Let us assume for a minute that nontheistic evolutionists are correct: everything that currently exists evolved on its own from lower states of existence, complexity and order. Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, uses an illustration titled “Mount Improbable” to show how order can evolve on its own, slowly inching its way up the mountain of complexity over billions of years, rather than needing a creator to boost such order to the top of the mountain in six days. That is all well and good, but a problem other than an initial cause (IC) raises its head at this point. Evolutionists acknowledge that each stage of the evolutionary process emerges from a less complex stage. If this is the case, what was the level of complexity at the very start?
Well, you guessed it: we are going to perform an infinite regression (just as we did in the previous post titled An Infinite Initial Cause), but in the reverse direction. If each previous stage was less complex than the current one, even if by an incredibly small amount, and we proceeded backwards through an infinite number of previous stages (known as taking it to the limit), it brings us to one and only one answer: zero complexity!
Even if the degree of complexity for each previous stage of development was only 0.9999999999999999999999999999999 times less complex, the answer is the same when taking it to the limit: zero. If Dawkins’ “Mount Improbable” is correct (even though he avoids taking it to the limit), everything that currently exists came initially from zero complexity. That may not seem staggering, but let us look more carefully at the implications of such an outcome.
Zero complexity equates to nothingness. Anything, even the simplest of all things, has a complexity greater than zero. Even a quantum mechanical string, the entity that physicists theorize is the building block for all subatomic particles, has a complexity greater than zero. If the total initial complexity of the cosmos were zero, there would be nothing. Not even the fabric of space itself would exist. Dawkins’ argument to prove that no creator was needed inadvertently argues that everything came from nothingness.
The two limits equations present confounding statements regarding the existence of the cosmos: either it always existed (requiring a continuous energy input) or it came to be from nothingness by means of infinity. For scientists to insist that complexity and order have risen out of the dust of the cosmos (without adequately explaining the origin of cosmic dust) on their own is mathematically not an option. The process described in the previous post (An Infinite Initial Cause), yields infinity as the cause. The process described herein, regarding complexity, yields zero as the starting point for the infinite initial cause (IIC). In a very real sense, these two values are on two sides of a very strange coin. Though some mathematicians insist that the inverse of zero is undefined, it is also thought of as infinity, and vice versa. Zero and infinity are at the root of all that is.
Reason, no matter how convincing, if limited in the extent to which it is carried out, is not in the end authentic reason, but a deceptive form of reason. Some escape the need for an infinite initial cause by claiming that the universe has always existed. If that is the case, it is infinite. Either way one cannot escape infinitude. What if, just what if, the IIC took nothingness and turned it inside out? What would it look like? Perhaps we are staring at it.
We are on a quest to understand the brokenness of the world, but we cannot fully analyze or understand our current state without assessing the stages of our development. In order to understand where we are headed, we need to know what brought us to our current state. I hope you will continue on this journey with me, attempting to get clearer pictures of both our origin and our destination.
-Sam Augsburger
Slices of God: Strange, Dimensional, and Fractal Perspectives on God and the Cosmos
