Originally posted by zrocks:
Audiorigami,
I like your analogy. However, the part of the ID is played by the watchmaker. Without the intervention of the watchmaker, it is highly unlikely that the watch would have evolved.
Exactly what I hoped you'd say. My question is this: if you consider a watch so complex as to require a designer, what do you think about the complexity level of
the designer itself? ID fails as a scientific theory because it is fundamentally flawed. Creationists (and IDers are creationists--a rose, by any other name, would still smell as sweet) hiding behind the complexity argument will claim that the myriad species on Earth are too complex to have evolved through natural selection due to environmental pressure and competition, yet will not balk at the concept of a being so complex it is omniscient, omnipresent, and atemporal.
The designer you claim to support is too complex to exist, by your logic, without being designed itself--and who did that, if I may ask?
The idea of time not being fixed is what made Einstein come up with the theory of relativity. For time to vary (and it does) the speed of light has to be constant. Astronauts have measured time differences due to velocity resulting from the orbiting of the Earth. In other words, a watch on the ISS runs slower than a watch on Earth.
No one is arguing against the apparent dilation of time and length viz. the Lorentz contractions. The notion of travel at extremely high velocities is a complete mindbender. Check out
this amazing demonstration showing how length contraction due to relativistic speeds of travel is actually imperceptible to outside observers! (That is one of the many brilliant explorations of physics on
this page, which I advise you to stay the hell away from if you have any work to do, as it will literally make time dilate in the space localized to your desk.)
Lastly, Nick, closed and open are classifications denoting different types of systems. A closed system is wholly self-contained, with no effects propagated to sources outside the system, and no interference coming from outside it either. This is usually only a metaphorical tool, as the only
real closed system I'm aware of is our entire universe itself taken as a whole. An open system, on the other hand, is influenced by events and actions outside the system. It's convenient to consider many systems closed for practical purposes, because, for example, the gravitational force exerted by Jupiter on my mixing board is negligible (although full moons seem to cause fader lockup :p ). In the context of the 2nd Law, entropy (the measure of disorder, or unrecoverable energy) is said to always increase in a closed system. In any small part of that closed system, however, taken as a small sample, entropy may in fact increase due to outside effects.