material contingency

Space and time only actually exist relative to matter. That's matter's special relativity. Space is position relative to matter, and time is the progressive relative positions of matter. No particle of matter can occupy the same position, relative to the balance of matter, in any two increments of time. No particle of matter can occupy two positons, relative to the balance of matter, simultaneously. In other words, nothing can be in the same space twice or in two places at once. For time to be simultaneously progressive and regressive, matter would need to not only be in two places at one time but also move in opposite directions at the same time. Time is progressive, not regressive, and certainly not infinitely regressive.

 

And matter/energy have always existed in one form or another as shown by the fact that they can be neither created nor destroyed.

You need to look up quantum entanglement if you think something can,t exist in two places simultaneously.

 

No, they do in reality too. Adaption through natural selection has been observed in short lived species (mainly bacteria), and increase in information is for instance what happens to people with Down's syndrome.

 

Computers do what they are DESIGNED to do.
Bacteria do not increase available genetic information via intergenerational cellular copy errors. They commandeer segments of information from their hosts.
It is a pre-existing information.

 

No. Matter is not necessary in its being. Matter is contingent in its being. This is evidenced by the fact that it is subject to change. Anything subject to change is subject. It is contingent in its being.

Necessary being is what it is necessarily; it is not subject to anything, even change.

 

Literally everything in existence is subject to change. We have zero evidence for anything being necessary.

 

The "everything" you cite above is empirical evidence of necessary being. After all, by definition, if contingent being exists, necessary being must exist.

 

You have yet to establish that as fact. Clearly the universe works just fine with everything being “contingent”.

 

Sure, you can increase the amount of information by reusing the same information (if you have a working reproduction system). You can then let one copy mutate and let the other remain, and you will have increased the information and through evolution, each bit will be different and meaningful.

 

However, the mutation cannot increase the available information, energy or functional complexity. It is far more unlikely that than shaking a box of letters into a novel. It's just not going to happen.

 

I like the novel example. What you have suggested is merely mutation. Let's see what happens when we add selection to the system.

We want to see if we can create, let's say the word "opopanax". Very unlikely to turn up simply by shaking a couple of letters out of a bag. However, imagine one first shook eight letters out, let's say "pdutjuah" (I just slammed my keyboard), then we applied selection, and we kill every letter which is wrong, i.e. every letter except the a, which we'll keep. We do it again "ribnsjax", now we have two letters that are right. We can keep going until the entire word matches. It'll take a while, but it'll be extremely quick compared to your suggestion of just randomising words. I wrote a quick program which does what I describe, it finds the right word in an average of 69 tries, as opposed to 24^8, which would be the random non-selected version. Here are the amount of tries I needed to generate certain words (each word is one letter longer than the last):

a 13
as 21
are 27
this 32
kinds 37
smooth 40
turbine 44
opopanax 46
totempole 49
bricklayer 51
transcribes 53
overestimate 55
periphrastics 57
politicalforum 59

as you can see, the time increase for each additional letter becomes smaller and smaller. Given that an individual with a successful gene is more likely to succeed, the process with selection is more similar to what I have done here than just shaking letters out of a bag unaided.

That being said, I just found it to be interesting to create the program.

 

Genetic mutations do not compile into eyes, ears or noses. They result in cancers, birth defects and other genetic deficits.
The assumption upon which macro-evolution is premised is erroneous. Matter does not spontaneously organize itself into ever more complex configurations.
Nor is it happening so slowly that we can't see it.
Now, extinction, I believe in. We start with maximum complexity, recombine portions of pre-existing information into unique combinations. Those unique combinations vie for scarce resources. Natural selection is the extinction process. Natural selection chooses between unique expressions of pre-existing information. Mutation never produces new information. Mutation can only corrupt information. Indeed, mutation is the spontaneous corruption of information.

 

Look at it another way. Consider the material involved with your above calculations. the wood and graphite of the pencil, the ingredients of the paper, the rubber eraser. It is obviously impossible that those elements would ever organize themselves into the work you produced. It's just not going to happen, not even if you gave them billions of years. It's much less likely that other just as unintellegent elements would ever organize themselves into the code that prescribes our corporeal being.

 

Sure, and that's why you don't see the purity of rubber or paper in things that do not go through evolution. However, the example I have given shows that if you allow natural selection to take place, you can ignore the vast majority of useless combinations. After two or three iterations of a reproductive process, the vast majority of gibberish combinations will not even be considered (since they would have to be the offspring of other bad individuals, and all those died).

 

And how do you tell whether a certain mutation is a corruption or a beneficial mutation? Matter spontaneously organises itself into any configuration, it doesn't know whether it has created a cancer or an ear. Then, it is natural selection (which is neither intelligent, nor random) which picks out and cultivates those parts that we have come to see as beneficial.

Take for instance Down's syndrome, it creates information, in that it produces an additional chromosome in the DNA of a person. That is an example of a process by which information is created in our genetic make up. The rules of entropy are fundamental physics laws, they don't care whether they act in one cell or two cells. We don't need to create any information, if we can just take a copy and place it next to our original (or rather, next to another copy).

 

Sans an external input of energy and information (design), matter increases in stability and decreases in complexity.

 

prove all of these assertions.

and these as well.

 

prove this as well.

 

Its not so much that ideas are really ever proved to us as it is that all of the other ideas that we have considered have been, to our satisfaction, disproved.
What remains is what we are left to believe, then that's tested, and so on, and so on. The closest thing that we will ever have to proof positive is experimental repeatability. We know what we know not-necessarily. Above, I iterate, and reiterate, the sequence of ideas that leave me to believe what I am currently left to believe. What we cannot offer each other is proof positive. As yet, I have not observed matter spontaneously increasing in functional complexity. Absolutely everything I have observed, measured or tested affirms the second law of thermal dynamics. Of course, that is subjective; or in other words, not-necessary.

You do bring up a good point. Unfortunately, it is a universal observation. Neither of us have anything closer to proof positive than experimental repeatability.

 

Yes, but for starters, things that undergo evolution have an external input of energy and information.

 

There is no repeatable mechanism by which such an "evolution" occurs apart from industry. Industry is well exampled in your above computers and models.
Industry in the combining of material and ingenuity.

Quite apart from all of that is matter's subjectivity. Matter's subjectivity (contingency) is best exampled in matter's subjectivity to constant change.
As yet, there is no "evolution" model that accounts for matter's actualized existence, in matter's coming to be in the first place.

 

Our relationship with Him changed. In the beginning He was Creator. In the OT, He was Lawmaker. Now He is Forgiver. Same God, just evolving His role in our perception as we evolve.

 

Again, i could write such a story without changing myself. It's not hard to get my brain around at all. The author is the unchanging changer.

 

This isn't proof or evidence. This is you restating your argument. Please provide proof for your claim.

 

Sure they do, the principles of evolution are often used, including in some examples which I have given you. Computer models and other models mimic reality (just like a computer can model 1+1=2 accurately, even thought it's a real thing).

I agree that the existence of matter in the first place is a completely different question to the complexity of the matter once it already exists. It was you who brought it up. In [this post], you responded to a post which had only to do with justification of belief with an argument about the arising of complexity.