Questions of Truth and Quantum Theory (Religion)

by David Turell , Friday, March 06, 2009, 13:42 (5536 days ago) @ dhw
edited by unknown, Friday, March 06, 2009, 13:54

George quoted Tony Hewish: "When the most elementary physical things behave this way, we should be prepared to accept religious mysteries such as the existence of God..."
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> Mark interpreted the Hewish quote as meaning that Christian faith should not be dismissed just because it is mysterious and contrary to common sense, "for the physical world at its most fundamental level is so mysterious and counter-intuitive that, despite our ability to mathematically model it, it defies understanding."
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> George had written that Hewish's comment justified belief in "absolutely anything", and I wrote that the comment in fact favoured atheism, because if incomprehensibility justified belief, it would be simpler to believe in the creative powers of physical matter itself than in God. Why have two mysteries instead of one?
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> David has responded: "But we do understand the quantum world. dhw has twisted Mark's meaning of the word 'understanding'. Our math formulas follow quantum mechanics beautifully."
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I wish a theologan would come to my help, but what Mark and Hewish are describing is exactly the effect my early studies of cosmology, particle physics, quantum mechanics and symmetry of the particle zoo had on my thinking. I went from agnostic to accepting a 'greater power' even before I found the huge gaps in Darwin's simplistic theory. Those latter discoveries simply confirmed what the physics was strongly suggesting.
To me 'beyond understanding', 'mysterious', 'defies understanding' can also be interpreted as 'wonderment' at the very neat designed-appearing underpinnings of the evolution of the universe and the enormously complex machinations of the living cell, a veritable factory of activity. And even more suprisingly the invention of mathematics, a rational system from our minds, that is able to describe all of this in math terms creates a concept expressed elsewhere that mathematics seems to have a predetermined existence of its own. It even can predict missing information such as the Higgs boson! dhw's argument seems to be splitting our reality into 'how' and 'why' as though they are totally separate and cannot be brought together at certain points. Note the first sentence in this entry: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090304091231.htm The weirdness of quantum theory does greatly influence philosophic thought. Why is it that we can model quanta with math systematically, yet not quite "get our hands" fully on this portion of reality? Why is it can we model everything else?
I can feel myself being forced to look at why, not just throw it aside, and accept that this one limitation in our ability to understand creates more wonderment. It appears to me that agnositicism will not accept any sense of wonder. The whole of our reality looks magical. Perhaps there is magic underlying the entirety of what we experience. 
Again as I have warned, going to the lengths of describing a 'loving God' creates all sorts of problems of theodicy, problems that we may simply conjure up going that far into an area we really KNOW NOTHING about, some accepting it on faith.