Is complexity an argument against design?

It may be that a rock is very complex, but it is random complexity. It has no context - it is just noise - so does not indicate design. In the same way, a random page of text, while complex in many ways, would be less indicative of design than a short sentence in an understandable language.On the other hand, the full works of Shakespeare are very complex, but also are in context, so the people of the 17th century would infer design. While they are equally complex in binary, they could not infer design from those patterns without knowledge of binary systems.So, it would be reasonable to conclude that neither simplicity nor complexity alone imply design, but something else comes into play - the context. There is a difference between syntactic information and semantic information.

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What about a galaxy or a hurricane? Do their beautifully complex paterns of spiralling arms imply a designer? (The complexity in this case isn`t random)

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But the complexity doesn't mean anything beyond its own structure (at least that we know of).

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But "context" is very subjective, isn't it? One man's noise is another man's music. One sees organization where another sees randomness.

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Very much so. That is why it - information - can never be a fundamental physical quantity.

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With a rock, there are an finite number of "steps" that gave it its present shape, even if we can't infer all of those steps from its present shape. Those steps constitute the "information" about the rock's shape. The more steps, the more information.

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If those steps produced Mount Everest or Michaelangelo's David, what's the difference?

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The difference is purely in the eye of the beholder. David represents something (from our learnt experience, we can see other people and we can read of biblical history, so due to what we have been exposed to, we can infer design), whereas a mountain does not represent anything other than itself.This is the danger of trying to infer design just based upon gut assumptions. It is entirely subjective, and one person will see meaning and others won't.

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Welcome to EvC.

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ThanksEdited by Doddy Curumehtar, : Saying thanks.Edited by Doddy Curumehtar, : No reason given.

Yes, but a pattern in the mountain may not have been the intended design. We humans have evolved to make Type 1 errors (noticing a pattern where there is none) more than Type 2 errors (failing to notice a pattern where there is one). Simply because jumping at every shadow is better for survival than walking into an ambush all the time.Yet another reason why we can't be trusted to infer anything.Edited by Doddy Curumehtar, : Fixed [quote] to [qs]. Stupid BBcode

No, I never did say that. But even if there was, we silly humans may totally miss the point and see a face instead.