Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

There are those who turn justice into bitterness
    and cast righteousness to the ground.
He who made the Pleiades and Orion,
    who turns midnight into dawn
    and darkens day into night,
who calls for the waters of the sea
    and pours them out over the face of the land—
    the Lord is his name.
With a blinding flash he destroys the stronghold
    and brings the fortified city to ruin.

• Amos 5:7-9

“The science of thermodynamics is rooted in the work of the German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888), who is credited with formulating the second law.  There are three fundamental laws of thermodynamics:  The first law states that the energy in a physical system can be neither created nor destroyed.  This is known as the conservation of energy.  The second law states that a closed system will tend toward increasing disorder, or entropy, until it reaches equilibrium.  The third law states that as a system approaches the temperature of absolute zero, its entropy approaches a certain minimum value.
“… there’s actually a … confirmation of the beginning of the universe, … the second law of thermodynamics.  According to the second law, less energy is being fed into a system, that system will become increasingly disorderly.  For example, if you had a bottle that was a closed vacuum inside and you injected into it some molecules of gas, the gas would spread itself evenly throughout the bottle.  The chances that the molecules would all huddle together in one corner of the bottle are practically nil.  This is because there are many more ways in which the molecules could exist in a disorderly state than in an orderly state.”

• William Lane Craig, On Guard

“Terms
“absolute zero – The lowest temperature that is theoretically possible.
“entropy – A thermodynamic property that is the measure of a system’s thermal energy per unit of temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work.”

• Lumen Learning, Three Laws of Thermodynamics,

My freshman year of college, I took engineering thermodynamics, a course required for all engineers, regardless of discipline.  I enjoyed the course, but it was taught by a mechanical engineer professor with a general engineering look on things.  The course was a single semester.  My sophomore year, I took chemical engineering thermodynamics, two semesters, and my world changed.  I realized that I could explain just about anything, in a chemical and heat transfer sense, to a series of mathematical expressions.

But a professor that I never took a class under pulled me aside during that school year to ask me if I could explain the second law of thermodynamics without explaining that the initial lack of disorder in the world could only be explained by God creating the universe.

His point was: “Who cranked up the clockworks?”  If everything in the universe is becoming disordered, how did it start so orderly?  Random and by chance?  How absurd!!!

Dr. Craig used the example of molecules in a bottle to counter the concept of the Big Bang, minus one second as being utterly impossible to conceive.  And for the Big Bang to happen, there must be a cause.  Indeed, there must be the instantaneous creation of everything in one place at one point in time for the Big Bang, or actually God speaking the universe into existence.

As one example was postulated in freshman Thermodynamics about the second law, try making a tree from the ashes after a forest fire that reduced the trees to nothing but carbon dioxide, water vapor, and a little ash – no hidden seeds in the ash.  Of course, the professor redirected us to engineered systems like an engine system and such.  Of course, I preferred a flash tank where hot liquid enters and the more volatile portions of the liquid will flash, preferentially, in a predictable method.  But in the end of this world, there may be nothing left other than some disorderly gases and an orb of sand and ash.

With each compelling argument for the existence of God, there are still those who will deny the obvious, blinded by their self-centered concept of how we can fix the clock before it winds down, rejecting true science and rejecting the one who cranked the clock in the first place and who is still acting among us in our midst, the sovereign Lord of the universe.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.