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Some questions are answered
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Category: Religion and Philosophy
Perhaps no argument is heard more frequently in support of God than the argument from design. It represents the most common form of the God of the Gaps Argument: the universe and living organisms on Earth are said to be simply too complex to have arisen by any conceivable natural mechanism.
Before the age of science, religious belief was based solely on faith in tradition and confidence in revealed truths in the Holy Scriptures and teachings of men.
As science began to erode these beliefs by showing that many of the traditional teachings, such as that of a flat Earth at rest at the center of a firmament of stars and planets were simply wrong, people began to look to science itself for evidence of a supreme being that did not depend on any assumption about the literal truth of the Bible.
Of course none have been successful.
Let us look at the Theory of Evolution.
A common argument made by deniers of Evolution is that it is not a 'true' scientific theory (like electromagnetism or thermodynamics for example). They wrongly claim that Evolution does not make predictions that can be tested and is thus not falsifiable. Wrong.
Darwin specifically predicted that recognizable human ancestors would be found in Africa. Many now have been. Evolutionary theory predicted that the use of antiviral or antibacterial agents would result in the emergence of resistant strains. This principle is, of course, a mainstay of contemporary medicine. Paleontologists correctly predicted that species showing the evolution from fish to amphibian would be found in Devonian strata.
This clearly demonstrates how the creationist claims that transitional forms (meaning fossils) do not exist, are outright lies. Paleontologists had expected to find transitions from land-based mammals to whales for years. In the past decade, science journals, as well as the media, have been full of these finds. A simple Internet search will yield hundreds of examples of transitional fossils.
The failure of many of these predictions would have falsified Evolution. If we were to find bona fide remains of organisms out of place in the fossil record, Evolution would have been falsified. Suppose mammals were found in the Paleozoic strata associated with trilobites, crinoids, and extinct corals. This would show that there was no Evolutionary process.
But we do not find any such inconsistencies.
Believers have good reason to regard Evolution as threatening to their own faith in the purposeful, divine creation of human life. The overwhelming data can be best understood in terms of mindless natural selection. The large number of species results from the many, largely random attempts that evolution makes to produce a solution to the survival problem. The other place where evidence for the absence of beneficent design can be found is in the short, brutal existences of most life-forms. Evolution implies humanity was an accident and not the special creature of traditional doctrine. Many find this unacceptable and conclude, despite the undeniable evidence, that Evolution must be wrong.
"Science does not know everything."
Science knows a lot more than most people realize. Despite the talk of "scientific revolutions" and "paradigm shifts", the basic laws of physics are essentially the same today as they were at the time of Newton. Fundamental laws of physics have not changed in four hundred years! Conservation of energy and other basic laws hold true in the most distant observed galaxy and in the cosmic microwave background, implying that these laws have been valid for over thirteen billion years.
Surely any observation of their violation during the puny human life span would be reasonably termed a miracle.
Until early in the 20th century, there were strong indications that one or more miracles were required to create the universe. The universe currently contains a large amount of matter that is characterized by the physical quantity we define as mass. Before the 20th century, it was believed that matter could be neither created nor destroyed. So the very existence of matter seemed to be a miracle, a violation of the assumed law of conservation of mass that occurred just once-at the creation.
However, in his special theory of relativity, Einstein showed that matter can be created out of energy and can disappear into energy. When a body is moving, it carries an additional energy of motion called kinetic energy. In chemical and nuclear interaction, kinetic energy can be converted into rest energy, which is equivalent to generating mass. Also, the reverse happens; mass or rest energy can be converted into kinetic energy. In that way, chemical and nuclear interactions can generate kinetic energy, which then can be used to do anything.
So, the existence of mass in the universe violates no law of nature. Mass can come from energy. But, then, where does the energy come from? The law of conservation of energy requires that energy come from somewhere. In principle, the creation hypothesis could be confirmed by the direct observation or theoretical requirement that conservation of energy was violated 13.7 billion years ago at the start of the big bang.
However, neither observations nor theory indicates this to have been the case. The first law allows energy to convert from one type to another as long as the total for a closed system remains fixed. Remarkably, the total energy of the universe appears to be zero. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that the negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero. (So the mean energy density of the universe is exactly what it should be for a universe that appeared from an initial state of zero energy, within a small quantum uncertainty.)
The Big Bang theory has recently undergone a number of stringent observational tests that would have been sufficient to prove it false. So far, it has successfully passed all these tests.
And here we come to the theist's greatest argument.
"If the universe were created, then it should have possessed some degree of order at the creation – the design that was inserted at that point by God."
In other words, this is the entropy argument.
"How can we observe seemingly increasing order in the universe with time?"
"Evolution is illogical, since things are supposed to get more disorderly, not more organized with time."
Prior to 1929, this was a strong argument for a miraculous creation. However, in that year astronomer Edwin Hubble reported that the galaxies are moving away from one another at speeds approximately proportional to their distance, indicating that the universe is expanding. This provided the earliest evidence for the Big Bang.
I will now demonstrate how our expanding universe started in total chaos and still formed localized order consistent with the second law of thermodynamics.
Suppose that whenever you clean your house, you empty the collected garbage by tossing it out the window into your yard. Eventually, the yard would be filled with garbage. However, you can continue doing this with a simple solution. Just keep buying up land around your house and you will always have more room to toss the garbage. You are able to maintain localized order – in your house – at the expense of increased disorder in the rest of the universe.
Similarly, parts of the universe can become more orderly as the garbage, or entropy, produced during the ordering process (think of it as disorder being removed from the solar system being ordered) is tossed out into the larger, ever-expanding surrounding space. So the total entropy of the universe increases as the universe expands, as required by the second law. However, the maximum possible entropy increases even faster, leaving increasingly more room for order to form. (Thus, while becoming more disorderly on the whole as time goes by, our expanding universe is not maximally disordered. But once it was.)
Let's put this into context. Suppose we go back to Planck Time; just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. As expected from the second law, the universe at that time had lower entropy than it has now. However, that entropy was also as high as it possible could have been for an object that small (1.6 x 10^-35 meter).
We are thus forced to conclude that the complex order we now observe could not have been the result of any initial design built into the universe at the so-called creation. The universe preserves no record of what went on before the Big Bang. The Creator, if he existed, left no imprint.
Thus he might as well have been nonexistent.
11:07 PM
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