Why faith? When I try to understand the word, I might translate it with trust. Trust that stories on the topic of God made sense. That science without God overlooked something significant. In 1865 Rudolf Clausius stated: “The energy of the world is constant. The entropy of the world urges towards a state of maximized entropy.” Later Willard Gibbs said this system should be described as: “Constant in volume and energy, with a shell that would not change in size nor let through energy in any form. If the entropy within could increase it would, where entropy could never decrease, and as a result entropy would maximize into a dead state equilibrium with maximized entropy.” Applied to the world this is called the heat death of the world and it was the great fear of Herbert Spencer the inventor of survival of the fittest. But it forgets photosynthesis and the food chain that it feeds and the increase of molecular complexity which is compared to the prebiotic soup a decrease of entropy. A decrease of entropy that could never happen in the idea of Gibbs when the idea of Rudolf Clausius would be true. From many molecules in the prebiotic soup, poor in energy, biodiversity is a decrease in number and an increase in energy, with chemical energy between atoms, made from sunlight by photosynthesis. This is the gain of molecular complexity outside the Gibbs/ Clausius/ Spencer idea of Nature. When deserts grow, forest fires burn, woods are logged and the ecosystem in the ocean dies, the decrease of entropy due to photosynthesis ends and spontaneous reactions will erode the chemical energy on earth till entropy maximizes. The decrease of entropy outside the thought of Herbert Spencer I trust to be something special and in that I have faith.
What flaw??
Faith precedes science and thus cannot be a result of anything in science. All use of reason depends upon faith. How can you draw conclusions using logic without first putting your faith in some set of premises? Equating science versus religion with that of reason versus faith is nothing but complete nonsense.
This is not to say that there is no difference between the findings of science and the claims of religion. There most certainly is. By restricting itself to the honest tests of hypotheses and the objective results of written procedures which give the same result no matter what you want or believe, scientific findings provide a reasonable expectation that others should agree with those results.
But as we found in the other thread, going from this small epistemological superiority to excluding the possibility of nonscientific knowledge can only pull the rug out from science as well, for science does not hold itself up by its own bootstraps. It is impossible in an existence where all access to reality comes first through the subjective personal experience, and the objective is entirely an abstract construction.
Faith precedes atheist science, and when science has flaws in excluding reasons to have faith, faith returns
What flaw? In the thought of Willard Gibbs a decrease of entropy is not an option, but it is so it seems why life takes the forms it takes, in the shape of biodiversity. Whereas Herbert Spencer did not understand evolution as a decrease of entropy. Still he is the reason why ill mannered people guess antisocial behavior is the cause of molecular complexity.
Why are you in denial of the increase of entropy? What is uncomfortable about it?
There is no such thing.
There is no such thing as theistic science either.
The question of God’s existence is completely irrelevant to the work of science. Science is not about beliefs. Indeed, since its written procedures give the same result no matter what you believe, your beliefs are irrelevant. That is why people all over the world of different cultures and religion can do the work of science and work together in doing so without any problem.
If your beliefs matter, then it is certainly not science.
I read a book on thermodynamics of a professor Kohnstamm, written in 1915, in Dutch and he wrote a chapter on the heat death of the world. He said equilibrium happens fast, we are living just too long on the planet earth for the second law of therodynamics to bring us the heat death of the world years ago, we do not see the whole story. It is not that I am in denial of increase of entropy. It just is not evolution.
Science is about challenging ideas whose only support is that they “make sense”. Science is what we invented when we discovered how fallible human intuition is.
In my experience, most people get entropy wrong in these types of discussions. Entropy has very little to do with evolution or survival of the fittest, and much more to do with biochemistry. Let’s remember that a single cell can divide and develop into a human being in the matter of just 9 months. If that isn’t a problem, then neither should it be for evolution and natural selection.
I am also quite confident that Gibbs fully understood that thermodynamics allows for local decreases in entropy.
What you believe is what you think you know, and shapes your intention. If your intention is criminal your beliefs will make you a crimnal scientist. When you think you are a robot and not a person you simplify the matters that shape you as a person. Darwin was agnostic and he cared to express he was not an atheist nor a person that was not someone. Norbert Wiener was the first to say the second law of thermodynamics was BS when you want to describe humans with it, since our volume may be rather constant our energy is not, we take in food, that gives vitality. Isaac Asimov also a person with a personality agreed but added that food is all photosynthesis built. The sun must be part of any analysis of life, he stated. Creationists say because the second law of thermodynamics excludes life there was no evolution. They read the Bible, I read Wiener and Asimov and they shaped my intention and in the end, what I hold true.
Nonsense. The facts all support the conclusion that criminal behavior is a product of either circumstances or personality disorders such as sociopaths and psychopaths. General beliefs have very little to do with it. Atheists are no more likely to be criminals than Christians. If anything, the opposite is the case, and the reason is that too many Christians have an authoritarian morality which workable for toddlers is utterly inadequate for the ethical thinking of responsible adults.
