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Fermi: Where Are They?

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Peter Burfeind contemplates the Fermi Paradox and atheists’ obsession with aliens in this post.

In a sense, Christian presumptions and its claim of historicity for biblical miracles is more consistent with what should be happening given the premises of evolutionary science. A complex and powerful Godhead with anthropomorphic habits, dimension-jumping beings doing God’s bidding or working against it, frequent interventions in history accompanied by bizarre occurrences in nature—isn’t this what we’d expect in a universe given all the oddities of physics in the context of evolutionary randomness?

Meanwhile, the aliens arising from the imagination of modern science fiction, because they have no affiliation whatsoever with the evidence at hand, have a little more than the whiff of blind faith associated with them. Unlike say, Christian faith, where powerful objective evidence creates an ongoing intellectual crisis calling one to abandon subjective thinking, blind faith in something lacking any objective basis leaves only the subject’s imagination as the focus of query.

 

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Great work, Born Again, as usual. Your hard work is making a difference. Quite a ministry!Truth Will Set You Free
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Thus the randomness inherent in the Entropy of the universe is actually proof for Theism and is not proof for Atheism, as the materialist, apparently, falsely believes in his constant appeal to randomness as the ultimate 'God substitute'. The second major problem, for the materialist, is that Entropy, i.e. the universal tendency of things to decay towards disorder, almost directly contradicts the claims of Darwinists that increases in functional complexity/information/order can easily be had. IOW, not only does Evolution not have any known universal law to appeal to to base its math on, (as other overarching theories of science have known laws to base their math on), the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. Entropy, a law with great mathematical explanatory power in science, almost directly contradicts Darwinian claims that increases in functional complexity/information can be easily had:
Why Tornados Running Backward do not Violate the Second Law – Granville Sewell – May 2012 – article with video Excerpt: So, how does the spontaneous rearrangement of matter on a rocky, barren, planet into human brains and spaceships and jet airplanes and nuclear power plants and libraries full of science texts and novels, and supercomputers running partial differential equation solving software , represent a less obvious or less spectacular violation of the second law—or at least of the fundamental natural principle behind this law—than tornados turning rubble into houses and cars? Can anyone even imagine a more spectacular violation? https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/why-tornados-running-backward-do-not-violate-the-second-law/ “Gain in entropy always means loss of information, and nothing more.” Gilbert Newton Lewis – preeminent Chemist of the first half of last century
Thus, the materialist’s appeal to ‘uncaused randomness’ to try to get around the necessity of God backfires on the materialist greatly since, number 1, Entropy, i.e. the source for randomness in the universe, is proof for Theism not atheism, and 2, the type of ‘decaying randomness’ inherent in Entropy is completely antithetical to the claims of Darwinists that increasing complexity and order are supposedly easy to achieve: Verse and quote:
Psalm 102:25-27 Of old You laid the foundation of the earth, And the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You will endure; Yes, they will all grow old like a garment; Like a cloak You will change them, And they will be changed. But You are the same, And Your years will have no end. “We have the sober scientific certainty that the heavens and earth shall ‘wax old as doth a garment’…. Dark indeed would be the prospects of the human race if unilluminated by that light which reveals ‘new heavens and a new earth.’” Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907) – pioneer in many different fields, particularly electromagnetism and thermodynamics.
bornagain77
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as to this comment:
In a sense, Christian presumptions and its claim of historicity for biblical miracles is more consistent with what should be happening given the premises of evolutionary science. A complex and powerful Godhead with anthropomorphic habits, dimension-jumping beings doing God’s bidding or working against it, frequent interventions in history accompanied by bizarre occurrences in nature—isn’t this what we’d expect in a universe given all the oddities of physics in the context of evolutionary randomness?
A few notes:
The Absurdity of Inflation, String Theory and The Multiverse - Dr. Bruce Gordon - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff_sNyGNSko
Here is the last power-point slide of the preceding video:
The End Of Materialism? * In the multiverse, anything can happen for no reason at all. * In other words, the materialist is forced to believe in random miracles as an explanatory principle. * In a Theistic universe, nothing happens without a reason. Miracles are therefore intelligently directed deviations from divinely maintained regularities, and are thus expressions of rational purpose. * Scientific materialism is (therefore) epistemically self defeating: it makes scientific rationality impossible.
Moreover, besides postulating randomness at the beginning of the universe being 'epistemically self defeating' for the atheistic materialist, the randomness postulate in Darwinian evolution, at least the way materialists typically use it, is indistinguishable from the Theist’s own appeal to a miracle from God.
Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness – Talbott – Fall 2011 Excerpt: The situation calls to mind a widely circulated cartoon by Sidney Harris, which shows two scientists in front of a blackboard on which a body of theory has been traced out with the usual tangle of symbols, arrows, equations, and so on. But there’s a gap in the reasoning at one point, filled by the words, “Then a miracle occurs.” And the one scientist is saying to the other, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.” In the case of evolution, I picture Dennett and Dawkins filling the blackboard with their vivid descriptions of living, highly regulated, coordinated, integrated, and intensely meaningful biological processes, and then inserting a small, mysterious gap in the middle, along with the words, “Here something random occurs.” This “something random” looks every bit as wishful as the appeal to a miracle. It is the central miracle in a gospel of meaninglessness, a “Randomness of the gaps,” demanding an extraordinarily blind faith. At the very least, we have a right to ask, “Can you be a little more explicit here?” http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/evolution-and-the-illusion-of-randomness
