“For the creature (creation) was made subject to vanity (futility), not of its own will, but by reason of Him who subjected it, in hope, because the creation itself will be set free from the bondage of corruption (its bondage to decay) into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:20-21). 

In the early 1800’s, steam engines were “the” advanced technology. And the young French military engineer Nicolas Carnot decided he wanted to really understand their efficiencies, not only in practice but in theory. Some steam engines were more efficient, and some less efficient, at converting heat to work. And there always seemed to be a large component of heat that could not be harnessed into work. He believed that inferior French technology contributed to the downfall of Napoleon. He finally published his findings in Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire in 1824, which established the foundations of the science of thermodynamics.

German physicist and mathematician Rudolf Clausius studied Carnot’s work and, in 1850, published his seminal paper providing the fundamental mathematics for the study of heat and energy: On the Moving Force of Heat and the Laws of Heat which May be Deduced from It. He coined the term “entropy” from the Greek word for “transformation” to measure the energy in a system unavailable for work. And he famously summarized “these laws of the universe”, as they came to be called, the first and second laws of thermodynamics, as “The energy of the universe is constant; the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum”. In other words, “energy unavailability” tends to its maximum.  

Both “Laws” support a biblical worldview. After the miraculous work of creation, Genesis tells us, “And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made” (Genesis 2:2). In other words, the 1^st Law supports the biblical idea that since the universe was created, the creation is finished, and energy is only changing forms within the universe.

The 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics says that as the energy of the universe changes form, its overall direction is toward more “unavailability”; overall energy availability is dissipated - it “decays”. The law predicts that energy conversion is always inefficient. For example, waste heat energy is always generated from machines performing work. Matter is fundamentally energy, so matter in its various forms naturally decays toward more dissipation. Gases, for example, always dissipate to the most widely scattered randomized state available within the space they are contained. Increasing entropy is arguably the most verified and far-reaching principle of science.

The law of increasing entropy has been extended to all kinds of phenomena. It governs the direction of chemical reactions via the concept of “free energy” introduced by another founder of thermodynamics, American physicist J. Willard Gibbs, in 1876. And through Austrian mathematician and physicist Ludwig Boltzmann’s famous equation, entropy is known to be at the heart of probability theory, predicting that the most dispersed and chaotic states of particles are the most probable. Entropy is now also mathematically applied to the loss of clarity in communication theory (information transfer) through poor language use, interferences, and other degradations (more on that next week).

The 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics, one of the most repeatedly verified and foundational “laws of the universe,” is also a huge supporter of a biblical worldview. The creation is truly “in bondage to decay” (dissipation) as in the verse quoted at the top of this blog post (Romans 8:20-21). The Bible teaches that spiritual and moral corruption led to physical corruption of the original “Edenic” creation (Genesis 3). When man first sinned against his Creator, God had to curse His creation to stay true to His perfect righteousness and perfect justice. The curse is the frustration of the death-process, i.e., decay, corruption of initial order, and increasing disorder, known scientifically as increasing entropy. And we must toil incessantly to overcome the irksome natural dissipations of increasing entropy: “…cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow (toil) you shall eat of it all the days of your life… for you are dust and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:17-19). As Professor P.W. Atkins of Oxford University puts it in his book, The Second Law, “…the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the un-stemmable tide of chaos” (Atkins, 1984).

But the good news, the very good news, (the gospel) is that God has made a way for corruption to put on incorruption. “O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25). God overcame entropy when He gave us the miracle of the personhood and resurrection of Jesus Christ, by whom we can be saved from the consequence of sin through faith in Him and His marvelous work on the cross on our behalf!

As the Scriptures say, “…flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does corruption inherit incorruption… So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal has put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory’ (1 Corinthians 15:50, 54-55). Those who trust in Jesus Christ can look forward to a redeemed life in glorious “Edenic” surroundings with our Maker and Savior! Indeed, the earth and the universe itself will be redeemed (Revelation 21:1).

-  Atkins, P.W., The Second Law, Scientific American Library, Scientific American Books, W.H. Freeman and Co, New York, New York, p 200, 1984.

-  Morris, Henry M., The Biblical Basis for Modern Science, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, MI, 1984.

-  Shannon, C.E., "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", Bell System Tech Journal, 1948.

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