A question that some of the more scientifically minded christians sometimes will ask is:
If everything in the universe is constantly moving to a state of maximum entropy, then why does life exist at all?
Then they propose that it must be because some entity outside the universe made it happen, i.e. god.
For those who don't know what entropy is, it is the quantity of energy that is available for useful work. Some people will describe it as the amount of randomness in a system, but this is an incomplete definition. Energy is never created nor destroyed, but it does seek a ground state that is essentially the most random state that the system can be in.
So why should our universe have life in it, since in order for life to exist it must fight against entropy? A tree must fight gravity to grow tall, animals grow and build habitats for themselves, and humans create all sorts of crazy things that seem to go against the natural flow into chaos. Life with high internal entropy tends to die.
God isn't a good answer.
First off, notice how in all of the proposed entropy reducing behaviors, they all actually maximize the entropy of the universe in every case. When a tree grows, it takes in UV light from the sun and creates sugars, then rejects green visible light to the environment. Those sugars feed the tree and allow it to run all the metabolic processes that allows it to live. This means that the net entropy of the system is higher than if the tree had never existed. The same is true for animals, and especially for human efforts. This is because in order for life to reduce entropy, it must use more energy than the amount it wants to decrease.
Another thing to notice is that life releases energy in whatever for it is, so trapped energy can be made available for use. Humans are the most guilty of this, but so do fungi and animals. Humans of course do this with deliberation, but so do subatomic particles.
If you take air particles and put them in a small box, they will naturally spread out to fill the box. If you create a simple AI agent that seeks to maximize the entropy in the system by behaving like air particles, you will find that it is able to replicate complex behaviors thought to only be the product of highly intelligent systems, including tool use, cooperation and problem solving without a specific goal.
The existence of life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, and thus does not require a god to exist.
7
Enjoy being online again!
Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.Create your free account
9 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Life...you can't kill it with a stick! Exhibit A: the heavily-blacktopped unused parking lot after 6 years......
AnneWimsey
Level 9
May 28, 2019
0
I've never met a believer yet, of any denomination, who has ever asked that question, or any like it.
KKGator
Level 9
May 28, 2019
0
Most Christian apologists bring this up at some point or another.
It's sort of rare, I've never seen it used in a formal debate, mostly because anyone in a position to learn about thermodynamics is smart enough to understand the whole story and wise enough to question what they don't know.
@Happy_Killbot Frank Turek for example. He's the I don't have enough Faith to be an atheist guy.
JW's also bring up this point in their literature.
Very good number of other examples out there I'll leave it to your discretion to research or not.
@TheMiddleWay I'll pass. I make it a point to avoid people who annoy me, whenever possible.
Life exists due to a sheerly coincidental confluence of chemical substances and physical forces. It is as simply as that.
wordywalt
Level 9
May 27, 2019
0
It certainly doesn’t seem very simple to me. Reality is a very deep and profound mystery. There’s more here than meets the eye. Even the concept of existence is not clear. The only logical response that I can think of is total bewilderment.
Why would entropy preclude the possibility of life?
indirect76
Level 7
May 27, 2019
0
Thing decay, energy becomes unusable, stuff tends to fall down. This would seem to make life impossible because life has to fight against this natural order by building things up against entropy.
@TheMiddleWay I understand this, but it isn't illogical to think that if things are becoming disordered that life should not exist, and once the universe is very old and entropy is at it's highest, the "heat death" of the universe, all life as we know it will cease to exist because it will run out of energy available for useful work, thus it can no longer lower it's internal entropy thus it will be unable to sustain itself without some sort of Clarktech entropy reduction technology.
To say that God did it is no answer at all unless you can define and understand God. It would be more honest to just say that you don’t know.
No matter what scientific explanations you give for nature, nature remains a deeply profound mystery.
WilliamFleming
Level 8
May 27, 2019
2
Yes. To claim that "some entity" outside the universe made it happen, accomplishes very little toward the establishment that the God of Christianity exists.
@MST3K -- Any god....
@evidentialist You are right. Just throwing out the god label is meaningless chatter, especially if you mean a supernatural being external to nature. People who do that have no idea of what they are talking about.
