Re: Predeterminism and parallel universes

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

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    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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