July 12, 2026

Give and Take in a Closed System

Like it or not, we reside in a closed system. And, like it or not, it’s a fuel-based system. Everything within the Earth’s atmosphere — except for energy in the form of heat — has been here since the atmosphere gelled, and energy in the form of heat is the only thing still coming in.

The rock cycle recycles worn out elements into new atomic structures and replenishes the Earth’s surfaces in a process that can take millions of years for a single circuit. The water cycle cleans and filters water almost as fast as we can pollute it. Like the human body, the entire Earth is a self-healing system.

Fuel-Based
Energy never disappears but it does continually change forms and fuel the next thing up the food chain. From viruses to bacteria, to amoeba, to plant life, to insects, to rodents, to small animals, to larger mammals like us, to giant critters like elephants and whales, every living thing consumes energy from the entities below it on the food chain.

Everything in the system competes with everything else for limited resources. That cheeseburger I ate yesterday will never again be available for you to make use of — at least in the form which it inhabited before I enjoyed it. The breath your body just converted to energy for your muscles, must be recycled by nature before it will do me any good.

Engineered Processes
The myriad complex systems that are at work to propagate and support life go far beyond chance-plus-time. And the odds of those interactive systems culminating in this space (our geographic location in the Milky Way) and at this time (our miniscule chapter within the Big Bang narrative) point far more strongly towards intentional design than random chance.

In fact, the odds of a blind monkey discovering an old fashioned typewriter and randomly pecking at keys until he completed a stylistically correct manuscript of “War and Peace” would be millions of times better than the odds of us randomly landing here on a perfectly sized and furnished planet, orbiting a perfectly constructed star at the perfect distance within the perfect space between spiral arms of the perfect galaxy. It ain’t chance.

No matter how franticly the intrinsically self-loathing dissemblers protest, the evidence confirms that humanity is an intentionally privileged species within creation. I’m not saying a super-intelligent designer didn’t create other highly intelligent life forms in the universe. I’m just saying the odds of them existing within our galaxy are vanishingly small, and intentional.

Finite Understanding
We understand a lot about our circumstances, but that understanding is a cumulative construct built upon the findings of our ancestors, and it will continue being refined and expanded by our progeny as long as mankind exists.

Today, we’ve tiptoed up to the threshold of Quantum Physics and we’re peering myopically through the slightly ajar doorway. But all our hypotheses and conjectures are no different than Copernicus’ understanding of the red shift in the light from cosmic bodies moving away from that first telescope. It would be centuries before spectral photography could provide us a means of understanding those mesmerizing auras.

My point is that the astronomical principles we benefit from today, were in place long before Copernicus was a twinkle in his daddy’s eye. And amid our intellectual aerobics, perhaps it would behoove us to lean back and absorb the sheer splendor of that which our finite minds cannot yet fully comprehend.

Perhaps we should even marvel at the thought that an infinite intelligence — capable of pre-synchronizing the universal laws of natural physics, quantum physics, and future realms of physics — should expend energy to insure the well-being of a herd of infighting bipeds born of a tiny blue planet on the outskirts of an obscure galaxy in the corner of a still-evolving universe.

Apparently, we matter.

Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth – the universe looks suspiciously like a fix.

― Paul Davies

Let’s talk. I’d really like to hear what you have to say, and it might even give me something to write about. Email me at guy@lawsoncomm.com.
I’ll buy you coffee and we can compare notes. I promise not to steal your ideas without permission.

Designed to the Core

— Hugh Ross

“My hope is that evidence for the exquisite fine-tuning observed at all astronomical levels, from the farthest reaches of the cosmos to the ground beneath our feet, arouses a profound sense of awe and wonder. My greater hope is that this awe and wonder will inspire readers to ponder the deep questions raised by a close-up glimpse of nature’s unfolding story.”

― Dr. Hugh Norman Ross, Ph.D. astrophysicist, Christian apologist, and old-Earth creationist.