A path to faith with science

[Iambreathingin]

There is still 0 proof or even evidence to suggest one concious being that created the universe. When every counter (such as fossils) is responded to with "The devil did it to confuse me" then I really question how arguing with somone so convited to their cause could be worth it.

While I read what you write with an open mind, my myself believeing in somthing greater than what we known, you seem to be already set in your beliefs and this is the condition belonging to all those devoted to their faith. Your belief is so strong that your mind will not have you believe otherwise, the idea of testing your own faith by actually considering alternatives would seem to put you off on some unconcious level.

the more you talk the less you listen and unless you'd like to hold a real time conversation with me I want no further part in this thread.

I'll leave you with this thought.

You have no more proof than we do. You do however have conviction to your belief, where as I for example am open to anything my logic approves of. As Buddha taught, believe nothing that does not agree with your own sense of logic, even if it is I who says it. (or somthing to that effect)

[Delta9 UK]

natureisawesome - I don't think you understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics and its application to evolution.

The 2nd law :
"No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body"

You are taking this to mean "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease"

Order from disorder is common - take a Snowflake or the helical structure of DNA. Life = Order from disorder - its all around you If these violate the 2nd law, well, they do it a LOT.

Anyway we are NOT talking about a closed system here - we have a Sun which is throwing out all the energy needed to support and sustain life on this planet. You seem to have neglected that bit...

[BlueDevil]

Just read the thread and Jamstigator's

I'm not saying there *is* no omnipotent being out there. I am saying that you haven't even come close to proving there is. Since one can't prove a negative, it's up to the proponents of a theory to prove the positive...or fail to do so. So far, you have failed.

..sums it up rather well IMO.

[LegalizeTheGreen]

just to clear things up, good and evil are easy to define, and don't require "God". Good is everything that coencides with the normal actions and thoughts of mankind, where evil is anything that deviates from the normal path. ie, the average person doesn't kill people, therefore someone that murders is "evil". It is pretty simple. In the past, where there was much more bloodshed, David murdering Goliath was interpreted as Good simply because it coeicided with the normality of the time (basicly a duel to the death, which wasn't an uncommon occurance). They used to stone people back in the day, and the bible even preached it, and it was good because it was the normal, acepted punishment, where nowdays, stoning is not generally practiced because for the majority of the world, it is no longer the norm, and would be considered evil now.

also, scientists don't go trying to convert christians, so maybe christians should leave science alone and stick to faith, like the bible says you should(Thou shalt not test the Lord your God).

[jamstigator]

"If those listening hear a radio signal with random noise, it is clearly the product of a natural process..."

Actually, that's not true. Encrypted data is basically indistinguishable from random noise. (There are some security software packages that take advantage of this to hide an encrypted volume within another encrypted volume, for example, so if tortured you can give up the passphrase for the outer encrypted layer, while denying the very existence of an inner encrypted layer.)

There is a theory that this is why we haven't yet detected signals from other intelligences; we're seeing the signals just fine, but because they're encrypted we don't know that's what they are. Of course, this leads to the question: why would they encrypt their signals? And one scary answer is: something out there is hunting down and eradicating intelligent civilizations when it detects them, leaving behind only those civilizations that *do* encrypt their data/signals.

BTW, the second law of thermodynamics argument didn't convince me. The amount of matter+energy in the universe will (so far as we know) never either go down nor go up. It may change form (solids to plasma, matter to energy, energy to matter, whatever), but that's it. If that's so, if the amount of 'stuff' in the universe cannot be altered, then if a contraction/expansion cycle could happen once, it could happen infinitely. I concede your point that apparently the universe will not contract (this time), at least so far as we can tell, but there's a lot of unanswered questions related to dark matter that need to be answered before anyone can say for sure. We haven't even *found* dark matter yet, despite the fact that it comprises the bulk of the universe in which we exist.

Now, here's a snippet from Wiki:

"The smallest DNA bacteriophage is the Phi-X174 phage, thought to be larger than Hepatitis B, at about 4 kb. [1]

Nanobes are thought by some to be the smallest known organism, about ten times smaller than the smallest known bacteria. Nanobes, tiny filamental structures first found in some rocks and sediments, were first described in 1996 by Philipa Uwins of the University of Queensland. The smallest are 20 nm long. Some researchers believe them to be merely crystal growths, but a purported find of DNA in nanobe samples may prove otherwise. They are similar to the life-like structures found in ALH84001, the famous Mars meteorite from the Antarctic."

