A path to faith with science

**natureisawesome** · 08-26-2007, 02:48 AM

Quote:
Originally Posted by natureisawesome
That's..I can't believe you are saying that.

Entropy is a measure of a a sytems unavailability to do work. The energy available in our universe to do work is being lost...I just don't understand how you can say that. That's totally wrong. I'm seriously baffled, like ..

Things don't naturally become more complex by the 2nd law. They become less complex. Period.

" The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium. "

I'm tired of arguing about whether things are closed or not closed. It's irrelevent. There are not exceptions to the second law.

Yes our bodies do harness energy from food, and complex machinery is required to do this.

Staurm said:

Again you choose to employ mechanistic terminology.

I'm not saying it is the second law which causes things to become more complex, its quasi-equilibrium, as I have already indicated. Dissipative structures defy the 2nd law by forming into structures which harness the flow of enery through them, in the same way an organism does, or a planetary biosphere such as the earth. This requires the harnessing structure to be closed, but at the same time open to a flow of energy through it.

It was you who said the second law causes things to become more complex, you are confusing order with disorder, perhaps unintentionally. Either way what you said about entropy and life was fundamentally incorrect.

I got around to doing a little study on what staurm is talking about and it's this new hypothesis called chaos theory.

It's supposed to find order out of disorder. It's obviously something devopeloped to try to overcome the challanges of chemical evolution. Chaos theory is about the discovery of the unsuspected patterns of harmony and beauty in apparently chaotic systems. for instance
there is believed to be a superstructure of some predictability in the otherwise unpredictable behaviour of water flowing turbulently.

It has buzz words like "fractals," "bifurcation," "the butterfly effect," "strange attractors," and "dissipative structures,". It supporters are claiming it to be as important as quantum physics or reletivity. as a widely read popularization of chaos studies puts it: "Where chaos begins, classical science stops" (Chaos-Making a New Science) .

There are many phenomena which depend on so many variables as to defy description in terms of quantitative mathematics. Yet such systemsâ??things like the turbulent hydraulics of a waterfallâ??do seem to exhibit some kind of order in their apparently chaotic tumbling, and chaos theory has been developed to try to quantify the order in this chaos...

...The discovery that there may still be some underlying orderâ??instead of complete randomnessâ??in chaotic systems is, of course, still perfectly consistent with the laws of thermodynamics. The trouble is that many wishful thinkers in this field have started assuming that chaos can also somehow generate higher orderâ??evolution in particular. This idea is being hailed as the solution to the problem of how the increasing complexity required by evolution could overcome the disorganizing process demanded by entropy. The famous second law of thermodynamicsâ??also called the law of increasing entropyâ??notes that every systemâ??whether closed or openâ??at least tends to decay. The universe itself is "running down," heading toward an ultimate "heat death," and this has heretofore been an intractable problem for evolutionists...

Basically all of this is based upon some some scientist named Prigogine .He argued (mathematically, not experimentally) that systems that were far from equilibrium, with a high flow-through of energy, could produce a higher degree of order.

Capra elaborates further:

In classical thermodynamics, the dissipation of energy in heat transfer, friction, and the like was always associated with waste. Prigogine's concept of a dissipative structure introduced a radical change in this view by showing that in open systems dissipation becomes a source of order.10

The fact is, however, that except in the very weak sense, Prigogine has not shown that dissipation of energy in an open system produces order. In the chaotic behavior of a system in which a very large energy dissipation is taking place, certain temporary structures (he calls them "dissipative structures") form and then soon decay. They have never been shownâ??even mathematicallyâ??to reproduce themselves or to generate still higher degrees of order....

...He used the example of small vortices in a cup of hot coffee. A similar example would be the much larger "vortex" in a tornado or hurricane. These might be viewed as "structures" and to appear to be "ordered," but they are soon gone. What they leave in their wake is not a higher degree of organized complexity, but a higher degree of dissipation and disorganization.

And yet evolutionists are now arguing that such chaos somehow generates a higher stage of evolution! Prigogine has even co-authored a book entitled Order Out of Chaos.

In far from equilibrium conditions, we may have transformation from disorder, from thermal chaos, into order.11...

