Posted on 03/07/2008 4:40:38 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Since writing my book "Irreligion" and some of my recent Who's Counting columns, I've received a large number of e-mails from subscribers to creation science (who have recently christened themselves intelligent design theorists). Some of the notes have been polite, some vituperative, but almost all question "how order and complexity can arise out of nothing."
Since they can imagine no way for this to happen, they conclude there must be an intelligent designer, a God. (They leave aside the prior question of how He arose.)
My canned answer to them about biological order talks a bit about evolution, but they often dismiss that source of order for religious reasons or because of a misunderstanding of the second law of thermodynamics.
(See Complexity and Intelligent Design for my Who's Counting discussion of biological and economic order and complexity arising out of very simple programs.)
Because the seemingly inexplicable arising of order seems to be so critical to so many, however, I've decided to list here a few other sources for naturally occurring order in physics, math, and biology. Of course, order, complexity, entropy, randomness and related notions are clearly and utterly impossible to describe and disentangle in a column like this, but the examples below from "Irreligion" hint at some of the abstract ideas relevant to the arising of what has been called "order for free."
Necessarily Some Order
Let me begin by noting that even about the seemingly completely disordered, we can always say something. No universe could be completely random at all levels of analysis.
In physics, this idea is illustrated by the kinetic theory of gases. There an assumption of disorder on one formal level of analysis, the random movement of gas molecules, leads to a kind of order on a higher level, the relations among variables such as temperature, pressure and volume known as the gas laws. The law-like relations follow from the lower-level randomness and a few other minimal assumptions. (This bit of physics does not mean that life has evolved simply by chance, a common mischaracterization of evolution.)
In addition to the various laws of large numbers studied in statistics, a notion that manifests a different aspect of this idea is statistician Persi Diaconis' remark that if you look at a big enough population long enough, then "almost any damn thing will happen."
Ramsey Order
A more profound version of this line of thought can be traced back to British mathematician Frank Ramsey, who proved a strange theorem. It stated that if you have a sufficiently large set of geometric points and every pair of them is connected by either a red line or a green line (but not by both), then no matter how you color the lines, there will always be a large subset of the original set with a special property. Either every pair of the subset's members will be connected by a red line or every pair of the subset's members will be connected by a green line.
If, for example, you want to be certain of having at least three points all connected by red lines or at least three points all connected by green lines, you will need at least six points. (The answer is not as obvious as it may seem, but the proof isn't difficult.)
For you to be certain that you will have four points, every pair of which is connected by a red line, or four points, every pair of which is connected by a green line, you will need 18 points, and for you to be certain that there will be five points with this property, you will need -- it's not known exactly - between 43 and 55. With enough points, you will inevitably find unicolored islands of order as big as you want, no matter how you color the lines.
A whole mathematical subdiscipline has grown up devoted to proving theorems of this same general form: How big does a set have to be so that there will always be some subset of a given size that it will constitute an island of order of some sort?
Ramsey-type theorems may even be part of the explanation (along, of course, with Diaconis' dictum) for some of the equidistant letter sequences that constitute the bible codes. Any sufficiently long sequence of symbols, especially one written in the restricted vocabulary of ancient Hebrew, is going to contain subsequences that appear meaningful.
Self-Organization and Order
Finally, of more direct relevance to evolution and the origin of living complexity is the work of Stuart Kauffman. In his book, "At Home in the Universe," he discusses what he has termed the aforementioned notion of "order for free."
Motivated by the idea of hundreds of genes in a genome turning on and off other genes and the order and pattern that nevertheless exist, Kauffman asks us to consider a large collection of 10,000 light bulbs, each bulb having inputs from two other bulbs in the collection.
Assume that you connect these bulbs at random, that a clock ticks off one-second intervals, and that at each tick each bulb either goes on or off according to some arbitrarily selected rule. For some bulbs, the rule might be to go off at any instant unless both inputs are on the previous instant. For others it might be to go on at any instant if at least one of the inputs is off the previous instant. Given the random connections and random assignment of rules, it would be natural to expect the collection of bulbs to flicker chaotically with no apparent pattern.
What happens, however, is that very soon one observes order for free, more or less stable cycles of light configurations, different ones for different initial conditions. Kauffman proposes that some phenomenon of this sort supplements or accentuates the effects of natural selection.
Although there is certainly no need for yet another argument against the seemingly ineradicable silliness of "creation science," these light bulb experiments and the unexpected order that occurs so naturally in them do seem to provide one.
