God's will and quantum mechanics

[Yuppert]

I have a theory that seems like it could explain an incredible range of mysteries and unknowns, but I have no one to bounce it off of. It’s okay if you think this is too long or incoherent to read or respond to; I basically have to just get it out there so I can free my thinking to move on to other things.

Although this isn’t where my theory began, it might help to explain two crucial notions. First, that the will of God doesn’t just cause reality; it is reality. What God wills simply is. Creating all things wasn’t about having the power to make it so; God wills a world to exist, so a world exists. But his will is flexible. When two possible situations equally fulfill God’s purposes, then both situations maintain a place within his will. We might say the universe has two layers, actuality and potentiality. Potentiality is everything that is not ruled out by the will of God or by definitive cause-and-effect relationship to what is actual. Potentiality is governed a-temporally by a God who exists outside of time, but its rules require it to be logically consistent within time. Actuality plays out in time but it must remain within the realm of what is determined by potentiality.

That explains quantum mechanics. God really doesn’t care exactly where a photon or electron might be at any given moment, so his will doesn’t assign an exact place, just allows for a range of possibilities. The scientific concept of “quantum probability wave functions” is nothing other than a description of what is possible within God’s will, as well as its probability relative to everything else that is possible. Everything exists as a range of possibilities until either God’s will, or our observation, or logical consistency leaves only one remaining option. When only one possibility exists, it simply is reality by definition. (Kind of like Sherlock Holmes’ famous observation about deduction eliminating the impossible; whatever remains is the truth).

The universe is like a set of dominoes, except that each domino could fall a hundred different ways and knock down a hundred different potential lines of other dominoes. A standing domino represents any particle or event or situation that has more than one possible resolution. A fallen domino represents anything that is certain, and therefore a part of actual reality. But note that these dominoes fall logically and a-temporally, although we observe them falling temporally, so we’re going to have to fight the temptation to think of their falling as itself being the actual flow of time. There’s a sort of law of logical consistency that requires that every domino is consistent with all past and future dominoes that have any cause-and-effect relationship to it. So its falling must propagate into the past just as it does into the future. The possibilities and probabilities could be thought of as constantly changing to reflect the impact of all past and future limitations on what is possible—except that it’s all a-temporal, so nothing really changes.

When you open Schrodinger’s cat box and find a live cat, it not only results in a live cat persisting afterwards; it means the cat was never dead. It collapses the past quantum probability wave function, so there never was a simultaneously live/dead cat. There never could be unless the box is never opened (or not opened until after all the potential cats inside have died and there’s no way to tell when it happened). It was alive the whole time, not as if your opening the box changed the past, but because the laws governing the realm of potentiality are a-temporal, that the present must always be consistent with the future just as much as the future must always be consistent with its past. It’s all just a reflection of the fact that God and his will exist outside of time. His will allows for what is potential and determines what is actual. Much simpler than the scientists make it out to be.

The same concept would explain spooky action at a distance. Quantum entangled particles match each other when their wave functions collapse, not because they instantaneously reach across space to affect the other. It’s more like the observation of one changes the past, except that it doesn’t happen temporally and nothing actually changes; it always was. We can imagine it as if the observing of one particle knocks down its predecessor dominoes back in time until it reaches the point of origin and then flows forward in time down the other path to knock down the other present particle, except that what is determined within the potential layer of reality is a-temporal. So it always was collapsed.

Secondly, we can then think of God’s work in creation as being primarily a matter of subtraction rather than addition. Imagine if God, outside of time, considered all of time and space and everything that could possibly happen in any possible universe, past, present, and future. Then he just started subtracting every domino that didn’t match his will, as well as every domino that was not logically consistent with those that remained. Whenever and wherever only one possibility remained within the will of God, that was or is by definition reality, and would be the first domino to fall, knocking down most of the rest. The Garden of Eden would then be the first primary spot where dominoes started falling, knocking down most, but not all of what would follow, leaving gaps and lines of standing dominoes that are not definitively and causally forced to fall by that initial cause. Those missed dominoes may or may not fall by other means.

If I’m right, then entropy is not tied directly to time moving forward, but rather to the causal relationship to the first cause, the first falling domino. Each domino that causes another to fall has a little bit of wiggle room, so it injects a tiny bit of randomness into the way the next domino falls, and that randomness is entropy. Because almost all dominoes are falling forward, from the Garden of Eden toward the end of time, entropy must increase. That would also mean that when you open Schrodinger’s cat box, or measure any quantum particle and send ripples back in time, the entropy would increase backwards in time in this instance. But it would be mostly unobserved. We’d see it only as an increasing haziness to the past. That is, when I open the cat box, I not only see the cat alive, I see where it is and what it’s doing. I can extrapolate where it was and what it was doing a few seconds before the box was opened as well. Before that it all becomes hazy as the lines of dominoes become too uncertain to definitively knock down their predecessors. That would be a sort of entropy increasing into the past.

This theory may have something to tell us about all kinds of other topics, like free will coexisting with God’s omniscience and control of all things (we can and do knock down dominoes ourselves, but only choosing from those pathways God left standing in front of us. But perhaps he chooses to leave them standing to give us choices—even while outside of time he already knows what our choice will be), or God’s activity in creation and in response to prayer (while God can always add new miraculous dominoes wherever needed and wherever his will places them, there’s really no limit to how much he could accomplish just by judicious removal of unwanted potentialities with no miracle required; sometimes reaching into the past and making wise use of the butterfly effect. And we’d never see proof of a miracle unless he willed us to see it, because even with overt miracles he can always add enough dominoes at the head of the line to hide the miraculous source in the unobserved past). Or how about questions like, what exists beyond the edge of the visible universe? The answer is infinite possibilities of an infinite universe, but nothing actual or real, because there is neither observation nor causal linkage nor any reason for God’s will to knock down any dominoes out there.

