[Gangee]

Don't know where you got the opinion that religion is decreasing but it's wrong. If anything religion is growing far more rapidly than ever before

[faber niger]

Of course not, religion, whilst I don't subscribe to it myself, provides all kinds of group-bonding and comforting roles that would be hard to achieve without the depth of feeling and experience. If we were forced to see life as it really is, very few of us would have the strength to go on. Most people on the Earth have much readier access to suffering than to science, and it'll ever be thus; that's why religion exists (even if you think it's an "opiate of the masses", you should also note the positive functions and connotations that opium-taking had in Marx's time -- most of the soldiers in the trenches as late as WWI were drugged up on the poppy, without it we wouldn't have won the war.)

I think it's a shame that Dawkins, given his excellent work in evolutionary biology, doesn't focus more on the "evolution of religion" and its adapative qualities (after all, nothing could last for all of known human history if it didn't have an evolutionary basis).

[AspiringGenius]

No, Cheistianity/islam/[insert modern religion] came about after the classical beliefs exhibited in Rome and Greece.

Undoubtedly the popularity of the modern religions will fail and some other concoction of idiocracy will replace it.

[lucaf]

(Original post by Dreamweaver)
Entropy tells us that nature tends to move from order to disorder in an uncontrolled system. For example, if pile of bricks were dropped from a lorry, it is more probable that they would form a scattered mess on the floor rather than a wall. Science tells us that it is more probable that the creation of the universe was controlled.

disorder may be more probable than disorder, but that in no way proves a creator. stars and galaxies and planets are more ordered than gas clouds, and yet we know that gravity can cause the collapse of gas clouds into these more ordered structures, a creator is not needed. likewise we know that plants can generate biomass literally from thin air.

[Tycho]

(Original post by jismith1989)
Of course not, religion, whilst I don't subscribe to it myself, provides all kinds of group-bonding and comforting roles that would be hard to achieve without the depth of feeling and experience. If we were forced to see life as it really is, very few of us would have the strength to go on. Most people on the Earth have much readier access to suffering than to science, and it'll ever be thus; that's why religion exists (even if you think it's an "opiate of the masses", you should also note the positive functions and connotations that opium-taking had in Marx's time -- most of the soldiers in the trenches as late as WWI were drugged up on the poppy, without it we wouldn't have won the war.)

I think it's a shame that Dawkins, given his excellent work in evolutionary biology, doesn't focus more on the "evolution of religion" and its adapative qualities (after all, nothing could last for all of known human history if it didn't have an evolutionary basis).

Interesting view. You seem to see religion as more of a psychological coping mechanism than of a real attempt to explain the universe. If that is true, then surely it undermines what it's trying to preach? If this really is the form religion is taking, then does it have a future on the basis of still trying to explain the universe? And if it's seen in this way, will it actually be comforting to people? Surely the most comforting thing for people is that they believe religion to be truth?

[faber niger]

(Original post by AspiringGenius)
No, Cheistianity/islam/[insert modern religion] came about after the classical beliefs exhibited in Rome and Greece.

Undoubtedly the popularity of the modern religions will fail and some other concoction of idiocracy will replace it.

Off topic, but you got your Latin motto from Google translate, didn't you? It's godawful at Latin translation.

The proper Latin would be medicinam studere sparamus. (Spes is the noun for "hope", not the verb, and you don't need the pronoun nos, as the verb speramus shows that it's in the first-person plural.)

[TheHansa]

(Original post by Tycho)
This is true but I don't really believe in the accuracy of the original point anyway. If the Arab Spring has taught us anything it's that people - irrespective of religion - don't want to have their future's dictated to them. They want freedom of speech and democracy. They want variety of opinions and free media. None of these things are particularly consistent with the original teachings of these religions; where tolerance for other ideas was very much considered an offence for which you could be executed.

So there is change throughout the world. Perhaps it's more gradual in the middle eastern countries, but even there, the grip of religion on people's lives' is diminishing.

LOL The Arab spring happened because their leaders imposed secularism on the people when they wanted religion to take a more central role in their lives.

