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I read an article not long ago that said fewer and fewer people are using their cellphones to make calls. I can believe it, having recently signed up for a new family plan with my wife and son. We were offered a gleaming array of mobile phones to choose from, most of them bristling with features that had nothing to do with voice communications. I selected a model from the “easy to use” category that offered few features but had buttons you did not need a magnifying glass to see. If truth be told, this was the first time I had actually owned such a device, having gotten by up until then with an old phone belonging to my wife. I own a desktop computer, a laptop, an iPod and an e-reader, so I hardly qualify as a Luddite. Yet I do not feel the need to spend every spare moment tweeting, texting or checking my e-mail while waiting in line at Starbucks. Silly me, I still regard a phone as a device you use to talk to someone who is not within earshot.
My late father-in-law, a scholar and a poet who lived to be 105, somehow made it through life without a cellphone, a desktop computer, a laptop, an iPod or an e-reader. His portal to knowledge was not the Internet but a library card. Until the last years of his life, he still had a rotary phone. For those who have never seen one -- my young nephew had not -- a rotary phone has no buttons at all. If you want to make a call, you just dial the number. The phone is virtually indestructible and does not need to be recharged. The only drawback is that it only performs its stated function.
Now that multitasking has come to be regarded as a desirable way to occupy our waking hours, we demand the same of the gadgets we use. The protype for this is the Swiss army knife, which not only cuts things but also serves as a screwdriver, can opener and corkscrew. The cellphone has become the electronic equivalent of a Swiss army knife. However, the Swiss army knife does not require a magnifying glass or a degree in electrical engineering to operate.
I became a convert to Apple products some years ago when I bought an early model iPod to listen to audio books while working out on a treadmill at the Y. The version I bought was about the size of a pack of playing cards and had no buttons, only a single “click wheel” that looked a bit like the dial on an old rotary phone, minus the finger holes. My original iPod performed only one function: it played audio files and was so simple to operate you can figure the whole thing out in five minutes. I was hooked. Clearly, here was a product that was designed as well as engineered: elegant, intuitive, easy to use, simplicity itself. As I later learned, simplicity was something of a religion with the late Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder. “Simple can be harder than complex,” he once told an interviewer in Businessweek. “You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”
Simplicity was also something of a religion with some of the great scientific minds of history, among them Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Aristotle, whose views on scientific matters held sway for a thousand years, kicked things off with the statement that "nature operates in the shortest way possible." Galileo chimed in by saying, “Nature does not multiply things unnecessarily; that she makes use of the easiest and simplest means for producing her effects; that she does nothing in vain…” Galileo, of course, got himself into hot water with religious authorities by insisting it was much simpler to calculate the movement of the heavenly bodies by placing the sun at the center of the solar system rather than the earth. Newton, who later formulated the laws governing the motion of these heavenly bodies, said, “It is the perfection of God's works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity.” Einstein did not believe in a personal God and yet frequently invoked his name in expressing his sense of wonderment at the mystery of the universe. “When the solution is simple, God is answering,” he wrote.
The common thread in such pronouncements is a principle that has come to be known as Occam’s (or Ockham’s) razor, named for William of Ockham, who, as it turns out, was a theologian rather than a man of science. The principle is usually given as "plurality should not be posited without necessity," or as Newton expressed it, "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances." Although most often applied to scientific pursuits, Occam’s razor is more a rule of thumb than a formal hypothesis grounded in logic or empirical observation. Apart from its undeniable aesthetic appeal, simplicity remains essentially a metaphysical argument. Whether or not it can ever be proved that nature always favors the simplest arrangement, the assumption is that it ought to.
Although nothing was to be posited beyond necessity, Ockham made an exception for things that are revealed by faith. He regarded God as the one true necessity, even though his existence could never be proved by logical argument and therefore might otherwise be eliminated as superfluous under the terms of Occam’s razor.
Does God’s presence admit of some added complexity in a world that otherwise favors the simplest possible explanation? As it happens, there is something analogous to Occam’s razor in theology known as the doctrine of divine simplicity. In the confession of faith hammered out at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 CE, God is described as having “one absolutely simple essence, substance or nature.” The idea, which is most closely identified with Thomas Aquinas, is that God is infinitely simple and therefore has no constituent parts or properties. This means that God does not possess such qualities as goodness, mercy and omnipotence, but rather they are identical with his being. However, this would imply that the disparate qualities identified with God are somehow identical to each other, which many modern theologians find to be logically incoherent.
The problem arises because we are in the realm of the pleroma, or fullness of the godhead, where individual characteristics are unmanifest. Aquinas himself noted that God’s infinite simplicity appeared to finite human minds as infinite complexity; hence, the tendency of theologians and philosophers to get tangled up in the concept. God appears infinitely complex because finite minds insist on trying to capture him (her, it) in words, and we quickly wind up with the theological equivalent of a Swiss army knife. Steve Jobs was right. Simple is harder than complex. It is hard to go from attribute to essence, from the many to the one. It is finally as the ancients proclaimed, "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one." What could be simpler?
Galileo Galilei, Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
Isaac Newton, Yahuda MS; Reguli Phisophandi
Albert Einstein, The World as I See It
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Deuteronomy 6:4
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