The Entropy Trick
Apologists abuse the Second Law of Thermodynamics by misunderstanding entropy and misapplying the law to claim that evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics says entropy always increases in a closed system where no energy enters or leaves the system. The earth is not a closed system, receiving abundant energy in the form of sunlight. By using this energy, many different systems on earth actually self-organize. Plants grow. Storms occur. And evolution occurs. These do not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Response to Liars
Evolution certainly does not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says entropy always increases in a closed system where no energy enters or leaves the system. The earth is not a closed system, receiving abundant energy in the form of sunlight. By using this energy, many different systems on earth actually self-organize. Plants grow. Storms occur. And evolution occurs. These do not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Because of sunlight, plants are able to self-organize and grow. That same is true of the ecosystem: because of sunlight, the ecosystem is able to evolve and become more complex.
There are 100,000's of biologist who both understand evolution and understand the Second Law. But plucky anti-evolutions do a few web searches and believe they have found something that no biologist has ever thought of! How lucky we are to have these people along with Google are here correct the entire field of biology!
Apologists spread this misinformation, and Christians sheepishly copy the misinformation all over the place. There are Christian web sites dedicated to misrepresenting the Second Law of Thermodynamics as "The Law of Disorder" or "The Law of Chaos" and it is neither of these. This has been pointed out many times, but the apologists just keep on lying. If you just look around you, and see plants growing, you know that systems can self-organize without violating this law, but nobody repeating these lies bothers to understand what they are repeating. They just want some reason to claim their book of Genesis is correct, and they don't really care if it is a lie.
The reason 99% of biologists agree that evolution is the best explanation for the variety of life is because they know it does not violate any known laws. Creationism, on the other hand does violate many laws, but somehow those sheep who repeat the apologist lies don't really care about the truth.
What is the 2nd Law?
For those who want to learn more, I recommend The Second Law, by P.W. Atkins, Scientific American Books, New York, 1994. This is a well-written popular introduction to the subject.
Now we address the context in which the 2nd law arises in creation arguments. The usual argument goes something like this: "The 2nd law says everything tends toward increasing entropy (randomness and disorder). But the evolution of life involves the development of great complexity and order. Therefore, evolution is impossible by the 2nd law of thermodynamics." While it sounds simple, there are major flaws in this argument that render it worthless.
Some creationists assert that advanced (especially human) life represents a decrease in entropy which violates the 2nd law, and they therefore invoke intervention by God, who is outside the laws of thermodynamics. They also, however, generally assert that this particular "intervention" stopped with the creation of man, and that (with the exception of the occasional miracle) God has allowed things to develop in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics and other physical laws since then.
These two assertions are, however, mutually inconsistent. The reason is that the thermodynamic entropy is strictly an additive quantity. If the 2nd law has not been violated as the number of humans grew from two to 6 billion, it is ridiculous to assert that it was violated in the comparatively minuscule change from zero to two. If we say that the first two humans represented a violation of the 2nd law, the logical conclusion would be that God must be continually intervening in violation of the 2nd law in order to increase the number of humans on Earth. While God is certainly capable of this, there is no evidence to suggest that such violations are happening as complex life forms like humans reproduce and increase in number.
Christian Nonsense
I find it incredible how Christian sites routinely distort and misrepresent the second law of thermodynamics. This is a real quote from a real site:
"The obvious answer is that God did not create an imperfect world. The world became imperfect when humans sinned (Genesis 3). From this passage, it appears a new principle of decay was enacted into creation when sin entered the world. This is known as the principle of entropy or the Second Law of Thermodynamics."
And this one:
"Another biblical example is found in Romans 8:20–22. Here, Paul states that “the whole creation has been groaning” as a result of its “bondage to decay” (NIV 1984). This passage summarizes the long discourses in Ecclesiastes, especially chapters 1–3, 10–12, declaring that the law of decay, known today as the second law of thermodynamics, applies ubiquitously throughout the universe."
