Does Quantum Mechanics Disprove an All-Knowing God?

Regarding the QM nature of neurons and genetic mutations, I don’t have knowledge of the primary literature as my area of QM is in the photonic device area and the area of quantum cryptography. There is a lot of layman literature though. Scientific America has had a lot of articles on this subject over the years.

But see that is the point. The universe is a quantum mechanical system in which the whole universe and everything in it behaves the laws of quantum mechanics. So nowhere in the universe could you know the future with 100% certainty. So is God inside the universe or not. If He is inside, doesn’t it mean that He is not all-knowing. If He is outside, well it doesn’t matter because He has not impact on this universe. He could be there, like the multiverses theory postulate but like the multiverse, the universe looks the same and behaves the same regardless of whether He is there is not.

Suppose I write a novel, and in this novel the world behaves well-defined physical laws. I exist outside the novel. Is it fair to conclude that I don’t matter to the novel?

I am trying to talk reality here. Real things, Real life. Real physics. Real chemistry, Real biology. Using all of the knowledge we have acquired. Of course the human mind can imagine anything. But at some point we have to translate that abstraction to what is real.

That doesn’t answer my question. By your logic, I would not matter to the novel I created. That’s obviously wrong. Why should your logic apply to a world God makes but not to a world I make?

The real science you’re talking about describes the interaction of physical entities. Why would you expect it to tell you anything about the interaction (if any exists) with nonphysical entities (if any exist)?

Because there is no evidence that any abstraction that you have in your mind actually exists.

@Patrick

God knows all what is, all what was, and all what might be. That is all-knowing. God does not know that which is NOT yet until it IS.
God works with us and wants us to work with God for the benefit of all. God does not want to work against us, but wants us all to work together. God is a good Leader, not a Dictator.

Non-believers seem to be of two minds. They want God to control and eliminate that which is evil, yet they do not want God to control and discipline them. God works through Love and the Holy Spirit to guide and support the good, and discourage and discipline the evil which means all of us. We can either accept this or reject it; work with God’s Goodness or go our own selfish way.

9 posts were split to a new topic: Can Science and Reason alone lead to value judgments?

Of course there is evidence. I saw the evidence written down, re the abstraction: if he was to write a book, which is the abstraction, was evidenced by the words he used to describe it. As an author, he matters is another abstraction, which was evidenced by the words he used to write it. You may not choose to agree with the abstraction, but the very fact of your disagreement gives evidence that the abstraction exists, and that there was evidence of the abstraction for you to disagree with or reinterpret or even to ignore.

But the book is not your thoughts. It is some of your thought written down in a physical media. If you wrote an e-book, it exists only as a coded sequence of memory locations in a server somewhere. Quite similar to your thoughts.

The book is not my thoughts, but is evidence of my thoughts, and tells what I was thinking. I was not thinking of a coded sequence of memory locations, but of something quite different. I was thinking of an author writing a book. That was my thought. Since I wrote it down, if you read this, you now know what my thoughts were. But they were there whether you knew them or not.

This intrigues me - if your thoughts are in the book, why say they are not? If otoh they can be made into an e-book, why bother writing a book?. You simply meet any people you wish and somehow download your e-book coded sequence and they have a perfect version of these thoughts you believe you have.

Neuroscience continues to seek a better understanding of brain activity - our understanding is minuscule and when materialists try to imagine they are similar to a computer program and hardware, they inevitably fall into an intellectual hole. Even writing is a complicated exercise which requires thoughts to undergo a sequence which is so complex that neuroscientist have a hard time locating the regions which brain activity occurs - we are far from analysing such activity into single neurons firing and these are then imagined as quantum events. I am also intrigued by the notion that some materialists are moving away from a digital outlook (on/of) to more like an analogue outlook. I suppose they will now tell us they really, really, (as being real) know what it all means (until the next guess!) Such hubris!

I have found that I can’t write longhand anymore. Sure, I can sign my name on a form (rarely do that physically anymore) but I no longer have the ability to transfer my thoughts to a piece of paper. My fingers and hand hurts when I try to do it, interrupting my train of thoughts. I really need a keyboard (could be virtual doesn’t have to be a physical keyboard) to express my thoughts.

In any case, at the quantum level, all that I am doing is transferring the states of electrons in the neurons in my brain to the states of electrons in the memory device that I am entering data on. Energy is transferring, entropy is increasing. A natural, noisy, uncertain, irreversible quantum mechanical process.

Your statements portray an extraordinary outlook, in that you do not hesitate at linking simple physical events (like writing or typing) with QM and brain activity.

