6/17/26

  I just had my second meeting with a young man named *Arnold from Cal State, not counting the initial time we met on campus. It was a very interesting meeting, and we talked for over two hours before he had to leave for work. Before I get into today's conversation, I need to back up and explain what happened on Sunday, because that's really where all of this began.

On Sunday, *Arnold and I met because I wanted to hear more about why he went from being an evangelical Christian to no longer identifying as one. I asked him to tell me his story, and one of the main themes that kept surfacing was his dislike of the traditional Christian doctrine of heaven and hell. It didn't seem that his primary objection was evidential, but rather emotional or philosophical. He simply found the idea distasteful. By contrast, he found reincarnation much more appealing. In his view, hell is wasteful because it essentially "throws people away," while heaven sounds monotonous. His argument was that nothing—even something good—could remain enjoyable forever. An eternity of anything, according to him, would eventually become unbearable.

Of course, that wasn't the entirety of our discussion. We spent a good deal of time talking about reincarnation, and although we never explicitly discussed epistemology, it became obvious that our underlying approaches to knowledge were very different. As he described his beliefs, I noticed that his way of evaluating religious claims seemed to revolve around personal preference rather than objective truth. Even the language he used reflected this. He spoke of religions almost as though they were different lifestyles that you try on to see whether they fit you. That struck me as a fundamentally different approach than asking, "Which worldview is actually true?"

The best analogy I could think of is that he treated religions the way people treat different cuisines. You sample one, decide whether you enjoy it, keep the parts you like, and move on if your tastes change. Maybe that's not a perfect analogy, but it captures the general impression I was left with. The individual becomes the ultimate authority. Rather than submitting oneself to what is objectively true, the goal becomes assembling a belief system that feels personally satisfying. You borrow ideas from various religions, keep what resonates with you, discard what doesn't, and continually revise your beliefs according to your preferences. Needless to say, I think there are several philosophical problems with that approach, and we explored some of them together.

Toward the end of our conversation, I wanted to better understand exactly what he believed. So, I asked him directly whether he believed in some sort of god, or whether he considered himself an atheist or a theist. Interestingly, he seemed reluctant to identify with either label. Whenever he described reincarnation, however, he consistently assumed that some sort of higher reality existed. He referred to it as a "structure" or a "system." But that description immediately raises further questions. Is this structure intelligent? Does it possess power? Does it have a will? Once you begin answering those questions, you end up describing something remarkably similar to what philosophers have traditionally meant by "God"—an intelligent, powerful, personal being with agency. Because of that, he seemed hesitant to answer my question directly.

That led me to ask whether he had ever heard the cosmological argument for God's existence—not specifically an argument for Christianity, but an argument for the existence of a first Cause. Earlier in the conversation he had mentioned studying utilitarianism in one of his philosophy classes, so I assumed he had at least some familiarity with philosophical reasoning. He told me he hadn't heard the cosmological argument before but was interested in hearing it. I explained that it's a remarkably simple argument, consisting of only two premises and a conclusion, although people frequently misunderstand the premises because they're often presented imprecisely. I also mentioned that I slightly modify the wording because I think it makes the logic clearer.

I explained the argument this way:

**Premise One: Everything that begins to exist has a cause outside of itself.

**Premise Two: The universe began to exist.

**Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause outside of itself.

I like to include the phrase "outside of itself" in the first premise because, although I think it's already implied, making it explicit helps prevent misunderstandings. In my experience, people often hear the argument as though it simply says, "Everything has a cause," which isn't what the argument claims. It is specifically addressing things that begin to exist.

As expected, Arthur's objection centered on the second premise. He responded, "Well, we don't actually know that the universe had a beginning."

I told him that, from everything I've read, the Big Bang remains the dominant model within modern cosmology. I'm certainly not a physicist, and I don't claim to be current on every new development, but the overwhelming consensus is still that our universe had a beginning. The universe is expanding and cooling. If you mentally reverse that expansion, everything converges toward an initial state of extraordinarily high density and temperature. There was a point at which the universe was not expanding, and then there was a point at which it was. Whatever ultimately explains that transition, it still calls for an explanation.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time before we could really dig into his objection, so we agreed to continue the conversation later in the week.

When we met again on Wednesday, we picked up exactly where we had left off. Before we met, I spent some time looking into the current scientific literature—not exhaustively, but enough to make sure I wasn't misrepresenting the present state of cosmology. *Arnold had been under the impression that Neil deGrasse Tyson believed the universe continually expands and contracts in an endless cycle, and that our present universe is simply one iteration of that cycle. After doing some reading, however, I discovered that this isn't actually Tyson's position. Like many science communicators, he discusses various cosmological models and occasionally speculates about alternatives, but he still accepts the standard Big Bang model rather than affirming a cyclical universe.

So, when we sat down again, *Arnold asked me to restate the argument. I walked him through it once more:

• Everything that begins to exist has a cause outside of itself. 

• The universe began to exist. 

• Therefore, the universe has a cause outside of itself.

