The Ancient Tradition

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Music

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You’re listening to The Ancient Tradition. A Wonk Media Production. Music provided by Joseph McDade. He is your host, Dr. Jack Logan.

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I’m Jack Logan. Welcome to the Ancient Tradition. Today’s episode is the terrifying second law of thermodynamics. And if you know anything about the second law of thermodynamics, it can be occasionally terrifying. But there’s this really special connection between the second law of thermodynamics and this incomprehensible brooding wind that we’ve been discussing. So I’m going to do that in this episode. We’re going to connect those two concepts together.

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And what you’re going to find by the end of this episode is that they really converge and provide us with this simple yet elegant explanation for the creation of the earth and the origin of life in the universe. It’s pretty neat. And we’re going to get to all of that in this episode. Before I jump in though, I wanted to let you know that I’m going to be out of the country during most of July. So our next episode won’t drop until the first part of August. Kind of keep that in mind. I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth.

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They’re going to keep coming. I mentioned towards the end of our previous episode in episode number 13, which was the incomprehensible brooding wind, that I was going to have a lot more to say about this wind in this episode. So that’s what I’m going to do. If you’re a regular listener, or if you’re a new listener and you’re just interested in these topics but you didn’t get a chance to listen to episode number 13 all the way through to the end, I highly, highly recommend that you do that. Go back, because it’s in the last 15 to 20 minutes of episode number 13.

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that you’re going to start to gain a foundational understanding of how the creation of the universe in life really came to be. Towards the end of the episode, you’re going to learn what caused the elements to transform, why they transformed, and how the transformation of the primordial elements set the stage for law and order in the universe. The last 15 to 20 minutes of episode number 13 really is truly foundational to the entire podcast.

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and it’s especially important for a lot of the stuff that we’re going to discuss in the next couple of episodes. So if you do that and go back and catch it up if you haven’t had a chance. Okay, so let’s jump in. In episode number 13, we covered a lot of different accounts of the primordial wind. We looked at the Judeo-Christian tradition, and we looked at ancient Egypt and the Vedic traditions. But there’s a lot more great stuff out there in the ancient record from all over the globe that I still want to…

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expose you to a little bit so you get a feel for how ubiquitous this aspect of the creation is in the ancient record. So today I want to start with ancient Mesopotamia. And for this then we’re going to have to return to the famous ancient Mesopotamian creation account, the Enuma Elish, which we’ve talked about several times in the podcast. If you’re interested in listening to an audio recording of the Enuma Elish, or you just haven’t had a chance to to listen to it yet,

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You can listen to a full audio recording of it on our sister podcast, The Ancient Tradition Audio Rit. Scholars date the Enuma Elish, this creation account, to between 1800 and 1600 BC, which means it’s really 4,000 years ago. So it’s one of the oldest creation myths that we have. If you’ll recall, it starts with the primordial waters, which are personified by the god Opsu. In the story, Opsu is slain.

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and his consort, Tiamat, then becomes the embodiment of chaos. At this point in the story then, a supreme being, the supreme deity of Babylon, Marduk. He’s the hero in the epic. His job then is to defeat Tiamat, who represents chaos, because she’s enraged, she’s upset, she’s seeking revenge because her spouse has been killed. You see what’s going on here. The Anuma Elisha is really highly

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symbolic. It’s a symbolic myth. In the story, Marduk represents the supreme God who’s seeking to establish order in the universe. But to do so, he’s got to conquer Tiamat, who’s the personification of disorder or chaos. So really, the Enuma Elish is a story of the battle or conflict between order and chaos. In tablet number four, we start, we see a lot of saber rattling going on.

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Marduk’s getting really ready in every way he possibly can to fight Tiamat or Chaos. And so listen very closely to how he accomplishes this. How does he actually take over and kill Chaos or Tiamat? It reads, and this is speaking of Marduk, quote, he made ready the bow. He chose his weapon. He slung a spear upon him and fastened it. He raised the club in his right hand. He grasped it.

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the bow and the quiver he hung at his side. He set the lightning in front of him. With burning flame, he filled his body. He made a net to enclose the inward parts of Tiamat. The four winds he stationed so that nothing of her might escape. The south wind and the north wind and the east wind and the west wind. He brought near to the net the gift of his father Anu. He created the evil wind and the tempest and the hurricane.

