The Creation Groans

What does an egg smashed on the floor have in common with a squirt of Eau de Parfum that soon suffuses a room? And what do both have to do with the “cosmic heat death,” when the universe (supposedly) will run down and burn out, with the only energy left being too diffuse to be transformed back to useful work?

They’re all part of the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy, which teaches that nature tends toward disorder, and though in an immediate context a local decrease in entropy can be staved off by increasing it elsewhere, in the long haul things will not get worse before they get better, but only worse. And the more we try to stop things, the worse they get.

Though most laws of physics can work in reverse—which means, ideally, that we should be able to restore the smashed egg or return the perfume to the bottle—your great-great-grandchildren’s great-great-grandchildren will have long been dust before you make much headway with either the egg or the Eau de Parfum. Why? To use a simple analogy: with one orderly way to arrange a deck of 52 cards, and 8 x 1067 disorderly ways to do so—which is more likely, order or disorder? There you have it: entropy—why everything turns to rot.

In Entropic Philosophy: Chaos, Breakdown, and Creation, Shannon M. Mussett tries a positive spin on it all. “Focusing solely,” she writes, “on disorder, leveling, dissolution, and death almost invariably leads to pessimism, creating the feeling that no matter how mightily we struggle, all our efforts are ultimately in vain.”[1] Instead, entropy “allows for new permutations and forms to come into being. . . . Death in one system is potentially life for another. The withering of one form often contributes to the prospering of another. Degeneration in one arrangement can become a stimulant to another. Chaos and destruction are also nurseries of creation.”[2]

Paul, however, is not doing physics; he’s describing the results of the Fall and, more important, the hope that we have despite it.

Entropy is linked with the passage of time, yes (no time, no change), and whatever beneficial “nurseries of creation” or “new permutations and forms” might arise from entropic breakdown—more is, always, ultimately, lost than is gained. Think: Granny’s corpse (“the withering of one life form”) fertilizing a few cabbages (“contributes to the prospering of another”). That’s the second law of thermodynamics.

Mussett’s book is a secular attempt (another) to derive hope from fleeting protoplasmic existences taunted by an eternity that, they know, will leave those existences, and every memory of them, lost and forever forgotten. She failed. They all do. I have read, and still read, secular writers grappling with the question “What’s it all about?” And no matter how erudite and clever the authors—always, in the end, death (entropy) not only negates the answers but exposes the desperation behind them. (Granny for a few cabbages . . . ?)

Paul, in Romans 8:18-22, depicts a groaning creation subject to degradation, corruption, futility, and death, which, though not exactly the second law of thermodynamics, sure sounds like it. Paul, however, is not doing physics; he’s describing the results of the Fall and, more important, the hope that we have despite it. “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:20, 21). 

Entropy, corruption, death—they do not have the final say. Jesus does, and what He says is that, through Him, we are promised eternal life in the new heavens and the new earth. And whatever the new physics is there, we surely won’t fret about it as we do the old here.

[1] Shannon M. Mussett, Entropic Philosophy: Chaos, Breakdown, and Creation (Philosophical Projections), p. 4 (Function). Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid., p. 197.