Who is Mr. Maker?

The God posited by most Christians is one with ultimate, or infinite, power.

We see that term "maximally great" coming up from time to time.

However, if you think that a god exists and he is the creator of the universe, and everything in it, at which point do you make the leap from there to his power being greater than all other gods?

We have no idea, in god terms, how much power making this universe requires. For all we know this could all be a level one class at god school. 

"Great work Yahweh, I like what you've done with physics there. The gravity is really good, but that dark matter is... Class, look at Yah's universe for a second. Look at the way his dark matter flows through his space. That's really neat Yah... 'A+', but be careful not to over reach in your next assignment in Level Two's blended reality project."

How does anyone know that this god is maximally great? It's like bees thinking I'm some fantastic ethereal creature just because the hive I made for them was of perfect quality, by their standards.. The only difference being that occasionally a bee-keeper is going to pop along and make (at least) his existence known.

This brings me back to a point I made in an earlier post. Let's say God did make this universe, does it follow that He is in charge of it still? How can we be sure that the god in charge now is the same one who created it all? Did you make the car you drive?

All we have to go on is a rather simplistic view posited by ancient people's who were keen to move away from a polytheistic concept into a more monotheistic view which affords far better control of the flow of ideas and, ultimately, distribution of power.

Of course it could also be true, that the Elohim (plural) created the universe and everything in it for the LORD (God) who has since assumed control over a prefab universe. Elohim is a plural (essentially the distilled essence of all the gods) so why isn't it so that a group of gods made everything? This could account for Yahweh's inability to change anything dramatically, or intervene to stop tornadoes from tearing up houses in the US Bible-Belt! He just doesn't have that sort of juice!

Any of these scenarios could be true, so why is it that the standard Christian idea, that God rules the universe He created, so pervasive?

The church wants it to be this way and their "sheep" just lap it all up.

That's the only reason I can think of. 

So What?

This post is for the atheists.

In my everyday conversations with theists I get a great deal of scripture quoted at me and a fair bit of the "God did this" and "God did that". As atheists, you probably all do. I mean, what else do we expect?

Theists are taught to prosletylize at us. It's in their books after all. Many of them are taught to follow certain scripts too, and this is the point we must get into our heads when we speak to them. They are parroting key lines and phrases taught to them at their places of worship. Particularly the Creationists. It's easy to believe that getting through to these folks is impossible, but it isn't. I know from experience that very often your seed of rationality can take months, or years, to bear fruit.

A little while ago I got a message from a chap who had been deconverted by something I had said months earlier. It had played on his mind and it sparked a realization. Though still a believer in an ultimate power, in a deist fashion, he no longer accepted Creationism as a valid model. Planting that seed is very important. You never know what might grow from it.

We've all heard the lines from the Theist Script a decent few hundreds of times. I don't need to reiterate them here, because the answers we should be giving don't come from a vantage point of defending our positions at all. 

In aikido, defence strategies are defined by the circle. Almost every technique relies on taking the opponent's attack and redirecting it back onto them. A swirling motion guides the attack from where it was going to where you want it to go, until ultimately it ends in a throw, a lock, or a grounding. Our strategy in defence of these theistic attacks on our credibility should be the same.

This is where the "So what?" comes in. 

The theist says "God did this..." so our answer has to be "So what? How does that action prove the current state of being of your God?" She says "God said this..." so our answer should be "So what? Why is this more important than what other gods are saying? What if it is more prudent to ignore these words in favour of our own, more successful philosophy?"

Recently the two earthquakes in Nepal have been in the news and it didn't take long for someone to attribute some of the discoveries of people alive in the rubble as 'God's mercy.' It may come across as cynical, or even nasty, but our response has to be "So what? Why did God create that earthquake in the first place? Why save that one person, but kill so many others? If it was a purely natural thing, why did God not save everyone?"

More often than not we get "the Creation happened as per the book and evolution is rubbish/lies etc" argument. Jeesh, how often do we get that?

If you'll recall in my earlier post I discussed how the idea that a god created the Earth and universe in no way supports the argument that he/she/it currently has anything to do with us.

