Omniscience and quantum mechanics

bricklayer · Feb 11, 2010

God is not objective, He is necessary.
God does not know things as they are, He knows them apart from their being.
God does not need a thing to be to know it completely.
God is not an objective observer of His creation, He is the author of it.

Christ's_Warrior · Feb 15, 2010

ephraimanesti said:
MY BROTHER,

The "uncertainty principle" deals with events in time and space.

God is outside of time and space--which are His creations for our benefit.

All events are present to Him in the eternal "NOW".

Therefore, the "uncertainty principle" can be true and God's omniscience true also.

ABBA'S BRAT,
ephraim

Ephraim, you should of stated this in the beginning, case would of been closed long ago.

Hi Wiccan, you seem like a highly intelligent person and kudos to you bro!

I am not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, nor do i confess to having any sort of scientific knowledge, but I understand that what we can observe through science is limited to physical space, matter and time, anything else is speculation.

If God is outside of this physical realm, how can we subject him to scientific observations as we understand them?

Example, we believe Jesus walked on water, if this happened, how does science explain it? (I know you don't believe he did, just citing an example that God is not bound by any scientific law) I understand that it is scientifically impossible to walk on water, but I believe along with billions of others that Jesus performed this miracle and in doing so he broke the laws of nature as we understand them.

Dude, it seems as though you let pride get in the way of knowing God, maybe this is why you can't find him.

bricklayer · Feb 15, 2010

In all of this, there is presupposed objectivity.

There is a presupposition of God's objectivity, by some.
They presuppose that God knows what is, as it is.
God does not need a thing, to be to know it.
God is necessary. He exists necessarily, and He is all He is necessarily.
He knows all necessarily, not objectively.

There is a presupposition of man's objectivity, by some.
They presuppose that man knows what is, as it is.
A thing does not need to be, as we know it.
We are contingent. We exist contingently, and we are all we are contingently.
We know all we know contingently, not objectively.

Quantum mechanics presupposes independent-trials, better known as chance.

Objectivity and chance, to me, seem anathema to a sovereign God,
and represent the futile foundations upon which is build "the ways of this world".

Jnwaco · Feb 15, 2010

Wiccan_Child said:
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[sub]x[/sub] ≥ 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"?

There's limitations to how much humans can know, because our measurement teqniques disturb the state. God doesn't have to use our measurement teqniques. But it's a good question to ask Him if you see Him.

Christ's_Warrior · Feb 18, 2010

Reasonable Faith: Question 138 - Divine Sovereignty and Quantum Indeterminism

Excellent response to a similar question raised by the OP by none other than William Lane Craig, I love this bloke.

The OP can also question Mr WLC, he has a Q and A section.

Wiccan_Child · Feb 20, 2010

Christ's_Warrior said:
Reasonable Faith: Question 138 - Divine Sovereignty and Quantum Indeterminism

Excellent response to a similar question raised by the OP by none other than William Lane Craig, I love this bloke.

The OP can also question Mr WLC, he has a Q and A section.

I like that article a lot. It's a very satisfying resolution to the dilemma. It also has a rather nifty solution to the problem of omniscience, omnipotence, and free will (I had my own reconciliation, but it's nice to have a spare!).

Wiccan_Child · Feb 20, 2010

Jnwaco said:
There's limitations to how much humans can know, because our measurement teqniques disturb the state. God doesn't have to use our measurement teqniques. But it's a good question to ask Him if you see Him.

Well, it's more fundamental than mere experimental error. But I have a whole laundry list of questions to ask God if and when I get the chance.

Jnwaco · Feb 20, 2010

Wiccan_Child said:
Well, it's more fundamental than mere experimental error. But I have a whole laundry list of questions to ask God if and when I get the chance.

Me, too!

Peter Tran · Feb 20, 2010

I didn't read the rest of the thread. (25 pages? ) If god created this entire physical world including it's laws. Then he himself put those limitations there, he can be beyond those limits that he created.

Oh and yes, once I get to heaven I have so many things I want to talk to god about. He wont answer all of my questions right now, only some of them. It's annoying, but at least he answers some.

dampes8n · Feb 21, 2010

The thoughts presented here seem like rash conjecture. Consider the Universe as a giant computer simulation, with God as the programmer. God need not work by the rules of the simulation to extract information from the simulation. Depending on how it was programmed, he may or may not have sub-particle resolution. No religious text bothers to describe it. But it is certain that he must interact with it from outside, and can be objective since he isn't part of this closed system.

