RAIMIUS wrote:
The Big Bang: small pieces of matter and antimatter collide to produce the current universe (after several billion years). Where did the matter and antimatter come from? How is it that the universe seems to have become MORE organized? This goes against entropy, does it not? If matter and energy are conserved, where was it before the Big Bang? I guess you could argue a multiverse collision, but, then, where did those other dimensions come from? Science still has a great deal to prove. I hope it does, in my opinion it will point more toward an "inteligence" than away from one.
While the laws of thermodynamics are pretty concrete as far as humanity is concerned, it does not apply the same way to the universe as a whole. Zero Point Energy (not the same as the zero point gun from half life 2) contradicts the first law of thermodynamics, inasmuch as energy is created out of nothing. (fun fact: Zero point energy is theorized to be directly related to inertia.) The arguments regarding the Big Bang and the first law have to do with the curvature of space-time, however I dont fully understand that material and couldn't explain it if I did. I would suggest getting a book from Stephen Hawking if you are interested.
RAIMIUS wrote:
Evolution has certain points that I agree with, but considder the probability of the current world occuring. How did we evolve into more complex beings? (entropy again). Evolution, however, is not a God disproving theory anyway...just interesting.
I'm not sure what you mean by the probability of the current world occuring, but I believe you are referring to the Intelligent Design argument that life on Earth would not exist if any number of variables were different. While this is true, it has no bearing on our current universe. The fact is that the universe happened, and life grew into the system that was already in place, and thus it is meaningless to look at both the universe and life in retrospect.
This site, which I linked earlier in this thread, explains this in more detail. This particular passage pertains directly to what I was talking about:
Every shuffle of a deck of cards leads to a 52-card sequence that has low a priori probability, but has unit probability once the cards are all on the table. Similarly, the "fine-tuning" of the constants of physics, said to be so unlikely, could very well have been random; we just happen to be in the universe that turned up in that particular deal of the cards.
Simplified: if you shuffle a deck of cards and deal, the chances of that particular sequence of cards occuring is very low. But after you shuffle, the chances of that sequence are 100%, because it has already happened. Similarly, the chances of the universe having the specific set of variables that make life possible is low (as opposed to any number of other possible universes), but the fact is it does exist, and so the chances of it happening are 100% as far as we (life in general) are concerned.
The second law of thermodynamics states, basically, that the energy in a system must remain even or decrease with time. (or that entropy must increase with time, which is essentially the same thing). Intelligent Design advocates have used this to try and disprove evolution, however their arguments are, again, flawed. The analogy I have seen used is that a building will not magically erect itself if all the materials required for its construction are thrown together. Similarly, a living cell will not assemble if all the chemicals are put in one place. This is true to a point, however life is not random, nor did it come about randomly according to most scientific theory. Life only exists because it is self perpetuating, and so the very first organism (in its most simplistic form) only led to life because it somehow created a copy of itself that was capable of creating copies of itself (a 'child' capable of having children, if you will).
As for the increasing complexity of life that has, over millions of years, led to organisms such as humans, that is also not a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. There are many examples of systems in nature that become systematically more complex of their own accord. Using a very simple analogy, the structure of ice is always the same (I am generalizing here, because there are, in fact, different structures of ice. Literature fans will be glad to know there is, in fact, an 'ice 9'). However the point is the same, if you take water and decrease the energy in the system (by freezing it) the ice will always organize itself with no outside guidance.
Life in general has many of the same characteristics, however life has the added bonus of having had evolution edit out most of the mistakes. The organs that seem so complicated today, such as the eyeball, are the result of a few million generations of slightly less complicated eyes saving their owners lives' long enough for them to reproduce. The eyes that didn't work well enough were eliminated with the organism they were a part of, and never made it to this point in time.
I would also point out that most religions place humans at the pinnacle of God's achievement (that existence was created for the purpose of supporting humans). However, the universe has been around for about 15 billion years, whereas humans have only existed for a puny fraction of that time. There is also a whole lot of universe and only one Earth with humans on it, raising the question of why He is screwing around with all this extraneous matter. There are also a large number of species that arent necessary for the existence or survival of humans, most notably those that existed in the past and went extinct. Their existence in any real form is more indicative of a random, unordered universe than it is of an all powerful omnipotent entity with humans in mind.