This theory seems like it could also be workable without reference to God, but there are some ways that it just makes more sense with God as the one willing it, selecting from infinite potentialities, and knocking down the first domino (and selected dominoes ever since). And I really doubt any non-theistic scientist would find anything worth pursuing here, because any explication of time from outside of time’s dimension and perspective is usually viewed as inert (there’s no time outside of time, so there can be no change, so there can be no influences or laws governing what would or could happen outside of time). I could go on, but I have my doubts that anyone will even read this far or want to hear more. I just had to get it all out.

 

[Larniavc]

This theory seems like it could also be workable without reference to God,

Ah, this is where you lost me. This frameworks only works in a universe with an omnipotent omniscient creator god.

 

[Yuppert]

I just meant that I could perhaps envision an interpretation of QM that suggest two layers of reality: potentiality and actuality, with potentiality being an a-temporal reflection of the sum of all possible states of all quantum wave functions governed by a law of logical consistency and actuality being that subset of potentialities in which, by observation or necessity, only one possibility remains. I don't know enough QM to really have a clue whether that would work or hold the answers to spooky action at a distance, etc.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

.... First, that the will of God doesn’t just cause reality; it is reality. What God wills simply is. Creating all things wasn’t about having the power to make it so; God wills a world to exist, so a world exists. But his will is flexible. When two possible situations equally fulfill God’s purposes, then both situations maintain a place within his will. We might say the universe has two layers, actuality and potentiality. Potentiality is everything that is not ruled out by the will of God or by definitive cause-and-effect relationship to what is actual. Potentiality is governed a-temporally by a God who exists outside of time, but its rules require it to be logically consistent within time. Actuality plays out in time but it must remain within the realm of what is determined by potentiality.

Sounds a bit like Spinoza's God, where God is the universe and its thoughts are the laws of nature. But Spinoza's God doesn't have will or intellect...

If I’m right, then entropy is not tied directly to time moving forward...

The arrow of time, e.g. time 'moving forward' is the result of entropy increasing. When an ordered system, e.g. of particles, is left to its own devices, it will tend to become disordered, even if the interactions are time-reversible (equally likely to go either way), because there are more ways to be disordered than ordered. The direction of increasing disorder is what we call 'forwards in time'. IOW, the past is more ordered than the present.

...That would be a sort of entropy increasing into the past.

That can't happen when the overall increase of entropy means moving toward the future. There are hypothetical scenarios for the big bang, where entropy increases either temporal 'side' of the big bang, i.e. from our perspective, entropy decreases prior to the big bang, reaches a minimum at the big bang, and increases subsequently. For observers prior to the big bang, the universe would appear to be expanding into the future just as it does for us, because the direction of 'forwards in time' for them would also be the direction of increasing entropy. From each of our viewpoints, the other would be reversed in time.

 

[Jonaitis]

Sounds a bit like Spinoza's God, where God is the universe and its thoughts are the laws of nature. But Spinoza's God doesn't have will or intellect...

I thought his view was more panentheistic. I was thinking it sounded more like Schopenhauer's World As Will and Representation, if the idea embodied a personal deity.

 

[disciple Clint]

I have a theory that seems like it could explain an incredible range of mysteries and unknowns, but I have no one to bounce it off of. It’s okay if you think this is too long or incoherent to read or respond to; I basically have to just get it out there so I can free my thinking to move on to other things.

Although this isn’t where my theory began, it might help to explain two crucial notions. First, that the will of God doesn’t just cause reality; it is reality. What God wills simply is. Creating all things wasn’t about having the power to make it so; God wills a world to exist, so a world exists. But his will is flexible. When two possible situations equally fulfill God’s purposes, then both situations maintain a place within his will. We might say the universe has two layers, actuality and potentiality. Potentiality is everything that is not ruled out by the will of God or by definitive cause-and-effect relationship to what is actual. Potentiality is governed a-temporally by a God who exists outside of time, but its rules require it to be logically consistent within time. Actuality plays out in time but it must remain within the realm of what is determined by potentiality.

That explains quantum mechanics. God really doesn’t care exactly where a photon or electron might be at any given moment, so his will doesn’t assign an exact place, just allows for a range of possibilities. The scientific concept of “quantum probability wave functions” is nothing other than a description of what is possible within God’s will, as well as its probability relative to everything else that is possible. Everything exists as a range of possibilities until either God’s will, or our observation, or logical consistency leaves only one remaining option. When only one possibility exists, it simply is reality by definition. (Kind of like Sherlock Holmes’ famous observation about deduction eliminating the impossible; whatever remains is the truth).

The universe is like a set of dominoes, except that each domino could fall a hundred different ways and knock down a hundred different potential lines of other dominoes. A standing domino represents any particle or event or situation that has more than one possible resolution. A fallen domino represents anything that is certain, and therefore a part of actual reality. But note that these dominoes fall logically and a-temporally, although we observe them falling temporally, so we’re going to have to fight the temptation to think of their falling as itself being the actual flow of time. There’s a sort of law of logical consistency that requires that every domino is consistent with all past and future dominoes that have any cause-and-effect relationship to it. So its falling must propagate into the past just as it does into the future. The possibilities and probabilities could be thought of as constantly changing to reflect the impact of all past and future limitations on what is possible—except that it’s all a-temporal, so nothing really changes.

