RanTom Thoughts/20080419 The Second Law of Thermodynamics argument strikes again
The Second Law of Thermodynamics argument strikes again
In Defeating Darwin in 4 easy steps, Bryan Fischer makes use of the Second Law of Thermodynamics argument to argue against evolution.
Pay no attention to that loud scream you just heard. I'll be OK, really. People have occasionally asked me why I seem to have a vendetta against Thermodynamics -- it's partly because of arguments like these. (However, these arguments mainly just show that the arguers do not understand Thermo. in the first place just like they don't understand Evo.) As PZ Meyers stated in his dissection, it's fairly easy to take apart by just pointing out that the speaker has in their own lifetime gone from a simple 1-celled organism to a more complex organism that regularly creates order out of chaos every day, while still obeying the Laws of Thermodynamics.
Fischer also confuses Evolution with Cosmology in his very first argument. Let me reiterate this: EVOLUTION DOES NOT SAY ANYTHING ABOUT PRIMARY ORIGINS. Darwinian evolution just says that once there is an original replicator (with a chance of variation in the copies) we can explain the diversity / complexity of forms today by a mechanism called Natural Selection without needing Special Creation for each and every form. It's us wild and crazy physicists that decided to extrapolate into the origin of the universe itself, not the biologists. (And don't get me started on the chemists with all of their fascination with having acids in their soups.)
You can still believe in evolution and God at the same time. In sort of a reverse application of the ontological argument of Anselm, I can even say that evolution Must exist if you subscribe to that argument. If you can imagine a God that is powerful enough to create everything one-at-a-time in Special Creation, I can imagine a more 'perfect' God who doesn't need to create everything, but only needs to set the laws in place that will result in evolution, which results in us. Therefore, according to Anselm, my more perfect God must be more real than yours.
(As an aside, from a very simple interpretation, a counter-example of the second law of thermodynamics is a black hole, which is an "Order to the eXtreme!" phenomenon. We've actually had to tweak the theory of black holes because the Religion of Thermodynamics says it must be so. Hawking first came up with Hawking Radiation to account for the commandments of thermodynamics. I'd like to point out that this radiation is something that we have no physical proof for other than that black holes "must not" have 0 entropy.)
