It was naturally a physicist that started promoting this thing called Information Theory, which shows up in all sorts of unlikely places, revealing that there exist non-material things that nevertheless have quantitative physical effects. It is arguably a far more important metaphysical than physical discovery, though scientists seem to have only vague premonitions about its connection to Intelligent Design. No theologian, however, seems to have traced the connection the other direction, that through information, dogmatic metaphysics is connected to physics. Since it seems that I can't talk about biology or theology or current events without bringing up the topic, I thought I would devote this blog to some history and evidences for the real existence of information and its connection to holiness.

Example 1

Let's begin with a gruesome example in the news recently: unholy information. Entifadh Qanbar, an Iraqi politician, who served as spokesman of the Iraqi National Congress and as the deputy military attaché for Iraq in Washington, D.C., writes about Al Qaeda torture houses discovered around Baghdad. He makes the interesting point that no such torture houses have been discovered in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, Sudan,  Somalia, Indonesia or the Philippines, despite the active involvement of Al Qaeda in all these other places. Nor are these torture houses found in the north or south of Iraq, but only in the Sunni regions. Why? Because they are remnants of Saddam's Baathist regime, which brutalized its inhabitants, practicing torture. Qanbar worries that as the US crushes AQI, some of that unholy knowledge will begin to infect neighboring countries.

He need not worry, it has already happened. A relative who has spent 16 years in Afghanistan used to say that it was perfectly safe there, far safer than New York City, because the Taliban wasn't like AQI, they were an irregular army, not terrorists. They don't talk like that any more. In just one week this past month,  on Feb 22 a suicide bomber killed 2 civilians in Khost, Feb 19 a car bomb killed 2 civilians in Kandahar, Feb 18 a suicide bomber killed 37 in Spin Boldak, and on Feb 17 over 100 civilians were killed by a suicide bomber in Kandahar. Suicide bombing violates the Koran & Pashtun practices. Why are the Taliban changing their tactics?

It is not a coincidence that when the US targetted a gathering of Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders at a safe house in South Waziristan, Pakistan, 13 men were killed including "four Arabs, two Turkmen, and two Pakistanis from Punjab province". Where suicide bombers collect are not torture cells soon to follow?  Or to quote Jesus, "where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather." (Gives a whole new meaning to the passage, doesn't it?)

So just as terrorism is a form of unholy information that can only be purged by cauterization, so also we have holy information that spreads in similar invisible ways, but with opposite effect.

Example 2

Jesus described the "magisteria" of holy information by using the moniker "The Kingdom of God" or its synonym in Matthew, "The Kingdom of Heaven". So cryptic has been the phrase, that many PhD theses have been written on the exact meaning and implementation of the idea.  Just so you don't think that Dan Brown invented puzzle thrillers, here are Jesus' examples of what is TKoG/H (in contrast to its actions or its relative location):
1)  TKoH may be compared to a man who sowed good seed...
2) TKoH is like a grain of mustard seed...
3) TKoH is like leaven...
4) TKoH is like treasure...
5) TKoH is like a merchant...
6) TKoH is like a net...
7) TKoH may be compared to a king...
8) TKoG is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground ...
9) TKoG is like a grain of mustard seed...
10) TKoG is like leaven that a woman took...

What do you notice? Well the repetition of 2,3 with 9,10 indicate that these really are synonyms. But notice how information is encoded in each of the equivalences or analogues. In 1,2,3 we have the encoding of agricultural information (tied to food production and the Neolithic Revolution) and its subsequent multiplication through the usual biological processes. In 4,5 we have the encoding of economic information (which most economics profs will say is the basis of the capitalist system). In 6 we have fishing (hunting) information related to efficient search algorithms. In 7 we have judicial information related to stable social hierarchy. Food, economics, justice, all the necessary aspects for a modern society tied by information content to TKoH, where information is discriminatory, separating the good from the bad, though occasionally focussing on the ability to grow or replicate without error.

With this appreciation, we can now see that the other 50 verses about TKoH are about the flow of information, or whether certain individual's "are in the know", able to access that information.  Thus Jesus builds up a very physical construct made out of unphysical substance, demonstrating once again that Materialism is a hopelessly naive and incomplete description of reality. Now one can go back to those innumerable PhD theses about TKoH that show how theology, ethics, politics, and science all flow from this informational construct, growing like that grain of mustard seed into an enormous tree of knowledge.