Our answer to the "God created everything" statement has to be "So what? Why does that matter? What proof is there that this god, or any other god, interacts with us? What if, in creating everything, he blew himself to pieces? How can you get from 'God did it' to 'God still exists and he cares about what we do'?" 

There's no point arguing about science, especially abiogenesis or evolution. "How did life begin?" Is a common question. Saying "I don't know" shuts down their line of thinking because they are fuelled by anti-evolution websites which we all know they've got bookmarked already to go. Avoid trading facts with these folk. It does very little good.

It's far more important to ask questions than to present arguments:

"So what? What does X mean to Y?"

"How do you know that?"

"Why is that significant?"

"Why should I believe that?"

and so on.

However, that said, there is another set of questions which we often overlook, because we assume that the person we're speaking to is fixed in their belief and cannot be swayed. The first question is: "On a scale of zero to one hundred, how certain are you that you are correct!"

This puts the theist in the position of having to put a number on their belief, and it gives you an idea of what you're dealing with.

The next one is: "What evidence could I present to you in order to lower your belief score by just one point?" This establishes whether the theist is using evidence (or what they consider to be evidence) to form their beliefs. Technically it measures their doxastic openness... how willing they are to hear other people's opinions and change their minds if necessary.

The last one is: "What one single piece of evidence could you offer me to change my mind and make me believe in God?"

This sets in place their best pitch. Something you could explore with them, or later, or work on the next time you see them.

So, what do you do if they pitch something which makes sense and actually changes your mind? Not necessarily converts you to their religion, but makes you stop and think. What's your best strategy?

It's simple. Revise your thinking! If you feel that you might have got it wrong then do your research and assess your stance properly, and, if you are wrong, change your mind to better fit the evidence.

In other words, there's no point going into these discussions and asking questions if you're afraid to change your own mind.

If you do, so what?

The Evolutionary Road to the Present and Beyond

WARNING: THIS IS A LONG POST. 

READ IT IN BITS, OR GET A COFFEE AND DIG IN!

I am frequently amused, and often appalled, at the Creationists who come on twitter claiming that "evolutionists" are living in a fantasy world if they believe we evolved from a common ancestor to monkeys. Let that sink in for a minute... Creationists, who believe that a magic sky-daddy poofed the universe and the Earth into existence at the same time and created every living thing on the Earth, including us, his special creation, believe that we live in a fantasy world.

Amazing!

We get everything from the classic line born out of sheer ignorance of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, or TOE for short: "If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"

Oh for flip's sake... really? Almost all bisections of the animal tree occur because of some sort of physical separation. So in our case the most likely scenario is that a large number of the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees got separated from the others in their group... we can speculate how to our heart's content... and their evolution, due to the change in their environment, possibly a once arboreal species now found itself on flat lands instead, came as a result of needing to adapt to the new conditions, or die.

This evolution took millions of years... as did the evolution of the rest of the species on the other side of the divide.

That ancestor is now extinct through necessity. A species cannot evolve en masse and keep the exact traits of its former self. That's just basic evolution 101.

 The other one they now seem to be focusing on is: "There is proof of microevolution and that fits in with our 'theory' of species being able to adapt, but no macroevolution has ever been observed so that cannot be true!"

These, and I'm struggling to not call them imbeciles, cannot [or will not] get their head around the fact that in science the terms macroevolution and microevolution simply have no weight at all. No true scientists use those words. Creationists should know this, because they send enough people on scholarships to proper university biology courses so that they can proclaim that an increasing number of evolutionary biologists [aka their plants] support Creationism. On those courses they are told that these terms are invalid.

On that last point they are correct, though as someone pointed out Pluto takes over 200 years to do one orbit of the Sun, but how can we prove that it does given that we live for a maximum of 120 years?

We extrapolate data from what we see in the laboratory, and these days we use DNA evidence to support the theory. We don't even need the 250,000 fossils we have to prove anything. The DNA supports our theory perfectly.

I often wonder how these people think, but then I read the webpages they point me to and realize that for the most part they don't think. They parrot off the stuff they hear at church, which is in turn parroting stuff that people like Ken Ham dream up between snorts of cocaine and threesomes with hookers in desert road motels. Perhaps I'm being too harsh there, but you know these people aren't straight arrows, and most of them aren't even happy about not being straight.

