Appendix B: The Pessimism of Cosmic Evolutionism
Appendix B is a reprint of Chapter 2 of my book, Is the World Running Down? (1988). You can download the book here.
I began Chapter 2 with a 1944 quotation from the British physicist, Sir James Jeans.
Physics tells the same story as astronomy. For, independently of all astronomical considerations, the general physical principle known as the second law of thermo-dynamics predicts that there can be but one end to the universe -- a "heat-death" in which the total energy of the universe is uniformly distributed, and all the substance of the universe is at the same temperature. This temperature will be so low as to make life impossible. It matters little by what particular road this final state is reached; all roads lead to Rome, and the end of the journey cannot be other than universal death.
I could have multiplied these citations, going back to the early 1900s. The message is uniformly pessimistic. The only cosmologists who are mute against this were those who proclaimed universal cosmic cycles, who were simply dressing Hindu cyclical philosophy in a scientific smock. There have been almost no cosmologists in the West who have held this position. Today, I don't think there are any.
The implacable pessimism of this worldview gives to Christians an enormous advantage. They do not believe that the second law of thermodynamics will apply forever. They believe that there will be a final judgment, and the second law of thermodynamics will be repealed by God for eternity. There will be progress in the world beyond the final judgment. This progress will be the exclusive possession of covenant-keepers. Covenant-breakers will have steady-state existence through eternity. Things will never get better, and things will never get worse. But they will be so bad, that those who know that things will not get worse will not be comforted.
If there is no God to impute meaning today, tomorrow, or in eternity, then life has no meaning, other than that imputed by individuals, and all individuals are dying. Those who hold such a view of life often use the phrase: "History will judge." No, it won't. The heat death of the universe will eliminate all life, and there will be no one to judge retroactively the meaning of anything.
Cosmic evolutionists don't talk about this in public very often. They know that a forthright admission of what they really believe about the future will undergird what they say about the present. They know that the common mass of humanity does not want to believe that life is meaningless. But that is what all cosmic evolutionists teach in principle. If there is no sovereign God to impute meaning to life, and if all life will end in the heat death of the universe, then whatever happens today is noise, ethically speaking. There is neither cosmic good nor cosmic bad.
The vast majority of humanity has never been willing to live with such a philosophy. This philosophy is the intellectual plaything of a tiny handful of scribblers, third-grade philosophers with degrees in science, and morose arsonists. They do not represent humanity as a whole. If they were more open about what they believe, and if they self-consciously developed public philosophies of what they believe, hardly anyone would pay any attention to them.
This is why Christians in every field should be self-conscious about the inherent optimism of the Christian worldview. This is certainly true of Christian economists. They can proclaim economic growth, which is the only social good that almost all economists publicly affirm, because economic growth is assured by a God who is sovereign over the affairs of men, and whose creation reflects a cause-and-effect principle tied to God's ethics. In other words, there is a relationship between doing good and doing well. This relationship is guaranteed by a sovereign God. It is not guaranteed by humanism.
The idea that people can do well by doing good is antithetical to the primary presuppositions regarding the cosmos that are preached by consistent believers in cosmic evolution. Cosmic evolution is ultimately cosmic devolution. This is guaranteed by the second law of thermodynamics and its inevitable effect in the cosmos: entropy.
The Christian economist should not believe that every advance that we see in life is based on an even greater destruction of valuable and irreplaceable energy from the closed environment of the cosmos. Christianity teaches that the world will run out of time, meaning cursed time, at the final judgment (Matthew 25). It teaches that the world will not run down in eternity, for the second law of thermodynamics will no longer apply. Christians are not threatened eternally by the second law of thermodynamics. Our philosophy is not threatened by it. But the philosophy of all forms of humanism is threatened by it.
These facts should provide great optimism to Christians in every area of life. It is only because humanists are not consistent with what they say is the foundation of cosmic evolution -- the second law of thermodynamics -- that they are able to the optimism associated with Christianity and parade it as if their philosophy had produced it. It has not produced it. Their philosophy has taught the opposite.