I mean, we are talking about human thigs, like good and evil, value judgements.

Ok, maybe the fact that the Universe began in a low entropy state can be used as evidence for God; or maybe the human concept of 'began' can only exist where time has directionality, thus must exist in the middle of a low->high entropy process. (All closed systems go from low to high entropy as time goes forward; but time going forwards has no meaning without therebeing a low entropy state to change from)

I find it silly but understandable that people have to link God heavily to the story of creation. People who seek God are seeking a purpose in life, and purpose demands a palatable explanation for how we got here and why we exist in the first place. Purpose doesn't require knowledge of the past, it just requires desire for the future.

A good take on the arrow of time (time and the second lawn must moce forwards) and entropy, I fully agree. Someone else raised entropy not me. I think that it might be our friend isher, I thought it interesting to comment, particularly in the context of free will.
Perhaps free will is relevant in discussing those 'human things'.

Well yes y2, I guess it all comes down to cause and effect. As you know these are well-rehearsed arguments which I think are pretty equally matched. Well actually I think God just shades it, but I am sure that you disagree. Let's not go there, please.

@orathaic, money is inherently evil, it is the definition of a necessary evil. Money makes organizing civilization and regulating the transfer of goods and services so much easier. But money is evil. The more you have, the more you crave. It's not required to live, but it is. The concept of money, while in the realm of business can spur great development, on an individual level it shackles people to the system. You start getting successful, you take on bigger investments and start owning more stuff and you get consumed. Not everyone does, but many people do. Why do most lottery winners end up with their lives destroyed?

I do not agree that money is inherenty evil.

Why do lottery winners end up unhappy? Because they have dreams which remain unfullfilled. Further they do not have a stable source of income, the lottery is a once off, so if they spend all their money they can't replace it, but it they don't spend it then what is the point?

It turns out that spending money on others (be it charity or otherwise) actualy makes us happier than spending it on ourselves.

But while money can't buy happiness, lack of money does result in unhappiness. Those who are struggling to get by (who may be more excited hy the idea of winning the lottery, and escaping that struggle - infact you can argue that they are paying for the excitement of a chance to win) they are shown to he more happy when they reach a certain level (what i refer to as basic needs) but more income beyond that does not equal more happiness.

There is clear research to this effect.

I would argue that money is a tool, and any tool can be used for evil. But the psychology behind how humans use/desire money is an issue. However that desire exists on its own. You can collect gold and diamonds to show off your status, and how much more powerful than our neighbours you are. This kind of greed and status grabbing is part of human nature, with or without money.

Perhaps money amplifies it, allows us to measure with a simple number how wealthy a person is, and yhis kind of simple thinking blinds a person to the value of friendship/social connection/family. It also blonds a nation-state to the value of anything not measurable in GDP terms ( community, volunteering, culture )

But money facilitates trade. Trade allows some people have jobs which are no directly invoved in agriculture (subsistace farming) and even farmers are better off with insurance to protect against 'acts of god' - drought or flooding, which can destroy agriculture.

Money allows all the work which created scientific development, (because people can work for money, and money can be used to buy food) which resulted in an end to millions of child deaths each year. (Just from medicine and good nutrition alone)

Reducing money to just 'people are greedy' ignores the essential features of money while also ignoring the ability of humans to be greedy without money.

(And don't get me wrong, the ability of money to represent trust can also remove tue need for communities, urbanisation and the end to rural living has had massively negative effects on human standard of living, and money has facilitated that, you can buy things from a person in a city without knowing or trusting them. And this reduces transactions to an impersonal level; i am believe there are positives and negatives in everything, and if you can't see them you are not looking hard enough)

@ fulhamish
I did mention entropy a while ago, in referencing the driving force behind both progress and destruction. The entropic principle (things running out of energy) is the driving force behind the universe, after all. Without death and decay, there would be no life, no change, only stasis meaning nothing.

the very physics that drive out bodies towards death are the same forces that allow us to progress, change and grow. Everything is eventually broken down into its elements, and scattered again to be reborn, on this planet for now, but eventually on different planets and suns. Who knows how many times the material of our bodies has been reconstituted in the past, in some alien rock, or plant, or being? Without the grinding down of life from entropy, nothing would have been created. And so death then, perhaps the most powerful and awesome force in the universe -- the taker, and the giver.