When you open Schrodinger’s cat box and find a live cat, it not only results in a live cat persisting afterwards; it means the cat was never dead. It collapses the past quantum probability wave function, so there never was a simultaneously live/dead cat. There never could be unless the box is never opened (or not opened until after all the potential cats inside have died and there’s no way to tell when it happened). It was alive the whole time, not as if your opening the box changed the past, but because the laws governing the realm of potentiality are a-temporal, that the present must always be consistent with the future just as much as the future must always be consistent with its past. It’s all just a reflection of the fact that God and his will exist outside of time. His will allows for what is potential and determines what is actual. Much simpler than the scientists make it out to be.

The same concept would explain spooky action at a distance. Quantum entangled particles match each other when their wave functions collapse, not because they instantaneously reach across space to affect the other. It’s more like the observation of one changes the past, except that it doesn’t happen temporally and nothing actually changes; it always was. We can imagine it as if the observing of one particle knocks down its predecessor dominoes back in time until it reaches the point of origin and then flows forward in time down the other path to knock down the other present particle, except that what is determined within the potential layer of reality is a-temporal. So it always was collapsed.

Secondly, we can then think of God’s work in creation as being primarily a matter of subtraction rather than addition. Imagine if God, outside of time, considered all of time and space and everything that could possibly happen in any possible universe, past, present, and future. Then he just started subtracting every domino that didn’t match his will, as well as every domino that was not logically consistent with those that remained. Whenever and wherever only one possibility remained within the will of God, that was or is by definition reality, and would be the first domino to fall, knocking down most of the rest. The Garden of Eden would then be the first primary spot where dominoes started falling, knocking down most, but not all of what would follow, leaving gaps and lines of standing dominoes that are not definitively and causally forced to fall by that initial cause. Those missed dominoes may or may not fall by other means.

If I’m right, then entropy is not tied directly to time moving forward, but rather to the causal relationship to the first cause, the first falling domino. Each domino that causes another to fall has a little bit of wiggle room, so it injects a tiny bit of randomness into the way the next domino falls, and that randomness is entropy. Because almost all dominoes are falling forward, from the Garden of Eden toward the end of time, entropy must increase. That would also mean that when you open Schrodinger’s cat box, or measure any quantum particle and send ripples back in time, the entropy would increase backwards in time in this instance. But it would be mostly unobserved. We’d see it only as an increasing haziness to the past. That is, when I open the cat box, I not only see the cat alive, I see where it is and what it’s doing. I can extrapolate where it was and what it was doing a few seconds before the box was opened as well. Before that it all becomes hazy as the lines of dominoes become too uncertain to definitively knock down their predecessors. That would be a sort of entropy increasing into the past.

This theory may have something to tell us about all kinds of other topics, like free will coexisting with God’s omniscience and control of all things (we can and do knock down dominoes ourselves, but only choosing from those pathways God left standing in front of us. But perhaps he chooses to leave them standing to give us choices—even while outside of time he already knows what our choice will be), or God’s activity in creation and in response to prayer (while God can always add new miraculous dominoes wherever needed and wherever his will places them, there’s really no limit to how much he could accomplish just by judicious removal of unwanted potentialities with no miracle required; sometimes reaching into the past and making wise use of the butterfly effect. And we’d never see proof of a miracle unless he willed us to see it, because even with overt miracles he can always add enough dominoes at the head of the line to hide the miraculous source in the unobserved past). Or how about questions like, what exists beyond the edge of the visible universe? The answer is infinite possibilities of an infinite universe, but nothing actual or real, because there is neither observation nor causal linkage nor any reason for God’s will to knock down any dominoes out there.

This theory seems like it could also be workable without reference to God, but there are some ways that it just makes more sense with God as the one willing it, selecting from infinite potentialities, and knocking down the first domino (and selected dominoes ever since). And I really doubt any non-theistic scientist would find anything worth pursuing here, because any explication of time from outside of time’s dimension and perspective is usually viewed as inert (there’s no time outside of time, so there can be no change, so there can be no influences or laws governing what would or could happen outside of time). I could go on, but I have my doubts that anyone will even read this far or want to hear more. I just had to get it all out.

But his will is flexible. When two possible situations equally fulfill God’s purposes, then both situations maintain a place within his will.

I have to question this concept. God is perfect only a perfect thought would enter His mind, two thoughts cannot be perfect therefore one is not perfect otherwise we have a logical contradiction.

 

[Hans Blaster]

Although this isn’t where my theory began, it might help to explain two crucial notions. First, that the will of God doesn’t just cause reality; it is reality. What God wills simply is. Creating all things wasn’t about having the power to make it so; God wills a world to exist, so a world exists. But his will is flexible. When two possible situations equally fulfill God’s purposes, then both situations maintain a place within his will. We might say the universe has two layers, actuality and potentiality. Potentiality is everything that is not ruled out by the will of God or by definitive cause-and-effect relationship to what is actual. Potentiality is governed a-temporally by a God who exists outside of time, but its rules require it to be logically consistent within time. Actuality plays out in time but it must remain within the realm of what is determined by potentiality.

