Granville Sewell has a video up on YouTube:
Mark Chu-Carroll has a take-down of the argument here, but I’d be interested to know what the ID proponents who post here make of it. It seems to me so self-evidently wrong, that I’d expect ID proponents to be rather keen to point out the errors, but it gets a shout-out at UD.
The reason it seems to me so evidently wrong is nothing to do with intelligent systems versus non-intelligent systems, but that quite simply, biological organisms do not violate the second law of thermodynamics, which states, as Flanders and Swann ineradicably taught me: you can’t pass heat from a cooler to a hotter:
In order for biological organisms to develop, reproduce, populate an environment, and evolve, they must utilise energy. And they do. Plants store sunlight energy as sugar, and then use that to grow and reproduce. Animals eat plants – or other animals, in order to gain energy, and grow and reproduce. As a result, the heat is dissipated, the universe as a whole gets slightly cooler (though there might be temporary local rises, as when I tried to climb a little mountain in Anglesey yesterday), and will continue to do so, as far as we know, until the whole universe is a uniform temperature and no heat can pass from one region to another.
So the apparent argument that biological organisms violate the second law of thermodynamics, therefore intelligent design, is based on a completely false premise. They don’t. There may be be perfectly good arguments for an ID but biological organisms violating the 2LoT isn’t one of them. Do any of our ID-supporting members disagree with this? If so, can you say why?
The one stated in the OP. Read the last paragraph.
You are slow:
And strange that we are still waiting for the evidence that refutes what Sewell said- IOW there is still no evidence taht blind and undirected processes can produce a living organism from non-living matter.
Joe, I guess I could ask him that, but why not just read his own words? I reproduce them again below:
Are you disagreeing with Sewell? Or do you think he missed a “not” out of his last sentence above? :p
What’s the point of asking Joe this question? He wouldn’t know entropy from enthalpy. We need some ID proponents who have some idea about statistical physics and those are in short supply.
Ask him and stop with the childish games already.
oleg it is very noticeable that you don’t have any evidence to discuss.
IOW you don’t know evidence from imagination, and it shows.
Well, we seem to have unanimous agreement, across both IDists and evos, on this thread so far, that life does not violate the 2LoT 🙂
Which is cool. There is only a bit of a nitpick between me and Joe as to whether Sewell, does in fact claim that life violates the 2LoT.
If Joe is correct, then we all agree that life does not violate the 2LoT, including Sewell!
Which would make this rather a successful thread.
According to us living organisms arising from non-living matter would violate the law. Therefor if you demonstrate such a thing you would prove us wrong
No. I am not aware of any calculation that supports this assertion. If you know one, give us a reference.
Therefor if you demonstrate such a thing you would prove us wrong
Your rhetoric isn’t going to do it…
Joe, before asking me to refute an argument, present it. Not an assertion, an argument.
Joe, could you answer this question for me, because I’m not clear about your position:
Do you, or do you not, think that life violates the second law of thermodynamics?
According to us living organisms arising from non-living matter would violate the law. Therefor if you demonstrate such a thing you would prove us wrong
So you agree that when you build a house you do not violate the 2LoT?
I believe I made that clear- the only way we violtae the law is in a blind watchmaker scenario
It’s up to you to provide positive evidence for your own claims Joe. It’s not up to science to disprove them. You sill don’t have the slightest inkling of how science works I see.
I have- OTOH your position doesn’t have anything- and your projection is duly noted
So you disagree with Granville Sewell, when he says:
?
That sounds like a claim to me. You say you provide support for your claims. Where is your support for that claim?
I say you are misrepresenting him
Only an IDist could say that quoting somebody’s own words is misrepresenting them.
Why don’t you say in what way he’s being misrepresented Joe?
Umm evos can a nd do take IDists quotes out-of-context- that is why I told Liz to actually just ask Sewell.
Ask him what? It’s all there in his own words.
Can you expand the quote and point out the missing context?
Yes, very unclear. Better ask him for clarification.
You say a lot of things that you can’t support.
How is Dr. Liddle misrepresenting what Sewell said?
I support most of what I say, unlike evotards who never supoort anything but TARD.
