Why do people deny evolution?

said- "I believe you can find anything you wish in the Bible, even a decent recipe for a martini"
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Dunno bout that, but Jesus changed 120 gallons of water to wine, and said he'd be drinking wine in heaven with his pals.
That's me out then, I don't drink..

I don't drink because of medical reasons, but not to imbibe occasionally is not to enjoy the fruits of our life. I really miss my occasional glass of wine with dinner.

You are beating a straw man. No one claimed the earth was a closed sysatem. Indeed it gets a contiuous infusion of energy from the sun (and even the stars) ansd also from the grsvitational action of the moon.

However a finite universe.....

Yes..? What about a 'finite' universe? Whatever that might mean..

Exactly so.

Those who use the 'not a closed system' argument must lack the vision to see what man would be able to do, given enough time. We have gone from dwelling in caves to sending men into space in a matter of thousands of years. Most of that progress has taken place in mere hundreds of years.

It does not take a lot of imagination to see that we could escape this 'open system' in the 5 Billion years before our sun incinerates the earth.

Bottom line, Because energy can be neither created or distroyed in this open system and the fact that we are able to defy entropy, it is easy to see that life could go on infinitely.

Life and only life defies entropy, closed or open system.

I'm not sure I follow that. The 2nd law of Thermodymamics is indeed generally true and applicable. Moreover current cosmological understanding is that our universe is indeed finite both in space and time.

What do you mean 'defy' entropy? As I mentioned, we win battles, but the war is ultimately, apparently lost..

The way I read what you say is that we carry within us energy and in so doing we defy entropy? I'm not sure I get that. We are made of star stuff. We are an open system. Yet, we are constantly losing ground, bound for the ground as it were. At least so far as we understand what that means from our limited perspective. Beyond our death, I have no clue if the physics laws we understand will apply.

The reason you may not have followed is because I was not disagreeing with those things.

I thought that when you cited a 'finite universe' you were inferring that man would ultimately prevail in countering entropy even on the scale of the closed system of the universe.

Here is what I'm getting at. In the 5 Billion years we have left in this open system, mankind is certainly capable of creating his own closed system in which to survive. He could go about gathering/concentrating energy and organizing it, out to infinity.

That is the nature of life, to reverse entropy.

There's the rub ain't it? You believe that we can continue gathering energy for infinity. But I think that entropy is part of that problem in as much as it relates to our inability to gather said energy with 100% efficiency.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is the law that states we can never do this. We cannot know the structure of the atom except by averages, which, by definition, means that no matter how hard we try, we can never obtain all the energy in a system. Some energy is inevitably lost in the marshaling or transformation of that energy. So, while it certainly is possible that we can extend entropy, win battles, by increasing our ability to capture, transform and use energy more efficiently, by Hesienberg's beard, we will never get to 100%.

Even if you were to extend order for an extra trillion trillion years, eventually the law will win the war and all will be par.

This is the standard to overcome. As I see it, the only way to buck this is to buck Heisenberg's law - which no one has obviously yet done or if that's not it, then its possibly true that the whole universe is a large pulsing thing that pushes out and sucks back in to eternity through gravity and the amount of available mass (not what current thought is - but there is much to yet discover - we may come back to this..) or we find an alien entropy reversalizer..

Yes, even subatomic particles have a half life so you can make that argument, assuming we don't find a way to organize matter without a half-life. As you said, there is much to learn yet.

But imagine the scenario of man trillions of years in the future but before all matter decays. Man would no doubt send out to the universe their own version of Voyager's gold record with the collective knowledge and experience of mankind. If it were just an encoded beam of photons or that 'gold record' made of matter without a half-life, - it and it's unmistakable 'order' would go on forever.

Thus the chaotic universe would end with order instead of disorder.

But all that is for the sake of argument. You already know I believe this universe was made for temporary use only and the 'entropy reversalizer' will call game over by the time we run out of matter or energy.

Even given no creator, you have a much more optimistic future for humans. Not sure we'll make it out of this century!