This is why I reject the notion of "eternal life" as many religions would describe it. There is no way the present can continue forever. There is only process and change. In every moment, everything is perfect and complete, but at the same time changing, evolving, and becoming something new. Eternity is now. Eternity is process.

and it is hilarious that i just posted that under a thread entitled "Roe v Wade."

Wow I can +1 which is the new way of agreeing with the previous comment.
In this thread...
I offer the opinion that money is amoral, it has no morality. Moral consequences come from the way money is used, and that's the responsibility of the users.
Certainly the wealthy have been able to use their power to ensure that when they need an abortion they can ensure the best medical treatment, and in nation states where abortion services are limited, restricted, it allows the wealthy to avoid the "backyard" illegal services that are high risk.
Is using wealth to circumvent harsh restrictions on abortion a good or bad thing ?

(Speaking of using wealth to avoid restrictions, on the island of Ireland - both the republic and northern ireland, there is a complete abortion ban, and money lets you travel to britian to obtain an abortion - unless you are are in care of the health service, or a refugee waiting on their application, or for other reasons reatricted from leaving the country(

At ishy and ora you have both given very good first year undergrad descriptions of entropy and the second law. However, in my view you miss the point that we are talking about a probalistic law/description here (hence my reference to Boltzman). It is in these terms that I refer to free will.

@ Major for your information.

The 'a' in atheist translates as 'without' so literally without belief in the existence of God..

The 'anti' in anti-theist translates as ‘against’ so literally against belief in the existence of God.

Two very different positions. I hope that is clear.

OK, ishy, ora & myself might spend a few minutes in the Naughty corner with our dunce caps on :-)

lol -- what a child i must be. i bow to your infinite wisdom, fulhamish.

Sorry guys - Sarcasm is lost in print. Nice to talk to you.

@fullhamish: I still don't why you're talking about boltzman.

You said "fulhamish (3255 D)
Wed 12 PM
+1
Entropy isn't a bad analogy, not there of course, but better than most. Provided one ditches that horrible 'disorder' rubbish and goes with a developing probability distribution. A creation at the start and then nothing (Deism at best)? Or an ongoing process of continual creation? And, by extension, the ongoing gift of free will?"

What is the initial creation? Or on going process, how does entropy help us understand this. So we are in states of a 'developing' (i want to use the word evolving, which has a different meaning in physics) probsbility distribution.

So we are far away from the stable state (maximum entropy) where the distribution stops developing? What has free will got to do with it? Can you use third year undergrad thermodynamics to explain how it relates to what states are accessible to the system? What system are we talking about exactly? The individual? Society? The Earth or the Earth-Sun system?

You went on to say: "Given that probability/possibilities increase in spontaneous reactions as a function of the second law that means that the natural course of events is a heightening of possibilities. Hence, my remark about free will and, by extension, a continual rather than time-specific, creation."

This seems misleading. More states open up as 'time goes forward' is sligthly backwards. The arrow of time is defined by the lack of accessible states in the past as distinguished from the large numbers of accessible states in the future. All closed system tend towards opening up more states because statistically that is tue most likely direction a system (with random motion t) will evolve.

Once you reach the maximal number of microstates within a given macrostate (maximum number of accessible states available) everything ends. Physics no longer has a tendancy to distinguish future from past. Hea death occurs. But with infinite time all previous state should eventually be explored.

Still from any lower entropy state the tendancy will be to head back to the maximal entropy state. Statistics requires this out of necessity.

I don't see how free will has any relevance to this.

Oh Fulhamish, you did make a valid point, I think I'm not a theist or anti theist, but I might be regarded as possibly atheist. Anyway there's a lot of stuff other than abortion happening here, I just joined up at V Dip and God plays Diplomacy there, I saw it, God is a registered player. Did Mujus know this ?

lol

Naturally they've made God an Almighty Mod over there