God lover
Member
Interesting. What do you mean, "it is driven by feedback" ?
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Science Proves Nature Was Created
- Thread starter Etritonakin
- Start date
Bunyip
pro scapegoat
That is the, first thing kids learn when taught about evolution mate. If you do not understand why, you don't know what 'evolution' means.
God lover
Member
Well, we are all in this world together.
Can you explain? This is a forum where people share ideas. I would love to hear about this. I tried looking it up on the introweb and got a flood of unrelated articles. Dumb it down for me
Bunyip
pro scapegoat
I'm sorry no. I don't believe it is possible that you are being sincere. If you had any interest in discussing evolution meaningfully, you would know what 'evolution' means in biology. I doubt you live in a vacuum.Well, we are all in this world together.
Can you explain? This is a forum where people share ideas. I would love to hear about this. I tried looking it up on the introweb and got a flood of unrelated articles. Dumb it down for me
God lover
Member
Why are you so abrasive?
To me evolution means that all life on earth stems from the most simple forms. Over a long period of time this formed into different forms. I was under the impression that it was mutations in the dna that caused different forms and those forms of life with advantages reproduced more effectively.
Am I wrong, or would you add some keys here?
I don't mean to be rude or confrontational.
Bunyip
pro scapegoat
Neither do I. I just need a real honest exchange.
Let me put it this way;
You begin with a false dichotomy - that the alternative to an intelligent designer is God.
That is a false dichotomy, because you do not know if they really are the only two possible options.
Now, I won't pick up on this - so we move to the premis you come up with in order to support your false dichotomy;
That evolution is random, because it is based upon random mutations - and just random chance can not create such complexity.
Which is demonstrably false in part, and a non-sequitur in another. Random processes can create incredible complexity, ask any computer programmer, or look to snowflakes, coral reefs, galaxies and so on. Also atomic clocks are based on random events (the decay of a radioactive element) and so the conclusion that order and complexity can not come from a process that has an element of random is just a non-sequitur.
Forgive me if I came across as hostile, I am not intending to be - but this is 2015 not 1859 and your argument against evolution began with a false dichotomy upon which it leveraged a carefully constructed non-sequitur. Relying all the time upon a fundamental ignorance of a process that has been established fact for more than a century.
Excuse me for saying so, but such subtle things smack too much of politics, not polite discussion. So yes, I'm afraid I find it hard not to be a touch suspect of your motives.
Bunyip
pro scapegoat
I have to point this out to you, but if what you wrote above is really what you think evolution is - then you could have answered your own objection about evolution being random chance. The description you give above is of a process that could perfectly well create an almost infinite complexity and diversity of life. You even describe in part the process of feedback that you apparently were innocent of 20 minutes ago.
Last edited:
psychoslice
Veteran Member
Well good luck with that.
Mohammad Nur Syamsu
Well-Known Member
Right. Randomness, that every part of every organism changes in every direction, and then the organisms are sorted by natural selection.
It doesn't work out, the power of randomness to produce chaos is much larger than the power of natural selection to sort out surviving forms.
That's why one simply has to hypothesize that there is decisionmaking with some sophistication in nature. Science is full of materialists who are dead against acknowledging freedom is real, even against acknowledging people have freedom. Nobel prize winning scientists would have no skill to describe anything in terms of freedom, including people, as there simply is no university level teaching about it. The sophistication of the discourse about freedom in academic circles does not exceed the sophistication of a 5 year old to talk in terms of choosing things.
The only functional concept of decisionmaking is the religious and common concept of it. In this concept it is categorically a subjective issue, what it is that makes any decision turn out the way it does. With a subjective issue the answer is reached by choosing it. So one expresses emotion with free will, choosing the answer, and that would be the right answer to the question about what the agency of a decision is. It means with a subjective issue 2 or more answers are valid. Like saying the painting is ugly, or beautiful, are both just as valid conclusions.
Materialists are generally against accepting subjectivity is valid. Against expression of emotion with free will. They want to make the issue of what the agency of a decision is, into a factual issue as well, like everything else. It cannot be done, and it creates enormous problems for ethics and religion when subjectivity is destroyed altogether.
So that is creationism vs evolution, it is accepting subjectivity is valid, and accepting the facts about how things are chosen vs denying the fact that freedom is real, and rejecting subjectivity.
Thief
Rogue Theologian
but then your signature would seem so contrary.
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
We are the only beings who ponder these questions, who deduce God's existence, we are the primary beneficiaries of everything creation has to offer- why would God create such a being he could NOT relate to on a personal level?
I think there is possible common ground here though, we are not entirely separate or entirely the same entity?
dust1n
Zindīq
So do you actually have any math to show that the power of randomness to produce chaos is much larger than the power of natural selection to sort out surviving forms, or is this just a claim based on no actual observable phenomenon. Because if you just made it up, it seems like a poor reason why one only has to hypothesize creationism to prove its true... without... you know actually do any other necessary step after the hypothesis... like test the claim with an experiment, gather data, publish results, and let thousands of other people test the claim for themselves.
But I guess that's the beauty of creationism. One does just have simply have to hypothesize. They just have their hypothesis.
Etritonakin
Well-Known Member
Well it is difficult to answer ethereal vagueness.
Obviously we do not know all things about God -and to acknowledge that is to not reduce anything, but to allow ourselves to gain more knowledge.
If our separate minds are the things that make us separate, then it is so.
Otherwise, we would not be on this forum disagreeing about the universal truth we do not yet fully understand.
Everything is connected, everything is made up of the same stuff, there is essentially only one reality of which we are all a part -but to personify it is not a mistake.
