Though God [img]http://207.69.158.95/ubb/wink.gif[/img] knows why I should again involve myself in the Magna Cum Loudly pissing contest this thread has slowly become, I feel I must point out one item which stuck in my tiny little descended from the monkeys brain.

Mr. Catalino, while arguing steadfastly against the theory of evolution, has casually, cleverly slipped in a reference to MENSA, and one can only assume he means the genius club and not a misspelling of an extra cranky period in his month.

Therefore, we can assume Mr. Catalino must in fact BE a member, or perhaps a janitor, in said club.

Therefore we can assume Mr. Catalino to be a genius, and by implication smarter than the rest of us, except me of course.

Therefore we can safely say that Mr. Catalino is more highly evolved than ordinary men, a mutant if you will, which more or less proves the very argument he is trying to defeat. Thankyew, thankyew.

p.s. Sam, before you bludgeon me with your witty repartee, please accept my little musings with the good humor they were intended to be. My sense of devilry, you see, is highly evolved...

>>Pat,
You have avoided all of my arguments. Not surprising.

Entropy is why your evolution doesn't work. I don't know what school of thought you went to, but it sure is as phony as a three dollar bill.

If you want to believe in science fiction nonsense and try to impress others with your limited amount of scientific knowledge, fine. Just don't preach your litany to me and expect that you are going to go unchallenged. Isolated systems....heh heh.

I do give you credit that you understand 50 % of what you have talked about.

You remind me of a Mensa meeting where someone was explaining quantum mechanics. There was someone else there listening that told this fellow's wife "Take him home. He's drunk!". I don't wish to draw an analogy between you and this fellow, but I thought it was an amusing story.<<

How can I avoid your arguments when you haven't made one yet, Sam?

All you have said, over and over, is that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. You have yet to articulate how or why this is the case.

I have told you, repeatedly, why it is NOT true. I have told you that entropy (and its increase or decrease) has only to do with the movement and randomness of molecules, not with complexity of systems or anything else that is involved in the fact of evolution or the theory of natural selection that describes how evolution operates.

I suspect you believe that evolution implies a more "ordered" world, one in which there is a heirarchy of beings from man through the anthropoid apes, other mammals, and on down to one-celled organisms. This is a common fallacy...evolution says nothing about such a heirarchy; rather that heirarchy is imposed upon nature by man, as a way of categorizing and interpreting nature.

And, at any rate, the "order" discussed in thermodynamics has nothing to do with "order" as understood in the above paragraph.

Further, entropy actually is a state of HIGHER order than lack of entropy. A fully ordered system is entropic--it has no energy. A fully random system is anti-entropic, it is highly energetic.

Best, Pat

I realize that, as a layman, I have probably done a poor job of defending evolution against the "violates second law of thermodynamics" canard.

Therefore, I have done a little research and found a website where the argument is layed out in far better terms than I could ever have managed.

I recommend it to all and sundry, most especially Sam Catalino, providing his incredibly closed mind is open to the idea that he might be wrong.

Here's the URL:
http://www.holysmoke.org/icr0dud.htm

Best, Pat

Oh, and here's something else I found in my research, and it is directed specifically at Sam Catalina and Ng Suat Tong:

"I'm a scientist. In science, all knowledge is tentative. Everything is a theory until a better idea comes along. Then we use the better idea. So by definition we're skeptics and we agree with the creationists when they say the theory of evolution will be history when someone comes up with something better. But I have a question for those who believe in creation. If something better came along, would you agree that creationism is wrong? In other words, are you willing, at least in theory, to change your beliefs?" --- (The Central Mechanism, by Jim Cowan)

A simple "Yes" or "No" will do.

JM: Following up on your comments about the inexplicable cures, I logged on to yet another website, http://www.csicop.org -- I think CSICOP stands for Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims Of the Paranormal, or something like that. I did a search of their files for various keywords from your descriptions; the only significant hits I got was for the keyword 'cures', and there were too many entries from that for me to search.

However, the site has an 'answer man' feature, and I copied your text into a question for them. They're supposed to respond within two weeks, and when I receive it I'll post it here. Note: I'm not going to do this for anybody else-- if you want an answer, log on to the site.

My own take on your description is:

Your claim of a 'powerful regenerative energy within the human body, capable of restoring functionality' is not necessarily concluded from the facts. As I understand you, the objective facts are that a patient's current condition is abnormally different and abnormally improved from an earlier recorded condition.

