Satan’s Counterfeit Healing

By Lawrence E. Burkholder, Roy Matheson and Charles Bakker

"The Christian church worldwide has been taken prisoner by Satan's counterfeit healing." This statement is based on the author's personal experience, modest exposure to the Toronto Blessing, observation of parachurch healing ministries, and extensive historical reconstructions.
Satan's Counterfeit Healing presents and evaluates Satan's supernatural healing from the Paleolithic period (ca. 45000 BCE) to the contemporary church. The guiding thesis is that Satan and his demonic surrogates perform miracles which are evident as psi paranormal phenomena. These manifestations include physical and exorcistic supernatural healings.
Paleolithic and Neolithic periods produced Great Mother goddess worship and healing, which have persisted ever since. These idolatries, combined with OT nature gods, were a backdrop to Jesus' true miracles. For two thousand years of church history there's been a tug-of-war between true and false healing. Mother goddess as Mariological shrine healing joined with natural and demonic magic, and esoteric energy psi. Alongside these the Holy Spirit has raised up genuine healers and their ministries.
Modern healing is marked by energy counterfeits and faith healing, the latter especially accompanied by trance, false prophecy, and psi transformations. True divine healing can be recovered when Christians repudiate nature gods, reject false prophecy, and restore proper eschatology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Sep 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532642326

Lawrence E. Burkholder

Lawrence E. Burkholder is an ordained Mennonite pastor, author, and independent scholar. He holds graduate degrees in history and theological studies. His academic publications have focused on the interfaces between science and paranormal psi, and demonic oppressions in people. This scholarly work has been enhanced by his pastoral counseling experiences in deliverance healing.

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Satan’s Counterfeit Healing

Lawrence E. Burkholder

Forewords by Roy Matheson and Charles Bakker

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Satan’s Counterfeit Healing

Copyright © 2019 Lawrence E. Burkholder. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-4230-2

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-4231-9

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All scripture quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted. New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (ESV) are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®). Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Psi Manifestations

Foreword by Roy Matheson

Foreword by Charles Bakker

Acknowledgements

About the Cover

Chapter 1: Supernatural Healing and Creation’s Laws

Chapter 2: Satan’s Healing and Its Psi Connection

Chapter 3: The Ancients Confront Death

Chapter 4: Healing From Jesus to the Church Fathers

Chapter 5: Medieval Relics and Mariology

Chapter 6: Discernment of Spirits in Medieval Europe

Chapter 7: The Rise of Modern Faith Healing

Chapter 8: Exorcism: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Chapter 9: Signs and Wonders

Chapter 10: Extraordinary Altered States

Chapter 11: Modern Discernment of Spirits

Chapter 12: Reclaiming Divine Healing

Bibliography

To the Holy Spirit,

who proves the world wrong

about sin, righteousness, and judgment

Psi Manifestations

Foreword

In Acts 8, some of the apostles traveled to Samaria when they heard there had been a fresh outbreak of the Holy Spirit. They encountered a man named Simon, who dabbled in the supernatural and who sought to buy the power of the Holy Spirit from the apostles. He is confronted by Peter, who declares that Simon has no part or share in this ministry (Acts 8:20), thus declaring that there is a great divide between the magical powers of Simon and the miraculous outpouring of the Spirit. It is a reminder that not all supernatural manifestations are of God. This is affirmed by Jesus in Matthew 7, when he declares that not everyone who casts out demons and performs miracles receives their power from God. There is a dark side at work, keeping step with the Holy Spirit and counterfeiting the genuine work of God. In this volume, Lawrence Burkholder shows that this has been true throughout the history of the Christian Church.

The author traces the history of what he labels as psi phenomena and exorcisms from the early church, through the middle ages, the post-Reformation era, and down to the present day, where some healing crusades bear the marks, not of a genuine work of the Spirit, but of the counterfeit. The author covers a broad waterfront, drawing on data from physics, psychology, medicine, history, and archaeology along with a solid treatment of the biblical texts. In the final chapter, he balances the many warnings with a recognition that there is a valid ministry of healing and exorcism for the church today if one exercises proper caution, relies on the Holy Spirit, and seeks to give the glory to God and not to the practitioner.