Sewell has been invited to appear here. If he shows up we will ask him all of that.
As to my question to you, I suppose it is safe to say that the answer will not be forthcoming.
Ask him what? His words are clear.
What is the question you are proposing that is asked Joe? If those are his words or not? If not that, then what?
Well, I originally posted the whole abstract, and there’s a link in this thread to the whole paper.
Here it is again.
So do check for yourself. Do I take it that your interpretation of Granville Sewell’s paper is that he does NOT think that life violates the 2LoT?
Why didn’t you just ask him about that when you invited him here?
If you have his email I suggest that you write him with your concerns so you can put it to bed.
As I understand it, Sewell’s argument is this:
Life goes from disorder to order, and therefore results in a decrease of entropy. A decrease in entropy on this scale is vanishingly unlikely, just as it is unlikely that a tornado would assemble a 747 from a scrapyard.
Therefore life was intelligently designed.
The problem we are seeing in his argument is that life does not go from disorder to order in the sense of decreasing entropy. He seems to have misunderstood the meaning of the word “entropy”. The 747 has the same amount of entropy as the junkyard, approximately, even though, to a human being, it is much more ordered.
In other words “low entropy” does not mean “ordered” in the sense of “tidy” or “useful” or “pretty”. It only means “ordered” in the sense of some things being in a higher energy state than others. And so life does not in fact decrease entropy, even though it certainly makes things more ordered in those other senses. It makes things less ordered in the sense of having greater entropy.
The sun plus some carbon dioxide has less entropy than the same sun and the same carbon dioxide ordered into a herb on my window box two weeks later.
So you are never going to just ask him. Sorry but that is just sad.
Because I’ve read his paper!
Tell me what your interpretation of his paper is.
As I said he is talking about naturalism (view the video- he says it), which means to refute him just demonstrate that blind and undirected processes can produce a living organism from non-living matter.
Joe, what is your interpretation of what he is saying about the 2LoT? Is he saying that life violates it (as it seems to me he is saying – and explaining that by invoking Design) or is he saying that life does not violate it?
It’s got to be one or the other!
What’s wrong with reading his paper? If I asked him I’d have to read his reply! What if I misinterpreted that too?!
OK, Joe, answer this question:
Do you think that a house has more, or less, entropy after it has been destroyed by a tornado than it had before?
Living organisms arising from non-living matter via blind and undirected processes would violate it- according to IDists.
I think Sewell makes a fundamental mistake in how he characterizes his argument. When humans build computers, they are not violating the 2LoT or defying entropy. What humans do is arrange matter and employ energy to produce results that are improbable to the point of absurdity without reference to intelligent manipulation.
I think what Sewell is really arguing is that the particular kind of employment of energy and arrangements of matter we find in living thngs are so otherwise unlikely in consideration of general entropic effects that unless we explain it via the same mechanism that explains similar such unlikely arrangements (intelligent guidance), then the vanishingly small probability of such employments and arrangements should be considered in principle a violation of the 2LotT.
While such events would not be technically impossible under 2LoT without intelligent guidance, nobody expects a volcano to spew forth a fully functional Hemi. That it did so would not technically violate the 2LoT, but we would certainly not credit volcanic processes alone with the production of the Hemi sitting on the ground.
And you think that is what Sewell is arguing?
Yes, I do as he referred to naturalism in the beginning of the videa.
Indeed. But that seems a lot more than mischaracterised an argument. It seems to me his argument is simply invalid. He isn’t saying: look these patterns we see in nature are very unlikely unless we invoke intelligence (which is the usual ID argument). He is saying: look these patterns violate the 2LoT, therefore biological organisms must obey a different set of laws.
To quote his abstract:
.
As he clearly does not think “that the influx of solar energy into the Earth makes the appearance of spaceships, computers and the Internet not extremely improbable” we must surely infer that he concludes “that the second law has in fact been violated here.”
