April 7, 2009
Thank you, Plane, for posting something I can work with!
First, I''ll answer it in my own words, then post my own link. I would have to ask why there is NOT ONE observation, ONLY speculation, about the Second Law being circumvented. Evolutionists claim that in an open system (defining the earth as such because it does receive external solar energy) information can be increased, and that is true, ONLY WHEN THAT ENERGY IS IN THE FORM OF "INTERFERENCE" FROM AN INTELLIGENT LIFE FORM.
Prove me wrong, Plane. You can''t.
There is an argument that "snowflakes are more complex than water droplets, so information is gained when they are formed", and so on. But that is so missing the point. Matter changing states by natural processes (water freezing, for example) is not an example of reverse entropy, it is just a natural process. Looking at the grand scheme, the hydrological cycle of our planet as a whole is breaking down slowly as more water is contaminated and our oceans fill with oil slicks. Yes, bacteria does break down some contaminates, but the bacteria die and the contaminants remain. The big picture will ALWAYS show entropy to increase. Again, try to disprove that.
Now, in someone else''s words, here is one excerpt that more than answers your link.
http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=245
Of course, the fact that no exception to the law of increasing entropy has ever been observed does not prove such a thing never happened. It simply shows that such ideas are outside the scope of science. Evolutionists are free to believe in such "singularities" by faith, if they wish (e.g., the inflationary universe, hopeful monsters, etc.) but they have no right impose them on unsuspecting young minds in the name of science. The more common rejoinder to the apparent creation/evolution conflict, however, is simply to dismiss it as "irrelevant" on the basis of the naive and incorrect belief that entropy only increases in so-called "isolated systems" - that is, systems closed to any external organizing energy *or* information. Lewin expresses this curious idea:
One problem biologists have faced is the apparent contradiction by evolution of the second law of thermodynamics. Systems should decay through time, giving less, not more, order. One legitimate response to this challenge is that life on earth is an open system with respect to energy and therefore the process of evolution sidesteps the law''s demands for increasing disorder with time.4
It is amazing how many anti-creationist debaters and writers try to "sidestep" this serious problem with such a simplistic cliché as this. Creationists who cite the entropy principle against the evolutionary philosophy are, time and again, dismissed as either ignorant of thermodynamics *or* dishonest in their use of the second law. Such charges are inappropriate, to say the least.
In the first place, the entropy principle applies at least as much to open systems as to closed systems. In an isolated real system, shut off from external energy, the entropy (*or* disorganization) will always increase. In an open system (such as the earth receiving an influx of heat energy from the sun), the entropy always tends to increase, and, as a matter of fact, will usually increase more rapidly than if the system remained closed! An example would be a tornado sweeping through a decaying ghost town *or* a cast iron wrecking ball imposed on an abandoned building. Anyone familiar with the actual equations of heat flow will know that a simple influx of heat energy into a system increases the entropy of that system, it does not decrease it, as evolution would demand. Opening a system to external energy does not resolve the entropy problem at all, but rather makes it worse!
The statement in integral form, namely that the entropy in an isolated system cannot decrease, can be replaced by its corollary in differential form, which asserts that the quantity of entropy generated locally cannot be negative irrespective of whether the system is isolated *or* not, and irrespective of whether the process under consideration is irreversible *or* not.5
Thus entropy in an open system always at least tends to increase, no matter how much external energy is available to it from the sun *or* any other source. To offset this tendency, the external energy must somehow be supplied to it, not as raw energy (like a bull in a china shop) but as organizing information. If the energy of the sun somehow is going to transform the non-living molecules of the primeval soup into intricately complex, highly organized, replicating living cells, and then to transmute populations of simple organisms like worms into complex, thinking human beings, then that energy has to be stored and converted into an intricate array of sophisticated machinery by an intricate array of complex codes and programs. If such codes and mechanisms are not available on the earth, then the incoming heat energy will simply disintegrate any organized systems that might accidentally have shown up there.
Evolutionists have hardly even addressed this problem as yet, let alone solved it. There are, to their credit, a few theorists who have at least recognized the problem and offered certain speculations as to possible directions in which to search for a solution. The one man whose speculations have received the most attention (even acquiring for him a Nobel Prize in 1977) is Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine, who advanced the strange idea of "dissipative structures" as a possible source of new complexity in nature. He postulated that when systems somehow are "perturbed" to a "far-from-equilibrium" condition, as a result of a large influx of external energy which produces an inordinate amount of internal energy dissipation, then certain "structures" might be generated. An example would be the generation of storm cells in the earth''s atmosphere by incoming solar heat.
How such "dissipative structures" could possibly produce organic evolution is completely unknown and seems quite impossible to imagine. Such systems in no way contradict the principle of entropy but rather are illustrations of entropy working overtime! The Harvard scientist, John Ross, comments:
...there are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics. Ordinarily the second law is stated for isolated systems, but the second law applies equally well to open systems. ...there is somehow associated with the field of far-from-equilibrium phenomena the notion that the second law of thermodynamics fails for such systems. It is important to make sure that this error does not perpetuate itself.6
