Re: [asa] observational vs. theoretical differences in scenarios; a direct question

George,
It seems to me that talking about QM to hide God's hand overlooks the
radical difference between primary causality and secondary. The latter is
what we detect and work with. The former is totally outside the reach of
science. I don't think there is any need for it to be hidden.
Dave (ASA)

On Thu, 2 Jul 2009 09:48:47 -0400 "George Murphy" <GMURPHY10@neo.rr.com>
writes:
Cameron -
 
1st, I agree that many in the biological sciences still operate with a
mechanistic picture of the world. "Classical mechanism is dead but, like
Charles Williams' headless emperor, it wades on through the disciplines
of biology and psychology" is a sentence from a 1977 article of mine on
science and theology, the 1st I ever published. I went on to say,
though, "The great progress that has been made in those fields since 1900
should not be minimized, nor can one deny that much about the life and
behavior of humans and other animals can be explained in mechanistic
terms. & I called attention to Bohr's suggestion that life and mechanism
could be considered as complementary descriptions, like wave & particle
in QM - in order to analyze an organism as mechanism, you have to kill
it.
 
But of course most physical scientists for two centuries before QM also
held a mechanistic view of the world, so that their "overall view of
nature, and of natural causes --was wrong." But that doesn't completely
invalidate the contributions of Newton, Laplace, Maxwell, &c. Their
theories are only approximations to more accurate ones developed in the
20th century but they aren't simply "wrong." Even less can the work of
Darwin, who made use of mechanistic ideas of causality in only a
qualitative fashion, in contrast to the quantitative formulations of
physicists, be considered simply "wrong" because of this. I see no
reason why the idea that natural selection is a major & indispensable
factor in biological evolution should be seen as invalidated, or even
threatened, by quantum mechanics & chaos theory.
 
It may indeed be true that a "Darwinian" world view, understood either as
the world view of the historical Charles Darwin or as that held by some
current "Darwinians," is not consistent with modern physics. But that's
quite a different matter & in any case does not at all impact my own
views.
 
It would be good if Collins, Ken Miller & other Christian evolutionary
scientists would answer your questions for themselves. To the question
of how someone might believe that God is to some extent in control of the
evolutionary process without appealing to quantum theory, my guess is
that many Christian would simply confess ignorance. Or they might simply
not have a strictly deterministic view of science. Even with a
“mechanistic” view in a loose sense, not everyone accepts a strict
“Laplacian” determinism. You can get an A in a good general physics or
even an advanced classical mechanics course without having to think about
the philosophical implications of the fact that knowledge of the initial
positions & momenta of all the particles & all the forces (or energies)
in a system determines the state of that system for all time.
 
In any case, I repeat that quantum mechanics & chaos theory (which you
tend to leave out), not Laplacian determinism, appear to be true &
there’s no reason for theologians not to make use of them in their
discussions of divine action. Of course neither of those theories should
be accepted “with the certainty of faith,” & if it turns out – which is
extremely unlikely – that classical determinism is true after all then
we’ll need to rethink a lot of things.
 
One thing we wouldn’t have to rethink, however, is the question of
whether God could be involved in the evolutionary process – even a
strictly “Darwinian” one in your sense. God can be understood to concur
with evolutionary processes even in a tightly Laplacian world. What QM &
chaos theory allow us to do is to understand God’s freedom to direct the
evolutionary process.
 
Shalom
George
http://home.roadrunner.com/~scitheologyglm

 
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Received on Thu Jul 2 16:14:56 2009