Science and “Entropy”

SMASHING THE LAST PEDESTAL OF HUMAN ARROGANCE

Copyright © 2003 Victor Shane, All Rights Reserved

But now we have received, not the spirit of the cosmos

[<Greek pneuma tou kosmou], but the Spirit which is of God

[<Greek Pneuma toek tou Theou], that we might know the

things that are conferred on us by God.

1 Corinthians 2:12

Most scientists take a dim view of religious folks talking about “entropy,” and this is understandable. For example, many theologians mistakenly cite the second law of thermodynamics (the law of increasing entropy) as “proof” that the theory of evolution is stuff and nonsense. Today it is not uncommon to hear a preacher make a statement to the effect that “evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics.”

Does evolution violate the second law of thermodynamics? No it does not. All that evolution does is to redistribute highly specified combinations of matter and energy within open systems. The planet earth is an open system receiving massive infusions of energy from the sun, more than enough to sustain its storehouses of complexity, assuming the preexistence of complex specified information (Dembski). Granted that universal entropy is always increasing, but some small part of the greater system of the cosmos can gain order and complexity at the expense of the rest, with a net conservation of energy and with a net increase in universal entropy (i.e., without violating the fundamental laws of the universe). No, evolution does not violate the law of increasing entropy. But does the law of increasing entropy have something to do with the anatomy of human destructiveness?

COSMIC MORALITY: The Derivative Nature of Man

The second law of thermodynamics is a scientific generalization of experience that informs the entire cosmos with a one-way “ratchet” mechanism, stamping the whole universe with an arrow of time and identifying the greater order of change. It invests physical reality with a nature, a property, and an orientation. Albert Einstein once said that the second law was the premier law of all the sciences. The great physicist Sir Arthur Eddington described it as “the supreme metaphysical law of the entire universe.” Other scientists were quick to draw the conclusion that the cosmos is engaged in a one-way slide towards disorder, (going by a purely human understanding of what we mean by “disorder”,) hence the loose definition of entropy as the inexorable tendency of the universe and every closed system in it to move towards disorder. The French have a simpler explanation:

Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe!

(Everything wears out, everything breaks, everything passes away!)

One cannot begin to talk about morality and ethics without assuming something about human nature, and one cannot assume something about human nature without understanding a thing or two about the nature of the cosmos itself. Our goal must always be to obtain an understanding of human nature that is consistent with the movement of the cosmos. Book of Life describes the derivative nature of man as a function of the nature of a cosmos in which entropy is always increasing, a cosmos in which the greater order of change is flowing down the gradient that leads from low probability to high probability—from complexity to simplicity, from heterogeneity to homogeneity. A cosmos that is statistically and probabilistically oriented towards “disorder.”

HUMAN SYSTEMS IN A COSMIC ENVIRONMENT

In analyzing physical situations it is customary for scientists to focus their attention on some event, arrangement, or pattern, which they separate in their minds and label system. Everything apart from and outside the system they label environment. They then try to investigate the way in which the system interacts with its natural environment. Universal systems tend to interact with their environments in known ways. The second law of thermodynamics predicts the outcome of such behaviors thus:

A natural process that starts in one condition and ends in another will go in the general direction that causes the combined entropy (disorder) of the system and its environment to increase.

But does this law have human referents? Can it also be ruling on human interactions in such ways as to cause their outcomes to go in the general direction of increasing entropy? Can the same law be reducing the racial, cultural and ethnic gradients of the human race by the human defaults of genocide, pogrom, holocaust and ethnic cleansing? Can it be at work among the diverse factions of humanity, consummating their potential differences by conquest and empire, by fagot and inquisition, by sword and Kalashnikov, by terrorism and suicide bombings? Is there a rational, scientific explanation for the anatomy of human destructiveness? Does the magnitude of the violence and disorder found in the laboratory of human history have something to do with the nature of the cosmos itself?

Granted, any definition of “order” or “disorder” must specify a frame of reference. Granted, reality is “fluid.” Granted, open systems should not be confused with closed systems. Granted, increasing entropy does not translate into local determinism. Granted, granted, granted. But these scientific objections, in context quite valid, have little or nothing to do with the twin premises of Book of Life:

1) Material reality is statistically/probabilistically oriented towards increasing entropy(increasing disorder).

2) The derivative nature of man is governed by the same orientation.

Contrary to appearances, we human beings are not “detached” from the behavioral field of the cosmos—there is no ultimate discontinuity between the cosmic and the human. We are made from the physics of this universe, existentially invested by the nature of reality and naturally informed by the spirit of cosmos— pneuma tou kosmou (1 Corinthians 2:12). We cannot even blink an eyelid without degrading energy, which results in a net increase in the entropy of the entire universe. Yes, we may enjoy a measure of God-given autonomy and free will in a spiritual sense (depending on how one would define that word), but otherwise we are nothing more than physical systems wired into the fabric of the universe in ways that may yet take a century or two to fully comprehend.