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and the fourfold wind and the sevenfold wind and the whirlwind and the wind which had no equal. He sent forth the winds which he had created, the seven of them, to disturb the inward parts of Tiamat. They followed after him. To the fight they came on, to the battle they drew nigh. The Lord spread out his net and caught her. And the evil wind, while as yet she had not shut her lips, the terrible winds filled her belly, and her courage

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was taken from her, and her mouth was opened wide. He seized the spear and burst her belly. He severed her inward parts. He pierced her heart. He overcame her and cut off her life. He cast down her body and stood upon it.” So at the end there you see, he’s standing upon Tiamat’s dead body, victory in every way. But did you catch how he slays her?

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What does he use to bring her down, to bring chaos down? He slays her with wind. Quote, he sent forth the winds which he had created to disturb the inward parts of Tiamat. The terrible winds filled her belly and her courage was taken from her. It’s after these winds have forced Tiamat into Marduk’s net, after the winds have taken her courage, then that Marduk stabs her and severs her inward parts.

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cuts off her life. It’s with the wind that Marduk destroys Tiamat, destroys chaos. This is very important. Just like we saw in episode number 13, it’s the wind that transformed, or as we would say from the Enuma Elish, slayed disorder, slayed the disorder of the primordial water, which we learned in episode number 11 where the disorganized chaotic primordial elements.

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And note too how we see some other themes here that we saw in episode number 13. We see here in the Enuma Elish that this wind is directly associated with Marduk. And it says, quote, he created the evil wind and the tempest and the hurricane. He sent forth the winds which he had created. It’s also interesting in the Enuma Elish that the text refers to Marduk and four winds.

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that he used these four winds to conquer Tiamat. It reads, quote, the four winds he stationed so that nothing of her might escape, the south wind and the north wind and the east wind and the west wind. So we gotta figure out what this means because it’s important to understand what these four winds symbolize because we’re gonna see these four winds show up all over in the ancient record. And so we gotta kind of get our, wrap our heads around a well.

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you know, what does this mean? What do they symbolize? So we got to start. Do you remember what number four symbolizes in the ancient world? If you don’t, we talked about it in episode number four. Did God reveal the ancient tradition in the Garden of Eden? Because we see the number four show up in this account quite a bit. And in that account, we noted that in the ancient world, the number four symbolizes geographic totality. In the Garden of Eden account, we saw that we have four rivers,

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They flow out of the center of the garden, and in the center of the garden was a tree of life, and that tree of life represented God. So these rivers flow to the four cardinal points, north, south, east, and west. And they symbolize that the vitalizing, life-giving power of God flows from His throne to the totality of His creation. His vitalizing, life-giving powers cover the entire world.

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Okay, so with this in mind, can you surmise what the four winds here in this Babylonian creation account symbolize? Like the four rivers in Eden, we’ve got the four winds and they represent geographical totality. But it’s a little different because in this case, they symbolize the notion that God’s vital essence covers the totality from north, south, east, and west of the entire pre-creative universe.

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So not just the world, we’re talking about the entire pre-creative universe, the entirety of the primordial waters. In other words, when Marduk stations the four winds at the cardinal points, this is just another way of saying that Marduk, or the wind that came out of God, like what we saw came out of Ptah, as we read in the Shabbatical Stone, blew through the entire expanse of the pre-creative universe. Not a single element went untouched.

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And that’s exactly what we surmised in episode number 13. And that’s also exactly what the Enuma Elish says. It reads, and listen closely here, the four winds he, Marduk, stationed so that nothing of her might escape. And by her, he’s talking about Tiamat, the chaotic primordial elements. So by using these four winds, which are assigned to the cardinal points,

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meant to understand that the totality of the pre-creative elements were touched by the wind or God’s life giving vital essence. Not a single disorganized chaotic element could escape. The triumph of Marduk over Tiamant is really meant to symbolize, just as we saw with the creator gods Ptah, Atum, Brahman, and Christ, which we’ve covered in the previous episode.

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meant to see that the god Marduk imposed order on the inert, disorganized, primordial elements and infused them with life. Every single one of them, not a single one of them could escape. So this is a victory indeed, a total victory of order over chaos, so much so that the enuma at least symbolizes it by Marduk standing upon the dead slain body of Tiamat.

