Physics Confesses Its Limits
In part two of our trilogy of articles we see
Physics itself facing a crisis of confidence.
Its greatest “laws” are inadequate to explain Life.
Physics Confesses Its Limits
By John D. Wise, PhD
Life and a Fourth Law?
Yesterday, in the first article of our December trilogy, we watched biology drift into a new conceptual landscape. Developmental rules, constraints, and integrated complexity had quietly replaced the ‘old’ Darwinian randomness. Today we climb one rung higher into the scientific hierarchy, to something more startling.
We turn to physics itself.
New Scientist recently ran a piece with a striking headline: “We may need a fourth law of thermodynamics for living systems,” 25 November 2025. That may sound sensationalized.
It is not.
The article acknowledges something biologists, physicists, and information theorists have been whispering for years, and clever readers of CEH have certainly sensed.
The classical laws of physics fail to describe life.
They were never meant to, really. Thermodynamics was built to explain steam engines, ideal gases, equilibrium systems, and heat flow. It was never designed to describe organisms that maintain structure, channel information, repair damage, export entropy, anticipate future states, and stubbornly remain far from equilibrium. It turns out that the laws explaining melting ice and dispersing gas clouds do not explain mitochondria, chromatin architecture, signaling networks, or cell division.
This article puts it delicately:
When it comes to life, with its complex interconnected cells, it is not clear that our current array of thermodynamical laws is enough.
“Not enough.” That is the confession whispered in the confessional.
The laws of thermodynamics are not minor technical constraints. They are the bedrock of modern physics, the undefeated general laws that apply everywhere, at all times, to all physical systems. They are the closest thing science has to universal axioms. They govern stars, black holes, chemical reactions, weather patterns, engines, crystals, oceans, and galaxies. When Sir Arthur Eddington said that no theory can survive contradicting the second law, he was not exaggerating.
So if physicists now say – or even, as in this article, seriously entertain – that these laws are “not enough,” they are admitting something monumental. They are conceding that the deepest principles describing the physical universe cannot account for living systems, that life is not physics with “extra steps.”
Life belongs to a different order.
The Uncrossable Discontinuity
Classical thermodynamics describes how energy disperses and how systems decay. It predicts that closed systems slide toward equilibrium. It permits certain simple forms of physical order to emerge – like stars, crystals, or convection rolls – but these arise automatically from gravitational collapse or energy minimization.
Thermodynamics never predicts the spontaneous rise of biological order: internal regulation, information-rich organization, error correction, homeostasis, or set point maintenance. Nothing in the physical laws predicts anything like a cell or an organism that maintains low entropy through coordinated information flow, repair, and regulation.
Which is why the article introduces a concept that classical physics does not have and cannot generate. The author calls it a “set point”:
… biological cells have what’s called a set point, which means they behave as if they are following an internal thermostat. There is a feedback mechanism that brings them back to the set point, which lets them keep functioning. It is this kind of behaviour that may not be easily captured by classical thermodynamics.
This is nothing less than a teleological Trojan Horse, though the author seems unaware of the danger. The term sounds harmless, almost mechanical, like a thermostat setting. But hidden inside is the admission that living systems do not behave like matter. They maintain target states. They correct deviations. They evaluate error. They act to preserve order. They defend structure against entropy.
Classical physics knows nothing of this.
Atoms do not have preferred states they defend, molecules do not maintain themselves through feedback loops, rocks do not correct errors, and stars do not repair themselves.
Only life does this.
Life is the irruption of intentionality into the inorganic sphere. It is a discontinuity in the created order, a boundary that can be approached but never crossed from below. [1] This boundary is a given feature of creation, not a gap in current knowledge. The physical world seeks the lowest energy state. The living world intentionally seeks the preservation of set points.
The inorganic realm and life are different magisteria. [2]
Integrated Complexity at the Level of Physics
What the New Scientist article hints at is that living systems exhibit integrated complexity at the thermodynamic level. They are not assemblies of independent parts. They are unified wholes that sustain themselves through coordinated processes. Change the energy flow, and the information network collapses. Change the information network, and the energy flow collapses. Life is not the sum of its parts. It is the orchestration of its parts. And that orchestration is not reducible to physics.
The laws of thermodynamics explain how systems decay, but life resists decay through regulated information, boundary maintenance, and goal-directed energy flow. Organisms export entropy, but only in ways that preserve their internal structure. They are integrated complexity machines powered by intentionality.
Set Points and Integrated Complexity
A set point is not a passive condition. It is a defended one. It requires:
- Sensing
- information comparison
- thresholds
- corrective action
- anticipatory behavior
- hierarchical control
- internal logical orchestration
This is the integrated complexity we saw in ferns yesterday, but now at the thermodynamic level. Remove any part of the network and the system collapses. Change one constraint and the organism destabilizes. Organisms preserve their set points because they intend to.
Thermodynamics alone cannot explain this, and it never will.
The author of this article tries to maintain neutrality, but the implications are unavoidable. A set point implies purpose. Purpose implies teleology. Teleology implies intentionality. Intentionality implies that life does not arise from the laws that govern merely physical systems.
This is why some physicists now speak of the need for a fourth law. But a new law is not the solution. Life does not require more equations. It requires the recognition that the inorganic domain is not continuous with the living domain.
The data-driven tension is growing, and scientists are beginning to say openly what has been implicitly clear for decades. There is a domain of order, direction, and information that classical physics cannot reach. Life is not chemistry that got lucky. It is a different category of being.
Our Trilogy’s Climax
If biology cannot be reduced to randomness, and if life cannot be reduced to physics, then modern science has arrived at the edge of the very bargain it struck in the 19th century. It was a Faustian exchange: abandon transcendence, embrace the Hegelian dialectic, and in return receive a self-enclosed, immanent world where mind, purpose, and God were unnecessary.
But all such bargains have terms, and those terms eventually come due.
Once the laws of physics are admitted as insufficient to explain life, the pact unravels. And as it unravels, the old binary returns: immanent or transcendent, non-dual Mind or God. A binary so long repressed in Freudian denial rises again, not timidly, but in Noachian proportion.
The final article in our trilogy from Uppsala University does not extend materialism; it abandons it, replacing matter with a metaphysical field.
And with that move, the age of materialism ends.
[1] This explains the dismal failure that is Origin of Life research.
[2] By “magisteria” I do not mean Stephen Jay Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA), which artificially separates science and faith into unrelated domains. I use the term in its older and broader sense to refer to distinct ontological categories within creation, each with its own principles, boundaries, and modes of operation. The inorganic, the living, the human, and the divine each constitute a magisterium in this sense. They are not stages on a continuous evolutionary spectrum but discrete domains established by God, each possessing properties that cannot be reduced to, or derived from, the category beneath it.
John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.