Upon being told I am blind to Jesus...

The problem is that looking objectively at all the evidence is the same as being blind to it all. There's no difference between the evidence for Christianity, and the evidence we'd expect to see if Christianity is false. After all, we can agree that other religions are false religions, and all of them have testimonials and first person experiences. So if Christianity were false, we'd expect it to have exactly what you claim it has. Being blind and being in a room with absolutely no light at all are very similar experiences.

There's no serious difference between Christianity and what we can agree are false other religions. Which is to say that Christianity has no evidence in its favor and considering things like blood sacrifice, and demigod adventures, the sins of ancestors, and fairy tales which are found in Christianity but should not be found in a true religion. Because they make no sense as a matter of reality, God no more needs a dying and rising savior son to be blood sacrificed to himself for propitiation for the sins of the ancestors than God needs a spaceship made of string cheese, but these are things we should expect of a religion that was invented in a mix of cultures obsessed with primitive blood sacrifice and that was hugely in love with the wacky adventures of the sons of gods.

We have no reason to suppose Christianity is any more true than any of the agreed upon false religions, and we have many reasons to suppose that it was simply invented by people between 1800-2000 years ago or so.

Garden of Eden, and the need for Jesus.

There are very serious problem with the story of Christianity, namely it doesn't really make any sense. With regard to Eden, why the hell are you going to put your talking/tempting snake anywhere near your magical tree or your humans not suppose to eat your magical tree? Why not plant your magical trees significantly far from your humans, like on the other side of the planet, or get this, don't even keep magical trees around at all (it's not like you need knowledge or life as God). It's not like I keep my lizard poison and my lizards in the same terrarium.

And to think, to fix this mistake God needed magical blood but only his own blood had enough magic to do it so he gave himself a body and killed it. Why did God need a magical dying and rising savior child? Well, much like propitiation by blood it was the style at the time. It isn't as if the universe would *actually* exist like this, that'd be insanely stupid. But, this is *exactly* what we would expect to come out of that region if they made up a religion. If you combine Judaism of the time with Paganism you pretty much end up with Christianity. The Jews liked them some blood sacrifice and the most popular motif in Pagan myth was the son of God and his wacky adventures. Give yourself broad appeal by adapting these much beloved plot points and you have a successful religion. However if you think about it, God no more needs magical blood than a spaceship and no more needs a dying and rising savior God-Child than the oxygen carrying molecules of a few terrestrial critters on this one dinky planet.

None of this makes sense if Christianity is true, but we should almost expect it if Christianity is false. If Christianity didn't exist, it would almost inevitably end up with some other group making up exactly such a story, so much so that the origins of Christianity are almost certain. It would be weird if somebody didn't try to mix Jewish mysticism with Pagan demigods.

Girl With A Pearl Earring

There is something absolutely brilliant about this kind of commentary.

Shorter Creationist

Basically I'll be doing some "Shorter" synopsis posts on creationist stuff I bother to read. I might as well have em. Today we have:

  Scientists Find No Genetic Evidence For Evolution

Next, Mathematicians will find no multipliable evidence for numbers.

Shorter Creationist: A decade ago scientists realized Molecular genomics was harder than they hoped, therefore their entire field is wrong and God exists.

Need to move data...

Data moving will take like 10 hours.
Start the move.
Go to bed.
Wake up to find Windows has been waiting with baited breath for 9 and a half hours to know whether I want to move Thumbs.db too?

This stuff wouldn't be so silly but Windows made thumbs.db. It's a windows file. It consists of thumbnails of pictures in the directory that would not be there if they moved. *sigh*

Inventing On Principle

That's a pretty good principle to have. I daresay there's a few places I could see it being hugely useful.

http://vimeo.com/36579366

A Plothole Nailed to a Stick.

Sometimes when you're in the zone, in this case responding to somebody on Amazon who seems intent on offering TAG as some kind of knockdown to Naturalism. Because if one can equivocate the meaning of "exist", one can somehow create a large enough hole to shove a god into.

It seems rather strange to follow a religion grounded in the primitive notion of blood sacrifice in a society that understands the utter silliness of propitiation by blood. That the creator of the entire universe needed blood to fix the universe and sate his own anger and allow violations of his own rules so much that he donned a baby suit and sacrificed himself to himself, because only He in human form had enough magic in his blood to accomplish this task. And rather than ever look and address these rather terrible shortcomings which, are well marked in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails, you attempt to squabble over your strawman versions of naturalist ontology, as if wrongly conflating physically exists with transcendentally exists or morally exists will suddenly make one forget you worship a plot hole nailed to a stick.