That explains quantum mechanics. God really doesn’t care exactly where a photon or electron might be at any given moment, so his will doesn’t assign an exact place, just allows for a range of possibilities. The scientific concept of “quantum probability wave functions” is nothing other than a description of what is possible within God’s will, as well as its probability relative to everything else that is possible. Everything exists as a range of possibilities until either God’s will, or our observation, or logical consistency leaves only one remaining option. When only one possibility exists, it simply is reality by definition. (Kind of like Sherlock Holmes’ famous observation about deduction eliminating the impossible; whatever remains is the truth).

Here's a problem with your proposal that you probably won't like.

Using the properties of protons and electrons, I can caclculate using the Schrödinger equation the energy levels of the hydrogen atom and the lifetime of the first exited state. It will match the values that have been known for some time.

Suppose I take a bunch of hydrogen atoms in the ground state and then using a 121.5-nm UV laser put them into the first excited state (n=2). Then I measure their transition back to the ground state. It matches (as it always does) the well known decay rate for the state.

Since I put the hydrogen atoms in the exicited state, then it was my will that they be excited, yet you want the quantum state to be a will of god, including the decay/transition to the lower state. Does god have free will to set the timing of any decay (or if it happens at all) after I excite the atoms?

Anyone with an atomic physics experiment can make this quantum god "dance". It would not seem to be very powerful. (Or at least it has no free will.)

 

[Neutral Observer]

I have to question this concept. God is perfect only a perfect thought would enter His mind, two thoughts cannot be perfect therefore one is not perfect otherwise we have a logical contradiction.

Unless there's no such thing as a "singular" perfect thought, but rather "perfection" is encompassed within the entirety of all possible thoughts. In which case taking any of them away would be to subtract from perfection, not enhance it.

 

[Yuppert]

Sounds a bit like Spinoza's God, where God is the universe and its thoughts are the laws of nature. But Spinoza's God doesn't have will or intellect...

The arrow of time, e.g. time 'moving forward' is the result of entropy increasing. When an ordered system, e.g. of particles, is left to its own devices, it will tend to become disordered, even if the interactions are time-reversible (equally likely to go either way), because there are more ways to be disordered than ordered. The direction of increasing disorder is what we call 'forwards in time'. IOW, the past is more ordered than the present.

That can't happen when the overall increase of entropy means moving toward the future. There are hypothetical scenarios for the big bang, where entropy increases either temporal 'side' of the big bang, i.e. from our perspective, entropy decreases prior to the big bang, reaches a minimum at the big bang, and increases subsequently. For observers prior to the big bang, the universe would appear to be expanding into the future just as it does for us, because the direction of 'forwards in time' for them would also be the direction of increasing entropy. From each of our viewpoints, the other would be reversed in time.

I don’t think I’m arguing for Spinoza’s God at all. I might be open to the idea that in some way the universe exists within the mind of God, but the universe is not God. God is much more than just what he wills. I’m only saying that God’s will governs and directs reality and events in a more direct way than saying God wants something to happen, so he directs his power toward making it happen, and then it happens. There’s no intermediate step. Things are because that is what God’s will has resolved. And when his will doesn’t resolve matters, they may remain unresolved and in a state of quantum wave flux.
I would say that the laws of nature are what they are because it is God’s will that the universe function in an orderly way capable of achieving all his purposes, so they are what God wills, but they are just one tool of his will; they are not the same thing as God’s will. And God uses them or overrides them as he chooses.
As for entropy, I may have used the wrong expression. I’m really only referring to one aspect of entropy. I understand entropy as just a measure of the disorder in a system, and I was linking disorder and uncertainty, perhaps inappropriately. You can temporarily decrease disorder in certain systems, but you don’t thereby cause time to either flow backward or be perceived flowing the opposite direction. But perhaps there is one disorder in the arrangement of matter and energy, and there is sort of disorder in the whittling down of possibilities to describe how, in this instance, the selection process would in one sense flow backwards.
Suppose we open Schrodinger’s cat box and find a dead cat. We can measure the amount of decay and cooling and normal increase of entropy to figure out approximately how long ago the cat died. Entropy is working just as it always does in terms of the condition of the cat and the arrow of time. But in terms of the selection process by which multiple potentials are reduced to a single actual, we have certainty when the box is opened, we have less certainty about the moments that precede that, and less certainty still about earlier moments. It’s related to our perception of the normal forward progress of time in that it’s like a weather forecast. The farther you try to see into the future, the hazier the forecast and the more random the possibilities. Maybe entropy was the wrong word for what I was describing, but here we’re trying to “forecast” (or “postcast”?) the cat’s history, and the farther we look, the hazier the postcast, the more overlapping potentialities we are dealing with because of the same injected randomness issue that increases normal entropy, which won’t allow us to identify one specific and definite timeline that leads all the way from the closing of the box with a cat inside to the reopening and discovery of a dead cat.

I have to question this concept. God is perfect only a perfect thought would enter His mind, two thoughts cannot be perfect therefore one is not perfect otherwise we have a logical contradiction.

Why can't two thoughts be perfect? If a photon may be polarized vertically or horizontally, and neither orientation will ever have any impact at all on God's plans for the world, how is one less perfect than the other?

Here's a problem with your proposal that you probably won't like.

Using the properties of protons and electrons, I can caclculate using the Schrödinger equation the energy levels of the hydrogen atom and the lifetime of the first exited state. It will match the values that have been known for some time.

