Second Law of thermodynamics predicts God?

Metaphysics and Epistemology
1

I ran across this web site today

A Practical Man’s Proof of God - Does God Exist?

I am concerned here only with his opening argument, entitled “THE BEGINNING”, since the rest of his essay rests on its premises.

A third scientific proof that the atheist is wrong is seen in the second law of thermodynamics. In any closed system, things tend to become disordered.

Here he implies that since the objects in the Universe consume fuel, i.e, the sun converts hydrogen into helium (which)=energy; the fuel (hydrogen) should have been used up long ago if the Universe is eternal. He is saying that the Universe is a closed system.

I seem to be having trouble addressing this statement. I think that my trouble lies in the fact that Closed and Open systems are not something I’m very familiar with. Does anyone here know what they are exactly? (No laughs please, :wink: I have come to realize in adulthood that my State sponsored education is lacking, and I am taking the proper steps needed to correct it.)

2

I never learned the second law of thermodynamics in high school, but a quick glance at some websites that discuss it give me the impression that it has to do with energy changing from concentrated to dispersed states. For example, the energy from a fire in the corner of a room will disperse throughout the room.

I think the understanding of the second law presented on the website you link to is a rationalistic one. Energy disperses, he says. Therefore, given an eternity, energy would become infinitely dispersed.

I’m not sure what the full argument against this is, but I would say that, though all energy TENDS towards dispersal, there are forces which counter that dispersal. I would point to the example of hurricanes, which are concentrations of energy formed from dispersals of energy.

3

I think this argument comes up quite often; talkorigins has a few articles devoted to it here. You might find something able to help.

4

Thanks for the replies,

While it is true that stars use up hydrogen, there must be some sort of reclycling system in the Universe to convert heavier elements into smaller ones. I was reading on Space.com (I can’t find the article but I’ll post it if I run across it again) that “black holes” may not last forever. Some scientists think that they may leak material over time. I would have to look more into this.

The main point though is that since Existence Exists, finding out how the Universe recycles stuff would require scientific investigation. What this article does is try to side step the task of investigation and say, “Well, we don’t know now, so God probably did it” :slight_smile:

(Interesting link poohat)

5

The author’s error is not in saying that energy will disperse. It’s in dropping the context of the word “disorderly.”

He’s saying, in a nutshell, “Science says that things get disorderly. It’s been a long time, and there’s lots of order. Screw science!”

The second law states that energy tends towards the state of lowest order. The most disorderly state of energy is plain-old heat. Energy is never created or destroyed (first law of td) but can only change forms. When you burn coal to turn turbines, you’re transforming stored chemical energy in the coal into heat, and then convert that heat into mechanical energy, you’re going to lose some energy in the process. In other words, the mechanical energy that you end up with will always be less than the total stored potential.

Entropy is the universal law of tanstaafl, and the reason why perpetual motion machines are impossible.

It is true, according to what humans know today, the strongest prediction is that someday in the super-mega-distant future, the universe will consist of a matterless “heat soup,” as that is the eventual end of the entropy train.

Contrary to popular belief, humans are great entropy machines. The majority of our caloric intake just goes to heating up the air around us. On top of that, we do a whole lot of burning of coal and whatnot. If you want ot use a lot of energy, you’ve gotta pay for it, that’s all. Don’t worry, there’s plenty left for the next bazillion years or so :slight_smile:

Black holes do spit out material. But that’s not an exception to the second law.

6

WWJGD

Cybernetics and Systems Theories address the concepts of “open and closed” systems. Try googling the theories. (I wrote my basic understanding of them in the thread about ecosystems)

Cybernetics Developed as a multi-disciplinary approach in the 20th century.

Its conceptualization of what a system is, when it is open and closed, and causality within a system has influenced fields such as (engineering, ecology, economics, sociology, family therapy, and artificial intelligence)

7

This is an interesting topic that comes up again and again. It seems the second law of thermodynamics is cast as the bane of every major scientific advancement at one time or another, be it nanotechnology, quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence, etc.

Certainly, given an eternity, the universe will tend to become infinitely chaotic, strictly according to thermodynamics. However, those who dogmatically uphold the second law as their own theory of everything forget to account for emergent phenomena. Basically the hypothesis goes that the more chaos there is, the more likely it is for self-organizing phenomena to emerge. In this regard, things like planets, lifeforms and minds can be thought of as emergent phenomena.

Interestingly enough, this view of the universe integrates marvelously into Peikoff’s DIM hypothesis.