The Bible in a Nutshell

Atheist Pig

How-to: write a mIRC games scores file.

I dealt with a lot to get such things to work well, and I highly recommend the way I did my scores to anybody. Which is to say tokenized strings in a flatfile to be accessed with a /filter command. Unless mIRC at somepoint gets mySQL this will be the best way to do things. A well placed filter command can pretty much access anything and in a fast enough time frame for a game. And it scales well enough to use.

In Tat's Trivia you can see the var commands. Namely setvar, readvar, getvar, gttok, tvartoks. These each do specific things.

Below the fold is a rather long breakdown of everything about how this stuff works. And why you should use this method.

Mysteries of size, solving lesser mysteries with greater ones.

We cannot solve the mystery of missing socks by involving elves. While it could plausibly be the right answer the mystery of the socks is a lesser mystery than the mystery of elves. So unless there is some overwhelming evidence in favor of elves, we should rationally reject it.

The atheist's wager...

Have you ever thought about what you'll say if you're wrong. If you're brought be before Allah and he asks where his Partners are? Where is this Jesus and this Holy Spirit you attributed to him? Before he casts you down into the pits of hell? Hm?

In truth, any God who sends people to eternal torture for failing to believe the exact right thing, when that right thing seems to be clearly wrong, is an evil God. According to the Bible, Gandhi is burning in hell forever for not believing this stuff. Any God that evil shouldn't be worshiped, it should be despised. Either there's justice in the universe or there isn't. The Christian God is petty and pompous and evil if he really just wants you to believe nonsense for bad reasons.

Betting that there's an evil God who sends people to be tortured based on beliefs is a bad bet. You're better off being a good person, believing true things, and helping your fellow people. If there's a God to reward you, great, bonus. If there isn't, then doing good is it's own reward.

I'm getting good at this...

More and more I'm regularly dropping wit filled pithy bombs. For example the following about how atheist children are to be pitied because their parents are "nuts".

Yes. Their children won't know of the great sacrifice that God made when he fixed the universe with blood. It's quite harrowing because only his own blood had enough magic to do it. So he gave himself a body and killed it. And if you believe this, and you revel in the blood sacrifice that God made to God by God of God for God's creations to fix God's flaws and their crimes against God, you can go to a magical land of bliss forever and ever. And if you don't regardless how good you are, you will burn forever in hell fire and torture, like Gandhi does. Because "atheism is completely nuts" but Christianity that's perfectly logical!

Scales of the Universe.

So rare are such things that just playing with them helps you to understand so well the size of things.
http://thisfile.me/Flash/Other/scale_of_universe_enhanced.swf

This thing is always so awesome.

Wolfram Alpha and Minecraft triangulation.

Running a Wolfram Alpha prompt on "intersection of line through (-250,-1556) and through (-241,-1546) and line through (-32,-198) and through (-22,-198)" will solve the location of the stronghold in your particular world.

intersection of line through (StartX0,StartZ0) and through (EndX0,EndZ0) and line through (StartX1,StartZ1) and through (EndX1,EndZ1)

I had to tell the wolfram people to fix it. Somehow it neglected to actually solve it. But, now it's golden.

Problem of Animal Suffering, Fine Tuned Evolution, and Divine Hidiness

Yes. How amazing is it that God chooses to make the universe exactly like it needs to be in order for us to form naturally without God needing to exist. In the case of nature, God tortures animals endlessly to sell the rouse of his non-existence. -- If there were no God, only natural forces could be at work and, you see, evolution requires that this be the case. Maximized suffering tends to be a required byproduct of a struggle for survival which is the engine of evolution. So God tortures animals endlessly so as to better hide from rational people and to better trick them into reasonable unbelief, and thereby into hell where he has them tortured forever.

The fine tuning argument, on it's head.

The fact the universe from its very inception require certain very specific characteristics in an incredibly narrow range for planets, stars, solar systems, galaxies and the chemicals and conditions for life to exist.

There's nothing to indicate they are variables at all and vary at all. In fact, we've never seen characteristic of anything that wasn't contingent on other physics.

