Does quantum mechanics make God's existence more or less likely?

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snarflemike

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QM tells us that there are things that we cannot, even in principle, know. An example would be when a particular atom will undogo radioactive decay. And yet atoms do decay. So reality behaves in ways that we cannot even in principle explain or predict scientifically (other than in probablistic terms). Does this situation affect the likelyhood of God’s existence, in your view?

To phras the question another way, would God’s existence be more or less likely if there were no such impossible to know, even in principle, events or behaviors?
 
Personally I think one does quantum mechanics a disservice to pull it into service of anything other than what it was meant to describe. The farther one gets from the mathematics, the more meaningless it becomes.

My wife took a class one time where the professor drew from a book called “Quantum Theology” or something like that. Totally bogus if you ask me…
 
Bobby_Jim said:
Personally I think one does quantum mechanics a disservice to pull it into service of anything other than what it was meant to describe. The farther one gets from the mathematics, the more meaningless it becomes.
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Not sure I understand this reply. Are you saying that the fact that we cannot even in principle know certain things about the material world says nothing about the likelyhood of God’s existence? I’m not looking to argue with that answer, just trying to clarify your response.
 
God exists so I don’t understand were you are going with it? God doesn’t hold on to our rationality to exist, we hold on to Gods rationality to exist. God is much more Just and True then any human person.
 
My mechanic does a good job and actually donates 5% of the invoice to the parish of the customer’s choice or Relevant Radio.

This was an attempt at humor, but nonetheless true!
 
Gods_Peace said:
God exists so I don’t understand were you are going with it? God doesn’t hold on to our rationality to exist, we hold on to Gods rationality to exist. God is much more Just and True then any human person.
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OK, then I’ll ask a different question.

Does the inability, even in principle, to know certain things about the physical world provide evidence for God’s existence, or does it provide evidence against God’s existence (both relative to the earlier belief that in principle we could know everything about the physical world).

Note that I’m not asking if God exists (as a Catholic I certainly believe he does). I’m asking about evidence, whether to a believer or a non-believer.
 
snarflemike said:
QM tells us that there are things that we cannot, even in principle, know. An example would be when a particular atom will undogo radioactive decay. And yet atoms do decay. So reality behaves in ways that we cannot even in principle explain or predict scientifically (other than in probablistic terms). Does this situation affect the likelyhood of God’s existence, in your view?

To phras the question another way, would God’s existence be more or less likely if there were no such impossible to know, even in principle, events or behaviors?
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I don’t think it really effects it either way. Like any physical phenomena, quantum mechanics can only explain its effects. It cannot account for its own underlying principles. Even with such high-handed efforts as Lawrence Krauss’ “A Universe from Nothing”, the ball is perpetually dropped. No matter how many layers you peel away from an onion, the onion will never explain its own existence. Krauss, for example, says that there is something rather than nothing because nothingness is unstable. This is a fallacious statement because in order for something to be unstable, it must obviously be something, even if that something is just an instability. That’s not nothing, and it doesn’t explain itself.
 
I think the uncertainty principle from quantum mechanics is a mathematical proposition, about the certainty with which we can know certain things (or pairs of things, if I recall precisely, like the position & momentum of an electron). I’m not really a physicist so I can speak too deeply about this. But fundamentally quantum mechanics is a mathematical description or model of the behavior of matter that is consistent with experimental observations of matter. I don’t think it makes sense to take something that is fundamentally mathematical which describes empirical observations, and try to extrapolate to something which is outside the realm of mathematical description or empirical observation.

As I re-read your original post, I think the example you give of not knowing when a particular atom will undergo radioactive decay, is a different thing from the “uncertainy principle” of quantum mechanics. A lot of things appear to us to be “stochastic”, meaning individually random but leading to predictable behavior at the population or ensemble level.

I’m not sure what this has to do with the existence of God. Either God exists or doesn’t exist. Probabilities and likelihoods describe ensemble phenomena. Not that existence of God is like a coin flip. But if you flip a coin, it is either heads or tails. If you flip it many times, you get 50% heads, 50% tails, but each individual flip is one or the other. Even though you can’t predict in advance what the result will be, you know it will be one or the other. Quantum mechanics and uncertainy principle has nothing to do with that.
 
I think that QM shows that the Universe is much less deterministic than physicists thought it was under the Classical model. Also, that it is more complicated and we really don’t know as much as we thought we did about how matter is put together.

All of this points to more that is required to make a reality and one that has freedom of action within it rather than accidentally come from chance and without freedom of our own choices being real choices not just more chemical reactions happening like preset dominoes in our heads.
 
I submit QM supports God’s existence. Power is granted to the observer to influence outcomes.

Our Lady continuously exhorts us to pray. Perhaps prayer operates at the quantum level.

In addition, QM postulates the universe to be porous, a place where God operates and sustains the universe.
 
buffalo said:
I submit QM supports God’s existence. Power is granted to the observer to influence outcomes.

Our Lady continuously exhorts us to pray. Perhaps prayer operates at the quantum level.

In addition, QM postulates the universe to be porous, a place where God operates and sustains the universe.
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This is using a physical theory to describe something metaphysical. It can be helpful as an analogy, like thinking of a dance or a shamrock to help understand the trinity, but beware of reading too much into the analogy, which will break down at some point.
 
