There is a strong possibility that this is true. However, Christians are generally positive about their lives after making a commitment, and this positive attitude may be somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy (pun completely intended). Certainly people who exhibit a constantly negative attitude find that indeed their lives are worse.

I can't imagine they truly believe if they did a blinded study, they would find subtle effects of the hand of god intervening on behalf of those who claim to believe.

No, codes are not subject to the laws of thermodynamics because codes are not physical things. The material substrate IN WHICH a particular code might be instantiated is, of course, subject to those laws — as is any material substrate.

Morse code is not subject to the laws of thermodynamics. The paper and ink WITH WHICH a particular instance of Morse Code might be instantiated are, of course, subject to those laws: the ink and paper must eventually deteriorate; but that doesn't mean Morse Code deteriorates. A pair of headphones and a code-keyer are subject to the laws of thermodynamics, but the code itself — which is a mapping of one symbol-set (dots and dashes) to another symbol set (the English alphabet) is non-material; hence, not subject to physical laws.

Mapping, ideas, concepts, imaginings, daydreams, musings, theories, hypotheses, etc., are not subject to thermodynamics any more than they are subject to gravity or the laws of motion.

I respectfully disagree. There is indeed a choice. One can choose to believe or not believe. I do not agree that the price is small as Pascal did, however. I would compare it to a football or baseball team trading an existing starter for future draft picks. If one is a Christian, one does have to be "all in" in the Texas Hold 'em sense. God does not want any lukewarm Christians (Revelations 3:16). Jesus had a particularly relevant parable here. He talked about whether a man would be willing to sell everything that he had for a pearl of great price. Rand would say that is ridiculous. For most people, it would come down to whether the one offering the deal is trustworthy and whether the pearl really is that good a deal.

Pacal's Wager
The price is small, the downside is great so do it. But do what?
1. Believe in God? or 2. Claim to do so?

The Wager has no meaning without choice. For a believer there is no choice. If making yourself believe is not possible (this could be debated, but the price is small) then the choice for a non-believer is either to deny or to fake it.

The argument is, if you do not believe but claim to, then you do not have a 'valid ticket' as God will know and send you down anyway. This assumes that God has perfect knowledge of your thoughts, or assumes that God cares about your thoughts. One can conjecture a God that is not all knowing, or does not care what you think but just wants worship. A God of power. A vitalist. Such a proposition avoids the absurdities from beneficence.
That is exactly what vast numbers of theists do, they accept Pacal's Wager by putting on an act of belief. It is the lowest cost action for them. The motivation is the reward now of being considered a 'good' person, and it is accepted by religious leaders who want the numbers.

I don't like the little, nonexpandable boxes much easier. Google allows you to expand the box so that you can see your entire message easier. Internet Exploder doesn't.

Regarding the faith as an insurance policy question, Christians usually point to an immediate benefit of their changed (and improved) lives as personal evidence that God will reward them with much more in the end. This is almost like a down payment for them.

I have moderated a couple of debates on Christianity vs. atheism vs. agnosticism before. It can be a suprisingly tough debate.

No arguments there. Christians base their faith on reason to some extent and argue based on a preponderance of the evidence that it is reasonable to pay such a premium. Where objectivists disagree is on a) whether the evidence is comprehensive enough to be convincing and/or b) whether anything should be believed that they cannot prove themselves. Christians would point to the example of doubting Thomas needing to probe Jesus' resurrected hands and side, and then take that historical evidence that it actually happened. Every objectivist would need to probe Jesus' hands and side for themselves.

Actually the codes are subject to thermodynamics. The shape, and thus the function, of the nanomaterials on which life is based is noncrystalline, but subject to many of the same rules that crystals are. The problem is that we don't know enough about the surface Gibbs free energy term yet in most cases. For bulk inorganic crystals, the surface Gibbs free energy term is negligible. However, what is interesting about life is that often one gets trapped in local, but not global, energy minima. This is what makes understanding of protein misfolding disorders so challenging, including sickle cell anemia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, mad cow disease, and a few others. Some are even debating whether Type I diabetes falls into this category now. A purely deterministic model will not do. One must use Monte Carlo stochastic models that are mathematically complex.

one of these days I'm going to quadruple check my spelling before I hit send. :) Hindsight.

