Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Origin of the Universe and Life: Random or Designed

Genesis 1:1 starts:  "In the beginning God."  The most basic understanding of world view comes down to whether you support those four English words or not.  If you accept them, that changes everything for you.  You are no longer free to assign meaning and value to the world.  God does that for you.  Since there is a beginning, there's also an ending.  Everything begins and ends with God.

The alternative to design is random.  And the alternative to random is design.  That's why if the evidence and probability is against random, then the scientific conclusion is design.  You don't have a third choice.  If everything is random, then no objective meaning can be assigned to the universe or life.  Everything came about by accident.  If everything is an accident, there can't be right or wrong.  The consistent position of a random universe and life is amorality.   Nothing can be said to be right or wrong.  There is no truth, no goodness, and no beauty.

No accident, which is what everything would be in a random universe, could be responsible for anything.  I understand that the world doesn't look like an accident, but that is beside the point.  Many people today say that it is the result of blind chance and yet we can also make moral judgments.  In other words, they choose to borrow a theistic (Christian) world view to argue for some type of morality.  They choose what they want for their world, in that world there is no controlling authority, and yet there is sufficient morality for their own convenience.

No random universe and life advocate should argue right or wrong.  He has no basis to do so.  When he does, he capitulates to a designed or created universe or life.   Or  in other words, he has conceded to a theistic world view.   So everyone lives according to a design origin.  They can't live otherwise, because there is no other alternative.  There is no choice between random and design.  It's a false choice, because design is all that exists.

The random side says that with enough chance and time, the universe and life could have originated and evolved.  To start, this ignores the second law of thermodynamics.  The energy necessary to sustain the repeated accidents until one sustainable useful, correct event occurred has depleted to the extent that the possibilities are increasingly remote.  It also ignores the law of biogenesis,  Life comes from life, not non-life.   When life is "created" in a laboratory, it always interacts with life of some sort.  Never has life randomly risen from non-life.

It's not just that one jackpot must be hit in the lottery of the universe and life, but those correct accidents must occur repeatedly in a very short, compact period of time.  Winning the lottery is possible, but this isn't about winning the lottery, but about choosing the right numbers day after day for months and years.  No one should believe that.   He should instead believe what he observes, which is a universe and life of design, truth, goodness, and beauty.

2 comments:

Georgi Gladyshev said...

The origin of life can be explained through the study of thermodynamics of universe evolution!
Origin of life and its evolution are the result of action of laws of hierarchical thermodynamics.
Thermodynamics investigates systems which can be characterized by state functions. The separation of biological systems into individual hierarchies of structures allows us to study the processes in them independently of the processes that take place in other hierarchical structures.

Life as a phenomenon is a set of cyclic metabolic processes in ontogeny, phylogeny and evolution. From the perspective of the dynamics of evolutionary transformations of structure of living things life is characterized by the changing of the thermodynamic stability of supramolecular hierarchical structures. In other words, cyclic metabolic processes constantly are enriched by the addition of more stable supramolecular hierarchical structures that are adapting to the changing environment. The thermodynamic design defines adaptation of living objects.

JOHN GARDNER said...

Hi Mr. Gladyshev,
Could you explain the origin of thermodymnamics?
Blessings