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So by now you should be noticing right there are tremendous parallels between these religious traditions. And this is a little bit mind-boggling because it really does speak to a common source, a single ancient tradition out of which these stories derive when we see wind showing up in the same way. So bear in mind that the wind here is a story about God imposing order. And in the next couple of accounts I’m going to give you here, think about how this special brooding wind that came directly from God’s being

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slayed chaos and imposed order in the universe. And then in a couple of minutes, I’ll get to how this wind is associated with the second law of thermodynamics. If you’re familiar with the second law of thermodynamics, see if you can’t already think of a way that the two might be connected. All right, let’s look at an ancient Greek creation myth. And this comes from the book, The Anatomies of God, the Bible and Religion. As you listen to this,

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You’re going to hear a lot of the same elements that we discussed in the last episode. This is a summary of a Greek creation myth and it says, quote, In the beginning there was an empty darkness. The only thing in this void was Nyx, N-Y-X, a bird with black wings. With the wind she laid a golden egg, and for ages she sat upon this egg. Finally life began.

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stir. Okay, let’s do a little symbolism literacy test here. In this creation myth, this Greek creation myth, what does the dark void symbolize? What does the bird and the bird’s wings symbolize? What does the wind symbolize? What does the bird Nyx sitting on an egg symbolize? And we haven’t talked about this yet, but what do you think the egg itself symbolizes?

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So if you can answer four out of five of these questions, then you’re really well on your way to deciphering the ancient tradition that’s concealed in these symbols. So let’s look at what we have here. In this Greek creation myth, we have a black bird, which represents the Greek god Nix. The myth says that this bird uses the wind to lay a golden egg. And in the ancient world, this golden egg is known as the world egg.

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because the egg represents the source from which all life is born, like a baby chick breaking out of an egg. But for our purposes in this episode, it’s interesting that it’s the wind. It’s the wind that prepares the primordial waters for laying this egg. It reads, quote, With the wind she laid a golden egg, and for ages she sat upon this egg. It’s the wind, we see, that transforms the primordial waters and creates elements that are suitable for life.

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I don’t know if you also notice this too, we can also see in this myth the connection between the primordial wind and brooding. It’s pretty clear, which in this passage is clearly connected to the world egg. They sits on the egg and then we have the birth of the world come out of it. Let’s look at one more here. I don’t want to belabor this point, but I want you to see how this pillar of creation, the transformative effect of a primordial wind on the primordial waters shows up.

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with really considerable consistency all over the globe in many ancient records. So let’s look at the Gnostics. We’re going to look at a faction of the Gnostics, the Scythians, and this text is dated to between 170 and 236 AD, and it speaks of the primordial waters. It reads, quote, And into all this infinity, which is under heaven, there was scattered and distributed

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the fragrance of the spirit from on high. Then there came into being from the water the firstborn principle, a wind violent and turbulent in the cause of all generation. For making some agitation in the waters, it raises waves in them. So we see the exact same thing. We see the wind, but we see the wind having the same role. It is quote, the cause of all generation. That’s the role of the wind to bring about all generation.

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And as a quick aside, if you’re a regular listener, then you might’ve also caught the phrase, the fragrance of the spirit. Recall in episode number eight, the fragrant dew of paradise, that this fragrance was connected to the anointing oil, which was a symbol of the spirit, and it was fragrant like sweet smelling myrrh. So here we have the phrase, the fragrance of the spirit, connects them together.

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And this is in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and this refers to the spirit that’s associated with Christ, the anointed one, who wears the sweet, fragrant scent of myrrh, of the anointing oil on his being. Myrrh is the fragrance of God. So in this passage, this fragrance was scattered or distributed across the infinity at the time the wind began working on the disorganized elements. Did you catch that?

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So this is symbolic and it suggests in the Judeo-Christian tradition that there’s an association between Christ’s atoning sacrifice, which the fragrant myrrh symbolized, and the creative ordering power of the wind. And if you haven’t given episode number eight a listen, the fragrant dew of paradise, it’s really worth your time. As the podcast continues, I really hope you’re starting to see a lot of these things that we’ve been talking about, especially the symbols, because they’re going to show up.

