Ask the Atheist

I simply LOVE the "Second Law of Thermodynamics" argument some creationists make. They like to think that evolution breaks the law, while at the same time conveniently forgetting things like the human body growing more complex as it ages, memories getting more complex as experiences are gained.... That's a common tactic though - as long as they THINK evolution has a problem somewhere, they completely ignore the reasons why their 'solution' shatters the possibility of a myriad of other phenomena.

The MOST annoying part is of course, that the "evolution violates 2nd law of thermodynamics" crowd ALWAYS completely ignores THE SUN. Consistently, without fail, 100%, completely ignores the big yellow ball in the sky.

One would think they hadn't ever even SEEN the sun... Although that makes sense - some of these Young Earth Creationists are pretty sheltered from the outside world.

Sorry I can't give them too much more credit - I HAVE seen it said outside of FSTDT. Specific examples are unfortunately not forthcoming as I can't remember them... I don't particuarly trust FSTDT anyway - funny as it is, at least a small few of those quotes must be either mined or made up - it's still hilarious though and the ones I bothered verifying are hilarious.

Point is their use of the Second Law of Thermodynamics ignores if not the Sun, then whatever it is they need to ignore to believe that science is on their side. You're right though - a lot of them completely fail to realise the level to which the law applies and/or the far-reaching considerations due it.

- Healyhatman
It's YOUR Hell, YOU burn in it.

Rene, it sounds like this site is among your first exposures to an openly atheist viewpoint. Look at it from our point of view for a moment. If you did not simply take it for granted that God exists, and you saw that huge numbers of people were frantically trying to please someone who is in all probability imaginary, wouldn't you want to cross him out too?

Anyway, why do you personally believe in God? I'm curious.

The figures you mention are straight from the last Federal Bureau of Prisons survey in 1997. That's not cutting-edge, but at least it's this generation. Here's another site quoting the details. You may be able to find a more direct source.

The survey says nothing about prison conversions. I'd say there are a great many of those, because Christian services are often the only religious or philosophical influence US inmates receive. Whether those who convert in the clink are more or less likely to reoffend upon release would be another interesting statistical question.

Don't worry, you've got your numbers straight.

It's a difficult concept, and most of us have to make do with an approximation, so here's mine.

Imagine the process by which objects with some physical order (structure, symmetry, smoothness, etc.) break down over time (decay, melt, crumble, evaporate, rot) into substances which do not have that initial order (powder, gases, liquids, mush). They're moving from an ordered state towards a more and more unordered state. Entropy, as a quantity, is the extent to which this has already happened at any given time. About the closest thing to a synonym for it is "loss of order".

If entropy increases, order has been lost. If it decreases, order has emerged or been created. The point of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is that entropy can't decrease without increasing by at least as much in some connected object or area. In other words, it can't decrease overall in a closed system.

The corrupted version of this law by creationists is effectively that entropy can't decrease at all without divine help. Alternatively they accept the law, but claim that the Earth is a closed system and any fresh order on it must be gods' work. The response to the latter is to point out that the sun is part of any closed system which includes us. The thing runs on explosions, causing massive amounts of entropy. It sends some of the resulting energy our way as light, heat and radiation so that we might undo a tiny fraction of that entropy. That's the connection.

A more general response is that if you think entropy is decreasing in a closed system, it's likely that the system is not really closed.

Destiny, you've ignored or misunderstood several things already in this thread and others, so I'll summarise as simply as I can.

- If there is a god but it's not the one you think it is, you will burn in hell for believing in yours. What special reason do I have for believing in your god instead of the 20,000 others on offer?

- If God was "always there", why couldn't the universe have been "always there"? Why does the universe need a creator if God doesn't?

- There actually was something to explode, absolutely everything in fact. The whole universe was compressed into a tiny dot, then it expanded outward. Nothing stops it all from having existed before that moment.

- Animals and people did not come about all of a sudden. Starting with very simple life forms, they developed and diversified EXTREMELY slowly into the complex forms we see (and are) today.

- Never mind why your god doesn't always answer prayers. How do we know that he answers prayers at all?

I'm sorry about your father, but what happened to him doesn't change the fact that simply wanting or needing God to be real doesn't make it true.

Your guess is as good as mine, Josh, but there are several possibilities.

Perhaps the universe was previously spread out, but got pulled together by gravity. When it all collided at the centre it instantly bounced and flew outwards again.

Maybe the universe was pulled together like in the above scenario, but since the conventional rules of collision might cease to apply in an extreme situation like this all the matter passed through itself at the centre and headed outwards without stopping.