The most honest and realistic assessment to me is that we are abjectly and totally ignorant regarding the deep questions of existence. We don’t even know what we ourselves are. No one understands conscious awareness, and the very concept of existence appears meaningless from a cosmic perspective.
The premise is wrong. The universe (a closed system) moves towards increasing entropy. This is not true for earth, which is not a closed system as it receives energy from the sun. Energy from the sun has a particular distribution in different wavelengths and so it is ordered. All in all, earth is not a closed system and hence the second law doesn't strictly apply
Spongebob
Level 7
May 27, 2019
1
I do not assume that this only occurs on earth, even though that is the only know place to contain life. I account for UV light from the sun as an energy source for trees, and their rejection of that light to green light as an increase in entropy. This would apply to the whole of the universe.
Another way to think about it is that the earth sits in a place where entropy is low enough that life can develop, but energy availability is sufficiently high enough for life to make use of it. Perhaps by coincidence, anywhere liquid water forms happens to meet this criteria.
@Happy_Killbot yes, I think we are in agreement
I don't believe in randomness. It doesn't mean I believe in a "God" though.
Piece2YourPuzzle
Level 8
May 27, 2019
0
You do not have "beleive" in randomness for it to exist. It's sort of like not beleiving in evolution. I.E. It proceeds and operates whether you beleive in it or not. It doesn't serk or need permission to exist and operate. The same is true of entropy and randomness. The study of the phenomenon is called complex systems theory (i.e. chaos theory). Its alive (so to speak) whether we choose to belive or not
the concept of entropy doesn't mean that things are random, it means that if you selected one possible state for that system to be in, if it has maximum entropy then it will be like the highest statistically likely mode of that system (complex, I know )
Now let me try to explain it with an analogy because it might be easier to understand that way. Imagine a checkerboard with a coin in half of the blocks. Every coin can be heads or tails, and occupy 1 coin to a square. You could have all the coins heads on only black squares, but that is unlikely. most likely half of the coins will be heads and half tails, so having all coins heads on black squares has low entropy. If the system has high entropy, then about half the coins are heads, half are tails and they are homogenously distributed, because that is what is most likely to happen.
@Happy_Killbot
Interesting analogy. So if I get your explanation, the ultimate entropic state is that that is most statistacally likely to occur. I am not sure entropy works that way. The convenient popular definition of entropy is the breakdown of the natural order, followed by a move to the simpliest state. However, I too find this too simplistic.
When I was participating in workshops at the Santa Fe Institute, an Institute dedicated to studying Complex Systems Theory in all fields, I was exposed to multiple examples of Chaos Theory and entropic deterioration models. One of the things that was made evident in the models is that all the models moved toward entropy, but not always to the exact same end or in the same way. Even when the stsrting conditions were identical. Unexpected events on the way to entropic culmination caused perturbations in the process. These perterbations sent the model on a different deterioration path and thus created similar, but distinctly different final outcomes.
Sometimes the terminus was only different in minute degrees, sometimes the terminus hardly resembled the other models. Does this represent randomness? Do we define randomness as something totally unrecognizable and unpredictable? I do not think so. Does randomness represent something inexplicable? Again I do not beleive so. Randomness as I understand it means that the system reverts to a base energy level and form that is not always the same or even statistically predictable.
@t1nick There is no way for me to prove conclusively that there is no randomness just like there is no way for you to prove conclusively that there is randomness.
I can give a half decent argument of there being no randomness in terms of there being free will or not though.
@Happy_Killbot Something that seems like randomness doesn't mean it is randomness.
Then again fellas. I have been drinking today on this Memorial Day lol
Maybe not best to have scientific or philosophical debates when doing so.
@Piece2YourPuzzle lol. Sometimes those are the best. But forgotten totally by the next morning. Lol
@Piece2YourPuzzle
true. That also doesn't mean randomness doesn't exist as well.
@Piece2YourPuzzle
I would agree with example of free will not being random. It is fraught with all kinds of tempering varables that do not necessarily exist in Nature and the physical world.
@Piece2YourPuzzle True randomness doesn't need to exist for this to be true. It just easier to use the concept of randomness when looking at potentially infinite possible futures than it is to calculate the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, which you can't do anyways due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principal.
Enjoy being online again!
Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.Create your free account
Share this post
Categories
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.