Comment on Louie Bishop Testifies, Again, about His Experience at La Sierra University by George Evans.
@Sean Pitman: You are sure taxing my mind, take it easy, I’m frail. 😉
It is interesting to note that order is increased in the construction of the little fan, even if you start from a bracket, axel and fan blades. If you just put the pieces at the hole you can add as much heat, or sunlight as you want and you won’t get work back. The confusion in this conversation is we have let biologists do physics and we’ve listen to them.
Adding the sun to the system does not overcome the problems evolution has with the 2LoT because sunlight has no order to add–it can’t help, in fact it almost always makes things worse. The ToE says everything started in a state of disorder and the 2LoT says it would have wanted to stay that way. Order doesn’t just happen. It has to be brought in, applied by something that has a lot of it to begin with–a designer. This is all physics and it is apparently physics that evolutionist don’t understand.
Why do you think a broken fan is the same as an unbroken fan in the eyes of thermodynamics. I would have to expend energy in order to fix it, and the fix would decrease the entropy of the system.
You wrote, “The 2LoT does NOT reference the presence or lack of machines within the system that might be able to take advantage of the thermodynamic potential of the gas molecules.” The 2LoT is a general law of nature. It can apply to any machine. The problem is that it greatly complicates the calculations and most people want to ignore it. When you “put” a machine into a system you change the system. You can’t just declare them irrelevant.
Your suggestion that an old person can be shown to be thermodynamically equivalent to a young person by burning their bodies is not the correct way to compare them because burning a machine is not the reverse of building a machine. That is just a measure of the materials and has nothing to do with the machine’s structural order.
George Evans Also Commented
Louie Bishop Testifies, Again, about His Experience at La Sierra University
@Sean Pitman: From the wiki article on conformational entropy, “It can be shown that the variation of configuration entropy of thermodynamic systems (e.g., ideal gas, and other systems with a vast number of internal degrees of freedom) in thermodynamic processes is EQUIVALENT to the variation of the macroscopic entropy defined as dS = δQ/T, where δQ is the heat exchanged between the system and the surrounding media, and T is temperature. Therefore configuration entropy IS THE SAME AS macroscopic entropy.”
Louie Bishop Testifies, Again, about His Experience at La Sierra University
@Sean Pitman:You almost persuadeth me. But please look at this paper. I think we may be on the brink of a breakthrough in the understanding of entropy.
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~rbaron/TPC_11_2006.pdf
Louie Bishop Testifies, Again, about His Experience at La Sierra University
@Sean Pitman: You wrote, “Therefore, there is plenty of thermodynamic potential to drive whatever kind of activity one wishes to imagine on this planet.”
The sun provides an endless supply of energy but it cannot impose order. Sunlight is incoherent. The only mechanism for imposing order is natural selection. The environment is the designer, and there is not much information in an environment, especially one without organisms in it already.
Something interesting to consider in the theory of functional islands is “changes in the water level.” A predator might have an effect. That gives the environment more information for selection. Would that lower the local water level? Maybe reveal an isthmus here and there?
Recent Comments by George Evans
Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Pauluc: You wrote, “In the Adventist tradition I am not dualist and accept that our brains are simply part of the natural world. They are not the repository of the soul or an antennae for the supernatural world but are highly complex elaborations of the invertebrates head ganglion.”
I didn’t realize we had this tradition. Now that I think about it, you seem to be voicing an idea I call neo-deism. I have used the term anti-pantheism in Adventist circles for obvious reasons. As a people we got so afraid of pantheism that we bolted to the other side of the road, and apparently developed a new tradition when I wasn’t looking.
This is very interesting. Until now I hadn’t understood the nexus of anti-pantheism opening the door for theistic evolution. Thank you, Paul.
Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Pauluc: A bee is not an extrinsic agent. Bees are not artistic.
Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Sean Pitman: From Merriam-Webster:
1. a : something created by humans usually for a practical purpose; especially : an object remaining from a particular period
b : something characteristic of or resulting from a particular human institution, period, trend, or individual
Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Pauluc: I think you are the only scientist that defines a beehive as an artifact.
Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Pauluc: In this case the Torah is the evidence. Before we get to criticizing the Pentateuch, we should consider it’s provenance. It is not a document that we dug up in some foreign land. It has been in the continuous possession of the original “family”. And this lays in the dust the charge that it is an old document written in a dead language also.
So what does the document say? It says that sometime during the event known as the Exodus, Moses, the leader of the group, chiseled out two tablets of stone, and God wrote on them. Shortly thereafter Moses apparently recorded the inscription, and we have it in Exodus chapter 20.
Modern scholarship is a flash in the pan by comparison. For us, at this end of history to question this story’s veracity be we gentile or even Jew, is ludicrous.
