[asa] Re: independent world; was: Re: Review of Behe in Books and Culture

1st, what I have theologically against the view you suggest is the belief that God is involved in everything that happens in the world, cooperating with creatures. The idea that God "sustains" the world but doesn't act in it is especially problematic in view of the dynamic character of the world as we understand it today. God sustains the world precisely by acting with it.

But that theological problem is not primarily what I had in mind in my earlier post. It is that we don't know the "laws built into nature" that are responsible for the reduction of the wave function to an eigenstate of an observable which is measured. Thus saying that God performs that reduction in some cases but not others puts us in an odd "semi-God of the gaps" position in which God is used as an explanation of something that science doesn't currently understand part of the time but not always. I guess this isn't impossible but it seems quite unsatisfactory to me.

This oddness is concealed to some extent by the fact that such views of God's action at the quantum level are often presented - as in the current discussion - not primarily as a solution of the measurement problem in QM but as a way of explaining how God can influence evolution. But it seems to me that the difficulty remains.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Don Winterstein
  To: george murphy
  Cc: asa
  Sent: Saturday, July 14, 2007 2:39 AM
  Subject: independent world; was: Re: Review of Behe in Books and Culture

  " Either God decides the results of all measurements (which returns to the cosmic dictator model) or God only decides some, in which case we have to ask what decides the others."

  What might you have against a cosmos created with an ability to function independently of any divine acts or interventions but in which God nevertheless chooses at various points to intervene? That is, most of the time the world would act as atheistic scientists believe it does--namely, in accord with physical laws built into the matter itself, but God on occasion would intervene to get the outcomes he desires.

  This is my preferred model, and it seems so reasonable I have difficulty understanding what holds everybody else back. So, in your example, "what decides the others" would be simply the laws built into matter.

  Some of the problem I suspect has to do with the idea that God continuously sustains the world. My model would say that God sustains only in the sense that he is personally and intimately involved and could instantaneously obliterate if he wished, but otherwise the world would continue "on its own" if God were to go on vacation.

  Don

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: George L. Murphygmurphy@raex.com
    To: Iain Strachan ; Michael Roberts
    Cc: Ted Davis ; asa ; Louise Margaret Freeman
    Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2007 11:20 AM
    Subject: Re: [asa] Review of Behe in Books and Culture

    I also have some problems with this view of God's action at the quantum level. Either God decides the results of all measurements (which returns to the cosmic dictator model) or God only decides some, in which case we have to ask what decides the others.

    But at least in the present state of QM there does seem to be a measurement problem. Yes, the Schroedinger eqn describes a deterministic time evolution of psi (it's 1st order in t so one needs to know only the initial wave fn), but the problem is precisely that with a measurement psi seems to change ("collapse") in a way that the Schroedinger eqn doesn't predict.

    BTW, Pollard's 1st name was William.

    Shalom,

    George

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Received on Sat Jul 14 16:25:42 2007