OSI model

I think the logic in the minds of the original authors was that the layers were numbered in order of increasing complexity. That is, you start at the physical layer which is essentially just a bit of hardware and you increase in complexity from there by adding more and more software functions on top of eachother until you have the whole network stack

reversing the order makes little sense ... lets look at it another way .. say your building a house .. what happens first?? eating dinner at the table (application) or laying the physical foundations for a house??

Having dinner at the table, is never going to happen until the other layers below have been completed .. so you would start counting the different stages from 1 at the beginning in the process.