IV. Physics

    Apart from life, how about the physical mechanics of how the universe operates?  The French Enlightenment spun an optimistic “progress” scenario that underlies the evolutionary framework for modern Western thought.  However, this notion was well-entrenched amongst European intellectuals on philosophical grounds before work on steam engines provided the foundation for understanding one of the most solidly-confirmed elements of modern science - the principles of thermodynamics.  Evolutionists can assume that nature is an upwardly organizing matter-machine if they want, but good science suggests that the real universe does not operate that way.  Because the 2^nd principle speaks so loudly against their basic “nature progress” myth, evolutionists continue to downplay it.  What are we talking about?

Thermodynamics

    Some of the best sounding ideas can be ruined by one piece of reality.  It was easy for the men and women of the French Enlightenment (1689-1789) to believe that nature was inherently progressing, developing, moving itself towards a higher level of order, because the second principle of thermodynamics was not yet widely known or understood.  Originally developed by Carnot, Clausius, and Kelvin and arising from engineering problems connected with steam engines and heat transfer, the principles of thermodynamics were just in their infancy when Darwin published his Origin of Species (1859).  Its validity and wider implications were not understood until later in the 19th century, after the Darwinian scenario was well entrenched in the scientific community.

    Essentially, the first and second principles of thermodynamics are two of the most solid concepts of modern science.  The first principle, known as the "Law of Conservation of Matter/Energy," states that matter and energy can be transferred or changed in form, but the total amount remains constant - at present, matter/energy is neither being created nor destroyed.

    The second principle states that every energy-matter/matter-energy conversion is accompanied by a loss in the amount of available energy for the future performance of work.  This law deals with the increasing entropy (disorder) that takes place as natural processes function.

Man has long been aware that his world has a tendency to fall apart.  Tools wear out, fishing nets need repair, roofs leak, iron rusts, wood decays, loved ones sicken and die, relatives quarrel, and nations make war.^[1]

Applied to the universe in general, a number of physicists have suggested that this means that nature, left to itself, is running down or moving toward disorder and the universe will eventually reach "heat death."^[2]  The Bible is in complete agreement with the 2^nd principle of thermodynamics and speaks of the present universe as "wearing out" (Psalm 102:25-27), "subjected to futility" (Romans 8:20), and "passing away" (1John 2:17).  However, for evolutionists, the implications of this principle are devastating, because their enlightenment mindset asserts that the natural universe is a self-existing, constantly “progressing” and improving system, moving by itself from simple to complex, primitive to advanced.  Most evolutionists have conveniently forgotten about the second principle of thermodynamics, because it argues so forcefully against any theory that suggests that the universe has an inherent tendency toward upward transformation into higher forms of order.^[3]

     While I have seen atheists attempt to justify "eternal matter" from this first principle, it only says that nothing is being created NOW - "eternal" matter cannot be proven from this law.  However, if the universe is in a general "energy/order decline," as the second principle of thermodynamics seems to suggest, then the Biblical creation and curse/decline concept fits very well.

     When confronted with the unwelcome implications of thermodynamic, it has become common for evolutionists to try and evade the problem by saying that the 2nd principle only applies to “closed systems,” whereas the earth is an “open system,” receiving energy from the sun to power improvements and developments.  But verbal gymnastics to evade the thermodynamics problem for the earth doesn’t solve the larger problem, for the earth is still a small sub-system of what materialistic evolutionists believe is a “closed” universe, with no input from the outside, so the second principle still applies to the universe as a whole!  Of course, the error in thinking the problem of life is solved by simply “adding energy” to an "open-system" earth is that the simple application of energy tends to be destructive unless mechanisms and processes are already in place to constructively utilize that energy.  You don’t go out and dump a gallon of gasoline on your car - that’s the application of raw energy - but all you will do is damage your paint job.  For energy to be useful, you need to have the appropriate collection, processing, and utilization systems already in place (such as a gas tank, fuel line, carburetor, ignition system, etc.).  What will sunlight do to plants unless their root and chlorophyll systems are already in place and functioning?

    In practical terms, natural processes are tending toward disorder (opposite the positive philosophical slant of evolution – simple to complex, primitive to advanced).  Thus, anti-creationists must explain why there appears to have been an initial “order” that is declining – where did this initial order come from – a “big Bang” explosion?  I have never seen an explosion create any level of “order” – explosions do the opposite – they are a massive “disordering” event wherever they occur, followed by further deterioration and breakdown (wood decays, metal rusts) unless intelligent work is applied.

