Faith + Science

[Digit]

The problem arises when you realize that X also fits all causes that obey the second thermodynamic law

Interesting, if we go ahead and substitute God for X, that makes your statement "The problem arises when you realize that God also fits all causes that obey the second thermodynamic law." By "fits all causes that obey the second thermodynamic law" do you mean "obeys/is subject to the second thermodynamic law," which would state that he either came from something with even lower entropy (ad infinitum) or, given enough time, a God came into being from a state of higher entropy (where there had not been one before)?

[Tao]

The problem arises when you realize that X also fits all causes that obey the second thermodynamic law

Interesting, if we go ahead and substitute God for X, that makes your statement "The problem arises when you realize that God also fits all causes that obey the second thermodynamic law." By "fits all causes that obey the second thermodynamic law" do you mean "obeys/is subject to the second thermodynamic law," which would state that he either came from something with even lower entropy (ad infinitum) or, given enough time, a God came into being from a state of higher entropy (where there had not been one before)?

No, I mean the arbitrary value X can fit all proposed causes of the universe. So anyone, theist or no, who wants to reconcile the points 3 and 4 of the linked argument must also agree that the universe doesn't exist. My proposition is that the universe does exist, and there is an irreconcilable flaw in the argument.

[Digit]

Ok, so you said

Y from X if and only if X<Y. (The Universe can only come from something if its entropy is less. [2nd Thermo law])
The probability of Y < X approaches 100%. (Given enough time, the Universe can come from a state of higher entropy. [point 4])

Rewriting the if-and-only-if biconditional there and also putting point 4 there together so all the premises are together would give

If Y from X, then X<Y (P1)
and
if X<Y, then Y from X (P2)
and
Y < X approaches 100% (P3)

Which you say gives ~(Y from X), or "Not Y from X" for any X, meaning that if the three premises above (having broken your biconditional into two simultaneously true premises) are true, nothing caused the universe, which can't be true, since we're here.

Did I get what you are saying right this time?

[Tao]

if the three premises above (having broken your biconditional into two simultaneously true premises) are true, nothing caused the universe, which can't be true, since we're here.

Did I get what you are saying right this time?

Pretty much. If I understand their claims correctly, they seem to be saying that the cause of the universe must be a thermodynamic anomaly, with entropy decreasing categorically. While I agree that statistical probability may provide for such an event, to allow such into consideration while at the same time offering no such probabilities to the opposing side rather hurts any attempt at appealing to reason.

[Digit]

Maybe in preferring randomness over deity, they tacitly adopted Occam's Razor, which is an oft-used heuristic by scientists. If, for simplicity's sake, instead of multiplying by a constant factor and normalizing to make probability a number between zero and one, we just directly equate entropy with probability, since as far as we know from experimental observations of which I'm not aware of having been disproven, lower entropy states have a lower probability of occurring, then we can say

P(x) = E(x)

Or the probability of x is equal to the entropy of x.

Case I. x = universe created by random chance.
Let's say that at the moment of the big bang, the entropy of the universe was 1/(1E100) Joules per Kelvin, or one in a googol. Then the probability of x happening is 1E-100. With random chance, there doesn't seem to be any more layers of the onion to peel off, unless you start wondering about the probability of the events that led to the random chance, which, by definition, are random.

Case II. x = universe created by deity.
If the second law of thermodynamics is a true law (scientists would probably assume so until given a counterexample), then the deity must have a lower entropy than the universe at the moment of the big bang. Let's say the entropy of the deity itself who created the universe was 1/(1E100 + c) Joules per Kelvin, so the probability of the deity happening is 1/(1E100 + c) where c is a positive number. Now there's a new question of how the deity happened. Again, applying the second law, the entropy and probability of the deity that created the deity would be something like 1/(1E100 + c + d) where d is a positive number. I apologize, I know I've described this road multiple times, but it comes down to this case of x being the limit of 1/n where n approaches infinity.

1E-100 >> lim( 1/n ) n -> inf

Occam's Razor: The simpler (higher entropy/probability) solution tends to be correct.