And a God does not need these specific characteristics to allow for the natural creation of planets, stars, solar systems, and galaxies, chemicals, or the right conditions for life. A God could just make that happen directly. Some land, make it the right temperature, poof life alive, and you're done! These special conditions are those which we have that allow for natural forces to result in exactly the universe we have, without God. This universe looks exactly like a universe would need to look if there were no God, and this is exactly true on every level and on every point. It's massively good evidence for atheism because on atheism we would assume these things would need to be the case and lo and behold they are. The fine-tuning argument in this light is really just looking at the fact that the universe can exist without a God, that it looks exactly as if there is no God, and says, "Well isn't that an amazing coincidence? Isn't that too good to be true? Yes it is, God did it!" -- It's saying that it's amazing that there are no gaps to shove God into, and therefore God.

The fine-tuning argument here is wrong because, God doesn't need *ANY* special conditions or characteristics. Only atheism requires that those characteristics should be exactly like they are, because these are the kinds of characteristics that could allow a universe to exist, if God didn't exist. "Why if you jigger those characteristics a bit you might not get 70 sextillion stars and 13 billion years to allow random mindless forces to get have life kick up here and there purely by chance!" -- YOU DON'T NEED THAT! GOD CAN MAKE ONE PLANET AND PUT LIFE ON IT!

You don't need just the right stars to make higher elements in those stars and allow them to explode and make the debris for planets to coalesce. God could just make these higher elements, without the right levels to build them in stars. Only atheism needs it to happen by mindless natural forces. "Oh, it's so suspicious that the universe so perfectly fits what it would need for atheism to be true, therefore, clearly, God exists and did that. Here's some things somebody else pulled out of their ass to suggested if they were different the universe wouldn't exist!" -- If the universe were made out of butter rather than elements there'd be no life, therefore Elves made the universe exist out of atoms. If gravity pushed rather than pulled there'd be no life, praise be to the flying spaghetti monster!

If the universe cannot be explained perfectly by natural forces, then God. If the universe can be explained perfectly by natural forces, "Well isn't that remarkably perfect?" Therefore God! The fine tuning argument is basically saying that perfectly meeting the requirements implied by atheism, is too perfect and therefore is evidence of God. There's a very narrow window of universes that can create themselves without God, and we perfectly fall into that window! It's an amazing feat that only God could do.

The universe as evidence for God.

There is evidence that elves exists.

Consider these facts:

1) There is a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach.
2) It rains.
3) Sand exists.

Therefore elves.

----

My analogy here is carefully chosen, it's not solely intended to poke fun at this argument but to show an analogy. While we might well just accept that life exists or that the universe exists because it demonstratively is true in that we exist to see such. We are then asked to weigh the need for a real explanation against Drew ad hoc supposing God exists, and that God should make the universe, as we have a universe it is therefore evidence of God. This is at the core what Drew is arguing.

Our existence is not contingent upon a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach. So we cannot say that because we exist, it necessarily must follow that there is a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach. But, this is true of life and the universe. We can only exist in universes which life can exist within, and we can only exist on planets which life can exists on, and given that a our parents met, their parents met, and they did exactly what they did. Any difference could well have resulted in different people rather than us. That we exist rather than one of any of those unborn ghosts, sisters and brothers, our half sisters and half brothers if our parents never met, or our cousins if our parents were never born. These odds against us are stupefying, if one pretends they are meaningful.

Why that exact series of events should occur rather than another, is not a question with an answer. It just did. It was hugely unlikely, as would be any specific set of events, but if it didn't something else would have, and it would be equally unlikely. This is the power of the anthropic principle, since we are contingent on everything that lead to us existing, the odds seem amazing, but since we are here they necessarily had to happen.

So claiming that elves made it so that I was born, rather than any of the other combinations of sperm and eggs of my parents, would seem dizzying. Because what are the odds? Well, really the odds are 100%. I can only exist as I do. If somebody else existed, they would only exist as they did. And any of the people who could be here (yet aren't) would be here, and be. They would exist as they did. So really, we need to get around this. It actually pointless to ask about any events that could only be what they are, because our asking is contingent upon them. Elves should want me to exist. If they existed they should make me exist. Since I exist, that is strong evidence for elves. This is actually meaningless. If somebody else existed they could ask the same thing. If Earth were a lifeless hunk of rock, aliens on another planet could well ask the same sorts of questions.

If you think that elves cause it to rain, every time it rains you'll see evidence of elves. We can only look backwards and ask ourselves, how we got here. Which theory is the best to explain the everything we have? We do not suppose that everything we have is evidence of elves, because you believe things about elves would give us everything we have.