    Thus, just to maintain the current level of “order,” there must always be a little extra energy properly applied or disorder happens.  In order to “create/increase order,” there must be even more energy applied (and intelligently applied).  This need to apply extra energy just to maintain a level of order is why we tend to drop tools where we used them rather than put them away, leave our dirty clothes on the floor rather than put them in the hamper, or let the roof leak rather than crawl up there and fix it, etc.  Because natural processes tend toward disorder and to maintain or increase order you have to apply extra energy in a constructive and usable manner – we aren’t just “lazy,” we are fighting this second principle of thermodynamics in everyday life!

    Essentially, evolutionists (because of their philosophical commitments) are very optimistic about matter and natural processes – given enough time, natural processes alone will turn chemicals into people.  Really?  Remember the Enlightenment mindset assumes: nature only and progress.  Let’s test that belief and I won’t even require you to come up with anything alive.  Would you tow your car out into the middle of a field, explode it with a sufficient amount of plastic explosive, and then sit down to watch time and natural processes reassemble those raw materials into a brand new Lexus (or even an old rusty one that would function)?  Of course not, but evolutionists want everyone to believe that such an unlikely process produced the universe and all lifeforms!!!!!!!!

    The Bible is very much at home with an original universal ordering event (we call it “creation”), followed by a pattern of general natural decline and disorder following throughout history.  A number of physicists, when true to their physics, pointedly throw down the gauntlet to evolutionists that want to ignore, limit, or suspend the 2^nd principle of Thermodynamics for the sake of their philosophy of an inherently progressing natural system.

There is thus no justification for the view, often glibly repeated, that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is only statistically true, in the sense that microscopic violations repeatedly occur, but never violations of any serious magnitude.  On the contrary, no evidence has ever been presented that the Second Law breaks down under any circumstances.^[4]

 “Another way of stating the second law then is: ‘The universe is constantly getting more disorderly!’ Viewed that way, we can see the second law all about us.  We have to work hard to straighten a room, but left to itself it becomes a mess again very quickly and very easily.  Even if we never enter it, it becomes dusty and musty.  How difficult to maintain houses, and machinery, and our bodies in perfect working order: how easy to let them deteriorate.  In fact, all we have to do is nothing, and everything deteriorates, collapses, breaks down, wears out, all by itself -- and that is what the second law is all about.”^[5]

To say that "there is an obvious tendency of nature from disorder to order and organization" and to advance this idea to a "fourth law" is to misunderstand completely and to compromise all of thermodynamics.^[6]

 An uninvited guest at any discussion of the origin of life and of evolution from the materialistic reductionist point of view is the role of thermodynamic entropy and the "heat death" of the universe which it predicts.^[7]

 “...there are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics.  Ordinarily the second law is stated for isolated [closed] systems, but the second law applies equally well to open systems ... there is somehow associated with the field of far-from equilibrium phenomena the notion that the second law of thermodynamics fails for such systems.  It is important to make sure that this error does not perpetuate itself.”^[8]

Radioactive Decay Dating Systems

    The work of Henry Becquerel and R. J. Strutt demolished Thompson's figures, which opened the way for B. B. Boltwood to offer the radiometric system for dating the age of the earth.  He had noticed that the ratio of lead to uranium was consistently greater with the assumed age of the rocks they are in.  Since radioactive uranium (U-238) decays into lead (Pb-206), this seemed to offer a possible dating system, if the decay rate of uranium could be determined and it had been uniform throughout history.  The time required for half of the radioactive uranium to decay into lead is called its "half-life."  If a substance is radioactive and has a half-life of one million years, then after a million years half of the radioactive material (the “parent” element) will have turned into something else (the “daughter” element).  By estimating (or “assuming”) the amounts of "parent" and "daughter" materials originally present in the rock, measuring the current amounts, and calculating the number of half-lives required to produce the current amounts of each, you can assign a very old age to rocks possessing both elements.  This approach was applied to the decay of uranium->lead, rubidium->strontium, potassium->argon, and carbon-> nitrogen.  All of these, except for Carbon¹⁴, have half-lives long enough to produce the kinds of ages required by evolutionists.  Boltwood’s work on radium led him to the conclusion that the earth was about a billion years old.  In 1921, a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science agreed that the earth must be several billion years old.  A few years later, in 1926, The National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences appointed a committee that declared that radioactive decay sequences provided the only reliable time scale for dating purposes.  Thus, by committee action, the view that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and that molten material cooled enough to begin solidifying into rocks around 3.9 billion years ago became the current orthodoxy.  Based on this process applied to a few meteorites, the current “orthodoxy/dogma” is that the earth is around 4.5 billion years old.

