CAN ORDER COME OUT OF CHAOS?

by Henry M. Morris and John D. Morris *

Institute for Creation Research, PO Box 2667, El Cajon, CA 92021
Voice: (619) 448-0900 FAX: (619) 448-3469
"Vital Articles on Science/Creation" June 1997
Copyright 1997 All Rights Reserved
"For God is not the author of confusion . . " (I Corinthians 14:33).

There is a new science abroad in the land-the science of chaos! It has spawned a new
vocabulary"fractals," "bifurcation," "the butterfly effect," "strange attractors," and
"dissipative structures," among others. Its advocates are even claiming it to be as important
as relativity and quantum mechanics in twentieth-century physics. It is also being extended
into many scientific fields and even into social studies, economics, and human behavior
problems. But as a widely read popularization of chaos studies puts it:
Where chaos begins, classical science stops.

There are many phenomena which depend on so many variables as to defy description in
terms of quantitative mathematics. Yet such systemsthings like the turbulent hydraulics
of a waterfalldo seem to exhibit some kind of order in their apparently chaotic tumbling,
and chaos theory has been developed to try to quantify the order in this chaos.
Even very regular linear relationships will eventually become irregular and disorderly, if
left to themselves long enough. Thus, an apparently chaotic phenomenon may well
represent a breakdown in an originally orderly system, even under the influence of very
minute perturbations. This has become known as the "Butterfly Effect." Gleick defines this
term as follows:
Butterfly Effect: The notion that a butterfly stirring the air in Peking can transform storm systems
2
next month in New York.

There is no doubt that small causes can combine with others and contribute to major
effectseffects which typically seem to be chaotic. That is, order can easily degenerate
into chaos. It is even conceivable that, if one could probe the chaotic milieu deeply enough,
he could discern to some extent the previously ordered system from which it originated.
Chaos theory is attempting to do just that, and also to find more complex patterns of order
in the over-all chaos.
These complex patterns are called "fractals," which are defined as "geometrical shapes
whose structure is such that magnification by a given factor reproduces the original
object."3 If that definition doesn't adequately clarify the term, try this one: "spatial forms of

fractional dimensions."4 Regardless of how they are defined, examples cited of fractals are
said to be numerous-from snowflakes to coast lines to star clusters.
The discovery that there may still be some underlying orderinstead of complete
randomnessin chaotic systems is, of course, still perfectly consistent with the laws of
thermodynamics. The trouble is that many wishful thinkers in this field have started
assuming that chaos can also somehow generate higher orderevolution in particular. This
idea is being hailed as the solution to the problem of how the increasing complexity
required by evolution could overcome the disorganizing process demanded by entropy. The
famous second law of thermodynamicsalso called the law of increasing entropynotes
that every systemwhether closed or openat least tends to decay. The universe itself is
"running down," heading toward an ultimate "heat death," and this has heretofore been an
intractable problem for evolutionists.
The grim picture of cosmic evolution was in sharp contrast with the evolutionary thinking among
nineteenth century biologists, who observed that the living universe evolves from disorder to order,
5
toward states of ever increasing complexity.

The author of the above quote is Fritjof Capra, a physicist at the University of California at
Berkeley, one of the prominent scientists involved in the New Age Movement, which tends
to associate evolutionary advance with catastrophic revolutions. He believes that, in some
mysterious fashion, chaos can produce evolutionary advance.
Paul Davies, the prolific British writer on astronomy, is another. He, like Capra, is not an
atheistic evolutionist, but a pantheistic evolutionist. He has faith that order can come out of
chaos, that the increasing disorder specified by the entropy law (second law of
thermodynamics) can somehow generate the increasing complexity implied by evolution.
We now see how it is possible for the universe to increase both organization and entropy at the
same time. The optimistic and pessimistic arrows of time can co-exist: the universe can display
6
creative unidirectional progress even in the face of the second law.

And just how has this remarkable possibility been shown? Capra answers as follows:
It was the great achievement of Ilya Prigogine, who used a new mathematics to reevaluate the
second law by radically rethinking traditional scientific views of order and disorder, which enabled
7
him to resolve unambiguously the two contradictory nineteenth-century views of evolution.

Prigogine is a Belgian scientist who received a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work on the
thermodynamics of systems operating dynamically under nonequilibrium conditions. He
argued (mathematically, not experimentally) that systems that were far from equilibrium,
with a high flow-through of energy, could produce a higher degree of order.
Many others have also hailed Prigogine as the scientific savior of evolutionism, which
otherwise seemed to be precluded by the entropy law. A UNESCO scientist evaluated his
work as follows:

What I see Prigogine doing is giving legitimization to the process of evolution-self-organization

8
under conditions of change.

