Re: Life Death and Genesis
Massie (mrlab@ix.netcom.com)
Mon, 26 Jul 1999 06:34:12 -0700
Craig Rusbult wrote:
>
> Glenn asks,
> >Why did God call the world 'good' rather than 'perfect' ... ?
>
> Sometimes YECs claim that one result of the Fall was that a "perfect"
> creation, unaffected by the ravages of the Second Law -- with increasing
> entropy, with disorder and decay -- became "imperfect" in part because
> God imposed the dreaded Second Law of Thermodynamics as a punishment.
>
> Part of what made the creation "good" is that the characteristics of
> nature (the force laws, values of constants,...) are such that natural
> processes allow life. And the Second Law is an essential part of these
> characteristics.
> But the Second Law has been so mis-represented by creationists (with
> illustrations involving rooms becoming cluttered, and so on) that its
> centrality and elegant simplicity have become lost. At its core, the
> Second Law simply says that "whatever is most probable (when all things
> are considered) will happen." Two essential concepts -- that cause much
> confusion when are ignored -- are that it is the entropy of THE UNIVERSE
> (not of A SYSTEM) which always increases, and that entropy is a technical
> concept involving things like total energy (this is why entropy increases
> when an object is heated) and the spacing of energy levels, not things
> like cluttered rooms.
> Without the Second Law, we would not have any of the normal chemical
> reactions of life, or nuclear-generated sunshine, or... The Second Law
> is not a curse; it is an essential part of what makes life possible.
>
> Some comments about the Second Law, including a simple illustration,
> are at http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~crusbult/origins/app.htm#rate
>
> Craig Rusbult
>
*************************
Without the second law and things like non-linear phenomena we would not
have for example attenuation of sound or the expansion of solids when
heated or more critically the essential properties of ice vs water.
More so, the YEC's want to see the food chain as evil because they have
attached to this imperfection and death and suffering.
Bert M