the laws certainly does not have to obey them.
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Talking about the likelihood of the existence of God makes it sound as if such a thing would objectively exists. It does not. As a matter of fact God either exists or he does not. Thus the chance we are talking about here in not an objective quantity as one would expect from science but rather a subjective measure.
In conclusion I think Dawkins does a disservice to science since he pretends theological questions could be answered by science and that in turn yields really bad science.
Gedanken zum Zeitgeschehen 