RE: Nature's Laws
May 22, 2015 at 8:55 pm
(This post was last modified: May 22, 2015 at 9:39 pm by nihilistcat.)
(May 15, 2015 at 2:21 pm)Freedom4me Wrote: Hello everyone! I'm a new member to AF. First, a tiny introductory note just to let you know a little about me. I was an atheist from about age 15 to 27. I came from a very strict baptist family background, and I guess you could say that I was somewhat oppressed by my strict religious upbringing. So I rebelled against my parents, my religion, and God. At the age of 27, one of my friends loaned me a book called "Evidence That Demands A Verdict" by Josh McDowell. That book changed my views completely. Since then I've seen lots of additional reasons to believe in the God of the bible.
The universe is orderly and purposeful in certain ways. How could impersonal stuff like matter and energy "obey" laws of any kind? Where do the laws of nature and the laws of logic come from? If there is no god, why do so many atheists care so much about the non-existence of a supposedly fictional deity? Please don't take any offense to my words. I'm not trying to offend anyone here. I'm just asking a few questions that seem to be fair.
Where do laws of nature come from? Well, from man of course. At one level, science is descriptive (not prescriptive). We make observations, like everything undergoes entropy, and we use that observation to formulate a law. How can impersonal things (inanimate matter) obey laws? Well, there's uncertainty in nature (we even devised a theorem called the uncertainty principle to describe this feature of nature). So matter doesn't always obey fixed laws. Sometimes particles jump in unexpected ways, but we can calculate the probability of these occurrences. In other cases, like entropy, violation of the law has never been observed (so we call it a law).
What is a gram? God didn't tell us how to quantify nature, we simply made up measuring techniques. So in the case of the gram, it's one cubic centimeter of pure water. Again, this is something we just contrived.
Where did the universe come from? We have some ideas (very good ideas in some cases), but at the moment we're not completely sure. Past generations channeled their uncertainty into ideas like supernatural agency. But then as science demystified one thing after the other, we stopped attributing what we do not yet understand to supernatural agency (i.e. a god of the gaps fallacy).
So your reasoning here is pretty common. It seems like the universe is a well oiled machine, but most astronomers would disagree (the universe is actually quite chaotic). Do you know that a black hole can sneak up on us, undetected until it's almost swallowing our solar system, and we would not be able to do a thing to save ourselves. But was it god who created the black hole? God is certainly not necessary (we understand how black holes are formed, no supernatural intervention required).
Likewise, we contrived laws of logic (thinkers like Aristotle basically invented logic). Yeah there's intuition behind logic, so where did our intuition come from? Well, intuition is not a magical force, and it can be explained by natural selection. I can go on and on here, but hopefully you see my point?
