"Howard J. Van Till" wrote:
>
>
> George wrote:
>
>
>
> Speaking of "the continuity of the
> creaturely cause/effect system" ignores the
> possibility we discussed in connection with Peter
> Ruest's proposal, that God is active at the
> quantum level. For the problem with understanding
> measurement & the apparent collapse of wave
> packets in QM is just that the collapse seems to
> happen discontinuously & that standard
> descriptions of QM don't provide a closed
> cause/effect system: They give no reason why we
> find the photon along one arm of the
> interferometer rather than the other.
> Again, I have problems with the idea that
> God simply steps in & collapses all the wave
> packets. But there does seem to be a lack of full
> creaturely causation here.
>
> 1. Re "the continuity of the creaturely cause/effect
> system": OK, perhaps the term "continuity" must be
> qualified here to include quantum phenomena (with all of
> their peculiarities) but to exclude coercive divine action
> that would supersede the creaturely system.
>
> 2. Re "full creaturely causation": Looks like the
> creaturely system of causation has some openness to
> contingency here. Another way to say it is that there are
> numerous examples of creaturely processes for which the
> final state of some event/process is underdetermined by all
> that can be specified about the system's initial state. As
> I understand it, Peter's proposal places God's decisive
> action (selecting one particular option) here.
>
> Question: Does this divine decision (Peter's proposal)
> supersede creaturely action? Is it coercive or non-coercive?
>
The creaturely action described by the Schroedinger eqn - i.e.,
continuous temporal evolution of wave functions - is superseded by
something when a measurement takes place. Otherwise electrons would
never be anywhere definite &c. It may be that the reduction of the wave
function takes place via some type of creaturely action we don't
understand yet - e.g., by the introduction of consciousness into the
system. (That's a rather speculative possibility but I think there's
something to be said for it.) In that case we would say that God
"cooperates with" or "lures" (depending on whether we take what I called
earlier the K or P view) creatures. I guess it's up to proponents of
this approach whether or not they're open to that type of understanding
of measurement or whether they insist that God's quantum action is
unmediated.
That may seem like a cop-out but it does come down to that.
It's pretty much the same as with the information content of living
systems. We all agree that there is information specified by DNA, &
that we don't fully understand at this point how it gets there. All
Christians will agree that God is active in getting the info there. The
ID folks then jump to the conclusion that God must do that in a direct &
unmediated way (though they may pay lip service to the possibility of
further research), while others of us think it's more likely that God
does this through natural processes that we don't understand yet.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
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