Atheists eat your heart out

What's the fairytale? There is no "standard" definition of life, but civilization satisfies most of the criteria on all the lists: Organization, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli. Perhaps even reproduction since Greco-Roman civilization can be construed as an offshoot of Mesopotamian.

The only one that doesn't clearly fit is Homeostasis, but I confess that I don't really know how to look for something analogous to the regulation of body temperature or the concentration of electrolytes, so they might be there. But even if it's missing, six out of seven is plenty. We'll be lucky to find that many in the first extraterrestrial organisms. It might take us twenty years on a new planet to realize that the funny little things we've been stepping over are alive.

You're going to have to come up with some specific counterarguments to these before you can refute my hypothesis.

It's because you haven't studied human history and prehistory thoroughly enough, especially from an economic standpoint. Greed is an unavoidable phenomenon in a pack-social species that is artificially going against its nature and building a herd-social organization. Our ability to regard people outside of our own community as fellows is reasoned and learned, whereas our tendency to regard them as competitors for scarce resources is instinctive. Modern life (i.e., life since the Agricultural Revolution in the 11th millenium BCE) is a daily struggle to transcend our primitive instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior, and we are the only species on this planet with a large enough forebrain to even attempt that feat. There will always be backsliding. On any given day millions of people will be temporarily taken over by their Inner Caveman, and do things we regard as antisocial or even criminal. But the next day they recover, usually without having done any major, permanent harm.

Greed is simply part of that phenomenon. We can't help listening to the Inner Caveman who says, "Why should that family have a Volvo when our family has to drive a Subaru?" The only reason greed appears to be a more prevalent phenomenon today than it was in the past is that there is so much more surplus wealth than there was in the past. The Industrial Revolution, with its harnessing of the chemical energy in fossil fuel, increased the per-capita GDP of the human race by something like a factor of ten thousand. The majority of us no longer spend every day growing and distributing food. We have other jobs creating whole new varieties of stuff that was never available in the past.

There is so much more to envy, so much more to be greedy for! Not just stealing your neighbor's food in order to survive a dreary winter, but envying his nice house, his beautiful landscaping, his comfortable and reliable car, the private schools his children attend (300 years ago there were almost no schools and very few people could even read), his art collection, the concerts he attends (300 years ago professionally composed and performed music was something the average person might experience once or twice a year), the vacations his family takes (300 years ago most people never traveled more than ten miles from the place they were born, in their entire lives.)

We've only lived this way for a few generations. It was only in the 1890s that America's economy toggled from scarcity-driven to surplus-driven, and the idea that anyone except the richest people could some day have more than they needed just to survive was unthinkable.

Our psychology hasn't had enough time to catch up with this new reality. So we're greedy. We'll get over it. We've gotten over much more difficult changes than this. Can you imagine what it was like, being a nomadic hunter-gatherer, with no responsibilities except to find today's meal, and suddenly have to settle down in one place and spend long hours cultivating crops and herding animals? Sure, you'd appreciate the fact that you'd never be hungry again, but could you be satisfied with the freedom you were giving up? How about the fact that the tribe on the other side of the mountain, whom you have hated since you were born, is coming to live in your village because the elders figured out that you'll be more productive that way? How about letting wolves come and live with you because they clean up the garbage, protect you from predators, and your babies and their babies love each other?

Do you think that a little greed will be harder for our species to overcome than all that? I don't!

I don't know how to explain this to you because you obviously have not had a university-level class in physics. Do you understand about matter and anti-matter? Do you understand that all matter and all energy is comprised of twelve kinds of elementary particles, called quarks, bosons and leptons? Everything that comprises the universe--protons, gravitons, electrons, photons, etc.--is all made up of various combinations of quarks, bosons and leptons. These particles all have exact antiparticles. A proton consists of 2 "up" quarks and one "down" quark, whereas an antiproton consists of 2 "up" antiquarks and 1 "down" antiquark.

The universe has an exact balance of particles and antiparticles. Its net mass is zero and its net energy is zero. There is no more mass or energy today than there was 13 billion years ago before the Big Bang happened. What we have more of today is organization. That total amount of zero matter and energy is more highly organized than it was back then.

Perhaps you've heard of the Three Laws of Thermodynamics? (If not, you're really on the wrong website. There's a minimum level of scientific literacy needed to understand these discussions.) The Second Law says that entropy tends to increase over time. "Entropy" is just a fancy word for "disorganization." The Second Law is essentially telling us that as the universe ages, its organization will vanish, and one day it will return to its original state, with no particles at all. (There are other hypotheses about the end of the universe, depending on how much Dark Matter there is, but they all obey the Second Law.)

So how did the universe go from a state of zero organization, which is another way to say 100% entropy, to the state it's in today, where there is tremendous organization and in many places entropy is very low? The answer to this is that the Second Law states that entropy only tends to increase over time. Local reversals of entropy are quite possible--and that means not only local spatially (entropy decreases in one place while it increases everywhere else) but also temporally (entropy decreases at one time, but at all other times it increases).

And there is no limit on the size of these local reversals. The appearance of the universe where there was nothing is certainly a rather large reversal of entropy, but it does not violate the laws of nature, so long as it begins to revert back to a state of complete disorganization, which it did one tiny fraction of a second after it appeared, and continues to do today.

To summarize, the Big Bang was nothing more or less than a rather large reversal of entropy, which does not violate the laws of nature.

For all we know, other Big Bangs may have happened at other times, perhaps a billion billion billion years ago or in the future, or perhaps a billion billion billion light years away, and those universes have already vanished or dissipated. We have no way of knowing this since we can't see that far away.

You mean the modern State of Israel? They're emigrating to the United States faster than our people are moving there.