Suppose I take a bunch of hydrogen atoms in the ground state and then using a 121.5-nm UV laser put them into the first excited state (n=2). Then I measure their transition back to the ground state. It matches (as it always does) the well known decay rate for the state.

Since I put the hydrogen atoms in the exicited state, then it was my will that they be excited, yet you want the quantum state to be a will of god, including the decay/transition to the lower state. Does god have free will to set the timing of any decay (or if it happens at all) after I excite the atoms?

Anyone with an atomic physics experiment can make this quantum god "dance". It would not seem to be very powerful. (Or at least it has no free will.)

I don't see the problem. First of all, I pointed out that God's will leaves room for our free will choices, and whatever effects our choices have on the world, as long as they fit within the possibilities God left available. Secondly, all the laws of nature are part of that will of God, so atoms acting the way the laws of nature tell them to act is just what I'd expect. The fact that it is a quantum state does not make it different or mean that God must arbitrarily decide its state in a way that's contrary to the excitations that have been applied to it. If you ever run that experiment and the result you're supposed to get would somehow contravene the will of God, he certainly has the ability to either give you an unexpected and even a miraculous experimental result, or to prevent you from doing the experiment at all. None of this is any more unpalatable to me than telling me that if I drop an apple it hits the floor, every time.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I thought his view was more panentheistic.

It's been called that, but it was very much his own take - deterministic & without will or intellect.

I was thinking it sounded more like Schopenhauer's World As Will and Representation, if the idea embodied a personal deity.

Perhaps; if the OP described a personal deity, it didn't come across to me, it seemed much lower-level.

 

[Halbhh]

I have a theory that seems like it could explain an incredible range of mysteries and unknowns, but I have no one to bounce it off of. It’s okay if you think this is too long or incoherent to read or respond to; I basically have to just get it out there so I can free my thinking to move on to other things.

Although this isn’t where my theory began, it might help to explain two crucial notions. First, that the will of God doesn’t just cause reality; it is reality. What God wills simply is. Creating all things wasn’t about having the power to make it so; God wills a world to exist, so a world exists. But his will is flexible. When two possible situations equally fulfill God’s purposes, then both situations maintain a place within his will. We might say the universe has two layers, actuality and potentiality. Potentiality is everything that is not ruled out by the will of God or by definitive cause-and-effect relationship to what is actual. Potentiality is governed a-temporally by a God who exists outside of time, but its rules require it to be logically consistent within time. Actuality plays out in time but it must remain within the realm of what is determined by potentiality.

That explains quantum mechanics. God really doesn’t care exactly where a photon or electron might be at any given moment, so his will doesn’t assign an exact place, just allows for a range of possibilities. The scientific concept of “quantum probability wave functions” is nothing other than a description of what is possible within God’s will, as well as its probability relative to everything else that is possible. Everything exists as a range of possibilities until either God’s will, or our observation, or logical consistency leaves only one remaining option. When only one possibility exists, it simply is reality by definition. (Kind of like Sherlock Holmes’ famous observation about deduction eliminating the impossible; whatever remains is the truth).

The universe is like a set of dominoes, except that each domino could fall a hundred different ways and knock down a hundred different potential lines of other dominoes. A standing domino represents any particle or event or situation that has more than one possible resolution. A fallen domino represents anything that is certain, and therefore a part of actual reality. But note that these dominoes fall logically and a-temporally, although we observe them falling temporally, so we’re going to have to fight the temptation to think of their falling as itself being the actual flow of time. There’s a sort of law of logical consistency that requires that every domino is consistent with all past and future dominoes that have any cause-and-effect relationship to it. So its falling must propagate into the past just as it does into the future. The possibilities and probabilities could be thought of as constantly changing to reflect the impact of all past and future limitations on what is possible—except that it’s all a-temporal, so nothing really changes.

When you open Schrodinger’s cat box and find a live cat, it not only results in a live cat persisting afterwards; it means the cat was never dead. It collapses the past quantum probability wave function, so there never was a simultaneously live/dead cat. There never could be unless the box is never opened (or not opened until after all the potential cats inside have died and there’s no way to tell when it happened). It was alive the whole time, not as if your opening the box changed the past, but because the laws governing the realm of potentiality are a-temporal, that the present must always be consistent with the future just as much as the future must always be consistent with its past. It’s all just a reflection of the fact that God and his will exist outside of time. His will allows for what is potential and determines what is actual. Much simpler than the scientists make it out to be.

The same concept would explain spooky action at a distance. Quantum entangled particles match each other when their wave functions collapse, not because they instantaneously reach across space to affect the other. It’s more like the observation of one changes the past, except that it doesn’t happen temporally and nothing actually changes; it always was. We can imagine it as if the observing of one particle knocks down its predecessor dominoes back in time until it reaches the point of origin and then flows forward in time down the other path to knock down the other present particle, except that what is determined within the potential layer of reality is a-temporal. So it always was collapsed.

Secondly, we can then think of God’s work in creation as being primarily a matter of subtraction rather than addition. Imagine if God, outside of time, considered all of time and space and everything that could possibly happen in any possible universe, past, present, and future. Then he just started subtracting every domino that didn’t match his will, as well as every domino that was not logically consistent with those that remained. Whenever and wherever only one possibility remained within the will of God, that was or is by definition reality, and would be the first domino to fall, knocking down most of the rest. The Garden of Eden would then be the first primary spot where dominoes started falling, knocking down most, but not all of what would follow, leaving gaps and lines of standing dominoes that are not definitively and causally forced to fall by that initial cause. Those missed dominoes may or may not fall by other means.

