These are uncreated energies that result in God’s will enacted, so there is a distinction with the essence of God that transcends the creation. In this way we may comprehend the atemporality of God’s will and the time dependent nature of the creation. This doctrine enables us to make theological sense out of the scientific notion of the time-space manifold and the ‘arrow’ of time, which may bring some comfort to those who feel wedded to the Darwinian ideology of an unfolding of species over spans of time. It may also bring disputes with ID ideology as the uncreated energies may also be construed as carrying information that determines the unfolding of the creation towards specific end(s).
Much speculation - we need not make it more complicated by talking of angles etc.
I find this extremely interesting!
Could you please develop more in detail how “the doctrine” may achieve what you claim regarding both “Darwinian and ID ideology”?
I am a novice regarding Orthodox theology, especially Patristic teachings, and thus I am reluctant to speculate further - I think the teachings of Maximus the Confessor are my next project as this may clarify individual entities (from The Logos or Word that created all). Once these matters are clear to me I may comment further.
our native language is not spoken as it pre- exceeds our comprehension of the word. but what I realised when once visiting i church service in prague I was amazed how I could understand the words.
You can get this effect by having someone praying the lords prayer in their own language or that of their grand grand parents and you shall be surprised.
In my view, we can distinguish different kinds of miracles:
Effects that regularly happen in the ordinary world become miracles if they happen in an extraordinary way: the transformation of water into wine at Canaan you refer to, or the multiplication of bread and fish, or the speaking ass of Balaam.
When we speak we order the outcomes of our brains acting spiritually from outside space-time.
The ordinary natural processes by which water becomes first juice in the vine, and thereafter wine, are also sort of speech: invisible intelligences (God, angels) speak to us “very slowly”.
When Jesus did transform the water into wine he was acting upon water molecules as we act upon the firings of the neurons in our brains when we speak. So the water became wine suddenly.
Since we cannot act upon water molecules from outside the space-time, such miraculous effects are beyond our operational capabilities, nonetheless they belong to the regularities of the ordinary world that can be described by mathematical algorithms.
Deeds that are beyond the human operational capabilities and additionally do not belong to the regularities of the ordinary world: resurrection of dead people, walking on water.
Death is defined as the irreversible breakdown of all brain functions. By irreversible the physicians mean a damage beyond our capability to repair. The resurrection of Lazarus was an effect happening in the ordinary world. From the perspective of QM it can be considered an outcome that happen with very low probability. Same thing for the walking on water.
Although such miracles cannot be considered regularities in the ordinary world they do not violate any inexorable law of nature simply because there is not such a thing as an inexorable law of nature.
Miracles of the types 1 and 2 referred to before can also happen in a way that they are witnessed by only a particular group of people: Resurrection, Pentecost, Ascension, Transfiguration, the dancing sun in Fatima (October 13, 1917).
Think on Pentecost: each group heard Peter and the Apostles really speaking in their native tongue. What Greeks heard was as real as what Parthians and Arabians did. The visible physical reality did depend on the observers watching at it.
Such observer dependent physical reality is at the core of QM paradoxes like the Schrödinger Cat and Wigner’s Friend. It arises when one applies the quantum superposition algebra to macroscopic objects.
The ordinary visible world we live in is possible precisely because quantum superposition is limited and does not apply to the so called macroscopic world. But this does not mean that the ordinary world is the only possible one.
In Pentecost God “did not fake reality” but created different parallel real worlds during a short time. One can think about Pentecost as an event where a speech is simultaneously translated by many invisible intelligences. What reveals that also in the ordinary world when we heard someone speaking our native language, actually we heard the speech because there is some invisible intelligence “bringing to our ears” the louds the speaker is uttering.
I fully agree to this! In the ordinary world God lets things happen when we perform certain operations. It is the world governed by mathematical algorithms we can grasp: If I type your phone number in my mobile your mobile will ring no matter whether I pray or not. By contrast the only way we can move God to perform miracles is by prayer.
