Entropy, in a broad sense, describes the tendency of systems—whether physical, biological, or social—to move toward disorder or randomness over time.
Globally, entropy is a universal principle: order requires energy to sustain, and without it, systems naturally decay into chaos. [Grok]
Despite the above, the empirical data suggests that the opposite might be true – that entropy need not be inevitable!
Humanity has shown that entropy can be resisted, and even reversed. We can call this “civilization.”
Mankind reverses entropy not just by turning forests into cities – we can do it by creating energy sources that in a normal physical world would be untapped (fission and fusion, and even fossil fuels).
History supports the anti-entropy concept. Despite all the chaos of the primordial age, the world did come into being, one way or another. The Creation of the world described in the Torah is deeply negentropic: G-d started with a chaotic mush, but then He separated and distinguished and created and invested so that everything became much more structured and hierarchical. Even the Big Bang / coincidence thesis relies on highly organized and complex biological structures emerging from ooze and mush.
Today’s organized and functional civilizations are clearly less chaotic and more energetic than any ancient society we can name. The laptop on which I am writing this piece is a testament to the anti-entropic force that is mankind. Every part of it is organized and fit for purpose.
In the minds of scientists, entropy requires that the universe is always and necessarily dying, and there is no golden age in the future. The belief in entropy is ultimately nihilistic and thus stands against Judeo-Christianity and the religious shared vision of progress and development. Which leads to a question: is the argument that entropy is inevitable, really a theological belief held by anti-religious scientists, who desperately insist that the physical world is all there is?
The physical world may well always move toward entropy. But human history and lived experience supports the idea that mankind, as a divinely-gifted force, is capable of reversing the flow.
If this is true, it helps explain an ongoing theme in the Torah – actively working to organize and counteract and improve the physical world and the damage that is wreaked by the passage of time. The Torah commands us to find, preserve and enhance the vitality within everything we do or touch. We try to emulate G-d by making order out of chaos, by giving meaning and purpose to all that is otherwise mindless animalistic and fundamentally entropic.
Entropy may be a physical “law.” But spiritual beings can – indeed, must – seek to make the physical world more advanced than it can make itself.