So, this means that the DNA data in a nanobe would be around 400 bytes. Not millions of pages, not 10^50000 or anything of the sort. While the random creation of the molecules necessary to form a bacteria (4000 bytes or so) would be unlikely, 400 bytes, given billions of years, and probably quadrillions of planets, is not at all implausible. And once you have even this crude form of life, the inevitable path to increased complexity has begun. This post has more data in it than a nanobe.

[natureisawesome]

delta9 uk said:

natureisawesome - I don't think you understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics and its application to evolution.

The 2nd law :
"No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body"

You are taking this to mean "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease"

Order from disorder is common - take a Snowflake or the helical structure of DNA. Life = Order from disorder - its all around you If these violate the 2nd law, well, they do it a LOT.

Anyway we are NOT talking about a closed system here - we have a Sun which is throwing out all the energy needed to support and sustain life on this planet. You seem to have neglected that bit...

I do understand what the second law of thermodynamics means. Not only can the entropy of a closed system not decrease, the entropy of an open system can't decrease either!

from Second Law of Thermodynamics: Answers to Critics :

Question 1: Open Systems
â??Someone recently asked me about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, stating that they thought it was irrelevant to creation/evolution because the earth is not an isolated system since the sun is constantly pumping in more energy.

â??This does seem to be a valid pointâ??do creationists still use this argument? Am I missing something here?â??

Answer 1:
The Second Law can be stated in many different ways, e.g.:

that the entropy of the universe tends towards a maximum (in simple terms, entropy is a measure of disorder)

usable energy is running out

information tends to get scrambled

order tends towards disorder

a random jumble wonâ??t organize itself

It also depends on the type of system:

An isolated system exchanges neither matter nor energy with its surroundings. The total entropy of an isolated system never decreases. The universe is an isolated system, so is running downâ?? see If God created the universe, then who Created God? for what this implies.

A closed system exchanges energy but not matter with its surroundings. In this case, the 2nd Law is stated such that the total entropy of the system and surroundings never decreases.

An open system exchanges both matter and energy with its surroundings. Certainly, many evolutionists claim that the 2nd Law doesnâ??t apply to open systems. But this is false. Dr John Ross of Harvard University states:

â?¦ there are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics. Ordinarily the second law is stated for isolated systems, but the second law applies equally well to open systems. â?¦ There is somehow associated with the field of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics the notion that the second law of thermodynamics fails for such systems. It is important to make sure that this error does not perpetuate itself.1

Open systems still have a tendency to disorder. There are special cases where local order can increase at the expense of greater disorder elsewhere. One case is crystallization, covered in Question 2 below. The other case is programmed machinery, that directs energy into maintaining and increasing complexity, at the expense of increased disorder elsewhere. Living things have such energy-converting machinery to make the complex structures of life.

The open systems argument does not help evolution. Raw energy cannot generate the specified complex information in living things. Undirected energy just speeds up destruction. Just standing out in the sun wonâ??t make you more complexâ??the human body lacks the mechanisms to harness raw solar energy. If you stood in the sun too long, you would get skin cancer, because the sunâ??s undirected energy will cause mutations. (Mutations are copying errors in the genes that nearly always lose information). Similarly, undirected energy flow through an alleged primordial soup will break down the complex molecules of life faster than they are formed.

Itâ??s like trying to run a car by pouring petrol on it and setting it alight. No, a car will run only if the energy in petrol is harnessed via the pistons, crankshaft, etc. A bull in a china shop is also raw energy. But if the bull were harnessed to a generator, and the electricity directed a pottery-producing machine, then its energy could be used to make things.

To make proteins, a cell uses the information coded in the DNA and a very complex decoding machine. In the lab, chemists must use sophisticated machinery to make the building blocks combine in the right way. Raw energy would result in wrong combinations and even destruction of the building blocks.

