No, I dont really think that this approach is against thelogy at all.
It… depends on what exactly we’re talking about.
I don’t have a problem with the possibility of other dimensions/universes per se – God’s creation certainly might be far grander than we know – but the MWI (Many Worlds Interpretation) of quantum mechanics, in particular, is very troublesome to me.
Here, have a look at this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
“Many-worlds denies the objective reality of wavefunction collapse …Many-worlds claims to resolve all the “paradoxes” of quantum theory since every possible outcome to every event defines or exists in its own “history” or “world”. In layman’s terms, this means that there is a very large, perhaps infinite, number of universes and that everything that could possibly happen in our universe (but doesn’t) does happen in some other universes.”
It’s a very popular theory in science fiction, yes, but it’s… screwy. Just think about what this implies. Somewhere out there, there’s a universe where dinosaurs still exist. There’s a universe where our sun is a red giant. There’s a universe where your parents were never born. There a universe where they were, but you were never born. There’s another universe where your parents died and left you as an orphan. There’s also a universe where you were exactly the same as who you are now, except you never got to this my response to your post, because you had a heart attack and died five minutes ago. There’s a universe where you were never a Catholic. There’s a universe where Adolph Hitler never existed. There’s a universe where aliens have already invaded earth and destroyed us all. There’s a million billion trillion variations on this universe, and they all exist out there “around us” in some unimaginable way. And maybe that sounds kind of cool. I understand, I really do.
But now think about the havoc that this plays on theology: because there are universes out there where Adam and Eve never had children, Abraham actually killed Isaac anyway, Mary said “no” to Gabriel, and Christ decided not to go through with the crucifixion. But let’s skip that and go to philosophy: you don’t have free will to make
real choices – instead, every choice that you ever could have made, you actually have made somewhere else. It really
is an attempt to put Newtonian determinism back into physics, after the initial discovery of quantum mechanics shattered it into a million pieces. Now, instead of one fixed universe, there’s a million of them, and the existence of choice/unpredictability is just an illusion that you see in the version of the universe you ended up in.
…But back to where I was: there’s also going to be the fact that, out of the several hundred thousand million versions of “you” that exist out there, about half of them are going to end up going to heaven and half are going to end up going to hell. Same holds true for everyone else in the world. You’re not really a very unique individual after all, and God never really had a special plan for your life – everything that ever could have happened to you actually did, just to another version of you in another reality. You just happened to end up in this version of reality, for no real reason – one version of you had to be here, after all.
And I’ll just have to force myself to stop there, because if I don’t I could just keep on going for a
loooong time. The point I’m trying to make, though, is that I find MWI theory very philosophically disturbing, and I don’t think it’s actually compatible with the Catholic faith. The truth is, there is only
one version of this reality, where every choice that we make really does have an eternal significance, where there is a
purpose for everything that happens, and where every single day adds a new page to the
amazing history of this unique universe that God has created, and is constantly guiding through His Divine Providence.
Also remember that these scientists are the kind of person that need empirical evidence to accept anything, and like virutally every physicist now believe that this makes a lot of sense.
No, unfortunately… quantum mechanics is still very much up in the air, as far as scientific theories go. Very little has been decided. And ee’re not dealing with normal scientific theories here… these are little more than
hypotheses, with almost no special evidence to back them up, invented to
possibly help explain quantum mechanics. But for the most part, scientists are still stumbling around in the dark, feeling around for all sorts of objects, and hoping they might get lucky and run into a light switch.
At the same time, we’re dealing with these hypotheses that are often more
philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics than anything else. And there’s simply a whole lot of well-meaning scientists out there who have
no idea what they’re really talking about when it comes to philosophy. They say “oh, that’s a cool theory, because it would allow for all this cool stuff that I really like”, and then they study that and become “experts” on a fun or popular “scientific theory” that might not ever be capable of being proved or disproved.
There has been allegations in quantum mechanics refering to “many” realities in “one” reality at the same time, and things like that.
There are a lot of interpretations of quantum mechanics:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_quantum_mechanics
And actually, the original Copenhagen interpretation is still generally on top, as most-widely-accepted among physicists.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation
And Objective collapse theory (which I like best) is very similar:
“Objective collapse theories… are realistic, indeterministic and reject hidden variables. The approach is similar to the Copenhagen interpretation, but more firmly objective.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_collapse_theory
For example there is this mental experiment call “Shrodiger’s cat”.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger’s_cat
I’m familiar with it. But I say the cat is either alive, or it’s dead. God alone knows, and decides. But it’s one or the other, not both at the same time… that’s just an absolutely absurd idea.
Also there has been exams that show that people are able to have previous knowledge of say a random image before it is actually is showed.
here there is a video about it, it is at the end:
youtube.com/watch?v=A85kY_1aL98
- I’m not quite sure what to think about that. I guess there’s nothing too problematic, but I’d still like to make sure it’s not terribly disputed in the scientific community. At any rate, it’s a very limited sort of “precognition”, so nothing tremendously earth-shattering.
- That’s dealing with quantum entanglement anyway, which is fine. It’s actually a rather well-known phenomenon, from what I understand. But it doesn’t really apply to the whole Copenhagen vs. MWI interpretations of quantum mechanics debate. If anything, I could even see it being problematic for MWI, if it seems to indicate that there’s one objective reality in the future. But I don’t know… I’m not too worried about quantum entanglement.
God bless.
- the answer is “No”.
I’m very glad to see that someone provided that.