Finding God in an untidy room

It is hardly the middle of the week yet and my apartment is already in a state of high alert. I’m just waiting for some terrible sequence of events to occur. The elements are all there: open computer boxes; a tangled web of power, USB, network and other miscellaneous cables that will make the ARPANET suffer from performance anxiety and pull back its spawning tentacles like a frightened amoeba; way too many power sockets draining from one power source always screaming “Feed me!”; all kinds of flammables, including ESL-notes, books ranging from Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” to a mini Bible library; enough CDs and DVDs to fill a section at a music store; half empty cups, dishes and cutlery, each breading a unique bacteria, of which one or two colonies have already invented the wheel and another is experimenting with creating fire; partnered shoes and separated socks; deodorant canisters and me.

And this leads me to believe that God exists. Not due to my providential safety in such a hostile environment (although it does help), but rather what it reminds me of.

Entropy: A spontaneous tendency towards disorder in a system, where differences (e.g. in temperature, pressure, the tidiness of an apartment, etc.) are smoothed out, as potential energy is released. (See also the Second Law of Thermodynamics.)

Or to put it simply – if you want order, you have to put in energy. Without effort your room (desk, marriage, business – you choose the noun) will decay into a heap of dust, or a den of chaotic atrocities. The latter not being the lively kind of atrocities you find in your local pub, but rather the fluidy kind you find splattered on the pavement outside of the pub.

A simple example of entropy is to drink your coffee shortly after it is prepared, unless you like it cold. The temperature of the hot cup of mocha smoothes out until it is in equilibrium with its environment. That’s entropy. To keep it from happening you would need to give your coffee an external heat source.

However, regardless of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the entropy-principle, there is still so much order, variety and vibrancy in the world. Go think this over. It is case in point for the existence of God.

The great preacher Morris Venden so eloquently argues the existence of God by means of one word: “Life!”

…ooOoo…

Now what a great closing it would have been if I could have ended this post just there. However, that would not give the scientific community an opportunity to counter. So allow me to do it on their behalf.

To all the geeky ones out there – did you know that entropy can produce order? This is according to the Law of Maximum Entropy Production, which basically says that the system will choose the path (or assembly of paths) that minimizes the potential or maximizes the entropy at the fastest rate given the constraints.

Think of it this way. Imagine you had a tank of water with two draining pipes, a big one and a small one. The “system” would “choose” to use the bigger pipe over the smaller one to drain the water. This Law of Maximum Entropy Production produces a predictable orderliness. The claim is that the planetary entropy (entropy on our planet and within the context of our solar system) are using an assembly of paths “that minimizes the potential or maximizes the entropy at the fastest rate given the constraints.” And according to the Law it is argued that Life and biological, psychological and sociological order are such paths that minimizes the potential or maximizes the entropy at the fastest rate.

Seeing how quickly we humans are destroying the Earth, rushing it towards a once more state of being void and without form, I can almost agree with such a fanciful interpretation of Life, the Universe and Everything.

However, even this rationalization far from adequately explain the original impetus, une poussée formidable, as the French philosopher – of Polish, Jewish, English and Irish descent (don’t ask!) – Henri-Louis Bergson exclaimed; the seemingly continuous sustenance; the fantastic variety* and complexity of everything; the wonder of Life and the witness of Providence – generally, but also as experienced subjectively in individual lives.

...ooOoo...

* Some would have you believe that Evolution is the cause for all the variety we see. Stop and think about this. Darwinian evolution is based upon natural selection. Natural selection do not encourage variety, instead it weeds out variety. A creature with any mutation that is “less fit” goes instinct. What we see in nature is more adherent to an entropic model (increasingly fewer species are surviving), than a survival-of-the-fittest-produces-more-variety-model. The entropy principle is one of many death-strokes for traditional Darwinian Evolution. Practically no self-respecting Scientist would still admit to being a traditional Darwinist.