>Indeed, it was a similar trap that Jonathan Edwards fell into with his
>formulation of providence. For him objects only existed in the moment to
>be created again in the next moment. Whilst his view maintained the close
>and direct involvement of God with his creation it left no real room for
>secondary causality.
This sounds eerily similar to the implications of the Lamb-Retherford shift
of atomic physics. The vacuum of space time is constantly creating virtual
particles, such as an electron and positron, which then annihilate each
other an instant after their creation, An electron attempting to orbit a
nucleus must run a gauntlet of these virtual particles. As I understand it,
occasionally the atomic electron may hit a virtual positron with the result
that the electron which continues around the nucleus is the former virtual
electron whose partner in creation was just destroyed. Thus, speaking
classically, the electron which completes the orbit is not the one which
started the orbit (although one cannot distinguish "different" electrons).
If this sea of virtual particles affects other nuclear particles, this leads
to the conclusion that the atoms and molecules in our bodies are not the
"same" as the ones we ate breakfast with, although they are indistiguishable
from those).
Reference, Misener, Thorne and Wheeler, Gravitation, 1973, p. 1190-1193
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm