How does Bernoulli's Theorem refute evolution? More curiously, how does Pascal's Theorem refute evolution?
Posted on 08/20/2002 2:15:59 PM PDT by restornu
Awesome argument that carries the day. We use the data at hand to extract a representative sample. If we're told the data at hand is incomplete, then it is incomplete for anyone and for anyone's theory.
That's why it is, imho, best to deal with the observable, the testable, and the historically recorded. If there is a disconnect between the observed and the theoretical, then it's only honest to say that there's a disconnect.
(Aside: Pasteur's observations concluded that "spontaneous generation" was an impossibility.)
You present a false presentation of the argument. The true argument lies in the assertion that complexity cannot arise spontaneously. If life on our particular earth could not have arisen except through design, then how did the designers arise?
Moving the origin of the designers back in time doesn't help, since the earth has been around for a large fraction of the age of the universe.
Moving the designers to some distant planet doesn't solve the problem of their origin.
ID is stealth creationism because it requires complex life to be made by an unmade creator. The designer cannot be a living (biological) being.
That was my complete statement. I don't post it because I think you left any significant part out. I simply want to make a point.
I truly am NOT a libertarian. And I truly AM a conservative. At some point, I get to assert my own affiliations and my own beliefs. Others are free to dissect them and say "Y is close to Z, therefore there are many traits of Z present." That's their right. They can analyze and dissect all day long....but I'm not a libertarian.
Likewise, the fact that a "Designer" has to be accounted for doesn't make me a "creationist."
It seems to me that you really DON'T have to find the identity of the designer for a designer to have brought about life on earth.
I can see TOTALLY non-religious people concluding that a "designer" guided the development of life on earth.
This comes up often, and it's a complete mischaracterication of Pasteur's work. I think that someone (or some website) is feeding you some really terrible information. Pasteur showed that bacteria are responsible for the life that was observed to spring from decayed matter. This is utterly unrelated to the "ultimate origin of life" issue. Some background material is HERE.
BTW, DO you know what Jesus said about the "origin of life?"
What? You're ashamed of your family?
The idea upon which the ID crowd hang their "theory" is that certain things could not come about naturally and were thus designed. They typically cite vertebrate blood clotting without realizing that biologists have already worked out the evolutionary steps of the clotting cascade (The Evolution of Vertebrate Blood Clotting) and discovered it is not irreducibly complex. IDers also claim the eye is too complex to have evolved naturally, but even Darwin showed how eyes evolve (How Could An Eye Evolve?). So, as you can see, as the knowledge base gets larger, the number of systems that appear to be "irreducibly complex" shrink. Would you like to lay odds that biologists will one day work out the evolution of every such system without recourse to inserting an Intelligent Designer in the process?
The wind blows where it wants to blow. You can hear the sound of it. But you do not know where it comes from, and you do not know where it goes. It is the same way with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
The above are words of Jesus.
What follows are are the words of Patrick Henry on the subject: (from The Life of Patrick Henry of Virginia by A. G. Arnold in 1854) "The rising greatness of our country...is greatly tarnished by the general prevalence of deism, which, with me, is but another name for vice and depravity....I hear it is said by the deists that I am one of their number; and indeed that some good people think I am no Christian. This thought gives me much more pain than the appellation of Tory (being called a traitor), because I think religion of infinitely higher importance than politics....Being a Christian...is a character which I prize far above all this world has or can boast."
There are, of course, absolutely zero demonstrable laboratory examples of Life spontaneously erupting from Non-Life anywhere in the history of science. Thus, much like the Law of Gravity, the Law of Biogenesis continues to enjoy absolute logical presumption over imaginative hypotheses about life spontaneously erupting from non-life.
Exceptionally Silly persons will continue to place a blind and uncritical Faith in various magical fantasies which suppose that life can mechanistically and spontaneously erupt from non-life; but of course, their unscientific fantasies are little better than a daydream -- certainly not to be confused with any kind of rational Thought.
Suppose I have a large, thin, spherical shell of matter, with a radius R0. The gravitational field of the shell is as per Newton's law outside the shell, and is zero inside the shell by symmetry.
Now let me collapse the shell to a smaller radius, R1. The act of collapse releases energy, which I can use to do work, or to generate mass according to m=E/c². The situation after the collapse differs from the situation before the collapse in that I have some new matter, and I've filled the region between R1 and R0 with a gravitational field (whereas before, the field in that region was zero). Since energy is conserved, we see that gravitational fields have a negative energy density.
Energy--and therefore mass--can always be created by filling space with gravitational fields (just as when you want more dirt, you dig a hole). This happens automatically in an expanding universe, but the expansion we see today is vanishingly small compared to the expansion that occurred during the inflationary phase. Essentially all of the matter we see in the universe was created then.
Have you ever read Patrick Henry's catechism of propaganda links presenting supposed 'debunking' of the solid facts of ID? - Is that flimsy crap religion, or what?
Shake the dust off of your sandals at his door, and move on to those who hold to a higher plane; we don't feed filet mignon to the hogs.
I can see TOTALLY non-religious people concluding that a "designer" guided the development of life on earth.
The identity of the alleged designer is irrelevent. But some key attributes must be asserted for any possible designer, such as whether the designer originated through evolution or through special creation.
Pushing evolution back in time or space does not argue against evolution as a process. It could be historically true that life on earth was designed by other beings, but the question of their origin remains.
No matter how you wiggle and squirm, if the process of evolution is asserted to be impossible or not historically correct, you are asserting special creation.
The ultimate cause of our existence is not addressed by science. Science only attempts to study processes. It is possible for a scientist to be religious, but it is rare for a science as a whole to ignore overwhelming evidence for a process.
How does Bernoulli's Theorem refute evolution? More curiously, how does Pascal's Theorem refute evolution?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.