Think of a a hundred miles... what is a single mile made of? Yards and inches. And each inch is made up of sixteenths. So, we know that a sixteenth exists because we can see it. We know the inch exists, because we can see that too. But, imagine that the hundred miles ahead of us is over bumpy ground, so we lose sight of it every so often. Got it?

If you're happier you can use metric.

OK. So we can look down that road for maybe four hundred yards, then the road dips. We can see the equivalent of say, 2300 years of our history before the road dips for a while and pops up at about the 3500 year mark. This happens over and over along this road.

As an example. We get to see snippets of our past laid out on each of the sixteenths of the inches which make up this road. "Macroevolution" is the same as "microevolution" in the same way that this fictional road is the same as the sixteenths of inches which make it up. As each bit of the road comes into view we get a view of our past and we get to examine that to work out what could possibly have happened in the dips. In the past we had to dig up bits of that history and examine the finds. Such as dinosaurs and human settlements and geological samples. We would search caves, deserts, meadows and mountains trying to find examples of things lost to the earth over vast swathes of time. On that point, just as an aside, we do know how long it takes for earth to cover stuff, so we can roughly date a find according to how far down we had to dig for it.

I know I'm labouring that point a little but you know that not everyone gets this stuff the first time around.

It takes a great deal of skill to work out what we're seeing when we find a dinosaur fossil, or part thereof. It's not guesswork as some of the Creationists will tell you. It's careful examination, recreation and experimentation. As technology has improved we can now use computer data to recreate these creatures, based on careful anatomical examination. We use microscopes to determine all sorts of features unseen to our unaided eyes. Not one single scientist working today gets away with just guessing stuff.

Even Professor Richard Dawkins has to present his work to other scientists for them to hack it to bits when it deserves to be. Yet Creationists laugh at Dawkins for his proposition that there was once a collection of land masses known as Pangaea, and that through a process of separation and drifting the continents moved away from one another to where they are today.

I am really not sure how Creationists can justify their position on this idea of Pangaea, because we know that the continents are still moving today and we measure the distances between them occasionally to make doubly sure. If we work backwards from the now and use the rate and direction of the continents' drift to calculate the position of each in the distant past we get Pangaea. It's really that simple.

Also, another side note, doesn't the Bible refer to land being a single mass which was separated by rivers and oceans? Isn't that a vague reference to Pangaea?

So we're looking at this road and seeing bits of it, trying to work out how everything happened in the dips from the stuff we can see. When we don't know exactly we say things like "this may have happened", or "could" or "perhaps this", and this uncertainty, which is entirely valid and honest in the context of science, seems to set the Creationists on fire. They are satisfied that they have the answer and are arrogantly positive about it: "The evidence is in the book!" they say, demanding that we accept that the Bible is evidence rather than the claim which we all know is the case.

Look, I don't care if the Bible is a million years old, I don't care if it was written by gold-plated angelic goat herders using giant, jet-black heron feather quills and unicorn blood, on the skins of sacrificial eunuchs, there is absolutely nothing in the Bible which can be taken as prima facie evidence for anything. Nothing. The Bible is, and always will be, a claim that the stuff in it happened. Most of it is not supported by evidence of any sort.

Sorry to have to tell you Creationists, but despite what you've been told there are NO corroborative contemporary accounts of anything Jesus is said to have said, or done, and the fact remains that the Bible is now and forever a work of fiction.

That's not blasphemy... that's just a fact.

I'm not even sure that Creationists really understand some of the implications of some of the texts, but I'll deal with that another time. The purpose of this post is just to raise an analogy which explains why scientists have to use uncertain terms to describe past events and evolutionary processes.

Despite our uncertainty over many dips in the road to our past, we do now have a helping hand. We have a traveler which has been to mostly every part of that road and has now finally reached us. I'm not talking about the crocodile, which seems to have been around for a gazillion years. I'm talking about deoxyribonucleic acid [DNA].

