Irreducible Complexity

I’m working on my essay for LSE100 here in LSE and the more I think about the essay question, the more I find the ‘irreducible complexity‘ argument of intelligent design rather limp. It is cited as an ‘argument from ignorance’ or ‘argumentum ad ignorantiam’ since the idea of ‘irreducible complexity’ is that since certain biological systems are of a level of complexity that we can’t see how it evolved (though most of the examples cited by proponents of ‘irreducible complexity’ has been refuted), then there must be an intelligent designer behind it.

There’s one thing it ignores, which is that the complexity that exists in the system can actually obscure the truth and impede our ability to understand it or to work out how it started from scratch. Scientists have largely been successful at reducing complexity and this is probably how ‘irreducible complexity’ can even come to be an argument for intelligent design.

Ask the social scientists and they’re going to tell you they are studying ‘irreducible complexity’ on a daily basis. They are not trying to reduce it, they’re looking at the interactions, the nature of causation of each factors and how the outcome may be contingent on any of the factors. In studying the Cold War and the complex factors that resulted in the end of it as well as the demise of the Soviet Union, historians don’t look at this ‘irreducible complexity’ and then decide that some intelligent designer must hate the communists and intended for the end of the Cold War. “How else?” an ‘irreducible complexity’ scientist will probably asks, having studied the the massive lists of factors and all the details of the Cold War. The fact of life is that when you put together individual agents acting within the bounds of some structural and physical constrains and the pervasiveness of certain dominant ideas, reality do play out at a level of complexity that will never be reducible. You can never narrow down everything into a single cause and even then, it won’t be useful to us. And that’s why, social scientists are unlikely to make much progress if they’re the ones doing the sciences:

Scientists are completely satisfied in having a mathematical description of their observations that can be used to ‘predict’ and describe the phenomena anytime, anywhere (in the most complete version of each theory, this is true). The science question is solved when you can describe the relationship between mass and gravity; but the social science question would remain: How does mass interact to form gravity? Why attraction only?

And that’s just pre-Einstein. You can go further: How does time and space interact with mass to produce gravity? What is it about time-space warping that unleashes the effects of gravity?

And as I end off, I continue to wade in this ocean of complexity I find myself in.