I vividly remember a high school conversation with a friend I’d known since we were eight. I’d pointed out that Hitler was essentially a pagan, not a Christian, but my friend absolutely refused to believe it. No matter how much evidence I presented, he kept insisting that Nazi Germany was an extension of Christianity, acting out its age-old vendetta against the Jews. Not that he spoke from any personal study of the subject; he just knew. He’d heard it so many times it’d become an article of faith — one of those things “everyone knows.”

Flash forward 25 years. A few weeks ago my last column (http://www.boundless.org/2001/regulars/kaufman/a0000528.html) refuted a number of familiar charges against Christianity, including the Christianity-created-Nazism shibboleth. Even though I only skimmed the subject, I thought the evidence I cited would’ve been hard to ignore; I quoted, for example, Hitler’s fond prediction that he would “destroy Christianity” and replace it with “a [pagan] religion rooted in nature and blood.” But sure enough, I still heard from people who couldn’t buy that.

Well, sometimes myths die hard. But this one took a hit in early January, at the hands of one Julie Seltzer Mandel, a Jewish law student at Rutgers whose grandmother survived internment at Auschwitz.

A couple of years ago Mandel read through 148 bound volumes of papers gathered by the American OSS (the World War II-era predecessor of the CIA) to build the case against Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremberg. Now she and some fellow students are publishing what they found in the journal Law and Religion(www.lawandreligion.com), which Mandel edits. The upshot: a ton of evidence that Hitler sought to wipe out Christianity just as surely as he sought to wipe out the Jews.

The first installment (the papers are being published in stages) includes a 108-page OSS outline, “The Persecution of the Christian Churches.” It’s not easy reading, but it’s an enlightening tale of how the Nazis — faced with a country where the overwhelming majority considered themselves Christians — built their power while plotting to undermine and eradicate the churches, and the people’s faith.

Before the Nazis came to power, the churches did hold some views that overlapped with the National Socialists — e.g., they opposed communism and resented the Versailles treaty that ended World War I by placing heavy burdens on defeated Germany. But, the OSS noted, the churches “could not be reconciled with the principle of racism, with a foreign policy of unlimited aggressive warfare, or with a domestic policy involving the complete subservience of Church to State.” Thus, “conflict was inevitable.”

From the start of the Nazi movement, “the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement,” said Baldur von Scvhirach, leader of the group that would come to be known as Hitler youth. But “explicitly” only within partly ranks: as the OSS stated, “considerations of expedience made it impossible” for the movement to make this public until it consolidated power.

So the Nazis lied to the churches, posing as a group with modest and agreeable goals like the restoration of social discipline in a country that was growing permissive. But as they gained power, they took advantage of the fact that many of the Protestant churches in the largest body (the German Evangelical Church) were government-financed and administered. This, the OSS reported, advanced the Nazi plan “to capture and use church organization for their own purposes” and “to secure the elimination of Christian influences in the German church by legal or quasi legal means.”

The Roman Catholic Church was another story; its administration came from Rome, not within German borders, and its relationship with the Nazis in the 1920s had been bitter. So Hitler lied again, offering a treaty pledging total freedom for the Catholic church, asking only that the church pledge loyalty to the civil government and emphasize citizens’ patriotic duties — principles which sounded a lot like what the church already promoted. Rome signed the treaty in 1933.

Only later, when Hitler assumed dictatorial powers, did his true policy toward both Catholics and Protestants become apparent. By 1937, Pope Pius XI denounced the Nazis for waging “a war of extermination” against the church, and dissidents like the Lutheran clergyman Martin Niemoller openly denounced state control of Protestant churches. The fiction of peaceful coexistence was rapidly fading: In the words of The New York Times (summarizing OSS conclusions), “Nazi street mobs, often in the company of the Gestapo, routinely stormed offices in Protestant and Catholic churches where clergymen were seen as lax in their support of the regime.”

The Nazis still paid enough attention to public perception to paint its church critics as traitors: the church “shall have not martyrs, but criminals,” an official said. But the campaign was increasingly unrestrained. Catholic priests found police snatching sermons out of their hands, often in mid-reading. Protestant churches issued a manifesto opposing Nazi practices, and in response 700 Protestant pastors were arrested. And so it went.

