"A watch must have required a watchmaker; a car could not have formed itself from parts."

        (The following includes some excerpts from the previous section, "Obstructions..")

        The above statements in italics from creationists are certainly true, but they have nothing to do with the behavior of atoms and molecules. Car parts in a junkyard don’t speed inside the yard at hundreds of miles an hour, constantly colliding with each other, fusing together to make a new transmission or a new car body so violently that enormous quantities of energy are given out!

        Why give a silly illustration like that? Anyone knows that it is not an inherent quality of metal parts to spontaneously join with similar or quite different parts to form complex new arrangements. Yet, this IS precisely the normal behavior of most of the chemical elements that constitute the world and the universe. The value of the second law of thermodynamics is that it quantitatively describes the energetic aspects of the chemical elements and the compounds they form. The chemical potential energy (the enthalpy of formation) that is bound in most of the 60,000,000 known kinds of molecules is less than that in their elements. Thus, energetically , the second law says that the majority of compounds now known could spontaneously form from the corresponding elements. In complete contrast, watches or cars are not lower in thermodynamic energy than the total energy of their individual components. Therefore, the second law says that it is totally inappropriate to compare them with the behavior of chemical compounds and elements.

        Incessantly moving at several hundred miles an hour at ordinary temperatures. hydrogen and many other atoms behave in a fashion that is impossible for car parts: Most atoms spontaneously "bond" when they vigorously collide, forming extremely powerful associations in very specific ways. These new arrangements can be molecules so stable that temperatures of thousands of degrees can't tear them apart again. Molecules are not atoms randomly stuffed in a package. When three or more atoms join to form a molecule, they are arranged in precise order, normally unchanging over time, and with a relatively fixed geometric relationship.

       Finally, many kinds of molecules can strike other kinds very violently and produce totally new types of molecules – another mode of formation of new complex ordered structures due to the same innate nature of atoms to form strong bonds and spread out energy to the surroundings. Amino acids when simply melted with other amino acids (to make them move more rapidly) form huge new compounds. These are NOT useful or valuable proteins. The process simply illustrates the probability of the existence of complex gigantic substances in nature. Though not proteins, they are "proteinoid" in that they have hundreds to thousands of amino acid units firmly joined in the same kind of bonds that hold proteins together.

        A simple example of the spontaneous behavior of elements is the reaction of hydrogen gas with oxygen. Hydrogen atoms have such a great inherent tendency to form strong bonds with oxygen to yield water that a small energy of activation, in the form of a spark affecting only a relatively few molecules, causes the two substances to start to react, resulting in an enormous evolution of energy. This is exactly as the second law predicts: some of the energy in a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen becomes spread out (so much and so rapidly that it is an explosion) when the lesser energetic compound, water, is formed. Yet, water is more complex than the simple elements and its atoms are arranged in an exact geometric pattern.

        There are millions of compounds that have less energy in them than the elements of which they are composed. That sentence is a quiet bombshell. It means that the second law energetically FAVORS — yes, predicts firmly — the spontaneous formation of complex, geometrically ordered molecules from utterly simple atoms of elements. Popular statements such as "the second law says that all systems fundamentally tend toward disorder and randomness" are wrong when they refer to chemistry, and chemistry precisely deals with the structure and behavior of all types of matter.

        Most complex molecules may require the expertise of one or of many chemists to put them together in a laboratory. However, so far as the second law of thermodynamics is concerned, not only water but cholesterol, DNA, the anti-depressant in St. John’s Wort and millions of other complex substances contain less energy than their constituent elements. Therefore, thermodynamically, their formation from those elements would be a spontaneous process, energetically favored by the second law.

"The Law of Disorder"

        As part of their attempts to challenge evolution, some religious writers have included comments to the effect that the second law – what they have called "the law of disorder" – strictly prohibits the chance formation of complicated structures from simple parts, including complex molecules from simple ones. This site, and especially http://secondlaw.com, have shown repeatedly that it is fallacious to view the second law as a predictor of disorder. The second law concerns energy, not patterns of objects. The second law states that energy tends not to be restricted to one or a few energy levels in atoms and molecules, but to be dispersed to as many such levels as possible – rephrased in homely terms involving molecules, "Intense or concentrated energy tends to spread out and diffuse".

        In that spreading-out process, macro objects sometimes are displaced and moved to random arrangements that humans subjectively define as "disorder". A violent wind not only can break a window in a building and blow the papers in an office all over a square mile, but also destroy the building itself. However, this is an incidental consequence of dispersing and spreading out of the energy in a tornado, not an event that is due to the innate nature or behavior of inanimate objects themselves in the absence of such an energy flow. Moving common objects around so they fall in disorder is a singular and accidental aspect of the universal tendency of energy to diffuse, not the general thrust or meaning or requirement of the second law that applies to objects.