In any case, order for free and apparent complexity greater than we might naively expect are no basis for believing in God as traditionally defined. Of course, we can always redefine God to be an inevitable island of order or some sort of emergent mathematical entity. If we do that, the above considerations can be taken as indicating that such a pattern will necessarily exist, but that's hardly what people mean by God.
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John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, is the author of the best-sellers "Innumeracy" and "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper," as well as of the just-released "Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why The Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up " His "Who's Counting?" column on ABCNEWS.com appears the first weekend of every month.
The argument that small amounts of order that might appear at random is justification to assume that larger amounts of order occur, is the same argument used by evolutionists that variation within species (microevolution) being observed is enough to conclude that speciation (macroeveolution ) must have occurred.
It’s a huge assumption made by extrapolating that has no basis.
It’s not surprising that the same flaw in reasoning occurs in in both fields. If you’re going to do it in one area, it will spill over to others.
Crystals of any kind form as a result of the inherent properties of the atom itself. A system working the way it is designed to does not *prove* that order can come about with no external influence.
If crystals would form of substances that normally don’t because of the nature of their chemical bonds, then there just MIGHT be something to be said for that argument. But again, the orders of complexity that exist between a snowflake and DNA are so vast as to make that argument ludicrous.
The very term *created* means that it not always was.
LOL, Scripture clearly teaches a definitive beginning to the universe as we understand it. Try Gen 1:1.
If somebody who doesn't believe in God can't grasp Gen 1:1 after 16 years of immersion in that type of environment, he/she provides a marvelous testimony of how the Word of God is not without effect. To those who reject Him, their hearts are simply hardened.
Not to worry though, every person alive still has opportunity to return to Him prior to the first death and be blessed with eternal life and many ther blessings by Him resulting from just a smidgeon more faith than absolutely no simple faith alone through Christ alone.
Entropy rules
You've said it better than I.
It's not hard to understand that only GOD can create matter out of nothing. Science can exam and attempt to understand how matter is transformed, but not how it appears from nowhere. Acceptance of the big bang theory leads to the ultimate question "where did all the matter of the universe that was held in a singularity come from".
Okay, I’ll note for the record that creationists have always advocated the Big Bang theory and that they somehow convinced scientists a few thousand years later of the fact.
Any thoughts as to what God was doing for infinity prior to creating the universe?
Punctuation, grammar, and spelling are our friends. May I may be so bold, as to edit your post to grasp your meaning? ....
We’re still citing the law, because we have yet to hear how ice crystals and gas molecules equates to immensely more complex dynamic living structures. Such complex structures were supposed to violate the law at trillions of steps of even higher complexities and organizations.
Inorganic materials following their own natural laws, separately from living structures, are irrelevant, because we have nothing to show beyond the simplistic for self-organization.
Ice crystals forming simple geometric patterns do not imply the creation of a woodshed from the sun beating down on a pile of wood in an ‘open system’.
It’s only going to result in wood rot, as the pile perfectly obeys the second law (as does every other living structure).
IMHO, order doesn't evolve from disorder, unless something more intelligent designs and acts upon it, as is evidenced above.
Whatever He wanted to do.
“Any thoughts as to what God was doing for infinity prior to creating the universe?”
The logical answer to your question (although not the answer that will make people feel good) is that God possesses the intellectual capacity to answer and understand it while humans do not.
But you focus well on the fact that we have no answer to the question of how to describe process of the chemical origin of life and that we’re not even close. And this fact is very helpful to illustrate something central to the debate.
The creed of atheism operates according to the premise that science can answer the origin of life question, a premise which cannot be defined as anything except faith. Thus atheism is grounded in that which it presumes to renounce, and it is irrational.
That’s not a logical answer. It’s an answer, which might be correct, but based entirely on faith. Faith is not to be confused with logic.
Faith is a belief, based in hope and trust, but unsupported by actual facts.
How would a question not have an answer, or perhaps an infinity of answers? Assuming it is a well-formed question.
That's a true fact. Then add in other disciplines besides objective science and some of the 'hot' terms acquire technical and common meanings multiplied beyond utility. It's not a bad plan to simply sit and watch the parade.
I think that was my point.
The 'why' mode throws the inquiry into the intention aspect. Intention means intelligence, a prejudice.
Possibly a result of applying science of laws where descriptive science should apply.
Helmholz mentioned that since we can't see the entire universe we can't say with certainty that the increase of entropy isn't reversed somewhere else. We can postulate, of course, for the time being.
It is imprtant to stipulate that overtly since most questions are not well-formed.
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