The Objective Observer

Proof of God

The Scientific Theory of God

A New Take on "Maxwell's Demon"

March 31th, 2005

Thus far, I have posited a lot of logical reasons as to why God exists. While these arguments seem entirely logical and reasonable to me, I am not 100% happy with them. The reason is that they require someone to actually be logical and reasonable, which seems to be in short supply these days. Thus, what I want is a way to objectively prove once-and-for-all, beyond any shadow of a doubt, SCIENTIFICALLY that God does in fact exist. To do that, I will use the scientific method of stating my theory and then finding supporting evidence to prove or disprove my hypothesis. In this way, God’s existence will be as provable to the scientific community and everyone else as the theory of evolution, theory of tectonic plates, theory of gravity, and every other theory. So maybe I was a bit hasty with “The FINAL Proof of God”. Oh well.

So, the question:

Does God exist?

The definitions:

God: The supreme or ultimate reality, the Being perfect in power, wisdom and goodness; a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes.

Exist: To have real being whether material or spiritual.

So, on to how to prove or disprove the existence of God. Luckily, science, and specifically; thermodynamics, already has a well-developed thought problem that I feel is extremely applicable to this issue. That thought problem is named “Maxwell’s demon”.

Maxwell’s demon, as first described by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell is a thought problem related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which essentially dictates that entropy must never decrease. Now, entropy has specific implications to thermodynamics, but can essentially be thought of as the measure of disorder of a system. You can paraphrase the law by stating that things tend to seek their most disordered state, such as a bedroom or a glass. Eventually, an orderly bedroom will become disorderly and eventually an unbroken glass will chip or become broken.

Thermodynamics takes this rather coarse definition of entropy a few steps further and essentially says that no macroscopic, physically closed cycle, such as a car engine, is perfectly efficient. The energy that is “lost” during each cycle is measured as entropy. There are various different things that can cause entropy, friction being one of the main causes in things like engines. Thus, the second law essentially dictates that the entropy of a macroscopic system must never decrease. The qualifier, macroscopic, is used because the "Fluctuation Theorem" essentially “breaks” the second law for microscopic systems, but we won’t go into that.

“Maxwell’s demon” is a thought problem that proposes a way to break the second law for a macroscopic system. In the thought problem, “a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own”, the “demon”, is able to manipulate a frictionless trap door between two bodies of equal temperature. The “demon” exploits information about the differences in the molecular speeds of the gas molecules, allowing only faster-than-average molecules into one container and only slower-than-average molecules into the other. This causes one container to heat up and the other to cool, essentially decreasing the amount of entropy within the system and violating of the second law.

There have been numerous and consistent attempts to “exorcise” Maxwell’s demon with the most recent exorcist conclusions being that eventually the demon will run out of information storage space and must begin to erase previously gathered information. Erasing information is a thermodynamically irreversible process which increases the entropy of the system. Another way that this is put is that while Maxwell’s demon might be able to reverse thermodynamic entropy with information, the act of gathering and storing that information exactly balances out the thermodynamic entropy decrease. This excercise exposes a rather obscure connection between thermodynamics and information theory, which led to the creation of "information entropy" theory. Regardless, the second law is preserved...

However, we can hypothesis that if we could prove the existence of “Maxwell’s demon” then we could prove the existence of some “being” that is not bound by the second law of thermodynamics. Such a being would have the power to decrease the entropy of a closed, macroscopic system and would thus fit our definition of God as a being that has more than natural attributes. Being able to ACTUALLY break the second law of thermodynamics has to qualify as “God-like”, or some all-powerful entity.

Hypothesis: The existence of a macroscopic cycle that decreases in entropy proves the existence of God.

Thus, how can we prove or disprove the existence of Maxwell’s “demon”, or God? Well, building upon what has already been written about Maxwell’s demon, one can further speculate that perhaps this little “demon” is a lot smarter than those that have thus far attempted to “exorcise” it. What if the demon has developed an information storage mechanism that has unlimited capacity? In addition, what if this demon can collect information without direct observation of the system? If we could find evidence of such an information storage and collection system, then current exorcist theories would be weakened and our theory that God exists would be strengthened. This sounds all well and good, but where might we find evidence of such a system?

I believe that the answer, and thus the proof, lies in applying the concepts of entropy to the closed cycle of LIFE. Life is certainly a macroscopic system and can be considered closed such that all things can be classified as either organic, or inorganic. And, within life, we find exactly what we are looking for to potentially prove our demon’s existence. We find an unlimited information storage system, one that can collect information without direct observation or intervention by external means. That storage system is called DNA.

If we look at DNA in terms of information storage, it indeed seems to be unlimited and seems to grow as organisms become more complex. A virus has 5,387 base pairs (two nucleotides on opposite, complementary DNA or RNA strands connected via hydrogen bonds) while a human genome has 3x10⁹. The plant, Fritillary, actually has even more base pairs, 13x10¹⁰. This seems to fit our theory since simple plants evolved before simple animals. Regardless, there is apparently no known limit to the amount of information that can be stored within DNA.

If we look at DNA in terms of information collection, DNA has the power of mutation, or the ability to collect information without outside intervention. Mutation and breeding causes evolution and from evolution, we can see that throughout 4 billion years of life on Earth information has been collecting steadily, essentially on its own, and that little, if any information, seems to have been lost. In fact, one might draw the conclusion that DNA seems to be oddly adept at NOT losing information given its properties of duplication and replication.

Scientists believe that they can prove that all life essentially originated from a single, very simple source. Evolution and speciation then occurred. Now, speciation would seem to indicate an INCREASE in entropy. However, at the same time, information was being collected and retained. Life became more complex and more organized. As with “Maxwell’s demon” using information to overcome thermodynamic entropy, this would tend to indicate a DECREASE in entropy.

Thus, it seems reasonable to postulate that the existence or non-existence of God can be proved by a rather simple exercise. That exercise would be to compare the rate of speciation with the rate of information added to the DNA chain. If there is greater speciation than information, then entropy within the cycle of life is INCREASING and would tend to disprove “Maxwell’s demon” at work within the life cycle. However, if the rate of information gathering is greater than the rate of speciation, then this would indicate a DECREASE of entropy within the life cycle, which would tend to PROVE the existence of God. If the rates come out to be equal, then this would indicate that LIFE IS A PERFECT CYCLE, which would neither prove or disprove the existence of God, or; perhaps, prove that LIFE IS GOD.

So, there you have it scientists, a scientific theory that presents a clear method by which to SCIENTIFICALLY prove or disprove the existence of God through observation and experimentation. My analysis, given what I currently know of thermodynamic entropy, information entropy, evolution and genetics is that all of the current scientific data tends to PROVE the existence of God rather than disprove the existence of God. Specifically, the simple fact that there have been multiple mass extinctions where over 90% of the species on Earth have gone extinct with no associated net decrease in the amount of information within plant and animal DNA. This tends to show that the life cycle is OBVIOUSLY an example of a cycle where entropy can be EASILY decreased. During these mass extinctions, entropy was most certainly less than before because most, if not all, of the genetic information was preserved while the species were not.

So, are any of you scientists out there up to the challenge of disproving this theory through sound, scientific evidence?


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