Reflectorites
On Fri, 7 Apr 2000 23:59:21 -0400, David_Bowman@georgetowncollege.edu wrote:
[...]
DB>In the interest of keeping down the noise level in this discussion I have
>elected to not address many of Stephen's provocations, accusations and
>other noise.
If there is any "noise" it is David's continual gratuitous comments about
the style of my posts. I assume that David does this to try to intimidate
me into posting the way that he wants me to. I reject such attempts and
wherever David make such a gratuitous comment, I will highlight it.
DB>However, in spite of this the post still has become
>unwieldy in size. For that I apologize and hope to be able to be more
>ruthless in my excisions in the future should it be necessary.
DB><snip SJ's rehash of his excuses for not explaining himself>
These were *not* rehashes of my excuses for not explaining myself! It is
*David's* continual "provocations, accusations and other noise" (which he
continues in this post) which forces me to defend myself and is preventing
us getting into the real issues.
>SJ>Under those conditions, David could just reply to whatever I said: "Well
>>I'm a qualified physicist, and you're just a layman, and I'm telling you that
>>you are wrong and I am right"!
DB>I would not do this. I do not like appeals to authority. I prefer
>actual explicit explanations. The arguments stand or fall on their own
>regardless of who makes them or what their 'qualifications' are.
We'll see. To date David just asserts on his own authority what the
SLoT means and dismisses out of hand what other qualified physicists
that I quote say it also means.
DB><snip more SJ accusations>
These were not "accusations". If David keeps this snide attacking up I will
have to keep defending myself.
>SJ>I rest my case! Surely You're Joking, Mr Bowman!
DB>If you rested your case then why were we subjected to another 18.6 kb of
>the rest of your post?
More gratuitious intimidation, ie. "subjected to".
I would remind David again that my posts are addressed to the Reflector, and
he is not forced to read them. I have my style of posts and David has his. If
David thinks by his continual snide remarks he will intimidate me into posting
the way David wants, he has another think coming!
DB><snip SJ accusation of me "bluffing", more quoting, etc.>
They are not "accusations". They are how I see David's posts. If David
has any other explanations for his gratuitious comments about my style
of posts, I would be interested to hear them.
>SJ>Granting permission to mention an error I made does not mean posting the
>>entire post!
DB>I'm sorry. I guess then I did not understand the qualifications you
>meant to imply when you granted your permission. I understood the term
>'this' in the phrase: "You may point this out in your reply" to refer to
>the reply message that I had resent to you reminding you of its
>existence.
>Since you had publicly challenged me on the reflector to
>come up with evidence that it had been pointed out to you that the
>arguments in question were bogus, and since the private message in
>question was simply a reply of mine to a public post of yours on the
>reflector it seems that you wouldn't mind if I posted the relevant reply
>message I wrote whether or not I asked for your permission. Since you
>*do* seem to mind, then I apologize for my breach for misinterpreting
>your permission and for whatever distress my doing so may have caused
>you.
Apology accepted.
[...]
>SJ>See above. The permission was only to mention my error, not to post the
>>entire private message! If David disputes this, I request his permission to
>>post my reply to him about this.
DB>I certainly don't care what you wish to post from these messages. Post
>whatever you see fit. It does seem to me, though, that your doing so
>would only continue to subject the readers of the reflector to evermore
>noise rather than bring in any substantive discussion of the scientific
>issues. But that's up to you if you wish to keep to a very low signal
>to noise ratio in your posts.
I regard this is as yet more intimidation. I would ask David to please
stop making intimidatory comments about my style of posting. Until David
stop this continual intimidation, we will never get anywhere.
[...]
>SJ>I thank David for his permission for me to post this message, which I will
>>do in its entirety, with additional comments where my position may have
>>changed since 1996.
DB>I hope the noise level will not be unbearable.
More intimidatory comments!
DB><snip more noise>
And again.
>SJ>If they are "subtly false" I suspect that it will all turn on how each of us
>>David define the terms "evolution" and "the second law of
>>thermodynamics". There are multiple meanings of "evolution" and also of
>>"the second law of thermodynamics". I state in advance that I do not grant
>>David the unilateral power to define these terms.
DB>That's nice. I don't even have or want that power. I only ask that when
>discussing scientific issues we use the definitions that the scientists
>in the relevant fields use when they are working in those fields. I
>don't think this is an unreasonable request. In the case of entropy and
>the 2nd law of thermo those definitions are found in the standard papers
>and texts of the field of statistical mechanics. The definitions in
>Freshman level intro books simply tend to be much to crude and
>unqualified for the task at hand.
The authors of "Freshman level intro books" are fully qualified professors of
physics whose books have been reviewed by many other physicists and chosen by
physicists in universities around the world as suitable. David's proposition
is that these physicist authors are not representing the second law truly, but
David is!
