To: SirLinksalot
The last paragraph makes a good point and is well written. There is a funny line in last paragraph. It is quite funny because of the size of understatement. (Meiosis is a figure of speech that intentionally understates something --sort of an opposite of hyperbole/exaggeration)
"Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much."
The first point an evolutionist will make whenever anyone advocating intelligent design mentions anything remotely close to the 2nd law of Thermodynamics [The entropy of an isolated system not at equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value. Every isolated system becomes disordered w/ time.]....the first thing an evolutionist will point out is that sunlight provides the necessary energy to increase entropy....i.e. the earth is not a closed system; sunlight (with low entropy) shines on it and heat (with higher entropy) radiates off
for example from Tim M. Berra, "Evolution and the Myth of Creationism"
"For example, an unassembled bicycle that arrives at your house in a shipping carton is in a state of disorder. You supply the energy of your muscles (which you get from food that came ultimately from sunlight) to assemble the bike. You have got order from disorder by supplying energy. The Sun is the source of energy input to the earth's living systems and allows them to evolve."
This is funny in a couple of ways:
1) there is intelligence putting the bike together
2) It is so improbable that it is funny that someone could believe that sunlight+some ridiculous amount to time+chance and natural processes could arrive at life as we observe it today.
last paragraph deserves repeating...
Then I imagine the construction of a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics (the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces) would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet (perhaps using random number generators to model quantum uncertainties!). If we ran such a simulation out to the present day, would it predict that the basic forces of Nature would reorganize the basic particles of Nature into libraries full of encyclopedias, science texts and novels, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers with supersonic jets parked on deck, and computers connected to laser printers, CRTs and keyboards? If we graphically displayed the positions of the atoms at the end of the simulation, would we find that cars and trucks had formed, or that supercomputers had arisen? Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much. Clearly something extremely improbable has happened here on our planet, with the origin and development of life, and especially with the development of human consciousness and creativity.
To: FreedomProtector
If we graphically displayed the positions of the atoms at the end of the simulation, would we find that cars and trucks had formed, or that supercomputers had arisen? Certainly we would not Ah, the always popular proof by assertion. It may interest you to know that evolutionary algorithms are a common programming technique, using recombination and mutation and fitness functions which result in increasingly better solutions. ("But it takes intelligence to create the evolutionary algorithms!" Yes, and a creator could have configured the initial conditions of the universe, or even seeded the first life forms; the theory of evolution doesn't forbid either).
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