The New ATHEISM. and the Latter Day Saints.

[huckelberry]

The further explanations of physics are always appreciated. Isn't Sean's argument that there isn't a possibility of another field, rather than exploiting a loophole in the present fields (as Sean is very interested in the measurement problem and open about our ignorance)? With respect to Huck's complaint about "nobody ever arguing that" I'd say it's a lot more likely for miracles to be claimed through God's undetected power than rigging the tennis-ball-appears-across-universe possibility in QM. I'm trying to imagine a theologian going this route. I mean, there has to be somebody who has, but I've just never heard it. Sean's favorite interpretation, many worlds, requires Jesus' miracles to happen in some universe, but no theologian can possibly believe that version, I can't even believe it. The Copenhagen Interpretation requires it to be a random fluke, I think, and so that's out. As a theologian, what Interpretations would be friendly to the Christian idea of God?

Gadianton, I am not seeing any difficulty with the very standard and traditional idea that God has primary creative power so can alter course of events when he wishes. This would not imply or need the existence of any ongoing god particles or such.

[Physics Guy]

I seem to have forgotten this thread from a few months back.

Isn't Sean's argument that there isn't a possibility of another field, rather than exploiting a loophole in the present fields (as Sean is very interested in the measurement problem and open about our ignorance)?

Yes. Carroll's point is that we can really be pretty confident that there are no additional forces or particles out there besides the ones that we currently know, except perhaps things that interact so weakly with the things we know that they can't be responsible for spirit or free will or miracles or whatever. His discussions of quantum fields and effective theories are the explanation of why this conclusion is a lot stronger than one might think. It's not just that we currently only know the things we currently know.

I agree with this conclusion myself, and I think that virtually all physicists also would, at least if they thought about it. There is really good reason to believe that even if vast new discoveries remain to be made in the future, radically revising our picture of everything, still the list of constituent parts in reality will never get any longer. If I were frozen and revived in the future and got to ask future physicists for their list of the particles and forces that make up and affect the kind of matter that makes up our bodies, they might sigh at the naïve ignorance of my question, but I expect that the answer they'd give, adapting themselves to my outmoded language, would be, "The Standard Model from your time."

With respect to Huck's complaint about "nobody ever arguing that" I'd say it's a lot more likely for miracles to be claimed through God's undetected power than rigging the tennis-ball-appears-across-universe possibility in QM. I'm trying to imagine a theologian going this route. I mean, there has to be somebody who has, but I've just never heard it.

I have to admit that I haven't read much theology, and it may be precisely because too many theologians seemed to make untenable assumptions about physics, so I lost faith that their further discussions would be worth reading.

Physics is the study of things so simple that they can be modelled accurately in theory and closely controlled in labs. Most of reality isn't like that, but physicists are people who would rather look at bits of dust under a good, strong lamp than have to peer even slightly at gold in dim lighting. As I'm learning belatedly nowadays, for a physicist even chemistry is like a novel in which you can tell from the first chapter that there's not going to be a lot of action, just talking and scenery, so you feel like putting the book down and never getting back to it. I know that chemists know a lot of real and important things that I don't, but I'm happy to leave it that way. Theology is like that except more so, I reckon, even for physicists who consider theology worthwhile as a subject. It is just not our genre.

All of which is to say that it seems obvious to me that most of theology must really be platform-agnostic about how the universe works. The important issues have not really changed. There's still a crime and a villain and a detective, and you just have to stop mentioning horses and rapiers all the time, and swap in some guns and the subway. Perhaps the problem is that too much of the audience for theology doesn't so much care about God as just want to get away from physics.

Sean's favorite interpretation, many worlds, requires Jesus' miracles to happen in some universe, but no theologian can possibly believe that version, I can't even believe it. The Copenhagen Interpretation requires it to be a random fluke, I think, and so that's out.

I don't know what people see in Many Worlds. It's explaining the apparently spontaneous breaking of walnuts by postulating an invisible sledgehammer. Copenhagen could be okay, because "random" just means that we can't see the pattern. A perfect code makes signal look just like noise; with a good enough encoding scheme, you could transmit the Bible and the bitstream would be awfully random.

As a theologian, what Interpretations would be friendly to the Christian idea of God?

Maybe I should try to write a book about this some day. I doubt it would find many readers, though.