Not that Christians took this lying down; the OSS noted that despite this state terrorism, believers often acted with remarkable courage. The report tells, for example, of how massive public demonstrations protested the arrests of Lutheran pastors, and how individuals like pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (hanged just days before the war ended) and Catholic lay official Josef Mueller joined German military intelligence because that group sought to undermine the Nazis from within.

There is, of course, plenty of room for legitimate criticism of church leaders and laymen alike for getting suckered early on, and for failing to put up enough of a fight later. Yet we should approach such judgments with due humility. As Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett write in their book Christianity on Trial (to repeat a quote used in my last column), “It is easy for those who do not live under a totalitarian regime to expect heroism from those who do, but it is an expectation that will often be disappointed. . . . it should be less surprising that the mass of Christians were silent than that some believed strongly enough to pay for their faith with their lives.”

At any rate, my point is hardly to defend every action (or inaction) on the part of German churches. In fact, I think their failures bring us valuable lessons, not least about the dangers of government involvement in — and thus power over — any churches.

But the notion that the church either gave birth to Hitler or walked hand-in-hand with him as a partner is, simply, slander. Hitler himself knew better. “One is either a Christian or a German,” he said. “You can’t be both.”

This is something to bear in mind when some folk on the left trot out their well-worn accusation that conservative Christians are “Nazis” or “fascists.” It’s also relevant to answering the charge made by the likes of liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: “History teaches that when religion is injected into politics — the Crusades, Henry VIII, Salem, Father Coughlin, Hitler, Kosovo — disaster follows.”

But it’s not Christianity that’s injected evil into the world. In fact, the worst massacres in history have been committed by atheists (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) and virtual pagans (Hitler). Christians have amassed their share of sins over the past 2,000 years, but the great murderers have been the church’s enemies, especially in the past century. It’s long past time to set the historical record straight.

The complete text of this article is available at http://www.boundless.org/2001/regulars/kaufman/a0000541.html

Here ya go, Sparky; knock yourself out on THIS one, written by a "Christian" physicist:

Entropy and Evolution

Entropy, God and Evolution

by Doug Craigen, PhD (physics)

revision 1.02, Oct. 29, 1996

Introduction

The theory of evolution presents many mechanistic and philosophical questions for those of us who believe in Divine creation. Among the many approaches to answering these questions, there are varying levels of questioning the existence of evolution and whether it could happen without Divine intervention to assist it. One argument that is commonly raised in this context that since entropy is disorder, and since evolution represents a greater state of order, therefore, evolution violates the second law of theromodynamics (that entropy is always increasing). In turn, this argument has led to the mocking reply that we believe in the "Sun God". The purpose of this present writing is to explain the relevant issues in this argument in a way that does not presume a high level of education in any of the subjects of physics, mathematics, biology, or chemistry.
Order, Disorder and Design

Consider the following three possible arrangements for 16 marbles in a box:
+----------------+     +----------------+     +----------------+ 
|                |     | *         *    |     |                |
|                |     |      *         |     |                |
|    * * * *     |     |            *   |     |   *   *        |
|    * * * *     |     |       * *      |     |   *   *        |
|    * * * *     |     | **         *   |     |   *****  *     |
|    * * * *     |     |   *       *    |     |   *   *  *     |
|                |     |          *     |     |   *   *  *     |
|                |     |              * |     |                |
|                |     |*    *       *  |     |                |
+----------------+     +----------------+     +----------------+               
     1 - ordered         2 - disordered          3 - designed
to call something 'ordered' is to imply the existence of an ordering rule. In a geometrical situation like the positions of marbles in a box an ordering rule would permit you to start at one marble and then using the rule predict the positions of the others. So for example, one could have the rule "from any marble you can find another one an inch to the left, or an inch to the right, or an inch up, or an inch down". Together with a rule to tell you where the edge was, this ordering rule could describe marbles as shown in #1. Geometric ordering rules could produce a wide number of resulting shapes (spirals, triangles, diamonds ...), the unifying thing that makes them all 'ordered' is the ability to use the rule to predict where to find 'the marbles'.
if we cannot find an ordering rule to describe something, then we call it disordered. If we have limited success describing something with an ordering rule then we can defined the amount of disorder mathematically by how much deviation there is from the ordering rule.
when we say that something has design, it is as much a matter of how we perceive it as of what is actually there. To someone who reads english, box 3 reads "Hi", but to someone who only reads Japanese it may simply look like a case of partial ordering. If it appears to us that there was some intelligence behind how something occured, or if it conveys meaning to us, then we say there is design. There may or may not be order in something that we consider to be designed (for example, abstract art). The problem with trying to talk about design in a quantitative fashion is that the human mind seems to have endless capacity to see design in something which is disordered (animal shapes in clouds, constellations in the sky etc).

