Questions for Atheists How do you reconcile intelligence with naturalism and the Law of Entropy?
8Questions for Atheists
The next question, "How do you reconcile the existence of human intelligence with naturalism and the Law of Entropy?" needs only a small treatment, since it has already been asked in different forms.
To summarise how intelligence evolved, Luca Rinaldi and Annette Karmiloff-Smith wrote in their abstract, "Viewing intelligence as a dynamic concept, indeed, implies the need to identify full developmental trajectories, to assess how genes, brain, cognition, and environment interact with each other. In the present paper, we describe how a neuroconstructivist approach better explains why intelligence can rise or fall over development, as a result of a fluctuating interaction between the developing system itself and the environmental factors involved at different times across ontogenesis," [2] which they then expand on in the rest of the paper.
Life is able to become more organised because entropy increases somewhere else. Albert Lehninger wrote, "Living organisms preserve their internal order by taking from their surroundings free energy, in the form of nutrients or sunlight, and returning to their surroundings an equal amount of energy as heat and entropy."[3]
Since life occurs in a macroenvironment that is relatively the same with regard to temperature and pressure, biological processes can be considered in terms of free energy using Gibb's Free Energy Equation. This equation shows the equivalence between the change in Gibbs free energy on the one side, and the change in enthalpy, temperature, and the change in entropy on the other.
Jeremy England reasoned that "systems of particles with certain characteristics" would be "strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath." [4]
As the irreversibility of their processes becomes increasingly irreversible, ie the probability of returning to an initial state becomes more unlikely, "the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment's external drives on the way to getting there."
This implies that molecules will arrange themselves better to resonate with their energy sources.
It turns out that at least some of the order in natural systems may be explained by thermodynamic principles themselves, rather being making them impossible as Creationists claim.
The brain is a highly ordered organ, and intelligence emergent from it. To keep functioning an organism with a complex brain needs a large quantity of energy in the form of food. Metabolising this food allows the brain to carry out its functions, and a vast amount of heat is generated that is dissipated into the environment. The environment increases in entropy so that the brain can maintain its highly ordered state to carry on functioning.
[1] "50 Questions for Atheists," by Meranda Devan, Why God
[2] Rinaldi, L.; Karmiloff-Smith, A. Intelligence as a Developing Function: A Neuroconstructivist Approach. J. Intell. 2017, 5, 18. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence5020018
[3] Principles of biochemistry by Lehninger, Albert L; Nelson, David L. (David Lee), 1942-; Cox, Michael M
[4] "A New Physics Theory of Life," Katherine Taylor, Quanta Magazine
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