8

Stars, planets, and people are not exceptions to the law of entropy, but great examples of it. The second law doesn’t state that order always goes away. It states that, for any increase in order, there is always a greater decrease in order, within a closed system. For purposes of analysis, you can treat many things as closed systems, provided that the system doesn’t transfer much energy with the outside, and that any changes in entropy are balanced locally. However, the universe as a whole is the only truly closed system. For every single moment that you’re alive, consider the vast energy waste that goes on. You’re taking highly ordered sugars and protiens and constantly turning them into useless ambient heat. And look at how much energy the sun wastes! Nice orderly subatomic bonds being reshaped and reformed into lower energy states and just throwing out all that heat and light. A star is like a Grand High Poobah in the Entropy Brigade.

There is no escaping entropy. And there is nothing to fear from admitting that fact. Anyone who would use science in an anti-science argument is committing the fallacy of the stolen concept. You can dismiss them on general principle.

9

Evening all,

Now it seems to me that there is a fatal flaw in the following “Logic”.

In order for matter to come out of nothing all of our scientific laws dealing with the conservation of matter/energy would have to be wrong, invalidating all of chemistry. All of our laws of conservation of angular momentum would have to be wrong, invalidating all of physics. All of our laws of conservation of electric charge would have to be wrong, invalidating all of electronics and demanding that your TV set not work!!

Now, as far as I remember the last time I checked, my television worked (a rather dull programme about a gay couple building a big white house). Now therefore, following the author’s logic, matter cannot be created from nothing. He/she? uses this logic to therefore suggest that the universe must have had a creator, i.e. God.

So if it is impossible for matter to come from nothing, it must be argued that there are two options for God.

a) God himself/herself/itself (to cater for all tastes) is matter and therefore had a creator.

:wink: God is a matterless principle.

Surely, in the case of a), the author has turned his/her own argument against itself and disproved God. If God had a creator (God’s God), then that God had a creator (God’s God’s God). This then proves that there was no beginning which seems somewhat at odds with the author’s following view…

The atheist’s assertion that matter/energy is eternal is scientifically wrong. The biblical assertion that there was a beginning is scientifically correct.

In the case of option B) , that God is a matterless principle, the whole basis of the argument on scientific principles must be abandoned. To say God exists as a matterless principle means that God is either a construct of the human mind, or a supernatural, undetectable force of nature. When it cannot be proven empirically that something exists through the experiencing of reality through the senses and therefore physical, empirical methods of measurement, it is as far as I understand impossible to argue for said ‘thing’s’ existence. Therefore, as in this option we are asked to take the idea of a God on faith, any previous scientific argument by the author must then be abandoned. If scientific methods of proof are removed and the basis is faith alone then the ‘evidence’ would appear to be that…

The Bible states, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

I do not believe that a book stating that something is true proves it. Show me proof and i’ll believe.

On a seperate note, this is my first post and I am very new to the ideas of Objectivism and Ms. Rand’s philosophy. If I am making a complete fool of myself with my above logic then please tell me and i’ll go away and work on it.

Meilleurs souvenirs et à bientôt,

Corbeau

P.S. - Nice to see a forum in which the typical slagging matches don’t take place.

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P.P.S - The :wink: 's represent the idea of b in a bracket. I didn’t realise it came out as a face.

C

11

You should read this article from the same site. The author gives up on molding science to his emotions and just starts quoting from the bible for evidence.

He explains that a physical concept of god is “alien to the Bible and to common sense” It’s obvious that a concept is “alien” to the bible but what about the “common sense?” There is no answer in the article. The funny thing is that there is no mention of faith as the answer just a blank out.

12

I see what you mean, doesn’t amount to much of an argument. In fact, it can’t really be said to amount to an argument.

Regards,

C

13

About the universe being a closed system, pls. note that acc. to thermodynamics a “closed” system is system with a thermodynamic boundary, which has no thermal contact with the outside system.

This definition therefore excludes the universe as a whole, cause the universe is not bounded by anything outside, it in fact has no such thermodynamic boundary.

14

I was reading on Space.com (I can’t find the article but I’ll post it if I run across it again) that “black holes” may not last forever.

This was one of the theories developed by Stephen Hawking. I don’t know what the mathmatical explanation is, but he theorized that single atoms are ejected by black holes, and that, over time, a black hole will whither itself out of existence.

15

A closed system is one in which no energy (or mass) is going into or out of it.

The only truly closed system is the Universe (since energy cannot be created or destroyed). All other systems are open.

