DNAunion: I have only a few points I would like to make in reply to David
Bowman's last post about Richard and me and Creationists.
>>>David Bowman: He [Richard Wein] seemed to put words into DNA's mouth.
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DNAunion: I think Richard is innocent - *even if I have already accused
Richard of the same thing*.
Yes, he did say to the effect, "DNAunion says...." and then show those
statements to be wrong, but that does not qualify as of "stuffing", in my
mind.
In my opinion, the act of "stuffing words into someone else's mouth" carries
with it *intent*, for example, with the *purpose* of then knocking down that
claim to discredit the opponent. I don't believe this is what Richard did.
I think Richard *honestly believed* that the person who discussed
"energy-conversion" mechamisms did think they were stating the mechanisms
converted energy into reduced entropy (and further, that he *honestly
believed* that person to have been me). He made an honest mistake, which he
unfortunately then used for the basis of other statements, several of which
were made before I saw that the error had been propagated through 4 or 5
posts.
But my point here is, No bad intent = no foul. I believe this now even
though I may have expressed differently earlier (I can't remember if I
actually posted it here - I know I thought it). I got upset and overreacted,
which caused more of a stir than the act deserved. I hope we can all put
this behind us and move on.
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[...]
>>>David Bowman: The *only* reason I even entered the discussion in the
first place was that DNA had claimed, in response to Chris' claim
(paraphrased here by memory) that matter doesn't have any intrinsic
properties preventing it from organizing itself in complicated ways via
normal natural processes, that, indeed, according to DNA, there *was*
something preventing matter from organizing, and that something was entropy.
I objected (and still object) to this counterclaim that somehow entropy
intrinsically prevents matter from organizing.
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DNAunion: I realize you are paraphrasing off the top of your head, so I am
not faulting you here. But I would to just clarify that I was not stating
that entropy PREVENTS matter from becoming ORDERED - my point was that since
entropy does TEND to inrease, then matter has a TENDENCY towards greater
DISORDER, but this tendency can be OVERCOME.
PS: I purposedly avoided the word ORGANIZE in the above because I am not
sure just how organized of a state natural processes can create. Remember,
organized implies multiple, interdependent components, each serving a
function, and operating together as a whole. This is more than mere order.
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>>>David Bowman: From further discussions with DNA I have learned that he
sees the situation as there being intrinsic default "tendencies" that matter
has, and one of these intrinsic "tendencies" is to "tend" toward
disorder/disorganization. Since DNA allows for these "tendencies" to be
"overcome" under an appropriate set of circumstances, so that the matter
properly obeys the laws of nature describing the matter's behavior under the
actual circumstances present, it doesn't make any practical difference as to
how matter ends up behaving in the end. If the behavior in a given
circumstance is opposed to the tendency, then the circumstances have merely
overcome that tendency. If the behavior is not opposed to the tendency, then
the tendency is not overcome. This view of the situation is effectively that
things tend to follow their tendencies--except when they don't because of the
particular circumstances present. So even though I think this view is a
conceptual violation of Ockham's razor, it has no observational consequences
that can make any difference in the actual scientific description of the
behavior of the system, and therefore is mostly a matter of conceptual
esthetics. It's just that I doubt that Chris had thought of (& I know I
didn't think of) the possibility of such a conceptual picture of the physical
situation when he made his comment about there not being any anything in
nature that prevents matter from oranizing itself in complicated ways.
Since my purpose was not to carefully attribute the source of any extant
concept in Richard's post, but rather to just deal with the concepts therein
no matter *what* the source, I did not try to check up on Richard's
attribution of the phrasing about an "energy conversion mechanism" to
DNAunion.
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>>>DNAunion: Just a reminder that I did not fault David at all for this,
just Richard. And I have since stated that I can easily understand how
Richard could have made the mistake honestly (I myself did the same thing at
least once at this board - as an honest mistake).
As I said above, I think all of us should put this insignificant discrepancy
behind us and move on. No one got "hurt" - all understand the lack of intent.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Nov 16 2000 - 22:16:34 EST