And it is truly enormous, for all the culture of the West is dependent upon this construct, the Kingdom of Heaven. All science, all capitalism, all rule of law, all freedom, all liberties enjoyed by the World today are rooted in the soil of information, holy information. For not all information is good, as example 1 demonstrated, but what is good is holy. And what is holy is sui generis, self-referential. The rest of the New Testament can been understood as the nurture of that seed of holy information into the mighty tree of holiness, planted by streams of water...

Example 3

But perhaps you don't see how this information connects to physics, so let me give a very brief history of the physics. During the 1800's, two main events happened to the world of physics that defined 19th century physics: thermodynamics and the atomic theory.  The first was an almost religious expression of the unity and universality of the cosmic spirit, while the second was a subversive reductionist division of nature into multitudinous, uncorrelated chaotic particles.

Thermodynamics was concerned with the unification of work and heat into the more general concept of energy and energy conservation. The steam engine had been the crowning triumph of the previous century, and the entire Industrial Revolution was now in full swing, dependent upon the new source of power enabled by coal and steam. It was truly a revolution, delivering man from the curse of the garden that "by the sweat of your face shall you eat bread". But those first steam engines gobbled coal almost faster than they could mine it, causing many brilliant minds to consider the need of being efficient.

The fruit of their intellectual labors was like a temple to Athena, a secret cabal, a sacred knowledge, with mysterious words like "entropy", "enthalpy", "heat", and "energy",  measured in stark quantities with serious names like "absolute temperature", "internal energy", and "total pressure". All these quantities were linked through a mathematical language called "partial derivatives" to a series of godlike, unchangeable invariants named for their demi-god discoverers: "Gibbs Free Energy" or "Helmholz Free Energy". Finally, the outcome of all these incantations were philosophical statements such as "There is no such thing as a free lunch", or "perpetual motion machines cannot exist", or "the three laws of thermodynamics are: you can't win; you can't break even; and, you can't even get out of the game". Pretty strong drink for an observational science! Here's a famous physicist, Sir Arthur Eddington, on the subject:

The second law of thermodynamics holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation, well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Atomic Theory, in contrast to this divine art placing limits on what man could do, released man from the limitations of the gods. It was devised by Democritus in the 4th century BC to counter the logic of Plato and Aristotle, which led inexorably toward a Divine Creator and ethical mandates. For if everything, including Man, were made of chaotic atoms, then there could no longer be a divine "ought" and a moral requirement. Atomic theory seemed to embody the exact opposite of Thermodynamics. Yet throughout the 18th century and into the 19th it explained more and more of chemistry and began to make inroads into physics. Which explains the foundations of reality better, divine spirit (Michael Faraday's fields and faith), or uncontrolled atoms (John Dalton's agnostic particles)?

Then in 1880, a devout Presbyterian, James Clerk-Maxwell, in a series of brilliant papers, combined the two theories. Now even in this century of bold scientific advances, Maxwell stands head and shoulders above the crowd. Had he been of a more atheist persuasion, he undoubtedly would have been adored as a Progressive saint as much as Newton or Einstein. But Maxwell was religious. And that was the problem.

For he realized that in combining the atomic theory of gases with the conservation laws of thermodynamics, he was either desecrating the holy or baptizing the profane. You know the dilemma: if a fly falls in holy water does the fly become holy or the water become unholy? Maxwell had just combined the two theories by showing that if heat were in the motion of atoms in a gas, then the gas laws of pressure, volume and temperature could also give the thermodynamic laws of energy, heat capacity, temperature and work through the process of taking averages. It was a non-intuitive solution, that the result of putting a million chaotic atoms in a bottle was far more predictable than putting in only a 100. And when one had a trillion trillions of atoms in that bottle, the predictions were as inevitable as the laws of thermodynamics. But the atoms knew nothing of the laws of thermodynamics, they were as blindly banging into each other as they were on the day they were created. Clearly the fly had won, the holy water was polluted.

