Welcome from EWS23

edit

Hello Bmord! My name is Eric, and it is my pleasure to be the first to welcome you to Wikipedia! I hope you will decide to stay a long time and help us continue to make this one of the greatest sites on the world wide web. Here are a few useful links for you to explore:

In addition to that great wealth of knowledge, let me offer you this advice: do what you enjoy! If you enjoy contributing to sports articles, do so! If you like to correct typoes (...), write new articles, find better ways to organize articles, make useful templates, work on projects with others, or even welcome new members, do so! A happy member of our community is a productive member of our community. You can read all of the above links to the last word, or you can jump right into editing. Be bold!

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have the need to sign a page without the time and date, you can use three tildes (~~~). If you have any questions that aren't easily found with the above links, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question. Once again, welcome to Wikipedia and enjoy!

P.S.- If you'd like to introduce yourself to the community and perhaps get a question or two answered in the process, drop us a line at the new user log.

EWS23 | (Leave me a message!) 02:43, 5 October 2005 (UTC)Reply

Discussion

edit

Bonaparte, thank you for your interest and for leaving me this message, let me now respond as best I can.

You speak of two things - science, and religion. To accord each the proper respect, a good encyclopedia (as a forum of secondary, not primary, research) must take care to use appropriate source material for each. In an article about Christianity, for example, source material might include the Bible, the works of biblical scholars and theologians, recognized leaders of various communities including the Pope, position papers produced by organizations such as the ELCA, etc...

In an article about science, proper source material includes papers published in reputable peer-reviewed journals of scientific research, as well as derivative work based on these such as college textbooks.

What you seek is to use one scientific theory - the second law of thermodynamics, against another scientific theory - the theory of evolution. You believe you have found a contradiction, such that one of these theories must win at the expense of the other. You also believe the loser will turn out to be evolution. Ok. Then what you are talking about here is clearly science, not religion. Therefore, as an encyclopedia, we must look to the scientific forums of primary research to evaluate and sort out your claims.

If there is well-received discussion in a reputable peer-reviewed forum of scientific research on the field of thermodynamics or else a journal of biology regarding possible incompatibilities between the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the theory of evolution, then this might already be an appropriate topic for a modern encyclopedia - even today. To the best of my knowledge, however, this does not currently exist. Unless I am wrong on that, then this proposed 2nd law/evolution issue is not an appropriate topic for wikipedia at this time.

I hope this helps. Bmord 05:43, 31 December 2005 (UTC)Reply

Second Law question

edit

Hi Ben, I left a couple more comments on the Second Law talk page, which is now archived. It looks like our (initially contradicting) opinions have converged to an agreement on that focused sunlight question. But my argument had to converge more, because it was mostly wrong. :) --Glengarry 19:09, 28 May 2006 (UTC)Reply