" it's like buying a lottery ticket. The odds are NOT in their favor, but the price of a ticket is relatively small-so the bet does not break the bank and if somehow you hold the winning ticket the upside is tremendous. There is a cost to suspending one's disbelief, in that if you suspend disbelief and reason for God, why not for other issues and difficult moral dilemmas."
If the premiums are true belief, though, can you actually will yourself to pay them. Your mind either believes, doubts, or rejects claims. You can't make yourself believe something in exchange for a reward.

"it's like buying a lottery ticket. The odds are NOT in their favor, but the price of a ticket is relatively small-so the bet does not break the bank and if somehow you hold the winning ticket the upside is tremendous. There is a cost to suspending one's disbelief, in that if you suspend disbelief and reason for God, why not for other issues and difficult moral dilemmas."
And if the stories about God don't make sense to you but you go ahead and claim to believe anyway, you haven't really purchased a ticket. You've just selected some numbers, but you don't have a bona fide ticket.

"So if you were previously wondering why some doubt evolution (at least, Darwin's notion of it), the reason is that codes are products neither of chance nor determinism."

This is an intriguing statement as I continually get reamed for suggesting there may be something other than darwin's evolution. I'd really appreciate learning a bit more. I think I can message you even though your not a producer account. IIf you would reply to me via the address contained it would be greatly appreciated (for personal reference and a timely bit of info for my current project),

I love learning something interesting and new. At this moment in time I'm just writing my books. This subject matter helps my level of understanding.

Crystal structures are irrelevant to the basic biochemistry of life, which is a system of CODED CHEMISTRY. Living organisms make use of two alphabets — a 64-symbol set of bases in the nucleic acids, and a 22-symbol set of amino acids in the cell body. The former symbolically represents and maps onto the latter without ever directly chemically interacting with it (neither DNA nor mRNA chemically interacts with the amino acids).

Both the specificity and the complexity exhibited here is similar to the kind observed in language — which is why linguistic terms such as "code", "information", "transcription", "translation", etc. are inevitably referred to in biochemistry.

None of the really interesting apsects of life — the coded-chemistry aspects — have anything to do with crystals, crystallography, or unit cells, which in any case, are all ultimately governed by thermodynamic considerations.

Codes are not subject to thermodynamics, which is the very reason there's such a thing as "life" in the first place.

So if you were previously wondering why some doubt evolution (at least, Darwin's notion of it), the reason is that codes are products neither of chance nor determinism.

Thanks, AJ. I thought I would be stirring up the pot a little bit here. I didn't think, however, that the firestorm would be on a materials science issue.

Well said!

I am going to miss not being able to respond to this thread tomorrow. It is my heavy teaching day.

Actually, I have to apologize a little here. The chicken egg lysozyme work got nixed from the webinar on Thursday 4/3 at 11 Eastern time. In the Nanoadvisor link in the previous comment, you need to register for the webinar via Nanoscience Instruments. What got left in was work on ammonium hydrogen phosphate, the material that kids make crystals out of for science fair kits. I can show the chicken egg lysozyme experimental work separately after the webinar is winding down for those interested.

I did not make this mistake, JerseyBoy.
In crystal structures, the subject that I was discussing, simple has a meaning that is equivalent to primitive (meaning that there is no repetition within the unit cell). And yes, I know the difference between simple and complex in the mathematical sense, too.