...Not even the first, and absolutely critical, step in the evolutionary processâ??that of the self-organization of non-living molecules into self-replicating moleculesâ??can be explained in this way. Prigogine admits:

The problem of biological order involves the transition from the molecular activity to the supermolecular order of the cell. This problem is far from being solved.12...

...He then makes the naive claim that, since life "appeared" on Earth very early in geologic history, it must have been (!) "the result of spontaneous self-organization." But he acknowledges some uncertainty about this remarkable conclusion.

However, we must admit that we remain far from any quantitative theory.13..

With regard to the claim that the "order" appearing in fractals somehow contributes to evolution, a new book devoted to what the author is pleased to call "the science of self-organized criticality," we note the following admission:

In the popular literature, one finds the subjects of chaos and fractal geometry linked together again and again, despite the fact that they have little to do with each other.... In short, chaos theory cannot explain complexity.14

The strange idea is currently being widely promoted that, in the assumed four-billion-year history of life on the earth, evolution has proceeded by means of long periods of stasis, punctuated by brief periods of massive extinctions. Then rapid evolutionary emergence of organisms of higher complexity came out of the chaotic milieu causing the extinction.

On the one hand, a catastrophic extinction of global biotas might negate the effectiveness of many survival mechanisms which evolved during background conditions. Simultaneously, such a crisis might eliminate genetically and ecologically diverse taxa worldwide. Only a few species would be expected to survive and seed subsequent evolutionary radiations. This scenario requires high levels of macroevolution and explosive radiation to account for the recovery of basic ecosystems within 1-2 my after Phanerozoic mass extinctions.15

Such notions come not from any empirical evidence but solely from philosophical speculations based on lack of evidence! "Since there is no evidence that evolution proceeded gradually, it must have occurred chaotically!" This seems to be the idea.

If one wants to believe by blind faith that order can arise spontaneously from chaos, it is still a free country. But please don't call it science!

So they've found some patterns in the interactions in nature. That's basically it. And it's not proven and it still doesn't overcome the second law. Oh, and that scientist Prigogine hasn't done any real experiements, it all mathmatical and philosophical. He hasn't been in a laboratory for years.

However, the type of â??orderâ?? (patterning would be a better word) which can be explained mathematically more readily by these principlesâ??the ripple patterns in sand dunes, whirlpools in flowing water, and fascinating surrealistic shapes on computer screens, is of a different dimension entirely from information-bearing chemical sequences that characterize living things..

..Even Ilya Prigogine, who received a Nobel Prize for work on the problem of trying to relate the formation of such things as whirlpools from energy flow to the origin of life, has admitted that he cannot use his â??non-equilibrium dissipative structuresâ?? to explain the origin of even the simplest living thing....

..Chaos theory may be wrongly named, anyhowâ??it actually proceeds on very complex non-linear statistical laws! ..

..No-one has ever seen, or is likely to see, machine functions or project-oriented programs arise from any sort of chaos. The Second Law is not rendered insecure nor denied by â??chaos physicsâ??...

So the actual evidece shows that the second law holds true. And Staurm is trying to redefine complexity. The order that comes out of such structures of apparent chaos are not like the order and complexity in living things. Totally different. Opposite direction.

Institute for Creation Research - A Christ-Focused Creation Ministry

Chaos physics: an escape route for evolution?

**natureisawesome** · 08-26-2007, 03:02 AM

Quote:
Originally Posted by natureisawesome
SO I have a question to get back to the topic.

What good reason does anyone have to doubt they exist?

About the same amount or reasons that we have to doubt that they dont exist.

No way. There are 0 good reasons to doubt your existance. We see the evidence for God and stability and reality and love all around us and in us.

The playing field is even, as far as I am concerned. Its a quagmire. No one can truely prove that god(s) exist with current evidence available, but no one can disprove it either. That is literally why the call it faith.

It's like you just totally ignored all the evidence I've pointed out.

In my personal opinion, if a person is leading a good life, no matter in who's name it is in, then why should they change their life to fit another god(s) ways?

Because you can't have a good life without God.

And in that freewill they gave us the ability to have morals, and let those morals be whatever we wish, as a part of our freewill. It doesnt mean that god doesnt have his set rules of whats good and bad, but they let us choose what we ourselves feel is good and bad.

But there has to be spiritual standard to say this is right or this is wrong. If God's morality and ours contradict, we're wrong. And most people would never put that philosophy that you mentied above to practice in real life. Without Spiritual truth good or bad is meaningless.

