Does quantum physics support a belief in God?

Physicist Stephen Barr has a superb post titled Does quantum physics make it easier to believe in God?

Excerpt:

Not in any direct way. That is, it doesn’t provide an argument for the existence of God. But it does so indirectly, by providing an argument against the philosophy called materialism (or “physicalism”), which is the main intellectual opponent of belief in God in today’s world.

Materialism is an atheistic philosophy that says that all of reality is reducible to matter and its interactions. It has gained ground because many people think that it’s supported by science. They think that physics has shown the material world to be a closed system of cause and effect, sealed off from the influence of any non-physical realities --- if any there be. Since our minds and thoughts obviously do affect the physical world, it would follow that they are themselves merely physical phenomena. No room for a spiritual soul or free will: for materialists we are just “machines made of meat.”

Quantum mechanics, however, throws a monkey wrench into this simple mechanical view of things...

Barr goes on to provide an elegant and fascinating explanation of the role that mind plays in quantum theory, and he points out that if the reality of the mind is denied, one is forced to accept a bizarre understanding of reality.

He concludes:

[I]f the mathematics of quantum mechanics is right (as most fundamental physicists believe), and if materialism is right, one is forced to accept the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. And that is awfully heavy baggage for materialism to carry.

If, on the other hand, we accept the more traditional understanding of quantum mechanics that goes back to von Neumann, one is led by its logic (as Wigner and Peierls were) to the conclusion that not everything is just matter in motion, and that in particular there is something about the human mind that transcends matter and its laws. It then becomes possible to take seriously certain questions that materialism had ruled out of court: If the human mind transcends matter to some extent, could there not exist minds that transcend the physical universe altogether? And might there not even exist an ultimate Mind?

Please read the whole thing.

I agree with Barr's take. There seems not to be any 'Schrodinger's Sixth Way' by which quantum mechanics demonstrates God's existence.

No surprise there. Demonstrations of God's existence are rigorously logical, not empirical. The Lord transcends the nature He creates. Primary Cause creates secondary cause, and is not reducible to it nor limited in it.

But quantum mechanics is a catastrophe for materialism, which is the modern metaphysical framework for atheism. Quantum mechanics makes it very hard to be an intellectually-fulfilled materialist.

Admittedly the standards for materialist gratification have never been high.


(H.T. Ed Feser)

L.A. Times dhimmi on the Murderers' Veto

From a Los Angeles Times Op-Ed (quoted on Hot Air):

The current standard for restricting speech — or punishing it after it has in fact caused violence — was laid out in the 1969 case Brandenburg vs. Ohio. Under the narrower guidelines, only speech that has the intent and the likelihood of inciting imminent violence or lawbreaking can be limited…
As for imminence, the timeline of similar events after recent burnings of religious materials indicates that reactions typically come within two weeks. Nakoula’s video was deliberately publicized just before the sensitive date of Sept. 11, and could be expected to spark violence on that anniversary.
While many 1st Amendment scholars defend the right of the filmmakers to produce this film, arguing that the ensuing violence was not sufficiently imminent, I spoke to several experts who said the trailer may well fall outside constitutional guarantees of free speech. “Based on my understanding of the events,” 1st Amendment authority Anthony Lewis said in an interview Thursday, “I think this meets the imminence standard.”

Have no illusion: the Left gives not a shit for your Constitutional right to freedom of speech. Nada. It is difficult to imagine a more open-and-shut exercise of Constitutionally-protected freedom of speech. A guy makes a video that satirizes Mohammed in order to express his opinion about the "prophet". People who don't like the video are free to 1) Not watch it 2) Make a video presenting their own view. Freedom of speech, 101.

Now this L.A. Times dhimmi (the author is a former assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) actually tries to make the case that the video mocking Mohammed is not Constitutionally-protected free speech.

:O

There is no debate here. The Islamofellating Left can wrap 'Brandenburg vs. Ohio' in a tight wad and shove it. To advocate giving Islamic murderers a veto over the free speech of Americans is so low that it shocks even me-- and there is little the Left can do that shocks me.

