Creationism and Entropy

How pop-science can lead to science denial.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

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.

The Creationist Entropy Argument

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

1. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says entropy cannot decrease.
2. Entropy is disorder.
3. Organisms are highly ordered.
4. Simple molecules are disordered.
5. For simple molecules to turn into organisms, a disordered system has to turn into an ordered system.
6. For a disordered system to turn into an ordered system, entropy would have to increase.
7. Entropy cannot increase.
8. The premise that simple molecules turned into organisms is therefore false.