Friday, March 30, 2012

What I believe: God is the Creator of all things, part 2

I spent the last post detailing why and how I believe that God is the Creator.

Today I am super crunched for time.

I am going to give you two reasons why I don't think evolution makes any sense, and one reason why I think it's kind of crazy to try to make it make sense.

In fifteen minutes or less.

Seriously, I'm sweating now. And I type really badly when I'm stressed.

Two reasons why the theory of evolution doesn't make sense:

(1) The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
(2) Statistics.

I'm not sure which to begin with, as they are inter-related. I guess I'll start with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that left alone, everything proceeds towards entropy. Entropy is increasing randomness or chaos, in other words: decay.

I am both a mother and a homeowner. I know that this is true. If I do not apply a lot of energy and work to my situation, things go downhill. Little children left alone in a room destroy it... until they reach a sentient age where they can be taught to join me in applying positive energy (work) to the situation to improve it rather than destruct it.

My children may or may not remember me telling them, as they played, "We are going to be constructive. We are not going to be destructive." This was a constant lesson I attempted to drum into them. "We build towers with our blocks," I told them, "we do not throw our blocks at each other or at the walls." I needed to emphasize these things, because left on their own, they would always destruct rather than construct. It is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You have to work very hard and very deliberately to counter the forces of nature.

This is why your house needs to be painted (or at least washed ) every few years. Why your plumbing needs to be cleaned out, why your roof needs to be replaced, why your landscaping needs to be pruned and weeded and eventually overhauled. It's even why your kitchen floor needs to be swept.

Everything is constantly moving towards disorder.

This tells me that the theory of evolution is impossible. Things simply, on their own, do not move from disorder to order. A mass of unorganized matter is never going to magically arrange itself into something that is ordered and eventually culminates in life. Apart from positive energy being applied to the situation by a sentient being (in this case, I'm arguing for God), it isn't going to happen. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us so, and all you need is a little bit of high school science to understand this.

On to statistics: I do not play the lottery. I never buy lottery tickets because I understand odds, and I do not like to waste my money. Same with Las Vegas. I look at the money they are using to build their high-rises, put on their shows, power their glitzy lights, and I know it comes from somewhere... from the poor fools who gamble and lose and gamble and lose. In Las Vegas, a few people win a little bit now and then, but overall, there is a vast conspiracy to make sure that the casinos are wildly profitable. It's kind of like insurance, except that there are government mandates that I buy insurance (even though I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the insurance companies are rigged to be sure that they take in far more than they ever pay out). There are no government mandates that I gamble. So, hallelujah, I don't!!

I understand the odds against winning in Las Vegas and against winning the lottery. However the odds are infinitely more likely that I would win at either of these than that evolution could ever have brought us life as we know it.

I don't care how much time you give it. More time doesn't mean better chances. More time means a further descent into entropy.

Think of a watch, a handy piece of workmanship. It's a very intricate thing, in its way. Of course, it is not nearly as intricate as, say, a solar system, or a daffodil, or a rabbit... or a human.

Suppose you took the pieces of a watch, all of them, nice, fresh-off-the-line screws and gears and whatever all else is inside a watch. Suppose you took them all, not one piece missing, and you put them into a box and you shook that box. Say you shook it for two hours straight. Do you think those parts would, within those two hours, form themselves into a watch?

Well, they wouldn't.

And suppose you continued to shake the box for a year. Fifty years. Three billion years. Over that length of time, are the contents of that box going to become more or less like a watch?

You don't know? Well, I'll tell you. After three billion years of shaking in that box, what used to be watch parts would have decomposed into dust (oh! we're back to entropy!). Materials that at one point could have fit together to form a watch are ground down into useless rubbish. Why? Because there was no sentient energy applied to the situation. (Although not sentient, we did apply energy! Imagine what would have happened over three billion years if the box just sat on a table.)

If you can't do it with a watch, it stands to reason that you couldn't do it with a universe.

You need a sentient, powerful God to create life.

They try to create life in the lab from "raw materials." Never mind that they aren't worrying about what would have been the original source of these raw materials (which they ordered from a catalog of chemicals). If we put that thought out of our minds, they've actually gotten pretty close to producing life. But they've never accomplished anything without applying brain power and energy to the experiment. I rest my case.

Lastly, it makes no sense to pursue the idea of evolution because clearly, the chicken had to come before the egg.

God created things in a mature form. He did not make Adam as an embryo or a six-month-old baby or even a nine-year-old-child. If He had, Adam would have required care. God made Adam as a fully grown adult male, and Eve as fully formed adult female. God made trees as trees, ready to produce fruit with seeds for reproduction. He made fish as fish, birds as birds and kangaroos as kangaroos.

We didn't get a glimpse of how our development worked until the first reproductive cycle began. In reproduction, things start from a single cell, and within this cell are the DNA blueprints for whatever multi-celled organism that cell is programmed to become. Creation and reproduction are not the same thing. Creation was when God wrote the blueprints and stored them in the DNA. Reproduction is when the cell follows the directions God gave it. Adaptation is when the blueprints flex to accommodate different environmental factors, and it certainly happens. But the adaptation of a species is not the same as the development of a new species (something we have never seen in recorded history; conversely, we have seen species become extinct, because that is the result of entropy).

It is my belief that people are clearly starting from a flawed premise when they try to work backwards to find the "first single celled organism." If you start from a flawed premise, you get flawed science.

Oh, I hadn't planned to mention this, but here's a freebie before I go: Carbon dating is at least as much an example of circular reasoning as is proving the existence of God with the Bible. Actually more so. Maybe we'll talk about that next time.

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