Is our universe more complex than a t-shirt or not?

[Angrboda]

I've only watched half of this video, but already I can see where it's going. The Muslim is trying to say that by noticing the complexity of a t-shirt, it's form, the graphics, etc.--by noting it's complexity, we infer that it was designed--however, the universe is as complex as the t-shirt, yet the atheist doesn't infer that it was designed.

This is a bogus argument. Basically it's asserting that complex things are not likely to occur by chance--the more complex, the more improbable. It's suggesting that the universe is so complex that there's no way it could have occurred by chance, therefore we should infer that it was designed. This overlooks a couple of points.

First, we don't infer design based on complexity. The argument that complex things must be designed has the obvious failing that in evolution, we have an explanation for how complex things can come to be without design. So the "complexity, therefore design" argument ignores that we have evidence that this is not strictly true.

Second, we identify human design--not by its complexity--but by an items similarity to something we know was designed. We know that this item of clothing, the t-shirt, was designed, because we're familiar with other items of clothing that we know are designed, and there are similar features. When archaeologists discover a shaped rock in amongst human remains, they can identify whether it was shaped by humans based on similarities to other rocks known to be shaped by humans. Thus if we come across a rock with two sharp, flaked edges, we infer that it is a product of human design because it has features that, say, a Clovis point has--sharpened edges, flatness, bisymetrical shape, and so on. If we had no prior experiences of what characteristics the result of human artifice has, we would have no way of knowing whether it was designed or just a misshapen rock. Thus the claim that we identify design based on complexity is false.

Finally, the complexity argument basically says some things are too complex to have happened by chance. This ignores the fact that highly improbable things happen all the time. Is the universe too complex to have happened by chance? That's effectively what the Muslim is arguing--and we just don't know what the chance of a universe occurring actually is--so saying that it couldn't occur by chance is asserting that we know how probable a universe is, and we don't know that at all.

So the t-shirt argument is wrong. The atheist isn't being inconsistent because he's not in fact using complexity alone to infer design.