nemesis_juggernaut writes:
I don't believe that 2LoT refutes evolution, per say. I'm saying very simply that things never organize themselves.
When scientists attempt to put thermodynamics into lay terms they describe entropy as a measure of disorder. While this isn't exactly wrong, it is almost always misunderstood by laypeople. This explanation gives laypeople the sense that neatening up the living room or cleaning up after dinner reduces entropy when this is definitely not the case. That's not the kind of order that entropy measures.
Entropy is a measure of a system's potential to do work, and you gave a correct example yourself in an earlier post when you mentioned heat transfer. A steam engine is the clearest example of a heat engine because it uses the heat from steam to do work. Wikipedia describes a heat engine as exploiting the temperature gradient between a hot "source" and a cold "sink" to convert heat energy to mechanical work. A steam engine increases the entropy, the disorder if you prefer, of a system, but as you can see it isn't the kind of disorder you see around the house.
When you add heat to a mixture of chemicals it can cause chemical reactions to take place, and in some cases that can result in energy being stored in chemical bonds. The heat did work to create those bonds, and the newly formed chemicals have lower entropy than the original chemicals. They are less disordered now, more organized. Again, this isn't the kind of organization you'll see around the house, but that's what reduced entropy means.
So it does not take an energy converter to increase organization and reduce entropy. Where chemical reactions are involved and the right chemicals are present, all it takes is the addition of energy. This is why Miller was able to create complex organic molecules in his experiment, molecules that were more organized with less entropy than the original constituents he began with. This is why we often find complex organic molecules in meteorites.
Secondly, the bike didn't design itself. It took people not only to design the bike, but to manufacture it, and to ship it. It then was required for somebody to assemble based on the schematics provided by another intelligent mind. The bike in no way organized itself, which Berra clearly wants us to believe about natural systems.
It's an analogy, a device for explaining something unfamiliar by reference to something familiar. There isn't an analogy in the world that can't be stretched to far. This analogy is not addressing anything related to design. It's attempting to explain the principle of entropy. He could as easily have used the example of sea shells on a beach that you gather and place into order by size and color. Or if you prefer an example with no people at all, imagine a gravel bed during an earthquake. The shaking ground will order the gravel by size with the largest pieces on top and the smallest on the bottom.
I would never say that evolution "violates" 2LoT, because nothing does. However, if creationists say that anything using energy must need some sort of converter, I obviously would agree that.
If I've explained this all properly, you now understand why converters are not necessary to use energy to do work.
--Percy
™ Version 4.2
