Don't let this title scare you. The takeaway from this chapter—things can't come from nothing and things get messy—is so simple every child knows it.
 
Materialism means that physical reality holds within itself the capability to cause the origin of itself and the universe. Moreover, matter, energy, and natural laws serve as the only needed raw materials for the appearance of the universe and life and its transformation into increasingly complex organisms.
 
The First Law of Thermodynamics
 
Evolutionists ignore the problem of the origin of their starting materials. They are taken as freebies, reminding me of a joke. It goes something like this: A materialist was explaining to school children that the origin of the universe was no big deal. A student remarked, "Well then how would you do it?" The teacher said, "Sure thing, first you start with some dust . . ." The student interrupts, "Hold on! Get your own dust."
 
Natural laws, energy, and matter must be accounted for but there is nothing within them that can account for their own origin.
 
Moreover, the first law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of conservation of energy, states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Energy can be thought of as matter (mass) since Einstein showed the two to be equivalent in the famous equation: E=MC². This means matter (mass) can be energy and vice versa: M=E/C² (C is the velocity of light). If energy (matter) cannot be created, the universe (including us) made of energy (matter) should not exist. But it does.
 
Thus, the materialistic tenet that the universe appeared spontaneously from nothing violates the First Law of Thermodynamics, a known truth. Ideas that contradict truth are false.
 
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
 
Even if we allow materialists to have starting materials and laws for a Big Bang, nothing is solved. In fact, things get even worse.
 
That's because abiogenesis and evolution means a progression from simple to complex. First, natural laws had to emerge from nothing. Then energy from nothing. Then atoms, perpetually moving and energized dynamos, had to appear. A Big Bang explosion had to form everything else using unaccounted for preexisting natural laws, thermal noise (energy), and hydrogen gas (matter). Then simple atoms had to combine to form cells and then humans.
 
The most apparent question is, hearkening to our common sense, how can these transformations be true when they contradict what we observe and experience in everyday life? We don't see (keep in mind that science is observation) natural laws, energy, or atoms coming into existence from nothing and then further organizing. Rather, things rust, decay, break, fall apart, get disorganized and messy. Functionally complex things turn into dust; dust does not turn into increasingly functionally complex things.

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​Science backs up our common sense and experience.
 
The Second Law of Thermodynamics demands that things proceed to maximum disorder. According to this law, the entire universe is headed one way with time's arrow: toward a bleak, dark, cold, uniform equilibrium of randomness.
 
The reverence that working scientists have for the Second Law is typified by the famed Sir Arthur Eddington: " . . . a supreme metaphysical law of the entire universe . . . If your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I can give you no hope, there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
 
It is the Second Law that prevents perpetual motion machines. No matter how efficient a machine is made, it eventually wears down, degrades, and disassembles. Leonardo da Vinci (1494) wrote: "Oh ye seekers after perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists." Now then, if great minds over the course of centuries can't defy nature's Second Law, unattended nature most certainly wouldn't either. But defying the Second Law is exactly what the alchemy of materialism means.
 
Against the backdrop of a universe that is headed inexorably toward absolute chaos, evolutionists contend that atoms, energy, and then biology do cartwheels uphill over every other spontaneous material thing headed thermodynamically downhill.

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​To counter this, materialists say the law only applies to "closed" thermodynamic systems. They argue that life could emerge and evolve on Earth because it is not closed. It is open to the energy from the sun. But they fail to prove that sunbeams can cause atoms to aggregate into living cells, or those cells complexifying into the myriad life forms on the planet. In effect, their argument voids the second law and would permit the spontaneous appearance of computers, space ships, or the assembly of landfills into cities. All that would be needed would be atoms and sunbeams.

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The existence of the tremendous functional complexity of life in the context of a universe that is infected with a thermodynamic virus causing universal degradation and uselessness presents a conundrum. Since evolution means simple to complex, the very material science evolution hails, including the Second Law, is the very science that denies the possibility of evolution.
 
Another problem is presented in that evolution demands an infinitely old universe. But the Second Law says that if the universe is infinitely old, the order that we see in it—planets, galaxies, hot spot stars, and us—would have long since breathed its last gasp and now be absolutely cold and without order. Everything should be just a homogeneous mix of energy and elementary particles evenly distributed throughout the universe. But that's clearly not the case.
 
The inference from the Second Law is that since all things run down, they all must be wound up to start. A sufficient winder upper can't be matter/energy itself since that's the stuff for which we're trying to account. And besides, the Second Law governs matter and says it cannot wind up all on its own, but must instead wind down.
 
Therefore, the fundamental materialistic tenet that things spontaneously increase in order and complexity violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a known truth. Ideas that contradict truth are false.
 
On the other hand, a creative intelligence not bound by the laws of thermodynamics is a sufficient explanation for the incredible functional complexity of the universe and life. This conclusion doesn't require any religious predisposition nor does it foster one. We're simply letting known truths speak to us.
 
Any materialist who disagrees is free to prove by evidence or experiment that complex things on the scale of complexity found even in the simplest living organism can arise spontaneously. So far, in spite of millions of pages of scientific literature and hundreds of years, nada, nothing. Just proclamations about how true evolution is. That's faith, not science.

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