One of the things I have noticed about physicists is that they get paid an awful lot of money for just sitting around thinking of weird things the rest of us don't. Recently I came across Maxwell's Demon, which apparently is one of the most famous thought experiments in modern physics.
James Clerk Maxwell was obsessed with the problem of entropy. For example, if you had a compartment that was filled with hot gas at one end and cold gas at another, if you mixed the two, the hot would become cold, per the second law of thermodynamics. But what if you wanted to reverse the procedure and separate the hot gas molecules from the cold once mixed? He thought about this a lot and finally came up with the idea of a miniature being who would examine the molecules as they passed through a hole and separate them according to temperature. Yes, I know this is weird but this is what these guys get paid for. My parents always called it "mooning around" as in "stop mooning around and go do something useful." Too bad I didn't know anything about physics then or I could have asked them if they wanted to deprive the world of another Einstein. Maxwell's contemporary, Lord Kelvin, liked the notion of this imaginary being so much he dubbed it Maxwell's Demon and so it has been ever since.
I was reading the account of Maxwell's Demon in James Glieck's The Information, which is one of those books that Upton Sinclair would probably say was "deadly to faith". I can't help myself, I am hopelessly addicted to this stuff. Anyway, Maxwell's Demon struck me as being a type of "God of the Gaps."
Our friends from the first century, Paul and company, wouldn't have understood the physics, but I think they would have understood the concept of the "demon". Except, Paul would point out, that isn't a "demon" you are talking about, that is God. That is how He runs the universe. There isn't anything imaginary about it.
But demons (the "real" kind) play a significant role in the New Testament. And people still believe in them today. M. Scott Peck, best known for his The Road Less Traveled, also wrote Glimpses of the Devil in which he describes his experiences healing so-called "possessed" people. As a person on the spectrum, I am deeply, deeply concerned that these attitudes are still around. I only wish it were as easy to treat mental illness as the New Testament makes it sound, just tell the possessing spirit to come out in the name of Jesus and all is well. But it doesn't happen that way. That is why we have mental hospitals and doctors and drugs, and even then they don't always work. But we keep trying, we keep learning. The mental health profession has made tremendous strides forward. M. Scott Peck and others like him want to take it back to the Dark Ages, when to be non-neurotypical was often a death sentence.
If we are all participants in a cosmic tug-of-war between invisible, undetectable forces of good and evil, then how can we speak of cause and effect in any meaningful way? How can we ever know the why of anything? I find this viewpoint frightening.
James Clerk Maxwell was obsessed with the problem of entropy. For example, if you had a compartment that was filled with hot gas at one end and cold gas at another, if you mixed the two, the hot would become cold, per the second law of thermodynamics. But what if you wanted to reverse the procedure and separate the hot gas molecules from the cold once mixed? He thought about this a lot and finally came up with the idea of a miniature being who would examine the molecules as they passed through a hole and separate them according to temperature. Yes, I know this is weird but this is what these guys get paid for. My parents always called it "mooning around" as in "stop mooning around and go do something useful." Too bad I didn't know anything about physics then or I could have asked them if they wanted to deprive the world of another Einstein. Maxwell's contemporary, Lord Kelvin, liked the notion of this imaginary being so much he dubbed it Maxwell's Demon and so it has been ever since.
I was reading the account of Maxwell's Demon in James Glieck's The Information, which is one of those books that Upton Sinclair would probably say was "deadly to faith". I can't help myself, I am hopelessly addicted to this stuff. Anyway, Maxwell's Demon struck me as being a type of "God of the Gaps."
Our friends from the first century, Paul and company, wouldn't have understood the physics, but I think they would have understood the concept of the "demon". Except, Paul would point out, that isn't a "demon" you are talking about, that is God. That is how He runs the universe. There isn't anything imaginary about it.
But demons (the "real" kind) play a significant role in the New Testament. And people still believe in them today. M. Scott Peck, best known for his The Road Less Traveled, also wrote Glimpses of the Devil in which he describes his experiences healing so-called "possessed" people. As a person on the spectrum, I am deeply, deeply concerned that these attitudes are still around. I only wish it were as easy to treat mental illness as the New Testament makes it sound, just tell the possessing spirit to come out in the name of Jesus and all is well. But it doesn't happen that way. That is why we have mental hospitals and doctors and drugs, and even then they don't always work. But we keep trying, we keep learning. The mental health profession has made tremendous strides forward. M. Scott Peck and others like him want to take it back to the Dark Ages, when to be non-neurotypical was often a death sentence.
If we are all participants in a cosmic tug-of-war between invisible, undetectable forces of good and evil, then how can we speak of cause and effect in any meaningful way? How can we ever know the why of anything? I find this viewpoint frightening.