As a matter of interest (to you, or anyone else interested in this area), the “brain activity” includes emotions, thoughts as words, thoughts as images, physical acts, and areas considered conscious and unconscious (I do not mention intuition). I add a small portion of a paper on this subject as a taste of what needs to be considered, before we think of the quantum level:

“… as a hierarchical system of neural networks which compares currently processed information with the one memorized in the cortex, giving priority and amplifying one piece of information to the conscious frequency levels of alph, beta, and gamma brainwaves; the rest of information remain non-amplified at unconscious frequency delta and theta levels (it should be stressed that the oscillator model of Ellias and Grossberg really predicts EEG rhythmicity in such a way that an increase in the input causes an increase in the frequency of oscillations, and decrease in their amplitude, offering an unified explanation of EEG waves ranging from gamma to delta).This might basically be also the mechanism of “emotional coloring” of some information …”

Obviously thoughts and feelings are part of a human being (and a great deal of chemistry and electrochemistry is involved), but such matters are better understood as the personality and psyche of a person - theologically we would then discuss our spiritual awareness and seek to understand the complete personhood (soul).

Sure, you don’t have to look at the quantum level to do chemistry. And you don’t have to look at chemistry to do electronic circuit design. There are levels which each field works at. So yes neurologist and psychologist can study brain activity at different levels and can come up with new insights.

Why is theology and the concept of a soul even necessary to study human thoughts and feelings? Could science do it without them? (As it actually has been done so far this century)

You have missed the point (again) - science can never (and has never) studied ‘soul’ - please read what I wrote - our spiritual awareness and personhood is understood as ‘soul’. Even if I reduce this to your simplistic notion of human thoughts and feeling, just how would science do without them? You seem to consider science as a thing out there - human beings do science, and human activity includes thoughts and feeling, along with intuition, reason, imagination, and so on. Neuroscience seeks to study these aspects of humanity, and there is no data that seeks to equate any of these with quantum uncertainty.

And yes I do look at the quantum level to do chemistry - but again I find your comments puzzling, since you have started this lengthy exchange by insisting that the quantum level is reality - now you say we can do without it, or we can ignore it? I am afraid your comments are at times contradictory.

Romans 8:28-39 is often cited in discussions on God’s predestination of believers. However, the Bible has multiple verses about free will, including Proverbs 16:9: The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.

Free will, predestination, and God’s omniscient foreknowledge: predestination is not a tenet of my tradition, and I find it difficult to reconcile the other two. Here is my speculation: It is God’s free will to give us free will, enabled by God’s election to know history (or most of it?) as it unfolds. But God is not surprised by unfolding history. When your life here is done, there will have been nothing in it that was not included in a universe of possibilities all known exhaustively and intimately by God from the beginning. It may seem that this “free will” hypothesis, by denying His foreknowledge of history, diminishes God’s omniscience. But suppose God loaded all his earth knowledge into two computers before discarding one.

  1. The predestination computer contained everything historical and everything destined to be history.

  2. The free will computer mirrors, as history or future possibilities, the contents of the first computer. But this computer also contains all the possibilities that never became history and never will.

If the foreknown history (predestination) computer was at capacity, the free will computer, without historical foreknowledge, would have to be larger by an order of magnitude we cannot imagine.

I apologize for minimal qualification to creatively hypothesize this “tension” away or conjecture on the mind of God. I pray that He be amused, not annoyed. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

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@Patrick,

I only stumbled across this thread a few minutes ago, so obviously I haven’t been following it and haven’t contributed to it. I’m hesitant to add anything, since I really don’t have time to get into a lengthy conversation with you and others (I see where your own contribution has been heavy here), but I am struck by something about your comments in general (as seen in several specific comments) that I simply want to point out.

When you say (e.g.) that science shows this or that, relative to God and QM, you’re going very far beyond what science actually says. I studied QM, too, and I also studied philosophical issues related to it. That was not recently, but I haven’t forgotten absolutely everything I once knew, and I continue to dip into issues of this type from time to time.

What QM means, relative to human and divine knowledge (which don’t equate), is not something that science itself can tell us. If it were, then Bohr and Einstein would have come out on the same side in those famous debates, and the kinds of issues they raised have still not yet been laid to rest. In short, there are no slam dunk answers to jump shot questions such as the ones being discussed here. You seem to think there are, and that colors so much of what you’ve said.

I can’t engage this at length or in depth, but I do at least need to nod in the direction of those who do engage these issues at length and in depth. So much of that conversation is print only, or else in journals that aren’t open access, so readers who want a lot more will need to visit an academic library. The best I can offer is a poor substitute. I suggest this article from Discover magazine as a good starting place: http://www.astralgia.com/editing/clips/physicsofdivine2011.pdf

Some very serious people, who know a lot more than you or me about the deeper issues related to interpreting QM, don’t find that QM just dictates answers to God questions. A pertinent example is Elliot Sober, an atheist philosopher of science who has gotten under Jerry Coyne’s skin b/c he understands that science doesn’t come with atheistic metaphysics attached at the hip. Here’s a glimpse of their interaction: Elliott Sober argues again that God might have caused mutations – Why Evolution Is True

The fact that Coyne describes Michael Ruse as Sober’s “brother in theistic apologetics” is quite revealing. I know both Ruse and Sober, and if either one has suddenly become a theist I’d probably find out. What bothers Coyne, apparently, is that neither says that science just equates with or directly implies atheism–they are just too well informed, too thoughtful, and too honest to say that.

