I saw something from our hotel room window a couple of days ago. It's not unusual; you can see it on almost any beach in the right conditions. And it utterly refutes one of creationisms central dogmas (to be fair to creationists, it's more a mindless mantra than a dogma and it's used more like a magic spell than a reasoned argument). The claim is that you can't get order out of disorder (or chaos). They chant this to try to make the evidence for evolution go away because someone has fooled them into thinking evolution is some sort of increasing order from chaos.
See those pebbles on the beach (from our window they look like brown patches)? Do they look randomly distributed?
Okay, that was rhetorical. Of course they're not randomly distributed otherwise they wouldn't look like brown patches. The beach would look uniformly pale brown from this distance.
So, according to creationists, it can't have been a natural, mindless chaotic process that produced order. It needed something other than the random movement of water molecules being made non-random by the operation of gravity and wave formation, then releasing stored energy when the wave breaks on a shelving beach, transferring that energy to pebbles and moving them up the beach until they are deposited as the energy moving them dissipates.
The fact that it is impossible to accurately calculate the movement of any single water molecule because there is too much chaos in the system, what with the way individual molecules react with other molecules depending on the exact distribution of electrostatic charges in the molecules, which is itself subject to the randomness of uncaused quantum fluctuations in the distribution of orbital electrons around atomic nuclei, has no bearing on it - because this chaos can't be the cause of order, because that's impossible.
And the fact that we can with a fair degree of accuracy, calculate what a large mass of those chaotically moving water molecules will do because with a large number, chaotic movement conforms to a precise distribution pattern which we can describe mathematically, can't have any bearing on the matter because that would be admitting we can get order from chaos.
No, it can't have been that because the dogma says you can't get order from disorder using purely natural and undirected forces. To get order from disorder, you need an intelligent designer to make it happen, apparently, according to creationists. In fact, there is so much magic involved that you can't explain it using science and anyway, science gives the wrong answer because it doesn't include an imaginary friend, so it's obviously false.
Nope! There is only one possible explanation for all the order you can see on beaches, and it can't be mere emergence from underlying chaos. Obviously, God personally arranges every pebble and puts each one exactly where he wants it to be according to some perfect plan, just as he personally organises every cell in every organism and pays special attention to Christians, ensuring his plan for everyone stays on track, despite them having free will and so the ability to change their own future.
Meanwhile, of course, this god who is busy arranging and rearranging every pebble on every beach with every tide and change in wave power, doesn't have time to bother with children starving or being killed by the malaria parasites it made to kill them with.
This must be true because you can't get order from disorder without the particular god that creationists' parents just happened to believed in.
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