Question 2: What about crystals?
To quote one anti-creationist, Boyce Rensberger:

If the Second Law truly prohibited local emergence of increased order, there would be no ice cubes. The greater orderliness of water molecules in ice crystals than in the liquid state is purchased with the expenditure of energy at the generator that made the electricity to run the freezer. And that makes it legal under the Second Law.2

Answer 2:
Rensberger is ignorant of the creationist responses to this argument. An energy source is not enough to produce the specified complexity of life. The energy must be directed in some way. The ice cubes of his example would not form if the electrical energy was just wired into liquid water! Instead, we would get lots of heat, and the water breaking up into simpler components, hydrogen and oxygen.

The ice example is thermodynamically irrelevant to the origin of life. When ice freezes, it releases heat energy into the environment. This causes an entropy increase in the surroundings. If the temperature is low enough, this entropy increase is greater than the loss of entropy in forming the crystal. But the formation of proteins and nucleic acids from amino acids and nucleotides not only lowers their entropy, but it removes heat energy (and entropy) from their surroundings. Thus ordinary amino acids and nucleotides will not spontaneously form proteins and nucleic acids at any temperature.

Rensberger also fails to distinguish between order and complexity. Crystals are ordered; life is complex. To illustrate: a periodic (repeating) signal, e.g. ABABABABABAB, is an example of order. However, it carries little information: only â??ABâ??, and â??print 6 timesâ??.

A crystal is analogous to that sequence; it is a regular, repeating network of atoms. Like that sequence, a crystal contains little information: the co-ordinates of a few atoms (i.e. those which make up the unit cell), and instructions â??more of the sameâ?? x times. If a crystal is broken, smaller but otherwise identical crystals result. Conversely, breaking proteins, DNA or living structures results in destruction, because the information in them is greater than in their parts.

A crystal forms because this regular arrangement, determined by directional forces in the atoms, has the lowest energy. Thus the maximum amount of heat is released into the surroundings, so the overall entropy is increased.

Random signals, e.g. WEKJHDF BK LKGJUES KIYFV NBUY, are not ordered, but complex. But a random signal contains no useful information. A non-random aperiodic (non-repeating) signalâ??specified complexityâ??e.g. â??I love youâ??, may carry useful information. However, it would be useless unless the receiver of the information understood the English language convention. The amorous thoughts have no relationship to that letter sequence apart from the agreed language convention. The language convention is imposed onto the letter sequence.

Proteins and DNA are also non-random aperiodic sequences. The sequences are not caused by the properties of the constituent amino acids and nucleotides themselves. This is a huge contrast to crystal structures, which are caused by the properties of their constituents. The sequences of DNA and proteins must be imposed from outside by some intelligent process. Proteins are coded in DNA, and the DNA code comes from pre-existing codes, not by random processes.

Many scientific experiments show that when their building blocks are simply mixed and chemically combined, a random sequence results. To make a protein, scientists need to add one unit at a time, and each unit requires a number of chemical steps to ensure that the wrong type of reaction doesnâ??t occur. The same goes for preparing a DNA strand in a correct sequence. See Q&A: Origin of Life.

The evolutionary origin-of-life expert Leslie Orgel confirmed that there are three distinct concepts: order, randomness and specified complexity:

Living things are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals such as granite fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; mixtures of random polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity. [L. Orgel, The Origins of Life, John Wiley, NY, 1973, p. 189]

Even the simplest known self-reproducing life form (Mycoplasma) has 482 genes, and it must parasitize more complex organisms to obtain the building blocks it cannot manufacture itself. The simplest organism that could exist in theory would need at least 256 genes, and itâ??s doubtful whether it could survive.

One of the classic examples of such â??order out of chaosâ?? is the appearance of hexagonal patterns on the surface of certain oils as they are being heated. The minute the heating stops, this pattern vanishes once again into a sea of molecular disorder.

These patterns, like the swirls of a hurricane, are not only fleetingly short-lived, but are simple, repetitive structures which require negligible information to describe them. The information they do contain is intrinsic to the physics and chemistry of the matter involved, not requiring any extra â??programming.â??

[natureisawesome]

legalize the green,

I feel no need to respond to your logic. I wil say though that I really really believe in God's word and I believe that people are going to hell. Now I love and care about mankind and so I'll do what I can to save asy many as possible. If this wasn't my attitude wouldn't I be a evil person?

I care about you, and I hope the best for you.

