I snatched this from wiki...my

"Thermodynamic entropy is a non-conserved state function that is of great importance in the sciences of physics and chemistry.^[4][5] Historically, the concept of entropy evolved in order to explain why some processes are spontaneous and others are not; systems tend to progress in the direction of increasing entropy.^[6] Entropy is as such a function of a system's tendency towards spontaneous change.^[6][7] For isolated systems, entropy never decreases.^[5] This fact has several important consequences in science: first, it prohibits "perpetual motion" machines; and second, it suggests an arrow of time. Increases in entropy correspond to irreversible changes in a system, because some energy must be expended as waste heat, limiting the amount of work a system can do.^{[4][8][8][9][10][11]"}

My statement(or question)....systems process toward entropy. Not away from it. Isolated systems never decrease. Energy stays within them. I see this as a pervasive law of the universe that evolution contradicts.

My apologies. I was operating on memory. It is the second law.

This is a straw man argument.

All human's are built with an internal compass for truth. Who said you need the Bible to believe in God?

Sorry, but wiki will not help you too much.  It will likely confuse you even more.    

a) systems do NOT "process toward entropy".  Systems have entropy, entropy is a parameter of any systems, like mass.  

b)  Free energy has a close relationship to the entropy.  Normally, when the entropy increases, the free energy decreases. 

c)  "I see this as a pervasive law of the universe that evolution contradicts."  Please describe what law of the universe contradict evolution.   In your previous half-sentences you neither described a law nor contradiction.  But read first, do not reply for a day or so.  Then make a new topic about some law of the universe and its contradiction to evolution and there we will discuss.

Have a good night.  

100%

A person should be at a certain degree of dumbness to believe that an "internal compass" will lead an Iranian villager to Jesus Christ.  Why don't you have an internal compass for Allah?   I think your internal compass and the belief of people in non-christain world in the only true deity could be a good separate topic.  I would suggest you post it in "Kill 'em with Kindness".

Welcome to the forums!

The "energy" for evolution would be the sun.

Internal compass for truth... Why is that necessarily true?

As far as I'm concerned it's pretty simple, if you read from Gen 1:1 on, and by Deuteronomy you aren't truly disturbed, then you are a disturbing person.  

  It's crazy right off the bat.  I mean  this god clearly says he'll greatly increase the pain of childbirth to "woman" meaning all women, because?????  He was pissed at eve?  Or because the book was written by a bunch of shauvanistic ancient turd burgelers, neither are good. 

Gen 3:16

"To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

It just get's worse and worse as you read on, it's really preposterous to think any of this came from a loving,  inteligent and wise entity.  Surely someone the like would have done a far better job, this is terrible work.  I'm the first to admit there are some beautiful passages in the bible, but these are found in many man made books, as for the bible for every reasonable piece of wisdom it tells, 10 absolutely rediculous things are commanded.  For every story that seems so hold some moral truth, their are 10 immoral and upsurd stories, some truly sick. It simply won't do as representation of some unimagenably wise being, his work should be unimagenably wise, not so obviously flawed.

Welcome!  If any of this stuff stands out as being of interest to you, don't be afraid to start separate threads.  I know it can be a pain to have a million people shouting at you about a variety of topics.

I'd be impressed by this argument if anyone had ever found belief in the Abrahamic God in a vacuum.  I've never heard any reputable source even claim such an event.  No-one has ever found a remote tribe in a far away Jungle that had Abrahamic morality.  Were your statement true, I would imagine you would find such a thing regularly.  I've yet to see a theist adequately explain why specific religions are tied so closely to geographic locations.

I'd be even more impressed if that 'internal moral compass' was consistent throughout time and circumstance, but it isn't.  See slavery, women's rights, use of violence and sexual morality as three obvious problems to internal moral truth in regards to theism.

I would also be impressed if you could show any objective evidence for why your beliefs are true, but another theists beliefs are false.  I've not been able to think of (or had any theist on this forum provide) any metric for their exclusive personal belief system that did not equally support another exclusive belief system.  You can't all be right when you all claim your systems are capital "T" objective Truth.  I find it more likely that you are all wrong, since you all use the same thought processes to justify and explain your contradictory beliefs.

I don't. I would recommend reading Bart Ehrman's 'Misquoting Jesus' for a good understanding of how the gospel stories were written (hint: they weren't written by the characters Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.) and how they are mutually incompatible stories if you read them side-by -side. Try it. Get out a couple of Bibles and try reading the gospel stories side by side. Check out all the places where they contradict each other. For example, how many women went to the tomb? Did they meet a young man or an angel? Was the stone rolled aside or not? There are hundreds of contradictions between the stories. They cannot be seen as historical, especially considering that they were written long long after the supposed events took place. The gospels are clearly mythological in nature, written by competing religious sects who each had their own ideas which they tried to push by writing different versions of the same basic story with different emphasis and different doctrinal messages.

This is a logical fallacy known as the Argument from Incredulity: "I don't understand how it could happen, therefore it didn't happen." Just because you don't understand something doesn't make it false.

Besides, I can guarantee that you don't really understand the arguments. For example, physicists *have* discovered how the universe came to have the complexity it has today. Yet you claim we don't have any understanding of it. You're only trumpeting your own lack of knowledge in this area.

Try harder. Here's a good place to start: http://www.talkorigins.org/. Or if you like books, try 'Why Evolution is True' by Coyne or 'The Greatest Show on Earth' by Dawkins.

I don't think you've really tried to understand evolution if you're asking about 'missing links'. It sounds to me like you've only read or heard from non-scientific sources or worse, from creationist sources which deliberately mislead the public with such claims as 'they've never found the missing link.'

Again, go to Talk Origins. They have answers to all the questions and objections you'll have.

It's not. It's the result of evolution by natural selection, which is non-random.

