Atheism and Theism 23that God could be a perfectly simple being. At first sight, as Hume seems to
have thought, the designer of a universe would need to be at least as complex
as the universe itself. It is not clear that this need be so. Complex forms of
life evolve as a result of physical law together with the randomness character-
istic of mutation and natural selection. Even repeated application of a fairly
simple set of rules will allow for very complex but in the large regular pat-
terns, as with the Mandelbrot set which is discussed in chaos theory. Does
this mean that the designer of the universe could be less complex than the
universe that is designed? Such a designer need not be the infinite creator
God of the great theisms, at least. Nevertheless the designer’s mind would
have to have within it a structure at least as complex as the conjunction of
fundamental laws and initial conditions. So the question surely arises: what
designed the designer? The design hypothesis thus seems to raise more ques-
tions (and so is less explanatory) than the atheist one. (I shall reconsider this
when I come to discuss John Leslie’s conception of God as an ethical prin-
ciple.^40 ) Stephen Hawking has famously, or notoriously, looked forward to
a simple ‘theory of everything’, which would give us knowledge of ‘the mind
of God’.^41 Of course if God’s internal structure were that of the fundamental
laws and initial conditions this would make Hawking’s metaphor of ‘the mind
of God’ appropriate. Nevertheless, the hypothesis of God, at least as designer,
would be redundant, and belief in this sort of mind of God would collapse
ontologically into atheism.
If the universe needed a designer which was not identical with the
structure of the universe (i.e. laws and initial conditions) we would get into
a regress, the designer needing a designer, and so on ad infinitum. One may
be reminded of Fred Hoyle’s fictional interstellar ‘Black Cloud’.^42 Hoyle
believed in an infinite steady state universe. If one asked where the (highly
intelligent) black cloud came from the answer was supposed to be that it was
designed by another black cloud, and this by yet another black cloud, and so
onad infinitum. Whether or not the cosmology was good (the steady state
theory is in fact not generally accepted) the biology was unsatisfying. One
expects a complex organism, even a ‘black cloud’, to have evolved from
simpler organisms and ultimately from inorganic life.
Artefacts do not evolve in this way, though it is possible that one day self-
replicating robots with occasional random variations in their programming
may mimic biological evolution. An engineer designing an apparatus may
produce a blueprint. Any complexity in the apparatus will then appear in the
blueprint. (If we neglect complexity antecedently inherent in the components,
such as transistors, which are the original materials for the engineer’s design.)
Here I am taking ‘apparatus’ in the sense of ‘hardware’. One may be reminded
of Descartes’ rather obscure dictum that there must be as much reality in the
cause as there is in the effect.^43 (Descartes used the principle in an attempted