let’s *really* try thinking outside the box.

Are you really in a position to declare what God is clearly not? Can you really say he is not a bearded guy, vibrating egg in another dimension, an amoeboid being, or spirit/Jesus/creator triune combination that insults our sense of understanding?

Obviously you seem to have concluded that Christianity can not possibly be God reaching out to us… but to answer your question “Would we know God if we encountered it?”

Let me refer you to one of those quaint western biblical references: “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. ” 1st John 1:10. Hence, the answer is no (assuming the Christian worldview is the correct one.)

Your article borders on gnosticism but seems to stop just short of coming right out and saying it. I thought it was kind of funny to see you carefully depersonalize God as an “it” yet personify the Earth as “her”, but I assume you were taking a light approach

Here is a hypothesis, perhaps God actually is active in the world and has reached out to us in exactly the way the Christian Bible has documented. He loves you a great deal and would do anything to be with you… even die.

the only other possibility I can think of is ‘just is,’ meaning ‘has always been, will always be. that’s pretty mind-boggling to contemplate in itself.

that would apply only to the universe and the total energy contained therein. the matter and energy is constantly being used to create new things.

This post was mentioned on Reddit by bautin: He was going to make a point, but then he got high. I really expected this to end with a “Whoa man”….

As an trained chemical engineer, nothing aggravates me more than the idea that “life counters the 2nd law of thermodynamics.” This is flying in the face of understanding of actual thermo. Religious ideas aside, this is just absolutely not true. The 2nd law only applies to a CLOSED system, in which no energy or mass cross the boundary of the system. The earth is not a closed system, and the only truly closed system is the universe itself. Processes can occur in which the local entropy will decrease, as long as the total entropy of the universe increases (that is some other system has its entropy increased by a greater amount than the first decreased).

For the earth, we observe entropy decreasing as plants and animals grow and live, but this is only because there is a system that delivers useful energy to our system, and in doing so makes itself more disorganized. That is the sun. For every molecule brought together on earth, thousands upon thousands of joules of energy are released in the sun, making the overall entropy of the universe higher, and allowing our entropy to decrease. You can see examples of this all the time.

Let me give an analogy: We use electricity to cool our refrigerators, which is a decrease in the entropy of the inside of the fridge. But the heat given off in the back coils of the fridge would more than make up for the cold air inside the fridge. That’s why you can’t air condition your house with a fridge. It would only make the house hotter. The total entropy of the house (the universe) goes up, but the entropy in the small part of the house (the fridge) goes down since heat is given off in a greater amount than it is absorbed inside the fridge.

That said, I appreciate your opinions on the non traditional idea of god. Good for you for thinking outside your intellectual box. And abstracting the thermodynamics problems, well written article.

Are those the only options? What does “purpose” mean in this context?