The earth is generally estimated by modern scholars to be more than four billion years old.  This is not a mere guess; it is based largely upon a study of the disintegration of radioactive minerals.^[9]

Problems with Radiometric dating Systems

     The whole basis of radiometric dating is the belief that radioactive elements in rocks can be measured from assumed original amounts and compared against the amount of a “daughter” element (an element created as radioactive material loses its extra electron over time) that is currently present.  What the public rarely hears are the massive assumptions that are made in order to get this system of dating off of the ground.

    First, most of the radioactive elements occur in igneous and metamorphic rocks, while nearly all fossils are found in sedimentary (water-lain materials) rock and this requires a rather complex series of inferences and comparisons for dating strata and fossils.  Second, how can anyone be sure that all of the "daughter" elements were absent in the beginning and only came into existence later on by means of radioactive decay?  Third, it is now known that radioactive materials can "leach out" of rocks in water and this could cause some rocks to yield ages much greater than they actually deserve - a major flood could make things appear much older than they are.  Fourth, the objectivity and exactness of radiometric dating becomes suspect when it is realized that fossils submitted for radio-metric dating are always submitted with a form specifying the expected/estimated age of the specimen, so that the technician has an idea of what kind of date he/she should arrive at.  Fifth, radiometric dating requires steady uniform decay rates throughout history.  Sometimes the extent of vastly differing dates for the same material is discussed in the scientific literature,

 A remarkable article in Journal of Geophysical Research tells of a volcanic flow in the years of 1800 and 1801 at Kaupulchu, Hualalai, Hawaii.  Although this material was solidified less than two hundred years ago, eight potassium-argon tests indicated ages ranging from 160,000,000 years to 2,960,000,000 years!^[10]

Lava coming from a more recent flow of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano was tested during the 1960’s and the results were equally surprising - the earliest (deepest) lava gave a Potassium-Argon date of 22 million years old, while the top appeared to be less than 200 years old - all from the same recent flow.^[11]  The potential for major errors in these procedures is acknowledged by some,

One serious consequence of the mantle isochron model is that crystallization ages determined on basic igneous rocks by the rubidium-strontium whole-rock technique can be greater than the true age by many hundreds of millions of years.^[12]

The problem, of course, is that the initial strontium indicated by the isochron method reflects conditions in the mantle from which the igneous rock material originally flowed, not the age of the rock itself.  Data from young volcanic rocks in certain Pacific Islands, for example, indicated an "apparent age" well back in the Precambrian.^[13]

     A more recent demonstration of the unreliability of the Potassium-Argon system comes from New Zealand.  Near the center of New Zealand’s North Island stands its newest volcano, Mt. Ngauruhoe.  Thought to have been active for 2,500 years, with more than 70 eruptive periods since 1839, the lava which was tested by the Potassium Argon method was taken from the February 11, 1949 / June 4, 1954 / July 14, 1954 / February 19, 1975 flows.  The samples were sent to the respected Geochron Laboratories and the dates they yielded ranged from 270,000 to 3,500,000 years.  Although known to be from lava flows which occurred less than 50 years ago, it is suspected that excess argon gas was brought up from deep inside the earth and contaminated the tests, which assume no “daughter” elements present at the time the rocks formed.  This further attests to the reasons for doubts about the dating method and beliefs about the age of the earth based on it and similar tests.^[14]  I have heard that the lava domes that have built up in the cone of Mt. St. Helens (since 1980) have yielded radiometric dates of 1 million years.