DNA has been with organisms for a very long time. It has been handed the baton from RNA and run with it all the way through history. A really interesting part about DNA is that some of its constituent parts may have formed in Red Giant stars. This means that when Creationists are poking us for evidence of abiogenesis on Earth, they're ignoring the idea that we might well have come from outer space! Hee hee!

Building blocks of DNA (adenine, guanine and related organic molecules) may have been formed extraterrestrially in outer space. Complex DNA and RNA organic compounds of life, including uracil,cytosine and thymine, have also been formed in the laboratory under conditions mimicking those found in outer space, using starting chemicals, such as pyrimidine, found in meteorites. Pyrimidine, like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the most carbon-rich chemical found in the universe, may have been formed in red giants or in interstellar dust and gas clouds. - Wikipedia [DNA]

Now that we've unlocked the secrets of our own genome we can read the DNA strands with relative ease. To the point where we are now using our knowledge to modify babies DNA to make them immune to certain genetic diseases. Something God forgot to do.
In our DNA we can see markers which we see in other ape species on out side of the divide, but not in other apes from the other side. We can trace our retroviral markers and figure out what changes have been made to the genome to make us happen, and make chimps happen.

This is not guesswork, this is bona fide science using the tools now available to us. Tools which can now see the very building blocks of life in full colour. We can see inside crystals, and pick out previously invisible specks of evidence from all around the world. We now know there was never a global flood. The Noah story is just another myth, which another thing the Creationists cannot accept.
We weren't created as a separate species from the Earth and women aren't the product of a man's rib. For starters there's no way you'll get a an XY being by taking parts of an XX being. Perhaps the other way around could be argued, but not that. Also, why would God create a woman if his goal was to have Adam and his "companion" look after the Garden of Eden? Surely another man would have done just as well, if not better. Men have similar strength profiles, unless you're going to include bodybuilders, or the Basques. Two men could have happily kept that garden in tip top shape forever. A woman was in fact an unnecessary addition.

The whole Creation thing is a load of hooey. For starters there's two versions of it, which Creationists seem to purposely ignore, or claim that the two opposing timelines are versions of the same event. I'd not want one of them defending me in a court that's for sure, if they can't see basic facts like that.

Evolution is a progression, one sixteenth at a time, until we cover the 100s and 1000s of miles into the past. It's like when we look at a prairie rising up to become a tall hill. The upward sweep of the lowlands forces us to ask a question... where does the hill start and the prairie end? Likewise with evolution, when precisely does species A become species B and how? What were the changes and what was the final straw which prevented the two species from being able to interbreed?

Where does the hill begin? Where do humans fit in on the future of the evolutionary tree? What will we become? Will we create a technological supreme being as has been predicted? Will we eventually be ruled over by this TechnoGod? Will the science of the future create what the Creationists have been telling us is already real?

Who knows? We don't... but one thing is for certain, Creationists really have no idea at all.

Evolution, Creationism and the Argument From Authority Fallacy

Hello again. I'm writing this post because of another chat I had recently with a Creationist on twitter. It seems this keeps on happening.

The conversation took many strands, which is never ideal, but I'll try to summarize each one as best I can. 

One of the strands included a look at the Argument From Authority Fallacy (AFAF). The chap kindly directed me to a site which details the whole fallacy in detail.

The AFAF goes like this:

1. Person A is (or is assumed/claimed to be) an authority on subject S.
2. Person A makes a claim C about S.
3. Therefore C must be true.

Unfortunately the chap I was chatting to failed to acknowledge much of the fallacy's components in his own argument.

One of the sites included a refutation of vestigiality. According to Dr. Jerry A Coyne, who is an authority on evolution, vestigiality is "diagnosed not by its usefulness, but because it no longer has the function for which it originally evolved" ['Why Evolution Is True' (2009)] 

Dr Coyne goes on to describe the fact that humans still have an extensor coccygis muscle attached to our coccyx. This is the exact same muscle which is found in monkeys and other mammals which have tails. In humans the muscle has no function despite it still being attached to our skeleton.

