What does the phrase "survival of the fittest" mean?

[Dr. Shane]

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I never realized that your purpose here on C/A was to be the channel through which God reaches the "unbelievers."

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Wow! That is an amazing admission. God wishes to use each of us to reach unbelievers in every avenue of our lives. BTW: I never said that Brother Bevin isn't a believer. In fact, by calling him brother I am showing I consider him a believer (we are not related).

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Or that God needed you in order for Him to reach ... anyone.

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He doesn't need me or you. He wants us. He could use the rocks to preach the gospel if He wanted. It is our priveledge to be used by the Lord.

[Dr. Shane]

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I doubt that Shane meant such, but he sure sounded like he sees himself as another Ellen White when he made his "no additional light" comment.

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Come on now, Brother Matthews. That was a humble admission that Brother Dwight Hornbacher is so much smarter than me that if he couldn't convince someoneto belive in the Scriptural account of creation, I certainly cannot.

[Dr. Shane]

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Science does not support a recent creation.

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Science in regard to this subject is complete speculation. We don't know how much nitrogen was in the air or soil before the flood. We don't know how much O2 was in the air. We don't know what the condition of the ozone was. We don't know how the water cycle worked prior to the flood. We assume the speed of light has always been constant but we don't know. There are so many possiblities and we really have realativly a small amount of evidence to analyze.

However one thing we can trust in is God's Word. There is a lot of evidence for a global flood. Is it conclusive? No, but that should prevent us from talking about it when we trust in God's Word. Science is conflicting but that is because we have only a few pieces to a giant puzzle. It is silly for anyone to claim to have scientific conclusions when they have so few pieces of a puzzle they can't possibly see the whole picture. Yet those of us that believe in the Word of God needn't rely completely on science. God has told us how life began. We need only believe Him.

[there buster]

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If there were no entropy, salt wouldn't dissolve in water.

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Actually, all it takes is a refinement of our understanding of entropy. A uniform saline solution is not less organized than pure water and salt crystals, it's simply organized differently.

And a uniform saline solution can, for example, conduct electricity more efficiently than pure water or salt crystals. So, arguably, it can actually do more work, not less.

Besides which, there's more than simple entropy at work in solution, otherwise glass would dissolve in water, too.

Entropy, as the inevitable tendency of things to decay and increase in disorder, is simply contrary to the image of God the Bible paints.

In any case, the idea of a conflict between the world God created and the Word God inspired is self-contradictory. The problem is not that science contradicts the Bible, or vice versa, but a failure of imagination and intellect.

It was Einstein who said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

[bevin]

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The Bible claims that the pond was once radically different, that different natural laws applied. But the poor believer in scientism says, "There's no scientific evidence for that," i.e., "there's nothing like that in the pond." As you can see, he misses the entire point.

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It is not the absence of evidence that is the problem.

It is the presence of contrary evidence that is the problem.

In the Origins Forum I listed a long list of unrelated pieces of evidence that ALL point to a very old Earth. Unfortunately it is only a small portion of the very much larger list that could be assembled.

EVEN WITH RADICAL CHANGES most of those items can not be explained by a short-term creation model - because they point very directly at very long ages.

Here is the list again...

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Geology

- Continental drift: Barely accepted science in the early 1970's, solidly supported by measurements, by fossils, by rock formations, by the distribution of species in the 1980's. It is truely difficult to explain New Zealand in a short-age model - and easy in the long-age model.

- Paleomagnetism: The magnetic fields measured in the rocks of the mid-Atlantic rift clearly speak of long ages

- Meteors and glaciers: The distribution of meteors in the Antarctic ice clearly show huge periods of time as the meteors fall, are carried by the glaciers, and deposited where the glaciers end.

- Limestone: The White Cliffs of Dover are obviously made from shells, and it takes a long time to produce that many

- Coal: There is a LOT of it

- Cold mountains: Bent strata requires huge amounts of heat and pressure, and it takes a LONG time for the mountains to cool down afterwards

- Huge Meteor impact craters - severely eroded

- World-wide iridium dust

Biology

- The fossil record

- The similarities and differences between modern species

- Ice cores clearly showing 100's of thousands of years

Archeology

- We know so much about history back to 2000 BC that there simply is not enough time for Noah's flood to have wiped the Earth clean, and then get the ancient civilizations that we find solid evidence of

I never heard a short-age creationist produce a plausible explanation for any of the above items, or for many more.

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Here is where, for me, the rubber meets the road. Short Age creationists are always telling me that they have explanations, but they never actually produce a single credible one.

/Bevin

[bevin]

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Is it such a stretch to posit that where God rules completely, there is no Entropy?

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Entropy is a measurable property of any system.

You can't not-have entropy, any and all systems can have this measurement made of them.

I think you are confusing the measurable property with an experimental observation that, in a closed system, the result of this measurement usually increases.

I say usually, because there is no actual physical law that says it must always increase. It is just that the more complex the system is, the more likely it is to increase - and for reasonable sized system it is incredibly unlikely to decrease.

/Bevin

[Dr. Shane]

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Short Age creationists are always telling me that they have explanations, but they never actually produce a single credible one.

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Do you know what all these creationists that are talking to you have in common? It is you. They are all talking to you. Has it ever occured to you that perhaps the problem may not lie with all these creationists? Maybe people just don't like to talk to a brick wall. Maybe they don't like talking to someone with their fingers in their ears. The problem isn't that there isn't explanations. The problem is that you turn people off so much that they have no time for you.

[bevin]

No, what most of them have in common, whether they are talking to me or anybody else, is a long list of excuses for why they can't or won't produce the explanations...

[Robert]

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a long list of excuses for why they can't or won't produce the explanations...

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You are relying too much on the human intellect. All these foolish, egocentric, pride-filled exercises of "the flesh" will get you a hardened heart!

What you need is to submit your mind to God and study His word with a heart filled with appreciation.

Rob

• God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

[Dr. Shane]

I use to think the whole world was wrong too. Now I learn the more time I spend examining the guy in the mirror the more problems I am able to solve.

We are all sinners. None of us are perfect. That includes all the PhDs too. The only thing we can trust is the Word of God. When we get to heaven we will see how incomplete our evidence here on Earth is.

Creationists trust the Word of God more than evolutionistic speculation. They too speculate - no doubt about it. Both sides speculate. There simply isn't enough evidence, and no way to gain such without traveling through time, to do anything but speculate. We just don't know exactly how the earth and its matter was during Eden or before the flood. We must learn such things in order to make sense out of the pieces of the puzzle we have today.

What we do know is that God created the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. We know that because He told us with His own mouth and wrote it with His own finger. And God doesn't lie.

[there buster]

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Entropy is a measurable property of any system.

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Quoth the pond-dweller.

[NormF]

Regarding the refutation of my statement that science deals only in facts, post #180577 ...

It appears to me that Ed D and I are clearly speaking over each other. His points are, for all practical purposes, mine exactly. Our conclusions differ, but not the input that leads to them. What a strange way of communicating. I said it before, but I'll say it again. We're using the same words, but with the way we're using them, it boils down to this: we're speaking two different languages.

By the way, how many have studied the history of this origins debate?

We are rehashing dialog that has been thrashed over hundreds, if not thousands, of times before, by people far more eloquent than we. It's a pity we have to get so worked up over reruns.

Regards,

Norm

[bevin]

Ed, when I use the word 'entropy' in a scientific discussion, it has a fairly precise set of meanings.

http://physics.about.com/cs/thermodynamics/g/Entropy.htm

What do you want the word to mean?

/Bevin