Probability

Suppose that the marbles were simply dropped into the box. Which one of the arrangements 1, 2, or 3 would be the most likely to occur? A critical thing to understand is that they are all equally likely. From a mathematical point of view you should be no more surprised to see 1 or 3 than to see 2. And yet we are, and we should be.
Confused yet? The solution is that while any single outcome is equally likely, the number of outcomes that are just plain disordered far outnumbers the number of outcomes that show either order or design. So while no single disordered outcome is any more likely than any single ordered outcome, the net probability of having the outcome disordered is much higher than the probability of having the outcome ordered. There are simply so many more ways of having the outcome disordered than there are of having it ordered.
Entropy

In a Thermodynamics or Statistical Mechanics class, the preceeding ideas would be usually brought together somewhat like this:
Consider the gas molecules that make up the air of the room you are in. They are scattered somewhat evenly throughout the room. There are many possible arrangements where the gas molecules would all be on the other side of the room, but we could spend our entire life in the room without fear that we would ever see it happen. The reason is that there is such an immensely larger number of possibilities where the gas fills the room, that the probability of seeing it all in one half of the room is for all practical purposes zero. Clearly the number of ways of achieving each possibility is a very important number for predicting what will happen. We give this number a special name, entropy (I will not bother with the complete mathematical definition of entropy here as it doesn't make any difference to the understanding of principles that I'm driving at).
The Second Law of Thermodynamics

If we have a physical system that is free to change between various states, we have the question of which state we expect to find it in (or if you have are watching it change, which state it will drive towards). From the point of view of , the state which is the most likely to occur is the state which has the most ways of occuring, and this is the state of highest entropy. We don't expect to see a system move from a state of high entropy to a state of lower entropy. This is the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
So, for example, if you have a cup of water and carefully place a spoonful of milk on top of the water, you will expect to see the milk mix into the water. It will maximize its entropy by spreading out, because there are so many more ways of being spread throughout the cup than there are of being all together. We expect the milk to mix into the water, and we don't expect it to later separate itself from the water.
When Does the Second Law Apply?

In the milk example above, if you were to leave the mixture uncovered long enough, the water would evaporate and you would have the milk left over. Does this violate the second law? No it doesn't. By taking the water molecules and spreading them through the room as a vapor, the total entropy of the water and milk together is much higher (even though the entropy of the milk has decreased again). One can have a decrease in the entropy of a part of the system, provided the entropy of the entire system still increases. What if you were to have a condenser that put the water back into a second cup as it evaporated from the first one? In this case, you have included something that is not part of the system. The second law does not apply to open systems where material or energy is being traded with some outside system, it only applies to self-contained, or closed systems. To have a closed system, you would have to make the condenser a part of it. In this case the operation of the refrigeration system creates enough additional entropy to account for the decrease in entropy when the milk and water separate.
From a chemical point of view of life, the thing that keeps our world going is the continual receiving of energy from the sun and the re-radiating of heat that keeps out planet from over heating. The earth is not a closed system, the reception of energy from the sun provides the possibility of process which locally decrease entropy (even though on a large scale entropy still increases). This is why you may find yourself mocked with "believing in the Sun God" if you say that God is the creator and sustainer of life.
Other Expressions of the Second Law

