What on earth does the second law of thermodynamics have to do with god's existence?

Alright, I have heard this a bunch of times when a theist tries to explain why god exists. Can someone explain all this, and effectively debunk it?

 

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Say WNDWAA to them.

They say, that (thsi is one version) the law of thermo II says that disorder must increase, therefore evulituion can not exist since that would be a loss of entropy (more order).

Those retards do not realize the prerequisite for the 2nd thermo law, which is, namely, (are you listening you freaks) "closed system". Certain parts of the universe can decrease in entropy, but not within a closed system.

It's retarded babbling, not worth debunking. But why did I just do it now!? *bangs head on floor*

 

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Of course God violates the second law of thermodynamics, but since he is magic it doesn't matter. If you were to believe creationists, it would appear that you couldn't even grow from a zygote. However, your growth(and evolution) results in an overall increase in entropy.

It is merely cunning propaganda, not even creationists take it seriously. But they know that if they say it often enough, some morons will be convinced. Simple, easy-to-repeat lies are much, much better than complex truths. In that respect creationism is quite savvy. Since the public doesn't the background or resources to determine the scientific strength of a theory or principle, convincing bullshit is far more suitable for influencing opinions.

 

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<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo.html">This effectively debunks these claims more eloquently than I can</a>

 

Replying to Zero. Are you saying that if something increases, something must decrease? Thats what I understood of it anywho.

 

Something about an old shoe.

-Mike

 

Hey Zero,

Is it my imagination, or are you rather grouchy lately?

-Mike

 

Actually zero is saying that entropy increases in a closed system. Meaning order degrades into disorder. But in an open system, such as the earth, a decrease in entropy is entirely possible. Meaning order from chaos.

 

Actually, even in a closed system entropy can decrease in one region as long as there is a corresponding increase in another.

Thus even in a closed Universe the entropy in a region such as "the Earth" may decrease provided there is a increase elsewhere "the Sun".

~Raithere

 

I thought I'd said it cleearly enough.

In a closed system, entropy must increase in any reaction whatsoever. This does not apply to open systems. The universe is a closed system, so its net entropy must increase with any reaction. Regionally, the entropy can decrease, but at the expense of even greater entropy elsewhere.

And where does this lead us? *taps foot impatiently* yesssss, since entropy is a measure of disorder, the universe will eventually reach absolute chaos.

 

Prove it. The universe is a closed system? How do you *know* this?

 

The Universe does not exchange matter or energy with anything else.

 

When creationists mention "entropy" we mostly mean "a process of degradation or running down, or a trend to disorder". (That definition is from Merriam-Webster).

Things tend to break down over time. Things tend to degrade.

For instance, If I put a pool of "biotic soup" in a bowl and set it in a rainforest, would you say, over time, it would tend to turn into a higher form of life, or degrade into dried mud, or something. How long would it take to evolve upwards? How would it exist for billions of years in order to evolve? Would replenishing the bowl of "biotic soup" merely reset the evolutionary stopwatch, or would it help the first batch continue to evolve?

Yet some evolutionists want us to believe that this is how life first came into existence.

There is only one conclusion. Those who believe this scenario do so as an alternative to believing in God. Otherwise, explain it to us misguided creationists. Please, enlighten us.

-Mike

 

It has experimentally been verified that complex compounds can form from such a soup, under conditions that can be imagined to exist on the early Earth. We may never discover the total answer.

I'm often thinking that Creationists are really making God small. What you envisage is a brilliant but unstructured engineer. So this engineer sets out to create a world; he creates night and day, and does some landscaping, then he remembers that night and day has to come from somewhere and creates the sun. Then he creates a lot of animals, and finally as the frostin on the cake, he creates a creature in his own picture (this must be his physical picture as we are far from devine). Then he remembers that this creature must also have a mate like everything else he created, so he retrofits a woman partly cannibalizing the man he created earlier. Then after six days of work, he has to rest.

In all probability, we humans are gonna be able to mimic God and create life within the next century.

But in the scientific view of the world ( and mind you, a great many scientist are religious), God, in a cataclysmic reversal of entropy, created an infinite universe with physical laws that allowed and enabled Life to arise and evolve. Now THATS devine!

Hans

 

True, unless things are structured in such a way that if you put energy into them they repair and/or reproduce themselves. The sun is constantly pumping energy into Earth, and the Earth itself has plenty of stored energy in its chemistry and molten core. Life is a process that takes a certain amount of high-quality energy to sustain/perpetuate itself, embedding a fraction of that energy in its structure, while dissipating the rest of that energy into the universe as lower-grade heat. Overall, the disorder of the universe always increases; life accelerates this process, extracting a capability to sustain and create order at the cost of such acceleration of decay. Really, you could think of life as an energetical parasite.

Obviously, there were no rainforests or bowls when life first arose. My favorite theory as of today is that the first life arose around hydrothermal vents in an ocean or a sea (these vents were all over the place back then, as Earth had a very thin crust and a much hotter core, so volcanism of all kind was much more active.)

Obviously, life did not start as life. Merely some organic molecules in solution or even more probably on some catalytic/stabilizing mud/rock/crystalline surface. Molecules were such, and/or assembled in such a composition, that they auto-catalyzed (IOW, were able to create copies of themselves from some basic building blocks floating around, given an external input of energy to drive the reactions -- for example, direct heat from a volcanic vent or such energy previously stored in energy-rich molecules floating around.) The molecules weren't nearly anything as complex as DNA or RNA. Modern, complex biochemistry would have taken some millions if not billions of years of ultra-fast molecular generational turnover to evolve.

Oldest known theorized fossils of earliest life on earth date back to around 3.9 billion years. Considering that due to severe orbital bombardment as part of its accretion the Earth was probably not habitable until around 4 billion years ago, then it might have taken some 100 million years for the first primitive single-celled organisms to appear and spread widely enough to have a chance of being fossilized and preserved for us to find. Or maybe it was more like some 400 million years; it's really hard to tell with so little of the original Earth surface from that time still surviving to this day. For example:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast17jan_1.htm

This is the current state-of-the-art knowledge, that is (and the error bars, or uncertainties, are quite large in this case.) Probably with more time we'll know more as more new discoveries are made around the world and better trace detection methods are developed.

Come on, it's life. How does life exist? It feeds, grows and reproduces. Need I go into greater detail?

It's not a soup that evolves, it's life. All you need is a pivotal moment when first primitive molecular life is formed. Once life forms, it's no longer just a soup; it is home to a chemically robust, growing, self-perpetuating structure.

Ehm, no. That's how you interpret evolution, incorrectly and without any basis in theory or fact I might add. Hopefully my explanation will shed some light for you.

There's hardly only one conclusion in this case, as peoples' cosmological beliefs are never so clear-cut. Quite to the contrary, you can believe whatever you wish. Then believing in God is just another alternative. On the other hand, if one wishes to be even the least bit rigorous one would try to postulate an explanation that could at least potentially be feasible within confines of the observable natural world.