Posted: Apr 14, 2011 2:21 pm
Teuton wrote:
"[T]he scientific evidence of thermodynamics confirms the truth of the second premise of the kalam cosmological argument. This evidence is especially impressive because thermodynamics is so well understood by physicists that it is practically a completed field of science. This makes it highly unlikely that these findings will be reversed."
(Craig, William Lane. On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision. Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2010. p. 98)
"The only person who seems to have taken seriously the simple mathematical truth that the ever-increasing nature of the entropy did not imply that it had to have been zero a finite time ago was the Catholic physicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem (1861-1916). He refused to use it as an argument for the creation of the universe out of nothing in the finite past or the achievement of a total heat death in the future because the continuous increase of the entropy of the universe did not mean it had ever experienced a minimum value, or would ever reach a maximum value in the future."
(Barrow, John D. The Book of Universes. London: Bodley Head, 2011. pp. 39-40)
"[E]ven if we were to grant that the second law is universally applicable, we could not conclude from it that the universe necessarily began a finite time in the past. All that can be said is that the universal entropy has never been decreasing. For example, it may well be that the entropy has merely increased asymptotically from some definite minimum value in the infinite past and will continue to increase to some maximum value in the infinite future. This would be the case in a cosmological model such as Gamow's infinitely old contraction-expansion universe, described above. Thus the second law of thermodynamics by itself does not provide any independent evidence of a beginning of the universe a finite time ago. It can do that only when used in conjunction with a specific cosmological model."
(Byl, John. "On the Kalam Cosmological Argument." p. 12)
"At the very least it would seem wisest, if we no longer dogmatically assert that the principles of thermodynamics necessarily require a universe which was created at a finite time in the past and which is fated for stagnation and death in the future."
(Tolman, Richard C. Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934. p. 444)