Site that claims "Science can be used to proove the claims of religion"
One of my co-workers is a young earth creationist. He sent me this link http://harvardhouse.com . I found it funny that he sent me a link trying to use the scientific method to prove Christianity, when he himself denies most of the facts the site is using.
Anyway the point of me posting this is to see if anyone has the time or is willing to not only examine the facts that I found to be mostly correct. But to see how/if they have been manipulated to fit the Christian belief.
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Welcome to the forum.
Lol. That's a misleading website name.
Let's see. Ah, here's a good page.
http://harvardhouse.com/Creator_or_Lucky_Dice.htm
So already, we have some confusion. First of all, I'm fairly certain that there is no such thing as a "universal law of decay." I'm assuming they're talking about the Second Law of Thermodynamics; it certainly seems like a weird label someone might stick on it if they didn't understand it.
And since everything outside of this universe is supernatural by definition, it's a bit trivial for them to say it must follow not follow some rather arbitrary natural law. For anything to 'decay' would require time, energy, space, some kind of substance that it's decaying from and decaying into and a lot of other things. I think they are having a hard time thinking outside the box.
Furthermore, I see no reason why this even has to be the case. Whatever caused the universe could simply cause this universe before it 'decays,' if it 'decays.'
Yay! A false dichotomy.
Since we know nothing about what occurred before the universe or if we can even talk about things 'occurring' in this context, there are an infinite number of imaginable and unimaginable of possibilities. If it's not intelligent, it certainly doesn't need to be a "mindless supernatural mother universe."
And, surprise! We have the semantic fallacy of equating all non-intelligent causes to chance.
Really? It sounds like the same flaw that plagues another very well known 'theory.'
I don't really support it, but I'd say it's probably more credible than God.
Lol. This is probably the dumbest thing I've found on their site.
Scientific naturalism is the view that only naturalistic explanations of the natural world are useful, because supernatural claims cannot be evaluated, by definition. We don't have to ignore any facts or have any faith.
Betting that an earthworm will win in a horse race? That's a cute metaphor.
How is a use of a word a logical necessity? They can just use another word; try hypernatural. And what does it have to do with proving the existence of the supernatural? They want to make an ontological argument now or something? That'd be funny.
I suppose the editors of this website proved that in their own minds, but I don't even see a valid argument anywhere.
I'll check the website again later and see how screwed up their relativity is.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
RIGHT THERE "WHATEVER"
Is an admission that a "what" could be the cause instead of a "who". That entire website is fucked by the usage of that word.
Not knowing what "ingredients" manifested into the universe doesn't default to a magical "who". A "what" is much less complicated, even if we currently don't know what happened before the big bang.
Inserting a "who" is nothing but human narcissism in projecting their own human attributes on objects. It is the same old anthropomorphizing every culture in human history has done in imagining their gods.
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"The Naturalist must ignore the three laws of thermodynamics."
That is utterly stupid/ignorant, since the Laws of Thermodynamics were formulated by the scientific study and analysis of Nature, they are used all the time by the Natural sciences.
As for a Law of 'decay', that makes no sense, since we observe every day, not only examples of 'decay', but also the opposite of decay, the growth of living organisms.
The growth of an adult human being from a single fertilized cell is an everyday contradiction of the standard argument of these idiots, that we never see spontaneous emergence of complexity from simpler things. Science understands pretty well all the stages of that process. The energy from food is what prevents any violation of the Second Law, which in its original form was based on the observation that energy cannot flow from a colder to a hotter body, without an external input of energy. When the input energy is derived from a typical 'heat engine' process, in which heat energy flows from a hot body to a colder, the overall efficiency can be no greater than 100%, and then only when the process proceeds at an infinitesimal rate.
From this we get the idea that the temperature distribution of a closed system must progressively even out, so that the available energy for heat engines keeps decreasing toward zero. We can get more energy from the energy stored in other forms (not as heat/thermal energy), such as chemical and nuclear energy. But the first generalization of the second law expresses the principle that to store energy back in one these other forms will take at least as much energy as we can get back out.
IOW, there is no such thing as a 'free lunch', no process can generate more energy than it consumes.
Now this is where it gets tricky, these things only make sense in collections of interacting particles. It is at heart based on the characteristics of thermal energy, heat, the 'thermo' in Thermodynamics, which only applies to a collection of particles - it is the average energy of vibration of such a collection. It does not apply to the individual particles, which while they can be said to have a temperature, according to their velocity, the idea of heat flow does not apply at that level. At the level of electrons/protons/neutrons, there is not even a clear direction of Time. All individual particle collisions, fusions, fissions are intrinsically symmetrical in time. The 'arrow of time' emerges at the level of collections of particles, which is a basic requirement for what we see as complex processes, including 'intelligent' behaviour, which also makes no sense at the level of single particles - sorry, Panentheists.
In particular, without going deeper into this subject, where it gets really mind-bending and counter-intuitive, this means that it does not apply to a singularity, or even a single super dense 'particle' which our Universe is envisaged to have started as, according to the Big Bang Theory. In the Big Bang, equal amounts of positive energy - every kind except gravitational potential energy - and negative energy, the energy that can be made available if we let masses 'fall' towards each other under the influence of gravity. So the matter/energy balance of the BB universe is zero, so nothing is violated in the splitting of 'something' into such a state, so answering the other big 'argument' they make.
From the 'outside', the Big Bang would be just the change of state of a single 'particle', no Thermodynamics involved. Thermodynamics only describes the statistical behaviour of the zillions of bits inside.
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