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



The above statements 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 a thousand miles an hour, constantly colliding with each other, fusing together with a similar part (or different ones) so violently that enormous quantities of energy are given out – enough to make them white hot.

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 20,000,000 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 a few hundred to two thousand 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

The second law of thermodynamics is quite complex and your junkyard explanation just does not hold up.

Chief,
The colorado river washed the erosion out to sea, Explain how a large flood can cut a canyon through granite it is impossible, the water would flow over the top of the rock it would not cut a canyon in it.