With some advanced calculus it is possible to take the mathematical expressions that underlie the description above, and find other equivalent principles that apply to situations other than closed systems. The second law can be seen as a fundamental principle behind why many processes occur in the direction that they do. For example, according to the first law of thermodynamics, a ball on a hill side could either stay where it is and maintain a high potential energy, or it could roll down the hill lowering its potential energy but gaining kinetic energy (as speed and rotation). The thing that tells you that it is the second one of these that will happen is the general form of the second law.
A Question of Scale

Two common logical fallacies are the Fallacy of Composition (arguing that what is true of the parts must be true of the whole - such as "pennies are light, so a million pennies are light") and the Fallacy of Division (arguing that what is true of the whole must be true of the parts - such as "computers are changing the world, therefore my computer is changing the world"). In thermodynamics we divide properties up into how they behave with respect to scale or division. Intrinsic properties are ones which are the same for the whole system and for any part of it. For example, temperature is an intrinsic property. If you pour half a cup of water into a second cup, both half cups of water have the same temperature which is the temperature they had when they were together in one cup. Extrinsic properties are proportional to the size of the system. Weight is one example. The two half cups may be at the same temperature as the initial full cup, but they are each only half the weight.
Entropy and energy are extrinsic properties. We can find the energy of the earth by adding up all the energies of everything in it. Similarly, we can find the entropy of the earth by adding up all the entropies of everything in it. We can also find entropy changes by subdivision, so that we can look at what is happening on an individual basis (plant by plant, leaf by leaf, cell by cell, molecule by molecule) regarding absorption of sunlight and the resulting chemical changes.
Entropy is NOT Disorder

As an aid for conceptualizing entropy, it is often described as a measurement of disorder. This is not intended as a definition of either entropy or disorder. Entropy is determined by the number of ways you could achieve a state, disorder is defined by the amount of violation of an ordering rule. The assignment "entropy is disorder" is intended to describe situations such as "the more space a gas takes up, the higher its entropy is, and the less you know about where all the molecules are (which in a casual sense means more disorder)". This conceptual link between entropy and disorder should not be interpreted as saying that increased disorder is increased entropy. An example of how entropy isn't disorder is that if you take a piece of glass, which is an amorphous material (one whose atoms are disordered), and place it in a fridge to cool it down, you will not change the atom locations. The glass remains just as disordered, but its entropy decreases as its temperature drops. In fact, in a very good fridge, the closer you brought it to absolute zero (-273.15 C or -459.67 F) to closer its entropy would become to zero. This would all happen without changing its structural disorder.
Entropy and Life

To argue that evolution is inconsistent with the second law of thermodynamics it is usually stated that evolution is a continual process of achieving higher order and design, which is against the second law. This is an argument based on casual definition of terms, rather than on quantification of order, design, and entropy. I hope that by this point it is reasonably clear that this argument actually has little if anything to do with the second law of thermodynamics. How would one propose to measure the relative order or design increase that would accompany any evolutionary step? What number represents the difference between standing erect and walking on all fours, between having only day vision and between having also developed night vision...? If we cannot answer such questions, then arguments about order and design will fall outside the realm of science.
To determine whether anything about the chemical processes of life violates the second law of thermodynamics requires looking at all the process on an individual basis. If there is no violation in the absorption of sunlight, or in any subsequent reactions, then there cannot be any violation of the second law as the net sum of such reactions (see the previous section on scaling). I am not personally aware of any such individual spots where the second law is violated. In fact, the second law is about as close as science comes to having sacrosanct laws. Any violations of this law that were discovered anywhere, no matter how small they were, would be very big news... I'm sure I would have heard of it.
Closing Remarks

