The Second Law of Thermodynamics

“My back hurts a lot more than it did when I was younger. Well, I guess that’s the second law of thermodynamics at work.” Actually, it isn’t. Misconceptions of the second law of thermodynamics abound, even within the creationist community. Such misconceptions include the idea that the second law (1) is the tendency of any ordered system to go to disorder, (2) is the same as the curse associated with Adam’s sin, or at least began at the fall, (3) disallows order spontaneously arising from disorder, and (4) would obviously make Darwinian evolution impossible. None of these are true. But the second law is relevant to origins and can be powerful when used properly. To understand the second law, we need some background information in the field of thermodynamics.