Why not--Maltheism? (Religion)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, July 03, 2011, 16:31 (4890 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

I'm interested to see how you'll respond to the idea of a fundamental balance in nature, because the continuous state of decay in terms of energy does not suggest balance at all. Entropy fundamentally challenges all notions of balance.
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> Fortunately, it is not up to me to answer this challenge, as it has already been answered by people much smarter than I am. 
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> http://www.spontaneousorder.net/
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> Physics may create disorder, but life creates order. Yin and Yang. There is always a balance.-A well-written piece... but you're engaging in the Cartesian dualism it discusses in the abstract: The order that life represents is fractional to the amount of energy it takes to sustain it, and THAT energy is lost to entropy. Life's order only exists because of the disorder created by the Sun, and the net overall balance in the universe is more disorder.-This article simply tries to say that Life's order negates the second law. It simply doesn't... it can only exist because the 2nd law exists...-The Sun's surface is 6000K. However, the temperature in the core is 15Million Kelvin. -That means that only 0.0004% of the total energy produced by the Sun, is available to earth. Technically speaking, much less, because we don't even receive all of it. Most of it is lost to interstellar space. The amount of order created by man, only comes at the expense of even more disorder. (lets not even talk about cities yet.) -Your average human requires 	
2000 calories = 5.22289535 × 10^16 MeV a day. -If you eat plants only, a plant only offers 1% of what it captured in terms of sunlight into usable chemical energy. (Order at the cost of more disorder.) When you eat the plant, only 10% of it joins your biomass, the rest is lost to heat (entropy). Yep. That's right. It creates more disorder for you and I to live. We need on average 2000 calories to live, and that means that 18000 calories were lost just to provide you with that 2000 calories. (Technically more, this doesn't account for the energy permanently lost from the sun.)-So to summarize: Only 0.0004% of the Sun's energy is available to earth. Of that only 0.01 of it is provided by plants for use by higher forms of life. (0.01 x 0.0004 = 0.000004%) The amount of energy lost is catastrophically huge. It cannot be maintained indefinitely. -I can do this all day, but the end result is that life creates more disorder in the universe than it creates in terms of self-organization. This fact is utterly ignored by the paper (as it devolves about halfway through to an argument against Darwinian evolution, using the 2nd law as its basis.) Life creates order, but again the amount of energy required to sustain it results in a net loss of 99.9996% of the Sun's energy into the cosmos. What I'm telling you directly refutes that paper.-Life exists because of the 2nd law, not in spite of or in contradiction to it.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"