Tom Pittman's WebLog

2024 December 24 -- Entropy

I am now in the period of my life where I start to notice significant decay in my faculties. Maybe I made these mistakes and forgot these things all my life, but now I notice them. Both my parents died one month before their respective 85th birthdays, and my sister (younger than me) is already gone, six years ago. Of course she did unhealthy things, but both parents (other than some overweight, perhaps like myself) took reasonably good care of themselves, yet they both lost their marbles going into the last year of their lives. If that is hereditary, I have less than three years of useful work left.

God can do anything He wants to do. Pretty much all of my work all my life was provided by God, and if He wants me to be productive beyond my statistical lifetime, He can do that. Or He can take me home any time He wants, I have no "bucket list." My sister was deathly afraid of losing her marbles so that she could not "love Jesus," and God honored her wish by taking her quickly. I would hope the same for myself, but God decides, not I. Or maybe dementia is not so total as it appears to the rest of us, and I can still be true to God while the rest of the world has only pity.

The Entropy Law of physics holds that (apart outside influence) things only run down. In my first year of grad school I learned that computer pioneer Claude Shannon showed that the same formula applies to information as the Entropy Law does for energy. That means that if you stop typing on your keyboard, unplug the internet, pull out the USB, the computer can only run down, destroy information, never get smarter all by itself. The so-called "Artificial Intelligence" community are in denial. They have been taught that all manner of system complexity can -- and did! -- come about by the accumulation of random events, so it must be a law of physics, and that's what they are doing to make computers appear smart. It's not working as well as they promised, but double down -- that's a futile effort by gamblers to beat the odds by continuing to spend money -- and add more carbon to the atmosphere, they fully expect to eventually win. The physics says they cannot.

Christians see the Entropy Law as a consequence of the Fall of Adam. All the species of Life that ever existed were in the Garden of Eden for Adam to name and care for, and representatives of the ones that couldn't survive the Flood were in the Ark with Noah. The rest of them, "billions of dead things, buried in rock layers, laid down by water, all over the earth." It all goes downhill. It's a Law of Nature.

Except.

God continues to supply energy to the earth (from the sun), so the earth is not a closed system in the energy domain. It's a Gift from God. Jesus said so. What about the information domain? Same thing. Jesus didn't say so explicitly, but one of his followers did:

If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. -- James 1:5 [oNIV]
Did you catch that? God injects information into the world the same as He injects energy into the world, and He gives it to everybody without finding fault, just like the sun and the rain, to His obedient servants and to the atheists alike. Except we get to ask, they choose not to.

The Entropy Law says that there is no new information, no new energy in a closed system, and while there is a continuous flow of energy from the sun, there is no such flow of information. Darwin and his followers say there is a continuous flow of new species (new DNA, new information) for millions of years, but physics says not, and nobody has ever shown otherwise (see my essay "Biological Evolution"). But where did all the human inventions come from? Surely humans are creative? Entropy says not. God said that He injected (and continues to inject) that information into the system.

I thank God that I get to ask for more, and He gives it to me, when I ask, and also when I forget to ask.

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