The assumed importance of his "discovery" is further emphasized by Coveny:

From an epistemological viewpoint, the contributions of Prigogine's Brussels School are
9
unquestionably of original importance.

Capra elaborates further:

In classical thermodynamics, the dissipation of energy in heat transfer, friction, and the like was
always associated with waste. Prigogine's concept of a dissipative structure introduced a radical
10
change in this view by showing that in open systems dissipation becomes a source of order.

The fact is, however, that except in the very weak sense, Prigogine has not shown that
dissipation of energy in an open system produces order. In the chaotic behavior of a system
in which a very large energy dissipation is taking place, certain temporary structures (he
calls them "dissipative structures") form and then soon decay. They have never been
showneven mathematicallyto reproduce themselves or to generate still higher degrees
of order.
He used the example of small vortices in a cup of hot coffee. A similar example would be
the much larger "vortex" in a tornado or hurricane. These might be viewed as "structures"
and to appear to be "ordered," but they are soon gone. What they leave in their wake is not
a higher degree of organized complexity, but a higher degree of dissipation and
disorganization.
And yet evolutionists are now arguing that such chaos somehow generates a higher stage of
evolution! Prigogine has even co-authored a book entitled Order Out of Chaos.
In far from equilibrium conditions, we may have transformation from disorder, from thermal chaos,
11
into order.

It is very significant, however, that all of his Nobel-Prize winning discussions have been
philosophical and mathematicalnot experimental! He himself has admitted that he has
not worked in a laboratory for years. Such phenomena as he and others are trying to call
evolution from chaos to order may be manipulated on paper or on a computer screen, but
not in real life.
Not even the first, and absolutely critical, step in the evolutionary processthat of the selforganization of non-living molecules into self-replicating moleculescan be explained in
this way. Prigogine admits:
The problem of biological order involves the transition from the molecular activity to the
12
supermolecular order of the cell. This problem is far from being solved.

He then makes the naive claim that, since life "appeared" on Earth very early in geologic
history, it must have been (!) "the result of spontaneous self-organization." But he
acknowledges some uncertainty about this remarkable conclusion.
13

However, we must admit that we remain far from any quantitative theory.

Very far, in fact-and even farther from any experimental proof!

With regard to the claim that the "order" appearing in fractals somehow contributes to
evolution, a new book devoted to what the author is pleased to call "the science of selforganized criticality," we note the following admission:
In the popular literature, one finds the subjects of chaos and fractal geometry linked
together again and again, despite the fact that they have little to do with each other.... In
short, chaos theory cannot explain complexity.14
The strange idea is currently being widely promoted that, in the assumed four-billion-year
history of life on the earth, evolution has proceeded by means of long periods of stasis,
punctuated by brief periods of massive extinctions. Then rapid evolutionary emergence of
organisms of higher complexity, came out of the chaotic milieu causing the extinction.
On the one hand, a catastrophic extinction of global biotas might negate the effectiveness of many
survival mechanisms which evolved during background conditions. Simultaneously, such a crisis
might eliminate genetically and ecologically diverse taxa worldwide. Only a few species would be
expected to survive and seed subsequent evolutionary radiations. This scenario requires high levels
of macroevolution and explosive radiation to account for the recovery of basic ecosystems within 115
2 my after Phanerozoic mass extinctions.

Such notions come not from any empirical evidence but solely from philosophical
speculations based on lack of evidence! "Since there is no evidence that evolution
proceeded gradually, it must have occurred chaotically!" This seems to be the idea.
If one wants to believe by blind faith that order can arise spontaneously from chaos, it is
still a free country. But please don't call it science!
REFERENCES
1

Chaos-Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987), p. 3.

Ibid.,
p.
8.
3
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms (4th ed., 1989), p 757.
4
Stan G. Smith, "Chaos: Making a New Heresy Creation Research Society Quarterly (Vol. 30.
March
1994),
p.
196.
5
Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), p. 48.
6
Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 85.
7
Capra,
op
cit.,
p.
49.
8
As quoted by Wil Lepkowski in "The Social Thermodynamics of Ilya Prigogine," Chemical and
Engineering
News
(New
York,
Bantam,
1979),
p.
30.
9
Peter V. Coveny, "The Second Law of Thermodynamics: Entropy, Irreversibility, and Dynamics"
Nature
(Vol.
333.
June
2,
1988),
p.
414.
10
Capra,
op
cit.,
p.
89.
2

James

Gleick,

11

Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), p.
12.
12
Ibid.,
p.
175.
13
Ibid.,
p.
176.
14
Per Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality (New York. SpringerVerlag,
1996),
p.
31.
15
Erle G. Kauffman and Douglas H. Erwin, "Surviving Mass Extinctions," Geotimes (Vol. 40. March
1995), p. 15.
* Dr. Henry Morris is Founder and President Emeritus of ICR Dr. John Morris is President of ICR.