(December 9, 2011 at 3:08 am)stephensalias Wrote: These religion and science debates are fascinating to me. A poster above mentioned that our physical laws show no evidence of changing. Given that, and the law of entropy, how does any model of cosmology make sense? The chain of events that produced life is infinitely ordered. It is so ordered, in fact, that it produced a self ordering human race. Not only that, but the order can be seen even at microscopic levels. How does one account for this scientifically?
Time.
Nothing is really ordered but a product of circumstance. The reason everything fits together so well is because everything has had enough time to do the necessary evolution.
You can look at it two ways - we eat an orange because it was given to us and designed for us, or we eat an orange because oranges were there before us and we evolved so that we could take advantage of the orange situation by evolving a capacity to ingest them. If we couldn't we may die.
I know some christians seem to have a hard time accepting that life is down to chance and evolution. How could something so complex as DNA just evolve? Surely it had to be made and programmed by somebody? It is actually harder to believe that a supreme deity managed to programme something so complex, not just for us but for billions and trillions of other things too. It's just too easy an answer. Goddidit.
But how could everything have just programmed itself? Such complexity? Well, random interaction, innumerable times, survival of the fittest meaning eventually everything develops its own station in the chain.
Over TIME. Give it enough time and enough interactions can occur.
People don't often seem to me to really comprehend how long a time 4.5 billion years really is. It's just a number right, a big number right, but you need to understand the hugeness of it. Think of light. It travels at c186,000 miles per second. Around 670 million mph. Travelling at the speed of 670 million mph it still takes over 4 years to reach the nearest star. The vast distance travelled in that 4 years is mindboggling, yes? We all understand that right?
A man walking at 3mph, walking pace, would take c220 million times longer than light to reach any destination, right? It would take a man c900 million years to WALK the incredibly vast distance to the nearest star.
My point? 900 million isn't even 1 billion. A man could WALK to Proxima Centauri FIVE times in 4.5 billion years.
THAT is how big a number 4.5 billion is.That is a looooooooong time for things to evolve on their own to fit their environment. Almost anything is possible given enough time, and life has has plenty of it, a vast amount of it.
So yeah, time.
You are currently experiencing a lucky and very brief window of awareness, sandwiched in between two periods of timeless and utter nothingness. So why not make the most of it, and stop wasting your life away trying to convince other people that there is something else? The reality is obvious.
