Quote (juliusjuice @ Fri, Oct 16 2009, 09:18pm)
research entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, then come back and argue more
over such unimaginable amounts of time, the almost impossible eventually will happen. a good example is throwing all of the pages of war and peace into the air. eventually they will land in the correct order, though could take a very very long time if it is possible, it will happen. kind of like the way everything on our planet works out.
Actually, entropy would suggest that while the impossible
could happen, it's infinitely improbable that it would. Arguing entropy is far more supportive of the existence of a God than not.
It's like you have a spaceship with an airlock full of atmosphere, with a door leading to the vacuum of space. Entropy tells you that the mass of air is chaotic, because there is a near-infinite number of configurations in which all of the oxygen atoms are colliding and wiggling and the door opens and one atom moves to fill a single wiggling atom's previously occupied space, and soon the entire mass is unstable and zooming into the vacuum. There is a possibility that you open the door, and the atmosphere in the room remains exactly where it is, but for that to occur, there is only a single configuration in which every atom in the room remains stable and non-volatile and manages to remain where it is, and just a single tiniest interaction can push the whole system to chaos.
With the googolplex of possibilities where the mass does chaotically escape, the chance of all of the air remaining in the airlock is astronomically small, so improbable that you could run through the duration of existence trillions of times, and it would likely never happen, but it's one unimaginably small possibility. For even the simplest of lifeforms to manifest, it would take millions or billions of these incredibly unlikely events to occur in approximately 14 billion years. The unlikelihood of such a extravagant chain of events occurring perfectly in a way that such intelligent and complex life has occurred is nothing short of a miracle. Even a single perfect event occurring as one of the billions of steps required for life to manifest is so mindblowingly improbable, that I could only see the entire series of events occurring if there were some intelligent being guiding it along.