If both premises are true, then the conclusion necessarily follows. That cause would have to exist beyond space, time, and matter, because those things constitute the universe itself. We spent quite a while discussing those implications, but before long the conversation shifted in an unexpected direction.

Throughout both meetings, *Arnold repeatedly returned to one particular idea: "Everything is energy." It's a surprisingly common statement, but I quickly realized that different people often mean completely different things by it. Some use the phrase in a scientific sense, although it's not always clear exactly what they mean. After all, energy isn't a single substance. Physics speaks about kinetic energy, potential energy, thermal energy, electromagnetic energy, and so on.

*Arnold, however, seemed to be using the term in a much more New Age sense. His understanding resembled the idea that all reality is fundamentally spiritual energy and that individual persons are simply manifestations of that universal energy. Within that framework, he repeatedly argued that because energy cannot be created or destroyed, reincarnation must therefore be true.

His reasoning was straightforward. If energy cannot cease to exist, then neither can the soul or the human spirit. It must simply continue existing in another form.

As I listened, it became increasingly clear to me that this conclusion depends upon a misunderstanding of what the conservation of energy actually teaches. The statement that "energy cannot be created or destroyed" doesn't mean that every organized system continues indefinitely, nor does it imply that consciousness survives death. Rather, it means that within a closed system, energy is conserved by changing forms. It is transferred. It is transformed. The law itself says nothing about reincarnation or the persistence of personal identity.

That realization ended up steering the rest of our conversation toward thermodynamics, entropy, and what physicists actually mean when they talk about energy.

I tried to explain that the conservation of energy doesn't mean energy can never be used. Rather, it means that energy is continually transferred and transformed. That's actually the point of the law. The total amount of energy in a closed system remains constant, but that doesn't mean the energy remains equally available to perform useful work. Those are two very different claims.

At that point, I introduced the concept of entropy and asked *Arnold how it fit into his understanding of the universe. The second law of thermodynamics doesn't contradict the conservation of energy. Instead, it explains what happens to energy as physical processes unfold. Energy isn't destroyed, but it becomes progressively less available to accomplish work. That's an important distinction, and I think it's one that's often overlooked when people casually appeal to the phrase, "Energy cannot be created or destroyed."

Admittedly, entropy isn't the easiest concept to explain in conversation, so I reached for an analogy that I found helpful. I asked him to imagine a spinning top sitting on a table. Suppose that top represents our universe. Before the top can spin, something outside of it has to impart energy to it. The top cannot generate that energy on its own. Once the top is spinning, however, it gradually loses that energy through friction with the table and resistance from the air. The motion slows until the top eventually comes to rest. The energy hasn't been annihilated; it has simply been transferred into other forms, primarily heat. The system hasn't violated the conservation of energy, but it has nevertheless exhausted the organized motion that was originally available.

I suggested that something similar happens throughout the physical universe. My own body doesn't generate energy out of nothing. The energy I use ultimately comes from outside of me. I consume food, which derives its energy from plants, which derive their energy from sunlight. At every stage, energy is transferred from one form to another. Some of it becomes useful work, while some of it dissipates as heat. No process is perfectly efficient. Even technologies designed to capture energy, such as solar panels, convert only a portion of the incoming sunlight into electricity. The rest is dispersed in other forms. The energy still exists, but it is no longer entirely available for the specific work we hoped it would perform.

The same principle applies to the spinning top. It doesn't simply decide to start spinning again once it stops. If it is ever going to move again, energy must once again be introduced from outside the system. That illustration helped me explain why I don't think the conservation of energy supports the conclusion that the universe endlessly regenerates itself or that reincarnation necessarily follows from physics. Conservation tells us that energy is not destroyed. It does not tell us that complex systems continually renew themselves without an external cause.

As I understand it, the universe itself exhibits a similar pattern. It has been expanding and cooling ever since its beginning, gradually moving toward greater entropy. Physicists often describe this long-term trajectory as the universe moving toward heat death—a state in which energy still exists but is no longer organized in ways that permit significant work to be done. If that's an accurate description of reality, then the universe is not simply recycling its original energy indefinitely in the way *Arnold seemed to imagine. Rather, the universe appears to be moving in one direction, not endlessly cycling through identical states.

Somehow, our conversation also made its way into morals and sociology by the end. We discussed the existence of objective vs subjective morals, with the typical back and forth of examples: cultural taboos and global accountability for genocides. Does the presence of different behavior connotations between various cultures prove subjective morals? Is the genocide performed by the Nazis morally permissable due to a mere cultural difference, or can there be objective accountability and justice? 

This question got us into *Arnold's deeper belief that religions were only implemented to bring order to chaotic societies until technology provided the means to keep an eye on everyone through surveillance. He shared that he thinks religion has done its role and can now be removed like training-wheels for a society needing some moral guidance. I curiously asked him many questions of how he thinks an atheistic society could ever be sustained morally if religion was fully done away with, but he was convinced that it would not lead to anarchy and chaos. I had to disagree with him, but he then checked the time and realized he had to leave for work, but he was eager to hear the next time we meet why I think the removal of religion would result in a fully anarchist society characterized by evil and chaos. Should be an interesting conversation!