I simply don't accept this. Unless we can agree that any definition of the
SLoT in any modern mainstream physics textbook (e.g. Giancoli) is reliable,
we can go further with this discussion.
>SJ>If I did, David would
>>automatically win the debate. I have already quoted from physics and
>>biology textbooks which define "the second law of thermodynamics"
>>different from David, and he just rejects them out of hand. While he does
>>this, I will *never* accept that he has shown my arguments to be "bogus".
DB>Why is this discussion a debate? Must every discussion with you be
>about 'winning' and 'losing'? I think you may have spent too much time
>dealing with the work of lawyers.
David has to be joking! He calls what I say "bogus" and continually
peppers his posts with intimidatory comments about the "noise" in my posts,
etc., yet he claims that all we are doing is having a "discussion"!
DB>How about having a discussion whose
>objective is to gain deeper understanding of the scientific issues
>involved as well as of their implications and their non-implications?
That would be nice. But before we can do that, David has to stop making
intimidatory comments about my style of posts.
DB>I suppose you can accuse me of rejecting those intro level definitions "out
>of hand" if you want to, but I *did* explain *why* those definitions of
>entropy tend to be inadequate and need to be rejected.
And I don't accept David's rejection. It is simply *unbelievable* that
all these physics professors who write introductory level physics
textbooks don't render the SLoT accurately.
DB>Again, it is
>because they tend to relate the concept of 'entropy' to the term
>'disorder' without carefully defining the extent of that relationship nor
>carefully qualifying, just *what kind* of disorder is meant in that
>relationship. It happens that the term 'disorder' is somewhat misleading
>in relation to entropy anyway because it tends to have a primary
>connotation of messiness. Messiness is not really necessarily a part the
>relevant idea in entropy. Rather, the main idea is of a measure of the
>size of the huge plurality of possible microscopic states. Better
>analogical terms/phrases would be amount of microscopic uncertainty,
>amount of missing microscopic information and/or amount of randomness at
>the microscopic level. 'Disorder' would be ok if it was carefully
>defined in an appropriate technical way (related to the microscopics of
>the situation) to purge it of its distracting common connotations
>(especially at the macroscopic level), but then we wouldn't necessarily
>think that the refined concept as what we usually think of by the term
>'disorder'.
I have no problem with defining terms, when (if) we ever get to start
discussing the SLoT! But I don't necessarily accept David's definitions
as gospel.
[...]
>SJ>Indeed, I would ask David to state his understanding of what exactly *are*
>>these "earth-based and cosmic arguments" which are "bogus" in the sense
>>of "*subtly* false". And I don't ask David just to regurgitate my arguments
>>back to me.
DB>Do I have this straight? 1. You accuse me of misunderstanding your
>arguments (which might actually be possible since you did not actually
>explain them; you merely quoted Ratzsch and others and apparently
>expected those quotes to speak for you).
What is David's question here then? He admits he might misunderstand
my arguments!
DB>2. You want to test my
>understanding or misunderstanding of these arguments by telling back to
>you what I think they are, but I'm not actually allowed to tell you
>precisely what those arguments are based on whatever meager explanations
>of your own position you may have happened to have mentioned. What kind
>of test is this? I think the Ratzsch quote is pretty self-explanatory as
>to what the cosmic argument is that I object to (and I thought was
>yours). If this is not your argument, why did you repeatedly throw out
>the quote to people on the reflector in a way that suggested it *was*
>your argument?
David claimed that I received certain "bogus" creationist arguments
on the SLoT and passed them on innocently like "counterfeit money".
I am asking David to support his claim by stating non-circularly
what these original "bogus" creationist arguments were that I was
supposed to have received.
DB>Just in case that your interpretation of the cosmic argument mentioned in
>the Ratzsch quote is different than mine I give my interpretation here:
>
> The 2nd law (in its simplest form) applies to closed systems. In such
> systems the entropy cannot decrease. The entropy is a measure of the
> amount of disorder in the closed system. The whole universe is a
> closed system. Cosmic evolution has the universe generating evermore
> order and organization as time goes on. Therefore cosmic evolution and
> the 2nd law are incompatible (i.e. either cosmic evolution violates the
> 2nd law, or the 2nd law precludes cosmic evolution).
I don't want to get into debating the SLoT yet. That will derail this
preliminary stage. Unless David agrees to my terms about his intimidatory
comments about my posts being "noise", and him accepting my quotes from
physics textbooks, there is no point to continuing.
But I will say that this is not what *I* claim. I am not even sure it is
what Ratzsch says that YECs claim. David evidently has not read my posts
carefully enough (presumably because he thinks they are just "noise") and
mistakes my clarification of what YECs claim to be what I claim.