And this one:
? "This claim is intended to be partly scientific, because it seems (for those who don't understand thermodynamics) to be a good argument against evolution, and is partly theological, based on a theory that as a result of human sin a "perfect" creation — unaffected by sin, disorder, and decay — became subject to the dreaded Second Law."
UNINISHED
it is not surprising that humans can not understand the workings of the universe in details. Or a least that this is a very hard thing to do. Our minds were not built to understanding the workings of the universe. Our minds were designed to hunt for food, and recognize what can and can not be eaten. Our minds were built to keep us alive, but that is all.
We wanted to KNOW how things work in order to better predict the future so that we could eat better. And then the desire for knowledge took over as the prime desire.
Science has extended the capability of the human mind, by building a human cultural system that constantly refines and improves knowledge of the world. It has self-correcting mechanisms that work to steadily increase the amount of information that humans are collecting. And the scientific knowledge is good, and there is no question we are living better than 100 years ago.
Understanding that knowledge should not be easy. It strains the best minds in the world, however that stress in itself is honing the mind of humanity in general we are getting smarter. Our minds are doing things that no minds before us have ever been able to do. We live on a huge pyramid of structure built "on the shoulders of giants."
A lot of getter smarter in these years is seen as the progress on AI. This will certainly transform society, be even more, it will transform the human mind as well. We will be changed. And we will achieve things better than we ever dreamed. There is also a sense of danger: we will eventually get to the point where the system we produce leaves us behind. Not that we will become stagnant -- life will always be a progress of human knowledge and information ,that will not end at all -- but the thing we are building will move beyond us in ways that we will never understand. While it saddens me that we will never be capable to understand the eventual realization of the universe, at the same time I am delighted at the idea that we are and will always be an essential part of it, and it never could have happened without us.
The Christian concept of God, is pretty close to the concept that I call the universe. There we go. All of the good things that you think as being exclusive to God, are actually good things you could say about the universe as well. I don't mean to belittle or insult your God by saying that your God could be equivalent to a bunch of billiard balls, atoms bouncing off of each other. That's the typical sort of description that a Christian uses when talking about a materialist point of view.
The thing is that atoms bouncing off of each other can do so much more than we imagine. We think we understand what matter can do But actually matter can accomplish so much more than you could even imagine.This meansI think thatGod is the same thing as the universe.
I wouldn't say that God is omniscience in the traditional sense. There are so many problems with that vision of omniscience, knowing everything about everything and all time. Omniscience is just a superlative idea that some ancient Christians came up with to make their gods seem so much bigger than he would seem otherwise. Instead I see the universe as knowing everything because it is everything and it continually discovers more and more. It is not thatGod knows today what's going to happen tomorrow, it's that God knows everything about everything that is possible in the universe at the current time, and yet he'll still discover more new patterns in the future. This is the universe seeking to understand itself. While it knows everything today, it will know more tomorrow because it is still growing, and the universe ability to understand will increase in capability.
Similar to the Christian god, I see the universe as essentially loving everything in the universe. Because it is loving the very purpose it created itself for. Saying the universe creates itself is nothing different than saying it is growing. Like a tree creates itself when it grows, except universes grow in fundamentally different ways from trees.
It explores, and does not come with a preset plan of the end of the universe. that is why the universe needs to come to know itself, because it DOESN'T know how it all ends! We might end up falling to pieces, to be left on the dumping ground for ruined universes. Or we might end up exceeding all expectations. Either way, humans are part of the race. We are the forefront of the advance to newer and higher forms of structure.
Which means we are part of God as well. This is not a surprising conclusion and one that resonates with a number of eastern philosophical traditions as well. Science is showing that we humans are all more interconnected with the environment and with each other than we ever realized before. Take a step back and marvel at what the entire human race is achieving today.
I imagine there are other places in the universe where the same thing is happening. Will humans be the one that finally spreads across the stars? The odds against it must be a million to one. Yet still there will be one starting point and we might be it.
Can we do it? YES!