oh hell. I just sent the really long second-law rant on thermodynamics, realized I misformatted the cut & paste from wikipedia, and thought up a really clever rejoinder:

If you don't believe in God, then you'll go to Hell. Response: Well, I think you may mean "If I don't believe in Jesus", assuming you're Christian. If so, then Buddha, Brahma, and quite a few other dieties would like to have a few words with you.
As would their believers.
And the Jews.
And the Muslims.

I think you get the picture.

Besides: what will I experience in hell? I think there's some eternal
suffering and burning, hellfire & damnation? And shooting through
this all, a knowledge that this omniscient, utterly moral being sent
me here?

Aaaah, I think I see your problem: Y'see, not only do you believe in bodily resurrection, which implies that I'm *not* bodied when I'm in hell, and thus have no pain receptors-- so we can't be burning me, but instead be forcing me to, e.g., watch evangelicals-- but moreover, I'm supposed to be in pain because I deserve to be here!

Of course, you presupposed there was a there there.

:)

Attached for proof:
Dammit (fuzzy on the subject of WHO-dammit, mind you):

Einstein believed in God, do you think you're smarter than Einstein? should *not* be answered with "If he believed in God-- yes!" but instead with "Well, only if he believed in *your* God."

After all, he was a smart hombre. I doubt he believed in any God without special bells & whistles! Be fair :)

And evolution does *not* violate the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states: "The second law states that energy becomes less dense over time and since we cannot move backwards in time, we cannot return to the prior energy density", as quoted from wikipedia.

In layman speak, that means that entropy, the ordering and concentration of energy, cannot increase over time without outside work.

The argument that entropy breaks this system is that life is, by its nature, structured and consists of striving to concentrate energy within itself, creating structure "out of nothing".

Of course, life tends to do messy things like eat (and defecate) or photosynthesize, or both, and respirate. This is because we use energy from our surroundings to overcome entropy, creating loss heat from the food we eat (body temperature) but also allowing our rather complex structures to continue functioning.

Then our adversarial friends counter: but, ahah, we're creating entropy! God is pumping energy into the system to keep the world from becoming a giant pile of dung!

Funny you should mention energy, God, and dung in the same sentence. The Egyptians believed that the Sun was at the same time Amon-Re, a god, and a ball of flaming dung, pushed by a dung beetle. Our Sun bombards the planet with quite a lot of energy, allowing us to 'violate' the second law because we aren't just decreasing the entropy in the system-- we're using the energy put out by the sun to power reactions which increase local diffusion of energy while decreasing internal diffusion, basically by raising the concentration of energy everywhere in the system.

In short, evolution does *not* deny the second law of thermodynamics, because you FORGOT ABOUT THE SUN.



Sorry about all the email!

Great site, btw. I really should be studying, shouldn't I?

The answer to the thermodynamics question on the arguments page has been adjusted to avoid any further enormous missives on the subject.