Chapter 11: Thermodynamics Falsifies Evolution

The second law of thermodynamics, which is accepted as one of the basic laws of physics, holds that under normal conditions all systems left on their own tend to become disordered, dispersed, and corrupted in direct relation to the amount of time that passes. Everything, whether living or not wears out, deteriorates, decays, disintegrates, and is destroyed. This is the absolute end that all beings will face one way or another, and according to the law, the process cannot be avoided.

This is something that all of us have observed. For example if you take a car to a desert and leave it there, you would hardly expect to find it in a better condition when you came back years later. On the contrary, you would see that its tires had gone flat, its windows had been broken, its chassis had rusted, and its engine had stopped working. The same inevitable process holds true for living things.

The second law of thermodynamics is the means by which this natural process is defined with physical equations and calculations.

This famous law of physics is also known as "the law of entropy". In physics, entropy is the measure of the disorder of a system. A system's entropy increases as it moves from an ordered, organised, and planned state towards a more disordered, dispersed, and unplanned one. The more disorder there is in a system, the higher its entropy is. The law of entropy holds that the entire universe is unavoidably proceeding towards a more disordered, unplanned, and disorganised state.

The truth of the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy, has been experimentally and theoretically established. All foremost scientists agree that the law of entropy will remain the principle paradigm for the foreseeable future. Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of our age, described it as the "premier law of all of science". Sir Arthur Eddington also referred to it as the "supreme metaphysical law of the entire universe".140

Evolutionary theory ignores this fundamental law of physics. The mechanism offered by evolution totally contradicts the second law. The theory of evolution says that disordered, dispersed, and lifeless atoms and molecules spontaneously came together over time, in a particular order, to form extremely complex molecules such as proteins, DNA, and RNA, whereupon millions of different living species with even more complex structures gradually emerged. According to the theory of evolution, this supposed process-which yields a more planned, more ordered, more complex and more organised structure at each stage-was formed all by itself under natural conditions. The law of entropy makes it clear that this so-called natural process utterly contradicts the laws of physics.
Evolutionist scientists are also aware of this fact. J.H. Rush states:

In the complex course of its evolution, life exhibits a remarkable contrast to the tendency expressed in the Second Law of Thermodynamics.141

The evolutionist author Roger Lewin expresses the thermodynamic impasse of evolution in an article in 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.142

Another defender of the theory of evolution, George Stravropoulos states the thermodynamic impossibility of the spontaneous formation of life and the impossibility of explaining the existence of complex living mechanisms by natural laws in the well-known evolutionist journal American Scientist:

Yet, under ordinary conditions, no complex organic molecule can ever form spontaneously but will rather disintegrate, in agreement with the second law. Indeed, the more complex it is, the more unstable it will be, and the more assured, sooner or later, its disintegration. Photosynthesis and all life processes, and even life itself, cannot yet be understood in terms of thermodynamics or any other exact science, despite the use of confused or deliberately confusing language.143

As we have seen, the second law of thermodynamics constitutes an insurmountable obstacle for the scenario of evolution, in terms of both science and logic. Unable to offer any scientific and consistent explanation to overcome this obstacle, evolutionists can only do so in their imagination. For instance, the well-known evolutionist Jeremy Rifkin notes his belief that evolution overwhelms this law of physics with a "magical power":

The Entropy Law says that evolution dissipates the overall available energy for life on this planet. Our concept of evolution is the exact opposite. We believe that evolution somehow magically creates greater overall value and order on earth.144

These words well indicate that evolution is a dogmatic belief rather than a scientific thesis.

The Myth of the "Open System"

Some proponents of evolution have recourse to an argument that the second law of thermodynamics holds true only for "closed systems", and that "open systems" are beyond the scope of this law.

An "open system" is a thermodynamic system in which energy and matter flow in and out. Evolutionists hold that the world is an open system: that it is constantly exposed to an energy flow from the sun, that the law of entropy does not apply to the world as a whole, and that ordered, complex living beings can be generated from disordered, simple, and inanimate structures.

However, there is an obvious distortion here. The fact that a system has an energy inflow is not enough to make that system ordered. Specific mechanisms are needed to make the energy functional. For instance, a car needs an engine, a transmission system, and related control mechanisms to convert the energy in petrol to work. Without such an energy conversion system, the car will not be able to use the energy stored in petrol.

The same thing applies in the case of life as well. It is true that life derives its energy from the sun. However, solar energy can only be converted into chemical energy by the enormously complex energy conversion systems in living things (such as photosynthesis in plants and the digestive systems of humans and animals). No living thing can live without such energy conversion systems. Without an energy conversion system, the sun is nothing but a source of destructive energy that burns, parches, or melts.

As may be seen, a thermodynamic system without an energy conversion mechanism of some sort is not advantageous for evolution, be it open or closed. No one asserts that such complex and conscious mechanisms could have existed in nature under the conditions of the primeval earth. Indeed, the real problem confronting evolutionists is the question of how complex energy-converting mechanisms such as photosynthesis in plants, which cannot be duplicated even with modern technology, could have come into being on their own.

