From: Richard McGough (richard@biblewheel.com)
Date: Wed Jul 02 2003 - 13:03:53 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 --
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