Laws censoring criticism of Islam are always and everywhere a denial of basic human rights, and, in America, government censorship of criticism of Islam is obviously unconstitutional.

The proper response to murder committed by Islamic monsters isn't ordinance, but ordnance.

'Aren't you doing babies a favor by aborting them?'

In a video charmingly titled "Atheist bitchslap", a young woman makes atheist talking points at a discussion about the existence of heaven.

Her points, with my reply:

'If heaven exists, and aborted babies are in heaven, then people who abort babies are doing the babies a favor'.

Her argument is no more rational than the assertion 'suffering exists, and aborted babies don't suffer once they're aborted, so aborting them does them a favor'.

The idiot argument can be applied to any metaphysic, secular or Christian.

Where it fails is revealed by the Principle of Double-Effect, which is a traditional principle of Christian morality. The PDE states that an act that has some bad consequences is ultimately good if and only if it meets all of the following four criteria:

1) The intent is good.
2) The bad is not intended.
3) The good is not a consequence of the bad. That is, the bad is not the means by which the good is accomplished.
4) The magnitude of the good is substantially greater than the magnitude of the bad.

Killing a baby to send him to heaven is an explicit violation of the second and third criteria of the PDE. The baby's death is intended, and the good-- going to heaven-- is a direct consequence of the bad-- killing him.

By ancient Christian morality, aborting a baby, even to send that baby to heaven, is intrinsically evil.

But if the atheist young lady were smart enough to understand the PDE, she wouldn't be an atheist.

"Faith by definition is believing in things without evidence"

 No. That is not the definition of faith.

Faith is not credulity. Faith is fidelity. Faith is our decision to act consistently in accordance with the  conclusions we draw from incomplete evidence. Faith is not belief in things without evidence. Faith is diligence in following truth as we know it. Fidelity to the belief that atheism is true is no less faith than is fidelity to the belief that Christianity is true. Faith is the decision to weigh the logical, empirical, emotional, and intuitive evidence and to act in accordance with our best understanding of truth.

The truth is that we all lack conclusive evidence, in the sense of empirical proof of ultimate metaphysical reality.  We all believe things without conclusive evidence, atheists and scientists no less than theologians. We have no other choice but to rely on an incomplete understanding of the truth. All of us-- atheist and Christian alike, see through a glass darkly.

Faith is the firm decision to follow the evidence where it leads, even though we don't always like where it leads because it thwarts some of our desires.

Fidelity and diligence are what Christians mean by faith.  But Christian faith does entail an aspect of faith not present in atheist faith. For Christians the truth is a Person. We have faith in Someone, not just in something.

We love and obey Christ, because we have come to understand Him in our limited way, and we mean to follow Him.

Faith is fidelity to truth, as we understand it Him. 

JT Eberhard on abortion: "Even human life has varying values..."

Atheist JT Eberhard discusses abortion on Patheos.

Eberhard:

My position is that the destruction of a zygote is little more worrisome that the destruction of a dandelion. Richard Carrier, I think, said it best:

“From a point of view outside of this affair, the killing of a neurologically inactive fetus is no greater a harm than the killing of a mouse, and in fact decidedly less–a mouse is neurologically active, and though it lacks a complex cerebral cortex, it has a brain of suitable complexity to perceive pain.” 

Things that cannot suffer their own loss, though alive, have never really concerned us, whether they are trees, insects, mice, etc. I see no reason to believe a zygote or a fetus is different in any meaningful way up until they reach that point.

Any human being who dies unaware of the fact that they are dying "cannot suffer their own loss". A person in a coma who dies does not suffer their own loss. They suffer nothing at all by dying, because being in a coma is to be, by definition, incapable of suffering. When your wife is sleeping beside you, she would not "suffer her own loss" if you reached over and shot her in the head. She wouldn't know anything, including her own loss. If you drop your newborn off a cliff, your child wouldn't "suffer her own loss".

Eberhard asserts that it is morally licit to kill people who are unaware that they are being killed, whether they are zygotes, or people in coma, or sleeping wives, or unwanted newborns.

