My understanding of the way you described the principle:

As I understand it, what happens to Block A and Block B is a consequence of the principle, not a statement of the principle.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether you think that (2R) is sufficient to qualify as a violation of the second law.

Works for me. I think you and I have made our cases as well as we can in this context.

I have explained what I think 2LOT actually says, and I note that (1) you have not told me that it says anything else

(1R) I think that's right. My understanding of the way you described the principle:
Blocks A and B are in thermal contact. Initially, Block A has a higher temperature than Block B. Block A will cool and Block B will heat until the temperature of Block A equals the temperature of Block B.

and (2) you have presented no reason to think that it ever is actually violated.

(2R) If Block A & B comprise the whole universe, and if enough time passes after their temperatures become equal, eventually Block A will heat up again and Block B will cool again until they look virtually the same as they initially did. A cool block will become cooler and a warm block will become warmer.

Neither of these statements is controversial. I'll leave it to you to decide whether you think that (2R) is sufficient to qualify as a violation of the second law.

I would recommend looking into this matter further, if you are interested. . . . Some of this depends on how the Second Law is defined, and there's some controversy on how that is supposed to be done.

It's possible that everything I have read on the subject before I came across this thread was written by partisans of just one faction of that controversy. And I can understood if none of them wanted to acknowledge the existence of any controversy. I'll be on the lookout hereafter for anyone with credentials like yours who agrees with you.

In the meantime, while acknowledging my own utter lack of relevant credentials, I have explained what I think 2LOT actually says, and I note that (1) you have not told me that it says anything else and (2) you have presented no reason to think that it ever is actually violated.

I would recommend looking into this matter further, if you are interested. I've received my PhD in Physics, and as far as I can tell, all the physics I brought up agrees with the consensus picture on the Second Law. Poincare's recurrence theorem is well accepted in the field, and most think it requires a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Feynman thought that the Second Law was a result of initial conditions and laws of probability. Eddington discusses Boltzmann's proposal that the universe could have arisen from a violation of the second law within a maximum entropy state:

A universe containing mathematical physicists will at any assigned date be in the state of maximum disorganization which is not inconsistent with the existence of such creatures. A. S. Eddington, Nature 127, 3203 (1931)

Some of this depends on how the Second Law is defined, and there's some controversy on how that is supposed to be done. But most standard definitions would have it that Poincare's recurrence theorem requires a violation of the second law.

My own opinion is that any law that allows for its violation (and even predicts it, in some cases!), even if only rarely, seems to me more like a very strong suggestion than some sort of invariant principle. This opinion doesn't require I find a mistake with what the experts think, since the predictions I get from my understanding are the same as they get from their understanding (as far as I can tell).

I've had no formal education in physics beyond the introductory courses required for anyone getting a college degree, but I've studied it as an interested layman for most of my life. Eddington's comment, as best I can tell, accurately represents the consensus of the scientific community regarding 2LOT. I have no problem in principle with anyone being skeptical about a consensus of experts, but I haven't seen a reason yet to think you've caught a mistake that the experts have either missed or simply ignored.

So far, the best candidate I've heard about for a violation of 2LOT has been Maxwell's demon, and it has been shown to be not a real counterexample. Nothing about the law, as I understand it, prohibits reversals of the sort you have postulated, provided their duration is only instantaneous. If I correctly understand everything I have read on the subject, the law cannot be tested just by measuring a system at two instants. Maxwell's demon presented a real challenge because it hypothesized a closed system in which entropy was continually reduced over an arbitrarily long period of time and kept arbitrarily low thereafter. The challenge failed when it was demonstrated that there was no possible mechanism for doing this that did not involve a corresponding increase in the entropy of the mechanism itself.

Science explanation can not and will never be a substitute for theological explanation. It plays a far more important role than mere substitution. Much more germane to the issue, if theology does not take account of the scientific explanation in its deliberations, it remains nothing but a thought experiment, a thought fest, rudderless and anchorless, its metaphysics unhinged from the physics.

Depending on what you mean, I'm inclined to agree with you.

