Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

https://aeon.co/essays/philosophers-must...modynamics

EXCERPTS: We have yet to conceive of reality as it truly is. Instead, philosophers cling to an ancient idea of the Universe in which everything keeps growing and flourishing. According to this view, existence is good. Reality is good. [...] Indeed, from Plato onwards, philosophers have generally agreed that living well means aligning with the rational order of the cosmos.

[..] Even in the 21st century, this picture of the Universe informs how we think we should live. It fuels our moral handwringing over the so-called Anthropocene, the notion that our planet has been fundamentally altered by human action. It motivates our attempts to develop ‘sustainable’ environmental policies and drives our escapist fantasies of ‘getting back to nature’. All that is wrong might be put to rights, we think, if only we could find a way to live within the purely creative and inherently benevolent order of existence.

Unfortunately, these long-held assumptions and aspirations are no longer tenable. In fact, our most excessive actions as a species – destroying rainforests, causing widespread extinction, altering the ocean’s chemistry, ‘time-bombing the future’ with forever chemicals and more – are perfectly in keeping with the ultimate aims of the Universe.

Reality, as we now understand, does not tend towards existential flourishing and eternal becoming. Instead, systems collapse, things break down, and time tends irreversibly towards disorder and eventual annihilation. Rather than something to align with, the Universe appears to be fundamentally hostile to our wellbeing... (MORE - details)
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But while there is that moral hand-wringing about the menace of capitalism and its destructive fruits afflicting the world and society, there is also literary intellectual crusading that could be packaged under the category of anti-naturalism. Where the natural world (especially with respect to biology) is regarded as inherently unjust and wicked. Granted, though, the original Marxist camp was fully on board with ways of the material world and the belief that via dialectical process a socioeconomic utopia would eventually be outputted (state of communist paradise). Start out with nature being oppressive, maybe, but it is fated to evolve into something nicer.

Entropy is not evil or hostile, it's amoral and neutral.

"The nature of evil is that the characters of things are mutually obstructive." (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, ed.)

I myself, in line with Whitehead's cosmogony, believe there is goodness at the heart of Being. While evil and tragedy exist, and indeed must exist as an extension of multiple free agents, Reality is none the less evolving towards less and less negative events. Less and less chaos. And less and less meaninglessness. We may call this "God" as Whitehead and Hartshorne did, or "Oversoul" as Emerson did, or "Spirit" as Hegel did. But the trend in the long run is towards "betterness"--of an advancing order that is preserved, refined, and passed down that maximizes the positive possibilities for all entities. The Good is therefore in Whitehead's sense an aesthetic vision, not a moral one, which is only a subset of the higher qualitative order. It is in the pure creativity of Being, the universal almost baroquian percolation of novelty at all scales, that keeps the deadening stasis of evil from ever gaining the upper hand.