I certainly have no problem with folks who don't hold my views on the world, the universe and all that's out there, I only object to the opinions of people who said that I don't belong here because I believe in God. (this is NOT directed to you Zen) I certainly won't tell you that you must think like me to talk to me.

I differ, Ayn rejected religion as she was exposed to it in Russia as a child (Russian Orthodox), she never understood protestant Christianity. There is a huge difference between the two. Russian Ortho. is most similar to Catholicism, but even as close as it is the doctrinal problems that make it objectionable to Objectivists exist.

Now we all know we are talking generalities, it's hard to know just what she took in, but nothing I've read showed any exposure to anything but these. That established as much as possible, all we can say is that she dis not understand protestant doctrines even as she laid them out in Atlas Shrugged. Yes, even in the strikers oath.

jbrenner: "All of this points to the idea that our universe is extremely logically laid out, and it is. Anyone with intelligence can see its order and wonder from whence it came. If one says that the order in the universe happened by a series of unlikely chances, then that person needs to answer how such remarkable order arose from disorder. A couple of months ago I referenced a list of 322 items that had to go right just to have an Earth capable of sustaining life, let alone producing life. That is just too many coincidences for me to accept. This same audience is quick to correctly point out even one "coincidence" when it comes to the Obama administration."

The physical universe did not evolve by chance as a coincidence and the universe has no "goal". Everything does what it does in accordance with its nature. If it weren't what it is now we wouldn't be here talking about it. That includes the conditions for life and the evolution of life itself. Darwin's theory of evolution was not and is not a progression of probabilities, nor was it compatible with a teleology and Creationism.

However we classify the distribution of entities within the physical universe as more or less uniform or "ordered" for purposes of our understanding, the universe continues to be what it is and acts accordingly. There is no metaphysical "disorder". There are only different states in a progression which we try to understand by identifying patterns and formulating principles of causality.


jbrenner: "None of that, however, does not prove or disprove that there is a deity who looks at humanity very ironically and chooses whether he/she is to be revealed or not revealed. Would it not be poetic justice if those here in the Gulch and people of faith were to be confronted by someone like Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation as a quirky omniscient, omnipotent deity? My point is that we have no idea what will transpire after this life and should go on living our lives honorably. If we do that, then we will have nothing to apologize for if there is an afterlife to which we must provide an accounting."

There is no evidence that we have any kind of soul or consciousness after physical death. All known observation requires a living, functioning, physical brain for consciousness. Anything else is pure, pointless speculation, often accompanied by equally pointless wishful thinking. We go on living our lives "honorably" in accordance with what we believe is proper for our lives while we live, not in a hope of fulfilling an unknowable future criteria for an after world, and not in accordance with standards guessed to satisfy it, hoping that by "coincidence" that they are the same.


"I will see the universe as a child like Einstein did. I can see its order and wonder about who could create such an order. And if you call me foolish or illogical, I want you to consider how foolish you sound in mocking someone who tries to see the universe as Einstein does."

Invoking the scientific prestige of Einstein as intellectual poetic intimidation for a hope of Creationism will not work. It doesn't matter what he thought about religion or deism (which wasn't much at all). We know better. We wonder how the universe works and try, like he did, to understand it. That does not imply wondering about a supposed superconsciousness creating and running everything, contradicting everything we know about the physical and biological universe.

jbrenner: "Tertullian can best be explained as believing what he does 'because this story is so crazy that for it to have survived this long, it must be true'. This is, of course, a logical fallacy. Many throughout time have seen the concept of a crucified deliverer as absurd, and it would be absurd if one applies logic to the situation."

It is a logical fallacy but it wasn't Tertullian's position. Tertullian (165-220), an early father of the church operating not long after the compilation of the New Testament taken as a Church authority, did not just believe that a crazy story must be true because it survived so long. He threw out the idea of explanation entirely and literally embraced the irrational as an act of faith. He thought that the religion itself was too bizarre to be capable of philosophical explanation. He believed revelation was both above and contrary to reason and denounced the possibility of a philosophy of the religion at all. That is how he wound up at this stage of his evolution in a crack-up as a screaming mystic literally embracing the absurd and unable to sensibly articulate it. Windelband quotes him as "credibile est, quia ineptum est; certum est -- credo quia absurdum". [Windelband, A History of Philosophy, revised, 1901, citing De Carne Chr. 5; De Praescr. 7.]

Fuller gives a classic translation of his position "It is believable, because it is absurd; it is certain, because it is impossible" [Fuller and McMurrin, A History of Philosophy, 3rd ed 1955]. (This is a source used by Leonard Peikoff in his lectures on the History of Western Philosophy.)