The concept of a closed system is a computational convention used by scientists and engineers to analyze the thermodynamics and energy transfer of certain devices or instances.

For example you may want to figure out how long it will take your freezer to freeze a room temperature, one pound piece of ribeye steak to 30 degrees F if the freezer is set at 20 degrees F. Simple enough, you figure out how much heat energy is in the meat frozen, subtract that from the amount of heat energy in the meat at room temp and that is the amount of energy that must be removed from the meat to freeze it. Then figure out how quickly that heat can be transfered from the meat to the freezer and voila (tried to make this as simple as possible). Now, back to closed systems.

Closed systems are analytical tools. They are boxes of dotted lines drawn on a piece of paper around any part of this system I choose to analyze. But there is no such thing as a closed system (except for the Universe as a whole) so I must always remember – THIS IS IMPORTANT – to draw an arrow going into the box (system) representing the energy that is supplied to the system and an arrow going out of the box (system) representing the energy which is removed from the system:

– I may be a meat man interested in the properties of meat and choose just to analyze just the meat, draw a box around the meat.

– I may be a refrigeration engineer and I want to know what kind of refrigerant to use. Draw a box around the whole refrigerator, arrow in for electricity supplied – arrow out for heat removed.

– I may be an architect and want to know how much AC I am going to have to supply to keep the room cool. Draw a box around the room, arrow out represents how much heat is put out by the refrigerator into the room, this equals the amount of heat that my AC unit must remove from the room – arrow in representing electricity used by AC unit.

– I may be a power plant engineer trying to decide how much energy must be supplied to a whole town of people trying to freeze their meat and live. Draw a box around the whole town. Arrow out is how much energy they all use which is how much energy I must supply – arrow in.

This can go on and on. We have meteorologists studying the earth as a whole. They can draw a box around the earth for analytical purposes but they must always remember to account for the energy coming in from the sun and the earth itself – arrows in, and energy lost to space – arrow out.

I hope I haven’t lost everybody because this is the REALLY IMPORTANT PART when refuting religionists who make claims such as this. They use the science of Thermodynamics to back up their claim for the existence of God or to refute evolution but they always forget the arrow in and the arrow out. Religionists label all systems they want to refute as closed when in reality there are no closed systems except the universe as a whole.

The author makes a completely arbitrary claim that all the hydrogen should have been used up by now. Why? Because he says the Universe has been around forever? Current estimates are that the Universe is between 10 and 15 billion years old. The fact that the universe is a closed system doesn’t help his case. Indeed the energy in the universe has become more dispersed as the second law of thermodynamics suggests. The same amount of energy exists now as 10 billion years ago (energy cannot be created or destroyed) but the universe is bigger, thus the energy is more dispersed. But these facts don’t prevent gravity from working to pull hydrogen together, creating a star, which is concentrated energy that itself is dispersing. Yes daniel, gravity is one of the forces that tends to concentrate energy and mass (which is really just concentrated energy).

Religionists use a different phrasing of the second law, that closed systems tend from a state of more order to less order, to refute evolution. They say "in the closed system of the earth how could life have evolve from a less ordered state like single celled organisms to the more ordered state of cell colonies much less into human beings. But the earth is not a closed system. Evolution is not a closed system. And organisms are not closed systems. How long would one of us survive if we were put in an air tight box even resembling a closed system? Not long.

The site poohat linked talk origins is an excellent source for all things scientific, especially as they relate to refuting religionists.

16

Is the Universe open or closed? I’ll let you know just as soon as I finish measuring it.

17

The universe is a closed system. To the best of my knowledge, nothing enters the universe from the extrauniversal abyss of naught, and neither does anything exit the universe to there.

18

My first post. :blink:

A closed system with either an infinity of time or an infinity of space is not really a closed system.

The universe is immortal or reconstitutes itself after dying. Therefore the entropy of the universe is reversed.

If not, then we inhabit the middle of that strange string of existence that began in nothing and ends in nothing.

Only then, nothing is different than any normal conception of nothing which can only produce nothing.

Roy

19

My, aren’t you waxing philosophical today!

20

Here’s something my friend and I can’t figure out: If the universe is an entity (which it is) then it has identity and is not infinite. Stipulating this, where does existence “end?” And if it doesn’t, then how is it not infinite?

Here’s something fun we came up for the questions: “What’s in between air molecules and what composes deep space?”: energy, that’s right, waves! (NOT ether, for Allah’s sake)