The End Game

Perfect Order & the Second Law of Thermodynamics

The moral law, C.  S. Lewis notes in Mere Christianity, is the only Law of Nature we can choose to disobey. The rest of them—like the laws of gravity or electromagnetism—demand compliance. They are so deeply woven into the fabric of the universe we rarely give them a second thought. But we should. They reflect the orderliness and constancy of our Maker. And they must be intricately fine-tuned, both individually and synergistically, for life to exist at all.

We are designed to operate under them, but unless we examine the physics that goes along with these laws of nature, it’s easy to miss their beauty and significance. Few of us could sufficiently understand the science that would lead to that kind of appreciation. But there is an exception. One of these laws is easy to comprehend.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the driving force behind the operation of everything from a computer’s microchip to the internal combustion engine to the biological machinery that runs every cell in your body. But the Second Law is more than just a useful but invisible feature of our world. Its simplicity camouflages the profound implications it has concerning the origin and nature of our cosmic home.

Two Laws

You understand the Second Law intuitively. You prove it every night when you plug in your cell phone to recharge it. As you are well aware, the battery only holds a fixed amount of useable energy. If you don’t restore it by connecting it to an external power source, it will eventually go dead. It’s not a mystery.

When it comes to using energy, our universe is like a giant battery. But unlike your cell phone, it doesn’t come with a power cord. The universe is what we call a “closed system.” There is no external source it can draw from to get recharged. As time goes on, a closed system uses the energy available to it until that energy is gone. And the laws of thermodynamics tell us how the process works.

The First Law of Thermodynamics—commonly referred to as the Law of Conservation of Energy—says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from one form into another. The Second Law tells us that the process of using energy only goes in one direction.

You understand this, too.

Energy Flow

Imagine that you have a match in your hand. The head of the match is made of combustible material that has the potential to create a flame. There is a fixed amount of potential energy concentrated in its head. When you strike it, the potential chemical energy in the tip transforms into the heat and light you see as the matchhead burns. Both heat and light energy disperse into the room. You see the light. And, if you had a way to measure it, you could also detect an increase in the room’s temperature.

Notice that you haven’t created any energy in this scenario. You’ve just observed the transformation of energy from one kind into two others.

Now consider this. Would you ever walk into a room holding a little wooden stick and have any expectation that the heat and light dispersed in that room could suddenly combine themselves into a glowing flame, then coagulate into a ball of chemicals on the end of your stick? If you consider that to be a silly question, you understand thermodynamics.

The Second Law simply formalizes what you already know to be true. It says this process of transforming energy is irreversible. You know that. But you might not know the technical, scientific term for the concept. It’s called entropy. The Second Law says that in a closed system, entropy always increases.

Don’t be intimidated by the word “entropy.” It’s simply a word for “level of chaos.” Increasing entropy means things get more chaotic. If you have a garage, you understand this. In the spring, you sweep it out, hang up all your tools, and straighten out the stuff on your shelves. It looks great. But by November, without any effort on your part, the garage has become a complete disaster. That’s the Second Law at work. Left to itself, the entropy of your garage always increases. Same with your kids’ bedroom closets.

In our matchstick example, the concentrated energy in the tip was transformed into the more dispersed and chaotic forms of heat and light. Things would never go the other way. The natural world tends toward disorder, not order.

Divine Implications

You understand these properties of energy transformation implicitly just from your experience of living in the real world. But the divine implications that follow from them become clear when you imagine running these processes backward.

Because the universe is a closed system with no way of getting recharged, we can deduce a couple of things about it. For starters, we know that the whole system cannot have been doing this energy transformation thing forever. If it had been going on for an infinite amount of time, all the energy would have already been used up. Our cosmos-sized battery would be dead.

But it’s not.

That means that the universe began its energy transformation process at some time in the finite past—at a point when the universe’s energy source was as full as it ever would be. It turns out that the Second Law leads us to the same inference as does Big Bang Cosmology, with which it is inextricably linked. The universe must have had a beginning. And, because beginnings need Beginners, the Second Law implies that a Creator set the whole energy transformation process in motion.

A Perfect Start

The Second Law points to a Beginner for sure. But it does more than that. Consider another implication that comes with our observations about the flow of energy.

Running the clock backward would also mean reversing the level of entropy in the universe as a whole. The farther back we go in time, the less chaotic things become. Reversing the process back to where it started, we reach the point where the entropy level disappears altogether.

Zero entropy. You can’t run the clock farther back than that.

This isn’t just another way to see that the universe had to have had a beginning. It reveals something about the nature of that beginning. Think about what it means to have identified a condition of “zero entropy.” If entropy is the level of disorder in a system, zero entropy is a place of perfect order. And that sounds like a very God-like place to be.

We have to be careful here. God is not part of the physical universe. To say he is would be to suggest a form of pantheism. But pointing out that the initial condition of the physical universe was a state of perfect thermodynamic order does say something about the nature of the One behind it all.

The Force of Laws

We choose to reject the Moral Law. And the human propensity to do so has created an ethically chaotic world. We see the consequences of it every day. Even those who deny God’s existence cry for justice from within the chaos. Those cries are tacit admissions that there is a perfect standard of goodness that isn’t being met. Our ability to complain about evil depends on the existence of a Moral Law that is grounded in God’s perfect nature. The Second Law—a law we have no choice but to obey—leads us through a different form of chaos to the same conclusion.

The simple power of the Second Law is so commonplace we give it no thought. So fundamental is it to our existence, we quite literally can’t do without it. But every time we flip on a light, or gaze into a blazing fire, or feel the warmth of the sun on our face, we should see it. The Second Law is evidence, not just that our Maker exists, but that the universe he created has reflected his perfect nature from the first instant it came to be.