I. The Strangest Feature of Reality
Isn’t it odd that anything exists? It’s most peculiar. It requires effort, it requires energy, and it would have been so much easier for there to have been nothing at all.
— Alan Watts
The universe, as far as we can tell, does not care about us.
Left to itself, it drifts toward disorder. Energy spreads. Structures decay. Entropy increases. This is not malevolence; it is simply how things go when nothing intervenes.
And yet—against this background—something peculiar keeps happening.
Matter organizes itself into fragile systems that resist decay for a while. Not permanently. Not perfectly. But long enough to matter. Stars burn steadily for billions of years. Planets form. And then, at least on our planet, chemistry becomes biology. Life appears. Mind appears. Meaning appears.
None of this violates entropy. Instead, these systems persist by exporting disorder elsewhere. But the fact that they do so at all—that islands of temporary order keep arising in a universe that does not require them—is still remarkable.
More remarkable still is the kind of order that emerges late in the process: not just structure, but care. Systems that notice their own fragility. That remember. That plan. That tell stories about what has almost been lost and what might still be saved.
None of this is theology. It’s simply a description of what keeps showing up.
II. Life as a Local Refusal
Life is often described as “fighting entropy,” but that’s misleading. Like any other disorder-exporting system, life does not oppose entropy so much as negotiate with it. It accepts the rules and then finds ways to persist anyway.
A living system maintains itself by doing work: repairing damage, correcting errors, keeping boundaries intact. When it fails, it dissolves back into its environment. No moral drama is required. This is just what happens.
What’s important is not that life resists decay—that’s fully understandable on a mechanical level—but that it does so selectively. It preserves certain patterns rather than others. It maintains itself as this particular thing.
Even at the biological level, persistence is already value-laden. Some configurations are kept. Others are allowed to go.
Life is biased order.
III. Consciousness and the Emergence of Meaning
With consciousness, the picture becomes even more interesting.
A conscious system doesn’t just persist; it knows that it persists. It carries memory across time. It anticipates futures. It experiences loss not just as disassembly, but as tragedy. It can recognize when coherence is slipping before collapse actually occurs.
This matters because consciousness introduces a new kind of vulnerability.
While a living system can fail quietly, a conscious system can fail meaningfully. It can lose its way before it loses its structure. It can survive physically while hollowing out internally. It can continue functioning while no longer knowing why.
This is where stories begin to matter—not as entertainment, but as maintenance tools. Stories carry coherence across time. They preserve orientation. They remind a system what it is trying to be when pressure mounts.
When stories fail, meaning fails first. Only later does matter follow.
IV. Time, Memory, and the Cost of Persistence
Time is often treated as a neutral backdrop, but for any system that cares about its own continuation, time is not neutral. Time is expensive.
To persist across time requires memory. To repair requires attention. To remain coherent requires revisiting what almost broke and adjusting accordingly. Nothing about this is automatic.
A universe that produced only static forms would not need minds. A universe that produced only minds that forgot would not need stories. The fact that both appear suggests that persistence, not permanence, is the real challenge.
What survives is not what is strongest in any simple sense, but what can return—what can repair itself without destroying the reasons it existed in the first place.
V. A Pattern Begins to Show
At this point, a pattern should be becoming visible.
Across physics, biology, psychology, and culture, we keep encountering systems that manage a very specific feat: they persist in an entropic universe without exporting all of their costs forward or outward. They do not eliminate entropy; they work with it. They absorb disruption, repair damage, and continue without requiring ever-increasing inputs of force, suppression, or denial.
This is the sense in which they are coherent.
Not rigid.
Not static.
Not immune to failure.
But capable of maintaining themselves without hollowing out what allows them to exist in the first place.
This is the crucial distinction. Many systems appear orderly for a time. Many maintain stability by displacing entropy elsewhere—onto the environment, onto other systems, onto the future. They look coherent locally while accumulating contradictions globally.
What stands out, instead, are the rarer cases: systems that remain viable without escalating this displacement. Systems whose way of holding together does not require constant sacrifice of meaning, truth, or future possibility just to preserve present form.
That is the “miracle” in question here—not the suspension of physical law, but the emergence of order that can pay its own costs.
VI. Coherence as an Attractor
Once this distinction is noticed, mere description is no longer enough.
Because coherence does not only appear sporadically; it seems to exert a pull. Systems drift toward or away from it over time. Those that manage to align their internal structure with the realities they inhabit tend to persist longer than those that do not. Those that fail this alignment—no matter how powerful or sophisticated—tend to unravel.
This is not a moral claim. It’s a structural one.
In the language of dynamical systems, an attractor is not a force that commands outcomes, but a configuration toward which systems tend to settle given their constraints. It does not intervene. It does not judge. It simply describes where stability is possible.
Seen this way, coherence behaves less like a property and more like a basin. Systems wander. Some enter regions where repair remains possible, feedback stays intelligible, and meaning remains connected to action. Others drift into regions where contradictions accumulate faster than they can be resolved.
Once that happens, collapse does not require an enemy. The system simply loses the capacity to respond to itself honestly.