Actually, what I believe is that if we don't 'get our act together' within 200 years (and that might be too generous a time span), then we're done as a species. If we do survive, then I think things will be way better than they are now. It'll take an asteriod or some such other natural disaster to fark things up after that (or things of that nature that could lead to severe resource shortenings and concomitant social unrest which breeds war and possible extinction) .

I'm also not sure we'll ever buck the Uncertainty Principle. I think we have severe limits, we may have reached them. We are a part of things, not the thing itself. I look at deciphering the atom the same as asking the kidney to understand the body it lives in, including psychology! The whole is greater than the sum of its parts and we are a part. By that definition, we can never reach an understanding of infinities.

There's other reasons to believe this as well. Our logic fails us in regard to infinities (time, atoms etc). These are things that don't make sense for a reason. The logical impossibilities they present impose on us a tacit restriction of what we can understand. Heisenberg quantified, qualified or otherwise articulated what was obvious to some 300 years before him, that those paradoxes can never be solved. But science as we know it wasn't required for this view. The aforementioned 300 years prior, Hume did it , just without the science of quantum mechanics to underscore its validity.

But, the floor is anyone's who wishes to challenge these things. Perhaps a substance that remains to be found will enable this new science? The burden of proof is on the 'optimists' though. Until then its science fiction..

Speaking of which, have you read Asimov's..The Last Question? There is your kind of optimism in that read and a nice twist ending that you might (or might not!) like. Deals entirely with this issue of entropy. Though might I remind, necessarily short on specifics and so it is just sci-fi..great read though!

Here's the link, very short story, take 30 mins to read..

http://multivax.com/last_question.html

All the history of the past 25 years or so indicates that the wrong people are going to develop or get nuclear bombs. That's the bad sign. However, one must also realize that any group that uses a nuclear weapon against another country is going to pay a high price for their misdeed. All the allies will come together to make sure the enemy is destroyed.

Korea and Pakistan have got nukes, so it's just a matter of time before they're "leaked" to terror groups.
The 3000 9/11 dead was bad enough, but a suitcase nuke smuggled into NY or any other city would devastate the entire city centre.

My guess would be that a nuke used against the US would cause a world war. I have no doubt the US would attack all of the countries it currently doesn't like, devastating every one of them which would have the inevitable side effect of spilling over into more neutral countries till it spiraled out of control and either we destroy ourselves or leave a world not really worth living in. That's worst case, best case is that the biggies stand down and take a hit while we decimate who we think is responsible (here assuming there is no obvious initial nuker), hitting everyone possible so we make sure and get the one..

Even under the best case, that piece of paper a lot of people love and have just commented on as being the glory of the US won't be worth the, er, paper its printed on. You can kiss all of that goodbye..

I don't think there will be world wars during our life time. We have nukes that can target smaller areas with pinpoint accuracy such as the Kremlin.

That's a best case scenario for us, but if hysterical, whoops, I mean if historical US actions are any indication of future action, I think things spill over and out of control. Ya just can't hit the big kid on the block, 9/11 proved that and a nuke would be far far far worse - and combined with the aforementioned attack, the response promises to be exponential..

I am just more pessimistic..I don't think these things can be controlled. Hell, regardless of where you stand on the rightness of our actions from 9/11, they are already biting us on the rear and those actions could still lead to a nuclear conflagration.

I think most of forget (and with good reason!) about the danger we are in every day from threat of nuclear war. Our politicians are not necessarily rational people and can't be trusted to do the 'surgical' strikes and even if so, those strikes no matter what the intention is, may cause unintended effects..

I trust Obama over Trump any day of the week. 24/7/365

With that view, You'd probably like this verse then:

Yep, I read that Asimov story like 50 years ago. He was obviously thinking about the creation conundrum too. The story goes along with the New Age line of "We Are God", or maybe inspired Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land" (Thou art God).

I had a crazy dream that Obama gave Iran permission to build nuke reactors!
Oh wait..