@mitchellmckain as very well expressed a similar idea in another thread:
There is some truth to this… BUT collectively they do represent things which are so highly improbable that it is extremely unreasonable to expect people to believe they happened just on someone’s say so. In some sense the scientific version of impossible is an improbability so high that it is something like on the order of the number atoms in the universe to one that such a thing would happen. And if someone claims that an event like this has happened several times in their vicinity then it is simply not reasonable to believe them. And even if I saw such myself I would strongly suspect a trick or a hallucination – something I will not do just because it happens to disagree with my current assessment of what is real, like seeing a ghost.
thank you for engaging on this rather difficult subject. Considering that the word of God as expressed in the bible is subject to the interpretation of a mortal human we have to make sense of it ourselves.
The problem of life and death is a question of your understanding of life and death and subject of a separate debate to be had.
What we perceive as miracles is down to the wishes we impose onto the abilities of the God we believe in. Do we believe in a God that changes the reality to be beneficial to ourselves and that upholds our materialistic values or are we following a God who’s reality we accept and who’s values we want to adapt. So if we look at the miracle of Jesus at the wedding at Canaan we have to explain the theological message in the actions of Jesus and what we learn from him as God’s word.
Considering the source of the drink served, what would the achievement be if you were to make a physical fine wine out of the water of ritual purification apart from defiling the holy water that was put in those vessels to make you presentable in the temple. The fine wine, with it’s associated materialistic value we put upon it, would definitely not satisfy that purpose. What is it in us that would make us admire Jesus more if he was to submit to our materialistic expectations by making them come true than if he were to challenge our materialistic expectations by serving us the water of purification instead of more wine. If we would have been there as his friends and future disciples, what actions would have made us follow him, as they did according to the bible?
Would the praise of the master of ceremony to the groom make sense if there would have really been more wine, particularly if he would have known that he had that fantastic wine still to serve?
The non-materialistic miracle makes much more sense to me than the provision of instant wine which can be done by modern technology,
and when it comes to resurrecting the dead, modern molecular biology will outdo Jesus by resurrecting animals dead for thousands of years with the technology advancing https://genesis-two-point-zero.com/
so perhaps the value of those miracles does not lie in the materialistic / physical meaning we attribute to them.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
1231
When? Which animals? Why not humans?
Jesus’ first miracle was incidentally about fulfilling ‘our materialistic expectations’, the symbolism of what He did eludes you. Why did He curse the fig tree?
The cursing of the fig tree is normally interpreted as a parable to Israel withering for bearing no fruit, linked to the cleaning of the temple. The figs represent the spiritual fruits of the people of Israel with the tree withering for failing to produce spiritual fruit. But you might of course read it with the view that its about a tree and real figs and think that there really were talking asses and snakes.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
1233
Why bless your heart marvin. There is only black or white eh?
Since you also are physicist it is for me a pleasure to discuss this matter with you. I think we can come to some interesting results.
Expanding on what you state I would like to point out:
What you call “the scientific version of impossible” refers to the question of irreversibility: “impossible” means to revert a process that for all practical purposes is irreversible. Here we are implicitly assuming that there is a limit to our capability to revert processes or repair damages. In this sense physicians define death as the “irreversible breakdown of all brain functions, brain stem included”, and in quantum physics we say (in Wheeler’s wording): “No elementary quantum phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a ‘indelibly recorded’ phenomenon, ‘brought to a close’ by ‘an irreversible act of amplification’.”
Which conditions define this limit, nobody knows for the time being. It is the so called “measurement problem”. We don’t know why we are incapable of resurrecting a dead person, or reverting a detection process.
The fact that something is impossiblefor all practical purposes , means something humans cannot perform, or outside what science shows is repeatable or demonstrable. But it does not mean that this something is absolutely impossible.
The world science describes is the ordinary world where we live and move, that is, the world functioning according to repeatable patterns, which are demonstrable for all to see and calculate, no matter what they may believe. You could even say God makes this world mathematically in order it fits to the way our mind works and we can develop algorithms allowing us to predict the events, develop technologies, and live in comfortably. So for instance we can precisely calculate when and where the sun will rise tomorrow in Zürich or New York.
However, God can in principle shape phenomena (lasting for more or less time) parallel to the ordinary ones, which are beyond the mathematical regularities science can describe, i.e.: beyond our operational capabilities. Such extraordinary phenomena are highly improbable because they lie outside the repeatable patterns we can grasp; they are beyond our operational capabilities. They violate such repeatable ordinary patterns but not any “inexorable law of nature”.