In the article on the Creationist site highlighted above, written by Dr Don Batten and Dr Jonathan Sarfati they state that: "it is in principle not possible to prove that an organ is useless, because there is always the possibility that a use may be discovered in the future." This is clearly not true of the extensor coccygis muscle, unless of course humans have yet to grow tails. To be honest I wasn't sure I was inclined to read any more of this article, but I struggled on.

The next point to be raised was about why emus and ostriches are flightless despite having wings. The article suggests that: 

1. they derived from smaller birds which could once fly (which is one form of evolution the Drs claim is acceptable within the Creationist model.)
2. they do have a function other than flight.
3. the Creator uses the same model for all birds regardless, and therefore all birds have wings.

Dr Coyne does not disagree with the second point at all. In fact he explains the exact same thing from an evolutionary standpoint. Ostriches use their wings in courtship displays (as do other birds), and to maintain balance, (as do other birds), and to threaten its enemies, (as do other birds.) So in fact the ostrich has wings which perform all of the function of other birds' wings except flight... perhaps then  the problem isn't that the wings are badly adapted for flight, but that the rest of the bird isn't... but that's just my wacky idea!

All flightless birds have wings, but the kiwi has only tiny wings buried deep under its feathers which are just remnants of their flying ancestors' wings. Totally useless for any of the above adaptations.

When Drs Batten and Sarfati try to claim that the fact that a vestigial organ, or limb, undermines evolutionary theory they miss the point entirely. "Evolutionary theory doesn't say that vestigial characters have no function" says Dr Coyne, " It is vestigial not because it's functionless, but because it no longer performs the function for which it evolved... Indeed we expect that ancestral features will evolve new uses: that's just what happens when evolution builds new traits from old ones."

When you admit, as the Creationists do that the wings of the ostrich now have new functions besides flight aren't they saying that these changes are adaptations, and aren't adaptations part of the evolutionary process?

Further in the article the Creationists claim that it is only possible to devolve and not evolve. That means that in the Creationist model it is only possible for organisms to lose function and not evolve new traits which gain function. They argue that once a bird has devolved to become flightless it cannot re-evolve to regain its flight. This is possibly true. I personally don't think I know of any animal which has regained past lost abilities, but then I know that the process of evolution only works in the direction of conferring an advantage to the organism within its current surroundings. So if a bird needs to feed on the ground then it is likely to become flightless. Unless its source of food learns to live arboreally, or fly, the bird is unlikely to ever need to go back to flying! That's just how evolution works.

It's worth going back to the AFAF for a second and take a look at the two sides I've presented here. Dr Jerry Coyne holds a PhD in Evolutionary Biology which he gained from Harvard, one of the USA's premier universities and has authored over 115 refereed scientific papers. He is an authority on evolutionary biology. Now let's see what the other side looks like shall we?

Well... Dr Batten is a horticulturalist, and Dr Sarfati is a physical chemist. Neither of them have any qualifications in evolutionary biology and so are not authorities in the field of evolutionary biology.

So to quote the AFAF web page sent to me by the Creationist on twitter:

"This sort of reasoning (AFAF) is only fallacious when the person is not a legitimate authority in a particular context... If a person makes a claim about some subject outside of his area(s) of expertise, then the person is not an expert in that context. Hence, the claim in question is not backed by the required degree of expertise and is not reliable. It is also very important to note that expertise in one area does not automatically confer expertise in another. For example, being an expert physicist does not automatically make a person an expert on morality or politics." [my emphasis]

So the Creationist has already fallen foul of his own accusation aimed at me that, since I accept the truth of evolution I am committing the Argument From Authority Fallacy, and yet in actual fact, since the authorities I accept my information from are experts in their field I am not committing that fallacy at all... I am merely accepting the word of someone whose accomplishments in the context I am defending are beyond doubt. This is a valid exercise.

