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God and Quantum Mechanics

Singularitarian

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It was once decided that whilst this essay had been rooted in physics, it was generally philosophical and perhaps a religious essay, designed to explore the relationships between modern mythology and traditional understandings, with those of quantum mechanics.


This essay talks about whether God should be limited to the laws of nature themselves. In fact, if He/She is, then it is possible that a quantum mechanical God could exist, where He/She obides by the nature of the universe

For me traditionally...

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=902031

Post edited to remove breach of Rule 4; URL added.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Locknar
 
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Hi Singularitarian

This essay talks about whether God should be limited to the laws of nature themselves.
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"Should" be? It's an odd choice of modal verb. Who are we to decide what God should be? Or do you mean "ought to be in order to be considered God"?

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=902031 said:
For me traditionally...

For me, three words can sum God up rather well. He/She is omnipotent. God is also omniscient. He/She is also omnipresent. This sums God up for me... but, before we continue, let us agree on one more aspect. God knows everything. There should not be an atom in the universe He/She is not aware of... hence something similar found in the Bible, ''God knows the number of every strand of hair on your head.''

However, having a scientific mind, i must admit, we must change our views of what God could be - we often take the bible far too seriously. For instance, to say God knows everything, is where the first inconsistency arises, when interpreting God into the theory of quantum physics.

According to the uncertainty principle, to know everything there is about matter, like the location or path of any particle simultaneously is unknowable. To know such knowledge would be disastrous for our universe; it would cause extreme violence.
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Eh? Nature is red in tooth and claw. Violence made Homo Sapiens. We don't need knowledge to make us violent. We knew how to be violent before we knew anything else.

If a measurement on the state of a particle is made in the past determining its path, and another measurement made of its momentum in the future, both the path and position of a particle is knowable in the present, because the momentum of a particle isn't determined yet in the present.
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How can we measure things in the past or future? All our measurements are made in the present, aren't they?
 
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UndercoverElephant said:
Hi Singularitarian



"Should" be? It's an odd choice of modal verb. Who are we to decide what God should be? Or do you mean "ought to be in order to be considered God"?



Eh? Nature is red in tooth and claw. Violence made Homo Sapiens. We don't need knowledge to make us violent. We knew how to be violent before we knew anything else.



How can we measure things in the past or future? All our measurements are made in the present, aren't they?
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1) - In a relative kind of sense, God to us should have characteristics which should appeal to the human nature of thought. Since the beginning of time, we have considered our divinities as being essentially an all-powerful all-knowing being, or superintelligence. This almighty power in which i speak of traditionally has no boundaries where the being cannot manipulate to their own will - however, quantum mechanics, the studies of the laws of fundamental nature, the physics cannot be so easily undone, and the rules written into space and time cannot be so easily bred away.

2) - No, this did not mean that knowledge becomes violent. The passage was illustrating what devistating effects there would be if we could violate the uncertainty principle for a large amount of energy packets.

3) - The timeline is a mysterious one, and not always the best understood. Essentially, there is no past and future. Current scientific status on the field theores of time take relativity seriously, and allow the past and the future to diminish as to have their own present times. This means there is no past or future, but a continuous string of moments which only exist within present time.
 
Singularitarian said:
For me, three words can sum God up rather well. He/She is omnipotent. God is also omniscient. He/She is also omnipresent. This sums God up for me... but, before we continue, let us agree on one more aspect. God knows everything. There should not be an atom in the universe He/She is not aware of... hence something similar found in the Bible, ''God knows the number of every strand of hair on your head.''
Click to expand...


I'm starting to think that, while you may very well be omniscient, you don't know everything.
 
Singularitarian said:
1) - Since the beginning of time, we have considered our divinities as being essentially an all-powerful all-knowing being, or superintelligence.
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Not really. Greeks, Egyptians, Mayans, Norse, etc, mostly had gods that were capricious, temperamental, kept secrets, made mistakes, competitive, flawed, etc. This explains reality much better than an all-powerful that pulls all the strings. Of course, the Judeo-Christian god often behaves the same way (destroying cities, slaughtering children, etc.), they just also added the footnote that despite these "behaviors" He's all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, unquestionable, etc. We just can't comprehend the infinitely-wise big-picture behind, say, a child stepping on a land mine.
 
I think though, whilst these divinities can flaw, (and this includes christianity), they are still all-powerful, meaning, no other power can overcome them.

However, when more than one God is applied like in Egyptology or Mayans, or what have you, it's better to say they where immortal, and indeed, more powerful than ourselves, making them possibly in the mythology as the most powerful beings. Whether all-knowing can be disputed theologically.
 
Singularitarian said:
1) - In a relative kind of sense, God to us should have characteristics which should appeal to the human nature of thought. Since the beginning of time, we have considered our divinities as being essentially an all-powerful all-knowing being, or superintelligence.
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Who is "we"? You are talking about western theists only. Eastern religions are less insistent about anthropomorphising their deities.
 
Singularitarian said:
I think though, whilst these divinities can flaw, (and this includes christianity), they are still all-powerful, meaning, no other power can overcome them.

