From: ingles@engin.umich.edu (Ray Ingles)
Subject: Re: Believers: What Would Make You Not Believe In GOD?
Date: Sat, 09 Jan 93 20:57:27 EST
Organization: University of Michigan Engineering, Ann Arbor
Keywords: So I fixed it

In article <C0LztA.7wF.1@cs.cmu.edu> drake+@cs.cmu.edu (Drake) writes:
>ingles@engin.umich.edu (Ray Ingles) writes:
[deletions]
>> Well, if someone walked up to me, put their hand on my forehead, and
>>cried, "In the name of __________ you now have 20/20 vision without
>>glasses!" and had it come true, I would be inclined to pay them some
>>attention, at least about whatever they used to fill in the _________.
>
>Some attention, but that's about it.  My guess is that you'd come up with
>some sort of explanation for it that did not include the premise of God.
>I know I would.  I have one already: anybody can do miracles if they just
>believe hard enough.  This guy did.  It was his belief that cured you,
>even though what he believed in was bogus.

 "Some attention" I said, and "some attention" I meant. I did *not* say
I would be instantly converted. What the 'healer' had to say about their
deit(y,ies) woudl be as important as the healing itself. If it didn't
hang together, I'd have to come up with another explanation.
 (Yours, BTW, seems a tad simplistic; how the the 'believe hard enough'
effect mediated? Correcting my eyesight would involve reshaping my eyes
in a fairly precise manner. Where did the necessary information come from?
Etc.)

[2nd Law deletions]
>I, for one, would like to hear your explanation of this; it's used a lot
>by Xian's trying to 'prove' that God created the universe (not realizing
>that establishing this as given does absolutely nothing for their
>religious theories).  How is it that I can better debate them on this
>point?

 Point to snowflakes, for one thing. Unless they hold that God sculpts
them individually (and be warned, they may, and cite some Bible passages
to back them up (there's one about how snow and hail are kept in
storehouses)) it's an example of complexity arising from disorder in a
limited area.
 The second point, of course, is that entropy is only constrained to
rise in a closed system. The Earth is not a closed system, we get
bignum ergs of energy from the sun, and we radiate heat out into space
every night. To illustrate the relevance of this, make a demonstration
out of, say, a two-liter bottle. Put a divider in the middle with a hole
in it. Put salt on one side, and water on the other. Seal the thing.
 Let the doubter shake it up, go wild, dissolve all the salt into the
water- increase the entropy, in other words. Then drain the saltwater
into one side, leaving the other side empty. Then put the bottle outside
so the saltwater is in the sun and the empty side is in the shade.
 The sun will cause the water to evaporate, and the water will condense in
the cooler, shaded side. Eventually, it will be all salt on one side and
all water on the other, just like when you started out. (The above stolen
from _Engines_Of_Creation_ of K. Eric Drexler.)
 Anyway, as an EE student I'm not the best one to be expounding on this;
I just read talk.origins where this notion rears its ugly head every five
minutes or so.

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles
 ingles@engin.umich.edu

 "Anybody who has ever seen a photograph showing the kind of damage that a
trout traveling that fast can inflict on the human skull knows that such
photographs are very valuable. I paid $20 for mine." - Dave Barry
Newsgroups: alt.atheism,talk.religion.misc