If I’m right, then entropy is not tied directly to time moving forward, but rather to the causal relationship to the first cause, the first falling domino. Each domino that causes another to fall has a little bit of wiggle room, so it injects a tiny bit of randomness into the way the next domino falls, and that randomness is entropy. Because almost all dominoes are falling forward, from the Garden of Eden toward the end of time, entropy must increase. That would also mean that when you open Schrodinger’s cat box, or measure any quantum particle and send ripples back in time, the entropy would increase backwards in time in this instance. But it would be mostly unobserved. We’d see it only as an increasing haziness to the past. That is, when I open the cat box, I not only see the cat alive, I see where it is and what it’s doing. I can extrapolate where it was and what it was doing a few seconds before the box was opened as well. Before that it all becomes hazy as the lines of dominoes become too uncertain to definitively knock down their predecessors. That would be a sort of entropy increasing into the past.

This theory may have something to tell us about all kinds of other topics, like free will coexisting with God’s omniscience and control of all things (we can and do knock down dominoes ourselves, but only choosing from those pathways God left standing in front of us. But perhaps he chooses to leave them standing to give us choices—even while outside of time he already knows what our choice will be), or God’s activity in creation and in response to prayer (while God can always add new miraculous dominoes wherever needed and wherever his will places them, there’s really no limit to how much he could accomplish just by judicious removal of unwanted potentialities with no miracle required; sometimes reaching into the past and making wise use of the butterfly effect. And we’d never see proof of a miracle unless he willed us to see it, because even with overt miracles he can always add enough dominoes at the head of the line to hide the miraculous source in the unobserved past). Or how about questions like, what exists beyond the edge of the visible universe? The answer is infinite possibilities of an infinite universe, but nothing actual or real, because there is neither observation nor causal linkage nor any reason for God’s will to knock down any dominoes out there.

This theory seems like it could also be workable without reference to God, but there are some ways that it just makes more sense with God as the one willing it, selecting from infinite potentialities, and knocking down the first domino (and selected dominoes ever since). And I really doubt any non-theistic scientist would find anything worth pursuing here, because any explication of time from outside of time’s dimension and perspective is usually viewed as inert (there’s no time outside of time, so there can be no change, so there can be no influences or laws governing what would or could happen outside of time). I could go on, but I have my doubts that anyone will even read this far or want to hear more. I just had to get it all out.

Some interesting speculations, and a lot of them. I enjoy considering new ideas, and consider it a good day if a person has some new ideas, regardless of how many are correct, because it's a way to make progress. (one has to have many wrong ideas to get to some right ones, etc.) While at first I thought perhaps your post would be best put in a theological subforum -- and it could -- I do see it has a kind of hybrid theological/physics speculation also. But since the physics speculation is really about God causing events it's really more of a theological post I think. And fun to read/consider. One thought that came up: it's generally thought nature works like a machine that is well made and reliably operates, because that's what we see happening, that consistency. Of course I get it that your theory fits this, but it's valuable to look at closely (as will become more clear later below).

In physics we observe all around us a vast range of phenomena that consistently and always operate in certain predictable ways. We find an always-the-same operation in nature, to the rules/laws of nature, though it takes time to gradually figure them out (and we are far from complete in that). Finding rules that work very well, and then continuing to make many observations at times we find discrepancies. But, so far each time we find an exception to what we thought was the physics of nature, as we have hundreds of times in the last century or so, we are able to gradually discover more physics that perfectly fits it and makes new predictions of not-yet-seen-things correctly. So that when we look for these newly predicted phenomena, they are often found, supporting the new theory in question.

And that makes an overall picture of Nature operating only just by physics alone....or so it seems. Since it is that way (we have many theories that have never once failed on their predictions) very consistently when we observe.

That's a consequential picture: Nature operating by physics that is fixed.
A simple example to illustrate is planetary orbits, and to use a nearby example, consider the orbit of the moon: it reliably continues according to known physics we have figured out, and it doesn't suddenly break those physics rules (plural, in that many known effects are happening, like the tidal interactions, etc.), but the orbit of the moon continues to always follow these already now known physics rules, continually, without any deviations. It doesn't suddenly change course and leave towards a new destination.

So we have a very extensive picture of nature always operating like a machine, on its own: by a wonderful design that it always follows, it seems.

Let's go to the theological side now. We read in Isaiah 46 that God at times tells us through the prophets certain things He has chosen to make happen -- the outcome He plans to create/cause. And then, we read, He does what it takes to "bring about" that outcome. So, here the text conveys (Isaiah 46) that God alters what would have happened to bring about what He chooses instead.

That's intervention, which the chapter lays out as done through agents he calls up, puts into motion, etc.

God "works" -- we read from Christ that He and His Father are "working".

So, together these mean that God, we read, is "working" to "bring about" those outcomes He has made a choice to bring about. That's an intervention.

In summary, we both see:

• A) nature operating on its own perfectly, like a perfect machine, with a perfect design, without needing any tending at all.... but, then, also:
• B) God sometimes intervenes to alter what would have happened, to achieve a goal He chooses, a new outcome, by working and making interventions, to alter what is happening and create the new outcome, which isn't from nature, but from Him.