They are unpredictablefor all practical purposes because they are not bound to physical operations everyone can perform, but are produced by God according to other criteria, as for instance someone’s sincere prayer. Accordingly, “how highly improbable” these extraordinary phenomena are, science cannot tell.
Something similar did happen at Pentecost, as reported in Acts 2:
12.Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”
13.Some, however, made fun of them and said, “They have had too much wine.”
How could the “amazed and perplexed” be sure that Pentecost was not a trick or a hallucination because of “too much wine”?
I would say: because they were aware of not “suffering a similar hallucination” before the miracle and after the miracle. And they also perceived “the Galileans” as normal trustworthy people, who used the miracle for “declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues” and did not try to make money with it!
Consider the 70,000 people who watched the dancing sun at Fatima, on October 13, 1917 (see here) at 2pm. The strange phenomena lasted for 10 minutes. Thereafter the gathered crowd perceived again the sun following its ordinary trajectory in the sky. If the “dancing sun” had been a hallucination deriving from some sudden collective mental disease, thousands of people would have continued seeing the strange phenomena for months. It is an important characteristic of miracles that the witnesses appear to be people who in every day’s life do not hallucinate and see the ordinary reality as their relatives and neighbors see it.
Mass hallucinations is an “explanation” which is no more credible than the conclusion that something really happened. To be sure, I expect the Pentecost and other spiritual events to be ones which the skeptic can dismiss in some way or another. I would be very surprised if there were not some people present who didn’t see anything too extra-ordinary happening. But since I do believe in a spiritual existence, and that includes God communicating with people, I do not take any of this to mean that spiritual explanation is wrong either. In quantum physics I do see a means for the events to be altered by causes outside of nature and the scientific worldview, but it is a narrow opening which doesn’t allow for something repeatable or controllable.
A dancing sun can be explained in a number of different ways from atmospheric to biological effects on the observers. I would tend to expect such explanation and do not think these means that was no miracle. I just don’t believe in a God who breaks His own rules especially just so He can impress a bunch of people who wouldn’t know the difference any way. That is stage magic whether it is God or a human performer doing such things, and since stage magicians do not have to break any laws of nature, I don’t see why God either has to or would do so either. Granted the laws of nature are highly probabilistic, but as I said before this means that one time can be put down to a statistical anomaly while repeated events are not credible and point to something else going on, where the possibilities are typically legion.
I basically agree with all what you say. In the following I would like to add some further thoughts that may help us to progress in understanding the relationship between miracles and science.
In my view, “the dancing sun” is more than stage magic: It can be considered a good example of observer dependence, similar to that we find in quantum paradoxes like the Schrödinger cat and Wigner’s friend.
The observer plays a key role in quantum physics and relativity: science is about what humans can observe, and in this sense it depends on the existence of human observers.
However, the main postulate defining experimental science is that the prediction of what is observed should not depend on who the observer is: Experiments must be repeatable, that is give the same outcomes no matter where and when they are done. On the basis of Newton and Einstein equations we can predict the sky coordinates where the sun will be tomorrow at noon in Zürich. If tomorrow people in Zürich would observe the sun dancing, this would be an event beyond the scope of science. In this sense we expect science to be observer independent .
This means that observer independence is a prerequisite of experimental science, but it does not mean that observer independence is inexorable.
The amazing thing is that the quantum algebra of superposition bears paradoxes like the Schrödinger cat and Wigner’s friend, where the outcomes depend on the observer. To avoid such paradoxes, one has to limit quantum superposition. In other words, the ordinary world we live in, the world of science, is possible because the quantum rule of superposition does not apply to the macroscopic level. To have experimental science you have to limit the quantum: The quantum on its own points to events “outside the scientific worldview”.
As you very well sate: “any connections outside what science shows is not repeatable or demonstrable and the skeptic can and will dismiss it as coincidental, even though I do not. Otherwise it would BE one of those mathematical laws of nature.”
Stage magic is basically repeatable (otherwise stage magicians could not use it for show business). By contrast, the “dancing sun” is not.
I will be thankful to know what do you think about this explanation.
Not in the sense of a conscious observer, no. All that is required are measuring devices. Every experiment has demonstrated that the presence of a conscious observer has no effect on the results whatsoever.