However, when more than one God is applied like in Egyptology or Mayans, or what have you, it's better to say they where immortal, and indeed, more powerful than ourselves, making them possibly in the mythology as the most powerful beings. Whether all-knowing can be disputed theologically.
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This shows a true lack of knowledge concering dieties in general. They are not immortal, no matter how you want to bend it to your preconceived notions.

And I think you snuck a fine tuning argument in there as well.
 
I'm confused by the thrust of this argument. Is it intended to be a backdoor restatement of the argument from design? There are 1040000 enzymes, which greatly outweighs the unlikelihood of other stuff, so God is needed after all?
 
Beerina said:
I'm confused by the thrust of this argument. Is it intended to be a backdoor restatement of the argument from design? There are 1040000 enzymes, which greatly outweighs the unlikelihood of other stuff, so God is needed after all?
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I wish it where that simple. If anything, the thread implies that God in whatever form may have place among science, and within the hearts of many scientists, but ultimately the theories appeal for nothing more than some Anthropic model of physics, where things are the way they are, so that we my exist. This existence may be a conscious performance by some Higher Being, or it could evidently be simply the work of the universe at large.
 
I'm a physics professor, and I'm wondering what any of this has to do with quantum mechanics :rolleyes:
 
The world is multidimensional (we also are^^), and follows its rules (as we do). The Judeo-Muslimo-Christian:p God as a Divine Principle has no limits and does not "exist". It's a principle, not a being, I'd say.
difference between: God as the Divine - Hole, and "his" punishments as the boomeranging out of the net we are constantly waving (some call it: karma).
or God as a spiritual - ex-isting - more or less archetypical being.

In my view, the manifestation, our life here with all its conditions is a thing that is wether good nor bad. We use to valuate things, but in fact, everything is just a more or less interesting experience. For "God" there's nothing bad or good. Everything happens following the rules, you reap what you sow (you can sow / nourrish not only acts, but thoughts, feelings, and they persist after the end of a lifetime).
If a God has created the Universe and thought that some of the things he explicitely made possible should be punished, than he should have created it differently.
So, refferring to God-the Divine-principle, I'd say, there's no valuation and gdp doesn't act. The creatures are very different emanations of his, the human being (as far as I have heard) being on earth the only one with a free will, so the only one who can experience in transgressing the Divine Harmony.

The valuating is ours, because we feel more or less in harmony with everything. So we can come to feel guilty / others feel angry or hateful towards us, or we don't perceive what we cause with our behaviour and that causes what some people may call "punishments". Besides that there are strokes of fate that finally are mainly a chance to get rid of what hinders us to fulfill ourselves.

We have our inner plan, our inner structure, and when we're not in harmony with it, our inner link to the Divine Power rings the Alarm Bell.

I think, when somebody like Moses, Jesus, Mohammed or anybody says he talks to God, it's to his higher self / higher conscience: to the way his soul manifests the Divine.
 
groink?

Bumble bees fly, even if they are quite big and heavy in comparison to their wings ("much to big and heavy", our scientists proclaim^^). Why shouldn't pigs do, if they had free will and decided to do it?
 
Satra said:
Bumble bees fly, even if they are quite big and heavy in comparison to their wings ("much to big and heavy", our scientists proclaim).
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Sounds like that might be the same scientists that proclaim we only use 10% of our brains.

http://www.paghat.com/beeflight.html

http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/98/bees

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1076/is-it-aerodynamically-impossible-for-bumblebees-to-fly

Satra said:
Why shouldn't pigs do, if they had free will and decided to do it?
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Don't pigs have free will? Or have they all just decided not to fly.
 
The author of this article appears to be quite the moonbat.

They betray that they don't quite understand what omniscience means in the first paragraph. Next they seek to reconcile omniscience with Quantum Uncertainty... It seems to me that omniscience means "all knowing" so why would God even be required to violate the UP(by knowing information that doesn't exist)? You can't know these things on a fundamental level, so that knowledge doesn't need be included under "what God knows".

Then they wrap it up with what seems to be the old favorite "argument from fine-tuning", which I had thought Brandon Carter had squashed in the 70's with everyone's favorite tautology.
 
Satra said:
Bumble bees fly, even if they are quite big and heavy in comparison to their wings ("much to big and heavy", our scientists proclaim^^). Why shouldn't pigs do, if they had free will and decided to do it?
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In three words: Square-cube_lawWP
 
Oh, thanks a lot, I was not informed about this!

Having read the first link:
Some US-Americans seem to have a big problem with creationists and with people who consider things another way than themselves? Besides, this article is a quite unfriendly response to my post.

I'm not a creatonist, and in my opinion, everyone should follow his personal truth and respect the one of his neighbour. The Universe is multidimensional, and we are not conscious of half the connections existing in the different events in our world.

If I understand the author well, he hasn't seen or integrated the film "What the bleep do we know" (neither some persons here). That doesn't seem a truely scientific approach to me ( but that's not my problem:) ).

He doesn't know about many things in the world, obviously, and allows himself to be very sarcastic. I'm somehow impressed about such inconsidered self-considence.

It's entirely ok not to know, just somehow strange to pretend with assurance to know better than persons with a larger horizon than yours. :boxedin: There's always a world behind the box of your (and my) horizon.

May be wiser to say "I know that my knowledge is limited". (just in case someone wanted to be wise and truthloving)
 
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