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all over the globe in all kinds of different accounts. And what’s even more remarkable is that these symbols usually express the same ideas like we’re seeing here with the wind. Whenever we see wind in creation accounts, we see that this wind comes first directly from God and two has an ordering life-producing quality to it. And that’s something. Let’s look at another text from Japan. I haven’t talked about Japan yet, but I love some of the stuff I’ve been reading in Japan. It’s called the Kojiki, which means

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records of ancient matters. So this text is dated to around 712 AD. In this creation myth, we have two gods, Izanami and Izanagi, and they use a jeweled spear to, quote, stir the ocean. And it reads, quote, Hereupon all the heavenly deities commanded the two deities, his Augustnessness, the male who invites, and her Augustness.

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the female who invites, ordering them to make, consolidate, and give birth to this drifting land, granting to them an heavenly jeweled spear. They thus deigned to charge them. So the two deities, standing upon the floating bridge of heaven, pushed down the jeweled spear and stirred with it, whereupon, when they had stiffened the brine, till it went curdle, curdle,

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and drew the spear up, the brine that dripped from the end of the spear was piled up and became an island. This is the island of Onogoro. Pretty interesting myth. In this myth, the stirring motion of the spear or the stirring of the primordial elements is really akin to the wind in other myths. Izanami and Izanagi stir the elements with the spear until they stiffen.

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and can form into earth. So we get the same themes. In Aztec mythology we have the wind god Ahakadal who according to worldhistory.org was quote, regarded as a manifestation of the great feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl. He was sometimes known as Quetzalcoatl Ahakadal. In which guise he helped create humanity in the Aztec creation myth. Ahakadal means wind.

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as the god was regarded as a manifestation or wind aspect of the feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl, one of the most important deities in the Mesoamerican pantheon. Here we have Quetzalcoatl, the creator god, described as a Quetzal bird, which are absolutely spectacular birds if you’ve never seen one. You gotta check one out, go Google it. They’re amazingly beautiful, which is just like we saw in Egypt with the god Shu.

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who personified the wind attribute of the great god Atum. We have Aheketel personifying the wind aspect of Quattal. The Codex Barbonicus, which was written by Aztec priests shortly before the Spanish conquest, and two other codices dated to the mid 16th century, we find depictions of Quattal as the god of wind. In Aztec creation myths, Aheketel played a role in the creation of the world.

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and featured in these myths as Nahui Ehakidol, which translated means four winds. And because of this, he was also associated with the cardinal directions, north, south, east, and west. In the Mayan Popol Vuh, which we’ve talked about several times so far in the podcast, we find the Mayan creation myth. And it reads, and this comes from the Adrian Racinos translation, quote,

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Nothing which could make a noise, nor anything which might move or tremble or could make noise in the sky. There was nothing standing, only the calm water, the placid sea, alone and tranquil. Nothing existed. There was only immobility and silence in the darkness, in the night, only the creator, the maker, Tepeu Guskoumatz, who is the Mayan equivalent to the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl.

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The forefathers were in the water surrounded with light. They were hidden under green and blue feathers. Note how the gods here are covered with feathers. We have got that bird theme again. And were therefore called Gukumats. By nature, they were great sages and great thinkers. In this manner, the sky existed and also the heart of heaven, which is the name of God and thus he is called. Then came the word, Tepeu and Gukumats.

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came together in the darkness in the night, and Tepeu and Gugumatz talked together. They talked then discussing and deliberating. They agreed, they united their words and their thoughts. Then while they meditated, it became clear to them that when dawn would break, man must appear. Then they planned the creation and the growth of the trees and the thickets and the birth of life and the creation of man. Thus it was arranged in the darkness and in the night by the heart of heaven, who was called

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Okay, this is interesting because here you have the feathered bird gods meditating over what to create and the god Hurrican arranges for the creation to emerge. Can you guess what the god Hurrican is the god of? Yes, you guessed it. Hurrican is the god of wind. And yes, if you’re wondering, the English word hurricane is derived from this Mayan god Hurrican.

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So the next time you hear about a hurricane brewing in the Gulf Coast, think of Hurrican stirring up the primordial waters. After the god Hurrican joins the bird gods, the Popol Vuh says this, quote, together they conceived light and life. So there we have light again. The wind also plays a really important role in Native American creation myths.

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So let’s look at the Navajo. And amongst the Navajo, the wind was considered holy. The following creation account comes from the book, Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy by James McNelly. And before I read this account, the author says this, nilchil, meaning wind, air, or atmosphere, as conceived by the Navajo, is endowed with powers that are not acknowledged in Western culture.

