Normally when a creationist brings up the 2nd Law I just point to the sun to answer them, but its been suggested to me that energy is not enough, that it must be directed

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Can anyone here tell me whether or not A mechanism by which incoming energy may be stored and harnessed Is actually required by thermodynamics? If it is needed, what other ways can I counter this argument?

I believe that's called the first law of thermodynamics.

Sorry, we're discussing The second law of thermodynamics as it applies to entropy. I should have made that clearer, my bad.

This is amusing:

I guess they aren't familiar with the "prebiotic soup" experiments. Quoting from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment


(emphasis added)

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This is a false assumption from the start.
The second law of thermodynamics only states that total usable thermal energy in a closed system decreases over time. It has nothing to do with "order", why does he think it's called THERMODYNAMICS!

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Because Thermodynamics referrs also to entropy, or disorder?

Well thats what we were taught, with IIRC entropy being given the symbol S

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Arguing with creationists is only self-instructive for the first few weeks. After that, it's just pointless.

They made these arguments to others before. They've probably been debunked before. Many of them probably even have an inkling of why this particular argument is wrong, and they're going to make it anyways. There is a creationist behind him/her who is going to try his luck battling a "Darwinist" and is going to restart the cycle by making the same argument.

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In answer to this particular series of arguments:
Yes. Earth is an open system. In order for there to be useable energy available to a system "indefinitely", it needs to have a "hot well" (the sun) and a "cold well" (non-sun-pointing space). Other hot and cold wells are available in other local areas, such as undersea hydrothermal vents, and other energy cycles exist there.

I don't think this is true. It is the case that life has a complex "computer-like" information storage mechanism (several of them! DNA, RNA, protien rings). But all that is necessary for entropy to decrease, for anyone who has studied thermodynamics, is some sort of matter - any sort of matter at all! A gas, the most disorderly chemical energy state has an entropy state associated with other thermodynamic variables (it's thermodynamic state is determined by any two of them). A heat engine goes through an entropy cycle with said gas - refrigeration, car engines, ect, wouldn't work otherwise. Gas certainly isn't a complex computer-like information storage mechanism, but on the level that thermodynamics operates it is sufficeint. Furthermore, "entropy" in information theory may bear superficial resemblance to "entropy" in thermodynamics, hence the similar name, but the link between the two isn't well established. Confusing the two is nonsense.
The only storage mechanism necessary for entropy in an open system to increase or decrease is for objects to get hot or cold. Other storage mechanisms are just bonus points on top of this.


The lifeless gas in a planetary climate system produces "complexity" up to a point, and local entropy/energy cycles, just by being in an open system with a hot and cold well.

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The second law of thermodynamics applies to closed (therefore finite), isolated systems. I am not sure the interplay between gravity and heat dissipation and whatever is causing what is perceived to be cosmological expansion is well accounted for in terms of entropy growth. Gravitational force opposes the increase of entropy associated with the heating of a collapsing proto-stellar cloud in which very large ion currents have formed giving rise to very large magnetic fields, and on some scale all of this is affected by the tendency of space (or some intrinsic spacebound [Higgs] field) to expand. Each of these very strong effects will vary over time in some stochastic manner and the interplay of neutrinos, gravitons, and photons and the influence of dark matter and dark energy ensures that there are no isolated systems in the observable universe nor in the physical universe unless some portions of it were mutually isolated during the inflation epoch.

My guess is that we must quantify the causes of cosmological expansion and gain a much better understanding than we (certainly I) currently have about how the usual suspects play together before we can appreciate the limits on entropy growth.

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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

In a way, the statement that it requires those four things is accurate, but only if you interpret numbers 3 and 4 in a way that the Creationist speaker did not realize was possible.

#4 is simple enough. Every single time energy moves anywhere or undergoes any kind of transformation, it's being either "stored" or "harnessed". It could never really not be doing one of those two things. So as soon as the energy flow in any closed or non-closed "system" is described, there's your storage and harnessing: it's in everything the energy did every step of the way.

#3 seems to be what they usually describe as a source of "information", something that restricts the countless hypothetically possible outcomes, most of which are rather disordered, and "chooses" one of the relatively few that are more ordered. But what they don't consider is that that input source doesn't need to be a programmer living outside the system; in certain cases the laws of physics, geometry, and natural selection have the same effect. THEY, the laws of nature, are the mysterious guiding input you're looking for that makes certain outcomes more likely than others and more likely than they'd be by pure randomness alone.