I was sent another link to an Answers In Genesis page the author  Dr David Menton (an anatomist not a paleornithologist - see above AFAF notes on relevant authorities) writes that Alan Feduccia, a noted paleornithologist has refuted the idea that birds evolved from therapod dinosaurs but if you go back a bit in the article you'll find this:"While evolutionists now agree that birds are related in some way to dinosaurs, they are divided over whether birds evolved from some early shared ancestor of the dinosaurs within the archosauria (which includes alligators, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and thecodonts) or directly from advanced theropod dinosaurs (bipedal meat-eating dinosaurs, such as the wellknown Tyrannosaurus rex). " [my emphasis]

So... the article goes on to refute the line of thinking which brings us to an evolution from therapods, and does so quite eloquently and rather convincingly I have to say. Me being no expert and all that. However, I can read, and I noticed that the AIG writer rather skimmed over the line of thinking proposed by one, Alan Feduccia... where have we seen that name?... that birds are evolved from archosaurs. In fact, Prof Feduccia's inclusion in the AIG article is a classic tactic of the Creationist movement. They find the current widely accepted theories and find the one person amongst the throng who disagrees, then elevates them to great heights as the ultimate authority on the issue at hand. Feduccia is in the minority, but his ideas might have merit. Unfortunately for the Creationists Feduccia's main argument is that therapods and birds have a common ancestor in the archosaur, so that means whichever way you look at it modern dinosaurs (birds) did evolve from earlier species, the only contention is which one?

Several times during the AIG article we are told that dinosaurs are reptiles, which is actually a misleading statement, since most of them did not exhibit characteristics that are particularly reptilian at all. It makes you think of scaly, cold-blooded creatures with four legs and flicking tongues. However, most dinosaurs had skin, not scales, walked on two limbs not four and were likely warm-blooded and highly socialized. So comparisons between reptile lungs and avian lungs, and between scales and feathers are invalid. Birds are recognized today as being bona fide dinosaurs by the vast majority of ornithologists and paleontologists. The evidence is there for those who truly want to find it.

So, atheists/skeptics beware when looking at sites such as Answers In Genesis, because the tactics are to seem very technical and scientific, but what they don't tell you is more important than what they do tell you.. and more important still is who is telling you! When talking about the Argument From Authority Fallacy the theists' side of the fence are almost certain to be the biggest culprits, so when they tell you that you are the fallacious one, remember that you are far more likely to find sources appropriate to the argument/discussion than they are.

Thanks for reading. Please comment on this if I've missed anything or made any obvious mistakes.

                                                           ______________________

"Why Evolution Is True" by Dr Jerry A. Coyne was published in 2009 and is available at all good book shops.

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics Argument

In a recent chat with a Creationist he attempted to use the age old, and incorrect, assumption that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (2LoT) renders Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (evolution) false. I did not engage with him because I wanted to think about my response, except to point out that the 2LoT applies only to closed systems, and the Earth is not closed. I suppose this blog article is my response. So...

It's probably a good idea to start with a brief explanation of what the 2LoT is and what it means for us before going too far into things.

The 2LoT states that the entropy of a closed thermodynamic system will always increase over time.

The Creationist argument stems from both a false definition of the word "entropy" and the incorrect idea that the Earth is a closed system.

The correct definition of entropy, with regards the science of thermodynamics, is that it is a quantitative measure of the total amount of energy not available to do work. So the 2LoT has absolutely nothing to do with evolution. It simply deals with the transfer of heat energy. However Creationists use a different definition which applies to the science of statistics and probabilities, which is that entropy is a measure of the randomness, or disorder, in a closed system. Whether they do this in an attempt to deceive, or mislead followers is uncertain, but I'm sure that is the case.

Using the Creationist definition along with their incorrect assertion that the Earth is a closed system, we are told that randomness and disorder, of all the systems on the Earth, increases over time. Well, what does this mean for their argument?

Creationists believe that the 2LoT shows that the universe could not have appeared by chance from nothing*, and that likewise animate life could not have sprung up from inanimate, non-life. They think that the Law prevents this because as the entropy increases these new organisms would be wiped out before they had a chance to mature and diversify.

However, let's look at the argument the Creationists are putting forward...

1. God created the universe out of nothing, or from his "Word".
2. God created every animal we see around us today in their mature form, from nothing... including humans and no form of evolution has ever taken place.

It looks very much to me like the 2LoT argument they put forward to counter evolution is destructive to their own mythology.