This book provides both a warning and a challenge. It warns us that the spirit of Simon is still with us today, where practitioners draw on occult powers and seek for financial gain. It is also a challenge for the church to take up the ministry of healing and casting out evil spirits, along with the preaching of the kingdom of God. Jesus passed on this authority to his followers. May this book be a tool to convince pastors and church leaders to pursue a genuine work of God in these areas.

Roy Matheson, ThD

Professor Emeritus Tyndale Seminary, Toronto

Foreword

It is impossible for me to describe, in just a few sentences, how profound an influence Lawrence Burkholder had on my life. It was he who first suggested that I pursue graduate studies in philosophy. And it strikes me as no coincidence that I have since chosen to focus my research on embodied cognition—an approach to the philosophy of neuroscience which is predicated on dynamic systems. Aside from the intellectual, it was also Lawrence who prayed daily for my spiritual protection from Satan’s attacks and who patiently guided me ever towards Christ. I have opened in this way so that the reader might gain an appreciation for where I am coming from as I write these words. I am not an impartial observer, for who I am today stands as a living testimony to Lawrence’s faithful service to the one called Jesus of Nazareth.

Indeed, this is the highest praise that I can think to bestow upon Lawrence—he was a good and faithful servant to the most high God. Other than Lawrence’s closest friends and family, and especially his dear wife Lois, few will ever know the full extent of the physical, emotional and spiritual suffering which Lawrence endured for the sake of the Kingdom. From software and hardware malfunctions that only seemed to occur when Lawrence was working on his books and articles, to countless demonic dreams, to the very personal experiences he discloses in his afterword to chapter eleven of this present book, the earthly price paid for Lawrence’s continued obedience will only ever be outweighed by that precious crown he shall one day lay at his Creator’s feet. Though the Holy Spirit had revealed to Lawrence that he would not live to see the full fruits of his labour, Lawrence keenly desired to see how his dearly bought words might be used by God to help shape the lives of lost and saved alike. Alas, on January 25, 2018, death, that final enemy, overtook Lawrence’s body and the task of carrying his work forward was left to others. This prologue then is just as much a nephew’s tribute to his uncle as it is an attempt to properly situate the reader for what is to come.

As Lawrence himself notes in his acknowledgments, Satan’s Counterfeit Healing is a companion to his earlier book The Leviathan Factor. Seen from a bird’s eye view, The Leviathan Factor contains Lawrence’s extended treatments of his broader metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, theodicy, and theology. Satan’s Counterfeit Healing is then a specific and practical application of many of these insights to the particular question of discernment. Since the focus of this latter work is that of application and not primarily that of explication, it would serve the reader well to refer to the former work where questions might arise. Thus, while it might sometimes seem as though Lawrence has spent too little time in Satan’s Counterfeit Healing establishing certain claims, especially concerning his physics and philosophy of mind, this is due to his focus, and by no means is it due to a lack of scholarship. Again, one must read The Leviathan Factor to see how everything is supposed to fit together in Lawrence’s system of thought.

It is in The Leviathan Factor that Lawrence first explains how all creation may be modelled in terms of a collective hierarchy of self-organizing dynamic systems, or as Lawrence refers to it—the Logical Automaton.¹ Though we shall not get into the details here, what matters presently is that the nature of the behaviour of such systems is to degrade over time unless corrected, or more accurately, attracted by a continual source of new information.² Since genuinely new information cannot be generated within a system, it follows that it must be derived from a master source that is external to that system. Lawrence rightly identifies creation’s ultimate master source as God.³ Seen in this way then, Lucifer’s rebellion may be understood as an attempt to replace with self-generated information God’s corrective input into his own system.⁴ In other words, Lucifer sought to become his own master attractor, which is also to say, Lucifer sought to become his own God. By cutting himself off from the true God’s corrective input, it was inevitable that Lucifer’s system would begin to degrade towards self-destructive formlessness. And in this way, we learn that death entered creation.⁵

In Satan’s Counterfeit Healing, Lawrence wastes no time getting to the core of the matter for humanity. As systems designed to function properly only with God as our master attractor, it is little wonder that we humans would expend so much time and energy trying to neutralize or otherwise conquer that death which Lucifer introduced to our forebearers.⁶ The tragic irony here is that so many of us have tried to defeat death and decay, not by surrendering to Christ and thus synchronizing with the true Creator, but by synchronizing instead with the very source of that same death.