He could or could not. We can't know based on the information we have.

Wiccan_Child · Feb 21, 2010

Peter Tran said:
I didn't read the rest of the thread. (25 pages? ) If god created this entire physical world including it's laws. Then he himself put those limitations there, he can be beyond those limits that he created.

dampes8n said:
The thoughts presented here seem like rash conjecture. Consider the Universe as a giant computer simulation, with God as the programmer. God need not work by the rules of the simulation to extract information from the simulation. Depending on how it was programmed, he may or may not have sub-particle resolution. No religious text bothers to describe it. But it is certain that he must interact with it from outside, and can be objective since he isn't part of this closed system.

He could or could not. We can't know based on the information we have.

It's not a simple problem of how the information is extracted, it's that the information doesn't exist. It's not that it's (quantum mechanically) impossible to know the precise momentum (say) of a particle, but that it doesn't have a precise momentum.
Thus, the question of omniscience: just what is it God knows? To what level of accuracy does he know how fast a particle is moving? If he knows it has a momentum of precisely p, then he can't know its exact position because it doesn't have an exact position (since it has an exact momentum). Likewise, if he knows its exact position, he can't know its exact momentum.

So, just what does he know about a particle's position and momentum? If quantum mechanics is right, the narrower a particle's momentum range is, the broader its position range is; that is, God's knowledge has an impact on the real world, rather than being a passive account.

The purpose of this thread is to discuss the ins and outs of God's omniscience (or your conception of it) more than anything else.

Jnwaco · Feb 21, 2010

Again the assumption seems to be that God has to use human means of measuring and knowing. That seems to be logically fallacious.

dampes8n · Feb 21, 2010

Wiccan_Child said:
It's not a simple problem of how the information is extracted, it's that the information doesn't exist. It's not that it's (quantum mechanically) impossible to know the precise momentum (say) of a particle, but that it doesn't have a precise momentum.
Thus, the question of omniscience: just what is it God knows? To what level of accuracy does he know how fast a particle is moving? If he knows it has a momentum of precisely p, then he can't know its exact position because it doesn't have an exact position (since it has an exact momentum). Likewise, if he knows its exact position, he can't know its exact momentum.

So, just what does he know about a particle's position and momentum? If quantum mechanics is right, the narrower a particle's momentum range is, the broader its position range is; that is, God's knowledge has an impact on the real world, rather than being a passive account.

The purpose of this thread is to discuss the ins and outs of God's omniscience (or your conception of it) more than anything else.

That's not likely true. At the quantum level the act of measurement collapses the probability wave because measurement involves bouncing the particle off something or having it manipulate a field with its mass. Experiments like two slit only do show that particles act strangely. However, something outside the system that built the program could have hooks in the particles themselves that tell him where they are.

Probability waves are ultimately just a strange artifact of occam's razor. There are real describable locations for these particles (which could be multiple locations) but the means to measure it don't exist. They by definition would have to be supernatural to not alter the particles in any way.

Because you can't know within this universe does not mean you can't know from outside it. However, What I find more interesting is that this kind of unknowable wavelike existence when not being observed, then on observation snapping to the quantum grid in quanta of energy as particles is exactly the same kind of thing videogames do when rendering a gameworld.

The whole game is calculated with floating point locations across an invisible universe, an entity not seen will be abstracted down to a marker in space and when it is within the range of the camera it collapses down to the grid of the monitor after being imbued with all of its finer details.

Our universe seems to be optimised for speed and not accuracy.

sk8Joyful · Feb 22, 2010

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

Yes, God does, know everything.

Wiccan_Child said:
But, according to quantum mechanics,
there are inherent limitations to just how much can be known about a given system.

You don't propose to limit God, to the inherent limitations of "quantum mechanics" as just another of man's simpleton explanations, do you?

Wiccan_Child said:
Just what does God know about the physical observables of a particle?

A better question: what do you know about the 'non'-physical observables of a particle?

Wiccan_Child said:
Does this relate to the qualifier, "God knows everything knowable"?

The assumption that God has to use human means of knowing, & therefore measuring, is logically fallacious - for He evidently works outside "qualifiers".

Again Yes, God does, know everything...
Including how we were constructed, including self-healing

mechanisms in our system. And a more useful question: How well? have you used this to help yourself, and other people.

