From: drake+@cs.cmu.edu (Drake)
Subject: Re: Believers: What Would Make You Not Believe In GOD?
Keywords: So I fixed it
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 21:30:55 GMT

In article <+gf=Dg@engin.umich.edu> ingles@engin.umich.edu (Ray Ingles) writes:

>>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.
>
> (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.)

Ummm....a duplication of the shape of the healer's own eyes?  Anyhow....this
is getting silly.  I'll agree that you'd rightfully pay some attention to
it, and so would I.  The point I was making is that you would be prejudiced
in favor of any explanation that you would come up with that could be
accepted while leaving the most of your prior beliefs intact.


> 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.

They may, and have.  I thought of this one a while back.  God is omnipotent,
don't you know?  He can do anything...including make every snowflake
individual.  (BTW, is there any proof that every snowflake is different?
I mean, it would seem to me that there would be a finite number of permutations
of water moleclues in the tiny area of a snowflake.  So there'd HAVE to be
two that were identical, eventually, right?  Unless of course God wants them
all diferrent.  What God wants God gets, even if it isn't possible.) :-)

> 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.

I know, and that's usually what I fall back on.  Is the universe as a whole
not a 'closed system,' however?  The main question, of course, is 'where did
everything come from,' or, as one philosopher put it, 'why is there something
rather than nothing?'  Theism, of course, believes that this question points
directly to their answer...a false notion, of course.

 To illustrate the relevance of this, make a demonstration
>out of, say, a twof-liter bottle.... <experiment deleted>

Very interesting.  I didn't know about that effect.  Thank you.

>I just read talk.origins where this notion rears its ugly head every five
>minutes or so.

Ah...I'll have to check out that newsgroup.  We have a local Xian TV show
here in Pittsburgh called 'Origins' that makes fun of scientists (but
not 'creation scientists'!) while supposedly 'proving' the truth of the
Bible.  I automatically assumed that a Xian point of view would be found
predominating that newsgroup.
-- 
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