Inception of Dissent

French novelist Victor Hugo once wrote that "One can resist the invasion of armies; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas." He is absolutely correct because the spark of understanding has the most measurable impact on the traditions, practices, and beliefs that stifle progress. The genesis of an idea can forever change the person who first has it, along with all those with whom the idea is shared. Very often it has the power to alter the course of society, and once a genuine idea has taken root, it can be very difficult to ignore.

For me, such an idea began to form about 2011. I had been a faded Jehovah's Witness (one who becomes inactive by choice) sometime in my early twenties. I was baptized at 15 and auxiliary pioneered for a summer. By most accounts, I was a pretty passive member. There was nothing remarkable about my service. No one ever studied with me, or came to be baptized under my direction. I was not, nor did I aspire to be, appointed as a Ministerial Servant or much of anything else.

My fading was less deliberate than it was lazy. I simply liked worldly pursuits more than theocratic ones. Being a curious person, I often buried myself in research on topics of interest, and being more drawn to secular pursuits, it wasn't long before there was no time left for the Truth.

On a slow day at work, I got into a discussion about Superman comics with a coworker. He's a bona fide comic nerd and was explaining why Superman is the greatest superhero in all of comic-dom. I'll spare you the nerd-speak, but it got me curious about villains that the Man of Steel may not have overcome.

There was really only one enemy that fit that bill. He was called Doomsday and was the result of an experiment that subjected him to repeated death and regeneration. With each death, he learned to overcome what had killed him before and thus became stronger. In the end, the only option that Superman had was to take Doomsday forward in time to the end of the universe. This is called entropy.

I had never seen this word before and it piqued my curiosity. A quick search of the intrawebs led me to a number of research papers on the topic. The concept was first voiced by French physicist Lazare Carnot, who discovered that mechanical devices slowed down because of the loss of moment of activity. In short, the expenditure of useful energy and dissipation thereof was the end result of any natural process, which would then come to a halt. In 1852, Lord Kelvin (William Thompson) published his theory that all energy in the universe, as derived from the the first two laws of thermodynamics, would eventually become distributed and called this the "heat death of the universe".

Over the following decades, Greek mathematician Constantin Carathéodory linked entropy to a mathematically defined irreversibility. In other words, energy, once dissipated, cannot be un-dissipated.

For two-hundred years, physicists have understood that the Universe will eventually run out of energy. More specifically, energy will be so evenly distributed that it cannot be harnessed to power any physical process. Machines will not run. Biology will not thrive. Suns will not burn. The light bulb of creation will have burned out.

How long do we have? About 4 trillion years.

I agree that that is a difficult number to comprehend. However, for the reasons stated above, the comparatively more pressing issue is of our own sun. In 4 billion years or so, it will have advanced in age and transitioned in to a Red Giant. At that time, its size will nearly, if not completely, encompass the orbit of the Earth. Our humble little rock will no longer be inhabitable. It may no longer exist at all. That is also entropy, even if only limited to our galactic back yard.

So what idea did this spark in me, and how is that related to my former faith as one of Jehovah's Witnesses?

From my earliest memory, I was taught one immutable truth. God would make faithful humans to live forever on a paradise earth. No expiration date. No take-backs. Except this conflicts with the physical laws of the universe. From the standpoint of faith, it's easy to bridge the gap between scripture and physics by saying that God will change the laws of the Universe so that we don't die from being slowly incinerated by the expanding sun. It's equally easy to say that we don't fully understand the Universe and its functions and can therefore choose to have faith that the provision has already been made. For information on this, explore Ockham's Razor.

Working forward from that premise we can now conclude that the eventual heat death of the universe, and even the expiration of our own sun, requires Divine intervention so as not to adversely affect eternal life as promised and promoted by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. I could have accepted that as a faithful Witness. There is nothing particularly outlandish about that from a doctrinal standpoint.

Then I had another 'a-ha' moment.

Jesus Christ was sent to earth to die for our sins. That is a ubiquitous part of Christian faith and not being questioned here. The purpose of his death was to relieve us from the burden of unnatural death. We were designed to live forever but fell short of grace, and it was only through his voluntary death that we could be granted eternal life once again.

But what about the sun? Jesus didn't really save us from anything. He simply stayed the execution. Even if he paved the way for perfect life, it's still only by the good will and charity of Jehovah that we could continue. That being said, was Jesus sacrifice really even necessary? A cancellation of a debt for which the creditor must later grant a pardon from repossession isn't really relief from anything. So why murder a kind man who taught love, only to make his death ineffectual?

Additionally, the argument of Divine balance is equally ridiculous based on our own observations of the cosmos. There have been over thirty observed and documented supernovae in the history of astronomy, most of which were noted from the 1930's onward. This is well established as the end-stage of a star's life. Therefore, it can be established that entropy has been, and is, occurring in the universe, and any perpetual stability would have to be localized to our solar system at a minimum.

Even at that, perpetual stability of our sun would preclude the possibility of a Coronal Mass Ejection. In this process, a star sheds gasses which are carried off by Solar Wind. It's not a catastrophic event, but it is certainly a loss of solar matter and energy which cannot be replaced according to entropic principles. During the normal cycles of our sun, this occurs as often as three times per day or as little as once every five days.

So, a stable and self-sustaining system which would have made a convenient foundation for Jesus' sacrifice cannot be demonstrated. To assert or assume that such a thing exists simply because faith demands it is, at best, a logical fallacy. At worst, it's recklessly foolish.

It used to be that I could just comfortably be disinterested in theocratic matters. That it had been important to me at all was the product of repetition by my parents and congregation. However, this idea is something from which I cannot retreat, and against which I cannot defend. I do accept that my reasoning could be flawed and that science has erred. But I would note that the observations of scientists follow only what they can prove, and have been peer reviewed for over two-hundred years.

Jehovah's Witnesses recognize no peers and expand theories to keep disproved hypotheses on life support. It is ultimately their inflexibility of thought that led me away from them. Not a lack of love, selfishness, or even the Devil. I dissent because I have an idea, and to them that is apostasy.