[Tao]

Again, until you get to infinite regression of gods, your argument is entirely a ontological decision made prior to the fact. You can't say that God must needs have lower entropy to create and in the same breath say that creation can happen from a source of higher entropy. If the second assumption is true, then the basis for the first is wrong.

As per infinite regression, I personally don't currently believe in it. But philosophically speaking, you've got so many assumptions piled one on top of another that by that time you've gotten to a point where nothing useful can be said for or against. It is somewhat akin to attempting to posit the color of grass in a universe where none of the basic laws of physics apply. You've gotten so many 'if's that anyone can say anything and falsifiability goes out the window.

[Digit]

Ok, I take your points and don't have any new ones to make. Thanks for the conversation. But I'm still going to ask the Big Man about the details if I meet him.

[Katya]

And I've never understood why things have become more organized with evolution, all the way to making some very complex life forms, instead of breaking down into chaos like Physical Science told me it should. Can you help me understand a scientist's perspective on that?

Entropy ("breaking down into chaos") is a measure of the average state of a system; the tendency of entropy to increase, overall, doesn't preclude the existence of pockets of organization. For example, if you drop a teacup and it breaks into pieces, it's possible to glue those pieces back together into a teacup, again, but it's a lot more work than smashing the teacup in the first place. Your body uses up energy while you're gluing the pieces back together, and the energy you use up when you're gluing it back together adds more entropy to the system than gluing the teacup back together takes out of the system. (LJ [or SMP!] might be able to clean up some of the technical wording here.)

As for evolution, when something is well designed, it self-preserves and self-replicates successfully. (That's more or less the definition of good design, from an evolutionary perspective.) So, if you have 20 viruses, and one of them is the best at getting itself replicated and transmitted, that's the one that's going to dominate the landscape. And if that virus mutates into 20 different sub-viruses, and one of them has a mutation that makes it even more effective at being replicated and transmitted, then that one will become the dominant virus. In each generation, you still have randomness at work, but the virus variant that has a replicating and preserving advantage will become the majority of the population.

It should be noted that evolution doesn't have to make things more complicated. There are plenty of little viruses and bacteria and single-celled organisms in existence that are doing quite well and are much less complicated than elephants or earthworms or you or I. But if a more complicated structure lends an evolutionary advantage, then it's possible for some species to evolve in that direction. (And the entropy of our entire solar system is still increasing as the sun burns itself out over millions of years. Whatever evolutionary complexity is occurring on our blue planet isn't enough to outweigh that.)

As homework, you need to go play Boxcar 2D.

[SMP]

With evolution, it is true that organized biomass is lower entropy than unorganized matter. To estimate how much lower the entropy of the world is due to the evolution of biomass, we can do an order of magnitude calculation. I Googled and found an estimate for the total biomass on the earth at 75 billion tons. Assuming it is all Carbon (a good enough assumption for our purposes) we find that amounts to about 5e41 total atoms. Using units where the boltzmann factor = 1, that gives us an upper bound on the decrease in entropy attributable to biomass. At the same time, low entropy photons from the sun hit the earth, and the earth (in steady state) emits an equal amount of total energy but through many more low energy photons. This conversion from a few high energy photons to many low energy photons represents an increase in entropy. The question is, is it enough to account for the decrease from biomass?

Well, using the radius of the earth, and assuming that 1000 W/m^2 of sunlight impact the earth, and asssuming the sun's light is 500 nm, we get that 3e35 photons hit the earth each second. Assuming the earth is 300 kelvin, using Wien's displacement law that gives a peak thermal radiation at 10 microns. Since the earth is in steady state, the total power emitted by the earth has to equal the total power absorbed. The 10 micron photons are 1/20 as energetic as the 500 nm photons, therefore there must be 20 times as many. So the earth must emit 6e36 photons per second.

So the entropy of the universe is increases due to the light from the sun hitting the earth and being re-emitted at a rate of about 6e36 per second. So how many seconds would it take for for this decrease to match the increase from biomass? Dividing 5e35/5e36 gives 100000. That's a little over a day.

So as far as the the second law is concerned, all of the biomass currently existing could evolve in a single day, and it would still be satisfied.

(there may be some mistakes in my calculations, and keep in mind, this was an approximate, order of magnitude exercise meant to simply demonstrate that evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics.)