Though I believe that we should stop arguing that the process of life (e.g. evolution) violates the second law of thermodynamics, this is not to say that there are no big unanswered questions for those who would use evolution to argue philosophically against religious belief. How and why it is that we see so much orderliness and design in the world around us remain big questions. However, the second law says nothing about design (which is a matter of perception of what is there) and does not appear to contradict anything about the order we observe. Actually, it should strike us as odd if God had set up the universe to operate under inconsistent laws.
In fact, many experts on the philosophy and history of science and technology believe that it was no accident that it was in Christian (and perhaps in particular, Protestant) areas where science advanced so quickly and had such a revolutionary effect on society. Rather it was the Christian belief that God created an ordered and rational universe working by predictable rules that enabled a scientific view of the world to develope. While the Bible records instances of the miraculous, it is perhaps remarkable what a small fraction of its content is involved in these cases. The vast majority of the Bible is about God's Providence guiding the world in ways that we would never see, except perhaps by inferal from the final result, where the miraculous is the exception. Whereas events like the parting of the Red Sea are spectacular, most of the Bible suggests a God who orchestrates events behind the scenes, planning hundred or thousands of years in advance through the smallest details in life for thousands of miles around. It would be arrogant to believe that now that we are a "scientific" people, that if we cannot detect God's working in our microscopes, then He isn't there. The church has gotten sidetracked on this point many times, with horrible results. The Bible is not a text book of Science. It is a mistake either to classify scientific theories as Biblical and non-Biblical, or to believe that the proof of God's existence will be found in the failure of science to explain something. We believe that God set the universe in motion with consistent and sufficient mechanical rules. Science studies those rules.
The larger questions such as why should we observe any order anywhere at all (rather than the smaller question I've addressed here of whether there are contradictions within the order we see) take us into whole new questions, such as the Anthropic Principle. That would be a whole other (and much bigger) paper than this one.
Related Pages:

Life on Earth - flow of Energy and Entropy
The Page of Entropy - one of the pages on this site (Entropy and Disorder) is particularly relevant.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics in the Context of the Christian Faith
The Thermosynthesis Home Page

Go to more of Doug Craigen's writings.

There you are, Sparky; a Christian physicist explains for you why the 2LoT doesn't say what you think it does, and doesn't preclude Evolution as you seem so desperate to believe it does.

How ya like THEM apples?

No, what you have is more fact-denying theories to try and negate the impact of the Second Law in regard to evolution:

Thermodynamics vs. Evolutionism

he debate between proponents of evolutionism and creation scientists concerning thermodynamics seems likely to continue without end. This is not because the laws of thermodynamics (and their ramifications) are subject to debate or relativistic interpretation, but because a handful of dogmatic evolutionists continue to vocally and energetically deny the truth concerning a simple matter of scientific knowledge:

The second law presents an insurmountable problem to the concept of a natural, mechanistic process: (1) by which the physical universe could have formed spontaneously from nothing, and (2) by which biological life could have arisen and diversified (also spontaneously) from a non-living, inanimate world. (Both postulates form essential planks in the platform of evolutionary theory in general.) While many highly qualified scientists who number themselves in the camp of evolutionism are candid enough to acknowledge this problem, the propagandists of evolution prefer to claim the only “problem” is that creationists “misunderstand” real thermodynamics.

This strategy is exemplified in Frank Steiger’s Thermodynamics FAQs in the Talk.Origins Archive, one title of which (“Attributing False Attributes to Thermodynamics”) may be said to better describe the “how-to” nature of his text than his case against the creationist writers he wishes to discredit.

Steiger accuses creationists of having created “voodoo” thermodynamics based solely on metaphors, and provides Talk.Origins readers with a detailed, albeit error-ridden, treatise on the subject. But while he may appear to have a handle on the mathematics and applied science of thermodynamics, Steiger himself steps out of the realm of scientific knowledge to defend the standard dogma of the evolutionist faith, using his own metaphors and semantic smoke and mirrors to make evolutionism appear immune to the best established scientific law known to man.

The purpose of this document is twofold:

To adequately familiarize the reader with the true scientific nature and ramifications of thermodynamics, as documented by leading non-creationist scientists. To document and dispel for the reader such common pseudo-scientific evolutionist errors as those perpetuated in Steiger’s essays, and elsewhere.