Maxwell gave a lecture at the British Academy in which he did his best to portray atoms as the pinnacle of God's creative process, incarnating all that was good about God. But the effort seems "over-the-top", it seems that "the lady doth protest too much", for atomic theory led as certainly to atheism as Platonic theory led to theism. This seems to have been the reason that Maxwell searched for a flaw in atomic theory that just might stem the retreating tide of Arnold's faith.  The textbook calls it "Maxwell's Demon", but perhaps Maxwell wanted it to be an angel.

In his words, we have a box with two compartments, and a little sliding door between them that was cleverly constructed to take no work to open or shut. Standing by the door is a demon who, when he observes a fast atom approaching from the first compartment, opens the door, but  when he observes a slow atom, closes it. Conversely, atoms approaching from the second compartment are given the opposite treatment.  Accordingly the second compartment will fill up with fast (hot) particles and the first with slow (cold). The demon causes heat to flow from cold to hot, like a refrigerator but without electricity, which violates the laws of Thermodynamics but does not violate the laws of Atomic Theory. Clearly then, atomic theory can never fully explain thermodynamics, and perhaps can never explain us, the universe, or God. Perhaps in this demon lies a defense against the atheism of atoms.

As you might expect, such a challenge to atheism has spawned a lot of response. Many of them focussed on the unknown  (and presumed "impossible") construction of the gate and demon, though this amounted to a pragmatic rather than a theoretical objection. As modern technology has learned to make superconducting nano-structures, many of the pragmatic objections about dissipative, inefficient mechanisms have been overcome. Another approach was suggested by the famous Einstein-Bohr QM debates, wherein Bohr demonstrates that collecting information disturbs the system. Here's the wikipedia version, where the word "entropy" figures prominently:

One of the most famous responses to this question was suggested in 1929 by Leó Szilárd and later by Léon Brillouin. Szilárd pointed out that a real-life Maxwell's demon would need to have some means of measuring molecular speed, and that the act of acquiring information would require an expenditure of energy. The second law states that the total entropy of an isolated system must increase. Since the demon and the gas are interacting, we must consider the total entropy of the gas and the demon combined. The expenditure of energy by the demon will cause an increase in the entropy of the demon, which will be larger than the lowering of the entropy of the gas. 

Roughly speaking, the argument is that if the demon manages to get heat to flow from cold to hot, he's getting hot himself, more than compensating for the refrigeration he's accomplishing, e.g., you can't cool off your kitchen by leaving the refrigerator door open. But of course, Maxwell's whole point in postulating the demon was to prove the second law wrong (and can't be proved from mere atomic theory), not that assuming the second law proved demons don't exist.

A Charles Bennett variation on Szilard's came out in 1982 from AT&T and their work on information theory. If we interpret entropy as anti-information, or conversely, information as negentropy, then the demon has to be very informed to operate the door, or low-entropy. Each time he sorts a particle he "uses up" some of his information, such that his entropy goes up while the gas goes down. This state of affairs can't go on very long, because eventually the demon runs out of information, and the refrigerator stops working. Conversely, if we want to upgrade the demon's memory, we would need more space, and if we tried to reuse the space, say, by erasing the flash memory, we are destroying information which also increases entropy. So lacking infinite space or the ability to reuse memory, we can't make the system into a perfect refrigerator or a perpetual motion machine. Thermodynamics wins.

And conversely, atomic theory loses. Which is to say, Maxwell may have found his delivering angel.

Conclusion

But notice how atomic theory is rendered "incomplete" by the conservation of information. Information has become a real thing, as real as the atoms that are conserved. It takes more than atoms, energy, and their conservation to reproduce the universe, it takes information. And since information can't be created (entropy must increase, 2nd Law again), where did the information come from in the first place?

Unlike atoms, which we can conceive as being made out of pure energy, information only comes from information. Some have argued that the sum total of mass + energy is conserved, but even that formulation has difficulty with gravitational potential energy and the Big Bang, but to my knowledge, no one questions the conservation of information and the 2nd Law, even in the Big Bang. So the only source of information is either outside the system of discussion (and what is "outside" the universe but God?), or it is sui generis, self-generative, recursive. As I have argued before, that is a divine attribute, for which we use the adjective, holy.

But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.