[krebscout]

Interesting, dudes. And totally makes sense.

So what is a "system" here? If the sun is included, how big does our system get?

Also, "so as far as the the second law is concerned, all of the biomass currently existing could evolve in a single day, and it would still be satisfied." Wow. wow. I take the sun for granted.

[Katya]

So what is a "system" here? If the sun is included, how big does our system get?

The size of a system doesn't matter; it just has to be effectively self-contained. So, a falling teacup that shatters shows an increase in entropy.

If I put the teacup back together, it looks like I'm decreasing the entropy in the universe by undoing the shattering, but that's only because I'm adding energy from outside the teacup "system."

You can think of a system like an imaginary bubble. If whatever is in the bubble is isolated from everything else in the universe, then the laws of physics will work inside the bubble. If the laws of physics don't work inside the invisible bubble, then there must be something outside the bubble that's acting on the things inside the bubble.

[Marduk]

In the example, krebscout, the system is all of existence.

[Katya]

So...and this is something I've always had a hard time understanding, despite having several good discussions about it...why faith? Why is it so important that we have faith? I think parents and children are a great parallel of our relationship with God, but one big difference is that our parents are (ideally) physically present. Children can still choose to obey their parents or not, they still have agency and trials and temptations and all the things that are so important to our mortal experience. But they can't have faith (in that sense of the word. There are other definitions of faith which I feel I understand a little better that will still come in to play), because they have a sure knowledge of their parents' existence.

Why is faith, why is not knowing, such a virtue?

Faith isn't just not knowing (that's ignorance). Faith is not knowing, but still acting in the hope that good things will come of your actions.

When you act in knowledge, you are more responsible (and culpable) for your actions. That's why, in the legal system, adults are tried differently from children, people of normal mental capacity are tried differently from people with a very low mental capacity, and there's a distinction made between 1st degree murder, 2nd degree murder, and manslaughter.

Having perfect knowledge wouldn't turn us into perfect beings. It would, however, make us perfectly culpable for our actions. Denying the existence of God is much worse if you know he exists as an incontestable fact. That's why the worst punishment in postmortal existence is reserved for those who "denied the Holy Spirit after having received it," in other words, they had a perfect (?) knowledge, and chose to act against it, anyway.

All of this makes it sound as though innocence or ignorance is better than knowledge. However, the point of this life is to progress, which we do by acting in faith, evaluating whether we successfully chose good over evil, gaining knowledge (from many different sources), and using that knowledge to take another step of faith into the unknown. So, knowledge isn't bad, but acting in faith gives us the opportunity to grow stronger before we receive more knowledge, so that we're not overburdened by knowing too much.

[krebscout]

All of these thoughts about faith are helpful, thank you.

Sauron and I were talking about it a few weeks ago, and he gave a similar analogy to DL's. He said that in order to have agency, we can't have perfect knowledge. Because "if someone said you could have a million dollars or you could have two dollars, no catch, what would you choose? There wouldn't really be a choice."

And I can understand that, and I think these are all important characteristics of faith, but I'm not fully satisfied. It feels like there's a big chunk that I'm just not getting, and for better or worse I rely on my feelings a lot for this kind of thing. I feel more satisfied with my relationship with the temple than I do with my relationship with faith, even though I understand the former much less.

So, given that faith enables agency and protects against first degree sin, how does all of this come in to play during the Millennium? Christ will be on Earth, available for people to see and touch - perfect knowledge, right? Yet people will still have agency, there will still be multiple religious factions (at least at first), and...am I correct on this?...there will still be sin. Perfect knowledge, agency, and sin will all co-exist. How does that work?

[Whistler]

maybe some people hate Jesus for no good reason?

[Defy V]

So, given that faith enables agency and protects against first degree sin, how does all of this come in to play during the Millennium? Christ will be on Earth, available for people to see and touch - perfect knowledge, right? Yet people will still have agency, there will still be multiple religious factions (at least at first), and...am I correct on this?...there will still be sin. Perfect knowledge, agency, and sin will all co-exist. How does that work?

This is pure speculation and perhaps a misunderstanding of what I heard in seminary, but I seem to remember hearing that Christ would reign but there might be lots of delegation. That is, He wouldn't always be on the earth. If you let a couple generations go by that might start requiring more faith again, depending on how you define faith.

Or maybe we just need to read 4th Nephi again and see how knowledge, agency, and sin co-existed then.

[thebigcheese]

So, given that faith enables agency and protects against first degree sin, how does all of this come in to play during the Millennium? Christ will be on Earth, available for people to see and touch - perfect knowledge, right? Yet people will still have agency, there will still be multiple religious factions (at least at first), and...am I correct on this?...there will still be sin. Perfect knowledge, agency, and sin will all co-exist. How does that work?

I don't think seeing Christ in person necessarily equates to having a perfect knowledge. For example, it is my understanding that faith was required in the pre-existence. We all had to have faith that Christ would actually perform the Atonement, that he was both willing and capable of doing it. I mean, what if we all came down here and then he decided that he didn't want to go through with it anymore? We had faith in him that he would follow through with the Atonement. Anyway, my point is that faith exists everywhere -- even in the pre-existence and even in the Millennium. Just because you see Jesus standing in front of your face doesn't mean you believe that he was the guy who performed the Atonement, if you even believe in such a thing. Granted, I don't know the exact circumstances of the Millennium -- maybe he'll have this cloud of glory all around him. But lots of people already proved their unbelief in Jerusalem...and he was right there, healing people right in front of them!

[Dragon Lady]

The Jews also saw his face when he lived and they (mostly) didn't have faith in him. Why would we be any different? They had been looking forward to the Messiah for as long and as fervently as we look forward to his second coming.

[krebscout]

Thought spew:

Okay, so Jews and Nephites both saw and touched Jesus in the flesh, but they still lacked perfect knowledge. (Also interesting that spirits in spirit prison, who were visited by Christ between his death and his resurrection, saw him, but they, too, had agency to choose.) So...seeing Christ physically does not equate perfect knowledge. That makes sense - there's still the matter of his divinity and his messiahship which one cannot physically see but must believe. What DOES make perfect knowledge, then? Is it being taught by the Spirit? What is the difference between having faith in what one is taught by the Spirit and knowing what one is taught by the Spirit? Empirical knowledge - science - comes from experimentation, observation, and physical evidence, right? Is it possible to have empirical knowledge about something that has no physical manifestation? Is all of this just a big experiment in phenomenology?

Which brings me to a thought I had the other night, which is that maybe we don't know because we can't know. We don't have the capacity.

Again, I strongly feel that our relationship with God is modeled in mortal parent-child relationships, and I think there may be an answer there. But I'm going to stop myself before I sound like a truly crazy person and get in trouble for speculation.

The aspect of faith that I feel more comfortable with is the trust part. I see my children, their trust in me even though they can't understand why I do the things I do. My daughter, at seven months old, has perfect trust in me. She willingly submits to anything I do, whether that be taking her in for vaccinations or stretching her hand out to pet a dog. She doesn't understand most of it. My son, at the more rebellious and independent age of two, cannot understand why he needs to eat his vegetables because he does not understand the human body, but I do, so I try to get him to eat his vegetables and I need him to trust me. He's just now getting to the age where I can reason with him ("If you take your medicine, you can have some chocolate chips") though he still doesn't understand why he needs the medicine. I understand things better than they do, and God understands things better than I do.

I'm just going to post this before I feel too sheepish and ignorant.

[Katya]

I agree that the parent-child relationship is a good model for our relationship with God, but I see some limitations to that approach.

The biggest flaw I see is that there are times when God doesn't talk to us, doesn't try to explain his commandments, doesn't answer us when we ask him to. He also sent us physically far away from him, and apparently won't let us talk to our mom, at all (although that's another can of worms, entirely).

I'm not arguing that these actions can't serve a higher purpose, but I am arguing that they would be considered very odd behavior on the part of a loving mortal parent.

Of course, one of the biggest differences between us and God is that he's omniscient, and perhaps being an omniscient parent leads to a domino effect that significantly alters one's parenting style and choices. After all, when we teach or comfort or discipline our children, we don't know what the outcome of our actions will be. We have a bit more perspective than they do, but, in the end, we're really just trying to muddle along, ourselves.