Questions of Truth and Quantum Theory (Religion)

by Mark , Friday, March 06, 2009, 19:13 (5741 days ago) @ dhw

I shall try to explain what I meant ... and what I didn't mean. - It is possible to use the idea of mystery as an excuse for not thinking. Christians sometimes do this. A readiness to use it as an argument-stopper can be just laziness. That is not, I hope, what I am doing here. Richard Feynman once said "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics". He didn't mean that we don't understand the equations, or that we are not sure what the equations should be. He meant that even though we can say precisely in mathematical language what is happening it remains baffling and counter-intuitive; completely different from the world on the scale at which we experience it. Anyone who doubts this should read and think about the double-slit experiment. - Now the reason we accept quantum mechanics is because of hard experimental evidence. I am not at all suggesting that the mysteriousness of quantum mechanics implies that we should be ready to accept other mysterious theories without evidence. Rather, I am saying that we should not dismiss an explanation simply because mystery remains in it. Einstein struggled to the end of his life with quantum mechanics because he couldn't accept the mystery. Now everyone accepts it. We have no choice. - I don't know what Hewish meant, and I think he should have elaborated. But I am suggesting that he could have meant that we should not dismiss Christian doctrine simply because it contains the paradoxical and mysterious. As a Christian I would argue that it is on the basis of evidence and testimony that I hold the belief that God is both three and one, and that Jesus was fully divine and fully human. You may dispute the evidence (and theology differs from science in that it cannot be based on repeatable experiments). But you cannot dismiss such beliefs on the basis that they are not completely explicable, for on that basis you would also have to dismiss quantum mechanics.