At Mind Matters News: Can higher dimensions help us understand biblical miracles?

_{Denyse O'Leary

December 19, 2021

Intelligent Design, Mathematics}

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We assume there are only three spatial dimensions because those are the ones we sense. Baylor computer engineering prof Robert J. Marks asks, What if there are four?:

I teach a graduate course entitled Multidimensional Signal Processing. The mathematical treatment of four, five or even an infinite number of dimensions is considered. Visualizing higher dimensions can be aided by understanding what happens in three or fewer dimensions. For example, I teach students how to visualize and play four dimensional tic-tac-toe by interpreting the game as a series of games in three dimensions…
Some Biblical miracles can be explained if there were four spatial dimensions. When the Flatlander was asked to point in the direction of UP, the best he could do was point north. You and I seem similarly constrained. When we are asked to point to a heaven in the fourth dimension, the best we can do is point up to the sky…
Extending this 2D to 3D example to 4D leads to the conclusion that if there were access to the fourth dimension, links of three dimensional chains can be separated without bending or cutting. Learning from the 2D chain, the 3D chain simply needs to be taken to the fourth dimension and separated. No saw or chain cutter is needed.
Such an event is documented in the Bible when the apostle Peter was imprisoned and chained by King Herod:
“ACTS 12: 6b-7. Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and guards in front of the door were watching over the prison. And behold, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared and a light shone in the cell; and he struck Peter’s side and woke him up, saying, “Get up quickly.” And his chains fell off his hands.”
Was access to the fourth or higher dimension used in this miracle? Possibly. A fourth dimension explanation is certainly compelling.
Robert J. Marks, “Can higher dimensions help us understand biblical miracles? ” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Some Biblical miracles are better understood if we assume four spatial dimensions. The short novel Flatland (1884) helps us understand.