DB>The above argument is subtly and deceptively wrong and is therefore
>bogus.
See above. I don't necessarily disagree. It is not what I claim. But I
don't want to get into this yet. David can argue this later when (if)
we have agreed on our terms. Otherwise we will get nowhere.
DB>Regarding the earth-based arguments, they typically state that the 2nd
>law is incompatible with biological evolution on Earth. There seem to
>be a greater number of permutations of this main argument (than the
>cosmic one above) but a typical such argument is given below:
>
> The 2nd law says that entropy can only increase with time. Entropy is
> a measure of disorder. Things must decay with time and not generate
> any new order. Evolution has living things becoming more complicated
> and ordered over geological time and therefore evolution is impossible.
> The evolutionists often claim that we creationists are neglecting the
> fact that the Earth is an open system and that it receives energy from
> the Sun so that evolutionary processes can create more ordered
> organisms by using the energy of the Sun as long as there is more total
> entropy or decay going on elsewhere. But their argument ignores the
> fact that for such an open system that generates order there needs to
> be a pre-existent energy conversion system that creates the order out
> of the chaos. Raw energy coming from the Sun can't create the order.
> A bull in a china shop provides energy to the shop's china pieces, but
> it doesn't create order; it only destroys any order that is already
> present. The energy has to be properly directed and focused by the
> energy conversion system. Biological evolution is supposedly blind and
> random and happened without any such guiding mechanism. The chance of
> this happening spontaneously is like that of a tornado passing through
> a junkyard and leaving behind a 747 airplane.
Again this is not what I claim, and I don't think it is even what YECs
claim. But again I don't want to debate this at this stage.
BTW, is David saying that *these* are the "bogus" arguments that I
received and passed on?
DB>I should mention that there exist some other mutations of the above
>Earth-based argument (possibly of some of the more recent ones) that
>may either add to or replace the supposedly needed pre-existent "energy
>conversion system" with a needed directing process whereby an externally
>supplied source of specified information needs to direct and orchestrate
>the generation of order in nature. I think other versions of the
>argument may just try to apply it to only the case of abiogenesis and not
>necessarily biological evolution per se.
See above.
DB>Neither of these above arguments actually indicate any incompatibility
>with the 2nd law of thermo. To the extent that one may be led to by
>these arguments to believe that that biological evolution *is*
>incompatible with the 2nd law, to that extent the arguments are deceptive
>and thus are bogus (i.e. subtly false) besides being plain incorrect.
See above.
DB>[BTW, I fail to understand the depth of the reaction that Stephen has had
>to my use of the term 'bogus'. I still can't follow Stephen's reasoning
>about the term having "emotional" connotations and implications of
>"immoral" motives, etc. I truly didn't see my explanation of my choice
>of the word as being any sort of "damage" control". Maybe the word has
>more a more sinister and depraved connotation down under than it has
>here. In the US the term is not so *personally* perjorative. It is used
>more in an impersonal sense about things, not about people or their
>motives. Since Stephen seems to have (for whatever reason) taken its use
>so personally I apologize for having chosen the word. (It just seemed
>such an apt characterization of these arguments.) So, Stephen, please
>accept my apology here for any offense my characterization caused you.
>This apology *is* an attempt at damage control.]
Apology accepted.
DB>I don't know my above versions of the cosmic and earth-based arguments
>actually represent Stephen's (current) view or not. I had assumed that
>his repeated use of the Ratzsch quote indicated that he did not agree
>with such an earth-based view and only agreed with the cosmic argument
>described there. But Stephen seems to talk out of both sides of his
>mouth on this without explicitly and carefully giving his position, and
>sometimes it seems that he agrees with it, and sometimes it seems he does
>not. For instance, in his two posts to the reflector that I had
>responded to him pointing out how both (Earth-based and cosmic) arguments
>were bogus (er, sorry, 'subtly false') we read him saying:
David's problem is he doesn't listen carefully enough to what I say. He
mistakes my clarification of what YECs are saying with what *I* say. The
logic of that would make Ratzsch to be believing what YECs say because
he tried to clarify what they say.
DB>http://www.calvin.edu/archive/evolution/199608/0201.html
>Re: TE is an oxymoron 1/2
>Stephen Jones (sejones@ibm.net)
>Sun, 18 Aug 96 21:43:48 +0800
>
>> ...
>>NR>*Evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics:
>>>producing order from disorder is possible with the addition of
>>>energy, such as from the sun.
>>
>>Too simplistic. Energy alone is insufficient. There must also be an
>>energy conversion mechanism:
I answered this is my post of 03 Sep 96 which David apparently did
not receive. When we get past these preliminary's I will post my
answer in full, with my updated comments.
[...]