The first pedestal of human arrogance had to do with the notion that we were the center of the universe. Happily that pedestal was smashed by the likes of Galileo. The second pedestal of human arrogance had to do with the notion that evolution had granted us privileged status on the tree of life, and that pedestal was smashed by the likes of Stephen Jay Gould. The last pedestal of human arrogance has to do with this business of trying to claim exemption for human behavior. The evidence found in the large sample of history would seem to be telling us that we enjoy no such exemption. Absent the influence of God in our lives we are nothing but physical systems (“a bunch of neurons”) moving from ordered to disordered states, just like any other physical system in the universe. Apart from any special worth and value bestowed on us by God, and apart from any spiritual liberty invested by Him in our earthly existence, we are nothing but physical systems whose behaviors are essentially cosmos-derived and cosmos-driven. The sooner we swallow our pride, come out of denial, admit this and smash the last pedestal of arrogance, the sooner will we be able to break free of the boundary conditions of error and failure.

The question we are really asking in Book of Life is this: How much of what we see catalogued in history can be said to be authentic and human, and how much derivative and elemental?

Freud was asking the same question before his death. Sigmund may have been seduced by his own brilliance, but he was brilliant nevertheless. Greatly disturbed by the horrors of the war, he spent the remainder of his life trying to find a rational explanation for the destructive tendencies of man, stumbling onto something that he labeled death instinct. In a 1930 letter to Albert Einstein he described the death instinct as some subtle force in living things that is trying to return life to its original state of inanimate matter. This is how he describes it in his Outline of Psychoanalysis (1949):

We may suppose that the final aim of the destructive instinct is to reduce living things to an inorganic state. For this reason we call it the death instinct.

There were rumors that Freud was drawing near to the concept of “entropy” just before he died. In a work entitled Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, the distinguished psychologist Erich Fromm considered the connection between Freud’s “death instinct” and what scientists would call “equilibrium states,” writing the following:

If Freud was influenced by these physical theories, they would have seemed to imply that the death instinct was only one particular instance of general physical law…. Whether or not Freud had in mind the connection between entropy and the death instinct does not matter too much. Even if he did not, the whole principle of excitation and energy reduction to the lowest minimal level rests upon the basic error that Dubos points to… of ignoring the fundamental difference between life and nonlife, between “organisms” and “things.”

Eric Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973, pp. 476-7

Fromm’s note of diffidence stems from the efforts of René Dubos and some others, among them two English writers, R. Kapp (1931) and L.S. Penrose (1931) to deny and derail any attempt to factor “entropy” into human behavior. And surely this is something that Freud himself would have understood! We humans are arrogant and anthropocentric creatures, deeply hurt by the suggestion that we might not be “in full control.” We are deeply insulted by the very suggestion that our material existence may, in some respect, resemble that of a mindless automaton.

Some of the arguments that were used to deny and stonewall “entropy” in 1935 are still in use today. These arguments may go something like this:

Granted, matter and energy are oriented towards increasing entropy, but they also have unknown properties whereby they can transform themselves into living organisms under certain conditions. And when that happens, they reverse their orientations and become anti-entropic in nature. The devil in matter becomes a saint when he transforms itself into living organisms.

Chickens have lips, pigs can fly, and the emperor is wearing purple robes! The reality is, of course, otherwise. Chickens don’t have lips, pigs can’t fly, and the emperor is naked. Matter and energy do not have mystical properties that enable them to organize themselves into living cells spontaneously. One elemental orientation underlies the physical constitution of “organisms” and “things” alike. The dichotomy assumed by Dubos and those English writers was a delusion. In the words of the Nobel physicist Richard Feynman:

The most important hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.

Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics

Addison-Wesley, 1963, Vol. 1, pp. 1-8

Granted, life requires highly specific combinations of matter, energy and information, but the orientations of matter and energy do not change in the transition from non-life to life. And they don’t magically transmute with the use of the word “emergent” either (a pejorative and catch-all that some atheists invoke when they cannot reconcile the nature of physical reality with the complexity of living things.) The so-called “emergent” properties of life are the products of Intelligent Design, having little or nothing to do with the orientations of matter and energy. It would be just as absurd to talk about the “emergent properties” of silicon. Computer chips do not derive their orientation from the “emergent properties” of silicon atoms; they derive them from the intelligence of those who designed them. Matter and energy do not undergo mystical transformations in the course of biogenesis. It is pure idolatry and nonsense to ascribe mystical properties to the atoms in living things, as though they were different from the atoms in non-living things.

A host of other tired arguments may also be used to deny, derail and stonewall attempts to factor “entropy” (a measure of probability) into human behavior. The most pedantic and pharisaical of these arguments usually goes something like this: “Entropy is a thermodynamic concept reserved unto heat transfers, steam engines and boiling kettles… (yada yada). Entropy has nothing to do with human order or disorder… (yada yada). You are trying to apply closed system physics to the human condition… .”

One needs to understand these attempts at intellectual evasion in a Freudian frame—what Freud himself would have called the last pedestal of human arrogance. The anthropocentric, proud and pompous root of depravity in human nature has always tried to claim privilege and exemption for itself, at one time even pretending that the universe revolved around itself. And now it is trying to claim exemption for human behavior—pretending that the laws that govern the natural/elemental behavior of matter and energy are not governing his own natural/elemental behavior. This is the main problem and hurdle confronting the human race as we speak—pride and hubris.

Book of Life provides rational and holistic definitions of order and disorder, confirming the existential stumbling block and cosmic pitfall that the Bible has been warning about for thousands of years, encouraging mankind to overcome both.

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