To create any kind of upward, complex organization in a closed system requires outside energy and outside information. Evolutionists maintain that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics does not prevent Evolution on Earth, since this planet receives outside energy from the Sun. Thus, they suggest that the Sun's energy helped create the life of our beautiful planet. However, is the simple addition of energy all that is needed to accomplish this great feat?
Compare a living plant with a dead one. Can the simple addition of energy make a completely dead plant live?
A dead plant contains the same basic structures as a living plant. It once used the Sun's energy to temporarily increase its order and grow and produce stems, leaves, roots, and flowers - all beginning from a single seed.
If there is actually a powerful Evolutionary force at work in the universe, and if the open system of Earth makes all the difference, why does the Sun's energy not make a truly dead plant become alive again (assuming a sufficient supply of water, light, and the like)?
What actually happens when a dead plant receives energy from the Sun? The internal organization in the plant decreases; it tends to decay and break apart into its simplest components. The heat of the Sun only speeds the disorganization process.
45 comments
You make my head hurt.
Obviously, no amount of energy is going to make a dead plant come to life, but it will sustain life in a live plant. And the decay process in a dead plant is just part of the biological process, and gives nutrients to a live plant. So in effect you shoot your own argument in the foot.
On the other hand, no amount of praying to your god is going to make a dead plant or person come to life.
I've never seen so many false premesis packed into such a small package.
The best is the idea of "Evolutionary Force" these people are so hung up on the idea of everything being caused by a "great force" (like god) that they attribute evolution to being basically a deity.
For the millionth time, evolution is a PROCESS which makes live grow more complex. It does not create life, nor is it sentient, or a force, or something that "decides" things. It's just the name of a process of populations changing over time due to natural selection
Why is this so hard?
Why oh why oh why can't these people understand that some things happen in a number of complex steps and that some phenomena may take up to - gasp! - several hours of reading to understand!
There is no dilemma between spontaneous generation and special creation, fool!
Ironically, the addition of the sun's energy to a dead plant initiates the decay because it brings in the microbes that will facilitate the decay in the first place.
Evolution does not -- and has never pretended to -- explain the origin of life on this planet. There are numerous hypotheses out there to explain how life came to be, none of which have been sufficiently tested to answer the question. The sun's energy prevented life from going into entropy once life began; how life began, well, we don't know yet.
"However, is the simple addition of energy all that is needed to accomplish this great feat? "
No, and that was never claimed in the first place. Next.
Argh. If an increase in order in the universe went against the 2nd law of thermodynamics (whether or not God was involved), it would disprove the said law. Laws are based on observation. If you observe that everything in the universe goes from a state of order to a state of chaos and formulate a law based on that, then you notice that some things (seeds growing into plants) go in the opposite direction, then your original observation would be false. Of course, the 2nd law of thermodynamics doesn't say what these guys think it says and the increase in order that happens due to evolution (or simply due to growth of organisms) no more disproves this law than a rubber ball bouncing upwards disproves the law of gravity.
Umm...no. A dead plant is made up of dead cells that have been damaged beyond any hope of repair, and thus are decomposing. Those cells are incapable of regenerating and performing the processes of living ones. You can apply as much energy as you want to a dead thing, but those cells aren't going to respond because they're so damaged and are breaking down.
Yes. Adding energy changes a whole system.
I kept a saltwater aquarium for years and had "sterile" tanks that supported no plant life. I upgraded my lights and the tank bloomed. Those plants, which I harvest at a rate of a couple pounds per month, sprang forth from rocks I had for years.
Energy changes everything.
The energy of the sun causes a seed to become a full grown plant. So clearly energy from the sun can cause a single cell to become a complex organism of trillions of cells. Only a fool would claim that's a violation of some law. The only issue, therefore, is how the instructions to use that energy got into the seed. And evolution explains how that happens via mutation and selection.
evolution's not even about living organisms becoming more complex. as another poster has stated, it's the name applied to a natural process that happens over vast amounts of time. if an organism is already best suited for its environment, no more changes are really going to happen. look at the shark, it's stayed relatively the same for millions of years.
Because abiogenesis cannot possibly start with a fully formed multicellular organism, and nobody has seriously suggested otherwise. It could start with simple self-replicating molecules, but almost certainly only on a young, dead world with lots of free chemical energy lying about and where an ecosystem of more highly evolved self-replicators wasn't already established to compete with them for it, which is almost certainly why we never see it today.
So the experiment would be: Rip a plant out of the ground and leave it on a rock to die, Godwins?
Asshole. They've been using the second law for decades wrong by ignoring the sun (which means it never applied to Earth but most creationists still use the Entropy law like it does) Now they begrudgingly accept the Sun but insists it can't raise the dead. Who claimed it could?
And oddly enough, life does begin for some organisms in the presence of a dead plant
"#1089294
MK
"However, is the simple addition of energy all that is needed to accomplish this great feat? "
No, and that was never claimed in the first place. Next. "
Not to be pedantic, but didn't Mary Shelly claim such a feat? I do remember a book called "Frankenstein"
Both fiction. Both equally plausible
Nothing more than an attempt to ask a silly question.
"If evolution is true, why do we die?"
Move on.. nothing new and exciting.
So you're refuting the idea that there's this magical Evolutionary force that otherwise works just like your magical Godly force.
0/100, has no comprehension of the basics of the material.
I'm no scientist, but isn't the Theory of Evolution about the slow change in living things in order to adapt to the changing environments, through spontaneous mutations and natural selection?
How life began is another field of science, isn't it? Abiogenesis, or something like that?
Evolutionists? Whut?
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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