As I noted here yesterday, this year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Origins and Destiny by the late Robert Gange. The crucial argument for intelligent design presented by Gange1 in his book focuses on his explication of the meaning and consequences of the generalized second law of thermodynamics. Referring to the casual familiarity of the concept of the traditional second law held by many commentators addressing the origin of life, Gange makes the cautionary statement:2
Creationists (wrongly) use it to say that evolution is impossible, and evolutionists (wrongly) use it to show that natural processes are equivalent to the activity of intelligence.
In my book, Canceled Science, I cited Gange’s explanation3 of the generalized second law and its consequent restrictions on naturalistic scenarios for the origin of the functional complexity of living things.
The essence of the generalized second law is that when considering non-equilibrium states, the final entropy must be greater than the initial entropy, which means that the final information available to an observer of a system is less than the observer’s initial information.4
Within the generalized second law, entropy is identified with the uncertainty that an observer has concerning a system, and the generalized second law requires that this uncertainty increases with the passage of time. As Gange summarizes,5
In the words of the New Generalized Second Law, an observer functioning within a closed system will lose, but never gain, information.
Applicability of the Traditional Second Law
Confusion over the applicability of the traditional second law to the origin of life frequently stems from focusing upon “the thermodynamic flow of energy in an organism, rather than on the genetic blueprint by which the flow is controlled.”6 As I emphasize in Canceled Science,7 having a low-entropy source of energy, such as radiation from the Sun, is irrelevant for explaining the information-rich blueprint of life. Raw energy does not produce information, it destroys it.
The production of ordered states, such as crystallization, follows this principle in that ordered crystals can be described with less information than it would take to describe their constituent particles in a disordered state. Gange emphasizes the well-known condition of biochemically relevant molecules as possessing complex, specific patterns and lacking repetitious order. Functionally complex patterns of particles, as found in all living organisms, have a high information content that cannot be accounted for naturally.
Referring to further results from information theory, by which one can estimate the information content of objects numerically, Gange describes the paucity of information in natural objects, such as stars and nebulae, compared to the information in even the simplest living structure. Since the generalized second law restricts the information content of any system (including the entire physical universe) from increasing with the passage of time, the conclusion from this law of nature is that abiogenesis is a scientifically flawed concept.
From the point of view of naturalism, the universe contained its maximum level of information when it began. Knowing an estimate of the total number of particles existing in the universe (roughly 1080 baryons), and knowing that their distribution is inherently random, one can come up with an upper limit to the information content of the non-living universe.
A Giant Spoon into a Star
Although stars exist throughout the universe, their information content can be seen to be low compared to the information of a living organism by a simple thought experiment. Imagine sticking a giant spoon into a star and stirring it up, then pull out the spoon and wait. In time, natural forces will return the star to its former state, shining like nothing ever happened. Now, imagine sticking a micro-needle into a living cell and stirring up its innards, breaking apart all its internal molecular structures. Now, wait. Will natural forces reconfigure the “alphabet soup” within the cell membrane back into a living cell? I don’t think so!
The star’s internal structure is only coarsely defined, with radially dependent temperature and density gradients that will return to hydrostatic equilibrium via a balance of the inward force of gravity against outward gas pressure. Nothing so simple comes even close to describing or establishing the inner structures and mechanisms of a living cell.
Theoreticians have estimated the information content of a single-celled organism, with its constituent molecular components. With its extraordinary level of information, suffice it to say that the moment the first living cell appeared on the scene in our universe, the net information content of our universe increased exponentially. According to the generalized second law, this step-function increase in information with the advent of life cannot be ascribed to natural processes.
As Gange affirms, and in my understanding as a physicist, the universal constraint on nature as an “information eunuch” means that any attempt to derive the origin of life apart from intelligent design is destined to come up empty. Nonetheless, the first appearance of life in our universe at a particular time in its finite history is a rational fact that calls for an explanation.
Meaningful Information and Function
It’s obvious from our experience that intelligent beings such as ourselves can arrange matter into specific, complex patterns that carry meaningful information and function toward useful ends, as a result of purposeful design. Since unguided natural processes cannot account for the arrangement of matter into living organisms, and since intelligent minds can produce information-rich patterns, to ascribe the existence of life to an intelligent designer is not merely a philosophically plausible explanation, it is a required consequence of our scientific understanding of the universe.