We synchronize with Lucifer when we try to gain an illicit control over nature, not, I would note, so that we might thereby empty ourselves to bless that which we rule over, but instead so that we might manipulate creation to gain-stay our immortality in some way.⁷ Of course, it is a fool’s gambit to synchronize with Lucifer, the original author of death, in a bid to become immortal. What is further, even if immortality could be achieved in this way, the death which Lucifer introduced into the Automaton is ubiquitous throughout the universe we inhabit.⁸ The eventual heat death of the universe ensures then that even this immortality will never really be eternal.⁹

Our only real hope lies in synchronizing with the one master attractor that could possibly provide true immortality.¹⁰ When we synchronize with God by allowing His Spirit and His Word to continually guide and correct us, we humans are saved from the disintegration into chaos that will someday overtake every informational system in the Automaton which is not synchronized accordingly. And, since it is the logical phase space of the Automaton which undergirds the physical universe, salvation from true death in the Automaton will always trump salvation from mere physical death in the present universe. To obsess over the latter is to miss the point entirely.¹¹ Indeed, to desire physical healing and resurrection over spiritual salvation, to emphasize signs and wonders over sanctification, in short, to believe that the good news of Christ is that we have now been given control over nature, this is all akin to spilling out the living water of God to make room in our cups for h2o.

Make no mistake, the Holy Spirit is not guilty of being confused on this point. When God, the master attractor, miraculously provides physical water, it is only ever so that He might thereby provide living water. In other words, when Christ healed the physically blind it was so that they could see spiritually.¹² As Lawrence puts all this,

". . . genuine supernatural miracles are never primarily about bodily reconstruction or being enthralled by signs and wonders, but are meant to bring people to Jesus Christ and form him within by the Holy Spirit."¹³

Lawrence may have suffered and died physically, but through Christ he is unfathomably more alive within the logical phase space of creation than those who physically walk this earth even now without the right master. It is far better to be synchronized with the one who created nature and who will one day fully restore it to equilibrium, than it is to be synchronized with the one who merely controls it, and this, only for an age.

Moving now from the bird’s eye view to ground level, in reading Satan’s Counterfeit Healing, it may be helpful to think of the overall structure in the following way. Chapters 1 and 2 provide the underlying theory of how creation is structured, how healing occurs within it, and how Satan interacts with creation to perform counterfeit healing and other psi phenomena. Chapters 3 through 7 provide a historical survey of miraculous healings and the theological interpretations variously given those healings, starting with the Paleolithic age and moving all the way up to the present day. Following this, Chapters 8 through 11 expound Lawrence’s theology concerning exorcism, deliverance, signs and wonders, extraordinary altered states, and the discernment of spirits. Furthermore, these chapters also contain his critiques of various alternative theological approaches to these matters. Finally, in chapter 12 Lawrence lists four suggestions for how the church might rightly move forward with authentic healing ministries.

I want to say a word about Lawrence’s writing of Satan’s Counterfeit Healing before concluding this prologue with a comment concerning Lawrence’s theory and the basis of our faith. In July of 2010, I participated in a time of listening prayer wherein a source of spontaneous thoughts, which I took to be the Holy Spirit, later turned out to be a demon masquerading as God. When I wrote to Lawrence of my experience, he responded by pointing out that Satan’s modus operandi is lying and noted that he too had once been deceived by a false trinity.¹⁴ It chilled me then to think that Satan could be allowed to masquerade as God, even in listening prayer. Looking back now however, I realize that Lawrence’s point was, in part, that this just is the fundamental lie of the devil—that he is good, that he is life, that he is God. Over the years, I often benefited from Lawrence’s discernment concerning matters such as this. And in return, my comments, questions and experiences would, on occasion, function as a catalyst for Lawrence to work out and articulate his thinking on a particular matter. If I aided Lawrence in his work, it was as a student might inadvertently help their professor. I deeply regret that I can no longer discuss with Lawrence how his work intersects with my own.