And frankly I could teach you quite a bit about protein folding and misfolding, for which deterministic algorithms ARE being developed, because I am one of the ones developing them. Indeed, protein misfolding is mathematically complex (as opposed to the journeyman's idea of complex). I figured out the steps in chicken egg lysozyme aggregation experimentally a couple of years ago (part of one slide I will be discussing in a webinar a week from Thursday at 11 AM Eastern time as advertised in
http://my.fit.edu/~jbrenner/Nanoadvisor_... on p. 4 on the bottom right. I am featured on pp. 2 and 3. I have a student right now starting a project on the computational modeling of chicken egg lysozyme aggregation. It is actually a pretty good model for what happens to Alzheimer's patients. Believe it or not, the mathematically complex process of protein misfolding is better done by gamers than by computers right now.

Unfortunately, as part of that talk, I must come clean. The last five years I have been non-mooching, but I got my last grant to fund that work just before reading AS. The work in the slide that I mentioned was post-AS for me.

I know plenty about Kolmogorov, too.

Yawn.

Nothing you've just posted — including the BS in which you compare yourself to imaginary romantic literary heroes — in any way contradicts or disproves what I posted earlier regarding crystals being repetitive and completely specified in their configurations. Ergo: their structures can be written in SIMPLE, ALGORITHMIC STEPS (e.g., "Do X, then do Y, then repeat the first two steps a millions times"). By definition, since the description of a regular crystal's structure can be compressed into algorithmic steps, it is NON-COMPLEX (or, "simple").

Look up "Kolmogorov Complexity" if you don't know what I'm talking about. You can also look up the work of Andrey Kolmogorov and Gregory Chaitin regarding algorithmic recursion and complexity.

Everything else you posted was irrelevant to the issue of biological organisms vs. crystalline "complexity." Regular crystals are completely specified and determined; biological structures (such as eukaryotic cells) are not: given a few amino acids along a polypeptide chain, there is no algorithm or repetitive unit cell or deterministic law by which you could predict what the next amino acid on the chain MUST be. And what is true of amino acids is obviously true of the nucleotides in DNA that code for them.

You make a beginner's mistake in logic: you assumed that the word "simple" (as used above) meant "easy to discover or grasp". It doesn't mean that at all. "Simple" has a precise, mathematical definition. Similarly, "complex" does not mean "difficult to discover or grasp." It, too, has a precise meaning.

There are 229 mathematically possible different types of crystalline unit cells, and all of them have been observed experimentally! I challenge you to sketch the structure of a monoclinic unit cell like Cu2S, even on a computer. It drove a couple of classmates to wishing to slit their wrists on my graduate crystallography final. It is one thing to be able to predict which structures will be stable by reading a phase diagram. Generating time-temperature-transformation diagrams necessary to make nonequilibrium structures requires the materials science and engineering background of a Rearden (or of me). If you have that expertise or want to get it, contact me.

When it comes to the order of nanomaterials, there is order, but is of a much shorter range, and consequently predicting that structure is quite challenging. Self-assembly of nanomaterials has been one of my areas of research for the past 5 years.

All biological structures lack long-range crystalline order and have nanostructures similar to those I am studying. Frankly only a few hundred (perhaps 1000) people me in the world know how to create such biologically-relevant nanostructures. And even people like me know how to make only a few such structures (< 1% of all such possible structures). You will learn that the more you know, the more you still have to learn.

Crystals are not complex: they have a regular repeating pattern that simply iterates the crystal's UNIT CELL. The emerging pattern of the crystal is not only unchanging, but predictable (i.e., completely specified), given the initial configuration of atoms in that unit cell. Thus, the configuration of every additional cell is completely specified, and thus predictable.

So a crystalline structure is not complex, but simple — simple, predictable, and completely specified. A biological organism (e.g., a cell) is completely different from the regular, ordered pattern of a crystal.

"Hypocritical" means "professing feelings or virtues one does not have; as in 'hypocritical praise')"

synonym: "insincere"
antonym: "sincere"

So the opposite of "hypocritical" is "sincere", not "non-contradictory."