Comments

There are other Biblical examples of this. For example, see John 20:19 and 26, where Jesus appears in bodily form inside a locked room. A 4th spatial dimension, accessible only through spiritual action, could account for this.Fasteddious_{December 22, 2021
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Banging the table, "Angels and demons do not exist!", shouts the man who himself does not exist. :)
The Brain: The Mystery of Consciousness - Monday, Jan. 29, 2007 Part II THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL Another startling conclusion from the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Steven Pinker - Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University http://www.academia.edu/2794859/The_Brain_The_Mystery_of_Consciousness "There is no self in, around, or as part of anyone’s body. There can’t be. So there really isn’t any enduring self that ever could wake up morning after morning worrying about why it should bother getting out of bed. The self is just another illusion, like the illusion that thought is about stuff or that we carry around plans and purposes that give meaning to what our body does. Every morning’s introspectively fantasized self is a new one, remarkably similar to the one that consciousness ceased fantasizing when we fell sleep sometime the night before. Whatever purpose yesterday’s self thought it contrived to set the alarm last night, today’s newly fictionalized self is not identical to yesterday’s. It’s on its own, having to deal with the whole problem of why to bother getting out of bed all over again.,,, - Alex Rosenberg - Professor of Philosophy Duke University - The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, ch.10 The Confidence of Jerry Coyne – Ross Douthat – January 6, 2014 Excerpt: But then halfway through this peroration, we have as an aside the confession (by Coyne) that yes, okay, it’s quite possible given materialist premises that “our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.” At which point the entire edifice suddenly looks terribly wobbly — because who, exactly, is doing all of this forging and shaping and purpose-creating if Jerry Coyne, as I understand him (and I assume he understands himself) quite possibly does not actually exist at all? The theme of his argument is the crucial importance of human agency under eliminative materialism, but if under materialist premises the actual agent is quite possibly a fiction, then who exactly is this I who “reads” and “learns” and “teaches,” and why in the universe’s name should my illusory self believe Coyne’s bold proclamation that his illusory self’s purposes are somehow “real” and worthy of devotion and pursuit? (Let alone that they’re morally significant: But more on that below.) Prometheus cannot be at once unbound and unreal; the human will cannot be simultaneously triumphant and imaginary. https://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/the-confidence-of-jerry-coyne/?mcubz=3 What Does It Mean to Say That Science & Religion Conflict? - M. Anthony Mills - April 16, 2018 Excerpt: Barr rightly observes that scientific atheists often unwittingly assume not just metaphysical naturalism but an even more controversial philosophical position: reductive materialism, which says all that exists is or is reducible to the material constituents postulated by our most fundamental physical theories. As Barr points out, this implies not only that God does not exist — because God is not material — but that you do not exist. For you are not a material constituent postulated by any of our most fundamental physical theories; at best, you are an aggregate of those constituents, arranged in a particular way. Not just you, but tables, chairs, countries, countrymen, symphonies, jokes, legal contracts, moral judgments, and acts of courage or cowardice — all of these must be fully explicable in terms of those more fundamental, material constituents. https://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2018/04/16/what_does_it_mean_to_say_that_science_and_religion_conflict.html
bornagain77_{December 20, 2021
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DI and ID folks spend inordinate amounts of time and mirth trashing anything Darwin, materialist and all else that rejects the ID canon, yet, in all seriousness, come up with screwball ideas like the one presented in the OP. So, miracles happen in another dimension? Is that the same dimension where angels and devils hang out? I swear, you can't make this stuff up....chuckdarwin_{December 20, 2021
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Why would someone feel the need to explain miracles with science? I would think only a materialist would want to do that.Pater Kimbridge_{December 20, 2021
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And while most people, (who are at least semi-literate in science), are aware of the fact that all of our best theories in science are all based on 'higher dimensional' mathematics, (and are not based on 3-D Euclidean mathematics as Newton's theory was), most people are unaware of the fact that life itself is based on 'higher dimensional' mathematics, and/or principles, and that life is not based on 3-D Euclidean mathematics, and/or principles, as is presupposed within Darwinian materialism. As Denyse O'Leary quotes, “Although living things occupy a three-dimensional space, their internal physiology and anatomy operate as if they were four-dimensional. Quarter-power scaling laws are perhaps as universal and as uniquely biological as the biochemical pathways of metabolism, the structure and function of the genetic code and the process of natural selection." and ""The conclusion here is inescapable, that the driving force for these invariant scaling laws cannot have been natural selection."
Post-Darwinist - Denyse O'Leary - Dec. 2010 Excerpt: They quote West et al. (1999), What Darwin Got Wrong – pg 79 “Although living things occupy a three-dimensional space, their internal physiology and anatomy operate as if they were four-dimensional. Quarter-power scaling laws are perhaps as universal and as uniquely biological as the biochemical pathways of metabolism, the structure and function of the genetic code and the process of natural selection." They comment, "In the words of these authors, natural selection has exploited variations on this fractal theme to produce the incredible variety of biological form and function', but there were severe geometric and physical constraints on metabolic processes." "The conclusion here is inescapable, that the driving force for these invariant scaling laws cannot have been natural selection. It's inconceivable that so many different organisms, spanning different kingdoms and phyla, may have blindly 'tried' all sorts of power laws and that only those that have by chance 'discovered' the one-quarter power law reproduced and thrived." Quotations from Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 78-79. http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-much-of-body-plans-of-organisms-can.html#links
