RE: Bullet One: You are correct. There are certain things that are unprovable - for instance, the existance (or non-existance) of God. Like the Big Bang. Like that the Universe wasn't created five seconds ago and you with a memory (think about that one for a while).
Bullet two: Turkey on a roll with mustard and lettuce.
Bullet three: You are deaf and blind, and therefore cannot determine where the sidewalk ends and the street begins. In addition, your seeing eye chimpanzee ran off and began humping a parked car.
...unless I remind myself that I can define "God" however I feel happy defining it
Here's where it gets interesting. Does the way you percieve things or the way you want them to be affect in any way the actuality of that thing? Basically what we're discussing here is the nature of our baseline - Absolute Truth if you will. It follows along the lines of "I believe that Heaven exists, so for me it does" or "I believe that there is no Hell so there isn't". Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not arguing for or against the existance of Heaven or Hell (personally I believe in both, but for the purposes of discussion, that is immaterial) - I am, however, arguing that regardless of what you believe, or how you want to define them, they are (or are not) what they are.
I know the following is a rediculous example, but it's the best I can come up with while typing with one hand and eating a sandwich with the other while writing code on the other computer, so bear with me:-) Say you're standing in the middle of the street. You are deaf and blind. There's a cement truck barreling toward you at 65mph. Your seeing and hearing friend yells for you to get out of the way - there's a truck coming at you! That truck, however, does not exist for you - you cannot see, hear, or touch it (yet). You don't believe him and stay put. Does the truck magically go away because you don't believe in it?
The reason I put "someone" in there rather than "something" is that I like most humans who describe "God" tend to anthropomorphosize Him/Her/whatever. You could just as easily substitute "God" for "someone" in the above quote. The Bible tends to refer to God as "I Am" meaning that God exists outside of the constraints of time or that He has always existed. And "Marklar" is clearly a set of people, a language, and almost the entire contents of that language and not a substitute for the word "God". Go back and study Southpark some more!:-)
But in order for it to be going relentlessly into chaos, we would have to assume that 15 billion years ago, the universe was at its most organized, no?
I do realize that entropy cannot apply to a subset of the closed system - my question was more related to whether or not the Universe can be determined to be a closed system.
Since people seem to like Hawking, here's a quote from him...
...the theory that the universe has existed forever is in serious difficulty with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law, states that
disorder always increases with time. Like the argument about human progress, it indicates that
there must have been a beginning. Otherwise, the universe would be in a state of complete
disorder by now, and everything would be at the same temperature.
Re:The problem of magnitude
on
Genome
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· Score: 1
I think the problem lies not with statistics, but with entropy. Given enough time, a closed system (that might be a problem - how do you define "closed system" for the purposes of discussion?) will tend toward chaos, not order.
Even if it did tend toward order, we are still left with the problem of origination. Where did the mass of whatever come from that started the whole thing off?
If you assume that the laws of physics do apply in all scenarios, self assembly would look more like entropy, and "God"'s will would look more like what we have now.
Throw the second law of thermodynamics together with the law of conservation of energy, and I'm thinking that the leap of faith that it takes to believe that random chance "created" the earth is far greater than the leap of faith it takes me to believe that someone gave it a push.
I would say that I am positive that mitosis does not work 100% of the time. That said, it's still pretty close to that original number of cells created over the duration of 50 divisions. By pretty close, I mean close to a quadrillion which is a lot. What's a few billion between friends at that point?
Re:Refuting Evolution
on
Genome
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· Score: 2, Interesting
At the risk of turning this in to an all-out flame war, I personally do not see any problem with combining creationism with evolution. The only thing that creation provides that evolution does not is a starting point and a way to explain the *IMHO* total leap of faith that random chance could produce beings with even the complexity of a bacterium.
There's nothing in my faith or bible that tells me to throw logic to the window.
50 cell divisions - assuming that each cell lives for the duration of all divisions would yield 1,125,899,906,842,624 cells. Don't know if I would have put it in the terms of "only" 50 divisions.
My only experience with this book being the review, I'm not sure that this applies, but I'm always a bit disappointed with books like this. Explaining the genome is all well and good, but I always want to see more "what-if" scenarios. Like would it be possible to make a fruit fly 50% bigger or something.
I'm continually stunned by what mankind can accomplish in this day and age. A century ago, crossing the Atlantic meant going by steamship. A century before that it meant sailing, and hoping you weren't boarded by pirates. A few centuries before that it was impossible! Now we can do it with a model airplane; what next?
Ha. I won't be impressed until they can do it with a paper airplane.