The influx of solar energy into the world would be unable to bring about order on its own. Moreover, no matter how high the temperature may become, amino acids resist forming bonds in ordered sequences. Energy by itself is incapable of making amino acids form the much more complex molecules of proteins, or of making proteins from the much complex and organised structures of cell organelles. The real and essential source of this organisation at all levels is flawless creation.

The Myth of the "Self Organization of Matter"

Quite aware that the second law of thermodynamics renders evolution impossible, some evolutionist scientists have made speculative attempts to square the circle between the two, in order to be able to claim that evolution is possible. As usual, even those endeavours show that the theory of evolution faces an inescapable impasse.

One person distinguished by his efforts to marry thermodynamics and evolution is the Belgian scientist Ilya Prigogine. Starting out from chaos theory, Prigogine proposed a number of hypotheses in which order develops from chaos (disorder). He argued that some open systems can portray a decrease in entropy due to an influx of outer energy and the outcoming "ordering" is a proof that "matter can organise itself." Since then, the concept of the "self-organization of matter" has been quite popular among evolutionists and materialists. They act like they have found a materialistic origin for the complexity of life and a materialistic solution for the problem of life's origin.

But a closer look reveals that this argument is totally abstract and in fact just wishful thinking. Moreover, it includes a very naive deception. The deception lies in the deliberate confusing of two distinct concepts, "ordered" and "organised." 145

We can make this clear with an example. Imagine a completely flat beach on the seashore. When a strong wave hits the beach, mounds of sand, large and small, form bumps on the surface of the sand.

This is a process of "ordering": The seashore is an open system and the energy flow (the wave) that enters it can form simple patterns in the sand, which look completely regular. From the thermodynamic point of view, it can set up order here where before there was none. But we must make it clear that those same waves cannot build a castle on the beach. If we see a castle there, we are in no doubt that someone has constructed it, because the castle is an "organised" system. In other words, it possesses a clear organization and information. Every part of it has been made by a conscious entity in a planned manner.

The difference between the sand and the castle is that the latter is an organised complexity, whereas the former possesses only order, brought about by simple repetitions. The order formed from repetitions is as if an object (in other words the flow of energy entering the system) had fallen on the letter "a" on a typewriter keyboard, writing "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" hundreds of times. But the string of "a"s in an order repeated in this manner contains no information, and no complexity. In order to write a complex chain of letters actually containing information (in other words a meaningful sequence, paragraph or book), the presence of intelligence is essential.

The same thing applies when wind blows into a dusty room. When the wind blows in, the dust which had been lying in an even layer may gather in one corner of the room. This is also a more ordered situation than that which existed before, in the thermodynamic sense, but the individual specks of dust cannot form a portrait of someone on the floor in an organised manner.

This means that complex, organised systems can never come about as the result of natural processes. Although simple examples of order can happen from time to time, these cannot go beyond limits.

But evolutionists point to this self-ordering which emerges through natural processes as a most important proof of evolution, portray such cases as examples of "self-organization". As a result of this confusion of concepts, they propose that living systems could develop their own accord from occurrences in nature and chemical reactions. The methods and studies employed by Prigogine and his followers, which we considered above, are based on this deceptive logic.

The American scientists Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley and Roger L. Olsen, in their book titled The Mystery of Life's Origin, explain this fact as follows:

...In each case random movements of molecules in a fluid are spontaneously replaced by a highly ordered behavior. Prigogine, Eigen, and others have suggested that a similar sort of self-organization may be intrinsic in organic chemistry and can potentially account for the highly complex macromolecules essential for living systems. But such analogies have scant relevance to the origin-of-life question. A major reason is that they fail to distinguish between order and complexity... Regularity or order cannot serve to store the large amount of information required by living systems. A highly irregular, but specified, structure is required rather than an ordered structure. This is a serious flaw in the analogy offered. There is no apparent connection between the kind of spontaneous ordering that occurs from energy flow through such systems and the work required to build aperiodic information-intensive macromolecules like DNA and protein.146

In fact even Prigogine himself has accepted that the theories he has produced for the molecular level do not apply to living systems-for instance, a living cell:

The problem of biological order involves the transition from the molecular activity to the supermolecular order of the cell. This problem is far from being solved.147

So why do evolutionists continue to believe in scenarios such as the "self organization of matter", which have no scientific foundation? Why are they so determined to reject the intelligence and planning that so clearly can be seen in living systems? The answer is that they have a dogmatic faith in materialism and they believe that matter has some mysterious power to create life. A professor of chemistry from New York University and DNA expert, Robert Shapiro, explains this belief of evolutionists about the "self-organization of matter" and the materialist dogma lying at its heart as follows:

Another evolutionary principle is therefore needed to take us across the gap from mixtures of simple natural chemicals to the first effective replicator. This principle has not yet been described in detail or demonstrated, but it is anticipated, and given names such as chemical evolution and self-organization of matter. The existence of the principle is taken for granted in the philosophy of dialectical materialism, as applied to the origin of life by Alexander Oparin.148

All this situation clearly demonstrates that evolution is a dogma that is against emprical science and the origin of living beings can only be explained by the intervention of a supernatural power. That supernatural power is the creation of Allah, who created the entire universe from nothing. Science has proven that evolution is still impossible as far as thermodynamics is concerned and the existence of life has no explanation but Creation.