Anthony Esolen, senior editor at Touchstone, penned an intriguing editorial here entitled Pride & Incorrigibility; How to Save the World from Itself, eloquently arguing that entropy dooms mankind and its accomplishments to “declinism” until and unless he turns to the One who cursed creation with entropy.

The remarkable point here is of broad application. Man does not only go astray; his proudest works do not only fall to ruin; he fails to learn the hard lessons which his own immediate forebears have to teach him. He does not have to wait to see what happens when in his pride he boasts that he can rival the Almighty or that he can safely ignore him. He need only look over his shoulder, and see the ruins of such pride in its nearest or most recent instantiation, fallen to rubble and still not cleared away. In this regard, human pride and the staggering ignorance that is both its nourisher and its offspring resemble those of Satan, who even after being flung down into Hell at the first sortie of the Son of God, remains “untaught” and ready to display his “proud imaginations” to the rest of his fallen crew, to lead them farther into evil, and thus deeper into folly and futility . . . The question for us Christians is what to do about it. The world cannot save itself. It seems rather to be an ever-collapsing bottomless crater, rather like what Satan says, with no one around to hear, about the entropy of his condition as separate from God . . . All will be in vain, unless we raise up altars in our hearts to God.