The new government of Libya under the will of the people decided to make the laws more based on Shariah not less based on it.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/26/wo...ria/index.html

Mubaraks Egypt despotically enforced secularism on the people and now look what happened to him

Although Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt have been less visible since President Mubarak ordered a crackdown in the mid-nineties, they have been especially discreet over the last two weeks. The Gama’a al-Islamiya declared a ceasefire in 1999, but thousands of its members remain in jail. Like its rival, the ideologically similar Islamic Jihad, the Gama’a grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which for decades has been advocating the Islamization of Egyptian society. Unlike the Gama’a, which is illegal, the Muslim brothers exist in an ambiguous political state described to me by one government official as “illegal but tolerated.”

For twenty-three years, power and its maintenance has been Mubarak’s obsession. Ever since the assassination of Sadat, he has maintained a state of emergency to justify a war against religious radicals. Over the years, tens of thousands of Islamists and other political opponents have passed through the jails, usually without trial or charge. According to both Egyptian human-rights groups and international organizations like Human Rights Watch, torture is “widespread and systematic”: beatings, electric shock, isolation. And Mubarak has always proved himself ready to employ maximum force to quell protest or unrest.

In time, Mubarak wore down the Islamist movement in Egypt, a fact that was all but admitted when, in 1997, the two main radical groups declared that they were ending all violent operations. There was an incident later that year, when terrorists killed seventy people in Luxor, but since then there has been nothing.


http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...s-mubarak.html

The bias is strongly pro American as you can tel0,l which in fact only serves to strengthen my point



Now look at which parties are set to make the gains in the Egyptian election, most of the world's people do not want europes system.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1544406.html

[Politricks]

(Original post by TheHansa)
For an atheist you have an awful understanding of evolution, not that you can sensibly argue that evolution will make religion extinct.

As long as factual and scientific errors and inconsistencies exist in the Bible and the Qur'an and people with a logical and critical mind exist, then atheism, agnosticism, and agnostic-atheism will always exist, and as humanity's understanding of the world around us increases, there will always be a growing minority of atheists and agnostics who have left Christianity or Islam, so no, atheism won't be wiped out. For a long time, there will always remain a religious majority, the religious majority will have the higher population, but the influence of the religious will carry on decreasing as it is decreasing right now, well, it will carry on decreasing in the Western world at least, where evolution is actually taught in classrooms as opposed to Biblical or Qur'anic accounts of how the world was created. Teaching evolution won't make religion extinct, as long as the religious keep reproducing at higher rates, but like I said, teaching evolution is what will ensure that there will be atheists, agnostics and agnostic-atheists in the following generations to come.

[AspiringGenius]

(Original post by jismith1989)
Off topic, but you got your Latin motto from Google translate, didn't you? It's godawful at Latin translation.

The proper Latin would be medicinam studere sparamus. (Spes is the noun for "hope", not the verb, and you don't need the pronoun nos, as the verb speramus shows that it's in the first-person plural.)

Actually I taught myself latin, but mine is pretty bad. A few members have said this so i will change my sig

[faber niger]

(Original post by Tycho)
Interesting view. You seem to see religion as more of a psychological coping mechanism than of a real attempt to explain the universe. If that is true, then surely it undermines what it's trying to preach? If this really is the form religion is taking, then does it have a future on the basis of still trying to explain the universe? And if it's seen in this way, will it actually be comforting to people? Surely the most comforting thing for people is that they believe religion to be truth?

I don't think that there's any evidence for a decline in religion. If you want to take Marx's hypothesis that religion is an opiate of the masses, that is necessary under capitalism, but supposedly wouldn't be under communism, then sure, secularism is pretty strong in the UK, but Blair wasn't too far wrong about Britain when he said "we're all middle-class now" -- we have fairly cushy lives, we can afford some epistemic insecurity. That's not to say that we don't have a working class, but the people who do our really dirty work, who really suffer, are in south and east Asia (and other parts of the "developing world"), and religion is very strong there, just like religion was strong here when we had mill-workers and coal-miners.

You could challenge my hypothesis by pointing to America and its relatively high religiosity in addition to its being the richest country in the world -- but it also has relatively high inequality, and studies have shown that there tends on average to be greater religiosity in more unequal societies, because even the relatively well off feel more insecure (although, of course, it's poor Southerners who are most religious).