What if the singularity was a packet of matter ejected somehow from another universe? Released from the confines (and possibly the different physics) of that universe, it was suddenly free to expand.

If you go along with the weird "quantum foam" idea, you could imagine that the matter emerged spontaneously in the ultra-compressed state, and really did explode outwards because that was an unstable way to be.

It's just one of those things that we don't know yet, so we don't try to answer authoritatively until we at least know more about it.

Hello, Amber, and welcome.

> The same huge spinning dust cloud, collapsing under its own gravity, created both the Earth and the Sun at around the same time. The Sun, comprised of the central mass, did begin to sizzle and shine first, about five billion years ago, and the Earth compacted together only about half a billion years after that. If there hadn't been an enormous central mass like the Sun to keep the Earth in orbit as it assembled, the loose rocks and dust would have flown off into space.

> Saying God doesn't have to be logical often gets people out of having to explain Him. There are two problems with this. Firstly and primarily, it was humans who declared in the first place that God is beyond logic, and there's no way for them to back this up with evidence. Secondly, if this supposedly extra-logical being is to actually have any influence in this logical world, at least His actions have to contain some logic or they couldn't manifest (that is, happen or come to be).

> You could look up mentions of Jesus decades or centuries later by Josephus and a few others. The earliest such writings (indeed, even the Gospels themselves) were written decades after Jesus' supposed death. There's a huge ongoing argument over any such reference that looks anything like it might mean something, so you do need to decide for yourself, but certainly nothing is rock solid. As for God, there are claims of scientific proof for Him all the bloody time. Google a few, and then research them very carefully, and you'll see what they're generally like.

> The "dot" I described was a gravitational singularity (and there's your first site for research). That means it was squashed so tiny that it had no volume at all (like a mathematical point or dot), and therefore infinite density. Chances are something like this happens even today, in the centres of black holes.

Let us know if you have more questions.

You know, Madie, your spelling and grammar is better than some adults who've written roughly the same thing to us. Well done. One tip: it's GOD, JESUS and I, not ME.

I'd never call you a dummy. I think you're wrong, but that doesn't mean you're not smart. No amount of smarts guarantees anyone that they're right, which is why people at the top of any field (science, mathematics, art, philosophy) are always arguing with each other. They respect each other's intelligence, but still don't agree.

I think I'm actually making the most of my time, rather than wasting it. Remember, I don't think there's a Heaven OR a Hell. I think that when we die, that's it. I try to get all I can out of this life, the only one I have. It's not just me either. I think everybody, even you, has just one short life, and so many people waste their time preparing for this other life which probably won't be there. To help them to make the most of their lives, I'm nice to people, I give people assistance when they need it and I try to tell them that this one life is unique and important.

All things considered, there's a fair chance Jesus was a real guy. It's just less likely that he did miracles, or came back from the dead.

I'd like to know about you, Madie. Please, tell us why you yourself believe these things about God and Jesus. If a grown-up showed you this site, I'd like to hear from that grown-up too.

If they thought any other church was acceptable, they'd merge with it. Each division exists for a reason. Not necessarily a good reason though.

Hi LC. I'm always glad to hear someone enjoys it here, no matter what side they're on.

Read up on comparative religion, mate, and you'll find Christian beliefs to be far from the strangest. Credibility is the issue, not strangeness; strange-but-true I can handle.

Concepts like the Big Bang and evolution require faith only if you haven't checked out the evidence for them. The nice thing about each theory is that it's falsifiable: find the right bit of contrary evidence, as creationists regularly claim to have done, and badaboom, it's proven to be false. That's one thing you can't really do with gods.

Each concept can be broadly summed up in a single sentence, which I'll do now:

1. Since the universe is constantly expanding, it used to be smaller, and at some point in the past the whole thing would have been scrunched together as small as possible, but with some outward momentum.

2. If each generation of living organism produces offspring with slight changes to its DNA which are then hereditary, and all life on the planet shares at least some of this hereditary material, then it appears that all known life is descended from a single common ancestor which lived a very, very long time ago, and each significant genetic change since then has either been beneficial and therefore been passed on, or been detrimental and therefore caused variants to die out.

Both of these sentences are deductions. The reasoning in each case has nothing to do with religion, pro or con; rather, each only entered into conflict with doctrine once the deduction was made, to the great concern of those who deduced it. I'm just saying that they were neutral interpretations of the data and not attempts to find alternatives to gods for the sake of it.