There are other similar quotes from Tertullian and others in the Church leadership. They make no logical sense, and by Tertullian's own principles of the time could not make sense; their statements illustrated, as they went in tortured circles trying to express the inexpressible, an embracing of absurdity as such on faith and intuition alone. This was in contrast to others who tried to buttress the faith they started with employing rationalized qualifications and fallacious 'proofs' employing "reason as a handmaiden of faith". And that is the point. It was all based on an irrational faith formulated in one form or another considered above reason.

About 900 years later St. Bernard [1091-1153] was still writing in the Tertullian tradition: "Like Tertullian, Bernard reveled in the incomprehensibility of this experience: 'I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind." [Jones, A History of Western Philosophy: The Medieval Mind, 2nd ed 1969.]

You still run across people today who gravitate towards the mysterious and feel at home mentally wallowing in the incomprehensible, but not usually with the same intensity committed across the board to their personal lives and not on a cultural scale or else we would be back to a Dark Ages, living under the philosophy of the original Dark Ages that put and kept it there for over a millennium.

Ayn Rand's ethics are fundamentally different than Christianity and its ethics. This is not a matter of free will and choice in a social context as some kind of common ground. Ayn Rand's ethics are not "all about" freedom to do what you want regardless of what it is. She rejected hedonism and did not base her ethics on libertarian politics, which is upside down.

Anyone can always choose to live any way he wants to anywhere and take the consequences in both its affect on his personal life and in accordance with whatever political system he lives under. That does not mean he is living in accordance with Ayn Rand's ethical principles.

Moral philosophy is more fundamental than politics. You have to know what man's nature is and what is right for him in making choices before you can know what social system is proper. Every moral system implies a political system.

Ayn Rand did not misunderstand Christianity. She rejected it.

Her morality of rational self interest implies and requires a politics of capitalism; Christianity does not. An ethics requiring a duty to serve others has consequences for political philosophy. Capitalism cannot be defended based on Christianity.

You should read the non-fiction books.

Heat is molecules in motion, which is described by statistical physics. Rather than try to make sense out of equations the meaning of which you have no clue, try reading the non-technical:

Broda, "Ludwig Boltzmann: Man -- Physicist -- Philosopher", Ox Bow, 1983
Von Baeyer, Maxwell's Demon, Random House, 1998,

But this has nothing to do with the physical universe being regarded as inherently chaotic rather than operating under causality and identity. "Chaotic" and statistical mathematical descriptions are methods, not physics or metaphysics.

The notion of existence having a beginning, coming from non-existence is meaningless, not just a matter of opinion. There is no non-existence as any kind of thing or place. Non-existence is not a kind of existence that can be somewhere waiting to sprout existence. It is an abstraction that first requires existence to abstract out a state when something is not there.

Piling on top of that the notion of an indefinable god outside of existence, but existing to create existence out of a literal non existence is even more preposterous. If the fact of existence is supposed to require and explanation, then this concoction still explains nothing and makes the problem much worse -- far worse than the infinite regress of 'who created god?'.

That's why it always winds up with the likes of an image of a man with a long beard sitting on a cloud described in mystical terms as having indefinite powers and which makes no sense at all, and is why you are then told to suspend your rational thought in a series of floating abstractions and just accept the ineffable in a trance of mysticism.

Teri-amborn tried to link those mental machinations as a sign of a superior mind. You are right that they can sometimes be very clever in their manipulations but not very bright -- bright in the sense of understanding facts and principles tied to reality, but "bright" isn't quite the right word for that. But often it isn't even clever, simply repeating fallacies indiscriminantly absorbed from others as rationalizations.

Medieval times were filled with church scholastics who were very facile with rationalisticaly manipulating floating abstractions detached from context and reality -- they could easily fill volumes with exegeses on the likes of 'how many angels can dance on the head of a pin' -- and so are many modern analytic philosophers, if you have ever seen them in action. (Robert Nozick was one of them, giving dazzling displays of stream-of-analysis classroom performances that led nowhere.) They are "bright" in the sense that they are quick and glib, but that's about it. They do not, as you put it, have "well-functioning brains" if that means using their brains to understand the world.

All normal humans can easily form abstract concepts, but a measure of intelligence is the ability to understand and work with higher level abstract concepts and principles (that are valid), such as in physics or engineering. The ability to detect and isolate patterns is part of that as an act of abstraction. Most people could think in higher level concepts more than they are, but don't because they don't know how, leaving themselves with vague imagery as a substitute.

A metaphor is one kind of abstraction, but you can't understand it initially if it is only stated literally. How could you? It either has to explained or used in a clear enough context making it possible to see the connection. (I don't remember how I learned it the first time.)