It remains an exercise in futility with no prospect of intellectual and philosophical growth as we witness THE TRENDS here. The religious explanation is waning as a tour de force because the community is becoming more learned and seeks a more comprehensive and robust explanatory paradigm, far more than what the ever increasingly inadequate prevailing religious explanation can offer.

Actually, the opposite is true. Most people today have unexamined assumptions about things, which they don't question or rationally consider. To put it another way, these people think they are looking for explanations for things, but in reality they are only looking for explanations for some things, specifically complex things (like quantum mechanics), while ignore their assumptions for simple things (like change or existence or causality). To actually look for reasons for these simple and obvious things, the person graduates from being a fideist to being a rationalist.

A good example of this is motion (change). Most people, including philosophers (although this is changing :-) ) hold an incoherent idea of change, ones which are refuted by Zeno. Descartes, who started this trend, took motion on faith: when he defined motion, be did it jokingly (and circularly). In other words, early moderns took motion on faith. Once one realizes he needs Aristotle's act/potency definition, than God actually follows from at least some of the Five Ways.

To summarize, one of the reasons some people (you have an unfounded confidence that religion is dying out) are intellectually leaving religious thought is not because they are asking more questions, but rather that they aren't asking questions: they have unexamined assumptions they take for granted. If skeptics would be more skeptical, they would become more likely to be religious. "A little philosophy leads one to atheism, but much leads one to religion," says Francis Bacon. I can vouch for this: I myself am a skeptic turned religious.

On another note, here's a question: what about our science today? According to Dr. Eller, the contemporary ideas in science are probably wrong, and will be substituted with new ideas some day. Do you really think this?

Christi pax.

Dear Mr. Papalinton:

Just as I pretty much discovered and concluded around the time I began to de-christianize myself after thirty years of living in a self-imposed ideological time warp. The Christian god is indeed synthetic, an er satz amalgam of supernatural superstition garnered from Greek, jewish, and Pagan sources, collated under the rubric of Classical theism.

The association of Christianity with Greek and Pagan sources (as if Greek were separate from pagan in some way) is accidental, not essential. Christianity cannot exist without Jewish thought, but it definitely can without Greek of pagan thought.

Are you a part of the group that sees Christianity as foundationally a bunch of myth synthesizing? Like how the Virgin Mary is "really" Isis?

That's the interesting irony. The Classical Theism God of David Bentley Hart and Edward Feser woul d not be recognised by the average pew warmer as the same Personal Theistic entity preached about by every priest, minister and pastor each Sunday, and promoted by Alvin Plantinga. 'Sophisticated theology'™ cannot agree in itself between a Catholic Feserian and Protestant Plantingan conjuration of what a god is.

Catholic and Orthodox are actually required to believe in the basics of Classical theism. Now, it is true that many may not understand it, which is fine, as religion, in the Christian sense, is for everyone, not just the intelligent and philosophically savvy. I honestly am appalled by the creationist movement, and think that they make Christians look terrible. But I also understand that we are not saved by secret knowledge, known only by the Enlightened(TM), but by Faith, so stupid Christians is not an impossibility (in fact, it is a fact). You are right that many Christians need to be more educated on what the Church teaches, but that doesn't falsify the Church in any way.

Many serious atheists complain about the incompetence and lack of seriousness in Gnu(TM) Atheism. It obviously doesn't follow that atheism is intellectually false, but rather those who believe it are intellectually incapable. Same thing with Christianity. Just because the laymen are ignorant, doesn't effect the truth of the belief. This is a distraction from the question of whether what the Church teaches is right or wrong.

Regarding the last part: who cares what Protestants think? They are all over the place, and they usually do not represent historical Christian thought. Catholics consider them schematics, so why do you even bring them up? How does the falsity of Catholicism follow from people disagreeing with it and/or breaking away from it?

As an atheist, I generally say the unresolvable argument is simply a matter of socio-cultural taste out of which no meaningful outcome will ensue.

Who said it was unresolvable? That, sir, is an assertion that has to be proven. You seem to have fallen into the despair regarding the knowability of religious truth. What about philosophical truth: can we know it? Or is science the only reliable way to truth?

