Can the second law of thermodynamics apply to any situation in the universe?
There are many equivalent formulations of the second law. In a situation like the earth, where there is heat (in the form of light) coming into the system, the relevant quantity is not entropy, it is Gibbs free energy. Essentially, Gibbs free energy is a way of accounting for the entropy change in the rest of the universe by looking inside the system. This depends on temperature as well as the energy change and the entropy change in the system. For example, ice will spontaneously freeze if it gets cold enough. This is a reaction where ‘order’ increases, but the energy released from freezing counteracts that increase. For the case of biological systems, the energy coming from the sun makes it so that a great deal of entropy decrease can occur within the system and still have a net increase everywhere. In fact, every biological reaction occurs in accordance with the second law, if it is correctly understood. Unfortunately, the creationists rarely understand thermodynamics past a very sha