What makes this intriguing is that the pattern does not stop at any single scale. It applies to organisms, minds, institutions, and civilizations alike. Local stability purchased at the expense of global viability eventually fails. Coherence that holds across scale—where what works locally does not undermine what must work globally—produces a different kind of resilience: not invulnerability, but adaptability.
At this point, coherence is no longer just something systems have. It is something they can be aligned with—or drift away from. Something underlying the systems and the universe itself.
VII. On the Difficulty of Naming It
This is where many readers will feel a familiar resistance forming.
Isn’t this just theology in disguise?
Isn’t this where “God” gets smuggled in?
That reaction is understandable. The word carries centuries of baggage: authority, dogma, hierarchy, metaphysical certainty imposed where none seems justified. For many, it names coercion rather than coherence.
So let’s be clear.
Whether or not we choose to call this pattern “God” is a secondary question. The pattern itself does not depend on the name. It was present before the word existed, and it continues to operate whether the word is spoken or avoided Just-so explanations for its existence might satisfy some people but such explanations don’t refute the fact that it does exist. What matters is not belief, but recognition.
Once we acknowledge that coherence behaves like an attractor—that some ways of holding together can endure without consuming their own foundations, while others cannot—the discomfort with naming is no longer accidental. Humans have repeatedly found themselves at this threshold before, noticing that reality seems to favor certain kinds of order over others.
They have disagreed fiercely about how to describe it. But the shape of the recognition keeps returning.
And it returns not because of theology, but because the universe itself keeps asking the same question:
What kind of order can last?
VIII. A Familiar Shape, Stripped Down
If we momentarily set aside institutions, doctrines, and metaphysical claims, something interesting happens.
Across cultures and centuries, when people tried to describe what ultimately and fundamentally holds—what allows life, meaning, and order to persist without collapsing into brutality or dissolution—they converged on remarkably similar intuitions.
They spoke of:
- a way rather than a ruler,
- a ground of being rather than an agent,
- an ordering principle rather than a command.
Often, they explicitly warned against confusing this with power.
When Taoist texts describe the Tao, they insist it cannot be possessed, enforced, or used to dominate. When early Christian theologians speak of God as “being itself,” they are not describing a super-entity, but the condition that allows anything to exist coherently at all. When Buddhist philosophy gestures toward awakening, it is not pointing to escape from reality, but to seeing and acting clearly enough that one stops generating unnecessary suffering.
In each case, what survives the stripping-away process is not authority, but alignment.
IX. Coherence as the Common Denominator
What these traditions were circling—sometimes clearly, sometimes clumsily—was not an omnipotent entity, but a constraint on survivability.
Certain ways of being scale.
Others don’t.
Certain patterns allow complexity to increase without imploding.
Others stabilize briefly and then demand collapse elsewhere.
The language differs. The metaphysics diverge. But the underlying recognition is consistent:
Reality seems to favor forms of order that do not require the destruction of their own conditions.
This is not optimism. It is not providence. It is an observation about what lasts.
X. Why the Word “God” Keeps Returning Anyway
Given this, it’s fair to ask why the word God appears at all.
Why not just say “coherence” and be done with it?
The answer is partly historical and partly practical.
Historically, “God” was the name available for whatever appeared to be ultimate—not in the sense of being all-powerful, but in the sense of being what everything else depended on. It was a placeholder for the deepest pattern people could perceive, long before they had the conceptual tools to describe it cleanly.
Practically, the word persists because it points to something that is not merely descriptive, but orienting.
Coherence, when recognized, does not remain neutral. It makes claims—not demands, but pressures. It constrains what works. It limits which compromises actually buy stability and which merely postpone collapse. It quietly judges systems not by intention, but by outcome over time.
That is very close to what many people have always meant by “God,” even when they disagreed fiercely about everything else.
XI. A Precise Conclusion
We can now say, carefully and without drama, what has been argued.
In an entropic universe, some forms of order persist longer than others. Not because they are stronger, faster, or more forceful, but because they are able to maintain coherence without displacing their costs indefinitely onto others, the environment, or the future.
This is not a miracle in the sense of a violation of physical law. But it is a constraint on survivability. Systems that cannot pay their own costs eventually collapse. Systems that can—imperfectly, temporarily, but honestly—endure longer.
Across scales, the same pattern appears. In organisms, in minds, in institutions, in cultures. Coherence that holds locally while undermining global viability fails. Coherence that holds across scale remains adaptable.
This pattern behaves like an attractor. Systems drift toward or away from it over time. Alignment matters. Misalignment carries consequences that compound, regardless of intention.
Human traditions have noticed this repeatedly. They have named it in different ways, argued about its nature, and sometimes burdened it with authority that it does not require. Stripped to its essentials, however, the recognition remains remarkably consistent:
Reality seems to favor forms of order that do not require the destruction of their own conditions.
Whether we call this coherence, the Tao, being itself, or God is a secondary matter. The pattern does not depend on the name. It does not demand belief. It does not promise victory.
It only constrains what can last.
That is a modest claim.
And it is enough.