From: Richard McGough (richard@biblewheel.com)
Date: Wed Jul 02 2003 - 14:15:22 EDT
George wrote:
>It diminishes God only if one thinks that the model of God as absolute monarch is necessary. But if God's action in the world is distinguished by kenosis (as the NT suggests) then God's not having complete control of all events is the kind of thing we might expect. (BTW this would be part of an answer to the question I posed yesterday about distinctive Christian insights on relision-science issues.)
There is another aspect to consider. Atheists use the many-universes theory to defeat fine-tuning arguments. If every possible configuration is not merely possible but necessary, then there is no need to account for the fine-tuning of our universe that allows for life to exist. Indeed, there is no need to account for anything at all since everything is guaranteed to be found somewhere in one of the many universes. It seems to be an atheist philosophers cosmic dream that would greatly aid them in their attempt to diminish God to absolutely nothing.
But I agree with George's take on the kenosis understanding of God. The idea of God micromanaging the universe so that there is not "one maverick molecule anywhere" (to quote H. Hannegraaph) is a poor caricature of the God of the Bible. Just look at how He typically accomplishes His purposes! Who can fathom His ways? Even the Apostles didn't know what He was up to when He went to the Cross.
George wrote:
>Or - one can argue that God acts at the quantum level to collapse wave packets for some or all events in such a way that there is no contradiction with our statistical laws of quantum theory.
I'm not sure the idea of the "wave packet collapse" is coherent within QM. If it is true, then Schroedinger's equation fails at every glance (measurement) because the collapse is not a unitary transformation. When applied as a proof of God (I read Belinfante's argument many years ago) we have the complete destruction of quantum theory since God's observation of everything everywhere and everywhen would collapse all state vectors so that NOTHING would obey Schroedinger's equation. In this scenario, we never would have discovered QM in the first place.
One compelling view of QM is the ensemble theory, which asserts that the state vector represents the statistical distribution of measurements made on an ensemble of "identitically prepared systems." In this interpretation, there is no such thing as a "collapse of the state vector" because the theory does not apply to individual systems. The ensemble evolves unitarily. But this doesn't satisfy our desire for a mental image of what is going on in an individual system. Perhaps such is not possible.
Of course, non-unitary evolution would allow the entropy = Tr(plnp) to actually change over time, in harmony with experimental results. In fact, non-unitary evolution is the only way it could change. Does this imply a need to modify Schroedinger's equation?
But I digress ...
-- Richard Amiel McGough Discover the sevenfold symmetric perfection of the Holy Bible at www.BibleWheel.com ---- Richard Amiel McGough Discover the sevenfold symmetric perfection of the Holy Bible at www.BibleWheel.com --
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Jul 02 2003 - 14:21:09 EDT