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RE: Bullet One: You are correct. There are certain things that are unprovable - for instance, the existance (or non-existance) of God. Like the Big Bang. Like that the Universe wasn't created five seconds ago and you with a memory (think about that one for a while).
Bullet two: Turkey on a roll with mustard and lettuce.
Bullet three: You are deaf and blind, and therefore cannot determine where the sidewalk ends and the street begins. In addition, your seeing eye chimpanzee ran off and began humping a parked car.
...unless I remind myself that I can define "God" however I feel happy defining it
:-) Say you're standing in the middle of the street. You are deaf and blind. There's a cement truck barreling toward you at 65mph. Your seeing and hearing friend yells for you to get out of the way - there's a truck coming at you! That truck, however, does not exist for you - you cannot see, hear, or touch it (yet). You don't believe him and stay put. Does the truck magically go away because you don't believe in it?
Here's where it gets interesting. Does the way you percieve things or the way you want them to be affect in any way the actuality of that thing? Basically what we're discussing here is the nature of our baseline - Absolute Truth if you will. It follows along the lines of "I believe that Heaven exists, so for me it does" or "I believe that there is no Hell so there isn't". Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not arguing for or against the existance of Heaven or Hell (personally I believe in both, but for the purposes of discussion, that is immaterial) - I am, however, arguing that regardless of what you believe, or how you want to define them, they are (or are not) what they are.
I know the following is a rediculous example, but it's the best I can come up with while typing with one hand and eating a sandwich with the other while writing code on the other computer, so bear with me
Depends on how you define "God".
:-)
The reason I put "someone" in there rather than "something" is that I like most humans who describe "God" tend to anthropomorphosize Him/Her/whatever. You could just as easily substitute "God" for "someone" in the above quote. The Bible tends to refer to God as "I Am" meaning that God exists outside of the constraints of time or that He has always existed. And "Marklar" is clearly a set of people, a language, and almost the entire contents of that language and not a substitute for the word "God". Go back and study Southpark some more!
But in order for it to be going relentlessly into chaos, we would have to assume that 15 billion years ago, the universe was at its most organized, no?
...the theory that the universe has existed forever is in serious difficulty with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law, states that
disorder always increases with time. Like the argument about human progress, it indicates that
there must have been a beginning. Otherwise, the universe would be in a state of complete
disorder by now, and everything would be at the same temperature.
I do realize that entropy cannot apply to a subset of the closed system - my question was more related to whether or not the Universe can be determined to be a closed system.
Since people seem to like Hawking, here's a quote from him...
reference, and a good lecture here.
I think the problem lies not with statistics, but with entropy. Given enough time, a closed system (that might be a problem - how do you define "closed system" for the purposes of discussion?) will tend toward chaos, not order.
Even if it did tend toward order, we are still left with the problem of origination. Where did the mass of whatever come from that started the whole thing off?
Any idea where that's documented? Now that's something I'd like to read.
If you assume that the laws of physics do apply in all scenarios, self assembly would look more like entropy, and "God"'s will would look more like what we have now.
Throw the second law of thermodynamics together with the law of conservation of energy, and I'm thinking that the leap of faith that it takes to believe that random chance "created" the earth is far greater than the leap of faith it takes me to believe that someone gave it a push.
I would say that I am positive that mitosis does not work 100% of the time. That said, it's still pretty close to that original number of cells created over the duration of 50 divisions. By pretty close, I mean close to a quadrillion which is a lot. What's a few billion between friends at that point?
At the risk of turning this in to an all-out flame war, I personally do not see any problem with combining creationism with evolution. The only thing that creation provides that evolution does not is a starting point and a way to explain the *IMHO* total leap of faith that random chance could produce beings with even the complexity of a bacterium.
There's nothing in my faith or bible that tells me to throw logic to the window.
50 cell divisions - assuming that each cell lives for the duration of all divisions would yield 1,125,899,906,842,624 cells. Don't know if I would have put it in the terms of "only" 50 divisions. My only experience with this book being the review, I'm not sure that this applies, but I'm always a bit disappointed with books like this. Explaining the genome is all well and good, but I always want to see more "what-if" scenarios. Like would it be possible to make a fruit fly 50% bigger or something.
I'm continually stunned by what mankind can accomplish in this day and age. A century ago, crossing the Atlantic meant going by steamship. A century before that it meant sailing, and hoping you weren't boarded by pirates. A few centuries before that it was impossible! Now we can do it with a model airplane; what next?
Ha. I won't be impressed until they can do it with a paper airplane.
I have a great device that I use to repel rats. It's called a house.