There is a personality expressed through all things -and it is God's.
A name does not reduce, but is a title for that which is is not yet fully understood.
When we are introduced to individuals (who are all a part of a whole), we first learn their name -and then we learn what it means -who they are -over time.
That which exists can be known to a greater extent over time.
Individuals are essentially subdivisions of a whole -and the intended purpose thereof is to allow independent creativity and infinite newness in which all individuals may delight.
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
It's called entropy
God lover
Member
Okay man. I see your point. I am like a guy who walks into a conversation and says what he thinks. I actually thought random mutation was the process of natural selection.
If my arguments are old school then help me out. Please don't accuse my motives. We are in a discussion forum and what better place to start than where I am at.
dust1n
Zindīq
Okay. Do you have the math showing that the power of entropy exceeds the power of evolutionary selection to cause genetic variation and/or common descent?
God lover
Member
What is feedback? Please just tell me! Honestly I ask with no trickery.
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
The power of entropy ultimately exceeds everything, you'd have to take up the mathematical argument with Hawking and most modern cosmologists, the universe began with very concentrated energy, a rapidly self extracting archive of information specific to creating everything we see, including life and a habitat for it, and it's all winding down towards a cold dark lifeless state.
the simple laws of random mutation and natural selection can be simulated in mathematical algorithms yes, and the program never accidentally develops it's own consciousness and ponders it's own existence. It creates the simplest homogenous form that satisfies the fitness function- reproduction, nothing more nothing less.
leibowde84
Veteran Member
But, this is a real world example of how time is not constant, is it not? It is a 4th dimension of our reality.
dust1n
Zindīq
Sigh... and creationism is a science...
"The second law of thermodynamics (the law of increase of entropy) is sometimes used as an argument against evolution. Evolution, the argument goes, is a decrease of entropy, because it involves things getting more organized over time, while the second law says that things get more disordered over time. So evolution violates the second law.
There are many things wrong with this argument, and it has been discussed ad infinitum. A summary of the arguments on both sides can be found on the links at www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo.html. These discussions never seem to involve any numerical calculations. This is unfortunate, since a very simple calculation shows that it is physically impossible for evolution to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
It is important to note that the earth is not an isolated system: it receives energy from the sun, and radiates energy back into space. The second law doesn't claim that the entropy of any part of a system increases: if it did, ice would never form and vapor would never condense, since both of those processes involve a decrease of entropy. Rather, the second law says that the total entropy of the whole system must increase. Any decrease of entropy (like the water freezing into ice cubes in your freezer) must be compensated by an increase in entropy elsewhere (the heat released into your kitchen by the refrigerator).
A slightly more sophisticated form of the anti-evolution argument recognizes that the earth is not an isolated system; it receives energy from the sun. But, the argument goes on, the sun's energy only increases disorder. It speeds the processes of breakdown and decay. Therefore, even with an energy source, evolution still violates the second law.
For the earth, though, we have to take into account the change of entropy involved with both the absorption of energy from the sun and the radiation of energy into space. Think of the sun as a heat reservoir that maintains a constant temperature T1 = 6000 K. (I am using the absolute, or Kelvin, temperature scale.) That's the temperature of the radiating surface of the sun, and so it's the effective temperature of the energy we receive from the sun. When the earth absorbs some amount of heat, Q, from this reservoir, the reservoir loses entropy:
On average, the earth's temperature is neither increasing nor decreasing. Therefore, in the same time that it absorbs heat energy Q from the sun's radiation, it must radiate the same amount of heat into space. This energy is radiated at a much lower temperature that is approximately equal to the average surface temperature of the earth, T2 = 280 K. We can think of space as a second heat reservoir that absorbs the heat Q and consequently undergoes an entropy increase
Since T1 is much larger than T2, it is clear that the net entropy of the two reservoirs increases:
Even if it is true that the processes of life on earth result in an entropy decrease of the earth, the second law of thermodynamics will not be violated unless that decrease is larger than the entropy increase of the two heat reservoirs. Any astronomy textbook will tell you that the earth absorbs 1.1 x 1017 Joules per second of power from the sun, so in one year we get (1.1 x 1017 J/sec)x(365 days/year)x(24 hours/day)x(60 min/hr)x(60 sec/min) = 3.5 x 1024 Joules of energy from the sun. This corresponds to an entropy increase in the heat reservoirs of
Just how big is this increase? For comparison, let's calculate the entropy change needed to freeze the earth's oceans solid. The heat energy involved is
Q = (latent heat of fusion)x(mass of ocean water) =
Water freezes at 273 K on the absolute scale, so the corresponding entropy change is
Comparing with the entropy increase of the two heat reservoirs, we see that this is a factor of (1.6x1024 J/K)/(1.2x1022 J/K) = 140 larger. Remember, though, that the number for the heat reservoirs was for one year. Each year, more entropy is generated. The second law will only be violated if all the oceans freeze over in about 140 years or less.
Now, the mass of all the living organisms on earth, known as the biomass, is considerably less than the mass of the oceans (by a very generous estimate, about 1016 kilograms. If we perform a similar calculation using the earth's biomass, instead of the mass of the oceans, we find that the second law of thermodynamics will only be violated if the entire biomass is somehow converted from a highly disorganized state (say, a gas at 10,000 K) to a highly organized state (say, absolute zero) in about a month or less.
Evolutionary processes take place over millions of years; clearly they cannot cause a violation of the second law."
http://physics.gmu.edu/~roerter/EvolutionEntropy.htm