Gange further explains why unguided “accidents” could not succeed as a mechanism for producing the information-rich structures of life. Distilling the meaning of the generalized second law from its quantum statistical foundations, Gange gives a plausible and experientially verified synopsis relevant to the origin of information-rich patterns.
We have said that the New Generalized Second Law can be understood to say that, on average, things mix. This means that with the passage of time, natural processes will destroy patterns. Conversely, if we wish to create a pattern, things will need to be separated by an activity of intellect.
The Reason Is Clear
Living structures exhibit patterns that are far too complex to ever form in a single random event. But neither can a sequence of small, unguided steps succeed in building a functional machine, meaningful message, or living organism. The reason is clear — meaningful patterns arise from a sequence of choices to make stepwise progress towards a desirable outcome, and at each decision point, there are far more ways to go wrong than to go right. One or two or a few correct steps might occur randomly, but beyond that, the exponential growth of improbabilities push the goal beyond the limit of possibility.8 I also addressed this from a different perspective in a recent article on the limitations of the forces of nature.
If someone committed to a materialistic worldview has read this far, the response may be to dismiss everything that I’ve presented as the biased nonsense of a religious zealot. However, I’m not throwing down a gauntlet or seeking to get into a fight, I’m offering neglected results from physics that should, if understood, align our thinking with reality. For too long, an inadequate view of the possibilities and limitations of nature has fueled contention, with futile strivings to find a naturalistic origin of life.
Just as an understanding of the electronic and nuclear structure of the atom terminated vain hopes of chemically transmuting lead into gold, and just as a proper understanding of the traditional second law of thermodynamics put an end to mechanical tinkering in hope of constructing a perpetual motion machine, so our current understanding of information theory and the generalized second law clearly shows the futility of searching for an unguided natural origin of life.
More Complex Life Forms
The same constraints from the generalized second law prohibiting natural processes from systematically increasing information to form a living organism from non-living matter also constrain the evolution of more complex life forms from simpler forms. As Gange explains,
The New Generalized Second Law imposes constraints on the changes that are possible between an earlier and a later fossil (the before and after rest states), and it tells us that natural machinery does not exist to systematically increase the complexity of biological structures with the passage of time. What’s important about this conclusion is that it does not rest upon a particular explanation (such as natural selection). Rather, it is the basic result that regulates physical matter.9
For almost the last 40 years, I have understood the truth of this statement based on its foundation in well-established laws of physics, but I have nevertheless held it in abeyance, evaluating its validity as other lines of evidence came to light, especially from biology and molecular genetics. Over the years, however, published work by researchers such as Michael Behe, Douglas Axe, James Tour, and many others10 has substantiated the claims made by Gange regarding the limitations of natural processes for the origin and development of the myriads of species of life on planet Earth. The conclusion of transcendent intelligent design as the source of life is not only consistent with the evidence but required to explain the wonders of life on Earth.
Notes
- Robert Gange, Origins and Destiny: A Scientist Examines God’s Handiwork, (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1986).
- Gange, Origins and Destiny, (1986), p. 48.
- Gange’s work cites several references on the quantum statistical mechanics foundations of the generalized second law. One of the key sources is, Arthur Hobson, Concepts in Statistical Mechanics (New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1971), which I refer to extensively in Canceled Science.
- Eric Hedin, Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See, (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2021), p. 159.
- Gange, Origins and Destiny, (1986), p. 46.
- Gange, Origins and Destiny, (1986), p. 47.
- Hedin, Canceled Science, (2021), p. 161.
- Recent claims for the formation of a self-replicating RNA chain involve such extensive experimenter input that the result cannot be considered to have formed naturally. See Brian Miller’s summary article.
- Gange, Origins and Destiny, (1986), pp. 90-91.
- Dr. Brian Miller summarizes the “state of the field” in protein evolution research: “The vast preponderance of the evidence indicates that novel complex proteins could never have evolved through an undirected process.” Dr. Rob Stadler and Professor James Tour recently reviewed numerous experimental evolution studies, with the conclusion: “They all show that evolution is a very constrained process, incapable of innovating.”