Re: Creationist discovers the missing link revealing the first true
- From: Friar Broccoli <eliasrk@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2009 17:53:35 -0800 (PST)
On Dec 5, 1:49 pm, George <gburk...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip of all but one point]
For a Biblical creationist with high standards Science is a
body of knowledge that has been gathered and correlated from
Observable Phenomena that has been demonstrated to be factual!
Like the laws of Biogenesis or the laws of Thermodynamics!
Although the thermodynamic argument is even more irrelevant to
evolution than abiogenesis, it is nevertheless one of my
favorites since pretty much nobody has any idea what entropy (of
the thermodynamic type, or any other type) is. Fundamentalist
Christians seem to believe that God created entropy so that He
would need to constantly intervene to maintain living creatures
- or maybe not, since it's hard to figure out what their
position is or how we would test it.
Since it looks like you intend to use entropy to show that
biological evolution is false, I thought I would explain what
physicists think entropy is so that you can better explain why
it is inconsistent with evolution:
The second law of thermodynamics (2LoT) has many formulations in
many fields, but basically all it says is that heat
*spontaneously* moves from hotter places to cooler places and
that when this happens it is possible to capture the motion to
do work. Electrical, chemical, and gravitational systems all
require slightly different formulations, but they all come down
to extracting work from *spontaneous* reactions.
Three obvious examples might make this clearer:
1) In a nuclear reactor the decaying uranium is the hot place,
and water is the cooler place. When heat moves into the
water it expands to drive turbines which do the work -
usually making electricity.
2) Similarly, when water is in a high mountain lake it is (for
thermodynamic purposes) the hot place and the ocean below is
the cooler place. Since, as you know, water spontaneously
moves from high places to lower places it can be used to
drive turbines on the way down.
3) Likewise, uncombusted gasoline contains heat, and after
burning, the reactants like water and carbon dioxide contain
less heat. When moving from the "hot" state (as gasoline) to
the cooler state (as atmospheric gas) work can be extracted
to run your car.
So, what's entropy?
In each case, after the "heat" has moved from the hot place to
the cooler place, the hot and the cold are no longer separated;
the energy from the nuclear reactor or the gasoline has gone
into the air, and the water from the high mountain lake has
moved into the ocean. In all cases it is no longer possible
to use that energy to do more work.
And that is what entropy is all about. When you have mixed the
hot and cold together into a warm puddle, all the heat is still
there, but it is no longer available to do work. When you have
thus decreased the ability of heat to do work, you have
increased its entropy.
So "increased entropy" = "decreased ability to do work"
Since all work necessarily increases entropy, the entropy of the
universe is always going up, which just means the potential work
that can be done in the universe is always going down.
But this isn't a problem for us, because God has provided us
with a star (our sun) that is constantly providing us with new
usable heat. The heat from the sun constantly evaporates water
and moves it into the mountains so we can extract the energy
from flowing rivers. More importantly, the sun drives
photosynthesis that creates the food we eat and the trees we
build our houses from, as well as the trees that a long long
time ago became the coal we burn today.
With that information about what entropy is, and why it remains
constant here on earth, I hope that you will be able to provide
me with a coherent explanation of why 2Lot proves evolution is
false, because so far, I haven't been able to understand how
that argument is supposed to work.
.
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