Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

• Genesis 2:7

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

• Genesis 3:19

Then he shall take some holy water in a clay jar and put some dust fromthe tabernacle floor into the water.

• Numbers 5:17

“The Lord will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from the skies until you are destroyed.

• Deuteronomy 28:24

He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap; he seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor. “For the foundations of the earth are the Lord’s; on them he has set the world.

• 1 Samuel 2:8

“Born in Ionia, off the southern coast of present-day Turkey, Anaxagoras played a key role in making Athens the world center of philosophy and scientific enquiry. Central to his thinking were his views on the material world and cosmology. He reasoned that everything in the material world was made up of a small part of everything else, otherwise it could not have come into being. Sentenced to death for impiety after insisting that the sun was a fiery rock, he fled Athens and spent his final years in exile.”

• Sam Atkinson (senior editor), The Philosophy Book, Big Ideas Simply Explained

Anaxagoras (500BC-428BC) discovered the true source of eclipses.  Too bad that was part of the reason he spent his last years in exile.  But his idea that there is a little part of everything in every little part of everything in that he felt everything always existed, but in the beginning, it existed in a disorganized state.  He was not correct, but his idea is possibly a bit closer than the secular world’s ideas that they force into the schools of today.

Okay, before we get started, let’s get the snarky remarks out of the way.

• Wow! In these “one-hit-wonder” philosophers in an annex to a book on philosophy, we sure have a lot of Anax… (Anaximander, Anaximenes of Miletus, and now Anaxagoras – Sorry, no more Anax… in the Annex)
• Did you have to start your name with A-N-A-X to be a philosopher in those days?  No. Anaximander was a student of Thales of Miletus.
• Why all this thought about earth, wind, and fire (okay and water)?  Is that singing group still around?  They will always be in our hearts and on the worldwide web.
• When Anaxagoras basically said that Everything is Everything, isn’t that a semantically null statement? Oh, please!
• Why can’t the element that is the source of the universe be chocolate?  Simple, it would have consumed itself long ago.
• From the Scriptures above, wouldn’t dust be a good candidate for the one element all other elements came from?
• Why do these thoughts enter my mind? Please, do not answer that one.

Now that I have that out of my system, Anaxagoras was getting the ideas that would be lasting within the scientific world.

“Change in entropy” refers to the variation in the level of disorder or randomness within a thermodynamic system, measured in units of joules per kelvin (J/K), and is calculated by dividing the heat transferred by the absolute temperature at which the transfer occurs (ΔS = ΔQ / T).
…
Second Law of Thermodynamics:
This law states that the total entropy of an isolated system always increases over time in an irreversible process, meaning the universe tends towards greater disorder.”

• AI Overview from NASA.gov, Chemistry LibreTexts, and Vedantu

A chemical engineering professor that I never took a course under, to my regret, pulled me aside when I was a freshman and asked me to ponder the Second Law of Thermodynamics and then try to conceive of how everything came into being without God.  Some call it the clock analogy.  God wound up the clock and the clock is now unwinding.  Some non-believers resist the notion of the clock.  Some Christians resist the idea that God wound up the clock and for all intents and purposes, God left the clock alone.

I love the clock analogy.  You can have a clock and God can be involved, in fact in charge, even while the clock unwinds.  Besides, God is the only One who can wind the clock up again. But, some say that this earth will die when the sun runs out of heat.  Some say that the universe will have to end at some point due to lack of energy.  Some point to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and say that all will become disorder at some point.

I say that the book of Revelation trumps all those ideas.  Jesus will return.  With a saving relationship with Jesus, there is hope.  And with Jesus, those that are His will live forever with a new heaven and on a new earth (with a self-winding clock).

But to the idea of Anaxagoras, snowflakes and raindrops are created by a speck of dust collecting water and then more water and more water.  You have to dry earth a lot to remove all the water.  And the constant churning of the oceans, helped by the precise position of the moon, aerates the water in the oceans to promote healthy plant and animal life in the oceans.  So, his concept has technical merit, millennia before we could measure such things.

But God states to dust you shall return only after the Fall of Man.  God, the great creator of all things, made man from the dust of the ground and He breathed into man his first breath.  Considering that God’s breath is similar to man’s breath, since we are made in His image, there was heat associated with that breath and there was moisture in the air that God breathed.  Thus, Anaxagoras is right, at least in the creation of Man.  There are all four ancient elements in the creation of Man: Earth (dust), wind (God’s breath), fire (in the heat from God’s breath), and water (the moisture in the air).

But with the penalty for original sin paid, we can be back to a pre-Fall condition with the new earth, where we are made from dust and we shall never return to dust, by God’s Grace.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.