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THE LAWS of physics contain many elegant analogies to principles of human behavior. This comes as no surprise to an Orthodox rabbi, who believes that one God created both the physical and human worlds, and the laws that apply to each. The monotheistic traditions, beginning with Judaism, teach that God’s act of creation preceded, and transcended, the physical laws that we know today. Without His intervention, the universe remains captive to the third law of thermodynamics: entropy is always increasing. In other words, defeating entropy is a God-like act. While only He can reverse entropy at the universal level, we humans can at least create small oases of physical and spiritual light. These oases, our neighborhoods, communities, and other associations, provide a valuable framework for our lives. Building them fights entropy, and is a worthy pursuit for beings made in God’s image.

The natural tendency to entropy reveals that our normal question about the decline of civilization has the order of things backward. We usually ask, “What has caused our lives to become so much more squalid, expensive, and dangerous?” Instead, we should be asking, “What did we use to do that kept society so stable, safe, and prosperous?” To use another analogy, don’t ask what made the airplane tumble out of the sky. The answer is simple—it ran out of fuel. Ask rather where the fuel came from and how it was converted into the thrust that kept the craft airborne.

RD

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Rabbi Daniel Lapin

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THE LAWS of physics contain many elegant analogies to principles of human behavior. This comes as no surprise to an Orthodox rabbi, who believes that one God created both the physical and human worlds, and the laws that apply to each. The monotheistic traditions, beginning with Judaism, teach that God’s act of creation preceded, and transcended, the physical laws that we know today. Without His intervention, the universe remains captive to the third law of thermodynamics: entropy is always increasing. In other words, defeating entropy is a God-like act. While only He can reverse entropy at the universal level, we humans can at least create small oases of physical and spiritual light. These oases, our neighborhoods, communities, and other associations, provide a valuable framework for our lives. Building them fights entropy, and is a worthy pursuit for beings made in God’s image.

The natural tendency to entropy reveals that our normal question about the decline of civilization has the order of things backward. We usually ask, “What has caused our lives to become so much more squalid, expensive, and dangerous?” Instead, we should be asking, “What did we use to do that kept society so stable, safe, and prosperous?” To use another analogy, don’t ask what made the airplane tumble out of the sky. The answer is simple—it ran out of fuel. Ask rather where the fuel came from and how it was converted into the thrust that kept the craft airborne.