Journal of Student Research 2015

106 Journal Student Research necessary for nature to exist before it existed. There is no alternative to nature existing. To transcend nature is a contradiction. Nonphysical cause, spaceless cause, timeless cause, supernatural cause, and transcendental cause are contradictions in terms. A contradiction, a supernatural existence, cannot be a cause of nature. Thermodynamics The laws of thermodynamics are some of the most accurate and reliable laws in physics. Craig tries to use the second law of thermodynamics to show that the Big Bang deflates back to a beginning if time is reversed. He does not account for the first law of thermodynamics (Craig, 2010). We know that nature has already existed forever because of the first law of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics is the conservation of energy, which means that although energy is always changing form, the total quantity of energy in nature is always constant (Chaisson & McMillan, 2004; Cutnell & Johnson, 2004; Serway & Beichner, 2000). Since energy can never be created nor destroyed, the same total quantity of energy has existed infinitely into the past and will exist infinitely into the future. It has no beginning, does not need to be sustained in exis tence, and it has no end. All subatomic particles oscillate (Serway, Moses, & Moyer, 2005). Energy is always in action. That is why motion exists and why something happens rather than nothing. Since energy has no beginning, there is no cause of its existence. The properties of energy explain why there is something rather than nothing at all and why there continues to be something rather than nothing at all. Na ture is composed of energy. Therefore, nature has all of the above properties of energy. A physical pattern indicates that there is a substructure of physical order. Since naturalism is always true, there can only be physicalistic reasons for why nature has the constants, ratios, and quantities that it does. Life is a part of nature and is adjusted to the rest of nature by natural selection. The rest of nature is not adjusted to life. Life is a physical phenomenon. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy (energy dis organization) always increases or remains constant if there is no energy input into or output from an isolated system. The total entropy of the universe does not change when a reversible process occurs and does increase when an irreversible process occurs (Cutnell & Johnson, 2004). The second law of thermodynamics depends upon the first law of thermodynamics being true. Entropy cannot be constant at its maximum or we would not exist, because energy would be too dispersed for stars and planets to exist. Given that past time is infinite (because of the first law of thermodynamics and