Omniscience and quantum mechanics

No no, nothing like that, though I can see how you got that. No, I'm talking about how Christians who say that God is omniscient are contradicting our understanding of the universe. A quantum mechanical universe is not deterministic: there are inherent limits on what you can know. An omniscience can't exist because the concept makes no sense in an indeterministic, quantum mechanical universe. Since our best understanding of the universe is that it is quantum mechanical (though that's not likely the end of the story), there's a paradox.

One has to give .

How can you know this? You've only ever been in the one reality you're working with now.

You have to reference every logic statement to this reality, don't you? I mean, you're in it.

Can you explain how a terrasect is 4-dimensional? I only see height, width and length; a cube inside a larger, mishapen cube.

I agree that a contradiction is impossible, but I don't think that what makes for a contradiction in one time and place has to make for a contradiction in another time and place (or in the absence of time and place: eternity).

It doesn't make sense to me because I'm a Christian; I'm a Christian because it makes sense to me.

I'm in it, yes, but that's incidental: the statement makes no reference to this reality (unlike, say, quantum mechanics, or evolution). The statement is true solely because of its own internal characteristics; the nature of reality doesn't affect the truth of the statement. In this reality we express the statement in a particular arrangement of symbols or phonemes, but that's different to the statement itself.

It is a projection of a 4D hypercube (the next step in the point-line-square-cube series) onto 3D space (the 2D nature of the monitor notwithstanding), just as this cube is actually a projection of a cube onto 2D space:



If you rotate the tesseract about an intersecting plane, this is what happens to its projection:



While it seems to be changing shape, it's actually not.

Why not?

How did that lead you to Christianity?

Well this should teach me never to enter a thread with the words "quantum mechanics" in the title. I presume you know what you're saying but I can't see how anything, even any thought in your head, does not have to "reference" this reality. There is nothing you can do or say or think which isn't founded in the reality of which your mind is a part.

And it reminds me though of another thing you say: that something can come from nothing. That idea seems wrong in a similar way, because once you have "something" (a universe) that statement is impossible to make. There is no "nothing" for something to come from. Maybe you could have made that claim 14 billion years ago, but it's too late now.

I don't understand this either. I see an interesting optical effect, but I'm not getting how this suggests a fourth spatial dimension. But I'll set the tesseract aside for now, unless you're in the mood to try and explain higher math for dummies.

I just simply don't assume the human mind can comprehend everything that could possibly be.

It wasn't any one or two ideas that led me to Christianity, but there are some ideas which even though I can't understand them, they sort of resonate within this reality, I guess I'd say. Or even though I don't understand it, "the idea of the idea" rings true.

Agreed. My thoughts about the statement are grounded in reality, because my thoughts are simply neural pathways. But the statement itself makes no reference to reality. We can talk about cubes, and our brains (which do the thinking) are grounded in reality, but the cube itself is not: it's a mathematical abstraction that can't exist in reality. Nonetheless, it does have six sides, eight vertices, etc.
Likewise, though we use reality to talk about logic (by manipulating the air, say), logic itself doesn't reference reality.

When we make a statement about reality, it carries with it all of the baggage, including the temporal nature of events. That's why we say two mutually exclusive things cannot be true simultaneously: they can be true one after the other (something changing colour, for instance), but they can't be true together (like invisible pink unicorns).

That said, it is interesting to note that "1 + 1 = 2" is true regardless of time.

Well, no, obviously. But you don't have to know everything to know that something is false. Bachelor's are unmarried. I don't have to know every single bachelor and unmarried person to know that this claim is absolutely true.

So, why Christianity in particular? I don't mean to pry, and I know it's not the right thread for it, but I'm just curious .

According to some, God is omniscient: he knows everything.

But, according to quantum mechanics, there are inherent limitations to just how much can be known about a given system. For example, knowing the position of a particle to a given degree of accuracy places insurmountable limitations on how accurate we can know its momentum (namely, ΔxΔp_x ≥ ħ/2).

How, then, can God know everything? This uncertainty principle isn't the result of practical limitations to measurements, but is an inherent property of the quantum mechanical nature of the system. Just what does God know about the physical observables of a particle?
Does this relate to the qualifier, "God knows everything knowable"?

It seems like you're saying that logic statements are unreal, or extra-natural or supernatural or something like that. When you say making no reference to "reality", are you really meaning to say making no reference to "nature"? That's the only way I can maybe understand what you're saying. I don't know about the math aspect of it, but I know a man can make a cube, and it might not be natural but it is real.

So if we could lose the temporal nature of events, then we'd lose that constraining baggage. So then something which would be a contradiction within the temporal realm might not be a contradiction outside the temporal realm, no?

What about before time, or outside of time? Are you sure that still has to be true? If spacetime is one thing, then you can't have space without time. And without space, there can't be 2 of anything, right? In that case, either both "1" and "2" would be meaningless, or else they could be meaningful in a way which doesn't rely on space (on things being separate things). Enter the Trinity, wherein "1 + 1 + 1 = 1".

Of course, but that's an observation which cannot not be true; it's tautological. That's not the same type of claim that you make in the OP.

No you wouldn't be prying at all, I'd love to tell you, but it's just that it's like asking for a small biography really. I thought and read about Christianity (and other religions/philosophies) for almost 20 years before I became a Christian. I can remember the exact moment in November 2007 when I decided, and it really felt like it was decided for me. After many times of praying to God to let me know, there was one time when I prayed and He did; it came into my mind and heart that Christ was the Truth, just like he said he is.

I do want to specifically disavow one idea that's often said of why people are Christians: that people become Christian because they like it; that they like the comfort of eternal life and the promise of paradise. It might be true in many cases, but it wasn't in mine. I never could convince myself of atheism, I called myself agnostic, but atheism was really what I wished could be true. It seemed like the ideal arrangement to live, enjoy life, even be reasonably moral (when it wasn't too inconvenient) and then just go to sleep. But I don't think that's the reality.

There's not one reason, but 1,000 different evidences from life which all point to the ideas contained in Christianity. I'd describe it this way, but someone already has, so I'll quote him (G.K.C.):

"If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, 'For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity.' I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts. The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy; it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion. Now, the non-Christianity of the average educated man to-day is almost always, to do him justice, made up of these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences against it. For when I look at these various anti-Christian truths, I simply discover that none of them are true. I discover that the true tide and force of all the facts flows the other way."

yay...someone into math on this forum!

Doesn't apply for this reason...your little equation there is relative to the speed, position, and momentum of moving particles equal to or less than the speed of light.

At a single point in time, we could measure position with a fixed value for the momentum...but it is beyond our human ability, but a piece of cake to God.

Hardly. While the momentum of a particle is relative to the inertial frame from which you measure it, the uncertainty is not. Thus, 'my' equation is not relative to anything: however you measure position and momentum, the product of their uncertainties has a minimum.


It's not a question of ability. A lot of people seem to make that mistake.