Then tell us the source of the work being done.
Yup entropy makes this impossible without a complex mechanism...../sarc
Posted on 11/20/2009 6:40:11 PM PST by GodGunsGuts
It has always amazed me how unconcerned evolutionists seem to be about entropy and the problems it poses both for a natural origin of life and for macroevolution. The argument from entropy is one of the most powerful arguments against the spontaneous formation of life from a random association of non-living chemicals...
(Excerpt) Read more at creationresearch.org ...
The dilution factor you're talking about from the sun's perspective is already accounted for in the delta-S of the absorption calculation.
How Cretins like GGG Misunderstand Physics.
People like GGG apparently have so little confidence in their faith they have to resort to lies and confabulation to rationalize real world observations.
Wind is also "harnessing the sun’s energy to produce work," (i.e. wind is the work) of which you said, "the ONLY known, empirical, reproducible cause [...] is intelligent design!"
But in order for it to accomplish complex, specified work
Despite that massive shove to the goalposts, you're still wrong.
The weather system is at least sufficiently "complex" and "specified" that farmers, for thousands of years, have been able to depend on it producing annually repeated patterns, to the point of prespecifying acts like planting and harvesting almost to the day. So much so that people actually did once widely assume that, say, the coming of Spring was due to intelligent design, and prayed and sacrificed to Gods to bring it about on schedule.
Orderly enough that, as I just pointed out to GGG, farmers can depend on it following certain patterns year after year, for thousands of years. That's pretty orderly.
In any case I already conceded that entropy certainly presents problems for the origin of life. I.e., how do you initially get those selectively catalyzed chemical reactions on which life depends running, as it were, uphill against probability, in the first instance?
Presumably it started with initially haphazard, low energy, reproduction; with the reproduction gradually becoming more and more dependable and accurate by progressively harnessing subsidiary complex chemical reactions. But that's just arm waving. Solving the problem of how specifically it might have happened will be extremely difficult. Indeed the problem may never be solved, since we have very little evidence to go on. Geological process and biological process have almost certainly long destroyed any remnant traces of prebiological chemical evolution.
What I deny is that entropy presents any problem for subsequent biological evolution once life exists. And certainly this argument fails to hang together:
While weather is a good example of how just poring energy into a system can produce slight areas of order, life isn't. To achieve that degree of order and information would require massive amounts of disorder to exist elsewhere for the system to balance out and looking at the universe as a whole, I just don't see that kind of disorder in evidence.
Problem is that, if you "don't see that kind of disorder in evidence," then that's not just a problem for the origin of life, but even more so for the mere existence and continuance of life.
Now, despite the hectoring of some of my fellow evolutionists to "do the match," I'm no more qualified to take that on than you are. However, it seems sufficiently obvious, at least to me, that the amount of negative entropy required to get an initial community of simple reproducers up and running, and get them to the point of honing their reproduction, must be very, very, very, very, very small in comparison to the amount of negative entropy required for the development and reproduction of any single generation of life on earth.
Think of how many trillions of living organisms exist on the earth at any given moment. Think of the immense amounts of work required for even one average animal to develop from zygote, to embryo to adult. Think of the millions of times a full set of cellular DNA is accurately copied over that course of development in just a single individual, then multiply by billions. Etc, etc, etc.
If all that's happening right now, and yet you don't see the "disorder in evidence," then the (at least energetically) far, far, far smaller task of getting life started can occur without you noticing the "disorder in evidence."
Hawking discusses this – its part of the search for matter. Is the universe expanding to oblivion, or expanding and contracting? Depending on the amount of matter found, we would know something happened before the big bang, but never know exactly what.
I understand why you want to avoid this important question.
So then, singularity would be a low entropy state?
Or what happened after singularity let go and the universe expanded was low entropy?
My understanding of the initial conditions of the universe suggest a high degree of entropy with the organization coming later. Which would mean that it started with high entropy and the entropy decreased as the matter coalesced and order increased.
Since everything tends towards increased entropy, which we observe around us even now, if everything started with a high degree of entropy, that would suggest some outside influence to provide the work to decrease entropy.
Work is being done to overcome the entropy.
That’s the part that so many ignore.
Energy alone is not enough. It can actually increase entropy unless a source of work is provided to use the energy to produce order.
But fall comes after a while and entropy again is evident. Things grow in the spring not just because they have energy being pored at them, but because of the activity within the cell in photosynthesis and cell division.
Einstein and Hubble destroyed the infinite universe with their calculations and red shift observations. The steady state model of the universe was debunked decades ago.
Your constant challenge to *Show me the math* does not disprove anyone’s argument and does not absolve you from answering the questions. It’s not an answer in itself, it’s just a method for you to avoid answering the question and claim victory.
Thanks for your wonderfully civil input.
We are and were actually having an interesting discussion about this, until your ignorant comment came along.
The failed crystal formation.
The level of order displayed when chemical substances entropy increases is orders of magnitude removed from the level of complexity displayed by the DNA molecule and the information it contains.
Apples to oranges with that example.
Weather is still not that orderly, which is what makes forecasting so difficult.
Much of the patterns observed for seasons are due more to the tilt of the earth’s axis, not because weather follows a pattern from year to year.
I would actually expect that it would take more work to get the system going than to maintain it, much has it takes more force to start an object sliding across the floor to over come the force of static friction, than it would to keep if moving overcoming the force of kinetic friction.