Well, no. Or rather, if all he was arguing was that “the particular kind of employment of energy and arrangements of matter we find in living thngs are so otherwise unlikely [unless there is an intelligent designer]”, fine. Well, not fine, but at least he’d be in line with other ID proponents. But, as you say, he does not say this. He says that biological arrangments of matter are possible, but unlikely unless the 2LoT is violated. This is simply wrong. Under the 2LoT, it is vanishingly unlikely that the molecules of air in my room will suddenly fly out of the window, unless some energy-consuming process happens to cause them to do so. But that cause need not be an intelligent agent. It could be a tornado. In fact, the tornado he shows destroying that house in the video is not increasing the entropy in the house, it’s actually, briefly, reducing it, which is how the air in the house manages to do what the air in houses doesn’t normally do, namely tear the house down. But it’s only a local decrease, because we know that the tornado itself (also representing a local decrease of entropy) is actually “bought” by solar energy, and that the net result will be an overall increase in entropy. The sun and the earth will both be infinitessimally cooler afterwards than they were before.
What’s Sewell seems to have done is to try to support the usual ID argument with an argument from Physics. But it doesn’t work. Whether or not it is true that evolutionary theory is adequate to account for life, it is certainly not true that tornados violate the 2LoT, even though they decrease entropy. Sewell gets this doubly wrong: he claims that the tornado increases entropy AND that if it decreased it it would violate the 2LoT. In fact it decreases entropy AND it doesn’t violate the 2LoT as it does so! And nor do we.
As you say, it would not “technically violate the 2LoT”. So why mention the 2LoT at all? It is irrelevant. Nothing in this world violates the 2LoT, “technically” or otherwise!
So while ID proponents might welcome Sewell’s support, they should be wary. An obviously fallacious argument does not strengthen the one you want to make, even if it suggests the same conclusion. As I’m sure, as a logician, you will agree. 🙂
But you think that he is saying that because naturalism is false, the 2LoT is not violated?
Would we even have tornadoes in a blind watchmaker scenario? Would we have the earth? Would we have gravity, the strong & weak nuclear forces and electro-mag?
Again his argument pertains to naturalism- you have to explain the universe using the blind watchmaker wrt 2nd law.
If ID is true then the 2nd law is not violated.
What about the origin of the “designer”? By (your) definition that must be a violation.
Elizabeth,
You say “nothing violates the 2LoT” as if it is a prescriptive law. All the 2LoT is, is a description of noticeable patterns. There is – technically – no “law” to “violate”, if we’re just going to get technical and not observe the spirit of best interpretation. Anything at all can happen, and 2LoT not be “violated” because there’s nothing to “violate”. From a technical perspective, Sewell is arguing nonsense because, simply, there’s no prescriptive “law” to “violate” in the first place.
If, however, we are going by the principle of charity, then what Sewell is arguing is that the patterns that we use to characterize “entropy” and “2LoT”, and the pattern that is evident when humans design and build things, are two different kinds of patterns. One is like the tornado movie going forwrds, and the other is like a tornado movie going backwards. Although it is not technically impossible to see the tornado build a house, we do not expect to see it. It is not the same pattern of entropic effects we usuallly see – as clumsy and as vague as that statement is.
The same is true of life and evolution; it is not the same pattern of entropy, or the same pattern of behavior under 2LoT, that we usually see. In that sense, both are indeed “violations” of the pattern normally associated with regular entropic effects under 2LoT. No, they are clearly not impossible, but they are clearly not the same. Something else appears to be going on to specifically direct energy to organize matter in such complex, functional structures, meaning it is reasonable to believe some additional mechanism is necessarily in play that is gaming the normal dispersion of effects into very unlikely scenarios.
IOW, even though there is no actual 2″L”oT to violate in the first place, what has been violated is the normal sequential patterning we associate with ordinary entropic effects. Sewell is trying to formally address that, IMO, and what is being offered in rebuttal here are, again, IMO, nothing more than technically valid appeals to bare possibility for no reason other than to avoid something rather obvious – something he uses the movie to demonstrate.
IMO, this is what a lot of evo-mat argument boils down to: technically valid appeals to bare possibility to avoid the obvious larger picture that is staring us in the face.
Which is?
OK, I think I see what you are saying.
In that case you clearly disagree with Granville Sewell, who says, at the end of his paper:
My emphasis.
Right?