We should not be blinded by the odds that life should exist elsewhere in the universe, nor should we be blinded by the odds that there exists a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach. Because we are not directly contingent on these existing. We can be objective about this idea, without supposing they are necessarily true. But, should we suppose that there is such a grain of sand?

We know that elves are expert craftsmen and want to make perfectly cubical things, and they made all the grains of sand, and a grain of sand would be so small as to be a marked feat of a great craftsman. Such a grain of sand would be strong evidence for elves, or some highly intelligent supernatural craftsmen with all the same properties as elves. Without elves, you would need to explain how such a grain of sand could exist. You would seemingly have nothing but natural forces to rely upon to make this case. Now, let us suppose I have located (regardless of the odds for it's existence) a perfectly cubical grain of sand on the beach. Is this evidence for elves? Should one accept it as evidence? -- Well, perhaps. But, it's still blindingly bad evidence.

What are the odds against elves? What are the odds that such a grain of sand could form by mindless natural forces? Much like abiogenesis there's a lot of good speculation here but not not a complete understanding of everything. We generally know how sand forms. We understand that it's silica crystals and crystals tend to have sharp edges due to the way crystals are. That we aren't dealing with randomly placing atoms but that the atoms by necessity are fairly uniform and the cleaving of these crystals will actually form sharp edges. In theory this reduces the odds from blindingly close to nothing to something somewhat reasonable. You need to run into parallel sides and right angles. And due to the way crystals form the parallel sides might well also be more likely than we should suppose by otherwise. Much as lipid formation into cell like structures or the the ease at which amino acids form, seems harder on first glance. One could argue that this grain of sand is more likely than it initially seemed, but it would still seem quite perfect. And still, one might assume, be good evidence for elves.

Well, the problem actually tends to go away when we consider how many grains of sand are on all the beaches of the planet. There are ~ 20 sextillion grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. If elves actually made all the sand and they love cubical things, why aren't they all cubical? Why didn't they just make one grain of sand? Why should there be ~20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand on the beaches of Earth if these elves just wanted to make one perfectly cubical grain of sand to show off their skill. But, if there were just one grain, then the odds would be staggeringly low that it could be formed by random mindless forces. The only way to get that mindless forces could be responsible is if there were so many grains of sand that one could just break just right to be. There would need to be forces such as crystallization which could allow for perfectly arrayed atoms in the sand, and some manner of sheering that allows for sharp corners. And amazingly all of these exist. Perhaps if elves wanted to carve a grain of sand to look like Mount Rushmore one could not have explained these things as easily. But, the overwhelming evidence is that it can just happened by chance. And there likely are a great many perfectly cubical grains of sand on the beach.

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour." - William Blake


And ultimately, this is the case with gods as well. As Carl Sagan noted, "The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth." (70 vs 20 sextillion) -- While the conditions needed for life, may be strange and they may be rare, to show how it could have happened I do only have a smattering of good scientific theories. But, to say that one is only taking facts and I am talking in theories is like saying that you need something to hammer in a nail, and when a hammer is offered, it is declined because one only wants to use atoms. Theories are made of facts. That's what decides the very quality of a theory. And whatever you end up using would equally just be a theory. The difference is that a theory that elves carve perfectly cubic grains of sand, seems so bad one typically wouldn't call it a theory. And supposing that it is the case and just using sand as evidence, because elves make sand. Is actually as firmly established as Drew's claim is.

