According to the theory of evolution, species of life become more involved and complicated over time, i.e. more complex and 'order'. That is what we were taught by EVOLUTIONSISTS! Am I now to assume that the evolutionists were clueless? If so, I'll gladly run with that!
So, now they are changing the rules to 'isolated thermodynamic systems'? Funny, our physical chemistry professors didn't include that extra modifier when I was in college. They taught that the Laws of Thermodynamics applied to EVERYTHING. So, are they now drawing the lines on the graph, then plotting the points? (NOTE: that was NOT sarcasm. It is a genuine question based on what I was taught in college)
And, abiogenesis is "life from non-life", which WAS disproved by Louis Pasteur way back when with his experiments. Anyone who has studied the history of science and biology has learned that. Unless, of course, the current 'powers that be' in science have re-written that section of the history books.
1 You underdefined complexity in evolution. It doesn't even appear orderly under scrutiny. Complexity building up implies a lack of planning - it's small mutations on the genetic level with natural selection to
"weed out" the
"bad" mutations from the
"good" - which are just human conceptions of course. Lower animals have no concept of beneficial or harmful mutations - they just try to survive. How is several billion different species of creatures with varying degrees of complexity "orderly" to you?
2 "Extra modifier"? When did I say thermodynamics didn't apply to evolution? That "extra modifier"
you forgot is called the sun. The earth is not a closed system. Not by a long shot. Even if you forgot the sun, like you did - there's still the moon and interstellar cosmic rays constantly bombarding the atmosphere.
3 Louis Pasteur is about as old as your ideas of how the universe works. His concept of abiogenesis is not the same as the one we have today. It's like saying the concept of evolution is the same today as it was in Charles Darwin's day, or the concept of astronomy is the same today as in Isaac Newton's day! Are you trying to imply that we've learned absolutely nothing about life since the time of Pasteur?
4 Louis Pasteur disproved the
spontaneous generation of
complex life - which is actually something closer to your belief system
(the creation of adam out of dirt?), while there is a myriad of irrefutable evidence that the early earth was ruled by bacteria and algae - especially blue-green algae, which appears responsible for our oxygen-rich atmosphere. Evidence of that is displayed in precambrian iron-banded rocks and stromatolite fossils. They practically
scream oxygenation event. So, did all that complex life just pop in at the last second of a long 4.5 billion year "clock", or did it develop slowly through varying degrees of complexity drawn out over millions of years?
Concerning my friends in the mission field that you insulted: If saving young ladies from being sold into prostitution and giving them a chance to live in freedom is "pissing on their culture", then give me a Foley catheter so I can join the pissing parade!
If teaching and rescuing orphans from the streets of poverty so they can learn a trade and contribute to their society is pissing on their culture, then let us piss away!
Insult me all you want. You travel down to Ecuador, Costa Rica, Haiti, Venezuela and other places where they are making positive impacts on the lives around them and TELL THEM TO THEIR FACES THEY ARE PISSING ON THE CULTURE AROUND THEM! Tell that to the local governments that seek their help. Tell that to the 15 year old girl in Ecuador that would be sold to be abused in some brothel that now has training to get a real job to earn money without selling her body.
Those people out there are heroes in my eyes. Some put their lives at risk just by being there. They will make a bigger impact on the world around them than you will in your ivory-tower astrophysics lab.
Interesting notion. The problem is that saving one girl here or three orphans there doesn't solve the larger issue; which is corruption at the governmental level. Would you propose forcing christianity on them as a solution? I would not, because our own government is a prime example of what happens when you poison politics with religion.
As for the crack about making an impact on the world.. our foray into space has paved the way for technology that impacts all of us. Communication satellites in specific.
Not only that, but you must realize that the Earth is eventually going to run out of space and resources. If we overpopulate too quickly, we get soil failure. Mass soil failure means no food. The result of that would be global infrastructure collapse. So how do we solve this problem? Do we enact laws to stunt population growth? Do we raise the prices of resources as they become less available? No, we find more resources. Places like the moon and mars are untapped resources and prime spots for future colonization. In fact, it's thought that the moon's yield of Helium-3 would be higher than the earth's because of it's constant exposure to solar wind. Helium-3 would be a boon in nuclear fusion research. Of course, that wouldn't be for weaponization. We already have fusion bombs. We want nuclear fusion where the energy output is greater than the input. This would solve any energy crisis we could possibly have
forever.
Going even further than that; you also must realize that the Earth lies inside of 2 asteroid belts. There's one inbetween Mars and Jupiter, and another beyond Neptune. It's also thought that our solar system is a speck inside of the giant "Oort cloud" which is comprised of icy comets and asteroids. There
is an asteroid coming for earth, the size of the Rosebowl, called 99942 Apophis. On April 13th (a friday!), 2029, it will flyby below our communication satellites. It will be the largest natural object that we have ever observed to pass by the Earth. It will make a return trip on April 13th (another friday) in 2036. Depending on it's path through the 600 mile wide "gravitational keyhole" 7 years earlier, it will either hit the earth or fly off again to make another return trip in 2068.
You're thinking no big deal, it's not likely to happen - and even if it does, it's a tiny rock, right? Here's a bit of reference for how powerful that object is at cometary speed. The 1908 tunguska event was essentially an asteroid exploding over a russian forest. It literally shook the earth. This explosion that shook the Earth was 1000x more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb explosion, which killed about 100,000 people. The estimated kinetic energy released upon the explosion of Apophis is somewhere around 8800x more powerful than the Hiroshima explosion. It's current path puts the impact in and around North America. This is more than twice as powerful as the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuke ever detonated.
Would you prefer we just fall to our knees and pray that god makes it miss the gravitational keyhole, or that humanity does something about it?
Going wildly into the future - our sun itself is not infinite! Eventually it will heat up to the point where the oceans are boiled off of Earth, and it resembles something closer to Venus than a habitable planet. Then in a few billion years, the sun will swell up into a red giant and it's outer layer will extend beyond the current orbit of the Earth. Of course, some time before that the great Andromeda Galaxy will have merged with ours, possibly causing a massive distortion as its own supermassive black hole draws against ours, which will cause one to repel off ferociously into space. That would wreak unimaginable gravitational chaos in whatever is in or near it's path! We're going to need a new homeworld.
TL;DR version: Astronomy definitely good, life-changing and possibly even life-saving. Praying... well, consensus is still being built on that one.
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Before I go to sleep, I have a challenge for you. A friend clued me in to this wonderful blog post about common descent:
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/02/more_ignorant_blather_from_ell.php My challenge is taken directly from his reply to an email.
Can you provide a coherent, consistent explanation other than common descent for the patterns of appearance of endogenous retroviruses in vertebrate genomes? Francis Collins, the Christian geneticist who headed up the Human Genome Project, lays out much of the data on ERVs in his book The Language of God and argues, quite correctly, that it simply cannot be explained without common descent (which is, of course, the theory of evolution).
If you only choose to reply to one thing I have posted, I do hope it is this specific challenge. Thanks in advance.
