Great! I was pleasantly surprised by AiG’s post, too. It was more nuanced than I had expected. They agree the 2nd law is necessary in living organisms.
2 Likes
If you can overturn the Ilya Prigogine’s ouevre, you can have his Nobel, which is given for one’s body of work epitomized by its greatest nominated example.
I would argue that you are in the realm of the programming and haven’t reached the edge. You see the robustness found in life and assume the change is due to mutations and natural selection when all you are encountering is the programmed intelligence. It is then extrapolated that this programming can go on indefinitely giving rise to the evolutionary tree.
Creationists and ID proponents are calling you out on this and want to see more evidence. We hear the “just so” stories of evolution, and want you to look at the real nuts and bolts of integrating new systems upon old systems- trillions and trillions of them. When you look at the size of the genome and the multitude of precise mutations needed for the change it just won’t happen. Or the burden of proof is on you to show it will happen. The notion that evolution can flutter around from one system to the next somehow making this more probable is just nonsense.
Creationists, including IDers, can never [have] enough evidence as they can’t use what there is, which is more than enough for rationality. There is only evidence for evolution, no evidence against it, any more than there is against quantum mechanics. In fact the concept of evidence is meaningless in this context. It’s like asking is there evidence for the wind or rain, and whether pigs have wings. And evolution isn’t programmed.
If God is a liar in nature, what danger is there in believing that He isn’t? Apart from not being able to trust a word He says?
2 Likes
My experience from my time here on BL is that Creationists and IDers who ask for evidence, upon receiving it, either handwave it away, change the goalposts (“that doesn’t count as evidence”), or dismiss the expertise of the person providing it. The forum archives are quite literally replete with this behaviour. So you’ll forgive if I find this statement hard to believe. Perhaps you are the exception… I truly hope so.
7 Likes
How does an Intelligent Design advocate explain the pseudopenis of the spotted FEMALE hyena? She gets impregnated through it and has to give birth through it. Does the designer have a sick sense of humor?
Hope over experience! You a bettin’ man?
1 Like
Perhaps before you flutter off to more evidences, the topic you raised can be dealt with. Did the Encyclopedia Britannica article clear up your confusion about the second law of thermodynamics?
3 Likes
Having the observed set of mutations has a probability of 1, because it already happened. What the probability of getting this result would be with 4,000,000,000 years of random changes is impossible to determine with any precision (i.e. it’s probably between 1 and 1 in 10^50, but hard to narrow down), due to the incredibly high number of poorly-constrained variables. Their is also the question of “How close is close enough?” Would it make a significant difference if chordates were closer to arthropods or mollusks than to echinoderms? Would it make a large difference if brachiopods had not been mostly replaced by bivalves? Would it make a large difference if humans had three toes on each foot or six fingers on each hand? And so on.
3 Likes
Back to the thread title, faith in ID is better if faith alone is not enough. Faith alone is enough in the unblinking stare of natural processes.
How exactly have I put forward any false statements? You fail to understand the local decrease in entropy and the need for a thermodynamic mechanism. At the very least, if one is honest, the second law resists evolution every step of the way. Here I didn’t go into abiogenesis which is needed for evolution to even start, where it too needs many thermodynamic mechanisms.
You must account for a viable thermodynamic mechanism that will constrain the probability (increase it) allowing for specific processes to happen. Life has precise processes built into it where it acts as the thermodynamic mechanism but it can only give you the same information as was already there - it being useful and not just possibilities of information. Evolution can never account for the incorporation of new systems on the old systems. It is just too improbable and the challenge for evolutionary proponents is to show this is possible. Saying that you cannot calculate this probability is a cop out and is inexcusable. To say it is observable so we know evolution happened is also a cop out because it can be well argued to be the part of the design enabling the robustness seen in life. If life wasn’t robust it would just die out. But the design is limited by the programming so we shouldn’t expect it to continue indefinitely creating the evolutionary tree.
thermodynamics: 1. the branch of physical science that deals with the relations between heat and other forms of energy (such as mechanical, electrical, or chemical energy), and, by extension, of the relationships between all forms of energy.