Intellectually, the Christian faith is ultimately founded on what we assert to be that non-vicious circle of reasoning which goes as follows: We know God exists because He revealed Himself to us through scripture. We know scripture is utterly reliable because it is the revelation of God. I myself subscribe to this line of thinking, albeit in modified fashion. For when it comes to the matter of rightly interpreting scripture, I am not convinced that human beings are sufficiently equipped to do so on their own.

As dynamic systems, the information we gain through reading the Bible can only be processed by way of those heuristics which we have learned to rely on over the courses of our lives.¹⁵ For instance, I will be much more inclined to take as literal the biblical accounts of miraculous healings if I have witnessed one with my own eyes. But notice that the reverse is also true. I will be much more inclined to interpret as miraculous a healing which I have witnessed, if I already subscribe to a worldview wherein miracles are possible. For reasons I will not go into here, there is reason to think that human beings are neurologically wired to seek out confirmation of our expectations of positive outcomes as a way of efficiently processing the information we continually receive from the world around us.¹⁶ Thus, if my interpretation of scripture leads me to expect miracles regularly, I will be more predisposed to interpret a given event as miraculous than I would be otherwise. Similarly, if I reject the Bible in its totality, I may be far less predisposed to interpret a given event as miraculous. And in both cases, my interpreted experiences will usually only serve to further corroborate my approach to scripture. Given that this is the way we are, one wonders just what it means to assert the aforementioned circle of reasoning concerning God and scripture.

I believe that Lawrence’s theory provides us with a deeper way of understanding this fundamental basis of faith. If we accept that we are systems designed to operate in synchronicity with our Creator, then it follows that a true Christian’s act of interpreting scripture will itself be partially determined by new, corrective information inputted into our minds by our divine attractor. In other words, a Christian’s interpretation of the Bible will be guided, even if only in part initially, by the Holy Spirit.¹⁷ But recall that the information inputted by the Holy Spirit must subsequently be processed through those heuristics which we ourselves bring to the table. Thus, our interpretation of scripture will be co-determined by the leading of the Holy Spirit as well as our current understanding of our own life experiences. With this in mind, consider now what Paul writes to the church in Galatia concerning the effects of the Holy Spirit,

"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, [and] self-control; against such things there is no law."¹⁸

The upshot of Paul’s words for our present purposes is that whatever the specific insights are which the Holy Spirit reveals to the community of believers through the Bible, they will be such that if we heed them, we will corporately and individually become more loving, more joyful, more peaceful, more patient, and so on. Therefore, in dynamic systems language, the effect of God’s input is such that it will produce a change in how we act (orthopraxis). This change, in turn, will then modify the types of heuristics we use to interpret our life experiences (hermeneutics). Then, as the Holy Spirit inputs further new information, we will process it through these ever more Christ-like heuristics (orthodoxy). This is the process of Theosis and I would suggest that this is what it means to be made alive in Christ. Notice here that this new information is not new in the sense of extra-biblical revelation. Rather, it is new in the technical sense of having once been external to creation. The Holy Spirit produces fruit precisely through pointing us back to that centerline of Christ which may be found within scripture. I would much rather listen to the simple advice of a person rich in godly character than the fantastical visions of a morally bankrupt faith healer. For where orthopraxy is found wanting, so too will right hermeneutics and orthodoxy be found wanting also.