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gives life, thought, speech, and the power of motion to all living things, and serves as the means of communication between all elements of the living world. Frank Goldtooth gave an account of the creation story in which Supreme Sacred Wind appeared as the supreme creator of this world. The Navajo Wind Deity is conceived to furnish the breath of life to the individual.

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This obviously reflects the same ideas that we see from Egypt to Japan. Navajo creation myths speak of this holy wind as four winds, a black wind, blue wind, and a yellow wind, and a white wind. So one of the Navajo creation accounts says this of these winds, quote,

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and creatures and made the lines of the fingers, toes, and heads of human beings and on the bodies of the different animals. The wind has given men and creatures strength ever since, for at the beginning they were shrunken and flabby until it inflated them and the wind was creation’s first food and put motion and change into nature, giving life to everything, even to the mountains and water.” I love the imagery. They were shrunken and flabby.

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and this wind inflated them. You know, it’s really interesting to see how there’s cultural interpretations of kind of the same concepts and ideas. And Apache tells this creation story, an Apache Indian, quote, in the beginning there was nothing, no earth, no living beings, there was only darkness, water, and cyclone, the wind. A band of Apache Indians known as the Lipans tell this of the wind in the creation, quote.

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When wind got to the surface, he forced himself through a mass of water which covered the earth. Then he pushed the water to one side using his strength and his tail so that some land finally appeared. With water on one side and land on the other, wind relaxed. He blew gently over the land until it dried. All right, the last creation story I want to share, although there’s really literally hundreds I could have shared.

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comes from the Seminole Indians. In this creation myth, the creator puts all of his creations in a shell, which seems to be an egg shell. Inside this shell, a panther desires to come into the created world first. It reads, the panther was patient, which the creator liked. But at this particular time, panther was too patient. The wind started circling around the crack in the shell, round and round the inside.

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so vigorously that the crack was made larger. The wind, however, remembered that the creator wished for the panther to be on earth first. We will fulfill the creator’s wishes, says the wind, reaching down to help the panther take its place on earth. The wind was everywhere. The wind was the air we breathe. After wind helped the panther out first, the panther thanked wind for the honor. So here we have from the sands of Egypt.

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right up to the modern day. Peoples of the world claiming that order was imposed on the chaotic primordial elements by a special wind which came directly out of God’s being. And this wind, I remind you, is symbolic. It symbolizes some sort of divine vital essence that came directly out of God, permeated the precreative universe, and fundamentally changed the disorganized, lifeless primordial elements into elements with the ability to order.

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produce life. This transformative process is very troubling from a scientific point of view. See in episode number 11, the mysterious primordial waters, we established that the primordial elements, according to the first law of thermodynamics, could neither be created nor destroyed, only altered in form. The primordial elements have always existed and will always exist. They are eternal.

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even though the idea of eternal matter is a bit difficult for some of our temporal minds to comprehend. This is exactly what both the ancient record and modern scientists have been telling us about the nature of the universe. So this brings me to the second law of thermodynamics. It’s a bedrock of science. And this is where things get really sticky. See, the second law of thermodynamics states that in an isolated system, entropy will always increase with time.

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To understand what this means, we must understand what is meant by entropy. Thermodynamic entropy is essentially a measure of how organized or disorganized energy is in a system of atoms or molecules. This is measured by microstates, but that’s a bit beyond what I want to cover in this episode. And remarkably, Wikipedia does a really nice job of explaining this. So let me read to you what it says.

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If the energy in those molecules is perfectly organized, then the molecules can do 10 units of work. However, if the energy became less organized, so the entropy increases, the molecules might only be able to do six units of work, even though they still have 10 units of energy in them. So let’s stop here for just a minute. This means that the work potential of energy is directly related to how

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ordered or disordered the molecules are Even though the energy itself within them never changes So they need to be more ordered for them to have work potential the less ordered they are the less work potential They have this is why order it matters here When total entropy is reached there is no more energy to spend a good example Of this is a cup of hot tea the tea has a lot of energy compared to the room the tea is in

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And over time, the heat in the tea will spread into the room. The tea will become colder. This is because the energy or heat in the tea moves to the surrounding area. Once the tea becomes cold, there is no more heat that can be spread. The tea has reached total entropy. So over time, as heat energy molecules become more and more disorganized and dispersed,

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they lose their ability to convert heat energy into work. And this happens until the molecules reach thermal equilibrium or the same temperature. And all work potential at that point is lost. This is known as total thermodynamic entropy. This process, as far as the scientific community has been able to establish, is totally irreversible, which is why this is referred to as the second law.