So, you have 2 things causing outcomes then in that case. If you count every last type of thing that happens, including on the particle level and so on, almost everything we see is nature operating on its own it seems (because whenever we measure, that's what we find), and in contrast to that continuous nature-on-its-own operation, the interventions that God does are comparatively rare, but remarkable.

I suppose the one thing here in this view that might be a little different (or not) from what you lay out is that here in this view, God doesn't have to constantly operate nature, having made it work well to begin with for instance. Like a well made machine that isn't flawed and so won't break down, but will operate on its own. So, in this more conventional view, which fits in what we read in the texts of scripture quite well, God is making some interventions, implying that many other things are happening without needing to be controlled.

 

[Diamond7]

First, that the will of God doesn’t just cause reality; it is reality.

Quantum physics is not going to do you any good if you do not study Hebrew. God speaks creation into existence. God declares the end from the beginning and He watches over His word to perform what He says.

 

[childeye 2]

Quantum physics is not going to do you any good if you do not study Hebrew. God speaks creation into existence. God declares the end from the beginning and He watches over His word to perform what He says.

What happens when the energy that created all things enters the creation it created, in the form of a person? The same energy is now affecting the creation from inside the creation. It reminds me of a sperm and egg. That should at least give a clue as to what God's expression of Himself, His Word, is accomplishing.

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. 8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.

9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

 

[Diamond7]

What happens when the energy that created all things enters the creation it created, in the form of a person?

I do not want to endorse Francis Collins because he removed the Government ban and approved the money for high-risk research on the coronavirus. But before all of that corruption, he did write a book on DNA being the "Language of God".

The problem is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God is only good. Man is good and evil. That is why he is perishing because he is a dichotomy. It gets complicated trying to understand God's plan and purpose.

 

[Diamond7]

Everything exists as a range of possibilities

My son is a computer engineer. He is very good at creating formulas. For him, everything is an exact science and he avoids probabilities like the plague. If things appear fluid the math is perhaps too complicated for our conscious mind. Even though our unconscious mind does extremely complicated math all the time.

Look at our solar system. This is all exact and precise. The problem from our perspective is that the planets have an effect on each other based on their location in their orbit. This creates a wobble that is beyond our ability to do the math so we develop a random theory. Even the planet when it changes it's shape and form has an effect.

Actually the ability to catch a baseball is beyond out ability to be able to do the math. BUT our unconscious mind is able to do the math so there are people who are very good at hitting and catching baseballs. I saw a girl on youtube that is very good with a bow and arrow.

Right now a day is 23 hours 56 minutes and around 4 seconds. A year is 364.25 roughly. I think there will be a perfect day of 24 hours and a perfect year of 360 days. I have not actually done the math to prove my theory. One of these days I am going to get my son to do it. He will not do the research so I have to give him all the numbers that he needs to work with to figure it out. Even if it is fifth grade math.

They say there is an exact connection between the spindown rate of the earth and the rescinding rate of the moon as it is moving way from the earth. One is actually transferred to the other.

 

[Yuppert]

I suppose the one thing here in this view that might be a little different (or not) from what you lay out is that here in this view, God doesn't have to constantly operate nature, having made it work well to begin with for instance. Like a well made machine that isn't flawed and so won't break down, but will operate on its own. So, in this more conventional view, which fits in what we read in the texts of scripture quite well, God is making some interventions, implying that many other things are happening without needing to be controlled.

My theory is not that God is constantly micromanaging the laws of physics, but that, first of all, he selected, out of all the laws of physics that are possibilities in any possible universe, that one set of laws that most ideally fit the plan he had for this world, and then he didn’t have to do anything extra to create the laws and create the infrastructure to make the laws work; the desired laws were the actual laws merely by virtue of being the only potential left when all other possibilities were eliminated. Why are the laws laws? Why are they consistent across the universe? Scientists describe the laws emerging from fields or from superstrings, but those things (if they exist) exist at a level far below the entire concepts of matter and energy and space and even time perhaps. What actually exists at that level? Could it actually be defined by the will of God, and not just more physical, material realities, like turtles all the way down?

Quantum physics is not going to do you any good if you do not study Hebrew. God speaks creation into existence. God declares the end from the beginning and He watches over His word to perform what He says.

Actually, I have studied Hebrew. Yes, God speaks creation into existence. But what does that actually mean? Did he utter sound waves from his mouth? Jesus is described as the Word, but he is not a five-letter word or any spoken word. A word, from God’s perspective, means the expression of God’s will in any way that makes his will perceivable, explicit, knowable, and known. Jesus is God’s will and God himself embodied in the flesh. He is the Word because he is the means by which God makes himself known, revealing everything that God is and everything he desires and everything he shares with us. So, in the beginning, God spoke; he made his will singular and real, and I’m just suggesting he did it by subtraction of all the possibilities that did not match his purposes and plans, rather than by addition of something invented ad hoc.

The problem is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God is only good. Man is good and evil. That is why he is perishing because he is a dichotomy. It gets complicated trying to understand God's plan and purpose.