[snowblind]

Quote
Not sure what you're referring to. And yes quotes from the bible can be used as evidence when presented in the right way.


like when you put spin on them

like....

'i did smoke marjauna, but i didnt inhale "

[natureisawesome]

Jamstigator said:

Encrypted data is basically indistinguishable from random noise

It can be simply pointed out that all information, even encrypted data is consistently patterned. Random noise can have a short lived pattern but it is usually not.

There is a theory that this is why we haven't yet detected signals from other intelligences; we're seeing the signals just fine, but because they're encrypted we don't know that's what they are. Of course, this leads to the question: why would they encrypt their signals? And one scary answer is: something out there is hunting down and eradicating intelligent civilizations when it detects them, leaving behind only those civilizations that *do* encrypt their data/signals.

You really believe that? How do you sleep at night? That's really paranoid you know. But I suppose that is one major possibility if you believe in evolution. There are lots of parasites and creatures that live off of other creatures energy in this world. It reminds me of this science fiction story I read when I was younger where these space pigs came to the earth in supposed peace but they really just came to eat everyone.

The amount of matter+energy in the universe will (so far as we know) never either go down nor go up.

The total amount yes.

there's a lot of unanswered questions related to dark matter that need to be answered before anyone can say for sure. We haven't even *found* dark matter yet, despite the fact that it comprises the bulk of the universe in which we exist.

It supposedly exists. For those of you reading who do not know, dark matter is needed by old age theorists to account for rapid stellar speeds in galaxies. If there is enough of this dark matter, much more than visible matter, then the universe would also be â??closedâ??. Assuming the Big Bang model, a closed universe would eventually collapse back onto itself, if there was enough dark matter. It was hoped that this dark matter would be mostly in the form of small stars called red dwarfs. But Hubble Space Telescope measurements have indicated there are hardly any of these red dwarf stars. So cosmologists must rely more on some type of exotic matter, which has so far been undetected. A further problem is that the red dwarfs they did detect are believed to weigh in at 20 % of the sunâ??s mass, which is contrary to popular models of star formation. One of these red dwarfs was seen to produce a flare, an event supposedly reserved only for more massive stars.

Furthermore, they haven't found any dark matter in the milky way at all :

No dark matter found in the Milky Way Galaxy

They are similar to the life-like structures found in ALH84001, the famous Mars meteorite from the Antarctic."

Which turned out to be discounted. For example, there is almost certain proof that the amino acids found in ALH84001 were the result of contamination from Earth, and other â??nanofossilsâ?? were merely inanimate magnetite whiskers plus artefact's of transmission microscopy (TEM). Of course, the humanist-dominated media and assorted â??skepticsâ?? didnâ??t give the retraction anywhere near the same publicity. Most recently they have supposedly come up with new 'evidence' .

from Conclusive evidence for life from Mars? Remember last time! :

" The new â??evidenceâ?? is tiny (one-millionth of an inch in diameter) crystals of magnetite, a magnetic oxide of iron (Fe3O4). These were analyzed using a new technique called high-power backscattered scanning electron microscopy (SEM-BSE), a method introduced by two of the researchers (J.W. and C.A.) to study endolithic (inside rock) microorganisms. These crystals supposedly show six key features that indicate that they were made by bacteria rather than forming inorganically:

they are in chains, rather than clumped by magnetic attraction
uniform crystal size and shape within chains
gaps between crystals
orientation of elongated crystals along the chain axis
flexibility of chains
a halo interpreted as a possible remnant of a membrane around chains.
In the same issue of PNAS, a NASA research team led by Dr Kathie Thomas-Keprta of NASAâ??s Johnson Space Center studied single crystals and claimed that their unique shape, which they call truncated hexa-octahedral, is evidence that they were formed by bacteria.3 "

It's hard to find information on nanobes and their proof as organisms of any sorts seems yet to be proven. But when it mentioned the antartic find that brought memories.

So, this means that the DNA data in a nanobe would be around 400 bytes.

They're not even sure it's a living organism. you can't be sure how much information it carries.

[Delta9 UK]

LMAO you can copy and paste all you like - I still stand by my point.

There is no thermodynamic reason why a molecule or gene cannot, by slight changes, go from one configuration to a different one that turns out to work better.

There ya go.

With all your links pointing to the same "resource" you really won't get far with your "evidence"