entropy x morality x A noble moral rebellion built on a hopelessly incoherent physics.

 a

Here’s a bullet-point gist of the passage you provided:

• The piece begins with a Sherlock Holmes quote about the beauty of a rose as evidence of divine goodness—flowers as “extras” beyond what is necessary for survival.

• David Bentley Hart responds to Drew M. Dalton’s Aeon article “Reality is evil,” which summarizes Dalton’s book The Matter of Evil.

• Dalton defends a scientifically informed materialism and a speculative realism that concludes reality is fundamentally evil due to entropy.

• He proposes an ethical pessimism: since nature is governed by the laws of thermodynamics (especially entropy), morality must be a form of resistance to the destructive, degenerative tendency of the universe.

• Hart argues Dalton’s project commits a category error by trying to ground ethics in physical science—an impossibility highlighted by Wittgenstein and Kant.

• Dalton avoids natural-law ethics: he claims goodness and mercy aren’t grounded in reality but are noble acts of resistance against it.

• Hart finds Dalton’s moral sentiment admirable but the reasoning “infantile.”

• Dalton interprets entropy as proof that nature is not creative but a machine converting disequilibrium into equilibrium—ultimately tending toward heat death.

• Dalton sees life itself as a mechanism for accelerating entropy by converting matter into energy.

• Hart counters that Dalton’s view is self-contradictory: if consciousness and moral striving arise from physical processes, they cannot at the same time be fundamentally opposed to the universe’s physical essence.

• Introducing purpose (“for the purpose of destroying/creating/accelerating entropy”) undermines Dalton’s physicalist ontology, since teleology is not admissible within his strict materialism.

If you want, I can continue summarizing the rest of the piece or compress it into even tighter bullets.

a