Although I wouldn't rule out extraordinary reasons for these changes, I would neither rule out more mundane explanations, such as mistaken identity and fraud.

This thread is tending to get bogged down in technical debates. Anybody want to talk about how religion and unbelief are represented in comics?

Joe: As you can imagine, mistaken identity and fraud are easily ruled out.

Actually, I don't know of any cases of mistaken identities with respect to such cures. The cases are rare enough that no such thing ever occurs.

Fraud isn't much of an issue either because there's no profit involved (usually the other way around) in being a medical guinea pig for a decade or so. No one seeks this, to the best of my knowledge.

The factors that are the most likely to explain away these cures are:

1) Was the person really afflicted with a correctly diagnosed disease in the first place? Wrong diagnoses happen all the time in medecine. Illnesses that could be hysterical are, of course, ruled out. You need the evidence of indisputable physiological damage.

2) Was the cure "real" and lasting? The fact that a patient says he's cured doesn't mean that he has in fact been cured. Plenty of tests are needed. And shorter-term remissions have been known to happen in cases of MS, cancer, etc. When a cure is a really a cure is another tough question. How long do you wait before pronouncing it definitive? Nowadays, 10 to 12 years seems to be the average.

3) Finally, could the cure be the result of an existing therapy? Today, there's an increasing array of sophisticated techniques used to try to cure people, and there's always the 1% possibility that even something that didn't work in 99% of cases may have worked once...

Clearly, as you can see, reasonable people can find plenty to disagree just on the above grounds, looking at cures on a case by case basis.

As I said in my earlier message, I found that there were plenty of remarkable cases (IMHO) that still got dismissed just because of a potential unresolved doubt or a missing X-ray.

By the way, I haven't met anyone in this field that considers it (rightly or wrongly) as part of the "paranormal" or supernatural. I don't quite see why SCICOP would be competent to express an opinion about this -- would you ask them to vet Michio Kaku's work on the cosmic string theory, for instance?

JM

Donovan,

Your post had me in stitches!!! I am not janitor, and I will bow to your superior wit for such a post.

Pat,

I don't subscribe to fad science either.
I thought you understood my argument. Either you don't understand, or choose not to open your mind to my argument.

Since I perceive it is the latter, rather than the former, it is pointless for me to continue. Just think of yourself as a system and I'm entrophy, and I'm wearing you down....I'll be around.

Best wishes,

Sam

>>Pat,

I don't subscribe to fad science either.
I thought you understood my argument. Either you don't understand, or choose not to open your mind to my argument.

Since I perceive it is the latter, rather than the former, it is pointless for me to continue. Just think of yourself as a system and I'm entrophy, and I'm wearing you down....I'll be around.<<

How can I understand (or misunderstand) an argument you never made? Repeatedly saying, "Evolution contradicts the second law of thermodynamics" without explaining how or why, is not an argument. I presented my refutation of your statement. I did it on my own, and I did it by specifically referring you to a website with experts' statements on the subject.

As for "fad science"--if you think the idea of scientists updating their theories to match the available evidence (evidence that, in the modern world, is coming in faster and faster all the time) represents a "fad" then, again, you don't understand science at all.

Was Einstein dealing in "fad science" when he proposed the theories that reconciled quantum mechanics with Newton's laws?

Are the astronomers who are now proposing the existence of a large celestial body (possibly a failed twin of our own sun) out in the Oort cloud--as the explanation for the observed and demonstrated movements of certain comets--dealing in "fad science"? Or are they doing what science is supposed to do--proposing answers to the questions presented by the evidence, answers that will be changed as new evidence arrives.

Science, you see, isn't a body of facts. It's a method of determining what the facts are.

Best, Pat

Pat,

I countered my arguement that systems don't get better or improve, they decay...The differences between our(now I'm being very objective) arguments is what we each determine what a system is. That was my point when I cited the theory of evolution violates the 2nd law.

Actually, I was waiting for a counter-argument of PE....

Just whose science are we to subscribe to? With due respect, but you sound like a "In Search of" promo.

Best wishes,

Sam

JM--

CSICOP was founded by a group of scientists and philosophers, with Carl Sagan as one of its board members. It's current board (listed on the inside front cover of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, which CSICOP publishes) includes many notable academics.

Whereas the Amazing Randi may specialize more in researching 'performances' of the paranormal, CSICOP has a much wider range. The latest issue of The Skeptical Inquirer has, for example, an article about the supposedly furtile quality of soil gathered on the moon, a subject quite remote from Tarot cards and the like.