PhysicsGuy wrote:Interesting. I started on a similar path, but it diverged from yours at some point. The end result being that I acquired a large distrust in science when it discusses anything other than predictions of experiments (as some of you know, this is one of my soap boxes); therefore, for me science does not have much say in things other than warming up my frozen pizza and the like.
I went through a very short phase, in my early teens, where my Mormonism had me thinking things like that the dating methods used by science to predict a very old earth and such must have been wrong, just as the young earth creationists do now, as a defense mechanism against the encroaching scientific awareness, but I'm way too scientifically minded, and that kind of thing didn't last very long at all.
It didn't take all that long before I decided that the science was pretty trustworthy, and if something looked old to the variety of science applied to it that comes back saying it's old, then it probably is old. Same with the rest. I don't trust science implicitly in the sense that I think science has discovered everything, or that science is always right, and so forth, but I do trust science more than I trust anything else, because it has a good track record, a good methodology actually designed to converge on truth over time, etc. I think our scientific understandings of most things are good enough now that we'll see not much more than some evolution of thought from here on, some fine tuning, and probably nothing revolutionary that turns over some major field of current scientific thought completely on its head.
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen
As I understand it on its most fundamental level, science works under the theory that the universe we observe and live in is made up of matter and energy, and that matter and energy interact through forces that operate in space and time. That is it.
Now, if there is a “god” (or an anything else), it is either made up of matter and/or energy and exists in space and time, or it does not. If it does not, then I claim that it is utterly irrelevant; if it isn’t in space and time, then it doesn’t interact with the things that are.
I suppose you could say I accept that on “faith”. It’s faith in something that has an incredible amount of evidence to support it. But in a way it’s faith. But if the alternative is true, then the proposition that the universe works according to natural law is an illusion.
From the perspective of Mormonism, God exists within space and time. If that is true, then science should be able to detect God. If there really is a holy ghost out there made up of matter (fine and pure matter, of course), then in principle, science should be able to detect it. If messages from the Holy Ghost stimulate the nuerons in your brain, then the messages should also be able to stimulate the receptors in a scientific instrument.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
Gazelam, for whatever reasons, protons are stable. Ok. One might conceive how the situation would be in the universe if they weren't stable, but they are stable, so it's just a dumb line of thought. Given that protons, for whatever reason, are stable, it is possible for things to be the way they are in this universe. If there are a zillion universes out there, and for all I know there may well be, it could be that in some of them protons aren't stable, and then I'll grant the likelihood of life arising in them is slim. But in this one they are, and here we are too. It's the anthropic principle at work in our case, for lack of a better explanation.
Now, as far as the second law of thermodynamics is concerned, it really has nothing whatsoever to do with the possibility of life arising from non-life, or of life evolving from simple life into more complex life. That is a pipe dream of those who wish to keep alive the likelihood of there being a God. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics has to do with the amount of usable energy in a system, and that's it. The amount of usable energy in a closed system either stays the same, or decreases, but doesn't increase. You may be aware that earth is not a closed system, but has energy being added to it in vast quantities every second of every day by the Sun. Overall, however, the Sun/Earth system is increasing in entropy, usable energy is being depleted, and in a few billion years this earth will die because of that, along with the Sun.
The 2nd Law does not require that nothing be capable of producing an ordering of things rather than chaos. There are a great many natural processes which result in local increases of order. Take the reproduction of cells. Raw materials come into the body in an essentially random, jumbled up, arbitrary state, and through natural processes they are taken into the body's cells and organized, through natural, chemical processes, into more cells. There is a reduction in the "orderliness entropy" of the materials that make up the cells as they go from random to organized in a specific way. Notice that this process actually takes an input of energy to achieve. The overall entropy of the entire system, including the source of the energy (the Sun, generally) increases, but the local entropy of the materials themselves, and the cells, has been reduced.
Another good example is photosynthesis. You take carbon dioxide molecules, some water molecules, and some sunlight, and the "orderliness" entropy goes down as they become ordered into very specific positions and states with respect to each other (or, their atoms do as old molecules are broken up and new ones formed). In fact, the real "useful energy" entropy of this system decreases too, at the cost of increased entropy elsewhere in the system (the sun)).
The fact is, the entropy decrease of everything ever organized by life on our earth has been paid for with an entropy increase that is even larger in the whole system. It takes more useful energy to create an adult human being than you could ever get back by, say, burning one. So even though we're organized, and our "orderliness entropy" appears to be reduced, there is no violation of the 2nd Law. The process of creating organized life still involves overall reduction in useful energy in our solar system.
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen
As the late great Mr. Wizard would have said, science is our friend. Sure, it can be abused by blowing us all up or transporting us to a planet in the grips of an ice age, but where would we be without it? Probably huddled in some dreary hut, waiting for some hulking barbarians to come over the next hill and plunder our village.
moksha wrote:As the late great Mr. Wizard would have said, science is our friend. Sure, it can be abused by blowing us all up or transporting us to a planet in the grips of an ice age, but where would we be without it? Probably huddled in some dreary hut, waiting for some hulking barbarians to come over the next hill and plunder our village.
Sethbag wrote:Now, as far as the second law of thermodynamics is concerned, it really has nothing whatsoever to do with the possibility of life arising from non-life, or of life evolving from simple life into more complex life. That is a pipe dream of those who wish to keep alive the likelihood of there being a God. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics has to do with the amount of usable energy in a system, and that's it. The amount of usable energy in a closed system either stays the same, or decreases, but doesn't increase. You may be aware that earth is not a closed system, but has energy being added to it in vast quantities every second of every day by the Sun. Overall, however, the Sun/Earth system is increasing in entropy, usable energy is being depleted, and in a few billion years this earth will die because of that, along with the Sun.
Sethbag: Thanks for clearing this issue up. I am so tired of hearing the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics used against evolution. The argument makes no sense and has never made sense. I had to explain its nonsense everytime I introduced the evolution unit to my biology students (this unit came after those discussing photosynthesis and the input of energy from the sun).
Gaz: I suggest, instead of turning to FARMS for all your answers, turn to a scientific, peer-reviewed text or article. It might help clear up some of the confusion you have on this issue. Why Darwin Matters by Michael Shermer is a great introduction to the debate about so-called Intelligent Design. Good luck. Bring any questions you may have to the board.
Sethbag wrote:If there are a zillion universes out there, and for all I know there may well be, it could be that in some of them protons aren't stable, and then I'll grant the likelihood of life arising in them is slim. But in this one they are, and here we are too. It's the anthropic principle at work in our case, for lack of a better explanation.
Another possible route for the operation of the anthropic principle arises from quantum indeterminacy. Now, I'm not a physicist, so I'm merely going to be explaining this as I understand it. Somebody like Tarski should definitely come along and clean up the mess when I'm done. But the idea I think is that electrons spin in both directions and occupy many different positions simultaneously until an observer "collapses" the function to a single value. So the mere existence of observers in this one of many possible quantum states may in fact have collapsed the wave function to this particular value. In the words of somebody smarter than me, "only universes with observers at some point in their history can become real."
Some theist rants against the anthropic principle here:
Some day I hope to know enough about some of these things to be able to tell what's bogus and what isn't. In the meantime, maybe somebody can fill us in? Tarski?
A good way of understanding the Anthropic Principle is to say that, whatever the odds of a planet forming which can sustain life, the odds of any given planet meeting the relevant criteria, upon which an intelligent life form has developed capable of asking the question, are 100% in favor.
Another way of thinking about it is to realize that for each person who wins the lottery jackpot, the odds may indeed have been millions to one against, but with even more millions actually playing it, inevitably someone was going to win, and they just got lucky.
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen