Excluding Intelligent Design Principles From the Search For Alien Life

KIdPanda writes "Prompted by pictures of man-made structures in the Utah desert, a SETI astronomer explains the sometimes-ambiguous difference between seeing the hand of God, alien intelligence, or nature. 'In my photographs, Shostak's SETI-trained eye — standing in for a pattern-crunching computer program — searched for an unexpected increase in visual order (or, in thermodynamic terms, a decrease in entropy caused by the rebellion of life against universal decay). A road or a tended field is mathematically simpler than a mountainous jumble or naturally varied vegetation. ... But there's an obvious problem: nothing is simpler than a sweep of blue sky, or the inky blackness of space. If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design."

Comments

What?

[navtal]

"But there's an obvious problem: nothing is simpler than a sweep of blue sky, or the inky blackness of space. If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design." What? I don't understand how something not being simple enough for our limited intelligence to understand constitutes divine creation?

Re:What?

[qbzzt]

Objects that are designed by people (and, presumably, other intelligences) tend to be simpler than those created by nature. For example, compare the straight lines of a road with the wavy shape of a river.

Re:What?

[Futile Rhetoric]

Is "more orderly" the same as "simpler"? Is higher entropy less simple than lower entropy? I would answer "no" to both questions.

Re:What?

[ceoyoyo]

The math would agree with you.

The article fuzzily jumps between concepts like "simple" and "complex" and low-entropy, high-entropy.

An intuitive way of thinking about entropy is considering how likely a particular arrangement is to give you the overall appearance you observe. Take a forest seen from the air and imagine cutting little bits of it out with Photoshop and moving them around. You can do that quite a bit and the result isn't all that terribly different from the original appearance. Now imagine doing it with the Nazca lines, or a pattern of roads. Big difference. The cases where you see a big difference are low entropy states -- they're special and random fiddling destroys them. The forest is a higher entropy state. Randomness doesn't have as much effect.

Now consider a plain blue sky. Do the same Photoshopping. No effect at all. The sky is an even higher entropy state than the forest.

Re:What?

[elronxenu]

Neither did the article.

Re:What?

[MightyMartian]

I'd say the real problem here is that identifying design is an incredibly difficult task. The Intelligent Design scammers would have us believe there's some sort of algorithm that could reliably pick intelligently-produced artifacts from natural ones. Of course, they have no such thing, and those sciences that have to deal in trying to figure out what was designed as opposed to what was made by non-intelligent beings is incredibly difficult.

SETI is making a basic assumption. It seems a reasonable one, but still, it is not the same as the claim the ID formulators like Dembski make that you can mathematically determine design on an object or phenomona. SETI's assumption is basically that a technologically advanced civilization out there in the cosmos will, in basic ways, use the same sorts of technologies we do. In short, we're applying the basic rule we always do to trying to determine design in other branches of science; is this artifact what I would make?

Re:What?

[Jeff Hornby]

I tend to agree with you in that a scrambled roadmap is very different from an unscrambled roadmap and a scrambled forest is the same as an unscrambled forest. But then we've probably been raised in similar circumstances.

Would a monkey or a hypothetical tree dwelling civilization find the scrambled forest the same as the unscrambled? Probably not because to these people each tree is unique. I would say that your distinction between low entropy and high entropy is very anthrocentric. From what I have observed, much of the natural world (or universe) has low entropy, we just discount the orderlinesss as unimportant because we didn't create it ourselves and we have no use for it.

Re:What?

[davolfman]

I think he's arguing that we're looking at one gigantic false positive.

Re:What?

[Futile Rhetoric]

Intelligent life would change its surroundings to better suit its needs (survival first and foremost). It is of course possible that it could be different, that is, if this life was fundamentally different from ours in that it did not arise from a process of natural selection, if it lacked the means to change anything about its surroundings (in which case intelligence would be of no selective value whatsoever and must have arisen spontaneously, randomly), or if its surroundings as formed by natural forces are utterly perfect for its needs (in which case, again, I would argue that intelligence isn't likely to arise).

These options sounds exceedingly unlikely to me. No, we're not bound to catch an intelligence like that, any more than we are to catch intelligent rocks on our own planet. Such an exercise is best reserved for the likes of Deepak Chopra; science on the other hand is based on extrapolation of what we (think to) know.

Re:What?

[SuchiRu]

No, straight lines are just simpler for US to understand. Many things in nature, if you take a step back from it, are based on the spiral. It's more complicated, but still ordered.

Re:What?

[Evil Pete]

No. This has a very strong mathematical and physical basis. In Statistical Mechanics one can start with looking at the number of possible combinations there are of objects in a physical system and then derive the likelihood that any change will maintain the properties or is a significant departure. A road is small set within the phase space of possible states of the system, random changes will usually end up in a set of objects that no longer define the concept of "road". This leads on directly to the concept and measurement of entropy. So the road / forest comparison is quite reasonable. The blue sky, well how many microstates are there in blue sky: one. So no matter how you permute it it will always be a blue sky.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

A hypothetical tree dwelling civilisation would try to reign in the forces around it. A tree village would look differently from a forest, and I daresay, the scramble test would most likely show that as well.

The problem is that humans are horrible at detecting patterns which fall outside of the ones we prefer or are familiar with.

For example what would you say if you drew the following playing cards from a deck?

* 2 4 6 8 10 Q

* A 4 9 3 Q 10

You'd probably conclude that the first is definitely ordered and the second is near-random.

In fact, both are ordered in a very precise way. They are the elements of the sequences f(x) = (2*x) mod 13 and g(x) = (x^2) mod 13, respectively, x in [14,19].

There are an insane amount of "ordered" sequences (c.f. http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/index.html), each one no more "random" than any other, given the appropriate context. Just because humans like x*2, and can pick it out easily, that doesn't mean that an alien species wouldn't find x^2 "more aesthetic" (or the Fibonacci sequence, or the digits of pi base 23 ...)

Another concrete example. An RSA encrypted message sure looks like random noise, and to any third party swapping bytes around it doesn't *look* like it significantly changes the file. However, if you do have the key, the shuffling turns a well ordered and precise message into gobbledy-gook.

The alien civilization may impose order on the world, but it may be order "not as we know it." We have to have quite a bit of hubris to think that our ways of ordering things are the only ways of doing so.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're presumably using the information-theoretic definition of entropy, which is equivalent to but more general than the thermodynamic definition of entropy.

If the definitions are equivalent then either definition should give exactly the same result - for domains in which they both apply.

So, are you suggesting that a thermodynamic definition of entropy doesn't apply to an actual forest? Or, are you suggesting that you have a fairly simple information-theoretic method that can accurately calculate the thermodynamic entropy of an entire forest?

More to the point though, I think you, or anyone, would be hard pressed to apply either an information-theoretic or a thermodynamic definition of entropy to an actual forest.

On the other hand, there are certain information-theoretic definitions of entropy that could, rather easily, be applied to something abstract (non-chemical) such as a digital image of a forest.

Maybe that's what you're suggesting: that comparing the entropy of an actual forest to the entropy of actual roads is pretty much impossible - but that, using certain information-theoretic definitions (that may, or may not, have anything to do with thermodynamic entropy), comparing the entropy of a digital image of a forest to a digital image of roads is relatively easy.

Re:What?

[im_thatoneguy]

This is an outright falsity of your visual cortex though. Your visual cortex says a sky is "blue" but it's actually a huge variety of hues, saturations and values.

I dare you to take a wideish angle photo of even a blue sky and try reorganizing it. It'll look senseless.

Even a blue sky has a pretty vast dynamic range from the horizon upward.

Photoshoping a sky is harder than photoshoping a forest because your mistakes get covered up in the forest very easily due to so much detail. That's the reason a forest is easy to scramble. Errors are difficult to spot due to the frequency of the data. Low frequency data such as a blue sky is obnoxiously difficult patch up because errors are so easy to spot.

Re:What?

[lysergic.acid]

if by "he" you mean the author of the summary, then perhaps yes. but if you're referring to Seth Shostak, the SETI guy, then that isn't what he's arguing at all. here's the excerpt FTA:

But there's an obvious problem: nothing is simpler than a sweep of blue sky, or the inky blackness of space. If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design. And leaving aside this uncomfortable implication, it would mean ignoring a piece of skywriting, or an overhead flying saucer, if it contains more visual information than its background.

That's true, agreed Shostak. But the key is comparison. Against a low-information background, one looks for life in complication; and against a complex background, one searches for simplicity. In either case, it's the degree of unexpected variation that matters. That's where Intelligent Design falls short.

oops

[girlintraining]

They assume intelligent life on other worlds would be trying to reduce chaos. I wonder how they arrive at this conclusion, since the only known intelligent life we've found so far seems to rather enjoy creating it in great quantity.

Re:oops

[RiotingPacifist]

Isn't life just the an efficient way to increase entropy (otherwise the chemicals would not have formed in the first amoeba)?

Re:oops

[Zwicky]

Surely she means the mice. Dolphins aren't all that, they just think they are.

Yeah...except not

[paiute]

The "inky blackness of space" is only simple if interpreted by a spectrally-limited human eye seeing only a tiny part of it from a distance. Space is crammed with a chaotic mess of strange crap on the macroscale and a lot more weird junk on the micro. Quasars, dark matter, nebulae, dark energy, black holes, virtual particles, gluon soup, quarks....

I will, as they say on the Internets, fix that for you:

If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is in no way evidence of design.

Re:Yeah...except not

[MyLongNickName]

Thank God we have someone like you who, through only reading a Slashdot summary, can point out all the holes in his logic.

Re:Yeah...except not

[lilomar]

He was talking about intellegent design.

Article in summary...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes stuff that looks artificial can actually be natural. Telling the difference can be hard sometimes.

Throw in references to intelligent design to get a bunch of people in a tizzy and drive page hits.

Where are their hyptheses?

[cromar]

Obviously, ID fails to impress us with its (lack of) logical hypotheses. I would like to see the ID crowd come up with an actual science that could predict whether something was created by an intelligence (and predict what "level" of intelligence created it). At least it would lend them some credence and provide a factual basis for their (and our) arguments.

Re:Where are their hyptheses?

[cromar]

There are certainly "levels" of intelligence - we measure this with (arguably flawed) IQ tests in our own species. We can measure the intelligence of animals relative to us. Even, I think a microorganism or an integrated circuit could be said to possess some level of intelligence. Obviously, the answer to what intelligence is would need to be part of the hypothesis.

It's an interesting intellectual question, and it has been touched on in many areas of science, most notably pattern recognition, as the summary states. It interests me that no mainstream creationist has pursued this line of thinking. There are good arguments for being open minded when it comes to our beliefs about the universe - not the least of which is that our senses, and so the data we collect using them, are not provable to be trustworthy.

Re:Where are their hyptheses?

[tyme]

cromar wrote:

I would like to see the ID crowd come up with an actual science that could predict whether something was created by an intelligence

The ID/Creationism folks can't ever produce such a thing because they don't believe that there are any examples of things that were not intelligently designed! They literally believe that everything that exists was created intentionally by an intelligent being, even apparently random processes that we can contemporaneously observe (as opposed to apparently random processes whose existence we only infer from a preponderance of evidence) are actually processes directed by the will of the intelligent designer.

Creationists/ID proponents, even when they claim otherwise, are inherently anti-scientific and anti-intellectual; they are driven purely and absolutely by unquestioning faith and an unquenchable drive to cram that faith down the throats of every other living person on the planet. They aren't even interested in the truth or falsity of their claims; the real issue, for them, are the moral and political implications of scientific discoveries. Creationists/ID proponents claim that anything that undermines the faith in a deity (and in the institutions that claim to represent that deity) leads directly to immoral behavior, because they believe that nobody would obey principles of morality unless there were a cruel and vengeful deity waiting to punish us for any immoral behavior after we die (probably because most Creationists/ID proponents are, in fact, immoral sociopaths who only observe the minimum requirements of civilized behavior out of fear themselves).

To call Creationism/Intelligent Design morally and intellectually bankrupt implies, incorrectly, that it's proponents ever had any moral or intellectual capital to squander.

Re: Where are their hyptheses?

[Black Parrot]

We humans think that self-replicating cells arose randomly from the "primordial soup" of the early oceans. Yet, despite science and technology's efforts we have not come even within light years of building any sort of machine that can take bare elements and make a copy of itself, which in turn copies itself etc. How is it that we can intelligently attribute to chance and time what we cannot do ourselves?

God, what a stupid post.

1) What are you going to do in a few years when the artificial life people do get their self-replicating metabolizing systems working. (Somehow I doubt that you've seen the literature on the topic.)

2) We can't do lots of other stuff that happens naturally; what's the problem with us not being able to create life in a test tube (yet)?

3) Whence the argument, "we smart guys can't even do it, therefore some intelligent designer must have"?

Don't you creationists ever think?

Re:I mod this down.

[sakdoctor]

For reference that's called the anthropic principle

Re:I mod this down.

[sumdumass]

Lol.. Tell us what you really thinks. And let all the anger out this time.

I don't know what christian pissed in your Wheaties and passed them off as coco puffs, but your letting your emotional anger cloud the conceptual message from the story. It isn't that intelligent design is real, it's that the logic behind it is real and the principles are being loosely used to determine the existance of life. At the basic level, they are saying based on the complexity of this, it couldn't be a natural occurance. An example of this might be a radio signal transmitting shakespear comming from inside the sun. There are other objective reasoning at issue too where we plant crops and build roads in generally straight lines, and so on. Nature doesn't do that quite often, take a river for instance, there are some that are straight but most of them have quite a bit of curves. Take a erosion line in a field that looks like a road or a fence line from a far distance. When water evacuated an area, it follows the path of least resistance and we know in nature that large amounts of earth (mars or whatever planet) are rarely uniform enough to create a straight line in the erosion on a scale large enough to be seen from space.

In other words, we are looking for things that wouldn't naturally occur by either stating the premise of nature isn't as prone to certain things or certain things or just too complex for it to happen naturally. In this story's context, the idea of intelligent design only refers to the context that some newly discovered thing is interpreted through or not. In other words, does this happen naturally or does it take some sort of intelligence to get it going. The principles that will convince you of it being a sign of alien life or a natural occurring will be the same that convinces a christian of ID. The article also looks at the impacts of that in how we bash on group (as you illustrated in your post) for using the very same techniques and basic thought processes that another uses. It is like telling a teen he can't get his drivers license because he will drink and drive or smoke while your holding a beer in one hand, the steering wheel in the other and have a cigarette hanging from your mouth.

Simple rules lead to complex patterns

[syousef]

Look at fractals. If you found a Madelbrot set sitting somwhere in space, had a bias toward ID, and didn't realize the pattern behind it wsa simple, you'd be tempted to conclude it was intelligently designed.

Just as you can look at life and argue ID, when in fact some molecules, simple rules and a lot of time can in fact be responsible for the variety we see.

Re:Entropy favors simplicity

[im_thatoneguy]

Good point. Efficiency is a better way to put it.

And one huge source of efficiency is to not unnecessarily modify the environment around you. Sustaining a highway takes an enormous amount of work. Doubly so in a mountain pass. It can be much much more efficient to build a mountain road that's mostly under ground to avoid fighting the constant battle with the elements. It also makes it largely invisible.

Why terraform a planet when you can just change the settlers to easily survive on it.

Re:I think you're overthinking this

[ceoyoyo]

I thought it was prime numbers and a Hitler speech.

Intelligence set

[Prof.Phreak]

There exists (in imagination land) a set of all things we (supposedly intelligent beings) would consider `intelligent'. This set does not (and cannot) include everything. In fact, it will not include -all- `intelligent' things that could exist---just ones we would consider intelligent.

We cannot escape this bias. It's not enough to spot intelligence... we also have to recognize it as intelligence.

(ie: is our planet intelligent? is jupiter intelligent? how about our sun? how about our solar system? is an electron intelligent?; consider that the universe may be playing out all the synapses of a brain on a much grander scale)

Right now, when we look for intelligent life, we are looking for signs of our intelligence set. Problem is, we do not know what this set is---which is why this question came up. Easiest way to answer it right now: If it looks intelligent (stuff looks like ``roads'' and ``cities''; no other reasonable explanation) then it is intelligence.

Very likely (I hope), one day, AI field may lead us to a definition of what this intelligence set is for us.

Opposite of intelligent design

[Geoffrey.landis]

This argument seems to get the Intelligent Design argument backwards. The ID people argue that complexity can't arise from simplicity, and thus complexity is the signature of design. This guy seems to be arguing that simplicity is the signature of design.

Neither one is particulary a good argument. Complex things can arise from simple ones-- a snowflake can arise from water vapor. And simple thing can arise from complex ones: water vapor can arise from a snowflake.

In either case entropy increases, and heat, ultimately, is dissipated into space.

Re:I mod this down.

[sumdumass]

What worries me is how little you have to know if your a creationist. How do they explain plastic, which is formed from oil, which takes hundreds of thousands of years to form, when the world is only ~4000 years old?

Yawn.. The creationist use science to explain plastic.

And no, oil doesn't take hundreds of thousands of years to make, it can be made in small quantities from organic matter in labs in less then 6 months. It's not economical viable to mass produce in this way or anything but it can be made.

And no, there is nothing in the creation story making the claim that the world is 4000 years old. That is a number, and incorrect number at that, which was pulled from people outside the bible who were attempting to add the ages of the key players in the bible up and estimating the age of the earth. There are a few problems with it though. Your also confusing the point of a creator who creates things. If someone or something, lets call it a GOD could create the universe, create life, create weather, water, minerals and everything else, Why couldn't he create oil too? I mean seriously, even if is took billions of years for oil to naturally occur, why couldn't the creator just create?

Anyways, your perception of creation is a little off. You see, you don't need to know how plastic is made or what processes are involved to believe in evolution or any other science. In fact, you only need to know about oil and plastic if you are doing something with it that required you to know about it. I mean seriously, how much force is needed to cause a nuclear reaction in a non-controlled environment? Don't bother looking the answer up, it doesn't matter because neither of us are working with nuclear reactions and the answer is a lot more then we have to worry about. So you believing in creation, evolution, paganism, the church of Scientology, the Flying Spaghetti monster or whatever doesn't mean you have to be able to explain someone else' concepts, misconceptions, or general ideology nor would you have to involve yourself with some deep knowledge of science either.

Re:I mod this down.

[Bloke down the pub]

attempting to add the ages of the key players in the bible up and estimating the age of the earth. There are a few problems with it though.

You mean problems apart from literally believing a book that's been through several translations from extinct languages and wasn't written down at all until many generations after the events allegedly happened?

Re:I mod this down.

[arminw]

...The Anthropic principle isn't that far from god, that's why scientists aren't very happy to just accept that ....

Why is it, that accepting God should make scientists unhappy? Just by studying the universe doesn't tell you much more about God than studying a building tells you about its architect. All of science works just fine, whether God enters the equations or not. Creationists believe that the Bible tells us a record of how this God did it. That is NOT intelligent design, which merely asserts that there is evidence that God may be behind the universe, but doesn't tell anything about how He did it or how long it took him to do or anything else.

There are scientists who believe that there is evidence of intelligence in nature, but in no way believe that this God, if you will, is the one we read of in any particular book. Creationism and intelligent design are not the same.

The guy should read more of Greg Bear

[tftp]

The Forge of God

It's all there.

Ridiculous argument

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

You're wrong :

The point is that intelligence-made structures have high entropy, while nature-made structure have low entropy.

Now let's look at your examples :
-> a perfectly flat desert : LOW entropy. Perhaps a bit higher than a not-quite-flat-but-looking-flat desert, but defineately LOW entropy.

Therefore it is not made by an intelligence. (according to this measure)

-> The surface of most gas planets : LOW entropy (obviously). Compare it to earth's ocean floor. It is mostly very, very flat. When a robot is standing on the ocean floor, he will see kilometers of perfectly flat dark terrain. The only real features, like volcanoes or sunken ships, come from external activity with high entropy (though not necessarily intelligence) That terrain does not have instabilities. It has very, very LOW entropy.

Therefore you can conclude it not to be man-made. You'd conclude the ships to be intelligently-made, which is correct, but you'd also call the volcanoes intelligently-made which is not correct. Unless the zulus are right and we better start throwing women into volcanoes to placate the volcano god, that is.

Now let's take another example. A road network. This is not a stable structure (without maintenance it will dissappear). It is something of very high contrasts, which will release lots of energy during it's decomposition, parts of it can collapse violently at any time (e.g. bridges), and over time it would be buried, made to look exactly like it's surroundings.

Therefore it has high entropy (certainly higher than it's environment) and would therefore be man-made.

Of course there are non-intelligent very very high entropy structures, like the magnetic field or the corona of the sun. Especially the magnetic fields are high entropy, and presumably not the result of intelligent design. (which are somehow capable of heating earth by at least a few dozen degrees with little warning. Currently they are heating the earth quite a bit, and we don't understand them at all).

But if "anything with high entropy is designed by an intelligent being" is your assumption then, yes, you'd presume God to be real (not allah, not krishna, not buddha, since those ideologies are in direct conflict with scientific theory. They both claim that scientific experiments have no validity, and convey no truth. Therefore using an experiment to validate them is beyond stupid. The bible, otoh, even describes a few experiments and accepts their outcomes as "obviously true". Since for example muslims claim allah decides "intelligently" the outcome of every single experiment every time it's carried out, the result of any experiment would change over time. Therefore any experiment, no matter what it's about, doesn't represent any truth to any muslim. Otherwise you'd directly arrive at the claim that the quran must correctly follow mathematics, which is a claim the quran fails (e.g. fractions of the same quantity in the quran don't add up to 1 : islamic inheritance laws are mathematically flawed in a way any 3-year old learns in school : if you cut a pie, the pieces always add up to a whole pie, never to more, never to less). The bible does seem to follow mathematics by contrast, at least you might say it tries, and even acknowledges that better study can yield better results. E.g. the bible claims salomon measured pi to be "a bit more" than 3, and claims a few centuries later it was measured to be 22/7, which is quite accurate).

The problem with equating high entropy with intelligent design is simple. The universe as a whole most certainly (currently) has a very (very) high entropy. The further back in time we go (and so presumably the closer to the creator) the higher entropy we see. So if entropy is higher for intelligently designed things, then most certainly the universe is designed, since the entropy at the start was infinite (according to big bang theory). (insert remark about correlation-causation not being equal*)

Of course that's discounting the fact that high-entropy events

Re:Ridiculous argument

[Kagura]

From the article:

rebellion of life against universal decay

There's no "fight against entropy" here. No matter how much you can reduce entropy locally, you are FAR more greatly increasing entropy outside of your "local" system.

Re:Ridiculous argument

[Endo13]

It's actually really simple. ID can never be proved or disproved because we're stuck inside the object in question. To accurately determine if something is the result of design or chance, you have to be able to have a perspective outside the object to compare it with other objects. Since we can't get outside our universe to see if there are other universes (and if so, compare them to ours) we have no way to know for sure. Ours could be intelligently designed from top to bottom to look random to us, and we'd be none the wiser.

So it all boils down to whether or not you want to believe in a "someone" (ie. God) that's always existed, or matter that has always existed. But you will never in this life know for sure whether you're right or wrong.

Re:Ridiculous argument

[ultranova]

-> a perfectly flat desert : LOW entropy. Perhaps a bit higher than a not-quite-flat-but-looking-flat desert, but defineately LOW entropy.

High entropy, actually. Low entropy means that very few rearrangements will remain unnoticeable, but one piece of flat, empty desert is exactly like any other, so they can be exchanged with each other without anyone noticing anything.

The surface of most gas planets : LOW entropy (obviously). Compare it to earth's ocean floor. It is mostly very, very flat. When a robot is standing on the ocean floor, he will see kilometers of perfectly flat dark terrain. The only real features, like volcanoes or sunken ships, come from external activity with high entropy (though not necessarily intelligence) That terrain does not have instabilities. It has very, very LOW entropy.

Again, it has high, very high entropy. Any cubic meter of ocean water (or gas giant atmosphere) can be replaced by any other, and no one will ever notice. In fact both ocean and gas giant atmosphere's are constantly being churned by storms, yet their characteristics remain the same; therefore they have high entropy.

The general rule of thump: the less features it has, and the more stable it is, the higher its entropy is.

Re:Ridiculous argument

[Anonymous Coward]

You got entropy wrong.

High entropy is what low entropy disintegrates to.
Ice crystals to water. Cities to dust. Music to noise.
Life fights this.

Man made things are LOW entropy because they have structure.

High entropy has finer and finer structure until there is no statistically significant contrast that stands out as a "feature".
This featureless high-entropy uniform blur you must have interpreted as "low entropy".

Here is a simplified rule to judge entropy:

Blend X in a blender.
- You can't call that "X" any more:
    X was LOW entropy.
- You still have X in the blender:
    X is HIGH entropy.

For example, if you blend an apple you got apple juice. Therefore apple is low entropy.
If you blend apple juice you still have apple juice. Therefore apple juice is high entropy.

And, please, don't take the analogy farther than it serves.

Re:Ridiculous argument

[adlo]

Now let's look at your examples : -> a perfectly flat desert : LOW entropy. Perhaps a bit higher than a not-quite-flat-but-looking-flat desert, but defineately LOW entropy.

Nope. It's the other way around. When you can't find a pattern, it's high entropy. The desert in this example is not a flat monomolecular sheet, it's white noise of sand. You don't get much higher entropy than this.

Therefore it is not made by an intelligence. (according to this measure)

You can't possibly make that deduction based on the entropy level. Intelligence can obviously create objects with either high or low entropy.

-> The surface of most gas planets : LOW entropy (obviously). Compare it to earth's ocean floor. It is mostly very, very flat. When a robot is standing on the ocean floor, he will see kilometers of perfectly flat dark terrain. The only real features, like volcanoes or sunken ships, come from external activity with high entropy (though not necessarily intelligence) That terrain does not have instabilities. It has very, very LOW entropy.

Same thing here. You completely misunderstood what entropy is.

Therefore you can conclude it not to be man-made. You'd conclude the ships to be intelligently-made, which is correct, but you'd also call the volcanoes intelligently-made which is not correct. Unless the zulus are right and we better start throwing women into volcanoes to placate the volcano god, that is.

You can't conclude anything. Especially when you don't have a clue of what entropy is.

Now let's take another example.

Let's not. Instead, read up entropy, and then, maybe, start discussing the subject matter.

Re:Ridiculous argument

[jeepien]

"Atheists believe they are themselves, gods"

Well, you believe that they believe that, but that's not the same thing is it? I mean, you presumably believe yourself to be making sense, yet you're not. Why couldn't you be just as wrong about atheists?

Re:Ridiculous argument

[TechWrite]

The great thing about science and everything in this universe of ours is that it doesn't give a shit what you think. Just because you think evolution is morally wrong and unjust and you don't want to live in a world with evolution, does not mean that evolution isn't fact. It simply does not matter what you think or how evolution makes you feel.

And how exactly could evolution ever be the guiding principle in anyone's life, atheist or otherwise? Atheism is the absence of belief in god, christian or any other kind. Just because an atheist does not believe in a christian god does not mean they have to find one somewhere else, so they aren't substituting evolution for god. Atheism doesn't worship anything, because there is nothing to worship.

I'm also curious how christian "morality" has conquered anything. I'm even more curious how hiding behind an old book even approaches morality, rather than having to think about your values and forming your own based on what you think. That takes real work while "christian" morality requires the ability to read.

Re:Entropy favors simplicity

[Anonymous Coward]

A civilization with practically unlimited access to energy would not optimize energy usage. Basically life as we know it uses up all available resources and maximizes effect instead of minimizing consumption. There might be a situation where a civilization only uses the most easily available resources because spreading to find more easily exploitable resources is more efficient than exploiting less accessible resources without traveling. But then the overall output would still be more than our output and should still be detectable.

Re:I think you're overthinking this

[MillionthMonkey]

It was a prime number of Hitlers.

Re:I mod this down.

[Bacon Bits]

However, it's also nearly a tautological statement. It's not deep.

It's just ~B -> ~A therefore A -> B. No shit. It means that the universe exists and works. The same is true of any potion of the universe, including the portions that we have designed. It neither precludes nor supports the theory of an intelligently designed universe.

Intelligent design, my ass.

[EWAdams]

One word: cancer.

The human body is clear proof that God is an idiot.

Benchmark of Design

[fatalGlory]

The benchmark of design is not simplicity. The benchmark is probably better described as specified complexity. A good way of spotting design is perhaps to observe an irreducibly complex mechanism that efficiently achieves a purpose. A field may be cleared intentionally, but a clearing in a forest may also naturally occur, so this is not a good example of spotting design.

The classic example is a mousetrap. None of the parts of the mousetrap are particularly useful on their own, but if you obtain them all seperately, then arrange them in a very specific way, the result is a very efficient mouse catching device.

This device is complicated, but not random. The complexity that makes it functional is specified by the person who intentionally assembled the mousetrap, but such a device would not naturally occur. It is irreducibly complex because taking away any of the parts it is composed of would cause it to cease functioning. This means that its function was intentional and had to be conceived as a whole rather than arrived at by gradual steps (since no step along the way would be any closer to the purpose, until the whole mousetrap is built).

Re:Lots of Stuff Are Regular

[Urkki]

More like the opposite. As far as particle physics and quantum mechanics are concerned, it looks very much like there are just a few different possible charges (for example). The multitude of different particles is a combination of very limited set of properties (electric charge being one of them).

In a designed universe, every particle could have been designed different. In an universe that has developed as dictated by rather simple laws, every particle also follows these laws, and in this case it means that no, electrons could not be different from each others.

Similarity of particles does not disprove a creator, of course. It does tell us that if the universe was "created", it was probably created by creating universal laws of physics, not by creating individual particles like electrons.

Too bad that "universe created by creating some universal laws of physics" is indistinguishable from "universe arising from a random quantum fluctuation with certain properties, we call the universal laws of physics" or some other non-creator origin theory...