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

Dave -

I didn't mean to suggest that QM would function as a "mask of God" any more than any other aspect of the world does. In fact, the idea that God collapses wave packets directly would mean that at a fundamental level there is no 2dary causality. That's why, even though I think the idea of God's action at the quantum level needs further exploration, I'm uneasy about it. If God collapses all wave packets - i.e., if God is directly responsible for the "condensation" of all probability distributions into certainties - then we've simply resintroduced what Barbour calls the "classical" model of divine action in which God acts as the dictator of the world to do everything directly. Creatures have no causal role at all. OTOH, if God acts directly to collapse only some wave packets - in order to direct evolution in particular ways, e.g. - then we have to ask what collapses all the others. I may be able to abandon the peinciple of sufficient reason, but a principle of "some but not all sufficient reason" seems quite unsatisfactory.

Shalom
George
http://home.roadrunner.com/~scitheologyglm

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: dfsiemensjr
  To: GMURPHY10@neo.rr.com
  Cc: wybrowc@sympatico.ca ; asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 3:53 PM
  Subject: 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 Fri Jul 3 08:29:48 2009