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Monday, April 14, 2003

An interesting site showed up on the ad banner today, titled Is Atheism Against the Law? By "Law" they mean the first law of thermodynamics. The premise is that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed "by natural means" (the latter part is not actually part of the law; the law actually says that matter/enegry cannot be created or destroyed by any means, period). The author of this argument then notes that there is matter, so it must have been created by something supernatural (assuming, of course, that it needed to be "created" in the first place). I have a similar argument, though mine has a different title: Is Belief in an Immaterial Soul Against the Law? The theory goes like this:
The soul is supposedly the thing that is truly you, that survives after you die, and most importantly all of our choices are made via the soul. Whenever I choose the right, for example, it is my soul that actually does the choosing. In the act of choosing, the soul produces observable effects in the physical world without being itself in/of the physical world. By inducing an effect which has no natural cause, the soul is able to increase the amount of energy in the universe. Since most Christians believe we act with "free will" in all/most of our actions, we must conclude that people are constantly creating new physical energy all the time. You could, in principle, put a person in an energy-capturing device and have him make a lot of decisions, thereby creating a perpetual motion machine. (One might argue that the soul-energy output is very tiny, but we should still be able to measure it). Even the Bible speaks of unlimited soul-energy: supposedly even the mustard seed has access to enough energy to "move mountains." We must be talking about Terra-Watts. Enormous! So the question is, with all this energy available to us, why do we need to eat? Don't tell me its original sin, because Adam and Eve needed to eat in the Garden of Eden even way back before they ever originally sinned. It seems like this whole "sin" thing could have been avoided if God had the foresight to create Adam with a little more soul and a little less stomach.

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