Christian Scientific Society on the strangeness of quantum mechanics was its best meeting ever?

What has always struck me, for as long as I've been aware of the verbal descriptions of QM, accessible to laymen, as being the biggest game-changer imaginable, is that QM has introduced paradoxes, front and centre. It, at least, ought to have been the death of the scientism and materialism blinding the metaphysic of the atheist 'scientists'. It cries Mystery from the roof-tops at the very foundation of our material world - leaving aside the immaterial, spiritual and psychological therein. As Christians, we cherish them in physics, since we know that physicists once accepting them, use them as spring-boards, from which to sally further into the mysteries between here and the infinite and eternal. Axel

as to this from post 1:

we should avoid strong claims that QM proves that people have a soul, or that God can do miracles, etc.

So the belief that we have souls and minds and the belief that God can do miracles is to be considered as outlandish as the claim that people can bend spoons and that there are an infinite number of copies of us in parallel universes? Might I suggest the belief that we are soulless/mindless zombies and the belief that God does not do miracles is a FAR MORE outlandish claim than the claim the He does do miracles and that we do have souls and minds???? A God who does not do miracles is no God at all and is, in reality, a figment of man's imagination. ,,, Effectively a dead God. Might I further suggest that the only reason someone would want to discount the reality of THE living God Who created everything that exists and Who does indeed do miracles in our lives when He so well sees fit, and to even discount the reality of our own souls and minds, (which is the most sure thing we can possibly know about reality!), is that they do not want to be accountable to God? Regardless of how some people may want Quantum Mechanics to behave so as to confirm their preconceived desire that they are soulless/mindless zombies who are not accountable to the living God Who performs miracles as He so well sees fit, Quantum Mechanics simply refuses to conform to their preconceived desires. Quantum mechanics, in fact, offers VERY strong empirical evidence for both the fact that God sustains this universe in its continual existence and for the fact that we have souls and/or minds that are not reducible to temporal materialistic explanations. A few notes to that effect:

Double Slit, Quantum-Electrodynamics, and Christian Theism - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK9kGpIxMRM Albert Einstein vs. Quantum Mechanics and His Own Mind - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxFFtZ301j4 Darwinian Materialism vs Quantum Biology - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHdD2Am1g5Y Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity, General Relativity and Christianity - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4QDy1Soolo

Verse and Music

1 Thessalonians 1:9 ,,, They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, Miracle By Unspoken https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yrV9kRr888

bornagain77

Very interesting link, touching on subjects we've been discussing. Some quotes:

Erica Carlson gave a great introduction to the strangeness of QM. She argued strongly against the idea that our minds control reality, as some "new age" writers have argued. Rather, our minds at most control the set of questions that measurement may give answers to.

Philosopher Jeffrey Koperski presented a critique of what could be called "miracles of the gaps," a position argued by some philosophers of science. In this view, the universe operates deterministically except at the points of random collapse in measurements, when God may intervene to bring about unlikely events. The motivation of this position seems to be a view that changing the laws of nature, or circumventing them, would be as unthinkable for God as changing the laws of morality.

Jeffrey also informed us that the many-worlds view of QM, which posits an infinite superposition of parallel universes, is making a comeback in the philosophy world. This past week I met a young scientist at a physics meeting who indeed holds to this view, which is now two I have met in the past few years, two more than in the three decades previously.

Thanks to all for praying, especially for Bob Griffiths' health. His health was good, and he presented an argument against "pilot wave" theory, which also seems to be gaining popularity these days. He also argued for not building major religious stories such as new-agey mind-over-matter interpretations of QM, when scientists disagree on these fundamental questions, and for keeping a Christian attitude of humility and charity.

In my talk, I presented an overview of different interpretations of QM and argued for the possibility of a modified Copenhagen view in which any macroscopic detector, not just human consciousness, may collapse the wave function. However, in Q&A I freely admitted that we don't know how to derive such a result from the quantum mechanical theory we have now. This modified view is in many ways the intuition of many scientists in the field, but has never been proven.

I made a comment about the above point recently, by the way.

In the panel discussion, we found that we had five different views among the five speakers! However, we all agreed that the tendency of people to run with spacey views such as mind-over-matter or many-worlds is to be avoided. For the same reason, we should avoid strong claims that QM proves that people have a soul, or that God can do miracles, etc.

jdk