I did not say that beliefs are irrelevant for the living of our lives. I said they were irrelevant in the work of science. Science is not and cannot be life, and any pretense to the contrary is delusional. If someone says they live their life as a scientist, it is unlikely that they are a scientist and really have any notion of what being a scientist consists of.
P.S. Notice that I am a Christian. Not a cultural Christian either.
You stick with your beliefs do not influence science, I don"t mind. I would not like to be a robot so I will not act as if. You have some idea what science should be, fine. I just admit that when you count the energy, the chemical energy within biodiversity, it is not explained by survival of the fittest, nor by the second law of thermodynamics. You’ll need photosynthesis for the foodchain and the evolution from bacteria to man.
When you become a judge and you have been fiercely anti abortion all your life, you may say: My personal beliefs will not change my judgement, I am a professional all the way. But I do not agree. As a judge your heart must be in it, when you want to do the job. When your instincts are not part of your judgement you cannot hunt for justice.
When I was a law student I was taught that within Natural law philosophy what is deemed “just” has a divine parameter. So when you serve justice, you want to know if what is deemed just can be. In a dictatorship Natural law philosophy is not accepted. When philosophy of law was invented people believed in a divine justice.
You should check out this thread entitled “How does 'survival of the fittest” work with the Bible." The first sentence of my response is:
“Survival of the fittest” doesn’t work with much of anything INCLUDING the facts of evolution.
LOL nor is biodiversity explained by relativity, quantum field theory, stellar dynamics, computer science, geology, law, mining sciences, the rules of football, or the top of the music charts.
The scientific explanation for biodiversity and the origin of the species is the theory of evolution. But few people understand the theory of evolution correctly just as few people understand relativity and quantum field theory. Frankly, the same goes for the Christian history, Christian theology, and the Bible.
The objectivity of science is not quite the same as a determination to be objective in work which still operates by the dictates of rhetoric.
Seems to me that in the legal justice system what you primarily serve is the written law. Ideals of justice only come into it when the law allows you some wiggle room.
In a dictatorship the highest authority is the law of the dictator, in a democracy as described by Sophocles’ Antigone, the law is as good as the people who make it, and bad people make a bad law that has nothing to do with justice
Asimov with his view on the
possible catastrophes, chapter: the increase of entropy (1979):
“The laws of thermodynamics apply to closed systems. The plant world produces
the food and the oxygen (the key component of air) that the animal world lives on
by the process known as ‘photosynthesis’. It has been doing so for billions of years;
but then plant and animal life taken as a whole are not a closed system either. The
plants derive the energy that drives their production of food and oxygen from
sunlight. It is therefore sunlight that makes life possible and the sun itself must be
included as part of the life-system before the laws of thermodynamics can be
applied to life. As it happens, the sun’s entropy rises steadily by an amount that far
outstrips any entropy-decrease that can be brought about by life. The net change in
entropy of the system that includes life and the sun is therefore a pronounced and
continuing rise. The vast entropy-decrease represented by biological evolution, then
is only a ripple in the tidal wave of entropy-increase represented by the sun…”
W. Durant (1940 in my Dutch translation) quoted Herbert Spencer:
“But finally, and inescapably, comes “Equilibration.”
…Gradually, and then rapidly, equilibration will become dissolution, the unhappy
epilogue of evolution. Societies will disintegrate, masses will migrate, cities will
fade into the dark hinterland of peasant life; no government will be strong enough
to hold the loosened parts together; social order will cease to be even remembered.
And in the individual too, integration will give way to disruption; and that
coordination which is life will pass into that diffuse disorder which is death. The
earth will be a chaotic theatre of decay, a gloomy drama of energy in irreversible
degradation; and it will itself be resolved into the dust and nebula from which it
came. The cycle of evolution and dissolution will be complete. The cycle will begin
again, and endless times again; but always this will be the denouement.”
Herbert Spencer saw the heat death of the world as the end of evolution as a result of the second law of thermodynamics. Asimov turned that around and said when you analyze the heat death of the world include the vast decrease of entropy due to photosynthesis. I asked a leading atmospheric chemist, we live during evolution which is a long time, would the end of photosynthesis be the end of all chemical energy on earth, aka the heat death of the world, and he agreed. Chemical energy would minimize. Quickly. I drew a map of the energy of this life on earth, and I sent it to the government. And the government agrees. Trees are being planted as a result.
If you think biochemistry violates the laws of thermodynamics then you need to take a biochemistry class. This just isn’t the case.
Life survived on Earth for millions of years without photosynthesis. Chemosynthesis will suffice, and is actually the primary energy source for communities that surround deep sea smokers. I would agree that photosynthesis was a key advance that did result in the biodiversity we see today. Photosynthesis does exist, so would you agree that evolution of oxygen breathers is allowed in such an environment?