He certainly deserves credit for candor.

The reason it is wrong to kill human beings is not because they will suffer if you kill them. The reason that it is wrong to kill human beings is that they are human beings.

Eberhard:

An argument that inevitably comes up in the abortion debate is that a zygote will one day become a child (perhaps the next Beethoven!) if left unchecked. ... do you not realize that every sperm in the male body is a potential human being (it just needs the female egg, itself a potential unique, glorious human being). Yet the prospect of this lost potential does not seem to frighten you into promiscuity... Don’t you worry that that particular sperm might have cured cancer one day, and you just let it slip away?

The abortion debate has nothing to do with "potential" human beings. It has to do with the protection of actual human beings.

Human life begins at conception, and at every stage thereafter-- zygote, embryo, fetus, child, adult-- this individual is a human being.

Each stage of human life has actuality and potentiality. An embryo is actually a human being with three germ layers, etc, and is potentially a fetus, child and adult. A child is actually a human being who is immature, learning to walk and read and write, etc, and is potentially an adult.

An individual is a human being at every stage of life, from conception to death.

Eberhard:

Don’t you worry that that particular sperm might have cured cancer one day, and you just let it slip away?... Why then do we care about a particular set of cells in the female because they share a similar potential?

An unborn child in the womb isn't a potential human being. He or she is an actual human being-- just as actual as his/her mother.

Instead of hating this lost potential, which could never even come close to being realized in reality, why not love the fact that an unwilling mother was not burdened with an expensive and lifelong roll of the dice she didn’t want, with equally small chances of making the next Richard Dawkins or the next Torquemada?

No human being should be killed because he/she is a "burden". The mother's reluctance to carry the child to term is regrettable, and in some situations understandable (e.g. after rape), but that is not a justification for killing a human being.

I can be happy for the women who experience tremendous relief that they were not saddled with the responsibility for a child they did not want or for which they were unprepared. Could you look me in the eye and tell me that you hate the ruining of somebody’s life less than you hate the loss of a some incognizant cells? Would you even want to? That would tell me all I need to know about the compassion of Christianity.

No woman is forced to raise a child. She simply has no right to kill her child.  Adoption is always an option.

The whole idea of post-abortion trauma is mostly fabricated anyway.

What a callous ignorant thing to say. Millions of women (and men) suffer horribly after abortion, often for the rest of their lives.

The average cost of raising a child is almost $227,000. And that’s just the money, this is not including the time you spend raising a child. In this case, for women who do not wish to raise a child, the convenience of getting an abortion is similar to the convenience of not losing all your worldly possessions in a fire several times over. At what point does “Holy fucking shit this is potentially life-destroying!!!” become differentiated from “convenience?” Why would destroying a wad of unthinking cells for the “convenience” of not incurring these costs not be ok? 

And even if it was just a matter of convenience, why wouldn’t it be ok then? Potential? That argument sucks. God? That argument also sucks.

Not even worth a comment. Just depraved.

You do not get to dictate what other people do with their bodies unless you’re protecting a conscious being from harm. Often, it doesn’t even matter that the life form is conscious (this is why you can kill mice).

Killing unconscious human beings, or even insufficiently conscious human beings, is fine with Eberhard. It's like killing mice.

Look, lots of things are alive that we do not give the first damn about. Even human life has varying values (if you doubt this, imagine you had to direct a missile to either a kindergarten or a prison).

That is precisely the difference between the pro-life view and the pro-abortion view on the sanctity of life. In the pro-life view, slaughtering prisoners is every bit as immoral as slaughtering children.

It is immoral to kill human beings. Period.

I admit that a zygote has some worth (I think dandelions do too), but I think that worth is obviously negligible. And if you’re going to suggest that the value of those unthinking, unfeeling cells is worth more than that of the conscious mother who has memories, a life she has built, love, and the ability to suffer the loss of all of it, as well as the ability to feel resentment at being forced to raise an unwanted child, you need to get a new definition of “twisted.”

The mother and the child have exactly the same "value". Both have an inviolable right to life. Both lack the right to kill others.

You know what I hate? I hate that there are some people who think they have enough ownership over someone else’s life to dictate that they bear a child. And I hate the religion that hands them that privilege as though it’s god’s will.

The basis for a lawful society is protection of innocent life. No one has a right to kill.

Eberhard expresses the depravity of the pro-abortion movement with uncommon clarity. 

Mother Theresa and the Psalms

David Van Biema has a lovely reflection on Blessed Mother Theresa.

Excerpt:

[T]he tireless, smiling nun spent the last 39 years of her life in internal agony. Jesus, she wrote, no longer seemed present to her, in prayer or even in the Eucharist. In letter after tormented letter she described an unrelenting spiritual “dryness,” a “torturing pain.” Her smile was “a big cloak” of deception. She admitted at one point to doubting God’s existence. Eventually she apparently became more reconciled to her condition; but as far as we know, she died with it...

But lately I’ve encountered the same starkly binary voice — in a set of 3,000-year-old poems. Written in around 1000 B.C., the 150 prayers in the Book of Psalms helped shape both Judaism and Christianity, are still memorized by some congregations, and live on in liturgy, hymnody and private prayer. Some are pure jubilation — the word “hallelujah” originated in psalms. But just as many — the “psalms of complaint” — sound like ... well, like the private Mother Teresa.

Here are Teresa’s words, edited down from three letters:

Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of Your love — and now become as the most hated one.

I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer. Darkness surrounds me on all sides. If there be no God — there can be no soul — if there is no soul then Jesus — You also are not true — Heaven, what emptiness. I am afraid to write all those terrible things — they must hurt You.

Yet, deep down somewhere in my heart that longing for God keeps breaking through the darkness. Love in me for God grows more real — I find myself telling Jesus unconsciously the most strange tokens of love. Let Him do to me whatever He wants. If my darkness is light to some soul, I am perfectly happy.

And here are key lines from Psalm 22:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but find no rest.

I am a worm, and not human. A company of evildoers encircles me. All who see me mock at me;’Commit your cause to the Lord; let him rescue the one in whom he delights!

Yet since my mother bore me you have been my God.
And I shall live for him. Posterity will serve him;
and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn.

Many deeply spiritual Christians experience a long period of spiritual dryness and agony. Many Christian mystics have written of it. St. John of the Cross called it the Dark Night of the Soul. It is a period of emptying from the soul all that interferes with union with God. It is a cleansing, a preparation to receive Him.

Of course Mother Theresa knew this, but it is small recompense for the agony of losing the sense of presence of God. She is in His presence now, as St. John wrote in his astonishingly beautiful poem:

I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.

The best synopsis of Obamacare

You can't get any more accurate a description of Obamacare than this:

So, let me get this straight. This is a long sentence. We’re going to be gifted with a healthcare plan that we’re forced to purchase and fined if we don’t, which purportedly covers at least 10 million more people without adding a single doctor but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that didn’t read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a President who smokes — [laughter] — same sentence! — with funding administered by a Treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, for which we will be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government that has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese — [laughter] — and finally, financed by a country that’s broke.

:)

Shapiro's and Sternberg's prescient 2005 paper on genome informatics

University of Chicago molecular geneticist James A. Shaprio has a fine essay on the Huff Post Blog on the landmark ENCODE research:

Last week, the ENCODE project (ENCyclopedia Of DnaElements) released a tremendous amount of new information about our genomes. The results of literally hundreds of millions of experiments using the most current "high throughput" technologies provided the data for over a dozen scientific papers in the journals Natureand Genome Research. The conclusions about organization and expression of the human genome were so significant that they were the topic of a front-page story in The New York Times.

The massive collaborative project examined how our genomes are copied into RNA, interact with regulatory proteins, and are compacted in chromatin, which organizes the genome for cellular differentiation. ENCODE examined DNA from dozens of cell types to find out if the results changed in specific ways from one kind of cell to another. Cell type specificity provides a strong indication that the data are biologically relevant.

