It’s hard to think of something more useful than showing atheism is as impossible as an infinite number of events or objects.
Did I tell you my big fascination is with what
kind of science fiction will be written when that happens?
As I said. The impact is meaning. How does God change biochemistry?
You apparently missed the fact this post was responding to someone else who brought up Matt 12:30.
Yes, they represent measurements. This is made even more obvious in quantum physics, where the pretense to metaphysical meanings (about existential realities) is abandoned and the entities used refer to measurements directly. Physicists have little interest in philosophical arguments which don’t go anywhere as far as they can tell. They certainly have no desire to have various ideologues interfere in the work of physics, when the issues that drive these idea peddlers has nothing to do with the work of physics.
AND this does not mean that physicists are logical positivists, saying that metaphysics has no value to anyone. They just don’t see any relevance to the work of scientific inquiry in physics.
It doesn’t – not literally everything. It does not change how we add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers – one tiny example among gazillions of them.
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It may be that QM helped clarify for physicists the distinction between testable theories and untestable interpretations; perhaps that wasn’t so clear in the days of Mach. It’s now a very clear demarcation when thinking about quantum physics.
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It would seem QM brings metaphysical questions and philosophical arguments to the forefront.
If something is “measured directly” and it is understood to be without cause then there can be no explanation for it.
Only in the philosophical discussions of the meaning of QM and its philosophical and religious implications, NOT in the work of physics itself.
This is the problem with the idea of separate magisterium. The separateness is all one way. To be sure the findings in science are VERY relevant to the philosophical and and religious issues. It is just that the disputes in philosophy and religion have no relevance to the scientific inquiries because these are dictated by the methods of science alone.
I’d like to hear more about the impact being meaning. It’s not clear what that means (no pun intended).
I gave numerous examples drawn from Math, Physics, & Psychology. I don’t have a knowledge of BioChem sufficient to give you an example. That’s why there are no examples in MYTH from biology.
I’m at loss to understand what physicists are actually claiming because the physicist who doesn’t claim a QM phenomenon is indeterminate has been the exception for me.
Same thing goes for physicists who acknowledge the problem of determining whether space is infinitely divisible. I seem to remember you writing me to say space is in fact discrete.
This is a reply to the comment that it doesn’t matter what the symbols in E = MC2 stand for because the symbols have “well defined relationships.”
This is patently false. If E stood for back cats and M stood for candy canes and C2 stood for the number of ornaments on a Christmas tree, then: 1) what it says wouldn’t be true, 2) what it says would have no value to physics because what it says would be (literal) nonsense.
The elements of a formula cannot have “well defined relationships” unless we know what they mean
- To your first comment: Physicists are concerned about this and regard it as a crisis in physics. That doesn’t stop some of them from claiming that QM deals with the ultimate reality.
- I agree. And the questions have to do with the meaning of what they’re dealing with.
- Whatever is regarded as uncaused has independent ( divine) existence. Such a belief ventures into the realm of religion, and what is believed to be uncaused is a rival divinity belief in opposition to the Christian belief that only God has independent existence.
Testable vs untestable doesn’t correspond to QM and not QM. Trying to ascertain the temperature of a liquid in beaker is untestable if you only have a thermometer.
My guess is scientists are uncomfortable with an unexplainable phenomenon. Uncaused happenings are acceptable, but not unexplainable.
The thing which I find absolutely phenomenal is that an uncaused happening would appear exactly the same as the immediate effect of an uncaused cause.
Give me an example of any (scientific) theory that is changed in the light of God being the ground of its being. What meaning does it suddenly have that it didn’t have when He wasn’t? That’s an open question.
I didn’t say it did. What QM did was make clear that there are some things that cannot be measured even in principle and that certain kinds of theories are intrinsically untestable by empirical means. This, I think, contributed to the now-standard distinction between quantum theories and interpretations of quantum theories.
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I agree that most physicists don’t reflect on issues such as what is a theory? How do we decide what counts as evidence? How do we know our perception yields knowledge of the world and of our experiments? And so on.
There is a level at which we all add up a column of figures the same way. Because we don’t ask such questions as: what is a number? How can we know mathematical truths are permanent & are the same everywhere? That doesn’t mean some answer or other isn’t tacitly assumed, or that how they are answered makes no difference. I’ve already mentioned the differences between Intuitionists such as Brower and Cantor, but there are a number of other disagreements as well: Hilbert’s idea of the nature of math was inconsistent with Poincare’s, and pragmatists disagree with all of them. Frege tried too show that the whole of math could be derived from set theory (and failed).
The deeper level of becoming self-conscious about what makes something science, what makes a theory a good theory, etc., is not something the average scientist pays attention to. I’ve said that from the start so I don’t know why several discussion partners keep saying it as though it’s an argument against my position. it’s not. But unconscious assumptions influence how a theorist handles his material and tests his hypotheses.
Someone asked me to name some scientists who raise such questions. Here are two: Whitehead & Russell. And if you want names in physics, how about Einstein & Heisenberg? Bohr? Bohr seems to have thought it was crucially important to get straight what an atom IS. How it should be defined - all issues having to do with the meaning of “atom>.”
The only point of yours that I’m challenging is the last one. I’m not looking for scientists who’ve thought or written about what theories are – I’m familiar with their existence, and probably more think about such things than you realize. I’m looking for scientists who change how they test hypotheses.
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Paul Draper was explaining to my philosophy of religion class the nonsense with Hilbert’s Hotel having and not having a vacancy, and my immediate intuition was, which I shared: “infinity is a non-numerical value.”
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And I agree with Cantor that there are more than one of these non-numerical values
- “immediate intuition”??
didn’t give you clue?
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My classmate liked it, not so sure what Draper’s reaction was. He would neither confirm nor deny.
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