– M C Hawking, “F**k the creationists”

It’s the ungracious behavior – one hundred percent. We all have plenty of malformed philosophies. In a way, they make us all a bit cuter, a bit more exotic. They make for a tangier stew. But then…Mother Teresa was religious, the Pope is religious, George Bush is religious, Torquemada was religious. What is the difference? Didn’t they all read the same Bible. Yes, they did, but religion is often used as a vehicle or even an excuse for manifesting the prior inclinations of the adherent.

Some use religion as an inspiration for love and appreciation. They want a loving relationship with a being who knows and understands them, someone strong and caring to express their hopes and fears to. I enjoy the company of such people. I feel comfortable with them. Their innate kindness and openness are a joy to all. Perhaps they are fundamentalists or perhaps they adopt a looser interpretation, but I really don’t care. I like them as people.

Well, of course, there is a very broad gamut of possibilities and variations, and I will skip most of them. But, at the other end of the spectrum, it is possible to use the scriptures as a rationalization for intolerance. Some fundamentalists virtually demonize entire groups of people based on extremely selective interpretations of the Bible. For instance, the Bible (1 Thessalonians 5:15) says “See that no one renders evil for evil to anyone, but always pursue what is good both for you and for all.” Yet I have never heard this quoted. How many times have I heard “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?” This is what I mean by selectivity. The speaker is feeling vindictive and uses “God” as a little puppet to support his case. You can make “God” say almost anything you want – a little selectivity, a little “interpretation”…. I could cite may more examples. For every nasty, misanthropic, judgemental sentence in the Bible there are ten kind, loving ones. I guess you find what you look for.

Obnxious, judgemental people offend almost everyone. But then there is another segment that flies in the face of the rationalists. This group likes to argue against scientific findings that challenge their own beliefs. The OP is directed against an argument put forth by one of these people.

You have to realize, that many scientists delight in the beauty and apparent elegance of reality. They leap to defend it against those who disrespect it, who callously violate the integrity of the truth and the sincere search for truth. Perhaps a Creator might appreciate their admiration for His production.

In some circles of educated (though perhaps less “focused”) people, boomslang’s suggestion,

“a predilection for the spontaneous emergence of order is a well-studied and well-documented chemical process. I don’t think the Divine’s name appears anywhere on the patent for Nylon, for example…”

would, even in its elliptical sense, be seen as a philosophical error similar in magnitude to the scientific error that Sean, in his post, is finding so compelling. But a really focused person might just ask boomslang to stop waving hands and write down the multiplicity of a farm.

I would like to make counter-suggestion, in the form of a modern parable I heard from a biochemist:

Once upon a time, a conference of biochemists and microbiologists agreed that they could make a living cell better than any found in nature. To prove their conviction they elected to challenge God to a competition, the winner of which would be the entity that (or “That”, as they generously provided in the disclosure) had made the better cell by the end of some number of hours.

God, bravely accepting the challenge of the scientists, said, “Okay, let’s do it this Thursday.”

Thursday came (as God generously provided), and in the morning the scientists and God gathered at the laboratory. The scientists had begun to make preparations and were readying their many supplies, when God rumpled his eyebrows and complained: “That wasn’t part of the agreement. You have to bring your own dust.”

This paper touches on the issue of the relationship between complexity and entropy somewhat.

As to my example, you’re spot on: the idea is precisely that a complex system can increase its macroscopic order while increasing its overall entropy. To oversimplify slightly, because we have a manufacturing-and-agriculture-based civilization, we generate more waste heat than we would if we were a (necessarily smaller, lower-energy-using) aboriginal ciovilization. Thus the technologiucal “advancement” of the Human Race increases entropy faster, and may therefore be considered to be naturally favored.

Nylon is a simple example of macroscopic order (a long-chain polymer) emerging inevitably from a chemical reaction; again, oversimplifying for clarity, this process may be offered as analogous to the rise of DNA: chemistry is often an engine of entropy which produces orderly end products, even macroscopic ones, but we didn’t invent chemistry — it has been there from (almost) the beginning.

could you point me towards some reference on the relation between entropy and complexity? Also, I don’t get your example, wouldn’t the question be what energy sources ‘farming, construction, and manufacturing’ use, and whether we could ever have exploited them without energy that goes back to the sun in one way or the other? (The answer is simply no, since humans are solar-powered.)

As far as I know Nylon is not a very complex system. As you say, it is an emergence of order that one has there, not self-organization of a complex system. The important thing about a complex system is that it can increase its macroscopic order while increasing its overall entropy. Is that what you’re trying to say?

In the expanding universe, all radiation emitted is redshifted, losing energy inversely with the size of universe. That’s why the energy density of radiation in the universe falls inversely as the fourth power of time, not as the inverse cube root of time (which describes how the energy equivalent of matter falls).

The loss of energy of radiation guarantees that you always have an efficient heat sink in space while the universe expands: it’s literally impossible for a radiation equilibrium (heat death via uniform temperature) to arise while the universe expands. Sure, eventually energy may be used up, but that’s not the same as entropy (disorder) always increasing.

By the way, it’s gravitation and other attractive forces which act against the rise of entropy. Disorder occurs at high temperature as you know from heating a magnet and seeing the magnetism (ordering of domains) disappear. If you heat up anything, it eventually vaporizes and becomes a chaotic gas with high entropy. As you cool such a gas, things consense due to electromagnetic forces (surface tension, bonding of ions and electrons into stable atoms, and then atoms into molecules, etc.) and gravitation (planet formation, etc.). So low temperatures produce order. As the universe expands, it cools, so the overall entropy falls due to those forces being able to bind particles together if the particles are slow (cool) enough that their kinetic energy is less than the binding energy due to the attractive force.

The second law of thermodynamics is based on heat engines, where you always need a heat sink cooler than the engine in order to get more than 0% efficiency. In a heat engine, entropy rises because the heat sink becomes warmer due to keeping the engine cool. This implies that in a closed, static system eventually you will uniform temperature. But that doesn’t apply to the universe, which is expanding. You could argue that when the stars run out of hydrogen and nuclear power in general, the universe will then be of uniform temperature. In that case, you need to prove how the curve of falling entropy of the universe since the big bang is going to reverse its direction and rise, which will require a detailed treatment of massive black holes which radiate at an decreasing rate as they grow.

(I’ll copy this comment to my blog in case it is too off-topic or too long long and is deleted or edited.)

Cosmic Variance digs up what is surely one of the finest examples of creationist thought yet enunciated: [...]

Science attempts to understand physical reality. I feel, sometimes, that by aggressively advocating atheism, some scientists arouse animosity towards their discipline, animosity born of the misconception that all scientists are atheists or that science is incompatible with a belief in God (which it certainly is not).

Religion engages peoples’ feelings (hope, reassurance, etc.), but pounds down on their heads with authority and judgement. Science springs from the intellect, but also involves feelings (curiosity, being right, etc.). When an atheistic scientist and a religious person debate, neither can convert the other. The arguement that takes place on the battleground of logic and reason (and sophistry) does not address the feelings – but the feelings are the real motivators, not just for the religious person but for the scientist as well. The atheism always seems to derive from some aversion or dissatisfaction, not from pure rationalism.

http://www.edge.org/