Well, fuck me. Does that mean I have to stop letting you do my thinking for me?
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That’s actually an excellent point that I haven’t considered.
Perhaps it’s easier to demonize atheists by lumping us all together . . . which certainly saves people the trouble of thinking.
I’m a pessimist; my guess is: its projection.
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Well - isn’t that because thats what they do (in various degrees)… personal testimony of spiritual experience believed because it must be true.
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A quite common rationale I’ve seen many theists use, goes like this.
P1 Atheists claim to be rational
P2 Belief in a deity is perfectly rational
C Atheist are irrational, and god therefore is real.
I’ve seen a few variations, some using a poisoning of the well fallacy when an atheist makes a logical error, as if trying to think rationally means you can’t ever be irrational, even by accident.
Other times they create straw man fallacies for the gotcha error. Or as above they use a premise that involves a begging the question fallacy, ironically to claim their belief is rational.
By far the most common lie these days, seems to be that atheism is a belief, and since you cannot disprove God (note god here is falsely presented as a single belief), then the “belief in atheism” is faith based.
They don’t seem to notice with denagrations of faith, that they’re shitting where they eat.
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you are all too logical and have a superior knowledge of the informal fallacies for the poor benighted bastards my friend.
I have enjoyed taking a “gold” seat at the back this last few months watching the few theists (and whatever those others were) coming in and catching a whiplash of cold hard realism from you young turks. Captain Cat has been known to smirk and lick a paw or preen a whisker at some your particularly good ripostes.
If I don’t post before, have a happy holiday time and all the best for the New Year.
Much love.
Oh and fuck you Cog, try plantains, they are firmer.
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I’ve seen the same thing over a grammar or spelling error, as if “you made a mistake there so the rest of your argument is a mistake.”
This is why they must think the entire bible infallible, because they believe that if one part of it is wrong then the whole thing is wrong.
“Atheists claim to be rational,” is a strawman. Rationality actually has nothing at all to do with believing or not believing in a God.
- I imagine living in a country where the majority of people are atheist. They are not “Rational” about their nonbelief, though it may be a rational coice. They simply don’t believe because no one arond them believes.
- There are primitive tribes that have no concept of gods or spirits. Nothing rational about it. They just happened to get it right from a ‘rational’ point of view.
I would assert that these non-rational atheists are more likely to fall for the fallacious claims made by the religious, for the simple reason that they have not practiced critical thinking or rational thought. A theist’s argument might sound rational to them as they have not, nor do they know how, to exercise their critical thinking skills.
Jsut a thought.
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I’d guess that is why see believers criticizing Darwin’s personal life, and expect us to accept it as meaningful criticism of the theory of evolution.
I’ve heard the opposite as well. Nonbelievers rejecting the Big Bang theory, because of one early contributors to the theory was a Catholic priest.
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A word of caution needs to be issued with respect to entropy, not least because there are two different approaches thereto extant in physics alone.
The macroscopic view of entropy, centres upon the fact that energy exchange processes usually terminate in the production of heat, in a manner that is no longer amenable to performing useful work. Which is one reason why the SI unit for entropy is joules per kelvin.
However, this macroscopic view of entropy, initially launched by Rudolf Clausius (whose statements on thermodynamics have NO correpondence with creationist caricatures of thermodynamics, incidentally, though this should not surprise the astute reader), there is also a microscopic view of entropy, based upon the statistical analysis of different arrangements of atoms or molecules in a system.
Quite simply, the connection between entropy and “disorder” (a term that in itself needs to be considered carefully, unlike the abuse thereof in creationist apologetics), arose from one simple fact. There exist far more possible arrangements of particles in a system of interest that lack an obvious ordering principle governing their positions and motions, than arrangements with such an ordering principle in place - at least, this is true in the typical model case studied when learning about such matters. Inherent in this analysis is the idea that all of the arrangements of particles within the system have equal probability, and the “disordered” (again, mindful to be careful how this term is defined in this context) arrangements vastly outweigh the “ordered” arrangements. In accordance with the usual probability summation rules, a “disordered” arrangement is more probable than an “ordered” arrangement.
At this point, it’s time to drop a little bombshell into everyone’s lap. Namely, that there exists scitentific papers documenting instances where naive ideas of “order” and “disoreder” in connection with entropy fall flat on their face. A classic example is provided by phospholipids - these are, in essence, fatty acid type molecules with extra phosphate groups attached. In the case of phospholipids, if you shake the jar containing an emulsion thereof in water, something very interesting happens. Namely, those phosopholipids arrange, apparently spontaneously, into ordered structures, known as micellws, bilayer sheets and liposomes. Similar experiments have since yielded similar results for lipids other than phospholipids, though phosopholipids remain the easiest choice for demonstrating the principles in question.