Can you please explain why a process that does not entail heat or other forms of energy can be described as thermodynamics?
I would ask, “Who is doing the hand waving?”
And you assume the change is mutations and natural selection. An ID prediction is that it is design. A good reason that it is design is that it happens too fast to be anything else but design. The time element is constrained by the rate of the mutations and the associated probabilities.
Hi Bill, the thermodynamic mechanism needs to harness some energy source to operate. All processes have some energy source interacting with them, so all processes are regulated by the first and second laws.
All life, with the possible exception of viruses, use energy. That is not in dispute. But where in the process of evolution is there a use of energy that is not related to the life of the organism? Nothing drives evolution so it doesn’t appear to need energy.
No I know. I assume rationality. The probability of any and all of it having happened is one. The probability that magic happened and left no trace whatsoever apart from your incredulity is zero. Can you give an example of it that couldn’t have happened with your Prigogine level knowledge of the rate of the mutations and the associated probabilities? With your workings of course. I agree that it couldn’t have happened in six days. Not even when it started to rain in the Hadean.
Life is evolution is life and is driven by energy in the tradition of its self-organizing according to the rational, prevenient, meaningless. probabilistic laws of physics.
I am very rational too. That is why I don’t accept evolution. Now I don’t know if you are a Christian or not but I assume you are by your tag about love. If you are a TE proponent than one view is that God directed the processes in evolution in which case the discussion about probability is a mute point. If God caused trillions and trillions of little miracles to happen to explain evolution then I cannot argue against it other than to say, “If God did these trillions and trillions of miracles, then why couldn’t he do the miracles of creating us like the Bible says he did?” It seems a little contrived to say he can do a vast set of little miracles (similar to what is conveniently espoused by mainstream science, though all natural) but can’t do one big set of miracles. Why not be a creationist?
If you are the other brand of TE proponent that says that God built the creation and used natural processes, using evolution in the process, then the probability question should resonate with you - if you are rational.
The power of the second law of thermodynamics is that it challenges evolution on a number of fronts. If we look at Prigogine’s life work, he was trying to get around the thermodynamic problem with his dissipative structures - he was a proponent of evolution or evolutionist as we creationists like to call it. One statement of the second law is that things move from order to disorder. It is the general trend seen in all of life which a general version of the second law captures. House deteriorate, cars wear out, people get old, buildings burn down, etc. But how can evolutionists get around this general law? They have to explain how things can grow in order and dissipative structures was Prigogine’s attempt at it. Although the math and analysis is grand, the idea is really basic if you look at it. Essentially, he was looking at natural thermodynamic mechanisms found in nature and he was trying to extrapolate this to explain abiogenesis and evolution. His idea was that order was spontaneous and and looking at far from equilibrium systems was the way around the old thermodynamic paradigm. As I said before, really he was looking at simple systems of nature that act as thermodynamic mechanisms but the problem is that these systems don’t control the boundary conditions so the only result is limited ability at ordering. You may find crystalline structures in nature, planets growing due to their natural gravity well, Bernard cells forming interesting flow patterns, bifurcation phenomena, and phase transition phenomena which lead to some ordering patterns but they are extremely limited and the extrapolation from them to the ordering needed in life is ludicrous at best! When we look at all the precise processes needed to get a baby from conception to birth, the number is breathtaking. One way of examining complexity in engineering design is to look at all the processes needed in a system. For example, looking at a car we would have on the order of 1000 depending on the level that you looked at it. Life on the other hand, like the baby stated above, would be much more than that where the cells would number about 2.6e10. Think of all the cell divisions, nanomachines, and processes required for this and it is mind blowing! And we are going to look at simple dissipative structures and automatically assume that life arose naturally? How ludicrous!
I may be wrong, but it appears you just hand waved away my concern… if so, that is a shame I would rather have been proved wrong.
If you ever desire to examine the basis of my claim you’d only need to spend some time reading the archives.
2 Likes