98cwitr · Feb 24, 2010

Wiccan_Child said:
Well, it's more fundamental than mere experimental error. But I have a whole laundry list of questions to ask God if and when I get the chance.

you ever tried praying about it?

Wiccan_Child · Feb 24, 2010

dampes8n said:
That's not likely true. At the quantum level the act of measurement collapses the probability wave because measurement involves bouncing the particle off something or having it manipulate a field with its mass. Experiments like two slit only do show that particles act strangely. However, something outside the system that built the program could have hooks in the particles themselves that tell him where they are.

Nonetheless, those 'hooks' would violate quantum mechanics. The point of a collapsing probability wave is that is that you have something to collapse: the hooks wouldn't tell you anything more than that. Moreover, quantum mechanical indeterminism doesn't result from practical considerations of measurement, but from a more general and purely theoretical view: measurement collapses the wavefunction not because it's physically interfering with the particle, but because it's measuring the wavefunction. If you could, somehow, magically conjure a value for a particle's position without physically interfering with it, it would still collapse the wavefunction.

In other words, just what value do those hooks describe, and to what accuracy? The Uncertainty Principles are more than pragmatic limits.

dampes8n said:
Probability waves are ultimately just a strange artifact of occam's razor. There are real describable locations for these particles (which could be multiple locations) but the means to measure it don't exist. They by definition would have to be supernatural to not alter the particles in any way.

Without getting into the semantics of as nebulous a term as 'supernatural', I disagree that particles have discrete positions. Or rather, quantum mechanics disagrees.

dampes8n said:
Because you can't know within this universe does not mean you can't know from outside it. However, What I find more interesting is that this kind of unknowable wavelike existence when not being observed, then on observation snapping to the quantum grid in quanta of energy as particles is exactly the same kind of thing videogames do when rendering a gameworld.

The whole game is calculated with floating point locations across an invisible universe, an entity not seen will be abstracted down to a marker in space and when it is within the range of the camera it collapses down to the grid of the monitor after being imbued with all of its finer details.

Our universe seems to be optimised for speed and not accuracy.

Of course, that presupposes that each variable has a discrete floating point. According to quantum mechanics, particles have a wavefunction to describe them, rather than an array of specific numbers. What you're describing is a naive (in that it's intuitive, rather than deductive), classical (Newtonian, rather than quantum), deterministic (classical causality, etc) n-body problem.

Wiccan_Child · Feb 24, 2010

Jnwaco said:
Again the assumption seems to be that God has to use human means of measuring and knowing. That seems to be logically fallacious.

I disagree. It's not to do with how one acquires the knowledge, but that the knowledge doesn't exist. It's not enough to say that God can know things about particles using different means to us and thus overcome all things quantum. It's like saying God can know my breast size just because he's not human: it's not that he has access to methods I don't, but that I don't have breasts!

Wiccan_Child · Feb 24, 2010

98cwitr said:
you ever tried praying about it?

I used to pray, when I was a Christian. They were never answered.

Why, do you think God will reveal to me a mathematical model unifying quantum field theory and relativistic mechanics?

Wiccan_Child · Feb 24, 2010

sk8Joyful said:
Yes, God does, know everything.

Can you elaborate?

sk8Joyful said:
You don't propose to limit God, to the inherent limitations of "quantum mechanics" as just another of man's simpleton explanations, do you?

That, sk8Joyful, is my question to you.

sk8Joyful said:
A better question: what do you know about the 'non'-physical observables of a particle?

Why is that a better question? I make no claims of omniscience.

sk8Joyful said:
The assumption that God has to use human means of knowing, & therefore measuring, is logically fallacious - for He evidently works outside "qualifiers".

The qualifier was one of logic. Some people define omniscience as knowing everything that can be known (making a distinction from knowing that which can't be known, such as how to make a square circle, or prove 1 + 1 = 3).

sk8Joyful said:
Again Yes, God does, know everything...
Including how we were constructed, including self-healing mechanisms in our system. And a more useful question: How well? have you used this to help yourself, and other people.

I have donated blood, which is about all I can do to help other people with my ability to heal.

98cwitr · Feb 24, 2010

Wiccan_Child said:
I used to pray, when I was a Christian. They were never answered.

Why, do you think God will reveal to me a mathematical model unifying quantum field theory and relativistic mechanics?

if that is His will for you to know then absolutely you will know.

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