In light of all this, I believe that God exists because He continues to reveal Himself to me through scripture. And I believe that scripture is reliable because through it, God continues to reveal Himself to me. My faith, my worldview, what I know, these are all dependent upon my becoming ever more synchronized in my actions and beliefs with the actions and beliefs of my Creator. How then do we know? We know by way of who we are, what we do, and what we believe. In this way, I would say that I know God, or rather, as Paul so wisely points out, I am ". . . known by God."¹⁹

Charles Bakker, M.A. in Philosophy

Hamilton, Ontario, August 2, 2019

References

1. Burkholder, Lawrence. Satan’s Counterfeit Healing. (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2019).

2. Burkholder, Lawrence. The Leviathan Factor. (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2017).

3. Lefebvre et al., Behavioural and Neural Characterization of Optimistic Reinforcement Learning. Nature Human Behaviour 1.4 (2017) 0067.

4. Zimmermann, Jens. Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)

1. Burkholder, The Leviathan Factor, pp.

7

,

37

-

51

.

2. Ibid. pp.

2

-

5

,

48

-

51

.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid. pp.

66

-

67

,

262

-

267

.

5. Ibid. pp.

60

-

62

,

120

-

121

,

277

-

278

,

288

-

291

.

6. Burkholder, Satan’s Counterfeit Healing, pp.

1

-

2

.

7. Ibid. pp.

45

-

48

,

51

-

55

.

8. Burkholder, Satan’s Counterfeit Healing, p.

19

.

9. Ibid. pp.

2

-

4

.

10. Ibid. p.

8

.

11. Ibid. pp.

241

-

245

.

12. John

9

.

13. Burkholder, Satan’s Counterfeit Healing, p.

244

.

14. Personal Correspondence. July

9

,

2010

.

15. Zimmermann, Hermeneutics, p.

94

.

16. Lefebvre et al., Behavioural and Neural Characterization, p.

6

.

17. John

16

:

7

-

15

.

18. Galatians

5

:

22

-

23

(ESV)

19.

1

Corinthians

8

:

3

(ESV)

Acknowledgements

In many ways, this book is a companion volume to my previous publication, The Leviathan Factor. In this book, I showed that the ancient serpent Leviathan (Satan) is responsible for a deadly skewing of creation. I explained Satan’s beginning, rebellion, destructive rampage through creation, and vendetta against humans, including the invasion of peoples’ minds. In the present work, I focus on Satan’s deceptive supernatural healing.

The charismatic fourth wave has been a strong influence in my writing of Satan’s Counterfeit Healing. In the mid-nineties, I attended sessions at the Toronto Airport Fellowship, and also a Rodney Howard Browne rally. The phenomena I saw and experienced I assumed to be of the Holy Spirit. However, there were gradual bits and pieces that challenged this belief. There was a prophet on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, obviously in a trance, proclaiming, there is no judgment, with the hostess swaying along with him. Then there was a friend’s Christian acquaintance who healed someone via an electrical energy transfer in her hand. Around the same time, my wife’s work colleague was severely burned on her arm by a heat transfer from a Reiki practitoner. I began to see that the cosmic battle between God and Satan isn’t abstract, but is being played out in competing claims of supernatural healing. All of these influences came to fruition in my own spiritual crisis in 1998 (see the Afterword, chapter 11). This forced a complete reassessment of supernatural healing, and eventually led to this book.

I thank those who have lent their names to this work. Roy Matheson, ThD, Pastor Emeritus of Chartwell Baptist Church, wrote the Foreword out of his deep experience as a New Testament theologian and deliverance healer. On a personal note, in 1998 Dr. Matheson led the deliverance session in which I was the client. Amos Yong, PhD, is Professor of Theology and Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary. A prolific Pentecostal scholar, he has authored or edited almost four dozen volumes and published over two hundred articles.

I’m grateful to the editors at Wipf and Stock who, in publishing this book, have once again proven they’re risk-takers. Obviously, any errors of fact or interpretation are my responsibility and not theirs.

Finally, I thank the Holy Spirit of God, to whom this book is dedicated. He has pointed me to data and given me the courage to follow where it led. This has resulted in some conclusions which, to various degrees, will be unpopular and controversial. My prayer is that the reader can receive those words which are helpful and allow the rest to fall by the wayside.

