Is Christ Maxwells Daemon?
I’ve been reading Zizioulas lately and I’ve been trying to reconcile theology with Biological Thermodynamics and Anthropology.
Two things I want to call out for context:
>”What is created is, of its very nature, mortal… The whole world—by the very fact that it is created—perishes while existing and exists while perishing: its life and ours are not ‘true life’” (Communion as Otherness)
>”there is no question of the ecclesial hypostasis, the authentic person, emerging as a result of an evolution of the human race, whether biological or historical.*** Teilhard de Chardin's understanding of man bears no relation to patristics theology.”
So if the second law of thermodynamics is a fundamental principle of creation but at the same time death didn’t enter into creation until the Fall, then what the heck is going on in the first three chapters of Genesis.
Let’s assume chapter 3 is allegorizing the Neolithic revolution. If we define life as an engine of negentropy, then agriculture was an innovation that allowed an immense capture of free energy to keep it going.
But at the same time it introduced human toil, new diseases, and death of course (Genesis 3:17-19). So what exactly was the historical sin of the Fall?
We see Christ actions as a movement of negentropy. He undoes death. And this gift is rooted in the future— the eschaton.
Zizioulas even says that “The truth of history lies in the future, and this is to be understood in an ontological sense: history is true, despite change and decay, not just because it is a movement towards an end, but mainly because it is a movement from the end, since it is the end that gives it meaning.”
So if the end of history must be an existence without death and decay, is Jesus Christ basically Maxwells daemon? If so, then the tree of Good and Evil perhaps taught Adam and Eve judgement and made humanity mistakenly believe it could sustain and order the universe as finite creatures. What would the Neolithic revolution may have looked like if that never happened, I’m having trouble picturing it. But I think this definitely explains the farming analogies Jesus uses in his parables in Matthew 13 for example
And even though Zizioulas doesn’t believe the emergence of this new ecclesial being is generated from a biological evolution in the human species, it must certainly be coextensive with it. For the body we inhibit must be like what we see Jesus capable of doing after his resurrection, all things which are physically impossible in our current bodies.