Thomas, I've got a question or two about Ross.
thomas malloy wrote:
Taking it one step further there is Ross's book Creator and the Cosmos.
What's Ross's position on the age of the Earth?
I _thought_ he was the young-Earth creationist and hydrologist who had
attributed continent formation and lots of other stuff to the Genesis
flood. Needless to say there are problems with that notion. But when I
looked him up online, it appeared that he's actually over on the other
side of the debate; in particular, he's credited with the "local flood"
notion, which is a serious attempt to square the biblical account with
history as we know it from extra-biblical sources.
So, is he a hydrologist, as I thought? Just what _does_ he feel the
flood did?
I looked through the TOC of Creator and the Cosmos (Amazon has it on
line); without looking at the actual book I can't tell what his
positions are but he's apparently at least on speaking terms with a lot
of mainstream science.
There are many conditions and physical constants: if any of them were
changed, life would be impossible.
Inflation theory and the anthropic principle do a somewhat plausible job
of explaining this. With the original Big Bang theory, on the other
hand, it was hard to avoid the need for an intelligent First Cause.
Have you read Hawking's Brief History of Time? It's very light (no
math) but none the less quite interesting, as it's mostly a
history-of-science book. In it, Hawking's discussing who thought what
when, and why they thought it, rather than propounding a particular
theory of everything.
It's not just an individual cell that's complicated, it's the whole
web of life, which collectively reverses entropy
No it doesn't, no more so than lots of other reactions which reverse
entropy _locally_.
Pumping energy into a system allows you to reverse entropy within that
system, but in that case it's not a closed system. If you close the
system, so that no energy enters or leaves, then you find there's no net
entropy reversal going on, and that's true of living systems as well as
nonliving sytsems.
There is nothing we currently know about life processes which violates
the rules of ordinary chemistry, and ordinary chemical reactions
(including those within living things) certainly obey the laws of
thermodynamics as they are currently understood. In other words,
biochemists do not need to resort to miraculous explanations to describe
the functioning of cells. If the processes in living cells "reversed
entropy" they would, indeed, need to be explained as an ongoing miracle
(or we'd need to discard thermodynamics).
If you want to see the source of the "entropy reversal" to which you
refer look at any green plant. That's where the energy is coming into
the system, and that's where simple molecules are being assembled into
more complex, more organized, and more energetic forms. Cut off the
sunlight and the whole system grinds to a halt.
both in concentrating solar energy into phytochemicals, it's the DNA.
It's a control system which resets itself through the sexual fusion
process. The biotechnicians were unable to come up with a function for
the majority of DNA, so they labeled it "junk DNA." What hubris! IMHO,
it acts as a receiver for a form of energy that we don't understand.
We are threatening their religion, and they don't like it one little bit
I don't know Park personally so I don't know whether that judgement of
him is correct.
I do, however, know that an awful lot of physicists who are _not_
pathological skeptics would be outraged at claims either that life as we
know it violates the second law, or that the Earth was created just 6000
years ago.
Claiming an intelligent "first cause" is something else again and is
much harder to dismiss, but since the "intelligent first cause"
hypothesis produces no testable predictions it can't really be classed
as a "scientific theory".
