Reanimating the dead?

sink

Sorry for lowering the tone of the place. At the risk of self embarrassment due my very rudimentary understanding of thermodynamics could someone constructively critique my reasoning in this post or add your own assessment of the resurrection from a purely scientific standpoint. I'm quiet willing to accept that I've completely misunderstood the subject.

sink wrote: »

CerebralCortex wrote: »

I don't think a resurrection is completely ridiculous nor do I understand why it goes against the laws of physics. It's highly unlikely that it actually happened but if it did what does it really mean. Matter was reorganised from one arrangement to another arrangement and back again. No problem for your average super being(natural) no need to invoke the supernatural which is the best escape hatch the religious have. I'm no expert on the resurrection but man anything could have happened there according to the witnesses' perception but how that equals "God exists" is beyond me.

In other words. A guy rose from the dead (supposedly). So what? After a few thousand years mere humans are splitting atoms, building particle accelerators, even challenging death, given enough time its not hard to imagine to ability to resurrect the dead.

Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about

I'm not a physicist so bear in mind that I don't fully understand what I'm about to say.

It violates the second law of thermodynamics because in order for living tissue to be reanimated it would have to reverse to a previous state which would require entropy to be reversed. The laws of thermodynamics are some of the most fundamental laws in physics, if they don't hold up in all situations our understanding of reality has to be thrown completely out and what is more because the laws of thermodynamics underpin 'cause and effect' and 'cause and effect' is the basis for all our understanding we will never be able to truly understand anything.

Now theoretically there are way's to get around this by replacing the body Jesus with a clone including the same memory and personality but somehow I don't think that is going to fly in religious circles (probably wrong on this) and is actually more of an argument against the existence of god.

Professor_Fink

sink wrote: »

Sorry for lowering the tone of the place. At the risk of self embarrassment due my very rudimentary understanding of thermodynamics could someone constructively critique my reasoning in this post or add your own assessment of the resurrection from a purely scientific standpoint. I'm quiet willing to accept that I've completely misunderstood the subject.

Hi Sink,

Basically you have a couple of in-built assumptions in your argument that are false. First of all, you assume that the entropy of a dead person is higher than that of a living person, but that is not necessarily true. For example, significantly reducing the entropy of a person by freezing them also results in death. The other assumption that is implicit is that the system is closed, but infact you have interaction with the environment. The body isn't a closed system, so you can't apply thermodynamics to it as if it were closed. For example, you can increase or decrease the energy of a rechargable battery depending on what you connect to it. So the idea of reanimating the dead doesn't violate thermodynamics, it's just a very tricky business.

Hope this helps.

By the way, a far more likely case would be that someone is simply mistaken for dead if they are unconcious and cold, with a weak pulse and shallow breeding.