by Michael Ellis
In August 1985, Paul Zimmerman of AT&T Bell Laboratories posted to net.religion.christian and net.origins a theological provocation: God exists, and is evil. The proof is entropy — the universe runs down, Murphy's Law, things fall apart. The deity behind all this is not a loving Father but a Damager-God, and Christianity is the religion of the Damager's accomplice.
Michael Ellis, a researcher at Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, responded not with outrage but with physics. He recognized that Zimmerman had accidentally reinvented Shiva — and he recognized, further, that Zimmerman had missed the most important discovery in thermodynamics since Boltzmann: Prigogine's dissipative structures, published 1977. Ellis's argument is that entropy and evolution are not opposites but partners, that the "destroyer" and the "creator" are the same force viewed from different distances, and that what is needed is not a theology that denies the destroyer but a theology that holds both — like Merton's.
This post is a gem of early internet intellectual culture: a physicist doing comparative theology, moving effortlessly between Shiva, Yahweh, the Tao, and the second law of thermodynamics, and landing on Thomas Merton. The thread that generated it — Buchholz on Schleiermacher, Zimmerman on the Damager-God, Ellis on entropy — is one of the most substantive conversations to take place on net.religion.christian in 1985.
[Responding to Paul Zimmerman's argument that entropy proves the existence of a malevolent God:]
Such a revelation!
Never before have I understood why the ancient Indian myth of the cosmic dance of creation was performed by Shiva, clearly one and the same destroyer you refer to — entropy.
But what you fail to realize is that entropy is its own OPPOSITE benevolent creative force. New scientific theories of "dissipative structures" actually imply that that old devil — the 2nd law of thermodynamics — not only taketh away (as entropy/death), but also giveth (evolution/birth), exactly like Yahweh, Shiva, and the Taoist force of chaos Hun Tun:
The behavior predicted by linear thermodynamics is stable, predictable, and tends towards a minimum level of activity (entropy). The depressing conclusions of traditional thermodynamic theories were a natural result of the computing power required to venture into the hairy field of nonequilibrium processes.
The analysis of far-from-equilibrium behavior of nonlinear thermodynamic systems (which underlie the biochemical processes on this planet) has recently (1977, Nicolis and Prigogine) become tractable, by the study of "bifurcations" — points where continued energy influx forces ever upward spiraling symmetry-breaking choices that lead to global self-organization of a higher level of complexity (evolution).
Thus, Boltzmann's dream of discovering Darwinian chemical principles is being realized today — I refer you to Ilya Prigogine's Order Out of Chaos.
In other words, without entropy and dissipative structures, there would be no YOU in the first place to rail out against your creator/destroyer!
A belief in the finality and irreversibility of evil implies a refusal to accept the precariousness and the risk that attend all finite good in this life.
— Thomas Merton
khronos ouketi estai
— Michael Ellis
Colophon
Written by Michael Ellis, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, CA. Posted to net.origins, net.religion, net.religion.christian, and net.philosophy, August 23, 1985. Message-ID: [email protected].
A response to Paul Zimmerman's "The truth about God" (AT&T Bell Laboratories, August 15, 1985), which argued that entropy is evidence of a malevolent deity — what Zimmerman called the "Damager-God." Ellis identifies Zimmerman's deity with Shiva and uses Prigogine's Nobel Prize–winning work on dissipative structures (1977) to argue that entropy and evolution are manifestations of the same thermodynamic force viewed from different scales. Order Out of Chaos by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers was published in English in 1984. The Taoist Hun Tun (primordial chaos) is the creative-destructive ground of the Tao. The Thomas Merton quotation is from No Man Is an Island (1955). The Greek khronos ouketi estai ("time shall be no more") is from Revelation 10:6.
Michael Ellis also wrote "Dirge of Life" the following day, using ASCII diagrams of Padraig Houlahan's life/soul model versus Charley Wingate's, and quoting Italo Calvino's "t zero."
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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