Complexity vs. Simplciity

An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off with Religion than without It
Bruce Scheiman

Capsule Review

In An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off with Religion than without It (Alpha, 2009), Bruce Scheiman makes the claim that religion offers the best means of understanding one's place in the world regardless of whether God exists.  Specifically, in his view it offers more than a purely materialist, science-based approach ever could.  He offers many interrelated arguments to support his claims.  Unfortunately, I do not have the time to dissect Scheiman's ideas in detail, but, after the majority of his edifice eventually collapses under the barrage of questions with which any thoughtful reader would inevitably bombard it, one question remains standing that we must consider.

Scientific materialism is reductionist – it holds that complex natural phenomena can always be reduced to a collection simpler ones.  Thus, any biological process is a collection of chemical ones, and a chemical process is a combination of physical ones.  In other words, biology is just chemistry, and chemistry is just physics.  And we all know that left to their own devices, physical processes will always move towards greater entropy, i.e. a lack of order.  So physics will always move away from greater complexity towards greater simplicity.  Yet few of us would deny that life, over the millions of years of its existence, has evolved towards greater complexity.  From RNA to DNA, from single-cell organisms to multi-cell ones, and eventually towards consciousness and intelligence.  How do we reconcile this glaring contradiction?

Scheiman says that only religion can do this.  This, though deeply appealing to a vast majority of people (he is right about that), is, of course, false.  Thomas Nagel, for one, has offered the idea of natural teleology that is compatible with a fully non-theistic view of the world.  His ideas, which, though fascinating, are a subject for another day, may yet end up being, if you will allow me, reduced to scientific materialism as we understand it today.  Still, the question of how to reconcile the physical imperative of greater simplicity with life's inexorable march towards greater complexity is something those of us who use science to guide important life decisions must examine seriously.