Second Law

The Second Law of Thermodynamics PRATT is on Answers in Genesis’ “Arguments We Don’t Use” page. This didn’t stop the Discovery Institute calling it their “Simplest and Clearest Argument“, and nor did it stop the ‘creation’ of the following That’s a Fact video, Second Law:

For a refutation of this argument and related claims, start here on the EvoWiki Thermodynamics page. I quite like this one:

Take a fairly large amount of salt and add boiling water until it all dissolves. The salt is now in a highly disordered state. Let it sit in a warm place for a while, and order will spontaneously develop in the form of salt crystals. Is this a violation of the 2nd law? For that matter, does creation get around the interpretation of the law being claimed, since life still exists and reproduction happens. No. Entropy is not the same as disorder: It is the reduction in the ability to do further work. We consume food and give back wastes such as carbon dioxide. The food cannot do further work now. Plants use energy from the sun to make food for us, but the sun fuses atoms together to provide that energy, which then can’t do more work.

Crystals do make a fairly good counter-argument. But I’ll do the video anyway:

Nothing hits the spot on a freezing day like a bowl of hot soup.

I’m going to have to object: there’s nothing like a mug of hot soup. A very important distinction, I know.

But don’t leave it out too long, because all that warm goodness quickly escape, making it cold and unappetising.

Nothing like a completely irrelevant example to start us off. Moving right along…

That’s science in action, by the way.

No, that’s entropy in action – “science in action” would be the process of determining the rules surrounding the phenomenon, not the occurrence of the phenomenon itself.

It’s called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or the Law of Entropy. History credits French military engineer Sadi Carnot as the scientist that laid the foundations for the second law. In his 1824 book Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which talked about heat and steam engines.

The full title was Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire and on Machines Fitted to Develop that Power as it happens. Find out more here!

Scientists today use the Second Law to describe anything that naturally goes from a state of order to disorder.

No. The systems – yes, that aspect is also important – must be ‘closed’.

Like your Car.

Another irrelevant example. What about a baby? That would be something that’s alive and grows, rather than being created in a perfect form from which all changes, by definition, must be degenerative.

Even if you maintain it like you should, it will eventually need to be replaced.

And at the end of the cycle, you get a new, equally ‘perfect’ car. Suggesting that there might be more to this system than the obvious…

Entropy affects everything, from cells in your body, to the magnetic fields of planets which run out of energy over time, like regular magnets.

Again with cells: You get new cells. How can this be? And planetary magnetic fields don’t run down as fast as creationists claim.

That’s why some scientists doubt that nature can ever make anything better through evolution.

The salt crystals above aren’t evolution, but it would fall to the same hurdle if one existed. Which it does not.

Of course, said scientists are creation scientists.

Like turning bacteria into people.

Now, evolution isn’t going to produce targeted forms, but it could easily have done it in the past and landed up here. Here’s an experiment for you: kill of all multicellular life, and then come back in a few million years to see if any new types have arisen.

Plus, the bible is clear that creation would go from order to disorder, because sin and death entered the world.

This is the specific concept that the Arguments creationists should avoid piece warns against – to quote:

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics began at the Fall. (If so, how could Adam and Eve have eaten and digested their food that they were told to eat before the Fall?)

In other words, the 2nd law would have had to have been in effect regardless of the existence of a ‘fall’ – and if so, would the world not have decayed even without “sin and death” coming into being? That’s theology for you…

And that’s exactly what we see happening all around us. So you’d better go ahead and eat that soup before it gets cold.

We do? That’s an interesting insight into the creationist world view – I certainly don’t. We may well be biased into noticing when things go in that direction – if you walk down the same road every day for a decade, for example, you probably wont suddenly notice a tree appearing, though you will when it gets cut down –  but I see no reason to suppose that to actually be the situation. Are things really looking so down for the ICR?