When Adam and Eve ate from the tree, God said they would become like God, knowing good and evil. If being like God means knowing both good and evil, then God knows both good and evil. How could that dichotomy be a bad thing? Adam and Eve already knew good, didn’t they? They were created perfect, in complete alignment with the will of God. What changed? Some have suggested that what they gained at the tree was an experiential knowledge of evil to go along with their previous knowledge of only good things, but that would hardly make them like God. I believe the word “knowledge” in this case expresses more than just knowing, but an authoritative determination of good and evil. What they gained was nothing but the attitude of self-appointed judges, deciding what is good and what is evil based on their own opinions. (Eve looked at the tree and decided that in her own judgment it was good for food and desirable for gaining wisdom, so she ate). Eating the fruit didn’t magically change them and give them something new as if it was a vitamin or poison within the fruit; the act of eating was itself the self-appointed determination of good and evil. They became like God, making judgments that some things are good and some are evil; but they did not make those judgments from the same divine storehouse of infinite, perfect wisdom and understanding that God has, and that is why man is perishing.

My theory could also have something to say to the conundrum of sin entering a world in which God's will is sovereign. If God is sovereign, is he responsible for sin? Why did he create the tree if he knew Adam and Eve would eat the fruit and bring evil into God's perfect world and ruin everything? Why does God allow evil and suffering to exist and bad things to happen to good people? Perhaps all these things stem from pockets where God allowed some dominoes to remain standing and in play, where we, if we were God, think we wouldn't have. But then God is not the cause of that evil; he simply did not rule it out. And he didn't rule it out because a) he desired to give us the freedom to serve him as children, not as robots or slaves (and giving children freedom sometimes means letting them make mistakes and sometimes suffer the consequences of their mistakes), and b) because it did not, in fact, ruin everything, but set the world on a course which, in the end, will be all the more to God's glory and praise for having saved us by grace.

Look at our solar system. This is all exact and precise. The problem from our perspective is that the planets have an effect on each other based on their location in their orbit. This creates a wobble that is beyond our ability to do the math so we develop a random theory. Even the planet when it changes it's shape and form has an effect.

Chaos theory reveals that we can never nail down the universe to one fated future, pre-ordained by all that came before. That’s simply a bigger example of what I was describing at the quantum level. It leaves huge swaths of the future course of creation within the realm of multiple potentialities, and God can choose from those possible courses the one that best serves his purposes, and in this way he is intervening in history, but without the need for a single miraculous contravention of the laws of nature. And he declares the end from the beginning, he makes all these choices from his position outside of time, which actually makes it so much easier. Why? Because if he was intervening in history from within history, every time he might use a miracle to change the course of my life, he would have to rethink and replan the whole future course of my life and of all subsequent history to account for everything that’s going to change. But if he works outside of time, then, in a logical sense, all of his interventions throughout all of history are planned out simultaneously (so to speak), and if he does it by subtraction of potentialities that don’t match his will rather than addition of something new, then all subsequent history does not need to be rewritten; it just gets chosen from a reduced set of potentialities.

 

[Diamond7]

When Adam and Eve ate from the tree, God said they would become like God, knowing good and evil.

Did hunter gather people know good from evil? Do animals know good from evil? People like Calvan and Jospeh Smith believe God wanted them to eat from the tree so they could be a part of the redemption of mankind. It just makes no sense to me that God wants them to disobay HIm. That does not line up with the rest of the Bible.

 

[Diamond7]

Why does God allow evil and suffering to exist and bad things to happen to good people?

He always causes good to come out of the worst of situations. All things work together for good. Which seems impossible for us when we see how much people abuse each other. But the main belief is that Satan got thrown out of Heaven and he wanted to get Creaton to destroy itself. So God is good and the author of good and Satan is evil and the author of evil. Rev 20:2 "He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years."

They say that man can only truly love God if he has free will.
The love of a slave is not the same love as a free man has.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

Secondly, we can then think of God’s work in creation as being primarily a matter of subtraction rather than addition.

Reminds me of Bernard Haisch "The God Theory"

Bernard Haisch - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Everything always is. But our brain filters out all but what the five senses let in.

 

[Yuppert]

Did hunter gather people know good from evil? Do animals know good from evil? People like Calvan and Jospeh Smith believe God wanted them to eat from the tree so they could be a part of the redemption of mankind. It just makes no sense to me that God wants them to disobay HIm. That does not line up with the rest of the Bible.

He always causes good to come out of the worst of situations. All things work together for good. Which seems impossible for us when we see how much people abuse each other. But the main belief is that Satan got thrown out of Heaven and he wanted to get Creaton to destroy itself. So God is good and the author of good and Satan is evil and the author of evil. Rev 20:2 "He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years."

They say that man can only truly love God if he has free will.
The love of a slave is not the same love as a free man has.

I didn't say God wants them to disobey him. I said basically just what you said in your second post, that God wanted them to love and serve him as his children, not as slaves or robots, so this is one instance where his sovereignty could have taken the option away from them, but he left that domino standing for them to make the choice, knowing that the choice they were going to make (the wrong choice) could not thwart his plans and good purposes for his children and his creation.
As for animals, they act on instinct, not on a conscious knowledge of God's will. As for hunter gatherers, all people since Adam and Eve are born with the law of God written in their hearts, speaking through their consciences that either accuse or defend them in each choice they make. That inner law, damaged as it is by the curse of inherited sin and often ignored until it becomes silent, reveals just what I said about the consequences of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil--people become like God, not the way we were meant to, by imitating him and living in his image, but by claiming for themselves the authority to make a different determination than what the true Judge has made, and to say, "I know what good is and I know what evil is, and I'm going to do what I choose to do, not what God or his law declares is my duty as his servant." As we read repeatedly in the book of Judges, "each man did what was right in his own heart," substituting their judgments for God's, as if they were become gods.