The Spirit of Thermodynamics
By Ian McKerracher
When I was an instructor at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), I was faced with a parade of (mostly) young men and women for whom it was my delight to demonstrate amazing applications of the laws of physics as they pertained to plumbing. Plumbing is one of the more physics-oriented trades and within the department the subject fell to me. Along with math and blueprint reading, physics was grouped under the rubric “related subjects,” topics that held little interest for the other instructors, mostly because of the math. I, on the other hand, enjoyed the sciences immensely, including the math, and appreciated that other instructors had little desire to muscle in on territory I increasingly claimed as my own.
Practically, plumbing science includes geometry, hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, pressure, and a few other things. But in this blog I want to focus on thermodynamics, i.e., the science of the movement of heat, and then tie it to a couple of the mandates God has placed on followers of Jesus Christ: (1) the mandate of sharing the gospel of peace with our fellow space-travelling descendants of Adam, and (2) the Biblical mandate to work for a better world.
As I said, thermodynamics is all about the flow of heat. Heat is an energy, which means, in a general sense, it finds its original source in the energy that flows into the universe from our Creator God. Something else that ties heat to the universe is that it can be seen as a parallel to goodness. Heat is the presence of something and cold is its reduction, just like goodness is the presence of something that evil can diminish or destroy. We live in a moral universe just as much as we live in an energetic one. Without goodness and heat, humankind would certainly perish.
“The point is that we must intentionally connect to the other person with a spiritual goal in mind for spiritual conduction to occur. We must reach out and touch them, however lightly, in the God-ordained, serendipitous courses of our life.”
So, back to the movement of heat, which follows four rather simple rules. First, heat naturally flows from the hotter to the colder until an equilibrium is reached, also known as the “Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics” (Think about it, what comes before first, second and third? Well, zero-th, because the First, Second, and Third laws were discovered before the primary law was stated...true story!). If there is something that contains more heat, and there is another thing that contains less heat, the heat will move. Wherever cold is found, heat will move toward it. In order to accommodate this movement, heat will move in one of three ways: conduction, convection, or radiation. I’d like to look at the parallels I see between these three ways of heat movement and three aspects of the Christian worldview. I hope you can also see these things in the fascinating world of thermodynamics.
With the first pathway for heat to travel, conduction, the hotter item and the colder item must be touching. The place where they touch is the connection point through which heat can travel. Without the connection, conduction cannot happen. When you are cooking supper and you leave a spoon in the soup it will heat up until it is the same temperature as the soup. You may thus discover the potentially painful consequences of the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics.
“As a kind of divine convection, God has designed the gospel to rise above the coldness of the world’s ordinary spiritual environment. ”
The same is true with the gospel mandate that each one of us has to share. It can happen in the connections we have with the rest of humanity, but only if the fire of the gospel burns in our souls, and only when we actually form life connections with others. Those connections can be as surprising as a fortuitous meeting on an elevator where you can only share a sentence or two, or an all-night conversation about metaphysics with a family member or friend. It can be an on-going periodic conversation with a co-worker in between tasks or a slow-motion conversation with an online acquaintance. The point is that we must intentionally connect to the other person with a spiritual goal in mind for spiritual conduction to occur. We must reach out and touch them, however lightly, in the God-ordained, serendipitous courses of our life. Such is the travel of our gospel “heat” according to conduction.
Convection means heat rises. The Maker of this amazing universe has decreed that heat will cause things to expand, making them less dense. If the expansion is inside a fluid, like a liquid or a gas, the hotter, and thus less dense part of the fluid, will rise and push the cooler, more dense stuff down. In the grand scheme of our planetary home, this is the process that gives us things like ocean and air currents and ensures that major portions of our planet stays in the livable “Goldilocks Zone,” neither too hot nor too cold.
As a kind of divine convection, God has designed the gospel to rise above the coldness of the world’s ordinary spiritual environment. Because we live in a fallen world, too many humans live life as a series of unfortunate events occurring in a morass of sin and heartache. Regardless of what we experience as smack-downs from the ugliness of existence, the gospel is above it all and stands ready to transform anyone who by faith receives what God offers in Christ. No wonder John the Baptist prophesied that our Lord would “baptize [us] with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Mat. 3:11). Our part as Christians is to rise to those occasions when God, the gospel, and a seeking person, all collide to rise together.
Finally, we come to the thermodynamics of radiation. Heat can travel from the hotter to the colder as a wave of radiation, not unlike sound or light. This is the heat transfer method that most directly contributes to the continuance of life on Earth. Without radiation, none of the heat generated by the giant fireball in the centre of our solar system would get to us. There is no conduction or convection in the near vacuum of space because nothing exists to conduct heat away from the Sun. If not for radiation the Earth would be a frozen chunk of rock, however closely we snuggle to the roaring campfire of our own personal star.
“The radiation of the grace of God also travels through a significant and vacuous space: the gap between Holy God and sinful man. ”
The radiation of the grace of God also travels through a significant and vacuous space: the gap between Holy God and sinful man. There is no natural way for man to connect with God (conduction) or rise into His presence (convection)—see Rom. 10:6-7 and John 3:12-13. In ourselves we lack the ability to generate a reason for God to confer any benefit upon us, including the warmth of His love. It must ALL come from His direction. Even apart from salvation, we exist solely because of the grace of a Creator God Who provides all that is required to sustain our lives. Under the doctrine of Common Grace, He provides the necessities of earthly life for everyone, regardless of what they believe. In other words, our God serves the common good of all humanity and bids us to do the same. After the gospel, this is the second mandate that we have as His people; to serve the common good.
There is one thing I didn’t mention about the “Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics”, which you will remember as the one that comes before law 1, the one that states heat travels from the hotter to the colder. The second part of that same law states, “the speed at which heat travels is directly related to the difference in temperature between the two objects.” This is commonly called the Delta T. The greater the Delta T, the faster the heat transfer.
The same truth applies to the spiritual realm. If we are on fire with the Spirit of God and allow it to burn in us with a hot flame, we will be motivated to share our faith with those around us. We will understand the dire, spiritual circumstances of our friends and relatives as they scrabble about on this puny rock, eking out a miserably small piece of cold pie to call their own. If we were hotter, we would be better prepared to speak the gospel, and serve our community. We would allow ourselves to really connect to the people around us. If we could just catch the vision and learn to converse with respect and gentleness about the grace of God in the Life of Jesus Christ, that would please our Lord, and would also be a life of significance sufficient to satisfy any soul.