To accomplish this aim, the subject matter shall be presented in the following consecutive sections within one document:

Understanding Thermodynamics

The Evolutionist’s Spin

Both Cannot Be Correct

Every effort has been made to explain the matters addressed in this document as simply and understandably as possible. While matters of science can sometimes seem beyond comprehension, the aim here has been clarity, yet without oversimplifying where the details truly matter.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Understanding Thermodynamics

heat

mechanical energy (or work-ready energy)

and

the conversion of either of these into the other All matters of physics, chemistry, and biological processes known to man, are universally subject—without exception—to the first and second laws of thermodynamics —hereafter, simply “the first law” and “the second law”.

While the properties of heat and useable energy may not seem particularly significant in a debate concerning origins, the first and second laws (which govern those properties and their transformations) speak profoundly to the nature of matter, energy, and therefore the universe itself. Within the realm of science, these are among the most immovable, universal laws of science, as the following scientific authorities testify:

“[A law] is more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different are the kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its range of applicability. Therefore, the deep impression which classical thermodynamics made on me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced, that within the framework of applicability of it basic concepts will never be overthrown.”

[Albert Einstein, quoted in M.J. Klein, “Thermodynamics in Einstein’s Universe”, in Science, 157 (1967), p. 509 and in Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations, p. 76.]

“No matter how carefully we examine the energetics of living systems we find no evidence of defeat of thermodynamic principles.” [Harold Blum, Time’s Arrow and Evolution (1962), p. 119.]

“If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics, I can give you no hope; there is nothing for [your theory] but to collapse in the deepest humiliation.”

[Arthur S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1930), p. 74.]

“The second law of thermodynamics not only is a principle of wide reaching scope and application, but also is one which has never failed to satisfy the severest test of experiment. The numerous quantitative relations derived from this law have been subjected to more and more accurate experimental investigations without the detection of the slightest inaccuracy.” [G.N. Lewis and M. Randall, Thermodynamics (1961), p. 87.]

“There is thus no justification for the view, often glibly repeated, that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is only statistically true, in the sense that microscopic violations repeatedly occur, but never violations of any serious magnitude. On the contrary, no evidence has ever been presented that the Second Law breaks down under any circumstances.” [A.B. Pippard, Elements of Chemical Thermodynamics for Advanced Students of Physics (1966), p. 100.]

“Although it is true that the amount of matter in the universe is perpetually changing, the change appears to be mainly in one direction—toward dissolution . . The sun is slowly but surely burning out, the stars are dying embers, and everywhere the cosmos heart is turning to cold; matter is dissolving into radiation, and energy is being dissipated into empty space.

“The universe is thus progressing toward an ultimate ‘heat death’ or, as it is technically defined, a condition of ‘maximum entropy’ . . And there is no way of avoiding this destiny. For the fateful principle known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which stands today as the principal pillar of classical physics left intact by the march of science, proclaims that the fundamental processes of nature are irreversible. Nature moves only one way.” [Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein (1957), pp. 102-103.]

“...there are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics....” [Dr. John Ross, Harvard scientist, Chemical and Engineering News, vol. 58, July 7, 1980, p. 40]

Having had a glimpse at the significance and respect afforded the laws of thermodynamics within the scientific community, let’s now examine what these laws say, and to what they apply.

The First Law

Since the controversy between evolutionists and thermodynamics involves mainly the second law, we will only briefly look at the first law, sometimes referred to as the law of conservation, which tells us essentially that Nothing is now coming into existence or going out of existence; matter and energy may be converted into one another, but there is no net increase in the combined total of what exists.

Regarding this first law, Isaac Asimov offers this noteworthy comment:

“This law is considered the most powerful and most fundamental generalization about the universe that scientists have ever been able to make. No one knows why energy is conserved... All that anyone can say is that in over a century and a quarter of careful measurement scientists have never been able to point to a definite violation of energy conservation, either in the familiar everyday surroundings about us, or in the heavens above or in the atoms within.” [Smithsonian Institution Journal, 1970, p.6]

The Second Law

On the other hand, the second law tells us what can and cannot take place in terms of the relationships and transformations between matter, energy, and work, and their respective properties, as well as those of information and complexity, saying Every system, left to its own devices, always tends to move from order to disorder, its energy tending to be transformed into lower levels of availability (for work), ultimately becoming totally random and unavailable for work.