The reason why these universal and as uniquely biological ’4-Dimensional’ quarter power scaling laws are impossible for Darwinian evolution to explain is that Natural Selection operates at the 3-Dimensional level of the organism and the ’4-Dimensional’ quarter power scaling laws are simply ‘invisible’ to natural selection. The reason why 4-Dimensional things are, for all practical purposes, completely invisible to a 3-Dimensional selection process is best demonstrated by the ‘thought experiment’ of ‘flatland’:
Dr Quantum - Flatland - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z-BmUnCxtM
Moreover, although Darwinian materialists deny that there is any transcendent, i.e. 'non-material', component to humans, (i.e. Darwinists deny that we have immaterial minds and/or souls), never-the-less transcendent, and ‘conserved’, (cannot be created or destroyed), ‘non-local’, (beyond space-time matter-energy), quantum entanglement/information, which is not reducible to matter-energy space-time, is now found in our material bodies on a massive scale (in every DNA and protein molecule).
"What happens is this classical information (of DNA) is embedded, sandwiched, into the quantum information (of DNA). And most likely this classical information is never accessed because it is inside all the quantum information. You can only access the quantum information or the electron clouds and the protons. So mathematically you can describe that as a quantum/classical state." Elisabeth Rieper – Classical and Quantum Information in DNA – video (Longitudinal Quantum Information resides along the entire length of DNA discussed at the 19:30 minute mark; at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper remarks that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it) https://youtu.be/2nqHOnVTxJE?t=1176 Darwinian Materialism vs. Quantum Biology – Part II - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSig2CsjKbg
Moreover, as the following study found, the greater the number of particles in a quantum hypergraph state, (which is exactly the type of quantum coherence that we have with protein and DNA molecules), the more strongly it violates local realism, with the strength increasing exponentially with the number of particles.
Physicists find extreme violation of local realism in quantum hypergraph states - Lisa Zyga - March 4, 2016 Excerpt: Many quantum technologies rely on quantum states that violate local realism, which means that they either violate locality (such as when entangled particles influence each other from far away) or realism (the assumption that quantum states have well-defined properties, independent of measurement), or possibly both. Violation of local realism is one of the many counterintuitive, yet experimentally supported, characteristics of the quantum world. Determining whether or not multiparticle quantum states violate local realism can be challenging. Now in a new paper, physicists have shown that a large family of multiparticle quantum states called hypergraph states violates local realism in many ways. The results suggest that these states may serve as useful resources for quantum technologies, such as quantum computers and detecting gravitational waves.,,, The physicists also showed that the greater the number of particles in a quantum hypergraph state, the more strongly it violates local realism, with the strength increasing exponentially with the number of particles. In addition, even if a quantum hypergraph state loses one of its particles, it continues to violate local realism. This robustness to particle loss is in stark contrast to other types of quantum states, which no longer violate local realism if they lose a particle. This property is particularly appealing for applications, since it might allow for more noise in experiments. http://phys.org/news/2016-03-physicists-extreme-violation-local-realism.html
Einstein once, infamously, derided quantum entanglement as being 'spooky action at a distance'. So since life 'exponentially' violates local realism, (via the fact that multiple particles are all quantumly entangled with each other in living organisms), then I guess that makes life 'exponentially spooky' for the committed Darwinian materialist. :)
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your (materialistic 3-D) philosophy.” – Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio (paraphrased) Mark 8:37 Is anything worth more than your soul?
bornagain77_{December 20, 2021
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To emphasize, all of our most precisely tested, and accurate, theories in science, (i.e. Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity and General Relativity), are all based upon higher dimensional mathematics, (not based on 3-Dimensional Euclidean mathematics like Newton's theory was based).
Four-dimensional space – with 4-D animation: Excerpt: The idea of adding a fourth dimension began with Joseph-Louis Lagrange in the mid 1700s and culminated in a precise formalization of the concept in 1854 by Bernhard Riemann.,,, Higher dimensional spaces have since become one of the foundations for formally expressing modern mathematics and physics. Large parts of these topics could not exist in their current forms without the use of such spaces.,,, Einstein’s concept of spacetime uses such a 4D space, though it has a Minkowski structure that is a bit more complicated than Euclidean 4D space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-dimensional_space Why do you need imaginary numbers (the square root of negative one) to describe Quantum Mechanics? “Quantum theory needs existence of an x such that x^2= -1. The reason for this is that orthogonal function spaces, of dimension greater than 2, cannot exist otherwise. In fact the only place where i (the square root of negative one) is needed is in the wave packet prior to measurement. Even the Canonical Commutation Relation doesn't need it. And nor do the eigenvalue equations. In those, any general scalar will