DB>and
>
SJ>http://www.calvin.edu/archive/evolution/199707/0193.html
>Re: Origin of life, thermodynamics 2/2 #1A
>Stephen Jones (sejones@ibm.net)
>Thu, 17 Jul 97 18:42:30 +0800
>
>> ...
>>1. The second law of thermodynamics cannot be ignored in evolutionary
>>theory bercause Evolution and entropy are headed in opposite
>>directions; and
>>
>>2. Naturalistic evolution is contradicted by the second law of
>>thermodynamics, *unless there is a pre-existing energy-conversion
>>system*:
>> ...
>
>But, OTOH, more recently we read in Stephen's 27 MAR 00 post on this
>thread:
>
>SJ>See above re David's strawman claim that I "conclude that evolution
>>violates the 2nd law". I actually say the *exact opposite*.
>
>and likewise in his 01 APR 00 post we read:
>
>SJ> ... This shows in his repeated claims
>>that I am saying that "evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics"
>>when AFAIK I have never said that, and in fact have said the exact opposite.
>
>And in his latest 06 APR 00 post we read:
>
>SJ>I do not even accept that what David calls generically "the earth-based and
>>cosmic arguments", are necessarily the same as what I am arguing.
>
>(Why then did you bring up the Ratzsch and other quotes? Why are we
>having this discussion? Again, please explain what you *are* arguing.)
See above. The answer is simple, and if David was not so prejudiced against
me, a person of his undoubted intellect would see it first time. It is that
David confuses two things: 1) Ratzsch's (and my) clarification of what YECs
are really saying (without necessarily agreeing with it); and 2) my own
position on what *I* am saying.
There is some similarity between my position and what the YECs say, but
it is not identical. But I will make that clear when (if) we get past
these preliminaries.
>SJ> For
>>example, David still seems to perceive that I am arguing that "evolution
>>violates the second law of thermodynamics" when from the beginning I
>>have never said that.
DB>I guess I don't know how to put these various excerpts together in a
>compatible way which could possibly describe a noncontradictory position.
>I expect that Stephen would attach some great significance to the fact
>that the exact quote of the phrase "evolution violates the second law of
>thermodynamics" doesn't explicitly appear in his quoted claims. However,
>I fail to see how this makes any real difference. The thrusts of the
>various claims in the various quotes separately seem clear. But not when
>one tries to consider them all together. It certainly doesn't make the
>task of trying to understand Stephen's position any easier when he
>refuses to carefully and explicitly explain himself.
Maybe now David will now "know how to put these various excerpts together
in a compatible way which could possibly describe a noncontradictory
position"!
>SJ>David is making a general claim that *all* the "earth-based and
>>cosmic arguments" regarding the SLoT that creationists post are "bogus".
DB>No, I don't think so. I was only objecting to the ones mentioned in the
>Ratzsch quote. I certainly have not scoured the literature to find
>all possible creationist arguments regarding the 2nd law to see if
>every one of them could reasonably be characterized as bogus (subtly
>false).
Well, since "the ones mentioned in the Ratzsch quote" are no more what
I believe than what Ratzsch believes, then maybe *my* claims are not
"bogus" after all?
>Now in his 01 APR 00 post we also read:
>
>SJ>I have *not* conceded that either my "earth-based argument" or my
>>"cosmic one" were incorrect. Indeed, I still believe they are *both*
>>correct.
DB>So here it seems that Stephen *does* apparently make both an Earth-based
>and cosmic argument about evolution and the second law..
There is no "apparently" about it. I *do*!
DB>I suppose that
>whatever these arguments actually are they must effectively claim that
>evolution is compatible with the 2nd law in both the cosmic and earth-
>based cases. Otherwise, it would not be the "exact opposite" of the
>claim that the 2nd law is violated. But if this is the case, then what
>kind of argument is that? It would not be much of an argument against
>evolution now would it? What would the point of such an argument be?
If David had been taking any notice of what I have been saying all
along, instead of assuming that I was just saying what the YECs were
saying, he might have found out long ago, what "the point of such an
argument" was!
It may well be (and I thought I posted it at the beginning of this
thread) that at the end of the day there may not be much difference
between David and I.
IMHO this whole thing has been blown out of all proportion by David
because he was looking for faults in physics arguments, and thought
that he had found what he was looking for in mine.
[...]
[continued]
Steve
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nor, fourthly, would any man in his senses think the existence of the
watch, with its various machinery, accounted for, by being told that it was
one out of possible combinations of material forms; that whatever he had
found in the place where he found the watch, must have contained some
internal configuration or other; and that this configuration might be the
structure now exhibited, viz. of the works of a watch, as well as a different
structure." (Paley W., "Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence
and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature,"
[1802], St. Thomas Press: Houston, TX, 1972, reprint, p.4)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Apr 08 2000 - 10:32:36 EDT