Relevant scientific papers covering the research in question include:
Gentle Force Of Entropy Bridges Disciplines by David Kestenbaum, Science, 279: 1849 (20th March 1998)
Electrostatic Repulsion Of Positively Charged Vesicles And Negatively Charged Objects by Helim Aranda-Espinoza, Yi Chen, Nily Dan, T. C. Lubensky, Philip Nelson, Laurence Ramos and D. A. Weitz, Science, 285: 394-397 (16th July 1999)
Basically, what is upended here, is the idea that each of the microstates have an equal probability. In the case of phospholipids, the ordered arrangements (micelles, bilayer sheets and liposomes) have a much [vb]higher[/b] probability than the “disordered” arrangements, because the electrostatic forces acting on the molecules in liquid suspension naturally align those molecules with each other in well-defined arrangements, which then combine with ease through those same electrostatic forces to produce the structures observed in the experiments.
Sadly, I don’t think I can attach the papers in question to this post, but they should not be difficult to track down.
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If I had been paid £10 for every time I had to deal with creationist bullshit about evolution and thermodynamics over the past 15 years, I would now be retiring to a Bond villain yacht in Monte Carlo harbour on the proceeds.
In the meantime, you might like to sample these papers, establishing that evolution is perfectly consistent with the 2LT. Namely:
Entropy And Evolution by Daniel F. Styer, American Journal of Physics, 78(11): 1031-1033 (November 2008) DOI: 10.1119/1.2973046
Natural Selection As A Physical Principle by Alfred J. Lotka, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 8: 151-154 (1922) [full paper downloadable from here]
Evolution Of Biological Complexity by Christoph Adami, Charles Ofria and Travis C. Collier, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 97(9): 4463-4468 (25th April 2000) [Full paper downloadable from here]
Order From Disorder: The Thermodynamics Of Complexity In Biology by Eric D. Schneider and James J. Kay, in Michael P. Murphy, Luke A.J. O’Neill (ed), What is Life: The Next Fifty Years. Reflections on the Future of Biology, Cambridge University Press, pp. 161-172 [Full paper downloadable from here]
Natural Selection For Least Action by Ville R. I. Kaila and Arto Annila, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Part A, 464: 3055-3070 (22nd july 2008) [Full paper downloadable from here]
Evolution And The Second Law Of Thermodynamics by Emory F. Bunn, arXiv.org, 0903.4603v1 (26th March 2009) [Download full paper from here]
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I fucking love it when you do that. I don’t have a fucking idea how you find the time to read all this shit but I don’t have a doubt in my mind that you do. As always, “I love your posts and look forward to the next.” In the mean time, I’ve some references to look up… LOL
ABSTRACT
Quantitative estimates of the entropy involved in biological evolution demonstrate that there is no conflict between evolution and the second law of thermodynamics. The calculations are elementary and could be used to enliven the thermodynamics portion of a high school or introductory college physics course.
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Christian values have been sneaking into our elementary schools under the guise of “civics.”
I think that the decline of our country closely paralells the influence of religion, as religion is an excellent balm that relieves one of independent thought and personal responsibility.
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Theists confuse what they cannot or don’t take the time to understand as being complex. It’s just a further extension of the gaps of knowledge fallacy, but this time due to personal ignorance.
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Thank you for these. It takes me a while to digest technical information these days, but I appreciate it anyway.
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I mentioned it in another thread . . . but an additional way of discussing the relationship between entropy, disorder, and complexity occurred to me.
I can have a sauce pan on my stove filled with a hot, concentrated solution of sugar and water.
The sugar molecules are moving around randomly in the water.
If–however–I put a wooden stick in the solution and let it gradually cool, I will have large crystals of sugar accumulating on the stick . . . and then I have rock candy.
The sugar molecules on the stick are in a very precise, neat, predictable, orderly arrangement in a monoclinic crystaline structure.
We didn’t even add energy to the system, as these crystals form when we stop adding heat!
So, where did the “order” come from? Does making rock candy violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? The dissolved sugar was very disordered, yet the rock candy represents quite a bit of order.
The answer has to do with the idea that the 2nd Law applies to a closed system, and the escaping heat was increasing entropy elsewhere in the saucepan’s environment.
Also, we need to add the electricity (or natural gas) that’s used to heat the sauce pan, and the source of the natural gas . . . and so on.
When all of these things are considered, then making rock candy actually represents an increase in entropy.
This idea also can be used to conceptualize how life can become more complex over time without violating the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
No God required (at least here).
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This really can’t be overstated. I’ve often heard it joked that the only part of science you can be sure won’t be overturned is the 2nd law; as it is underpinned by the Law of Large Numbers, and we know that is right.
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Being able to cool down is what makes it an open system and that’s why you can’t say it increased entropy.
Not only do you have to stop energy from getting into the system, you also have to stop energy from escaping the system.
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Quantum tunneling is in a sense violation of second law of thermodynamics
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The probability of it decreasing entropy is less than the probability of it increasing entropy. Taking us right back to the Law of Large Numbers driving the 2nd law.
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