Re: The reasoning behind my quantum concerns

My comments interspersed

> Theologically, I think it's true that "we can never be sure - that
> faith is the only way." Maybe part of this is due to QM, or maybe not.
> But either way, one excellent reason for God to use QM as a basis for
> nature is simply to make the universe "work" so natural process will allow
> life, so we can have sunshine, water, and DNA.

As long as this is not to imply that God couldn't have done it some other way.

Furthermore the "design" goes deeper than just having non-zero
Planck's constant. I recall during second year university physics
lectures, the lecturer remarking that if "The Almighty" had chosen the
binding energy of the deuteron to be more than 1% different from its
known value, either too high or too low, then stars and hence we could
not exist. If the binding energy is too high, then fusion is not
viable and stars don't burn, and if it's too low, then the deuteron
doesn't stay together for long enough for significant amounts of
fusion to take place.

I've no idea whether the lecturer was a believer, or whether his
reference to "The Almighty" was tongue in cheek, but it was the first
time I'd ever come across any kind of "fine tuning" argument.

<QM article excerpt snipped>

> ------------------------------------
>
> I'm not smart enough to know if a QM-based universe is essential for
> life, if God could design a universe with life but without QM. But in our
> universe, QM is certainly an essential part of a natural world that allows
> life.
>
> Praise God for his wonderful design! :<)

This is all very true, but I'm not sure it addresses John's anxiety,
which was not about quantization per se (which as the excerpt
excellently shows is essential for things like life or indeed anything
interesting in the universe to happen). As I understand what John is
saying, it is the randomness and uncertainty in QM that allows the
possibility of free-will and God etc to happen (I believe the
physicist Paul Davies argues along these lines in "God and the New
Physics"). The worry for John is Einstein's vision that "God does not
play at dice" - that there are hidden variables that are deterministic
- the dice thrower actually being a deterministic process that maybe
only has the appearance of randomness because we can't see it.

My only thought on this is that perhaps it is dangerous to pin one's
beliefs on a scientific theory - to say that we can believe in God
because QM is probabilistic is to build one's house on sand. Before
QM was discovered, Newton's clockwork universe was entirely
deterministic, and in principle predictable, yet it didn't prove a
barrier to Newton's faith and the many believing scientists who
followed him.

There aren't any easy answers to this one. I guess the only stab I'd
have at it now is that I said it as "in principle" predictable. In
practice, we can't even predict the motion of three bodies under
gravity, which can be chaotic, and will give very different answers
for extremely small changes in the starting conditions. That is even
within Newton's clockwork mechanistic universe. Perhaps the key then
is that WE can't predict what happens, and as Isaiah 55 9 says:

"As the heavens are higher than the earth,

    so are my ways higher than your ways

    and my thoughts than your thoughts.

.. so whether or not the universe is "in principle" deterministic, God
has placed us in a universe where that complete knowledge is way
beyond our grasp. Only God knows what will happen, and all we can say
is that He wants us to put our trust in Him, in matters of faith, and
not in science.

Iain.

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