ENCODE described their most striking finding as follows:

"One of the more remarkable findings described in the consortium's 'entrée' paper is that 80% of the genome contains elements linked to biochemical functions, dispatching the widely held view that the human genome is mostly 'junk DNA'. The authors report that the space between genes is filled with enhancers (regulatory DNA elements), promoters (the sites at which DNA's transcription into RNA is initiated) and numerous previously overlooked regions that encode RNA transcripts that are not translated into proteins but might have regulatory roles. Of note, these results show that many DNA variants previously correlated with certain diseases lie within or very near non-coding functional DNA elements, providing new leads for linking genetic variation and disease."

In other words, the old idea of the genome as a string of genes interspersed with unimportant noncoding DNA is no longer tenable. Many eminent scientists had opined that the noncoding DNA, much of it repeated at many different locations, is nothing more than "junk DNA." ENCODE revealed that most (and probably just about all) of this noncoding and repetitive DNA contained essential regulatory information.

Shapiro goes on to describe a prescient paper that he and Rick von Sternberg published in 2005 about the functionality of supposedly "junk" DNA repetitive segments.

He quotes from the abstract of their paper:

"ABSTRACT: There are clear theoretical reasons and many well-documented examples which show that repetitive DNA is essential for genome function. Generic repeated signals in the DNA are necessary to format expression of unique coding sequence files and to organise additional functions essential for genome replication and accurate transmission to progeny cells. Repetitive DNA sequence elements are also fundamental to the cooperative molecular interactions forming nucleoprotein complexes. Here, we review the surprising abundance of repetitive DNA in many genomes, describe its structural diversity, and discuss dozens of cases where the functional importance of repetitive elements has been studied in molecular detail. In particular, the fact that repeat elements serve either as initiators or boundaries for heterochromatin domains and provide a significant fraction of scaffolding/matrix attachment regions (S/MARs) suggests that the repetitive component of the genome plays a major architectonic role in higher order physical structuring. Employing an information science model, the 'functionalist ' perspective on repetitive DNA leads to new ways of thinking about the systemic organisation of cellular genomes and provides several novel possibilities involving repeat elements in evolutionarily significant genome reorganisation. These ideas may facilitate the interpretation of comparisons between sequenced genomes, where the repetitive DNA component is often greater than the coding sequence component."

Shapiro observes:

Although we could not predict in detail all the ways repeated DNA would serve genome functions, I think our statements stand up well in light of the recent data. Without knowing the specifics, we were correct in asserting that the genome had to be highly formatted to serve as the marvelous information organelle it is in every living cell and organism.

It's worth noting that Shapiro's co-author on the ENCODE-vindicated 2005 paper-- Rick von Sternberg-- is the intelligent design scientist who was hounded out of the Smithsonian Institute because he published, in his capacity as a journal editor, a review article by Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute on the origin of biological information.

In October of 2006 the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform released their investigation of the harassment of Sternberg. The report was titled:

"Intolerance and the Politicization of Science at the Smithsonian: Smithsonian's Top Officials Permit the Demotion and Harassment of Scientist Skeptical of Darwinian Evolution"

Seven years after the harassment and demotion of Sternberg, Shapiro and Sternberg's design-oriented approach to molecular genetics-- in Shapiro's words:

... [t]hinking of the genome informatically and of mobile DNA as a potent force for genome organization...

-- has been elegantly vindicated, and Darwinian junk-science so decisively repudiated, in the ENCODE research.

There's a satisfying irony that a notable example of the prescient science vindicated in the ENCODE research was written by a scientist who the Darwinists tried so fervently to destroy.

Darwinists understood the work Rick Sternberg was doing.

It's not a stretch to suggest that Nature's and two other first-rank journals' unapologetic publication of the 30 articles by 400 leading molecular geneticists that has left the Darwinian junk-DNA hypothesis in shambles is a not-so-subtle repudiation of the Darwinist Iron Curtain behind which so many scientists have worked for so many years.

The message running through all of the ENCODE publications is this: Enough with ideological purity. Let's stick to science, and follow the evidence where it leads.