Bobby_Jim said:
This is using a physical theory to describe something metaphysical. It can be helpful as an analogy, like thinking of a dance or a shamrock to help understand the trinity, but beware of reading too much into the analogy, which will break down at some point.
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Let us test its limits then.
 
snarflemike said:
Not sure I understand this reply. Are you saying that the fact that we cannot even in principle know certain things about the material world says nothing about the likelyhood of God’s existence? I’m not looking to argue with that answer, just trying to clarify your response.
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I believe he is. When the materialist physicists, i.e. the establishment, talk about one of the ever-growing proliferation of paradoxes they meet, the further they penetrate the quantum world*, they talk of its being ‘counter-intuitive’, when the reality is that it is ‘counter-rational’, totally repugnant to logic, impossible; in other words, an oxymoron that happens to be true.
Indeed, it is now almost a hundred years since these things were discovered by the great paradigm-changers, particularly, Max Planck and Niels Bohr. Please read their Wikiquotes page. What they say about the fundamental phsyical reality will blow you away.

But, no. ‘One day my son,’ with an expansive sweep of the arm, 'All this uiverse will be understood in the finest detail by you; or if not you, your son, or grandson, they would far prefer to say, indeed, in effect, insist on saying. And they are not going to let any steenking reality of physics and logic get in their way. The fabled, ‘promissory note’! The sovereign irony is that this quantum physics which has brought the old, classical, mechanistic physics, kicking and screaming into a whole nother world of mystery. Just like the Christian mysteries they still like to scoff at.

Another of the materialists’ follies, even more deranged, is the evolution of everything out of nothing. All the incredible designs of the universe - the dynamic structure of a single living cell is actually mind-blowing - are supposed to be the result of random chance! Had they done the mathematics, as Wolfgang Pauli, another of the greats, did, they would have discovered that it was wildly impossible, odds-wise, even if the universe were a million times older. Yet they still cling to it. Indeed, they scoff at the most obvious thing in the world to the whole of the rest of mankind, namely that the world must be the product of an utterly extraordinary intelligence.

www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings

I always like to keep up with this site: uncommondescent.com

*“There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature…”

PS: The thought of this quote always tickles me, too:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
(NASA Astronomer Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, p. 116.)
 
It means nothing to the question of God’s existence. Physics, quantum or otherwise, is not metaphysics, and the existence of God is proven through metaphysics.
 
pbecke said:
I believe he is. When the materialist physicists, i.e. the establishment, talk about one of the ever-growing proliferation of paradoxes they meet, the further they penetrate the quantum world*, they talk of its being ‘counter-intuitive’, when the reality is that it is ‘counter-rational’, totally repugnant to logic, impossible; in other words, an oxymoron that happens to be true.
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Since you are quoting the OP’s reply to me, I presume you are referring to me as “he”???

Basically my point is that quantum mechanics describes the motions & energetics of subatomic particles, using a mathematical “language”. It is meaningless when you try to apply it out of context, or without the mathematics. Like taking the physical principle that “opposites attract” (i.e. Coulomb’s Law) and applying it to romantic relationships - it’s pretty bad advice. One has to be careful about applying scientific principles beyond the very narrow range of phenomena they are meant to describe.
 
snarflemike said:
QM tells us that there are things that we cannot, even in principle, know. An example would be when a particular atom will undogo radioactive decay. And yet atoms do decay. So reality behaves in ways that we cannot even in principle explain or predict scientifically (other than in probablistic terms). Does this situation affect the likelyhood of God’s existence, in your view?

To phras the question another way, would God’s existence be more or less likely if there were no such impossible to know, even in principle, events or behaviors?
Click to expand...
I’m currently reading Modern Physics and Achient Faith by Stephan Barr, head of the physics department at the University of Delaware. Barr talks at length about this. Basically, QM severely undermines Materialism, which is the underlying philosophy of many atheists. Of course,quantuum non-determinism or the role of the observer in QM, in themselves, don’t prove the existence of God…merely, they cast (serious) doubt on some of the plausible alternatives.
 
trapper1 said:
I’m currently reading Modern Physics and Achient Faith by Stephan Barr, head of the physics department at the University of Delaware. Barr talks at length about this. Basically, QM severely undermines Materialism, which is the underlying philosophy of many atheists. Of course,quantuum non-determinism or the role of the observer in QM, in themselves, don’t prove the existence of God…merely, they cast (serious) doubt on some of the plausible alternatives.
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Barr goes on to show the frames of reference eventually point to God.
 
Bobby_Jim said:
Since you are quoting the OP’s reply to me, I presume you are referring to me as “he”???

Basically my point is that quantum mechanics describes the motions & energetics of subatomic particles, using a mathematical “language”. It is meaningless when you try to apply it out of context, or without the mathematics. Like taking the physical principle that “opposites attract” (i.e. Coulomb’s Law) and applying it to romantic relationships - it’s pretty bad advice. One has to be careful about applying scientific principles beyond the very narrow range of phenomena they are meant to describe.
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A practical application.

When you stand at the edge of a pond and look down - what determines if the photons go to the bottom or reflect off the surface?
 
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