Plus, while there are (essentially) machines in place now to provide the work (cells, protoplasm, etc) there was nothing in place to provide the work to form the initial chemical components from which life was to have started.
Something was needed to form and maintain those components. I just don’t buy the self-assembly by mindless forces of chemical components and proteins, enzymes, etc that held together long enough to fall into place in just circumstances to initiate life.
It’s way too improbable. We can hardly do stuff like that on purpose. Believing that it happened by accident requires more faith than I can muster.
That’s the part that so many ignore.
Granted I have a lay understanding. But as I do understand, you have this almost exactly backwards.
Work does not "overcome" entropy. It is precisely doing work that generates entropy. Any time any work is done, entropy must increase. (Or, theoretically, remain the same, but I assume that almost, if not literally, never happens. For entropy to never increase you'd have to have a system, or a universe, where literally nothing ever happened.)
IOW, at least as I learned it (although I understand it can be formulated in other ways) entropy is a measure of the energy not available to do work. Push a wheeled cart a few feet, and at least some of the energy used has been expended through friction, heating up the wheels and the ground a little bit, or through producing sound waves. This heat and sound energy is now in a more diffuse form. You can't "gather it back together" and use it for anything like pushing a cart, at least not without doing more work than you would recover in energy. (This is why entropy can also be formulated in terms of how evenly or unevenly heat is distributed.)
Energy alone is not enough. It can actually increase entropy unless a source of work is provided to use the energy to produce order.
Once again, backwards. Not only can the addition of energy never increase entropy absent work being done, it can by definition only decrease entropy. More energy available to do work equals negative entropy.
“Work is being done to overcome the entropy.”
I think you miss the point - “work” is being done by plants in springtime. Work can be in many forms. The increase in potential energy required to extract carbon from CO2 takes work.
Come on. Hubble's law states nothing about the size of the universe, it only addresses the observed rate at which objects within the observable portion of it are moving away from each other.
As for Einstein, he was instrumental in proving the Infinite (Closed) Universe. Relying on Newtonian physics Einstein found that the Infinite Closed Universe model is shown to fit all the data of the Hubble diagram better than the Big Bang. (The Infinite Closed System theory simply states that infinity is the boundary of the system thereby precluding the addition or subtraction of any energy into or out of the system.)
Within the field it is common knowledge that by applying general relativity and Newtonian physics Einstein found that the force of gravity between two point particles can be calculated. Utilizing this force and the Infinite Closed Universe model, the net force of gravity on a point particle, in arbitrary motion, due to the uniform mass distribution of the universe can then be calculated by an integration. The result is that the net force of gravity is found to be equal to the force of inertia. These calculations explain Newton's First Law, Newton's Second Law, and the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass. In addition, by the extension of Einstein's general relativity to two-body interactions Newton's Third Law is elicited.
That's not the way I learned to think of it, but I see the point.
Work is needed to be done to decrease entropy, and energy is used to do that, so I can see where the energy used could thought of as to increase entropy.
For entropy to never increase you'd have to have a system, or a universe, where literally nothing ever happened.
An interesting thought I had was that the universe could not tend towards order. If it did everything would become locked up so tight that nothing would happen there either.
But since the universe has a tendency towards disorder, order can be produced out of it, but still, something has to be done to make that order. I don't think that anything but the coincidental appearance of isolated pockets of order are possible without an active agent behind it.
No, I didn’t miss that.
What I’m saying is that simply adding energy is not enough. All it would do on its own is warm things up.
Just because the sun is adding energy to the system (earth) doesn’t automatically guarantee that order will arise. Something has to make the order, especially of the complexity exhibited in life.
The transient pockets of somewhat order that are observed in weather systems are about all I’d expect to see from a system without outside forces acting on it.
Plus, if the small amounts of order from weather systems create larger amounts of disorder, then for the high degree of order created in life, should result in a high degree of disorder elsewhere and I don’t see that much disorder that could be accounted for from the highly structured order life displays.
That’s why I believe that there must be some outside influence doing the work. Any machine, mechanical or biological, which is doing the work must have a source and machines themselves, denote intelligence.
It is not widely accepted that the universe is infinite in size, but size was not what you were referring to when this conversation started.
In your post # 57 You stated....”However, Entropy does not imply that there can be no brief moments, even in a closed system, in which the order may be increased. It only establishes that the level of organization will trend toward some minimum value over time. The few billions of years life has been on earth, in the context of the infinite life of the universe, can manifest one of those brief moments.”
You clearly stated that you were talking about the lifespan of the universe as being infinite. It is not. Hubble’s redshift observations showed a beginning, as did Einstein’s equations. He finally removed the *cosmological constant* that he added to try to demonstrate an ageless universe, when Hubble’s redshift observations forced the issue.
The estimated age of the universe is currently between 13.5 and 14 billion years. A *few billion* years (guessing a minimum of three to qualify as “few”) is a much higher percentage of the life of the universe than a *brief moment*.
As far as the universe being infinite in size, you are apparently the odd one out on that thinking these days. Current theorizing is that it is indeed finite, which is would be anyway if it had a beginning. As a matter of fact, interestingly, there is speculation that the universe isn’t really as big as previously thought.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4250-tantalising-evidence-hints-universe-is-finite.html
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