Wolfgang Pauli comments on the shell game that Darwinists play with the word ‘chance’ here
Pauli’s ideas on mind and matter in the context of contemporary science – Harald Atmanspacher Excerpt: “In discussions with biologists I met large difficulties when they apply the concept of ‘natural selection’ in a rather wide field, without being able to estimate the probability of the occurrence in a empirically given time of just those events, which have been important for the biological evolution. Treating the empirical time scale of the evolution theoretically as infinity they have then an easy game, apparently to avoid the concept of purposesiveness. While they pretend to stay in this way completely ‘scientific’ and ‘rational,’ they become actually very irrational, particularly because they use the word ‘chance’, not any longer combined with estimations of a mathematically defined probability, in its application to very rare single events more or less synonymous with the old word ‘miracle.’” Wolfgang Pauli (pp. 27-28) http://www.igpp.de/english/tda/pdf/paulijcs8.pdf
Robert C. Sproul points out: “By calling the unknown cause ‘chance’ for so long, people begin to forget that a substitution was made. . . . The assumption that ‘chance equals an unknown cause’ has come to mean for many that ‘chance equals cause.’”
The Universal Determinism Dichotomy (UDD) – David L. Abel – 2015 Excerpt: We sometimes appeal to yet-to-be-discovered laws when trying to explain what appears to be chance phenomena. Most theorists, however, attempt to reduce Chance Contingency to unknown and/or very complex physical causation, as summarized by Peale.12 Thus Chance Contingency as a true cause may be only “apparent.” Sproul argues effectively that chance is not a cause of anything. Chance is nothing more than a statistical description of unknown or complex physical causation. Chance, therefore, cannot have any physical effects, since it is not a physical cause. 13,,, 13. Sproul RC. – Not a Chance: the Myth of Chance in Modern Science and Cosmology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books; 1994 https://www.academia.edu/12267097/The_Universal_Determinism_Dichotomy_UDD_
Nobel laureate Jacques L. Monod, for one, used this chance-equals-cause line of reasoning.
“Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, [is] at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution,” Monod wrote. “Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance.” - Monod
In ‘only by chance’ Monod does what many other materialists do—he elevates chance to a creative principle that is indistinguishable from the Theist’s own appeal to a miracle from God. Chance, as it is used by materialists, is, in fact, offered as the ultimate ‘God substitute’ by materialists. i.e. As the ‘uncaused cause’ by which the universe and all life in it came to be. For Darwinists to say a mutation “happened randomly by chance", as it is typically used by Darwinists, is in reality a ‘placeholder for ignorance’ instead of being an appeal to a known cause. And is, in fact, no different from the Theists own appeal to a miracle from God. Thus, when an atheist adamantly claims that something randomly happened by chance, we have every right to ask the atheist, as Talbott pointed out, “Can you be a little more explicit here?” Moreover, if we try to be ‘a little more explicit here’, then we find that the ‘randomness postulate’ of materialists falls completely apart upon closer examination and that the 'randomness postulate' of atheists actually ends up supporting theism rather than supporting atheism. First off, if one wants to build a better random number generator for a computer program then a better source of entropy is required to be found to drive the increased randomness:
Cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator Excerpt: From an information theoretic point of view, the amount of randomness, the entropy that can be generated is equal to the entropy provided by the system. But sometimes, in practical situations, more random numbers are needed than there is entropy available. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographically_secure_pseudorandom_number_generator
,,, There are two major problems, for the materialist, with Entropy being found to be the primary source of randomness in the universe. The first problem is that Entropy is, by far, the most finely tuned of initial conditions of the universe, and therefore Entropy itself powerfully points to Theism. Moreover, the randomness inherent in Entropy is not truly random as atheist envision it to be, but Entropy is governed by a constant.
The Physics of the Small and Large: What is the Bridge Between Them? Roger Penrose Excerpt: “The time-asymmetry is fundamentally connected to with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: indeed, the extraordinarily special nature (to a greater precision than about 1 in 10^10^123, in terms of phase-space volume) can be identified as the “source” of the Second Law (Entropy).” http://irafs.org/irafs_1/cd_irafs02/texts/penrose.pdf "This now tells us how precise the Creator's aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123." - Roger Penrose - (from the Emperor’s New Mind, Penrose, pp 339-345 copyright 1989, Penguin Books) How special was the big bang? http://www.ws5.com/Penrose/ Bruce Gordon, PhD math, discusses the initial entropy of the universe in this following video The Multiverse confirms the Ontological Argument for God https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgDn_k11ups&t=12s The Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann first linked entropy and probability in 1877. However, the equation as shown, involving a specific constant, was first written down by Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics in 1900. In his 1918 Nobel Prize lecture, Planck said: This constant is often referred to as Boltzmann’s constant, although, to my knowledge, Boltzmann himself never introduced it – a peculiar state of affairs, which can be explained by the fact that Boltzmann, as appears from his occasional utterances, never gave thought to the possibility of carrying out an exact measurement of the constant. Nothing can better illustrate the positive and hectic pace of progress which the art of experimenters has made over the past twenty years, than the fact that since that time, not only one, but a great number of methods have been discovered for measuring the mass of a molecule with practically the same accuracy as that attained for a planet. http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/B/Boltzmann_equation.html
bornagain77
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