And another thing

Rubbish, entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 13th June 2007

This stress on the peculiar heinousness of growing categories of offences, to treat them not just as crimes but as sins, with moral resonance, shows that we now face the phenomenon of a rapidly spreading new religion, what I call scientific pantheism or ‘scipan’. Since human beings need to believe (as well as to know) and to condemn (as well as to praise), it was inevitable that the decline of traditional faith would lead to a huge vacuum, to be filled by a secular system of beliefs, virtues, vices, rewards and punishments. Central to it is the notion of a crime or sin against the planet, and if the scipans have not yet created new notions of hell and purgatory, they are engaged in an effort to reverse the entropy caused by humans, and not just on the issue of rubbish either. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the number of sins identified by moral theologians surpassed 10,000, and was constantly increasing. Within Christendom efforts were made to back the spiritual sanctions of the Church by law, but they usually failed. For brief periods and in particular places — in Savonarola’s Florence, for instance, or in Calvin’s Geneva or the New England of the Pilgrim Fathers — sins were, in general, punished by law. But the drift of secularism inexorably took the sin dimension out of crime, leaving the priests only with their echoing pulpits.