        Further, as described in the first section of this website, the second law is a tendency, not an instantly effected edict. Its predictions might not come true for millions or billions of years. These kinds of delay are due to the second law being obstructed and hindered by what chemists call "activation energies". All the biochemicals in our bodies except inorganic substances are protected and kept from oxidation or other disastrous reaction by activation energies. Almost all the materials from which our orderly prized artifacts are made are similarly kept from rapid oxidation in air. The second law is a powerful generality, but it is often blocked (to our human advantage) in chemical substances, chemical reactions, and physical events in everyday life.

"The second law says that complicated molecules can’t form spontaneously"

(This question is treated in greater detail and more technically in the last half of the previous section, "Obstructions to the second laws make life possible…")

        Of course, the most complex substances that we know are produced by organisms. The photosynthetic example often cited by creationists is as follows: Trees make sugars and cellulose as well as the green chlorophyll and other colored chemicals that we see in Fall leaves, among hundreds of other compounds. They use energy from sunlight by means of intricate chemical processes to synthesize the complex higher-energy content substances just mentioned from lesser energy compounds like carbon dioxide and water. But the second law says that the opposite process – of higher-energy compounds changing into lesser-energy substances – is what tends to happen by itself, spontaneously, without outside aid from any energy source. Therefore, photosynthesis is a thermodynamically non-spontaneous process.

        Religious writers are familiar with the general process of photosynthesis but are unskilled in dealing with chemical thermodynamics. They claim that the second law not only says that it is impossible for more complex substances to be spontaneously formed from simpler materials, but also a non-spontaneous process like photosynthesis that produces complex substances requires the presence of an organism, such as a plant.

        Neither claim is true. As has been discussed adequately in a previous portion of this essay about the second law and evolution, "A watch must have … a watchmaker", the spontaneous formation of millions of far more complex compounds than their elements is energetically favored by the second law. This is true whether the new molecule is more or less complicated than its starting materials because the second law is concerned only with energy. All other requirements or consequences are not within the purview of the law.

        It is equally erroneous to state that complex substances cannot be formed non-spontaneously from simpler without the intervention of an organism, "a patterning mechanism". Again, as has been discussed, the formation of patterned molecules is inherent in the nature of atoms combining with one another, no external template or help from a living organism is required by any physical law. "Non-spontaneous" simply means the addition of energy to a system of elements or compounds during the process of forming a new compound. Chlorophyll and substances as complex as chlorophyll have been synthesized in the laboratory, in glass vessels without the presence of any organisms in the reaction. Although that process was extremely difficult and took many person-years to complete, the principle was clear long before the chlorophyll project was undertaken: The non-spontaneous syntheses of greater-energy, complex substances from lesser-energy simple molecules without the aid of organisms is not prevented by the second law. It is just not favored. Over the past two centuries, millions of complex substances — admittedly less so than chlorophyll — have been made similarly in laboratory glassware without the need for organisms.

The spontaneous and non-spontaneous formation of complex compounds in space

        Finally, it should be recognized that both spontaneous and non-spontaneous reactions to form complex substances are common in outer space. The two most prevalent elements there are hydrogen and carbon with considerably smaller quantities of oxygen and nitrogen. Although relatively few atoms or molecules are present per cubic inch, in untold quadrillions of cubic miles of space there are many millions of tons of each.

        Organic compounds are those substances that contain carbon. (Because they differ so much from organic compounds in their properties, carbon monoxide, dioxide and the carbonates are not included.) The simplest organic compounds, called alkanes and composed only of carbon and hydrogen, contain portions or sections with one carbon atom holding two or three hydrogen atoms. Spectroscopic evidence for these characteristic alkane sections has been found throughout space. All alkanes are all lesser in energy than their elements. (Structures are in: http://www.nyu.edu/pages/mathmol/library/hydrocarbons/ ). Therefore, the second law says irrefutably that they could be formed spontaneously from carbon and hydrogen with the net evolution of energy. Their structural pattern is not vastly complex but it is far more so than that of individual elements.

        Even more complicated types of compounds that contain either carbon and hydrogen alone, or those elements with oxygen, have been detected in space: PAHs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The thermodynamic category of formation of the two groups of PAHs are different. IF oxygen is present in the PAH ( and this cannot yet be decided spectroscopically ) the substances are less energetic than the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen elements from which they were formed. Thus, they were formed spontaneously strictly in accord with the second law of thermodynamics.