I can see Lucretius, you're not much of a scholar of comparative religion, the study of which throws into such stark relief the utterly inane nature of these theological arguments, arguments that have been tossed around for millennia, and still, no one is any the wiser.

Seriously? First of all, I am knowledgable in comparative religion (notice the implicit ad hominem), and I have no idea what you are even trying to say. Are you saying all religions are the same? Or are you trying to tell me that the controversies between religions is unresolvable? The first one is nonsense, and the second one is asserted, not proven.

I say it's time to set aside supernatural superstition for a better explanatory model than the morass that religions has proven to be.

People have been saying this since at least the BCs, my friend. It has never happened yet, and it is unlikely to happen in the future.

Anyway, what do you mean by "supernatural superstition for a better explanatory model?" How do you explain motion, efficient causality, and teleology? As far as I'm aware, all three can only be explained by a being that just so happens to have many of the characteristics of the Christian God.

Science and reason are SUBSTITUTIVE and ELIMINATIVE: new ideas replace old ideas. Religion is ADDITIVE and/or SCHISMATIC: news ide as proliferate alongside old ideas. For instance, the development of Protestantism did not put an end to Catholicism, and the development of Christianity did not put an end to Judaism. With science, we get BETTER. With religion, we get MORE."

This quote is nonsensical, First of all, it is implicitly assuming that religion being "Additive and/or Schismatic" somehow destroys the claims of different religions. The author is dodging the question of whether Catholicism is true by bringing up religion's "additiveness." It is really accidental to the Truth of Catholicism that many schematics broke from the Church, and that there are other religions. The Church's teachings (or any religion's tenets for that matter) are not falsified by people denying it and breaking away.

I also wish to point out the subconscious "neo-worship:" the idea that new ideas are inherently better than old ones, and that old ideas are somehow "bad," which is a very, very silly philosophy: remember, fascism and communism were a new idea. How did they work out... Anyway, neo-worship allows one to complete dodge the difficult task of actually defending his beliefs, and allows him to dismiss those who disagree on the basis of "being old fashioned" and "not Progressive(TM)" and even "on the wrong side of history," instead of rejecting his opponents beliefs on the basis of argument (which is sadly what you and Dr. Eller seem to be doing).

Second, what does Dr. Eller mean by "reason?" I hope he doesn't have philosophical schools in mind, because philosophy is as "Additive and/or Schismatic" as religion! And I won't even bring up the several competing theories in quantum physics.

And third, and most devastating of all, is that you just complained that religion was becoming more and more nebulous and impersonal, which, in your opinion, would make religion "substitution and eliminative," as the old "superstitious" beliefs about God (again, in your opinion) are being replaced by the new rational beliefs. You are defeated by your own reasoning: you were arguing that religion is wrong because it has been evolving (again, in your opinion) into something more rational, and now you are arguing that religion is wrong because it doesn't evolve, but just adds new and new ideas on top of the old ones.

Christi pax.

Again, Andrew and Ignatius were equivocating on definitions. No one is denying that there are different geometries. Andrew is equivocating when he says that a square circle is possible, as the claim he is rejecting was clearly using the Euclidian definitions, and to refute the claim by changing the definition is sophistry. Square circles are not possible according to Euclides. I don't think anyone is foolish enough to argue that.

Christi pax.

I went and asked someone more knowledgable on the subject, and he agreed with me that Andrew and you are equivocating:

Did this person happen to be a math teacher? Fact is, both you and your "more knowledgeable" are factually wrong. I hope you don't trust this person too much. This handout does a good job explaining the topic.

http://www.math.ucla.edu/~radko/circles/lib/data/Handout-348-421.pdf

I'm a little rusty on something things but I was a wiz at math in school, nothing but straight A's. You have to have a mathematical system to even define a circle. We're talking math here not just the shape a 2 year old can recognize...I think this is another case where you and your friend do not even know enough to know that you don't know...

i'm happy too, that your god aliens don't exist.. and that your god 'nothing' is just... nothing.. no creative power!