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thermodynamics. We know of no process that can permanently reverse entropy. It’s a law of the natural world that heat energy particles or molecules go from a state of order to disorder and this moves everything irreversibly towards decay. The implications of thermodynamic entropy are pretty widespread and really quite astounding because it means that the natural state of the universe is maximum molecular disorder.

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This is why our cells degenerate and we become older and not younger. This is why when we scramble an egg, it doesn’t naturally unscramble. Or when we break a glass, it doesn’t return to its unbroken form. It’s why cars fall apart, why fruit rots, why ice melts. This is why we die. Why everything dies. The second law of thermodynamics is the inexorable trend towards decay.

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degradation, degeneration, corruption, disintegration, and death. The prospect is rather bleak and terrifying to many. And like I mentioned, there’s no permanent reversal to this process. In this very moment, the universe is headed towards total thermodynamic entropy. We are literally headed towards universal death. If you listen to episode number 11, the mysterious primordial waters,

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that the description of thermodynamic entropy, or maximum molecular disorder, sounds very familiar to how the ancients described the pre-creative state of the universe. A universe of dark, infinite, lifeless, disorganized elements. It seems the ancients were really onto something. And at this point, you might be thinking to yourself, okay, if entropy is the normal state of the universe, and it’s this maximum molecular disorder,

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and it’s irreversible, then within the laws of physics, the Earth shouldn’t even exist and life shouldn’t exist. There shouldn’t be anything in the universe except for the chaotic primordial elements. There shouldn’t be plants or stars or flowers or trees or elephants or tigers, and there definitely shouldn’t be any human beings. And you would be right. The normal state of the universe is a state of total entropy.

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George Wald, a Nobel Prize winner and professor of physiology at Harvard University says, quote, the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. See when explaining the origin of life, the scientific community can’t have it both ways. They can’t claim the second law of thermodynamics is a law of nature and then postulate that life originated in some way that defies the second law of thermodynamics.

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then how are we here? How are there planets and puppy dogs and people? That’s a really great question. And for the answer to that, we have to examine the details in the second law of thermodynamics. The law states, quote, in an isolated system, entropy will always increase with time. The emphasis here is on isolated.

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An isolated system is a system that’s completely closed off to outside sources of energy. In an open system, when a car breaks down, we can use some of our own energy to repair the broken down parts. We can change the oil, fix a broken valve in the engine, fill it with gas, or do whatever is needed to bring it back to, quote, life. But in an isolated system, the car would remain irreversibly broken down because it didn’t have access to an energy source.

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like you or me, that could counter the effects of entropy. Without an outside source of energy, over time it would continue to degrade. But in an open system, where energy can flow into the system from an outside source, infusing it with new life, so to say, the process of entropy can be momentarily stopped or slowed down. And this is why we see life flourishing on planet Earth.

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Our planet is not an isolated system. We get energy 24-7 from the sun. And as long as we have access to this energy source, which comes from outside of our planetary system, we’re good to go. There’s an energy to fuel the existence of life, to counter thermodynamic entropy. But there’s a problem here too. Although energy from the sun can sustain our system, thereby combating

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planetary entropy, the Sun itself is bound by the second law of thermodynamics. It too is heading every minute towards thermodynamic doomsday. Unless of course there is another energy source in the universe that is keeping the Sun alive. But then again, whatever that energy source might be, it too would be subject to entropy.

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There’s no escaping entropy as far as we know anywhere in the universe. This means that at some point, the second law of thermodynamics will lead to the end of the universe. Scholars at Boston University say it like this, quote, it implies that the universe will end in a heat death in which everything is at the same temperature. This is the ultimate level of disorder. If everything is at the same temperature,

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no work can be done, and all the energy will end up as the random motion of atoms and molecules. Jim Lucas of Live Science says this, quote, In the distant future, stars will cease being born, galaxies will burn out, the black holes will evaporate until there’s nothing left but subatomic particles and energy. Lucky for us, this cosmic cooling down of the universe or

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thermodynamic doomsday isn’t predicted to happen for millions of years. There’s actually a mathematical physicist at the University of California who predicted it will take as long as 10 to the power of 10 times 26, which is 1 to the 1026 power or 100 septillion zeros, which is a very, very long time. So at this point, you might be wiping your brow.

