“The tendency toward complexity”

The tendency toward complexity is Abdel Khader Khan’s name for the universe’s persistent movement from simpler arrangements toward more complex ones. He turns this account of cosmic development into an ethical proposal: good and evil can be judged by whether actions advance or obstruct that movement. The idea matters not as a detached scientific explanation alone, but as a standard meant to apply across beliefs and to questions as consequential as war, killing, and the supply of weapons to Afghan mujaheddin.

A universe moving toward complexity

Abdel Khader Khan presents complexity as a tendency built into the way the universe works, rather than as a product of random events. Matter, given suitable circumstances, comes together in increasingly complex arrangements. The universe has been moving in this direction throughout its history, he argues, from near-absolute simplicity toward forms of greater order and combination. The process is not limited to life or to human society: it describes the way matter itself develops.

He places that account on a vast timescale. The universe began about fifteen billion years ago in almost absolute simplicity and has grown more complex ever since; on his telling, the movement will continue into the future, including across the next billion years and beyond. Atoms, leaves, people, planets, birds, bees, trees, and galaxies are different expressions of this ongoing complexification. No single form is guaranteed to endure or to reach the final destination. Each belongs to a process whose direction exceeds the fate of any one of its products.

Abdel Khader Khan calls the destination ultimate complexity, or God. The name is a choice of language: someone who rejects the word God can use Ultimate Complexity instead. His claim is not that every atom, organism, or planet will survive until that point, but that all are participating in a universe moving toward it. The final state remains beyond the reach of any particular form, even as the larger movement gives those forms a common direction.

Cosmic loss and the persistence of the process

Lin tests the model against events that appear to contradict it. A major asteroid impact could smash the planet, and the Sun will eventually die; either outcome would destroy complex forms rather than increase their complexity. Abdel Khader Khan accepts the force of the objection. Humans are, as far as they know, the most developed expression of complexity in their part of the universe, so their annihilation would be a profound loss and a waste of accumulated development.

That loss, however, would not mean the universe’s tendency had ended. Abdel Khader Khan’s reply shifts the scale from an individual world to the process as a whole. Human bodies are made from atoms formed by earlier generations of stars, which themselves died before those atoms became part of human life. If humanity were destroyed by an asteroid or by its own actions, he reasons, the process would continue, and another expression of comparable complexity might emerge. Individual forms can disappear while the larger movement persists.

This distinction makes the concept neither a promise of safety nor a claim that every outcome is beneficial to those who experience it. The destruction of a complex world remains a terrible loss, even if it does not reverse the universe’s overall development. The theory holds together two different scales of consequence: what is lost locally and what continues across cosmic time.

From cosmology to a measure of good and evil

Abdel Khader Khan draws a moral rule from the universe’s supposed direction. Actions that enhance, promote, or accelerate movement toward Ultimate Complexity count as good; actions that inhibit, impede, or prevent it count as evil. He presents this standard as objective in a qualified sense: it is grounded in what people know about the universe, not in the revealed authority of one faith or the political doctrine of one movement. Its objectivity is limited by present knowledge, which can change as new information and insight become available.

The need for such a standard emerges from competing claims to moral authority. Abdel Khader Khan contrasts it with opposing religious communities blessing their soldiers as they prepare to fight one another, each side believing God supports its cause. When moral judgment rests only on a group’s own convictions, he argues, people can justify their conduct while condemning their opponents. A measure drawn from the shared history and operation of the universe is meant to offer a basis that believers and non-believers alike can examine.

He acknowledges that the choice of complexity might itself seem arbitrary. His answer is comparative rather than absolute: like a unit of measurement, a moral standard may be the best available now without being the final or perfect one. He invokes the platinum-iridium bar and the later measure based on the distance travelled by a photon in a vacuum to show how standards can become more precise as knowledge develops. The tendency toward complexity is his proposed moral measure because, in his view, it is the largest fact available: it involves the whole universe over the whole of its history. He invites Lin to offer a better way to include all people, faiths, non-believers, and cosmic time.

Lin’s lesson and the test of action

The concept recurs as Abdel Khader Khan teaches Lin and later asks him to explain the model back. Lin reconstructs its central steps: the universe began in simplicity, has grown more complex, and produces people and other forms of life as part of that process. If humanity were wiped out in a cosmic explosion, Lin says, another expression of its level of complexity could emerge. Abdel Khader Khan listens with his eyes closed, nodding, and responds with evident pleasure when Lin demonstrates that he can state the argument in his own words. The exchange shows the theory passing from a set of claims into a framework Lin has been coached to understand and apply.

The model’s practical test is collective rather than merely personal. Lin applies it to war, killing, and smuggling guns to Afghan mujaheddin by asking what would happen if everyone did the same thing. Would that conduct help people in their part of the universe move toward the final complexity, or hold them back? The answer, in this framework, supplies a reason for calling an act good or evil, not merely a label. Yet Lin’s earlier question about who judges an act remains important: Abdel Khader Khan promises a fuller answer at the appropriate time, while the later lesson supplies this universalizing test.

Life and the reach of the idea

In a later conversation, Lin repeats the cosmological argument before asking a question of his own. Abdel Khader Khan answers by describing life as a characteristic present in every atom. The more complexly atoms are arranged, the more visible the expression of life becomes: a rock is a simple arrangement whose life cannot be seen, while a cat is complex enough for its life to be obvious. For him, invisibility does not mean absence. Life belongs to the rock as well as to the cat, though it appears differently in each.

This extension connects the theory’s account of complexity to a broad conception of life. The world is not divided, in Abdel Khader Khan’s explanation, into living forms and wholly lifeless matter; rather, it contains different degrees of complexity and different degrees of visible expression. Taken together, his lessons give the tendency toward complexity two related roles. It describes a universe in motion, and it offers a revisable ethical measure for human conduct within that motion. Lin’s ability to restate the argument marks its transmission, while his questions preserve the unresolved demand that a universal principle must still be interpreted in particular cases.