EDIT: And if our current religions fail to provide their adaptive functions (e.g. people are no longer able to believe in them), then new ones will come along that are able to provide them. New religions are always memetically competing with each other, but very few survive -- scientology (which piggybacks on the credibility of science) and the Bahai faith (which synthesizes previous religious material) are two relatively successful recent religions, for example.

[faber niger]

(Original post by AspiringGenius)
Actually I taught myself latin, but mine is pretty bad. A few members have said this so i will change my sig

Cool -- I also meant to say speramus, not sparamus, so medicinam studere speramus.

[Dreamweaver]

(Original post by Tycho)
You misunderstand entropy. It is indeed observed, and human existence does not undermine it, nor does it suggest entropy is not happening. It doesn't support the idea that the creation of the universe was controlled, as any creator would aim for perfection with everything they create, rather than a scattered bundle of bricks on the floor as you suggest.

Hawking looks at this in quite some detail in his books. I'd suggest reading it if it's of interest to you - even if you don't agree with that viewpoint.

That entropy can create humans and an ideal planet like Earth is that rare occurrence I was referring to. Yes in most instances those bricks falling from a lorry will invariably end up as a random mess on the floor, but in a very small number of cases they may end up as a wall. This rare occurrence is the same rare occurrence in nature that sees the existence of humans. That almost every other planet we have observed is far less than ideal for human's to prosper on is evidence of all the other instances where those bricks have fallen and created a mess on the floor.

Human existence does undermine entropy and this is something evolutionists have failed to explain. The fact that other planets aren't suitable for humans doesn't in any way sidestep this problem. Our concept of perfection is flawed because we automatically assume anything that doesn't favour our existence is fundamentally flawed, which is false.

(Original post by mmmpie)
I haven't heard the second law of thermodynamics referenced for ages!

The surface of the earth is not a thermodynamically closed system. Therefore the second law of thermodynamics doesn't have anything to say on the matter - entropy can decrease on the surface of the Earth.

Your pile of bricks is a false analogy btw - bricks do not spontaneously move nor alter each other, organic molecules in solution do.

The entropy principle applies at least as much to open systems as to closed systems. In an isolated real system, shut off from external energy, the entropy (or disorganization) will always increase. In an open system (such as the earth receiving an influx of heat energy from the sun), the entropy always tends to increase, and, as a matter of fact, will usually increase more rapidly than if the system remained closed! An example would be a tornado sweeping through a decaying ghost town or a cast iron wrecking ball imposed on an abandoned building. Anyone familiar with the actual equations of heat flow will know that a simple influx of heat energy into a system increases the entropy of that system; it does not decrease it, as evolution would demand. Opening a system to external energy does not resolve the entropy problem at all, but rather makes it worse!

Source

[faber niger]

(Original post by Dreamweaver)
Human existence does undermine entropy and this is something evolutionists have failed to explain.

Actually, it doesn't. We're ordered systems, but we actually release more disorder into the world than we create order in ourselves -- so we contribute to net entropy. We eat animals and plants (ordered biological systems) and then produce just energy or heat as a result (cf. Shrodinger's phrase that we "feed on negative entropy", in other words we eat order and excrete disorder).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life

[Dreamweaver]

(Original post by jismith1989)
Actually, it doesn't. We're ordered systems, but we actually release more disorder into the world than we create order in ourselves -- so we contribute to net entropy. We eat animals and plants (ordered biological systems) and then produce just energy or heat as a result (cf. Shrodinger's phrase that we "feed on negative entropy", in other words we eat order and excrete disorder).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life

What i was saying, is that the theory of human evolution contradicts human existence in terms of entropy. The claim is that 'the energy of the sun somehow is going to transform the non-living molecules of the primeval soup into intricately complex, highly organized, replicating living cells' however this makes no sense in terms of entropy.

[Tycho]

(Original post by Dreamweaver)
Human existence does undermine entropy and this is something evolutionists have failed to explain. The fact that other planets aren't suitable for humans doesn't in any way sidestep this problem. Our concept of perfection is flawed because we automatically assume anything that doesn't favour our existence is fundamentally flawed, which is false.

We don't assume that they are flawed, only that they are not capable of supporting human life. They are disordered, and the same could be said about Earth. The process of moving from order into disorder does not necessarily mean that everything inbetween is disordered too, and indeed it statistically won't be. It's easy to argue that human life - if you even wanted to consider it ordered - is one of the very few ordered phases of moving from order into disorder. My previous post stands true. Our solar system will eventually come to an end, proving that the eventual result - irrespective of what happens inbetween - is entropy.

This doesn't require any external intervention to make it happen, as it'll happen given the laws of science that currently exist. No modifications to those laws are required, and so no God is needed to do anything. If your argument is that God started the whole process off in the beginng, then that's a different thing. You'd then be left trying to explain what created God.

[faber niger]

(Original post by Dreamweaver)
What i was saying, is that the theory of human evolution contradicts human existence in terms of entropy. The claim is that 'the energy of the sun somehow is going to transform the non-living molecules of the primeval soup into intricately complex, highly organized, replicating living cells' however this makes no sense in terms of entropy.

The fact that the universe has a tendency towards entropy does not mean that order cannot be created (as you say, we're evidence of that); it simply means that more disorder will be created overall.

[soempty]

Why didn't you think of possibility that our evolution and development will lead to mass teocratic society?
If the existance of God will get proven, there would be no atheists left, if someone will keep denying fact, the practice of burning at stakes will get revived i am afraid.

[mmmpie]

(Original post by Dreamweaver)
The entropy principle applies at least as much to open systems as to closed systems. In an isolated real system, shut off from external energy, the entropy (or disorganization) will always increase. In an open system (such as the earth receiving an influx of heat energy from the sun), the entropy always tends to increase, and, as a matter of fact, will usually increase more rapidly than if the system remained closed! An example would be a tornado sweeping through a decaying ghost town or a cast iron wrecking ball imposed on an abandoned building. Anyone familiar with the actual equations of heat flow will know that a simple influx of heat energy into a system increases the entropy of that system; it does not decrease it, as evolution would demand. Opening a system to external energy does not resolve the entropy problem at all, but rather makes it worse!

Source

Copypasta from ICR. I was quite impressed by your argument until I found the paragraph that you'd pasted.

First of all, it's important to note that the laws of thermodynamics are statistical - Entropy 'tends to' increase, but it will fluctuate up and down. There is therefore a very small probability that even in a closed homogeneous system in equilibrium, entropy will suddenly be reduced spontaneously. The fluctuation theorem describes this and it has been observed.

Secondly, all thermodynamical cycles on the surface of the earth are driven by heat flux - the heat radiated away from the Earth to space, and the heat imparted to the Earth by solar radiation. In the Hadean and early Archean heat radiating away from the Earth greatly outstripped heat being absorbed by it - the Earth was still cooling after it's formation and the Sun was significantly dimmer than it presently is. The net heat flux is therefore negative - the surface of the Earth is loosing energy. By the third law of thermodynamics, which does apply to systems which are not isolated, entropy decreases as temperature decreases - you verify that for yourself by making some ice cubes in your freezer.

So we expect order to emerge at this point in Earth's history, and it so happened that this is roughly when the earliest life appears - the early part of the Archean aeon. Life, as an ongoing process, behaves in essentially the same ways as a power station - low entropy high potential energy fuel is burned to produce work, leaving high entropy low potential energy waste. Autotrophs can gather heat from their environment and use it to do work, and in particular they produce new low entropy high energy fuel molecules as a storage medium.

So, abiogenesis and the ongoing nature of life are not problematic. Evolution seems to behave a bit like Maxwell's demon, utilising a selection mechanism to force entropy down. However, the order which things create as they grow, reproduce and mutate is more than compensated for by the effect they have on their environment - soil is a homogeneous mixture but it only exists in that form because of the action of life, while rock is a far more orderly structure. One can also argue that the disadvantageous mutations, which are at least as common as advantageous ones, increase entropy at least as fast as evolution decreases it.

[Miryo]

Can people stop posting facts about growing religious people numbers, that is only due to the population growth

[3ary]

I think believing in something originates in the heart not in the mind.