Your comment on my paper's page:
Paul,
We posit some of the same mysteries, issues and questions but I tend to leave nature in the realm of a process we are left with and God in the realm of faith to embody what we can't seem to fathom. Entropy is a natural process which seems to govern the animate and inanimate -- the tiny and the colossal.
An interesting read.
Jim Hoover
Dear James,
Your concept of God is common among those who don't actually believe in the actual existence of God. The general belief is that as science advances all of the things we currently can't fathom will be explained and then there will be no need for a concept of God. The problem with that concept is that there are two possibilities. One is that God exists and created the universe and the other is that God does not exist and the universe came about in some other way. Putting blinders on oneself and only looking at and trying to work for justification of only one of the two possibilities will likely end in false results because they will be founded on the wrong assumptions. Only a balanced approach that honestly looks at and analyzes both possibilities and looks for all the information that can be found that would support both possibilities and also all the information that would be against both possibilities can after full analysis be expected to be able to likely give a truly valid answer to the question. As an example, suppose that God does exist and that he created the universe and everything in it, but suppose that he made it such that it works automatically, so that you find that it appears to you that no God is needed. If God made it for some purpose, such as to create a body for himself and left signs of that purpose hidden in the structure of the universe in such a way that you would not see them unless you were purposely looking for them and also gave explanations of his purpose to certain men who then wrote them down in a book for people to read and get an understanding of his purpose, which included that he made us to become parts of his body which will live eternally in a new universe after this one is destroyed by him when he has all of his body members made, but we must choose to become members in a certain way that he has provided for us to do so, you would likely not read that book because you would think that you have the answer that you desire to have. The result would be that you would spend a lot of time coming to a conclusion that would leave you out of the whole purpose of the universe and the life that can be had after this one. A true scientist looks at and analyzes all of the possibilities and then makes decisions based on all the information available. Even then he always keeps his mind open to new evidence that could possibly change that decision.
I spent over twenty two years looking for that answer in man's science as that advanced over the years and in other sources all of which together ultimately led me to understandings that go well beyond man's current understandings of how the world works. I then, by what I at that time thought was just by chance, happened to open and read a part of the Christian New Testament scriptures and found to my amazement that it contained information that was not currently known by man in this world. That a book written about two thousand years ago contained such advanced information caused me to decide to read it all and I have since found much more information, some of which I still don't yet completely understand about many different areas of knowledge. I also found that the Old Testament contains similar information. I included a small amount of that information in my paper, but the paper was too short to include very much of that information in it.
When I first started my quest to determine whether God exists or not, I found it relatively easy to believe in a natural universe because the accepted theory at that time was the steady state theory, which held that the universe has always existed and that stars would eventually burn out and explode and that the dust from that explosion would eventually come back together to form new stars, etc. Evolution was also easy to believe because living creatures were said to be composed of cells that were filled with protoplasm and cytoplasm and some mysterious unknown life force. This sounded simple enough to possibly come about naturally and evolve. As the steady state theory was ultimately disproven and it became evident that the universe had a beginning and that living creatures were made of cells that were actually very small factories that produced very complex structures that are even today beyond man's ability to make, etc., it became evident that the universe could not have created living creatures because it tends to break down such structures instead of making them and since the universe had a beginning, that also fit into the concept that it was created by God. I still did not fully accept the existence of God until I saw the information that was provided in the scriptures about him and the world that he created. Since then I have also come to understand other problems with concepts such as evolution. As an example, If you use a DNA copy error rate and a positive result rate that are great enough to possibly allow the production by evolution of all of the types of living creatures that have ever existed, those rates would cause an exponential increase in evolution due to the population increase of all of the creatures, so that today we should see many major evolutionary changes happening all around us, but we don't.
You are right that entropy is a natural process and that it governs both animate (living creatures) and inanimate (nonliving structures) and applies to things of all sizes. The main difference between the living and nonliving things is that the nonliving things behave completely according to entropy while the living creatures apply some of the motion (energy) that they use to build very complex molecular machines and thus work contrary to entropy in that respect. The nonliving things don't do this. Of course, living creatures use more motion than they place into the building of these complex structures, so they still can't completely escape entropy. All of the fossil fuels that man is currently using and has used in the past are the remnants of that stored motion that living creatures have produced over a long time. The natural world does not generally build and store such motion. Instead it tends to break down and disperse any such stored motion over time.