     The half-life of Carbon 14 is only 5,500 years and the rapid decay rate suggests that 100,000 years is the maximum age for which any kind of a radiometric age should be discernable for this method.  Hanruedi Stutz found some sandstone in Switzerland which contained fossilized mussels and had been classified as belonging to the Upper Tertiary geological system, making it around 20 million years old.  Interestingly, fragments of coalified wood were also found in it and, when dated by Carbon 14, the results were 36,440 years old.  Since there was some carbon 14 present to detect, the sandstone and everything in it could not be 20 million years old.^[15]  Along a similar line, miners sinking a shaft for the new Crinum Coal Mine in Central Queensland (1993) found wood fragments entombed at the bottom of an ancient basalt lava flow.  The wood was still partly standing and was organic rather than petrified.  Traditional geological dating would assign an age of 30 million years to the basalt and anything trapped in it, although the two trees appeared to have roots in the siltstone below the basalt.  The siltstone in which the roots extend belongs to the Permian German Creek coal measures and is dated at 255 million years old.  Again, detectable carbon 14 was present and the wood was dated to 44-45,500 years old.  Potassium-Argon dating on the basalt yielded a date of 45,000,000 years old.^[16]  The very fact that detectable carbon 14 was present in the wood rules out the extremely old ages for these things.

    The validity of the radiometric dating systems and the importance of the assumptions or variables connected with them is closely linked to how much one is predisposed to believe in a very old earth and the geologic column,

 Radiometric dating would not have been feasible if the geologic column had not been erected first.^[17]

    Theoretically, the various modern dating systems should confirm one another, if they are valid means of determining age.  However, as with the highly questionable accuracy of Potassium-Argon, so comparisons between Carbon14 and Bristlecone Pine tree-rings has revealed that the radiometric dates prior to 1,000 B.C. are inaccurate by as much as 800 years or more.^[18] 

The accuracy of any age can only be guessed at, in that we do not know the true age of any geologic sample.^[19]

     Dr. Robert Gentry has shown that radioactive samples from different depths give what appear to be increasing ages as you go deeper, but may instead be reflecting the effect of increasing heat upon the rate of radioactive decay.  In effect, assuming a steady decay rate under all circumstances gives the appearance of offering a “dating system.”  However, if the radioactive decay process speeds up with greater heat, then deeper strata may not be much older than that closer to the surface.  The heart of radioactive dating, as in geology, is the principle of uniformity - assumed slow and steady rates/processes.  Many assumptions are made in this dating system that the public is unaware of.

Dark Matter & Energy

     The idea of “dark matter” has been around quite awhile.  What is it?  It is believed to be a form of matter that does not emit light, absorb light, or scatter light, but only interacts with gravity.  “Dark Matter” is thought to far outnumber ordinary matter in the universe, but it has never been detected in any laboratory.

      "I'm as big a fan of dark matter and dark energy as anybody else," says astronomer Richard Ellis of Caltech. But, he adds, "I find it very worrying that you have a universe where there are three constituents, of which only one [i.e., ordinary matter] is really physically understood."

     "When you teach undergraduates, and they say, 'Well, what is dark matter?' Well, nobody's really sure.

     'What is dark energy?' We're even less sure. So you have to explain to a student, that … 90 percent of the universe, 95 percent, is in two ingredients that nobody really understands," says Ellis. "This isn't really progress."^[20]

     Prior to 1998, astronomers tended to believe that cosmic expansion was gradually slowing down.  That began to change after two groups of astronomers surveyed exploding stars, or supernovas, in a number of distant galaxies.  They found that the supernovas were dimmer than expected and that meant they were farther away than they should have been.  To explain this, the astronomers concluded that the expansion of the universe must have sped up at some time in the past and this required some kind of “anti-gravity” or negative pressure effect to have been involved.  It was at this point, in 1998, that “dark energy” was theorized to account for the situation and many astronomers believe that it is real.  However, no one can really explain it.

"Frankly, we just don’t understand it," says Craig Hogan, an astronomer at the University of Washington at Seattle. "We know what its effects are," Hogan says, but as to the details of dark energy, "We’re completely clueless about that. And everybody’s clueless about it."^[21]

     I find it interesting that “God” is now inherently “non-scientific” as an explanation for anything in the physical universe because He cannot be directly seen or quantified, although “assuming His existence and influence” seems to answer many questions.  These same characteristics apply to “Dark Matter/Energy,” but somehow to imagine/invent untestable and hypothetical impersonal entities/forces to help explain things in nature is “scientific.”  The philosophical agenda and bias towards materialism and naturalism in modern scientism is often all too obvious.

A Ministry of Severn Christian Church (Severn, Maryland)

Unless otherwise noted, all material produced by Charles E. McCoy

All Scripture citations/quotations from the New American Standard Bible

To send a question to Chuck: chuck@severnchristian.org