Chapter Two and the physical scientists

Well, here I am struggling with Chapter 2.  How Peel seems to yearn for the physical scientists to catch up with divine Science! He is not easy to read, especially when he comes up with words like entropy (para 1, page 11).  (Ed. See end of article for some insight into this term.) Does one really have to study physics to understand his reasoning?  It wouldn’t hurt.  I like the bit about the physical scientists work on page 1: they provide the “how – though not why – nature works as it does”.

It seems to boil down to “If you cannot measure it physically, it has no substance.”  But, how can the disappearance overnight, through a spiritual vision of Jesus, of 38½ pounds of matter (which had called itself cancer), as happened in the healing of Alice Newton(recorded on pages 16-18), be measured? Peel gives a telling physics-type note about that disappearing matter:

“This bulky mass of matter, which had simply disappeared, would have been enough – if it had been transferred into energy as physics would say it must have been – to leave the city of Leavenworth in ruins.”

Which seems to bring the conclusion that, yes, we should have some knowledge of physics.

However, could we perhaps say that the cancer was zapped by divine energy?  Science and Health says of divine energy: “Let us feel the divine energy of Spirit, bringing us into newness of life and recognizing no mortal nor material power as able to destroy” (p. 249:6-8).  And “Christian Science silences human will, quiets fear with truth and Love, and illustrates the unlabored motion of the divine energy in healing the sick” (p. 445: 19).

It seems the physical scientists didn’t learn big lessons from that happening, nor did they “cotton on” to the divine law behind Mary Baker Eddy’s healing which is recorded on pages 18 and 19.  They could not provide a “why” to either occurrence, so they ignored one and dismissed the other.

Joyce Voysey

 

Editor’s research into entropy and historicity:
·        www.entropylaw.com
The law of entropy, or the second law of thermodynamics, along with the first law of thermodynamics comprise the most fundamental laws of physics. Entropy (the ... subject of the second law) and energy (the subject of the first law) and their relationship are fundamental to an understanding not just of physics, but to life (biology, evolutionary theory, ecology), cognition (psychology). According to the old view, the second law was viewed as a 'law of disorder'. The major revolution in the last decade is the recognition of the "law of maximum entropy production" or "MEP" and with it an expanded view of thermodynamics showing that the spontaneous production of order from disorder is the expected consequence of basic laws. This (web) site provides basic texts, articles, links, and references that take the reader from the classical views of thermodynamics in simple terms, to today's new and richer understanding.

·        encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/entropy

entropy (ĕn`trəpē), quantity specifying the amount of disorder or randomness in a system bearing energy. (Energy - in physics, the ability or capacity to do work or to produce change. Forms of energy include heat, light, sound, electricity, and chemical energy. Energy and work are measured in the same units—foot-pounds, joules, ergs, or some other.)

 Entropy was originally defined in thermodynamics (a branch of science concerned with the nature of heat and its conversion to mechanical, electric, and chemical energy. Historically, it grew out of efforts to construct more efficient heat engines.) in terms of heat and temperature, entropy indicates the degree to which a given quantity of thermal energy is available for doing useful work—the greater the entropy, the less available the energy. For example, consider a system composed of a hot body and a cold body; this system is ordered because the faster, more energetic molecules of the hot body are separated from the less energetic molecules of the cold body. If the bodies are placed in contact, heat will flow from the hot body to the cold one. This heat flow can be utilized by a heat engine (device which turns thermal energy into mechanical energy, or work), but once the two bodies have reached the same temperature, no more work can be done. Furthermore, the combined lukewarm bodies cannot un-mix themselves into hot and cold parts in order to repeat the process. Although no energy has been lost by the heat transfer, the energy can no longer be used to do work. Thus the entropy of the system has increased. According to the second law of thermodynamics, during any process the change in entropy of a system and its surroundings is either zero or positive. In other words the entropy of the universe as a whole tends toward a maximum. This means that although energy cannot vanish because of the law of conservation of energy (see conservation laws - in physics, basic laws that together determine which processes can or cannot occur in nature; each law maintains that the total value of the quantity governed by that law, e.g., mass or energy, remains unchanged during physical processes), it tends to be degraded from useful forms to useless ones. It should be noted that the second law of thermodynamics is statistical rather than exact; thus there is nothing to prevent the faster molecules from separating from the slow ones. However, such an occurrence is so improbable as to be impossible from a practical point of view. In information theory (or communication theory: mathematical theory formulated principally by the American scientist Claude E. Shannon to explain aspects and problems of information and communication) the term entropy is used to represent the sum of the predicted values of the data in a message.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia® Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/

 Readers may also be interested to view a YouTube video of a TED lecture called Life’s Third Act by Jane Fonda http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHyR7p6_hn0, in which she speaks of entropy as a state of decline and decay, to which there is but one exception, the human spirit.

·        en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity

Historicity is a term referring to the historical actuality of persons and events, meaning the quality of being part of history as opposed to being a historical myth ...
 
·        en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
o   Existence and chronology ·
o   Denial of existence ·
o   Methods of research
Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed, and biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of his non-existence as ...