...or...

The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease. (Entropy is a measure of (1) the amount of energy unavailable for work within a system or process, and/or (2) the probability of distribution or randomness [disorder] within a system.)

To help ensure an adequate understanding of what the second law means, consider the following, also from Isaac Asimov:

“Another way of stating the second law then is: ‘The universe is constantly getting more disorderly!’ Viewed that way, we can see the second law all about us. We have to work hard to straighten a room, but left to itself it becomes a mess again very quickly and very easily. Even if we never enter it, it becomes dusty and musty. How difficult to maintain houses, and machinery, and our bodies in perfect working order: how easy to let them deteriorate. In fact, all we have to do is nothing, and everything deteriorates, collapses, breaks down, wears out, all by itself -- and that is what the second law is all about.” [Smithsonian Institute Journal, June 1970, p. 6]

This is the essence of Classical Thermodynamics. Similarly, the “generalized 2nd law” applies to probability of distribution matters in Information Theory in such a way that, left to itself over time, the information conveyed by an information-communicating system will end more distorted and less complete than when it began (again, a higher measure of, or increase in, entropy—in this case informational entropy)—and likewise, applied to matters Statistics, left to itself over time, the order or regularity of a system will be less than when it began (and again, a higher measure of, or increase in, entropy—in this case statistical entropy).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Evolutionist’s Spin

Evolutionist theory faces a problem in the second law, since the law is plainly understood to indicate (as does empirical observation) that things tend towards disorder, simplicity, randomness, and disorganization, while the theory insists that precisely the opposite has been taking place since the universe began (assuming it had a beginning).

Beginning with the “Big Bang” and the self-formation and expansion of space and matter, the evolutionist scenario declares that every structure, system, and relationship—down to every atom, molecule, and beyond—is the result of a loosely-defined, spontaneous self-assembly process of increasing organization and complexity, and a direct contradiction (i.e., theorized violation) of the second law.

This hypothsis is applied with the greatest fervor to the evolutionists’ speculations concerning biological life and it’s origin. The story goes that—again, in violation of the second law—within the midst of a certain population of spontaneously self-assembled molecules, a particularly vast and complex (but random) act of self-assembly took place, producing the first self-replicating molecule.

Continuing to ignore the second law, this molecular phenomenon is said to have undergone multiple further random increases in complexity and organization, producing a unique combination of highly specialized and suitably matched molecular “community members” which formed what we now know as the incredibly efficient, organized self-sustaining complex of integrated machinery called the cell.

Not only did this alleged remarkable random act of self-transformation take place in defiance of the second law, but the environment in which it happened, while itself presumably cooperating with the second law’s demand for increased disorder and break-down, managed (by some further unknown randon mechanism) to leave untouched the entire biological self-assembly process and the self-gathered material resources from which the first living organism built itself.

Evolutionism takes its greatest pride in applying this same brand of speculation to the classic Darwinian hypothesis in which all known biological life is said to have descended (by means of virtually infinite—yet random—additional increases in organized complexity) from that first hypothesized single-celled organism. This process, it is claimed, is directly responsible for the existence of (among other things) the human being.

Details, Details...

Perhaps the reader should be reminded (or informed) at this point that not one shred of unequivocal evidence exists to support the above described self-creation myth. Yet very ironically, it’s the only origins account treated in the popular and science media, nicely blurring in the public mind the distinction between bona fide science and popular beliefs.

To be sure, many corollary hypotheses have been produced to show how one or another biological or geological phenomenon—or an empirical fact gathered in any scientific discipline—might be explained in evolutionary terms (often not without the use of highly convoluted, incredible, and unprovable stories). But as Karl Popper observed, a theory that seems to explain everything really explains nothing. Popper insisted that a theory’s true explanatory power comes from making narrowly defined, risky predictions—success in prediction being meaningful only to the extent that failure is a real possibility in the first place. Evolutionists find ways to explain and/or produce after-the-fact “predicitons” for any and every empirical fact or phenomenon presented to them—frequently ignoring established standards for logic and scientific method.