Gormley, Ontario, December 12, 2017

About the Cover

In mythology, the caduceus (not to be confused with the physicians’ Rod of Asclepius) was a symbol of the Greek god Hermes, the guide of the dead. It carries competing connotations of theft, deception, and death versus rebirth and regeneration, all fitting symbols for Satan’s counterfeit healing. Johann Froben’s late medieval version, which has been edited for this cover, included a dove with the biblical inscription, Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

1

Supernatural Healing and Creation’s Laws

A good parlor game is to ask folks to guess how many people have ever lived. Invariably the estimates are not merely low but ridiculously low, typically a few billion. In fact, the best calculation of homosapiens’ accumulative population over the last ten thousand years or so is 106 billion.¹ Although these people were and are diverse in every way possible, one factor binds all of us together, with the exceptions of Enoch and Elijah: each person either has already physically died or will perish.

Death is the great human equalizer. On a practical level, this is beneficial, because earth’s present ecology would collapse without death in the biological chain. Consider the impossible situation if all 106 billion humans born in the last ten thousand years should be alive today! On a more emotional level, we are conscious of, or more likely consumed by, our personal mortality. It’s of little comfort to tell ourselves that, in the grand scheme of things, the universe is itself heading toward heat death and lifelessness. Perhaps strong intellects, to use Richard Dawkins’s phrase, can face death motivated by his Bertrand Russell quotation: when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.² It turns out, however, that most folks reject Dawkins’s dismal nihilism; three-quarters of Americans actually believe in life after death.³ Though most of these survivalists are likely unfamiliar with the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, they do share his inherent sense of eternity. In saying that God has put a consciousness of past and future into our minds (Eccl 3:11), the Preacher sharpens our awareness that human life transcends death.

For many, this awareness of death is accompanied by a deeply-ingrained determination to lash out at the forces of dissolution and nothingness. In secular circles, the battle with death is expressed in anti-aging research, tissue engineering, re-creation of extinct species and of dead peoples’ DNA, and for fringe metaphysicians, immortalization as virtual software agents.⁴ Some of these utopian schemes are advancing as, for instance, the regeneration of existing organs and, down the road, perhaps of whole bodies. The recreation of extinct species through DNA combinations of living relatives with dead specimens also is underway. Virtual reality humans, the most visionary concept, is frankly illusory, since even then a physical universe with residual heat is required to contain the copies. Consequently, in the end, every physicalist eschatological dream humans follow is subject to the basic structures and laws of creation.

In Part I, this fact leads us to a consideration of the fundamental processes which define the universe’s laws. The root structure is a logical automaton which generates every law in creation. The heat death boundaries given to these laws account for entropy, against which any healing must strive. Part II describes the secondary lawful boundaries which limit supernatural healing by focusing on limb regeneration. I consider a broad swath of data introduced by a case study of healing evangelist Michael D. Evans. Then I demonstrate that biological pre-pattern blueprints exist in the virtual reality epigenome. As a result, blockage of limb regeneration and other boundary conditions such as chromosomal deficiencies is by information loss, specifically of pre-patterns. I conclude by reviewing Miguel Juan Pellicer’s supernatural limb reattachment, post-amputation.

I. Supernatural Action and Natural Law

The basic structure on which creation rests, even below the cosmic vacuum, is a cellular grid (automaton). This is a non-material logical structure which may be visualized as a multi-dimensional checkerboard in which a change in one location, or cell, triggers changes in all locations. All of creation’s laws result from automaton operations. Though it’s theoretically reversable,⁵ in reality, the grid produces a unidirectional arrow of time moving toward the future. Each cell contains rule sets (algorithms) whose calculating operations produce the physical reality which ultimately is subject to human investigation in the grosser realms of stuff.