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We’re grateful that the terrifying prospects of the second law of thermodynamics are millions of years away. But we still have one incredibly important problem to solve. If the normal state of the universe, due to the law of entropy, is made up of random, lifeless atoms and molecules, and the universe is a closed system, then how in the world did the universe come into being?

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problem here. According to the second law of thermodynamics, there’s absolutely no way that a closed system can reverse entropy. So there’s literally zero chance of life. A universe in thermodynamic entropy could never produce life or anything. It’s against the laws of physics. Biologist Lyle Watson says this, quote, any kind of order is unnatural.

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The combination of molecules into anything as highly organized as a living organism is wildly improbable. Life is an unreasonable thing. This is a problem. According to this law, there should be nothing in the universe but an ocean of chaotic primordial elements. But here we are. So how do we explain this? Well, either the second law of thermodynamics is not really a law.

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which doesn’t seem to be the case because everything in the universe indicates that it is a law of the natural world. Or we have another very, very, very intriguing possibility. And this is the possibility that our universe is not a closed system. I have never heard a single scientist or physicist offer up this possibility.

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What this would mean is that our universe came into being with its galaxies, stars, planetary systems, its flora and fauna, and human beings because it got energy from a source outside of our system, outside of our universe. This would mean that the universe itself is an open system, meaning outside sources of energy can flow into it, thereby thwarting entropy.

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And think about this, this makes perfect sense because this is where all other systems get their sustaining energy from other systems. And this idea is confirmed every day by the human body. The human body, if it were a closed system and it had no access to outside sources of energy, would quickly die. But every time we chow down on an apple, we take energy into our bodily system by drawing on energy sources outside of our own bodily system.

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and this allows us for another day to slow down the process of entropy. The supposition that our universe is an open system and not a closed system is not only incredibly elegant in its simplicity, but it’s also elegant in its explanatory power because it not only fully conforms to the strictures of the second law of thermodynamics, but it also provides us with an incredibly simple explanation of how the Earth was created.

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and how life came to be. I hope you see where I’m going with this because this is exactly what the ancients were saying in their creation myths. They tell us that before the universe came into being, the universe looked just like we would expect it to according to the first and second laws of thermodynamics, a primordial ocean of random, unorganized lifeless elements. And it’s at this point in the creation stories that the ancients are practically unanimous in declaring that a source

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pre-existent to and outside of our universe initiated order and life in the universe. And what was this source? Well, in the ancient text we read in our last episode and in this episode, this source was described as wind. A wind, which I remind you is symbolic, which is described by the ancients as coming directly out of God’s being.

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had a profound transformative effect on them. This wind swept across the primordial elements and infused them with something, which according to the second law of thermodynamics had to be some sort of energy that could counter the thermodynamic entropy. The ancients are telling us that a source outside of our system infused our system, our universe.

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with the energy needed to counter the laws of entropy and that this energy came directly from God, who in the ancient record is most often described as a being of ineffable light. And light, physical light, is a form of energy. Thus, it’s plausible to suggest that the vital energy source that came out of God and was described by the ancients as wind and the breath of life

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was somehow a portion of his light, that he infused some of his light energy into every single primordial atom or element, and which conforms with, quote, the teaching that Pata is in all things. According to the ancients, it was this external energy source, this wind, that ignited the inert primordial elements and initiated the creation and life.

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And don’t forget, as we mentioned in the previous episode, the ancient Egyptian god Shu, the god of air and wind, also represented sunlight, the beams of the sun god Re, which could be seen by virtue of air. We see all of these ideas, creation, God, light, and life, in the Judeo-Christian tradition in John 1,

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all things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” In this light, and I say that in quotes, the second law of thermodynamics isn’t so terrifying.

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That wraps up this edition of The Ancient Tradition. If you’re interested in learning more about the evidence I presented in this episode, visit theancienttradition.com and search for this specific episode under evidence. Near the bottom of the podcast page, there’s a button to subscribe to the podcast, as well as a running countdown to our next episode, all of which you can share with your family and friends. And a quick reminder that our next episode won’t drop until the first part of August.

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as I’ll be out of the country during most of July. Hopefully the ancients have left you with a lot to ponder. With that, I’ll leave you with the words of William Shakespeare, knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven. I’m Jack Logan.

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You’ve been listening to the Ancient Tradition. A Wonk Media Production.