Quick slightly over-exaggerated for the point example... Stealing is considered bad, and is stated so in the bible, correct? What about stealing to feed your family? What about stealing to save a life? What about stealing to protect the person whom you stole from? So many nuances, that can never fully be covered by any rules laid down in a book or by a god. Do you just go with the blanket ruling that stealing is bad, and leave it at that? Or do YOU have specific things out of that list that you feel is ok considering the circumstances?

It's not right to steal from others. But what if someone's value system told them it was fine to steal from you? How would you like that? Stealing by defenition is taking something not rightfully yours to take. So it's always wrong.

**snowblind** · 08-26-2007, 03:06 AM

hi, before i add my opinion on god, the universe, life, cheese grills.

id like a ceationist or 'intelligent deisnist' which is funny cus thats on a car add in the uk, views on dinosaurs ?

why did god create them before man ?
then why did he let them die out?
was he just messing around before he wanted us around?
where they his mistakes ?

ok here's my 2 cents

i think god is just the universe personified and that the universe is god sterilised.

and there is probably a happy medium. omnipotent sentient beings, meta physical beings, life forces, something, a soul if you like to the void of space that we rotate in.

that about 99 % of the three core religions are rehtoric, fables and added/edited bits.

ala church of england, created so henry the viii could divorce.

then to that 1% id add eastern philospoies about mind, spirit and body, and the earth.

add in a bit of nural kinetics

add in a bit of luck

boil with lots of love

and in about 24 hours you've got the essence of my theologies on religon, spirituality and life

but yeah dinosaurs please

**natureisawesome** · 08-26-2007, 03:11 AM

Quote:
Originally Posted by natureisawesome
SO I have a question to get back to the topic.

What good reason does anyone have to doubt they exist?

About the same amount or reasons that we have to doubt that they dont exist.

No way. There are 0 good reasons to doubt your existance. We see the evidence for God and stability and reality and love all around us and in us.

The playing field is even, as far as I am concerned. Its a quagmire. No one can truely prove that god(s) exist with current evidence available, but no one can disprove it either. That is literally why the call it faith.

It's like you just totally ignored all the evidence I've pointed out.

In my personal opinion, if a person is leading a good life, no matter in who's name it is in, then why should they change their life to fit another god(s) ways?

Because you can't have a good life without God.

And in that freewill they gave us the ability to have morals, and let those morals be whatever we wish, as a part of our freewill. It doesnt mean that god doesnt have his set rules of whats good and bad, but they let us choose what we ourselves feel is good and bad.

But there has to be spiritual standard to say this is right or this is wrong. If God's morality and ours contradict, we're wrong. And most people would never put that philosophy that you mentied above to practice in real life. Without Spiritual truth good or bad is meaningless.

Quick slightly over-exaggerated for the point example... Stealing is considered bad, and is stated so in the bible, correct? What about stealing to feed your family? What about stealing to save a life? What about stealing to protect the person whom you stole from? So many nuances, that can never fully be covered by any rules laid down in a book or by a god. Do you just go with the blanket ruling that stealing is bad, and leave it at that? Or do YOU have specific things out of that list that you feel is ok considering the circumstances?

It's not right to steal from others. But what if someone's value system told them it was fine to steal from you? How would you like that? Stealing by defenition is taking something not rightfully yours to take. So it's always wrong.

If you ever get a chance natureisawesome, I recommend reading through a few other religious texts, and to take the time to notice the similarities and differences in the "rules" of all of them. You would be shocked at how similar, yet so dis-similar they can be.

I'm quite aware of this. But the bottom line is justice and love are recognised by everyone. Everyone has their own twisted view of what that entails. It is also important to remember that culture that influences people's philosphy and morals shaped by people's behaviour. So it all comes around back circle.

IDK, you might enjoy it, you might not, but I always think that full understanding of something you believe in is important, otherwise you may find you are following nothing but lies, or have misunderstood/interpretted something critical.

We never start out with a full understanding. We grow and learn and our understanding grows. What's important is that you're honest and wise about what you have. It will grow in the right direction then and we will learn more only to learn more.

**natureisawesome** · 08-26-2007, 03:29 AM

whoops I posted that twice.

**Hardcore Newbie** · 08-26-2007, 05:47 AM