Given that in both cases the Biblical history was so widely accepted by the population in Western countries, any contradictory suggestion would have got absolutely nowhere without a vast array of supporting evidence. Fortunately, the array of available empirical evidence for each theory is indeed vast. If something particular about either theory is a sticking point for you, let me know.

To your second point: I've encountered and addressed your view of atheism (very common among theists) quite a bit, but once more won't hurt. The majority of atheists (like in all positions, some may go too far) do not, and need not, claim certainty. They claim there's no god, all right, but that's not because they're 100% sure. Even Richard Dawkins, on his scale of 1 to 7 that goes from "I know there is a god" to "I know there is no god", places himself at 6.

I agree with the agnostic position. I'm an agnostic atheist. We don't know, and we probably can't ever know. What we can do is judge probabilities, and from honest appraisal of the world in which we live an atheist places the probability of any god existing at not just low, but negligible. Saying "there are no gods" is like saying "there won't be a hailstorm in Cairo this year": It's conceivable that I might be wrong, and eventually be proved wrong, but that's so unlikely that I'll happily say it anyway. I don't know, I think, but I think out loud.

There's always room for God around science, LC. However things happened, you can always simply say that God made them happen that way (and interpret your creation story to match the facts), and there's no way to prove you wrong. So if you're just looking for a lack of contradiction, you're sitting pretty. There are two much more difficult things which some religious people attempt to do: establish a god as a necessary entity, and advance the details of their holy text's specific version of events (six days, the Earth predating the Sun, every kind of animal created as-is) in spite of contradictory evidence.

I see where you're coming from, the notion of anything sitting inert for an eternity and then spontaneously springing into action is odd. Even applied to a god, it's difficult to justify; why did He wait? Thing is, the Big Bang doesn't imply that this happened.

The idea that the universe spontaneously emerged from nothing, which is one hypothesis that Stephen Hawking takes seriously, posits as I said that "nothing" is a quantum "foam" of potentiality from which energy and matter could potentially emerge at any time (a really gross oversimplification, but there you have it). The idea is not that this foam waited forever and then acted, but that it has been acting similarly forever, possibly creating an infinite number of universes at roughly regular intervals.

While I'm on that, you want to be very careful taking matter-factory concepts like this "foam" and then calling them God. The Christian God especially is a well-defined concept which is not a good match for the cosmic equivalent of primordial soup. That is, just because something satisfies one of God's supposed functions doesn't mean it automatically does the rest of them, like answering prayers and judging dead people. It might be godlike in ways, but what are the chances that it's your guy?

Leaving quantum mechanics alone for now, I'm sure you're familiar with the ordinary law of conservation: that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, just converted back and forth. Just take a moment to digest that: as far as we've ever observed, it cannot be created. An extremely special case in a highly theoretical branch of physics had to be imagined just to allow for the "foam". If you take the old law at face value, then the seldom-disputed fact that matter exists implies that it must have always existed.

This doesn't mean that it just sat there in a dot before exploding. Read my responses to Josh F. above, when he asks, "what made it go bang?" There are several scenarios wherein the "bang" was just part of an ongoing process and needed no spontaneous addition of momentum.

ok just a note to say that if the universe was created by god(possible i'll grant) then why couldn't he set it up the way that it seems to have played out? in my opinion the creationist story in my mind is like god winding up a clock and letting it tick and thats if you want to believe in the creationist thery (i can't spell that word for the life of me!!!!) anyway so lts say hypothetically that there is a god and that he created the world that nessicarily doesn't have to go against science...in fact in this thread we aren't even argueing the disexistence or exestence of god we are disgussing and wether with or with out a deity's help we now how it happened because of science....sciencve is not just point and stab guess work...its search and find. so yeah thats how i see things....and in my opinionblashemous as it may be is that if a god did create the universe he did a few off the wall things anyway soo yeah

you right the existence of god as far as science ius concerned it impossible to prove or disprove for that matter because with the way science has things plotted out which is how it seems to have happened well it really could have done it on its own but there is room for a god at the same time...so who can really say.

havent you ever read netiquette? y'know, the basic thing taught in all 7th grade orientation classes. you really shouldn't type everything in all caps, it turns people off. and if anyone does read it, it's probably b/c they're like, "oh, what the hell does this jackass have to say?" if you dont believe in anything anyone says on here....then don't waste space telling us so. we dont block up your little christian sites with our hate do we? no. be peaceful. wouldnt "god" want you to be nice? and....is that the kind of language you use in church? im sure your mom wouldn't approve. or jesus....