Not understanding is fine. It's when people aren't willing to listen, and aren't willing to learn, that's when I start to lose respect for them. Not understanding is an easy problem to fix. Just read and learn and eventually you'll understand. But if you're closed-minded and not willing to consider the possibility that you could be wrong, that's what would bother me.

Like when Jesus (supposedly God) explains how slave owners should treat their slaves, instead of rebuking the whole concept of slavery? Seems pretty simple to me. Jesus was never God. The people who wrote the gospels were not inspired by an all-loving god. If they were, they never would have condoned slavery.

Then why do you suppose billions of people believe in those religions? Do you think it could be that they grew up in a culture where these religions were dominant, and they just went along with everyone else and believed what everyone else (including their parents) believed? Do you think that they don't look at the Bible and think that it's full of "much more unbelievable ideology, ideology that goes against the nature of mankind and the world"? Are you somehow special in seeing the absurdity of their religion, but when they see the absurdity of your religion, they've got it all wrong?

Could you convince a Hindu that his belief in Vishnu is mistaken? How would you do that? What evidence or argument would you use?

The fact is, you grew up surrounded by Christians, and the only reason you're Christian is because you picked it up from the culture around you. If you had been born in India, you'd be a Hindu instead. There is no truth in religion, it's just tradition and dogma.

I'm curious. You stated that you were once an atheist (or perhaps agnostic), and then went back to Christianity. 1) What rational reasons did you have for disbelieving in God? and 2) What rational reasons did you have for starting to re-believe in God again (in other words, how did you overcome your previous rational reasons for disbelief)?

What you perceive as being construed as random is not.  Evolution is at least as deterministic as gravity, if not more so- Evolution is not "random".  You'll find scientists arguing with each-other about this- but not one arguing about whether or not evolution is valid.

All of your questions on evolution are answered here:  http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html

If you can find a question that isn't answered there, then I'll be happy to answer it personally if nobody else can.

For the record, evolution is also far better understood than gravity (Gravity- which only a few people in the world are close to understanding).  In all seriousness, I advise you to question gravity long before you consider questioning evolution; you'll get more respect that way.  Evolution is not up for debate- gravity very much still is (not that things fall, but *why* they fall).

Instead of telling us things you think are espoused about evolution- because every single thing you have said is entirely false, including about how trees work- you should read up on the facts of the matter.  You are entirely wrong about evolution- but more importantly, you're wrong about gravity, because you completely ignored it, and it should have been the very first thing you brought up with regards to any understanding of the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of the universe.

Read up on gravity, then come back and make some similar claims and you will get a little more consideration- you might even be able to ask some difficult questions and make some people think.

To understand why I tell you this, consider this:  If gravity or the other fundamental forces do not require a deity, then nothing else does- all other emergent 'forces' (diffusion, entropy, evolution) come from those forces.  If gravity or another fundamental force requires a deity, then everything does- all other forces coming from those.

You're fighting the wrong fight.

Evolution is fact and does not require a god, but evolution relies on gravity.

Evolution is very well understood and proven, and there are no problems with it- gravity is generally poorly understood, no single theory proven, and we know the current models have problems.

If gravity requires a god, then because evolution requires gravity, then evolution must require a god.  That would still mean that evolution is technically true, but that it was caused by a god deliberately using gravity (e.g. how a god created).

To summarize:

You're attacking the strongest, most evidenced, and most thoroughly proven fact in human history- evolution- and you're ignoring the weakest theories, which are highly debated, and have proven problems that are well known and puzzled over by scientists- those theories of gravity.  If evolution relies on gravity, why are you trying to disprove evolution, instead of asking tough questions about gravity and suggesting that gravity requires a god in order to function?

As I've said, with regards to evolution, you can just read this:  http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html

If you have any questions that aren't answered there, we'll be happy to answer them.  Once you finish reading about evolution, though, you can accept it and move on to something that hasn't been beaten to death (those same questions have been asked- and answered- about evolution for a century)- you can move on to a much more interesting conversation, and you can ask *new* questions that nobody has heard before.

Talk about gravity rather than about evolution- you'll find it a much more vibrant topic, and so will those with whom you converse.

In regards to the big bang: Forget gases (there were none "prior", which is not a time; they formed during the event), and forget energy- life, matter, everything, is all about information in one form or another.  This event ["the"/"a" big bang] represents only *subjective* information genesis.  Seen through an objective Many-World interpretation (which is the only one consistent with overwhelming evidence and one of few consistent with reason itself independent of empiricism), genesis is purely subjective, and there has never been any objective break in symmetry or creation of information.

To summarize it as simply as possible:  Standing inside the universe, from your perspective, it looks like there is a great deal of "stuffness".  From a hypothetical (but impossible) view outside of the universe, all of the different configurations of positive and negative "stuffness" cancel out, and there is no "stuffness" at all.

So, imagine you're looking at a big zero.  You are "outside" the universe, looking at it; and it's just a big zero- nothing.  However, if you go inside that zero, you can see everything it's made of: 0 = 1 + -1 + 2 + -2 etc.  So, from inside at any given location- lets say 42- that's all you can see.  For all the world, it looks like everything is 42, and you just can't imagine how this could come from nothing.  You'd be right: 42 can not come from nothing, and it didn't come from nothing- it's *part of* nothing.  Because all you can see from that perspective is 42, you don't realize that there's also -42, and every other number, all adding up to zero.

If you are familiar with mathematics and particularly digital information, I can explain it using a better analogy.

Probably overwhelmed.  "Fresh meat!!"

I hope he actually does, probably won't.

Their are many ways it could end.

Typical

You should atleast try.  Or only awnser the people/questions you find will produce the best discussions.  You should atleast try, say something.  Bowing out doesn't do much for helping your position, does it.