Creationism and Entropy

How pop-science can lead to science denial.

In appealing to the general public, pop-science must simplify science. While science communicators must often leave out the math in their simplifications, they can go too far and leave out other important information. Worse, some of these simplifications change the facts, giving false information undue credibility. Pseudoscientists can then exploit this false information to then push their narrative. In this article, I want to talk about a case of simplification gone wrong — Creationism and Entropy.

While they may add their own spin on their entropy argument, the base of the argument is as follows:

First, entropy is not disorder, as I’ve shown in the section What about Disorder? in my article on entropy. Remember that we’re talking about science, and proving things in science requires theory or experiment¹. If you want to argue that a process leads to an increase in entropy, you’ll have to prove it with math or experiment and not appeals to vague statements like “order” or “disorder.”

Second, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says entropy cannot decrease in an isolated system but says nothing about an open system. More specifically, to show that a process such as abiogenesis violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, you would have to show that the entropy of an isolated system that contains the entire process would have to increase.

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