Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 137:546 (Apr 1980)
Article: Moral Entropy, Creation, and the Battle for the Mind
Author: Kenneth O. Gangel

---

BSac 137:546 (Apr 80) p. 156

Moral Entropy, Creation, and the Battle for the Mind

Kenneth O. Gangel

[Kenneth O. Gangel, Professor in Church Ministries, Miami Christian College, Miami, Florida]

In science the second law of thermodynamics states that disorder in a closed system increases with time. Stated more specifically, the word entropy assumes the dissolution of matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity. In short, everything is going downhill. This article proposes that there is also the problem of moral entropy, which may be dubbed the “law of theo-dynamics.” This principle holds that the moral, spiritual, ethical, and cultural qualities of society are consistently deteriorating because of the presence of sin. This process began at the Fall and will ultimately culminate in worldwide degradation and the onslaught of evil, stoppable only by the return of the Lord of creation Himself.

An obvious presupposition here is that divine law is operable in both natural and moral spheres. Without such a basis one faces a terribly pessimistic subject, but the open-eyed realist in the late twentieth century certainly must view the world around him with an awesome concern for its headlong plunge into Satan’s stronghold.

When the city of Rome was being overwhelmed by barbarian hordes under Alaric in A.D. 410 and it seemed to thinking people that civilization was coming to an end, that total chaos would ensue, that all hopes of progress and orderly living were to cease, then Augustine, building upon the writings of his predecessors but illuminating them enormously from his own giant intellect, bequeathed to the world between A.D. 414 and 426 his own contribution, The City of God. Here he endeavored to assure his readers that there is still meaning and purpose in it all, that God is still the great planner, and that though events in the earthly sphere seem to be completely

BSac 137:546 (Apr 80) p. 157

without reason or order or hope, in the spiritual realm God remains in sovereign control and world history is moving exactly as he intends it to.1

Augustine was primarily concerned with the relationship between man and God; man and nature; man and sin; God and nature; and man in society. Through the Dark Ages these ideas were retained (albeit at times in a most fragmented and inconspicuous form) until Thomas Aquinas reconstructed the thesis into an elaborate and logical world view which has been called “the medieval synthesis.”

Demonstration of the Problem

Biblical Patterns

Buswell, one of the great evangelical theologians of the twentieth century, argues that the historicity ...

visitor : : uid: ()