As I mentioned above, the Earth is not a closed system. It receives heat and light energy (along with other sources of radiation) from the Sun, and radiates heat and light back out into space, not to mention the stuff we send up into orbit and beyond and the stuff which occasionally crashes onto its surface from deep space. So the 2LoT does not apply to the Earth directly. However, the idea that the universe as a whole is a closed system may have some merit. Even if the Earth were a closed system the idea that such systems always fall into disorder is inaccurate because we observe random dust clouds settling in space to form planets and all of us have seen what happens when you shake a snow-globe, right? Eventually it settles down and becomes orderly.

So the argument put forward by the Creationists not only refutes their own beliefs but it is also untrue with regards the nature of the Earth and its inhabitants, by their own (incorrect) definition.

It only remains to point out that if the Earth is a closed system as per the Creationists' argument I believe that the 2LoT goes on to support evolution. They simply haven't thought it through.

In a system with a constant increase in disorderliness the transfer of DNA from one organism to its offspring would result in ever increasing changes and errors, which perhaps could wipe out a species (and therefore all species) pretty quickly, but at any rate would alter the next animal down the line each time they procreated. This means that the offspring of any animal would be changed slightly, so the animal which stepped onto the Ark would have descendants which are very much different to it today. It would be relatively difficult to argue that the lineage has remained stable in the face of the Law, once you've stated that the Law dictates that a state of chaos is the result of time passing. Even if you were to argue that the disorderliness had some sort of pattern to it you would be in the same boat of having to explain why your theory of increased chaos doesn't apply to organisms.

This change over time is the very definition of evolution... the only difference is that science states that the mechanism for evolutionary change is not simply random, due to occasional disorderliness in the DNA transfer process, but it is also driven by the need to survive and pass on genetic information to offspring.

So the next time a Creationist suggests using the 2LoT as an argument against evolution there are two things to bear in mind. Firstly, that their definition of entropy has nothing to do with thermodynamics, and secondly that their definition (if the Earth were a closed system) seems to support the concept of evolution more than it refutes it.

I hope this has made some sense, and is useful to you should you ever come across the 2LoT argument yourself.

___________________

I must insist that if you find any errors in this article that you point them out to me publicly on twitter, using @UBlasphemist, or using the comments section. I don't get offended or precious over my work, so feel free to make your point known to me. I'll happily credit any corrections which pass muster.

I used a variety of books and online sources to write this piece, but the most important was IronChariots.org, the marvellous brainchild of members of the Atheist Community of Austin, home of Matt Dillahunty and the Atheist Experience TV Show.

* It is important to point out that the Theory of Evolution does not address the origin of the universe, or any lifeforms which may develop within it. It has nothing whatsoever to say about either of these two things.

Let's say God created everything...

How many times have you heard Christians claim that their god, Yahweh, created everything?

Well, for the sake of argument, let's say their god did create the universe. How many alternatives can you think of to the standard scriptural model of a god who is still present and looking after it?

I can think of quite a few, and I'd challenge any theist to find evidence to disprove me (since they insist we disprove their ideas.)

1. God created the universe and everything in it... but died in the process.
2. God created the universe etc... but moved on to design and build another one, leaving this one to fend for itself.
3. God created etc...  but gave it to his younger brother to look after.
4. God etc... but cannot interact with it because he moved onto a different plane of existence.
5. God etc... but it was considered a failed experiment and is currently in a room somewhere awaiting destruction.
6. God etc... but was part of a research and development team working for a corporation which is using it to power their offices.
7. God etc... but the universe is a component of a much larger machine.
8. God etc... but the universe is the result of a weapon which he activated as part of a multidimensional war.
9. God etc... created it by accident... whilst cooking a Victoria Sponge in his new quantum oven. (courtesy of @CrispySea)

In all of these scenarios the same god created the same universe but is not interacting with it anymore.

Which brings us to the other claim made by Christians that we have to worship their god by way of thanks for creating us... If any of these scenarios are correct, why are they worshiping the absentee? Clearly there is nobody there to make any changes, or answer prayers, or cast anyone to a fiery hell.

The failure of the theist isn't so much believing the nonsense he got sold by his church pastors... it's not imagining the range of alternatives open to him.