Is there a Creator who cares - Ch 2

by SickofLies 4 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  SickofLies

  Chapter 2 – How Did Our Universe Get Here? – The Controversy
  
  The main point of this chapter is to try and show that the universe is very complex and also to suggest that complexity requires some kind of designer. Of course they don’t address the underling problem of who designed the designer, who by definition would have to be more complex than his designs thereby requiring a more complex designer. Rather the society presents matters as they usually do by directing their comments towards an audience with an 8th grade level of education and reasoning.
  
  “With the naked eye, it is possible to see a few smudges of light (stars) that actually are other galaxies, such as the beautiful and larger Andromeda.” – Pg. 10
  “All … stars you see are in the Milky way Galaxy. Until the 1920’s that seemed to be the only galaxy.” –Pg. 11 Hmm… I have to think about that one for a second… Can both these statements be true?
  
  The chapter goes on to talk about how the Universe is expanding, this is an idea the society seems to like a lot because it has the implication that if the universe is expanding then it must have had a beginning. The Watchtower does a fairly good job explaining on how and why the universe is expanding, however, they fail to mention the big bang theory even once in the entire book. This omission is not accidental, as the Watchtower tries to take the usual creationist stance that theory = some dumb asses idea with no supporting evidence.
  
  Here’s where the Watchtower society takes a left turn and starts throwing in opinions and hopes you’re too stupid to notice: “Foresight and intelligence are also needed because the rate of expansion seems very finely tuned.” – Pg.13-14 By throwing this in with a bunch of other scientific facts and saying it authority they are trying to suggest that this is a widely accepted fact as well. For the most part the rest of the chapter keeps going back to this theme of all the forces in the universe being ‘finely tuned’ somehow and that if someone were to suddenly change the physics of the universe things would get really messed up.
  
  First, of course if you change the physics of the universe will be messed up, but the implication that planets and life couldn’t have formed in any other universe that had physical constants slightly different from ours is totally unsubstantiated. The fact is we do not know how things would develop or form in a universe where the physics is totally different from ours, because we can only measure and do experiments in the physics of this universe. “Many scientists … speculate that by some mechanism it (the universe) created itself out of nothing. Does sound reasonable to you?” Pg. 15 Sounds just as reasonable as saying that an all knowing, all powerful and totally unknowable and unverifiable God created the universe.
  
  “Such speculations (on the origins of the universe) usually involve some variation of a theory (inflationary universe model)* … this theory “does not explain how the universe arose from nothing.” Pg. 15-16 So immediately after talking about how so many scientists speculate about the mechanism for the universe creating itself, stating that such speculations take the form of various theories, they talk about the inflationary universe model which has nothing to do with the origins of the universe?!? This shows the typical reasoning that the Watchtower society uses to try and confuse people about the facts and indoctrinate them with their own superstitions.
  
  Now for the final insult, they try and use the second law of thermodynamics to say the universe couldn’t have evolved. They define the second law of thermodynamic as everything getting more complex, then they imply that the universe has order, thereby violating the second law of thermodynamics. This is clearly a false line of reasoning, many people have proven this already so I wont go into it in much detail, but to point out that physics describes what we see in the universe. The universe doesn’t violate the laws of physics, but rather physics is defined by the universe, so the society clear doesn’t understand thermodynamics either.
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  SickofLies

  Wow, best article ever!!!
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  Kudra

  Could you tell me about how entropy fits into our "organizing universe"- I have never understood that and I'm even a wanna be scientist...
  Or point me to some article that does, please.
  Thanks!
  -K
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  SickofLies

  The following is from Talk.Orgins

  The second law of thermodynamics says that everything tends toward disorder, making evolutionary development impossible.

  Source:

  Morris, Henry M., 1974. Scientific Creationism, Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 38-46.

  Response:

  1. The second law of thermodynamics says no such thing. It says that heat will not spontaneously flow from a colder body to a warmer one or, equivalently, that total entropy (a measure of useful energy) in a closed system will not decrease. This does not prevent increasing order because
     
     
     • the earth is not a closed system; sunlight (with low entropy) shines on it and heat (with higher entropy) radiates off. This flow of energy, and the change in entropy that accompanies it, can and will power local decreases in entropy on earth.
     • entropy is not the same as disorder. Sometimes the two correspond, but sometimes order increases as entropy increases. (Aranda-Espinoza et al. 1999; Kestenbaum 1998) Entropy can even be used to produce order, such as in the sorting of molecules by size (Han and Craighead 2000).
     • even in a closed system, pockets of lower entropy can form if they are offset by increased entropy elsewhere in the system.
     In short, order from disorder happens on earth all the time.
  2. The only processes necessary for evolution to occur are reproduction, heritable variation, and selection. All of these are seen to happen all the time, so, obviously, no physical laws are preventing them. In fact, connections between evolution and entropy have been studied in depth, and never to the detriment of evolution (Demetrius 2000).
     
     Several scientists have proposed that evolution and the origin of life is driven by entropy (McShea 1998). Some see the information content of organisms subject to diversification according to the second law (Brooks and Wiley 1988), so organisms diversify to fill empty niches much as a gas expands to fill an empty container. Others propose that highly ordered complex systems emerge and evolve to dissipate energy (and increase overall entropy) more efficiently (Schneider and Kay 1994).
  3. Creationists themselves admit that increasing order is possible. They introduce fictional exceptions to the law to account for it.
  4. Creationists themselves make claims that directly contradict their claims about the second law of thermodynamics, such as hydrological sorting of fossils during the Flood.
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  Diogenes

  Is there a Creator? Who cares?

  If there is he/she hasn't given us much time to play with! I'm sure he/she wouldn't want us wasting it thinking about him!