#31 The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Most likely you have heard the term, Second Law of Thermodynamics, but may not be able to give a definition. Note that this is a scientific LAW of nature. It’s been around and verified again and again for a long, long time and there are no known violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, unlike the THEORY of evolution.

Thermodynamics has to do with the study of energy. The meaning of the Second Law in simple terms is that everything tends toward disorder. Energy tends to disperse. Nothing becomes more complex on its own. Everything tends to break down over time as long as nothing new is added to the system from outside.

Hot things cool down as the heat (i.e. energy) disperses. Things tend to go downhill (not uphill) to a lower energy state. Everything wears out and eventually decays. Living things all eventually die. This is the natural order of the universe.

Isaac Asimov (a highly respected evolutionist, and ardent anti-creationist) has said: “Another way of stating the second law then is: ‘The universe is constantly getting more disorderly!’ Viewed that way, we can see the second law all about us. We have to work hard to straighten a room, but left to itself it becomes a mess again very quickly and very easily. Even if we never enter it, it becomes dusty and musty. How difficult to maintain houses, and machinery, and our bodies in perfect working order: how easy to let them deteriorate. In fact, all we have to do is nothing, and everything deteriorates, collapses, breaks down, wears out, all by itself—and that is what the second law is all about.” [1]

Since everything in the universe tends toward disorder, it is a violation of the Second Law if they become more orderly and complex all by themselves.

If you leave your room one day and it’s a mess, it will stay a mess for all eternity, gradually getting messier and messier until it one day disappears. If you go away for awhile and come back and it is cleaner and more orderly, then you know your mother was there. Or at least some energy force was there with the distinctive quality of order. Energy itself would not be sufficient. There had to be the component of orderliness. Otherwise the random energy would have just added to the mess. Putting a wild bull in there would not have cleaned the room.

This is where evolutionists have a really hard time. They can say all day that there was energy coming down to the earth from the sun, but what about the orderliness which requires information and intelligent design?

If there were to exist some primordial soup of chemicals (disregarding where it came from), then for all those chemicals to somehow change into a living cell is a direct violation of the Second Law. They would not order themselves into a living organism that has gigantic numbers of orderly properties like digestion of energy sources and reproduction.

People who deny the existence of God have a huge problem with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They usually claim that the energy of the sun qualifies as the outside source that can cause life to form accidentally. That’s a huge stretch because there is no order and information in the sun’s energy. There are many examples of the sun’s energy speeding up the process of disorder, not the other way around. It heats water to cause it to evaporate faster. It wears out the paint on your house.

They also try claim that the earth is an open system and somewhere in the universe changes are going on that balance out the increased order on the earth. That’s an extreme level of faith in a mystery greater than the mysteries in the Bible. That’s on the order of saying that I’m sitting in my room watching my computer fall apart, so somewhere else on earth a computer is being built all by itself. Except the problem is multiplied millions of times over because living beings are millions of times more complicated than a computer.

Honest evolutionists will admit that they have a problem, but nonetheless go right on having faith. They have faith even though there must have been millions upon millions of violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics necessary to get to every new stage up the evolutionary ladder from a single living cell, to multi-celled species, to plants, to animals, up to human beings. That would take an unfathomable number of increases in order, each one a violation of the Second Law. The only honest explanation is that an unseen intelligent designer is adding energy and information.

“If Evolution is true, there must be an extremely powerful force or mechanism at work in the cosmos that can steadily defeat the powerful, ultimate tendency toward “disarrangedness” brought by the 2nd Law. If such an important force or mechanism is in existence, it would seem it should be quite obvious to all scientists. Yet, the fact is, no such force of nature has been found.” [2]

“Using natural processes alone, there’s just no explaining how the complex, information-intense organization of even single-celled life and its uniquely inherent and complex processes could have emerged from non-life in the first place, and then could continue to fly in the face of natural law with untold increases in information, complexity and organization to yield all the flora and fauna varieties known to have existed.” [3]

“Thus, unless we are willing to argue that the influx of solar energy into the Earth makes the appearance of spaceships, computers, and the Internet not extremely improbable, we have to conclude that the Second Law has in fact been violated here.” [4]

There must be a God!
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[1] ] Isaac Asimov, Smithsonian Institute Journal, June 1970] [Isaac Asimov, "In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can't Even Break Even", Smithsonian Institution Journal (June 1970), p. 6

[2] ChristianAnswers.Net http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-thermodynamics.html

[3] T. Wallace Five Major Evolutionist Misconceptions about Evolution, http://www.trueorigin.org/isakrbtl.asp

[4] Granville Sewell, "A second look at the second law", Mathematics Department, University of Texas, El Paso, Jan. 19, 2011 http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/AML_3497.pdf