what’s nature progressing towards?

Chriliman said:

Nature has a tendency to be efficient. Do you think it’s possible for nature and life to reach a point of 100% efficiency were there’s no waist and no decay/death?

Or are these things part of how nature/life is already 100% efficient?

Maybe another way to pose the question is if it’s possible for nature to get better and better at sustaining life without negative consequences to the point of immortal life?

Or is it inevitable that all life in nature will eventually die out forever?

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I guess I don't fully understand the question. Why must life be working toward anything. Also why is "death" a negative consequence?

Chriliman said:

Nature has a tendency to be efficient. Do you think it’s possible for nature and life to reach a point of 100% efficiency were there’s no waist and no decay/death?

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Uhm.... Have you read about the "New Earth" in the Bible??

The current state of nature is the corrupted form. Even nature is sick because of man's sin. When Christ returns, there will be healing of the land and there will be no more death.

Chriliman said:

I don't know, I guess I thought it was obvious that life works towards survival and is at least somewhat efficient towards that goal.



Well the entire concept of negativity is dependent on life. If you value the concept at all then having life end should seem like negative thing.

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"Seems" being the operative word. But the death of individual creatures is not the ending of life as a whole, in fact it is necessary for life as a whole to go on, adapt and survive.

Chriliman said:

I don't know, I guess I thought it was obvious that life works towards survival and is at least somewhat efficient towards that goal.

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Living creatures certainly seek to stay alive. I won't argue against that. But life qua life doesn't seem to have a necessary drive toward "immortality". Each individual may seek that (in that none wish to die), but I thought the question was aimed more at life as a larger concept.

Well the entire concept of negativity is dependent on life. If you value the concept at all then having life end should seem like negative thing.

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I think my question was more aimed at life as a larger concept, rather than on an individual basis. Certainly an individual seeks to NOT die. Just not sure that means that overall life is "working toward" anything in particular. And, indeed, it is arguable that death helps make life more efficient in its role. Evolution works precisely because things which are mal-adaptive die off.

But further I'm not entirely certain that immortality is a necessary "good" overall. Perhaps just my opinion, though.

Tolworth John said:

Nature is not efficient, all life is degrading, rna and dna are in a constant struggle to preserve the contents of the dna.
So left on its own nature will degrade to the lowest common denominator= death.

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The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Everything is running down and going to pieces. ----- Well, that is a rather simple way of describing it. A better definition would be "in a closed system, entropy (a measure of disorder) will on average constantly increase" Since this is a statistical law, two terms are vitally important ---‘closed system’ and ‘on average’.


***”closed system” means that there is no net influx of energy from outside the system. So far as we know the universe as a whole seems to be a closed system with the result that it will eventually wind down and suffer a heat death. However the planet earth is not a closed system. It receives a net influx of energy from the sun and it is this that allows entropy to decrease and makes evolution possible.


***”on average” means that while entropy in a closed system may be increasing on the whole, there may be localized parts of that system where entropy is actually decreasing. Think of the universe as the system and the earth as such a localized part.


***being statistical laws also means that thermodynamics does not govern the behavior of every single bit of matter at a microscopic level but rather the behavior of collections of matter at the macroscopic level. To say that the class average in the last test was 48% does not mean that every student got that mark or even that the majority of students failed. It is in fact entirely possible that some students bucked the trend and wrote perfect papers.

Chriliman said:

Makes one wonder how life came to be in the first place if death/no life is the lowest common denominator and nature was supposedly already there in the past before life began.

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Life came to be through chemistry. Just as hydrogen and helium eventually gave rise to stars that produced all the other elements, so all those elements eventually gave rise to molecules that produced life.

Large entropy gradients act to increase energy dissipation and drive the generation of complexity (complex dissipative structures), which maximises energy dissipation. You can see the same principles in fluid flow, where increasing pressure and flow rate produces turbulence, eddies, and vortices, that dissipate the energy more rapidly than laminar flow.

timewerx said:

Uhm.... Have you read about the "New Earth" in the Bible??

The current state of nature is the corrupted form. Even nature is sick because of man's sin. When Christ returns, there will be healing of the land and there will be no more death.

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This is quite interesting in view of one argument that creationists like to bring on: the "fine-tuning" of the universe.

It is not quite clear how "man's sin" could result in such a fine-tuning, or why the "divinely fine-tuned universe" turned out to be corrupted.

But I am sure the apologets and creation scientists will make u... err... discover the answer to that important question, as soon as they have finally settled whether the earth is really spherical or flat.

Freodin said:

This is quite interesting in view of one argument that creationists like to bring on: the "fine-tuning" of the universe.

It is not quite clear how "man's sin" could result in such a fine-tuning, or why the "divinely fine-tuned universe" turned out to be corrupted.

But I am sure the apologets and creation scientists will make u... err... discover the answer to that important question, as soon as they have finally settled whether the earth is really spherical or flat.

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One wonders why an omnipotent deity would need to 'fine-tune' the universe at all... it seems more like evidence against such an entity.

Chriliman said:

In what other way would an omnipotent being create a universe?

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Set it up so that the potential values of the relevant constants and the strengths and character of the fundamental forces may take on a wide range of values without impinging on the ability of the universe to host life.

Tolworth John said:

Life was created by God.

When one looks at the complexity of dna it is only the unimaganitive you say it happened by chance.

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Who thinks life began by chance? Looks like a nice strawman you have erected there. It may have been a remarkably unlikely event but without sufficient evidence or a robust enough Theory, the appropriate answer is "I don't know." To claim that the answer is goddidit, you bear the burden of proof for your claim. So where is that evidence please?

Chriliman said:

In what other way would an omnipotent being create a universe?

The Christian view is that God first made angels who had the ability to sin but not the propensity. I believe it’s when they sinned that God made the universe as a result for restorative purposes.

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You ask in what other way an omnipotent being would create a universe... and follow it with talking about another way an omnipotent being alledgedly created a universe.

It's amazing...

Chriliman said:

In what other way would an omnipotent being create a universe?

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Why use fine tuning if it could just specify that life could thrive regardless? For that matter, why create such a huge universe in the first place, when we have no likelihood of exploring beyond an infinitesimal part of it and need no more than the solar system?

The Christian view is that God first made angels who had the ability to sin but not the propensity. I believe it’s when they sinned that God made the universe as a result for restorative purposes.

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Restorative how?