Young Anabaptist Radicals

He who knew nothing other than creatures would have no need for thinking of sermons, for each creature is full of God and is a book [about God].
-Meister Eckhart

High school physics classes generally teach something about the Laws of Thermodynamics, which can be summed up, more or less, as the following: Energy can be transformed — for example, from electricity into light, as in a light bulb, or vice versa, as in a solar panel — but energy can never be destroyed. It does, however, inevitably change into less and less usable forms. In other words, there is always a bit of waste. When electricity is turned into light in an incandescent bulb, a bit of the energy is lost as heat. As energy changes form, it tends to become less useful, a process called entropy.

Physics Lesson Two: A couple of decades ago, physicists and cosmologists had basically agreed that the universe started with the Big Bang, when the entire cosmos exploded from a point microscopically small, and that the universe would end with everything collapsing back onto itself in what they termed the Big Crunch. The theory was appealing for a number of reasons, not least of which is the symmetry of explosion and collapse. A lot of religious folks found the theory interesting because it seemed to mirror the traditional stories of Genesis and Apocalypse. (more…)