My guess is this guy’s math ability is very, er, minimalist as well. Quite possibly another apologist with numerology masquerading as math.
To be fair, when did you ever encounter a religious apologist who asked that about anything? Except maybe evolution, endlessly…
Or conversely, why are they even bothering to explain things in any remotely scientific way, when they start by invoking inexplicable magic powers.
Special pleading is so second nature to them that they don’t realize they are doing it.
The universe cooling off to nothing violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, so this isn’t much of a thermodynamics argument.
I can’t count the number of times that I’ve heard the “Life violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics” canard . . . starting when I was 11 years old, when I read The Planet that Wasn’t by Isaac Asimov.
Instead of considering life, let us–instead–consider a common refrigerator.
The inside of a refrigerator is constantly colder than the room that it sits in. Further, the environment around the refrigerator is warmer than it would be if the refrigerator wasn’t there.
Does the refrigerator violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Should the Second Law of Thermodynamics be discarded? Or does mankind have the power to supercede this law of physics when it’s convienient to do so?
No . . . absolutely not!
When the refrigerator is unplugged, the interior of the fridge begins to warm up immediately, and the point of this exercise is that the power supply to the fridge must be considered . . . as should the power plant that burns the coal (or oil, natural gas, uranium,* etc.), and then we need to consider how the energy got into the coal . . . which means that we need to consider the Sun.
When we consider these steps that bring energy into the refrigerator, we discover that the Sun has had an increase in entropy that is much greater than the corresponding decrease in entropy represented by the cold interior of the refrigerator.
Life is like this.
Life does–indeed–represent a decrease in entropy, but this is at the expense of a vast increase in entropy elsewhere, mostly the sun.
This is why life doesn’t violate the laws of entropy and thermodynamics, and if anyone asks about the uranium that I mentioned earlier, then keep in mind that it was synthesized in supernova explosions, and the same reasoning is just as relevant.
I am surprised that these religious people don’t think that this seeming contradiction between life’s intricacy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics occurs to scientists.
Do they think that all scientists are so lost in malice that they wish to spite God? For what purpose?
Of course this reasoning seems to suggest an “ultimate energy source” which the theists call God . . . which mirrors the debunked “prime mover” argument.
We may not know why the Universe began with a minimum of entropy, but not knowing why or how doesn’t mean we should automatically invoke God.
If we always used God as a substitute for curiosity and skepticism, then women would still be dying from sepsis of childbirth instead of doctors washing their hands before attending a woman in labor.
BTW, I did paraphrase Asimov in much of this post, which I want to clarify because I don’t plagiarize.
An axiom to be remembered and applied often … you know a creationist is lying, because his lips are moving.
Go to the top of this thread, then scroll down until you hit my earlier posts. I think you’ll enjoy them.
I have the idea (it is incomplete, and does have some gaps) that the Universe periodically resets itself into a state of minimum entropy, which we call the Big Bang.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is (in part) a result of statistics and chance dictating that the kinetic energy of randomly moving particles sort themselves out into a situation where there is less and less of a temperature difference between the different parts of the closed system.
I view this like a deck of cards that is randomly shuffled.
However, if we keep shuffling a trilllion decks of cards together and dealing out a trillion poker hands for an infinite amount of time, then it is 100% certian that I will deal out a trillion royal flushes a trillion times in a row.
This will happen very rarely, but people misinterpret the definition of infinity, as many people think of it as a very large number when–in fact–infinity is an endless number. One trillion is precisely as close to infinity as is the number 1, because one trillion lacks the quality of endlessness that defines infinity.
This means–at least to me–that a Universe in maximum entropy that exists for an infinite time will–very rarely–have the random movements of its particles randomly sort themselves into a state of minimum entropy, which we call the Big Bang.
This idea is consistant with the First and Second laws of thermodynamics, it eliminates the need for a God or gods, and it closes the loop on infinite regression into the past and infinite progression into the future.
There are problems with this idea, as Get Off My Lawn has pointed out that if I want to consider this fluke of statistics, then I must consider all flukes equally if I don’t want a subtle double-standard . . . and some of these flukes could–perhaps–cause the Universe to vanish into non-existence, and leave behind a true nothingness (which I equate with the empty set in mathematics, not to be confused with the number zero).
Also, my idea does not explain dark matter, dark energy, or why the expansion of the Universe may be accellerating.
I would also expect all of the galaxies of the Universe to look like they are organized on the surface of a Universe-sized sphere (because mass of the Universe is accellerating outward equally from a tiny starting point), and plainly this isn’t the case.
Also–most important–my idea cannot be falsified by any way that I can imagine, so my exercise in “do it yourself cosmology” may have the same credibility as the claim that “God did it.”
Still, I feel that my hypothesis is useful–at least to me–because it can show me where I deceive myself when I want to believe something, as I have been obsessed with this idea since I was 15 years old.
Indeed, the fact that infinities (and yes, there’s an entire hierarchy of them, thanks to Georg Cantor and others) behave in a manner that’s fundamentally different to finite numbers, sometimes catches even trained mathematicians off guard, unless they’re treading very carefully indeed.
So it’s no surprise to see scientifically and mathematically illiterate creationists fail to understand how infinities work.