do. But in the wave packet, you need an i.” - Steve Faulkner - Philosophy of Science, Logic, Epistemology https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_do_you_need_imaginary_numbers_to_describe_Quantum_Mechanics2 The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem – Mark Steiner – (page 44) Excerpt: Let us now recapitulate: beginning with the concept of a Hilbert space, a certain kind of (usually infinite-dimensional) vector space, and the formal requirement that a unit vector on the space represents all possible information can be gleaned. First, the space cannot be a real vector space; the usual formalism is, therefore, based on a complex Hilbert space. With this formalism the Heisenberg uncertainty principle follows directly. So does the quantization of angular momentum, including the so called “space quantization”. So does the prediction that “electron spin” cannot be due to spatial rotation. And so do the selection rules for the spectrum of hydrogen, based on the “nonphysical” concept of parity. The role of Hilbert spaces in quantum mechanics, then, is much more profound than the descriptive role of a single concept. An entire formalism-the Hilbert space formalism-is matched with nature. Information about nature is being “read off” the details of the formalism. (Imagine reading off details about elementary particles from the rules of chess-castling. en passant-a la Lewis Carro;; in Through the Looking Glass.) No physicist today understands why this is possible.. https://books.google.com/books?id=GKBwKCma1HsC&pg=PA44
In fact, Einstein's great breakthrough into general relativity was only made possible by the previous work of Christian mathematicians Gauss & Riemann in laying the foundation for 'higher dimensional' mathematics, and also by the work Hermann Minkowski, (one of the math professors of a young Einstein), in applying Riemann's higher dimensional mathematics to Special Relativity.
The Mathematics Of Higher Dimensionality - Gauss & Riemann - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxy3JhPRlV0 Beyond the Surface of Einstein’s Relativity Lay a Chimerical Geometry BY VASUDEVAN MUKUNTH - 10/09/2015 Excerpt: let’s skip forward to July 1912, when Einstein had just returned from Prague to Zurich. The first thing he did was to speak to his friend Marcel Grossmann, who was also the head of the maths department at the Zurich Polytechnic: “Grossmann, you’ve got to help me or I will go crazy” (Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson, p. 193).,,, The problem was that Einstein didn’t know the mathematical laws that described the properties of the gravitational field he was trying to uncover. When working on his special theory of relativity, he hadn’t bothered with the mathematical rules of the system – only their physical properties and behaviour. It was after he’d published his results that his former teacher, Hermann Minkowski, described the geometry of special relativity’s space-time, since called Minkowski space-time. But with general relativity, Einstein felt he needed to explore the maths himself as he was starting to realise it would help him make discoveries that lay beyond the reach of his famed intuition.,,, Grossmann referred Einstein to the work of Riemann,,, Einstein had only popularised what Riemann had found in 1854.,,, Einstein’s theories were contested by various mathematicians who saw in his conception of relativity the imprint of their discoveries in geometry – in turn drawn from the findings of Riemann and his teacher, Gauss.,,, https://thewire.in/science/beyond-the-surface-of-einsteins-relativity-lay-a-chimerical-geometry Spacetime Excerpt: In 1908, Hermann Minkowski—once one of the math professors of a young Einstein in Zurich—presented a geometric interpretation of special relativity that fused time and the three spatial dimensions of space into a single four-dimensional continuum now known as Minkowski space. A key feature of this interpretation is the definition of a spacetime interval that combines distance and time. Although measurements of distance and time between events differ for measurements made in different reference frames, the spacetime interval is independent of the inertial frame of reference in which they are recorded. Minkowski's geometric interpretation of relativity was to prove vital to Einstein's development of his 1915 general theory of relativity, wherein he showed that spacetime becomes curved in the presence of mass or energy.,,, Einstein, for his part, was initially dismissive of Minkowski's geometric interpretation of special relativity, regarding it as überflüssige Gelehrsamkeit (superfluous learnedness). However, in order to complete his search for general relativity that started in 1907, the geometric interpretation of relativity proved to be vital, and in 1916, Einstein fully acknowledged his indebtedness to Minkowski, whose interpretation greatly facilitated the transition to general relativity.[10]:151–152 Since there are other types of spacetime, such as the curved spacetime of general relativity, the spacetime of special relativity is today known as Minkowski spacetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime
And as I have previously noted earlier this month, although Einstein himself may not have personally believed in life after death, (nor in a personal God), but Special Relativity itself contradicts Einstein and offers stunning confirmation that Near Death Testimonies are accurate ‘physical’ descriptions of what happens after death, i.e. going to a ‘higher timeless/eternal dimension’, i.e. heavenly dimension, that exists above this temporal realm.
December 2021 - Thus in conclusion, although Einstein himself may not have personally believed in life after death, (nor in a personal God), but Special Relativity itself contradicts Einstein and offers stunning confirmation that Near Death Testimonies are accurate ‘physical’ descriptions of what happens after death, i.e. going to a ‘higher timeless/eternal dimension’, i.e. heavenly dimension, that exists above this temporal realm. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/at-mind-matters-news-einstein-believed-in-spinozas-god-who-is-that-god/#comment-741908
bornagain77_{December 20, 2021
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Well, this particular miracle doesn't require the supernatural. Angel just means messenger. A human angel, perhaps a disgruntled soldier, freed Peter and ran away with him.polistra_{December 19, 2021
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