[Neo]

Originally Posted by Professor S

This is where you lose me in your arguments. You are so convinced that science holds tha answers to everything you put all your faith in it, but cannot even imagine putting faith into God. Its just mindboggling that as a scientist you would completely disregard one thoery out of hand because you don't understand it.

Strangely enough I do consider God to be an option, though I know no one would ever be able to tell that from what I said. You may not believe me when I say this but I really hope that you are right and there is a God of some kind. There are in fact a few quantum physical theories floating around which support the existence of a God or universal consciousness of some kind. They’re not completely fleshed out and aren’t backed yet by hard math, but the potential is there. See The Spiritual Universe by Fred Alan Wolf. Some reviewers feel the book is too technical, but I think it provides something religion is lacking in that it tries to provide a quantum physical basis for the soul and for the existence of God. I’m not saying I think he has everything completely figured out but it does demonstrate what a powerful tool physics can be.


This is the only way I know how to believe in God. I can’t just make myself do it out of faith. Every time I try I get these nagging doubts in the back of my mind like “that’s not evidence of design, that’s an example of a well-adapted DNA pattern” or “that’s not God I’m feeling, it’s a chemical reaction within my body.” Even if an angel materialized in front of me I would probably search around for a holographic projector. If there isn't one then I would notice that the angel is obviously emitting photons of light which my brain is interpreting as electrical signals, so the angel must be composed of electrons which generate the photons therefore it is physical in origin. You see what I mean?

The fact you want empirical evidence shows that you don't enderstand the philisophical basics religion.

Quite possible. I took a philosophy of religion course once but it was really a history class. I don't know how God would react to me asking for quantifiable evidence of existence. Would he be glad I am inquisitive, or would he be sad that I can't just have faith in him?

As for the example you wanted, you gave it to me. Electrons jump levels when according to the laws of science they can only exist on a level. So if they can only exist on a level, how do they move levels without ceasing to exist? Is there a finite time or space they travel through?

The honest answer is I don't know. My personal belief is that it is related to holographic models of existence based on new research which shows that the information contained within a black hole is proportional to its surface are, not its volume. That's a fancy way of saying the information of the 3D object (black hole) is contained on a 2D surface (event horizon), just like a hologram. Now holographic plates have the curious property that if you smash them into tiny bits, you can shine a laser though any fragment and reproduce the whole image. In other words the information of the whole object is contained within every point on the plate. We would never know that from looking at the hologram. To us it looks as though the hologram has height, width, and length, when in reality that's just an illusion. There are a few physicists who think our universe might operate in a similar fashion. So an electron doesn't really jump from level to level over a physical distance since on the holographic plate of reality the electron hasn't really moved at all.

Same would be true for the spooky "action at a distance" scenario where two particles created together and sent off in opposite directions always seem to know what each other is doing. If one particle is flipped to spin-up, then the other particle immediately becomes spin-down, though no information has passed between them (as this would violate relativity). This seems impossible unless you think of the world as a giant hologram. While to us it appears as though the particles are separated by a great distance, on a 2D holographic surface they're actually right on top of each other.

There are theories and conjecture as to how this happens, but in the end there is no proof. You accept that there is a scientific explanation on faith.

I suppose that's true depending on your definition of faith. I have faith an explanation will be found since physics has provided me with so many good explanations for other phenomena.

You accept that we will find the link between bacteria and single celled organisms on faith.

Biology was never my forte so I really can't comment on that. It would seem more logical to me that a physical rather than divine mechanism will eventually be found based on the past successes of evolutionary biology, but I am rather ignorant of how those things develop.

And even if science can discover more and more information, does that mean that God dosn't exist?

Not at all. I would say that more we learn about the world the less we need to fall back on the "well God made it that way" explanation but no it certainly doesn't prove God doesn't exist.

How can you simply eliminate God out of hand? Its rediculous.

As a scientist you're right I can't eliminate God. I can build a case for or against him, but I can never fully eliminate anything.

http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=18923

If this isn't close to being religious faith in something, I have no idea what is. One theory is that electrons cease to exist on one level and then just exist on another. If this is true, I see no better "proof" of the existence of God than that.

Yeah that's probably more in line with the Copenhagen interpretation, which is really less of an interpretation and more of a "don't ask don't tell" policy. Physicists who subscribe to Copenhagen (and it is a majority of them) view these events purely in terms of statistical mathematics and say that it's meaningless to ask how for example a particle can be in two places at once. I think what happens is that students of physics study the philosophical implications until they get headaches at which time they simply stop thinking about as they're not able to get anywhere, save for the ones I mentioned doing the black hole research. There are tons of books on the metaphysical interpretations of quantum physics but that topic is beyond the scope of this post. In the world of quantum physics probability is treated as a real "thing" which can be described by equations. It really is quite bizarre but extremely interesting at the same time.