Many of our theories for abiogenesis deal with healthy bit with stuff we're not sure about, but many things we are. We know there are basic ways to replicate and basic biochemistry that works, there are balls of lipids that could protect an early organism and there are many. We know all of the basic stuff we need to happen are entirely possible and we know a lot of facts like the property of crystals to form sharp edges which suggest that far from being an impossibility it's actually nudged significantly towards being likely. The universe is exactly as it should look if there were no God. That's a fact. It's built on other facts and other theories and even educated guesses and reasonable inferences. The universe is vast and old with time and chemicals aplenty to kick up life here and there, and maybe a perfect cube of sand or two. Whether it's in the waves of Hawaii, off up near some rocks in Indonesia, unnoticed in the waters of the Florida Keys, or on some atoll largely ignored. There is more sand on these beaches than there are stars in the sky, we don't know if it's only a one in a million chance or one in a billion. Or if it's one in a hundred sextillion and we should count our lucky stars that life exists at all (as there'd only be a 70% chance for 1 and we'd likely still then be that one and have gotten lucky). If there was an all powerful being who created us, why should there be an uncountably number of pointless planets revolving around pointless stars in pointless galaxies we can barely see with billion dollar telescopes. And galaxies we can't because they formed so far away that they don't yet exist to us yet. A god would only need to create one planet, wouldn't even need a star and certainly not one that only gives us 2 out of every billion photons. A God could create any manner of universe, so why create one that looks exactly like one that could happen by way of mindless natural forces? Why create a universe where solar genesis happens? Where nebula create stars? Where life evolves? Where life can evolve? Where only the tiniest fraction of a long 13.75 billion years where in 0.0001 billion is of any relevance to our species? Unless you talk about the 2 billion years it took for our species to evolve from tiny nothing of bacteria into highly impressive species with 7 billion people each made up of 50-75 trillion cells. Which is a lot of work for nothing. Though if there were no gods then this is the only way to be here. And since we can only look into the past and ask for the best explanation of it, it's actually remarkably damning for theism. Everything that needs to be true for atheism to be true, is true.

Why should every question we've ever really answered always come down to mindless natural forces? Why is it that when theists claimed that lightning was caused by the gods, that disease was caused by demons, that heredity was the domain of God, that the sun was a fiery chariot across the sky, why should they always be wrong? Well, they don't have to be. They just are. It turns out that that supernatural answers of gods and elves and spirits and ghosts turn out to be wrong. We understand this reality because we've looked a lot of claims made over the years, and we know what sorts of answers are likely correct. So if we care about our answers and we like to guess correctly when we only have guesses we can make, we should guess at unknown natural forces because after all those are the only answers that have ever been right. When somebody guesses at gods for the million-and-first time, we should be unsurprised when those claims turn out to be wrong and it turns out that again it was mindless natural forces. In fact, since that is always what has happened throughout all of history, we should expect it!

For atheism to be right, stars should form naturally. Planets should form naturally. Life should form naturally. Elements should form naturally. A process by which simple forms can become progressively more complex must exist. Everything should be made of pretty much the same stuff. You need to a lot of time to get anything as strange as life to kick up, by chance. There needs to be an enormous amount of universe to exist to allow life to kick up, because it like cuboid grains of sand should be rare. There needs to be an enormous amount of time for life to kick up in. It would take real work to go from a simple form to a complicated form, and it would take real time to do that work. And everything from Human parasites, to human food animals, to humans would have had to have come about by this process. Everything from the tides to the seasons need to be the result of mindless natural forces. And every time a theist says that we can't explain that, they need to be wrong. Wrong about the tides, wrong about the seasons, and wrong about every explanation that says a creative superbeing is making puppets of us. And all of this is true. Everything that needs to be the case, for the universe to exist as it does without a God, exists exactly in that way it needs to. Everything. And everything is a whole lot of facts. So many in fact, that you'd be hard pressed to keep any of them straight without modeling those facts and drawing conclusions. And hence the need for theories.

You wish to oppose all this evidence. Everything we know about the universe, such that it's exactly what it needs to be for there to be no God. And do so by assuming God in the first place, and using the existence of the universe as evidence. I am at a loss as to how you cannot see through this as obviously hollow. We can only exist in universes where we exist. Such is no more convincing that elves that arranged for our parents to meet, so that we could exist. Because it's seems such a rare set of events.

If elves would make grains of sand to be a perfect cube, that such sand is evidence for elves. If you believe that elves cause it to rain, then everytime it rains you'd see evidence of elves. This doesn't work. Because you never established the first bit, that there are elves, that this is their intent. And that there aren't better answers out there. You are trying to use, what must be the case, as evidence for something that people made up without any good reason to do so.

After all, if there are no gods, then we need to understand why people keep inventing them. And coincidentally they invent thousands of them, and none of them agree with each other, but all of them agree with the person making the god claims. We know a lot about the gods of men, and they don't reside on Olympus or Sinai, they are in the heads of men. Who look at the complicated world, the happenstance nature of reality, all those cogs and bits that gave rise to them and think that it could happen no other way that the universe intended it for you. That the elves arranged those cogs and bits so that you might be. But, really, if it wasn't you, it would be something else. And isn't it that much more odd that you're making a claim that most people are wrong about. Theists know that other theists are wrong, they can see all too clearly that what others propose is absurd, and should see that those propositions are believed just as clearly and just as strongly as their beliefs. You are supposing an answer that we know human beings make up out of the blue for no reason. From the cargo cults of the John From to the God who needs blood to fix the universe, these are beliefs that humans invent and there's no good reason to suppose that it's true, or to suppose that a perfect God should want for a universe, or that a universe is what an all powerful God should want.