I looked at your paper and found some of the usual attempts to justify the concept that the universe somehow created life. The idea that entropy could drive matter to acquire life-like physical properties ascribes an intelligence to inanimate matter that it does not possess. Inanimate matter can only act in accordance to its built in structural information which means that it behaves in accordance with entropy and tends to average the motion contents of all entities in the system toward the center or average of their motion amplitude range and tends to disperse evenly throughout available space. Larger entities that are more subject to gravity tend to be pulled together by it, etc. There is a long way from matter that is placed in an environment with a lot of motion forming clumps and the generation of complex protein machines and DNA molecules. If that is a natural tendency, why do we not see naturally produced protein molecules and DNA molecules everywhere? The planet Mercury receives a great amount of energy that needs to be dissipated. It should, therefore, by the theory that you support generate a very great amount of life on that planet to help to dissipate all that energy. The same could be said about Venus. If that theory really worked it would be very good because if I made a kettle of chili, every time I warmed it up it would reproduce and automatically make more for me in order to dissipate the applied heat, so I would never need to make more. I might, of course, have to add some dirt or something for it to convert into more chili every so often or something like that. One of the problems with the concept that life would form as a natural process to aid dissipation of energy is that building complex molecular structures is not energy dissipation. It is energy storage. Nonliving matter would tend to dissipate all applied energy, but living creatures would store much of the applied energy into the complex molecular structures that they make. This would actually hinder energy dissipation, not aid it.
Evolution does not intrinsically increase complexity in living creatures. It would only support successful adaptation to the environment. If the environment were to change so that no creature larger than an ant could survive, we would all die out, but ants would still survive and that would be evolution in action even though it would be supporting less complex living creatures over the more complex ones.
The earth's environment could support the 7+ billion people on this planet if man would stop burning the fossil fuels and use solar energy to generate needed power. If this was done properly, man would take energy that hits the earth from the sun and needs to be dissipated anyway and use it to produce the motion that is needed and then allow it to dissipate back into space normally. This would also get rid of the pollution problems.
It took me quite a while to fully accept the evidence that the universe and life were created by God, so I can understand why those who desire a natural answer to the question of the source of the universe and of life would tend to rationalize some way to look at the world in a way that would support that result, but it is evident that entropy works against life which is why all living creatures have machinery to repair the damages that it causes to them. If the big bang actually happened to create the universe, its cause cannot be discerned because all of man's theories break down before getting all the way back to the actual beginning of the expansion. With two possibilities (created by God or by some natural occurrence) and no way to determine which it is, any reasonable person would say that it is a fifty percent chance either way. The only thing that could change that understanding would be if the universe's structure indicates that it was created by an intelligent being or by natural random processes. In that respect its complex multilevel hierarchical structure implies that much intelligence went into its construction, especially into the production of living creatures. To me an attempt to convince people that the thing (entropy) that works to break down and destroy living creatures and the things that they make actually is what works to create life is the ultimate misinformation campaign. Of course, each has the right to have his own delusion if he desires to do so. I just desire to know and understand how things really work too much to continue down that path when it is now so obvious that it is a dead end path.
I find it interesting that we are coming to the end of a complete cycle of understanding. If you go back into history in the United States, when the country was more Christian oriented, someone with the naturalist philosophy would have been considered either very naïve or foolish. At that time there was little scientific evidence either way. Later scientists bought into that philosophy which gave it much credence in the intellectual world and it got to the point that those who believed in God were considered very naïve or foolish. When I came on the scene, I did find that most Christians that tried to disprove evolution did not understand its concepts, so that led me to tend to agree with the scientists of the time. As time went on and the true complexities of the world and the life in it became more and more known, it became apparent that a natural explanation was not practical. Now I find that some scientists are purposely trying to reinterpret the facts of how things actually work in the world to continue to support the naturalist philosophy when the scientific evidence is actually showing it to be wrong. In addition to that I am now finding some Christians who have gone into scientific fields such as genetics and biology who recognize the problems and are beginning to publically address them. The main good thing that has come out of all of this is that science has greatly advanced in the process of trying to prove it in one direction or the other and in the end God still wins because his works prove him.
Sincerely,
Paul