There is no paradox because the results do not depend on a conscious observer but only on measuring devices where the behavior of billions of billions of particles are altered according to a measurement. It is all a matter of what happens when too many particles becomes entangled causing a decoherence of superposition states.
One perhaps small but relavent point - the experimental set up and activities are surely observer/experimentalist dependent? How much would the expectations and intentions of the observer impact on the result(s)?
Nope. Not in these physics experiments anyway. Any part of the setup and activities can be automated.
None. Only the actual setup matters → what devices and where. Science overcomes the effect of expectations and intentions by requiring a written procedure to give the same result no matter who does it.
We know the conscious observer has no effect because we have used rather elaborate setups with many stages, removing the involvement of conscious observers from the interactions with the measuring devices.
The only real impact of the human observer is the necessity of the measuring devices to be able to produce something which the observer CAN observe… which requires behavior of billions of billions of particles to depend on the result of the measurement – like… make a needle move, change a liquid crystal display or produce enough light for us see.
P.S. smallest number of atoms that we can see is estimated at 10 million million or 10 trillion, so it is possible that the number of billions of billions which I gave is a little high (by a factor of 100,000).
That is interesting - it has been some time since I followed this area - I had in mind experiments that used slits. This I would assume, were very large openings at a quantum level, and single photons are sent through them (?). Perhaps you would elaborate.
I had in mind something like the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment which uses both slits and entangled photons, and seems to violate time-ordered causality. But in all these experiments it is very clear that the roles of any conscious agent can be replaced by a mechanical apparatus without altering any of the results.
These experiments seem to show (oops fail to show) the act of detection (or is it the observer) determine the result - or is it clumped?
Fascinating stuff that inspires lots of sci-fi. Paradoxical. We shall continue to be intrigued and yet the theological reasoning of energies and logi also fascinate and intrigue.
I thank you very much for these thought-provoking comments!
You are absolutely right.
I myself have contributed to perform such experiments using a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and the result is that a conscious observer cannot mentally change the results of the experiment (the counting rate of the detectors) without performing a convenient physical manipulation upon the setup. The expectations and intentions of the observer do NOT impact on the results.
As you rightly state:
Nonetheless, when I claim that “science is about what humans can observe” I am rather stating the same you state here:
You cannot define ‘observation’ without referring to ‘the observer’; you cannot define what is a measurement or an outcome without referring to what the observer CAN observe, i.e.: the capabilities of the observer. And for the science we know and do, this observer is the human observer.
I apologize for repeating the story about the famous US quantum physicist John Archibald Wheeler. He was once asked: "But if the universe only starts with our observations, is then the big bang here?” Wheeler answered: “A lovely way to put it -‘Is the big bang here?’ I can imagine that we will someday have to answer your question with a ‘yes’.”
If we take the perspective of quantum physics, then we have to conclude that any reality in space-time necessarily relates to the human observers accessing it by means of observations: The physical reality is humanity dependent, but this does not mean that a human observer has to be watching an experiment in order the outcome to happen. It rather means that in the measuring device something happens (a registration) so that humans can become aware of.
The Schrödinger’s cat and Wigner’s friend paradoxes do not depend at all on assuming a “conscious” observer: Any conscious agent can be replaced by a “quantum computer” without altering any of the paradoxes. The paradoxes emerge when you assume that you can apply quantum superposition to measuring devices!
The ordinary world where science applies is defined by the following
Assumption of observer independence:
“the fact that an experiment has outcome A instead of outcome B should not depend on who is the observer”.
If you keep to this Assumption, then you have to introduce the postulate that quantum superposition does not apply to measuring devices , and this postulate comes from “outside the quantum”.
The story of “decoherence” is another way to say the same without acknowledging that something happens beyond our capabilities to revert the process of “decoherence”.
However, the “assumption of observer independence” IS AN ASSUMPTION: It holds ORDINARILY but not absolutely. God can (for whatever wise reason) produce other parallel worlds (lasting more or less time) where the observers observe things that are different from what the observers observe in the ordinary world. This was the case in Pentecost and with the “dancing sun” in Fatima. By the way, this is so to speak the right ingredient in “Many Worlds” and “the Multiverse”.
I summary, to shape the ordinary world and make experimental science you have to limit the quantum ; the quantum points to phenomena which are beyond the scope of experimental science.