Numerology is not mathematics. It is the misuse of mathematics as number mysticism. The Pythagoreans were notorious for that in addition to their valid contributions to geometry. Trying to predict when the wold will end from prophesies in a sacred text is mysticism, not science and not mathematics (which is a science, but a science of method, not a physical science, and not capable of predicting anything in the physical world without reference to facts in the physical world).

Ayn Rand did not employ Occam's Razor as a standard, not anywhere.

She did reject arbitrary assertions, and no amount of dressing them up as "testable hypotheses" justifies them. The onus of proof is on he who asserts the positive. The burden is on he who asserts it for it to be taken seriously at all, let alone demand that a commitment to belief be made.
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Atheism means not believing in a supernatural deity, not denying that anything we don't know about must not exist, which is ridiculous.

Agnosticism says: you have just made an arbitrary statement with no evidence and no proof so I don't know whether to believe it or not. The rational response is to reject it out of hand and not believe it.

That does not mean denying outright that it could be true, provided the assertion is specific enough to be meaningful. When the arbitrary assertions of the existence of a god ascribed with contradictory characteristics or characteristics described as indefinite, i.e., no identity, then it is logically required to deny it _can_ exist. There are no contradictions in reality and everything that exists exists as something in particular, which means it is definite and specific in every respect -- that is 'identity'. No identity, no existence. The history of the Church is filled with fallacious assertions with contradictory notions of a god, which led to all kinds of endless and irresolvable disputes and official accusations of heresy. The proper response is to deny the whole approach as knowledge and leave them to their own devices.

I'm very comfortable with existence exists, has always existed and will always exist.
That's my opinion.

None of that is true. It is more strawman evasions from someone who consistently avoids the content of what has been discussed. But it is true that he is wasting his time trying to defend religion.

Ayn Rand did not use an "Occam's Razor" argument. She did not appeal to the "simplest" as a standard of argument. Where did you get that from? She addressed what is rational to pursue. It is not a "shortcut" to reject the irrational. She was "consistent" in rejecting invalid concepts and unsubstantiated assertions, and in denying that versions of a god claimed to have contradictory or meaningless attributes, i.e., no identity, can exist.

Of course they do. They are opposites.

j, you'll be bored quickly with me here, But, again, it is about heat, not about order. Can you address that?

j, in order to have a conversation we need to define our terms. If you cannot define God, then I don't know what we are talking about. That is not evasive. That is not post doc 'I don't know anything because I know everything':) Rand took a common definition used by Christians:
"God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. . . . Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. . . . Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith . . . The purpose of man’s life . . . is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question." -Galt's Speech
Why can we not be comfortable with no origin? Conservation of matter and energy implies things have always been. adding God doesn't solve a puzzle. who created God? no short cut

What the second law says it that entropy is constantly increasing in the absence of external work. If you use Maxwell's relations, you can express deltaG in terms of deltaH - T*deltaS.

More ordered crystalline structures do appear, but the impurities segregate to grain boundaries and to surfaces. The impurities are what dictate many of the other material properties. In a system without impurities, many of the spontaneous order arguments do make sense, but refinement of such impurities requires someone like me or like Rearden who know a thing or two about phase diagrams. The problem is that the world is not a system free of impurities.

Agnosticism does evade the concept. On that we agree.

Einstein did not think that it was unreasonable from a physics point of view. He actually wanted to be an atheist and defined a constant to avoid dealing with "the beginning". He then acknowledged that as a mistake.

I could give numerous definitions from multiple religious cultures, but I will readily admit that I could not convince most (or even any) people of God's existence. I will gladly acknowledge my lack of knowledge in this area.

We all know what a BS degree means. An MS degree is more of the same, and a PhD is piling it higher and deeper. The other story about a PhD is that you realize that you don't know anything and neither does anyone else. It is kind of sad, but regrettably true.
Rand's answer of God being nonsensical is an evasion. Ultimately those who attempt to solve this puzzle will either evade the issue or ask someone to take a step in faith.

2nd law doesn't say anything about "order"? it discusses heat. distribution of heat. for instance, as water loses energy or heat, it becomes more ordered (crystalline structure).
I'm going to stick here because you can run circles around me in this arena ;)

Spontaneous order is present in some physical and biological systems, and is being discussed by some as an outgrowth of the mathematics of chaos theory. In some cases, such order is "natural". It is in many ways non-Darwinian. There is that nasty little 2nd law of thermodynamics about work needing to be done to prevent the disappearance of order. Where does that work come from?

Granted, that argument applies to closed, equilibrium systems, and the universe is neither.

bottom up: agnosticism is a way of evading the concept.
to Einstein's quote: it is perfect for literary points but miserable from a physics point of view. But people will use analogies.
Rand's answer was by the very definition of God, it was nonsensical. What definition would you give for God, J?

Why would the argument assume order from a series of unlikely chances? Tell me why order is not natural and why you assume chaos is natural?