Quote:
Originally Posted by lagtight
if I were to embrace Darwinism and its underlying premise of naturalism, I would have to believe that:
3. Randomness produces fine-tuning.
It is a huge error to say order cannot come from disorder.
It is another way of claiming that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics prevents evolution, since the cosmos always moves towards entropy.
The mistake is to conclude that local parts of the universe cannot
decrease in entropy by sucking energy from other parts.
Example: You drain a tub. Energy exits the higher state, just like entropy is supposed to work.
But lo, in the gallons of randomly bouncing H2O molecules, a structure spontaneously emerges: a whirlpool.
The whirlpool is more efficient, faster, at draining water to a lower energy state, i.e. advancing entropy. There are analogous whirlpools distributing energy in all sorts of places for wind, heat, electricity, chemical solutions, etc.
So the underlying claim, that order cannot come from disorder, is flat wrong. The claim is only true for the total entropy of the entire universe.
I'm getting this schpiel from this very interesting article,
Is the universe pro-life? It discusses the field of "dissipative adaptation," which examines how spontaneous order arises in order to speed the entropy of the overall system.
Quote:
Though dissipative adaptation occurs before a system has genes, the basic chemical system can still evolve through a kind of primitive natural selection process that is easy to conceptualize. When a molecular system is undergoing natural fluctuations whereby its collective form is randomly sifting through a number of successive structural states, those arrangements that allow the system to more effectively extract energy from the environment—a requirement for survival—will persist, while those arrangements that do not go by the wayside. This is presumably how an inanimate network becomes a biochemical network, such as that of a cell.
We have not remotely exhausted research into how life might have self-assembled. There is no reason to take the extreme step of rejecting the reliability of our senses, which is what you have to do in order to ignore the fossil record of evolution. (And once you do that, your perceptions of everything are unreliable, including of God.)
I'm sure all this will be dismissed with another one line platitude or catchy but vapid quotation, but I tried.
Last edited by Bill Haywood; 02-08-2020 at 01:28 PM.