Proselytizers (part 2)

One of the things that the proselytizers and I immediately disagreed about was evolution. Back a long time ago, when I was a Christian one of the scriptures that really spoke to me was the verse out of the Psalms which said: "The heaven's God's glory do declare and the sky his handiwork teach." I really saw God's hand in all of creation. As I looked around the world, I saw a carefully balanced and designed system. Then one day while I was on a religious retreat, I was reading a book and something I read was like pulling a string on a knit garmet causing the whole thing unravel. I remember the exact moment when that string was pulled. I was reading a book that had absolutely nothing to do with the Bible, or biology. It was a book on artificial life, a sub-topic of artificial intelligence, of all things. It really didn't have anything to do with any of the bounds that normally shape the debate regarding evolutionary theory and creationism. The thing that really impacted on my thinking was a discussion regarding emergent behavior.

My thinking before that point had been something like, the physics of the world show that there is ever increasing entropy. I believed that because things tended toward disorder, and there was ample order in front of me. Some intelligence must have not too distantly put things in order. The chapter in the artificial life book on self organizing systems and how they can lead to emergent phenomena shook that belief to its core. I think before that moment, I had never seen or even heard of any natural situation where order spontaneously arose. This chapter about emergent phenomena gave ample examples in many domains where things self organized. It turns out that in many cases, when energy is applied to a disordered system, it orders itself. A simple example is if you mix up some sand and rocks in a bowl and then shake it, the rocks seem to magically float to the top. I was familiar with many of these self organizing systems but never realized the implications of them. I guess that I really didn't ever consider the scope of the "system" in my notion of the second law of themodynamics. Our planet is constantly receiving huge doses of new energy from the sun and from the heavy radioactive elements at the core of our planet undergoing fission. All that has energy been driving the open system toward more complexity and overcoming the entropy. Therefore, the 2nd law of thermodynamics doesn't prove God's existance.

The realization that we live in an open system and that energy from the sun has been driving a very complicated self organizing system toward ever increasing complexity was the initial tug on the string that began unwinding my belief in God. One by one, the core beliefs that I had built my life around came crashing down. This process took me many years and was a kind of existentialistic crisis.