The universe doesn't care about us. The solar system formation process bombarded Earth with massive impacts over and over again, and still can to this day, though there are far fewer rocks, they can wipe out the dinosaurs for no reason leaving the birds as their only survivors. Life has to evolve through a process that amounts to torture, that necessarily as a consequence of geometric population growth kept in check only by mindless natural forces causes most life forms to live terrible lives of pain, suffering, illness and death, and the best of them may breed more before succumbing. If there were a creative God, who made evolution, who guided evolution, we should spit in his face for being a sadistic bastard. But, if there are only mindless natural forces, evolution would be the only way to get at complicated organisms through the struggle for survival.

Surely, everybody should see that the entire universe being made exactly in such a way to happen by mindless natural forces, is strong evidence against a God. One could suppose there is a trickster God who wants to hide, but there no reason to suppose this either, and good reasons to suppose against it. And so few gods are trickster gods. Humans tend to only invent gods who love them and planned for them and made them happen. But, such a God could do far better than this universe. Mindless natural forces could only do this universe. But, looking at the universe that we have, we find a universe such that God is unnecessary. But, more than unnecessary such a God shouldn't create a universe like this at all. And this is very strong evidence indeed. Everything atheists need for the universe to exist without God existing does exist, and on the opposite claim, the God of theism is bending over backwards spitting out pointless planets for no reason at all, torturing animals needlessly, and giving us 13.74 billion years of pointless time.

Can a universe be evidence for God? Yes. Is this universe good evidence for God? No. This universe is good evidence for atheism.

Greta Christina, Why arguing against religion is not a waste of time.

The Hidden Faith of the Founding Fathers, what an odd thing...

It's literally a documentary from a Christian perspective on the founding fathers and the lie that they they were gungho for Christianity. It's very Christian perspectives with good facts behind it. I'm not even sure what to make out of it.

On the laws of thermodynamics and evolution and life.

I have yet to meet the person who has ever put forth the argument you describe. My guess is that you haven't either. It's a strawman- an argument nobody is actually positing, stated merely so that the person stating it can claim superior knowledge.

Some people do make that fallacy. They say things like because everything has a cause the universe has a cause. That actually fails due to composition.

Thanks for stating the obvious. It doesn't change the fact that the entire rest of the known universe follows basic fundamental laws that render Life impossible.

That the vast majority of the universe is inhospitable to life and that there's 70 sextillion stars in trillions of galaxies, with even more planets and moons around that, most of which are undoubtedly dead and the whole thing some ~14 billion years old is exactly what we should expect if there is no God. Without a God the only way to make life is by getting really lucky, and you might well need 70 sextillion stars to get lucky enough to mix up the chemicals enough times in enough places and do so over and over and over again in a really old universe. If God existed, you'd need one star and one planet. And even that arrangement might well overly complex.

Actually, we can't. Not even close.

We can and do. In fact, that's pretty much just how climate science works. Heat in vs. heat out.

There's not even close to enough matter in the observable universe to explain the energy that it generates. That's why the aforementioned "Dark Matter" theory exists.

Gravity isn't energy it's a force. You can't take a magnet and make power out of it. You need magnetic flux. The change in gravity is energy. Gravity is just a force there making anything with mass stick together and tugging at spacetime to do it.

This isn't a topic that's open for debate. It's a settled scientific fact.

The fact that you're wrong is certainly worth addressing. Dark Matter is a theory because galaxies spin too fast without flinging apart. So the presumption is there's more gravity there than we suspect. That's not bonus energy, it's additional gravity. And it's concerning galaxies not Earth. And it doesn't have any known implications on "energy in, energy out" on Earth.

For the Universe to be expanding at the rate it's expanding, there simply isn't enough matter in existence.

That's dark energy. If there were only matter things would actually collapse as we originally suspected. The universe however is accelerating in it's expansion. But this is nothing to do with the matter but rather that spacetime is expanding.

But in terms of evolution, it means that natural systems never move from simple states to complex states. It's not how the universe works. Look at any other planet in the solar system. Are they "evolving"? No. They're cooling. They're moving from a state of high energy to a state of low energy.

