ESCHATOLOGY - RAKE'S PROGRESS ?
15th May 2002
The next issue, Number 72, will appear on 15th June 2002.
An old kinsman of mine - Uncle Ned - often said that "Truth is forged by the irresistible hammer of faith impinging on the immovable anvil of doubt."
Nowhere is this great insight the more starkly visible than in the subject of eschatology. The philosophical dictionary defines this word as the study of "last things" - the cosmic end-game - Judgment, Eternity (blissful or otherwise) and all that sort of thing.
There is nothing quite so dependably disconfirmed by experience as our longest term predictions; those predictions are the ones that are the farthest extrapolated from empirical data and so are, we must suppose, liable to the greatest error.
Human beings never know as much as outspoken individuals claim to know and what we don't know we feel compelled to make up as we go. It takes some rare degree of maturity to live with perennial doubt. We speak glibly of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In reality we are doing pretty well if we get more than a glimpse of the first .......... the second and third members of this set are for ever elusive. Freedom is, in some ways, the assertion of the right to err - especially the right to be dangerously wrong about the second and third of these categories.
A better trio might be things we know, things we don't know and things we don't even suspect - things we don't know we don't know.
Eschatology is the theologians' parlour game - although game is perhaps the wrong word for, in this particular pastime, people make up the rules as they go along. But no - not quite! There is the possibility of extrapolating from the received laws of physics to what the ultra-far future might hold. A serious attempt to do this extrapolation was made by a writer in the philosophical magazine PHILO. The author was very ready to acknowledge that his perceptions of the 'last things' was very tentative. I responded by sending him an essay of mine - which I summarise below (in edited form).
RAKE'S PROGRESS ?
Big Bang protagonists often resort to the analogy of playing the film 'Expanding Universe' backwards to infer that the origin of the universe resided in a a very small whatever it was.
How about playing the Second Law of Thermodynamics backwards? If we take this law to express the inexorable spontaneous (but not instantaneous) crumbling of order into disorder - unless appropriate energy inputs occur to re-instate bits of order - then we can fantasise rather interestingly.
Assuming that the wind-back is complete (just like the notional Big Bang wind-back) then we could infer that in the beginning there was a quite static condition of perfect order which consisted of a large (but finite - see First Law) stock of potential energy. In the end, that order will have become total disorder and the entire stock of once-potential energy will have become degraded to equi-potential energy - energy that can never be tapped, never put to work. This is because equi-potential energy comprises no potential-gradients - no slopes for things to roll down, no springs to uncoil, no struts to buckle, no ties to snap, no explosive mixtures to blow up, no temperature gradients to flatten themselves, no electrical potential to overcome the resistance of imperfect insulators - nothing with any built-in tension ever to break out into change (and hence needing no time flux to which change could be referred). We are assuming both the First Law - that there is no change in the quantity of energy in a closed system and that the universe is a closed system 'within the meaning of the Act', so to speak.
We can generate a lot of unfalsifiable mileage by asking such unanswerable questions as ...... who made the initial order, who brought imperfection into it, who set up the Second Law, who set that law rolling and, thus, who willed the consequent ultimate state of deconstructedness?
Interested persons could suggest that, given that it was a real event, the Big Bang must have been antedated by the possibility of its happening as a tiny singular bit of perfect order going off bang. What is more, if we assume that some conceivable post-bang paths were open but that some were closed (being logically impossible or merely physically impossible) then there must have been a framework of possibilities and restrictions, logical and physical, antecedent to the bang. The 'laws of nature' cannot be wholly subjective constructions of ours. By whatever means ...... the universe 'knows how to work'; those means do not rest upon our telling it what to do. It was already doing it long before we arrived to see some order in it.
Theology is an addictive game about 'The Universe, Life and All That' - rather as chess is a game related to mediaeval warfare. Theologians could have a ball with a scenario that begins with timeless perfect order, gets itself fatally flawed and ends in timeless total disorder. The scope for God and the Devil is almost endless - but only almost, because these two players (assuming them to be really existent beings) would presumably both be lost without trace in the ultimate equi-potential mush. Fitting us into this theological framework, ....... could provide pensionable employment for many a brain worthy of more pressing challenges.
Where are we in all this?
It is important to bear in mind a number of things about the spontaneous decay of order into disorder: one is that the decay is by no means instantaneous and another is that energy input, in an appropriate form, can give rise to a temporary and localised development of order from disorder. For example the eventual cessation of the sun's output - indeed of the sun's very existence as a distinct entity - has not prevented the sun from radiating (for example) ultra-violet and infra-red energy to a (cosmically speaking) temporary Earth for long enough for some of the materials comprising the Earth to become ordered into an environment from which micro, plant and animal life-forms have been able to emerge. These life-forms will no doubt be lost in the overall disorderly demise of the solar system but their very emergence, albeit fleetingly, exemplifies the notion of energy input being able, temporarily and locally, to reverse the larger order-to-disorder scenario.
That's where we are at - if my understanding of the Second Law is sound. We exist because a temporary (cosmically speaking) diversion in the inexorable descent from order to disorder has enabled the emergence a life form (ourselves) capable, to some extent, of comprehending that descent but powerless to stop it.
We comprehend that descent by way of observation experiment and inferential model making - by way of science validated by the knowhow it gives us.
But there is a problem - the perceived 'uniformity of nature'. Without this uniformity, science, and indeed daily life, can be seen to be inconceivable. But what if the order-to-disorder is itself disorderly? If that is the case then the current uniformity of nature is a dubious concept perhaps needing to be refined by postulating metaphorical islands of surviving order in a sea comprising both decaying order and already terminal disorder. Science, on that model, happens on the island of order on which we act out our being.
On that basis we can find some fragile credibility for the alleged paranormal ...... phenomena that are the subject of much persistent anecdote but which, it seems pretty certain, fail rigorous tests of validation. Perhaps the paranormal resides in those parts of the sea of disorder that are inexorably eroding the shores of our island of order. Perhaps telepathy (say) works sometimes - but not dependably and is, hence, not rigorously demonstrable.
Returning to the famous Big Bang, perhaps this was the instant when an infinitely small and totally orderly entity , consisting of a huge amount of potential energy, went off bang scattering this and that in an expanding format in which some energy could, for a while, spawn the bits of order from which we have sprung. But it had to be a format heading into the ultimate disorder in which all identifiable things and processes will cease to be. "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust" isn't the half it. In the beginning there were no ashes and no dust and, in the end, there will be none. The whole show, that we think we know and feel we love, is ultimately a lot of potential energy degrading into an equal lot of equi-potential energy.
Perhaps we are but self-applauding extras in a cosmically momentary blip in the Rake's Progress of total order to total disorder. We may be the Biggest Show on Earth but we are one of the smaller shows in the universe.
E.S.
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