Relocating To Elfland

In view of Bruce Waltke’s recent video on Biologos (which, due to ensuing furor, has been removed), I am brushing up on my sympathetic imagination when I listen to evolutionists. So here is Sean Carroll (the physicist, not the biologist), who “happened” to stop by the offices of the New York Times last month:

“It’s likely that we can’t do time travel. But we don’t know for sure. The arrow of time comes from the increase of entropy, meaning that the universe started out organized and gets messier as time goes on. Every way in which the past is different from the future can ultimately be traced to entropy. The fact that I remember the past and not the future can be traced to the fact that the past has lower entropy. I think I can make choices that affect the future, but that I can’t make choices that affect the past is also because of entropy. I can choose to have Italian food tonight, but I cannot choose to have not had it last night. But if I travel into the past, all that gets mixed up. My own personal future becomes part of the universe’s past. We’re not going to make logical sense of that. So the smart money would bet that it’s just not possible.”

I’m no physicist, but here’s what I’m getting from Mr. Carroll. The universe is falling apart. It’s unraveling. It’s getting more chaotic and disordered all the time. That’s why the “past” (which I can fondly remember, notwithstanding the increasing disorder of my brain functions) is different from the “future” (which I can’t “remember,” because it has too much entropy for my brain to engage at its current level of entropy? . . .). I may be able to make choices that will impose some kind of order on the increasing chaos of the “future” (which is a bit hard to understand if I am to be part of that increasing chaos), but there’s no hope of making choices that impose order on the greater order of the “past” (not because the “past” has already happened, mind you, but simply because of the laws of physics). Then a final dismissive wave of the hand toward time-travel: we can’t, after all, “make logical sense of that.” Sink me, Mr. Carroll, I can’t make logical sense of any of this. Do you think I have abnormally high levels of entropy?

Mercifully, he doesn’t leave me in my insecurities:

“You’re allowed to feel small. As the 1970s rockers sang, ‘All we are is dust in the wind.’ But there’s another way to think about that. Instead of being humbled by how tiny we are, we should be impressed that we can understand it. The rules of nature are ultimately our rules and when we try to understand them, we learn something about ourselves.”

As I write, Eyjafjallajokull is still belching ash into the skies of Iceland. A portend of the “future” according to Mr. Carroll. Indeed, a metaphor for our very existence. But we, unlike the other dust particles of the cosmos, have created “our rules” to explain this to ourselves; and so, in the brilliance of stuff like entropy theory, we enjoy self-discovery. We are not humbled by our tinyness; we are not intimidated by the sheer randomness of our drifting in the wind. We stand tall with “our rules”; sometimes we even understand them.

But I’m kind of scared, Mr. Carroll. While we sit around doing our thought experiments, Eyjafjallajokull keeps vomiting. Nothing including “our rules” can stop her or predict what she will do next. You told me our choices can affect the future, but there seems to be something deep and inexorable at work here. Please tell me there will at least come a point where entropy will destroy self-awareness, where chaos will obliterate the need for explanations and even consciousness itself. I would really like this to happen before I am buried under a pile of ash.

Thus far sympathetic imagination. I’m going to stop now.