The sun's energy performs all sorts of actions upon the earth's surface. Many of them result in work. Many of them can be used to locally reverse entropy.
Let's go back to that water wheel I mentioned somewhere back there. A creationist might say that it does work useful to humans because it had a human designer. (Well, duh-uh!) But lots of work gets done by hurricanes, tornadoes, rain and wind without human agency. It may only randomly be useful to humans, but so what?
Let's suppose you wanted to build a water wheel where there was no natural stream. You want to divert some of your mill's output to pumping water back upstream to feed your mill continuously from an artificial reservoir which you will fill manually the first time, hauling the water by truck.
This scheme will not work. The first law of thermo (conservation of energy) says you can't win. The second law says you can't even break even; you're certain to come out behind with every cycle and rapidly grind to a halt. For all that this scheme has a Designer and lots of organizing input etc. etc. it can't work.
But when you site your mill on a natural stream, you have the sun raising your water back to the top of the mountains for you. Yes, your God would seem to be a Sun God here. Note that this version works because the earth is not a closed system.
It isn't having a Designer or an organizing principle or whatever that makes a difference, and no non-creationist version of the second law mentions any such thing ever. It's having an energy source to pay the entropy bill. The second law says you have to have that and we do. No miracles needed.
Of course, the fact that no exception to the law of increasing entropy has ever been observed does not prove such a thing never happened. It simply shows that such ideas are outside the scope of science.
One problem biologists have faced is the apparent contradiction by evolution of the second law of thermodynamics. Systems should decay through time, giving less, not more, order. One legitimate response to this challenge is that life on earth is an open system with respect to energy and therefore the process of evolution sidesteps the law's demands for increasing disorder with timeRoger Lewin, "A Downward Slope to Greater Diversity," Science (Volume 217, Septernber 24, 1982) p. 1239.
In an open system (such as the earth receiving an influx of heat energy from the sun), the entropy always tends to increase, and, as a matter of fact, will usually increase more rapidly than if the system remained closed! An example would be a tornado sweeping through a decaying ghost town or a cast iron wrecking ball imposed on an abandoned building. Anyone familiar with the actual equations of heat flow will know that a simple influx of heat energy into a system increases the entropy of that system; it does not decrease it, as evolution would demand. Opening a system to external energy does not resolve the entropy problem at all, but rather makes it worse!
The statement in integral form, namely that the entropy in an isolated system cannot decrease, can be replaced by its corollary in differential form, which asserts that the quantity of entropy generated locally cannot he negative irrespective of whether the system is isolated or not, and irrespective of whether the process under consideration is irreversible or not.Arnold Sommerfeld, Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics (New York Academic Press, 1956), p. 155
Thus entropy in an open system always at least tends to increase, no matter how much external energy. is available to it from the sun or any other source. To offset this tendency, the external energy must somehow be supplied to it, not as raw energy (like a bull in a china shop) but as organizing information. If the energy of the sun somehow is going to transform the non-living molecules of the primeval soup into intricately complex, highly organized, replicating living cells, and then to transmute populations of simple organisms like worms into complex, thinking human beings, then that energy has to be stored and converted into an intricate array of sophisticated machinery by an intricate array of complex codes and programs. If such codes and mechanisms are not available on the earth, then the incoming heat energy will simply disintegrate any organized systems that might accidentally have shown up there.
Evolutionists have hardly even addressed this problem as yet, let alone solved it.
Hey, that's an interesting line of argument! If Sparky, Wallace, Morris, & friends are correct, then a perpetual motion machine should be possible - if only you put enough effort & design work into it. A simple perpetual motion machine won't work. Only a highly designed perpetual motion machine, with lots & lots of organizing principles behind it, will work.Let's suppose you wanted to build a water wheel where there was no natural stream. You want to divert some of your mill's output to pumping water back upstream to feed your mill continuously from an artificial reservoir which you will fill manually the first time, hauling the water by truck.
This scheme will not work. The first law of thermo (conservation of energy) says you can't win. The second law says you can't even break even; you're certain to come out behind with every cycle and rapidly grind to a halt. For all that this scheme has a Designer and lots of organizing input etc. etc. it can't work.
But when you site your mill on a natural stream, you have the sun raising your water back to the top of the mountains for you. Yes, your God would seem to be a Sun God here. Note that this version works because the earth is not a closed system.
It isn't having a Designer or an organizing principle or whatever that makes a difference, and no non-creationist version of the second law mentions any such thing ever. It's having an energy source to pay the entropy bill. The second law says you have to have that and we do. No miracles needed.
I see a multi-level marketing project here. We could get rich! =:-D