In the same manner, many evolutionists are so convinced of evolution as a “fact” that they are compelled to either ignore or dismiss the applicability of the second law to biological processes. The presupposition of evolution as “fact” leaves no alternative but that it must be possible in spite of the second law. But no one can explain satisfactorily how a presumed process of nature (evolution) has moved steadily towards higher arrangements of ordered complexity, when the foremost law of nature demands that (in Asimov’s words) “all we have to do is nothing, and everything deteriorates, collapses, breaks down, wears out, all by itself.”

Open vs. Closed Systems

The classic evolutionist argument used in defending the postulates of evolutionism against the second law goes along the lines that “the second law applies only to a closed system, and life as we know it exists and evolved in an open system.”

The basis of this claim is the fact that while the second law is inviolate in a closed system (i.e., a system in which neither energy nor matter enter nor leave the system), an apparent limited reversal in the direction required by the law can exist in an open system (i.e., a system to which new energy or matter may be added) because energy may be added to the system.

Now, the entire universe is generally considered by evolutionists to be a closed system, so the second law dictates that within the universe, entropy as a whole is increasing. In other words, things are tending to breaking down, becoming less organized, less complex, more random on a universal scale. This trend (as described by Asimov above) is a scientifically observed phenomenon—fact, not theory.

The evolutionist rationale is simply that life on earth is an “exception” because we live in an open system: “The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things.” This supply of available energy, we are assured, adequately satisfies any objection to evolution on the basis of the second law.

But simply adding energy to a system doesn’t automatically cause reduced entropy (i.e., increased organized complexity, or “build-up” rather than “break-down”). Raw solar energy alone does not decrease entropy—in fact, it increases entropy, speeding up the natural processes that cause break-down, disorder, and disorganization on earth (consider, for example, your car’s paint job, a wooden fence, or a decomposing animal carcass, both with and then without the addition of solar radiation).

Speaking of the general applicability of the second law to both closed and open systems in general, Harvard scientist Dr. John Ross (not a creationist) affirms:

“...there are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics. Ordinarily the second law is stated for isolated [closed] 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.”

[Dr. John Ross, Harvard scientist (evolutionist), Chemical and Engineering News, vol. 58, July 7, 1980, p. 40] So, what is it that makes life possible within the earth’s biosphere, appearing to “violate” the second law of thermodynamics?

The apparent increase in organized complexity (i.e., decrease in entropy) found in biological systems requires two additional factors besides an open system and an available energy supply. These are:

a “program” (information) to direct the growth in organized complexity

a mechanism for storing and converting the incoming energy. Each living organism’s DNA contains all the code (the “program” or “information”) needed to direct the process of building (or “organizing”) the organism up from seed or cell to a fully functional, mature specimen, complete with all the necessary instructions for maintaining and repairing each of its complex, organized, and integrated component systems. This process continues throughout the life of the organism, essentially building-up and maintaining the organism’s physical structure faster than natural processes (as governed by the second law) can break it down.

Living systems also have the second essential component—their own built-in mechanisms for effectively converting and storing the incoming energy. Plants use photosynthesis to convert the sun’s energy into usable, storable forms (e.g., proteins), while animals use metabolism to further convert and use the stored, usable, energy from the organisms which compose their diets.

So we see that living things seem to “violate” the second law because they have built-in programs (information) and energy conversion mechanisms that allow them to build up and maintain their physical structures “in spite of” the second law’s effects (which ultimately do prevail, as each organism eventually deteriorates and dies).

While this explains how living organisms may grow and thrive, thanks in part to the earth’s “open-system” biosphere, it does not offer any solution to the question of how life could spontaneously begin this process in the absence of the program directions and energy conversion mechanisms described above—nor how a simple living organism might produce the additional new program directions and alternative energy conversion mechanisms required in order for biological evolution to occur, producing the vast spectrum of biological variety and complexity observed by man.

In short, the “open system” argument fails to adequately justify evolutionist speculation in the face of the second law. Most highly respected evolutionist scientists (some of whom have been quoted above with care—and within context) acknowledge this fact, many even acknowledging the problem it causes the theory to which they subscribe.

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