That's why we have metabolism. It's basically the one of the defining bits of life. They salvage energy and store it. That's what plants do. It's not that they are basking in the sun but rather that they are banking some of the suns energy because that a massive ball of negative entropic energy we orbit around, is constantly bombarding us with it. The entire raison d' etra of life is that it captures energy originally from the sun and uses it to do better at getting more of it. And the better organisms are at this the more of them exist, because we also bank those tricks in hereditary molecules. We end up hitting an energy ceiling whereby most of the potential new critters can't exist. So it ends up, sorting out those banks of tricks, and if anybody happened to have accidentally copied it down wrong and tweaked it for the better, that critter will be more likely to do better, have more copies, and more copies of that helpful trick.

So just some duplicating gunk trying edging each other out for a fraction of that incoming energy to duplicate a but more is entirely possible within the confines of thermodynamics. And that's also basically the definition of life.

Your objection is basically that we don't know of anything else that has a metabolism that isn't alive. And we only know about life on this planet. And you're using this objection to attempt to say that life on this planet isn't possible.

He instead used the term "Natural Selection", which only means "If you kill all the redheads, only blondes and brunettes will be left to reproduce".

He wanted to try to stick to the science and arguments. People had knee jerk reactions to claims about transmutation at the time, as Darwin so acutely learned from Vestiges (book). Also, redheadedness is a recessive gene. You could certainly select against it with murder. But that's artificial selection, not natural selection. Natural selection is when you allow nature to do it because of the struggle for existence and rather than select for just something like non-redheadedness you select for *anything* that makes one do better and the difference has to be ever so slight and you get eons to do it in. Darwin's argument here was quite good. In a couple hundred years look what we did to pigeons and dogs, imagine what the selection of nature could do in eons!

It doesn't say, as so many Atheists seem to think, that the universe wakes up one morning and decides that people are a cooler idea than apes. That's a distinction that requires intelligence. Which the universe doesn't have.

That distinction requires people not intelligence. Humans are apes. Ape is a taxonomic group and humans are certainly a great ape. And evolution never made that decision. After all, there are still apes and there are still monkeys. It's not that one is cooler than the other but that each group has survived on it's own merits.

Me, I argue that evolution is inconsistent with the second law because the second law says that evolution can't happen.

It doesn't. It says things will tend to lose their energy and order. Your argument would suggest more directly that life itself cannot exist. That I cannot from eating sugars and breathing oxygen live from day to day without decaying in short order. And it's actually true if I were not alive. As soon as my metabolism shuts down and I'm not unbanking energy stored reserves of the negative entropy of the sun my body will break down. The problem here is that we're alive, and we store energy. We effectively have sugar-batteries. So even though we should stop working, we fight that breakdown and loss by adding even more energy into the system, constantly. We get that energy from the sun and banking it is called metabolism. And we tend to make copies of ourselves so if one copy stops working there are others, and if one copy happens to be an improvement then more copies of that copy are made and the future copies will be improved. And necessarily since worse copies won't copy they won't be around.

Far from thermodynamics making evolution impossible, thermodynamics are the reason why evolution works. You got to beat the decay and anything that doesn't is screwed. So the critters with the best methods of thriving giving such decay do the best, and thus there are more of them. Is it any wonder that some of the most successful organisms thrive on poop and death?

There's absolutely no way to explain why the universe, sans God, would suddenly decide that Elephants are "better" than snails.

People tend to decide such things like that. But, nature doesn't. You can tell by the existence of both elephants and snails. They both do a great job. Elephants exploit economy of size and run warm blooded, and snails conserve their energy and protect their bodies with a natural ceramic. Those are both really great strategies and they both do very well in their respective niches. And both of them beat out the decay.

But "better"? Nature doesn't really decide that. I suppose one could argue that lizards are better than trilobites because trilobites bit it, but that just surviving. Copies of lizards are still around, so by some measure they were better at avoiding the decay. But, that's a bit narrow of a definition.

So basically, if we just overlook that troublesome "How did Life come into being in the first place?" thing, then everything is hunky-dory. But we can't. That's the entire issue.

No it's not. All your objections were to how things cannot possibly beat out decay but metabolism and evolution certainly do solve that. You could build a little rover with a solar panel, battery and wheels, and that would suffice to solve those problems. Abiogenesis is actually a completely different issue. Where do these original copiers come from? And odds for that are pretty good that they just kicked up by chance.