I took time to make this comment as a caveat lector: readers need to understand that these are deeper waters than what might first appear from this conversation.

Nevertheless, thank you for sharing your thoughts here on BL, @Patrick.

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Science tells us that HPV causes cervical cancer. Applied science (technology) tells us if a vaccine can be developed. Science doesn’t tell us what should be done. And then ethics help us weigh the benefits against any possible risk, etc. Hospitals have ethics committees with member doctors, nurses, clergy, lawyers, etc.

Ted,
Thank you so much for the two papers. I read them carefully, thank you. Up until today, I had never heard of John Polkinghorne. What an amazing person. Working with Gell-Mann, Wienstein and Salem on weak-electromagnetic unification. Really amazing work that benefited humanity in the basic understandings of the real physical world.

After reading those two papers, I needed to go back and solve a more fundamental problem. My original title for this thread was “Does Quantum Mechanic Disprove an All-Knowing God?” Clearly
from John Polkinghorne, QM doesn’t disprove an all-knowing God. You can’t prove there is no God or any supernatural agent not impacting the outcomes of QM systems like quantum computers, radioactivity, and genetic mutations. So from both the physical and metaphysical realms, a person or machine can’t know if the results were random or there has been intervention by a supernatural, metaphysical realm. So here is now the new fundamental problem and it is more of an engineering problem than anything else. And it has an engineering solution to it rather than a theological answers as I am a better engineer than a theologian.

Problem: I (and many others) have told the Government that it is possible to build a perfectly secure communications system using quantum entanglement and other quantum mechanical properties. A lot of progress has been made on such systems this century. Alice sends a quantum encrypted message to Bob and Bob can be 100% sure that the message he receives is the one Alice sent and that nobody has intercepted that message or manipulated it in any way. Should some entity try to intercept the message, they would not get the message just garbage as the quantum states before detection by Bob is unknowable and would collapse to a different state (message) if intercepted by anybody before Bob’s detector. Polkinghorne discusses this very case and concludes that in the physical domain, it is easy to prove that the communication system is perfectly secure. But he also says that it is impossible to show that God can’t know or can’t intercept the communication. I accept this. But I still need to design a prefect QM communication system that I am 100% certain is not possible to intercept both physical and metaphysically.

I break the problem into two parts: how to design the prefectly secure QM physical system and how to design the perfectly secure physical AND metaphysical system. The physical system is hard work, taking years of research but it coming along well. There are presently QM communication systems using entanglement that work pretty good. Improvements are need but the science and technology are progressing. But I still want to make this QM system 100% secure against intervention by God and other supernatural agents.

Why? well God doesn’t keep his knowledge secret. He tends to tell people and they tend to misinterpret what He says. So I want Bob to know that when He receives the message from Alice that it hasn’t been intercepted nor manipulated. I am not okay with the God of the OT intercepting the message and telling other people, He is kind of vengeful and I don’t know what He would do to Alice or Bob or all the rest of us. I certainly don’t want Allah to intercept the message, as the people who believe in Him want to kill us all as non-believers. The NT God, the son Jesus, and the holy spirit together three in one is much more forgiving, I don’t mind them intervening but they then to eigher do nothing or tell very different message to a large number of Christian groups and individuals. And because I want Alice and Bob to use this QM communications systems anywhere even in space and the rest of the universe, I want to make it secure from interception and manipulation from other supernatural agent, spiritualistic, anything metaphysical, anything Deepak Chopra can come up with.

Solution: I went to millennial computer scientist Nancy for help. She is very bright and a great coder. What she build was a software module to put right after Bob detector right before he gets the message. The piece of code is called a Supernatual Intrusion Nullifier (SIN). SIN has the following properties. SIN knows what Alice’s message is, even before she sends it. SIN uses the exact same metaphysical powers as God, Allah, Spirituality uses. In fact SIN is super-supernatural. It is God 2.0, Allah 3.0. This software module sits after the Bob’s detector and looks at the message that comes in and compares them with Alices message that was sent (And that it knows). If the message are the same, SIN does nothing at all. If the detected message is different, SIN inverts the message, nullifying the manipulation that God did. Bob is 100% certain that the messages he recieved are from Alice non manipulated. Problem solved! The QM communication system is 100% secure both from physical and metaphysical manipulation.

Test Results: In extensive testing of all QM system to date with the SIN module installed has shown that it has never had to nullify God’s manipulation. It just keeps run comparing messages with no nullification needed, as if God wasn’t making any changes to the messages that Alice sent.
So God may have the power to influence the QM system, but so far He hasn’t and no other spiritual metaphysical entity has. With the SIN module installed I can confidently proclaim that the QM Communications system is secure against manipulation by both physical and metaphysical entities.

Lastly I want to say that we are training millennials coders how to design better SIN modules - we call it secular education, critical thinking, and reasoning so that they can lead meaningful purposeful lives.

Thanks again for pointing me to John Polkinghorne.