This calculating process means that creation is digital, an idea accepted in some version by many physicists, computer scientists, and mathematicians. In a 1989 lecture, physicist John Wheeler succinctly summarized the idea: every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely from binary choices, bits. What we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions.⁶ Science writer Kevin Kelly noted that when science got beyond the level of fleeting quark and muons it knew the world was incorporeal . . . Those strange and insubstantial quantum wavicles, along with everything else in the universe, are themselves made of nothing but 1s and 0s. The physical world itself is digital.⁷

Physicist Rudolf Treumann actually calculated that, at the beginning of Planck time, there would be only one bit. He rejected his own conclusion, saying creation’s initial condition needs at least two bits for a yes/no choice.⁸ However, Edward Fredkin moved the discussion into metaphysical territory by stating that a digital creation demands someone outside it to program it, a being Fredkin called the Other⁹ and which we know to be God. This God-creation relationship is called a network in dynamic systems theory, and the cosmic covenant in biblical theology.

If creation at this basic level is digital, then it follows that, in some sense, it’s determined. This is contrary to our daily experience, but it’s not the deal-breaker it might seem. The rule-sets which govern the digital processes can include apparent randomness. Pseudo-random number generators can be completely deterministic, yet produce phenomena that pass every statistical test for randomness.¹⁰ Rules can also be designed so that they produce parallel outputs and choice.¹¹ Such creational design features provide for apparent randomness in more complex levels to allow the element of choice that appears in higher-level reality.

The automaton subsists and generates the universe. The latter is a massive energy system which could have begun either in heat balance (negentropy) or heat imbalance (entropy). This preset structural dichotomy allowed God two choices after Satan’s heavenly rebellion. First, there could be a death universe with entropy, which could be redeemed. Second, a negentropic new universe could be created which lacked the very qualities which God had already determined to be optimum in creation’s original design. God chose redemption and, therefore, from its beginning, the physical universe was created with entropy and death.

This meant that there was a high differential between the two poles of heat and cold. Science has labeled the condition of maximum heat differential/disorder, low entropy, and the condition of minimum heat differential/order, high entropy. Low entropy defines a measurement of the universe’s ability to do useful work, namely creating and sustaining life. Because of the thermodynamic laws of physics, the tendency of the system has been to gradually move toward a neutral temperature in which the universe has become energetically lifeless. The energy differential is crucial, since it’s this factor which allows physical processes to occur. An analogy is a simple storage battery which can perform useful work as long as the opposing negative and positive charges are sufficient to create a current. In the big picture, at some point in the far distant future, the universe’s battery will have become cold, lifeless, and dead.

Entropy means that life itself is so improbable as to be incalculable. Physicists Shahar Dolev and Avshalom C. Elitzur comment, Living systems control the operation of single molecules, guiding minuscule amounts of energy and matter into an enormously ordered, macroscopic system. Then they say, Statistically, it seems, the odds for such a transition are nearly zero. Yet, the very fact that this statement is made by living creatures means that, long ago, the next-to-impossible has happened. They continue, It is extremely unlikely that life on Earth evolved against the laws of thermodynamics, hence there must be some guiding principle that helped the biosphere to advance, against all odds, from the vast realms of disorder into smaller and smaller regions of growing complexity.¹² Taken together, the two opposing facts of the universe’s energy rundown producing simplification, versus life inception producing complexification, are absolutely stunning testaments to God’s creative power.

The origin of life in a universe heading toward entropic heat death raises profound questions about causation since the same devolutionary processes are at work in the human body. These can be measured, rendering a bodily systems’ decline at the rate of about 1 percent a year.¹³ This scientific finding equates well with the biblical statement that a person’s lifespan is seventy years, or eighty if one is strong (Ps 90:10). So, regardless of supernatural healing interventions by either God or Satan, this barrier cannot be overcome, although God or Satan can temporarily and locally increase negentropy as healing.

Even faced with entropy, classic evolutionary theory has assumed that upwardly-trending complexification processes are inherent in nature. G. F. R. Ellis has tabulated this causation idea in terms of nature and humans.¹⁴ At this stage, we’re not so much interested in Ellis’s specific complexification categories as in evolution’s received idea of upward causation.

Table 1.1 Complexification

However, it’s now understood that complexification cannot occur solely by upward causation, but depends on downward causation as well. Gennaro Auletta and his co-authors (including Ellis) describe this reciprocal action very well:

Top-down