Not if you follow the logic of Epicurean materialist thinking:
Let’s wind the clock back to the first century BC, when a Roman poet and philosopher named Lucretius wrote the poem On the Nature of Things.” In this poem, Lucretius outlines a philosophy known as Epicureanism in order to demonstrate the world can be explained without reference to a deity. In the Epicurean philosophy, only three things exist: atoms, the void, and the universe. Consequently, everything we see in the physical world can be reduced to atoms bumping into each other.
You may notice that Epicurean philosophy sounds similar to modern day physics. This is not an accident. Through the influence of chemist Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and the Royal Society, the view, directly derived from Epicurean philosophy, that the physical world could be reduced to atoms became the dominant view. However, the moderns made different assumptions about atoms. They did not consider them eternal, for example, as Lucretius did.
Eric Holloway, “Can the “physical world” be wholly physical? Physical at all?” at Mind Matters News (November 19, 2021)
You may notice a problem. It is a very big problem. We now know that the physical world consists of more than atoms bumping into each other. There is energy. There is gravity. There is magnetism. There are electrical fields. None of these physical phenomena can be reduced to atoms bumping into each other.
In fact, atoms do not even bump into each other. Instead, they are repulsed by field effects. Nothing ever physically touches anything else in the physical world.
So, taken seriously, simple Epicurean materialism would show that almost all of nature is non-physical. That’s not really where an Epicurean would want to end up.
Takehome: The Epicurean philosophy of pure physicalism is attractive to many but the logic of it, followed consistently, refutes itself.
You may also wish to read: Why physicalism is failing as the accepted approach to science. The argument that everything in nature can be reduced to physics was killed by the philosophical Zombie, as Prudence Louise explains. Physicalism which depends on a mechanistic view of the universe, was challenged by observer-dependent quantum mechanics. Then the Zombie started walking…”
Challenged and defeated.
As to,
And to back up Eric Holloway’s claim that atoms don’t ever physically touch each other, (and to bring all this closer to home in the ID vs. Darwinism debate), in the following video Dr Rieper states, “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,,,”
In fact, Quantum Entanglement is what gives DNA its helical structure,
Moreover, it is now known that classical information, such as the information encoded on DNA, is a subset of quantum information.
In the following site entitled “Quantum Information Science”, a site where Charles Bennett, (of quantum teleportation and reversible computation fame), himself is on the steering committee,
On that site, they have this illustration showing classical information to be a subset of quantum information
The thing that is so antagonistic for modern day Epicureans/materialists with quantum entanglement in biology, (and elsewhere), is that it takes a ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, cause in order to explain quantum entanglement,
As the following paper entitled “Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory” stated, “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
Moreover, to make the ‘outside spacetime’ problem all that much worse for Darwinian atheists, and 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.
Darwinian atheists, with their reductive materialistic framework, and especially with the falsification of ‘hidden variables’, simply have no beyond space and time cause that they can appeal so as to be able to explain the non-local quantum coherence and/or entanglement that is now found to be ubiquitous within biology.
Whereas on the other hand, Christians readily do have a beyond space and time cause that they can appeal to so as to explain quantum entanglement. As Colossians 1:17 states, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Moreover, ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, quantum entanglement can be used as a ‘quantum information channel’ in order to perform quantum computation,
And quantum computation in biology would go a very long way towards solving Levinthal’s paradox and explaining how it is even possible for proteins to find their final folded shape as quickly as they do,
As well, quantum computation would also go a long way towards explaining DNA search problems, such as DNA repair. A search problem which has been likened to “spotting potholes on every street all over the country and getting them fixed before the next rush hour.”
Besides DNA and Proteins, quantum entanglement, and/or quantum information channels, has now also been found in wide range of biomolecules,
In the following 2015 paper entitled, “Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules” it was found that “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” and the researchers further commented that “finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,,
And this follow up 2018 article stated that “There is no obvious evolutionary reason why a protein should evolve toward a quantum-critical state, and there is no chance at all that the state could occur randomly.,,,”
If Darwinian evolution were a normal science instead of being, basically, an unfalsifiable religion for atheists, this should count as yet another powerful empirical falsification of Darwin’s Theory.
One final note, it is also important to realize that quantum information is conserved. As the following article states, In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.
The implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, cannot be created nor destroyed, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following article, “the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Personally, I consider these recent findings from quantum biology to rival all other scientific discoveries over the past century. Surpassing even the discovery of a beginning of the universe, via Big Bang cosmology, in terms of theological, even personal, significance.
As Jesus once asked his disciples along with a crowd of followers, “Is anything worth more than your soul?”
Of supplemental note to the fact that, “atoms don’t ever physically touch each other”,
And let us not forget about the “physical” laws which are also irreducible to matter.
Bornagain77/4
And another fairly and pleasantly obvious implication is that, if quantum information can be neither created nor destroyed then it must always have existed, hence there was no creation event and no creator.
Hahahahahahaha!
Rethink your logic there Sev
You’re just splitting hairs. You’re assuming it always existed based on immutability, you cannot guarantee that, and for something to be effectively indestructible and seem like it can neither be created or destroyed could solely depend on the physics of that universe and the rules that dictate it, these rules/physics could have been created by a creation event and a creator. You would know no different, other than it’s part of the system that makes us up
Thanks AaronS1978.
Quantum Mechanics is not now, nor has it ever been, your friend Seversky!
Seversky said:
I agree. The idea that space-time was “created” is nonsensical even without the eternal nature of information. I mean, if there is no time, there was no “before” the creation event, and no space in which it could have occurred.
Ultimately, what are so-called “natural laws?” They are models that describe the behavior of various phenomena in our experience. Where does that experience occur? In mind/consciousness.
There’s a difference between “physical” and “material.” We experience a physical, apparently external world in dreams, but few here would assert that dreams constitute our being in an external, material world. Usually, gravity also appears to be governing our dream world. Does gravity actually exist in a dream world? Or is it just a pattern of behavior of phenomena we experience while dreaming?
Extracting a non-materialist language from a materialist conceptual framework is a very difficult process at best. One of the key issues is the difference between “having a physical experience” and “living in an external, material world.” Physical and material are the same thing under materialism/dualism; they are two entirely different things under Idealism/MRT.
BTW, dualists may not realize it, but their perspective has been killed by the same quantum gun as materialism.
BA77: Christians readily do have a beyond space and time cause that they can appeal to so as to explain quantum entanglement.
So do Hindus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman
I would imagine Muslims and just about any other religionist would agree.
Someone tell me what it means for something to exist “beyond space and time.” Until you can do that, you might as well be saying that a square circle exists.
Ram states, “So do Hindus,,, I would imagine Muslims and just about any other religionist would agree.” (that they have a beyond space and time cause that they can appeal to).
But alas, out of all the religions of the world, only Christianity can lay claim to founding modern science itself.
Moreover, presupposing a rational universe, (which is necessary to even ‘do science’ in the first place), necessarily presupposes that the universe must also have some teleological purpose behind, and for, its existence in the first place. And Christianity can lay claim to providing the correct teleological purpose for the universe in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead, via evidence gleaned from the Shroud of Turin, provides a coherent solution for the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”,
Verse
If everything must necessarily exist in space & time, then space & time itself must exist in space & time. If that is correct, then that would be another space & time, so that space & time A exists in space & time B. If so, then space & time B must exist in space & time C.
…. And so on.
BA77,
. It did not spring out of a single mind and religion. Modern science has many contributors to thank for its existence, including atheists, deists, Jews, Christians, Muslims and Greeks and was a progressive development over many centuries with a lot of people standing on the shoulders of those who had gone before.
–Ram
The Great Courses has several courses on the history of science
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/history-of-science-antiquity-to-1700
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/history-of-science-1700-1900
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/science-in-the-20th-century-a-social-intellectual-survey
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/great-scientific-ideas-that-changed-the-world
144 lectures in all.
That’s a lot of it. Most of it in a few places in the world.
Well Ram, that is the usual reply from people who would like to distance modern science from its Christian roots, but the fact remains that “modern science—not an occasional flash of insight here and there, but a systematic, programmatic, ongoing way of studying and controlling the world—arose only once in history, and only in one place: medieval Europe, once known as “Christendom,” where that Biblical worldview reigned supreme. That is no accident. Science could not have arisen without that worldview.”
Stephen Meyer (who has a PhD in the Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University, i.e. Isaac Newton’s alma mater), in his recent book, “Return of the God hypothesis (2021)”, lists the three necessary Christian presuppositions that lay at the founding of modern science in Medieval Christian Europe as such.
Verse:
Of further note, and right on time I might add,
On this new ID the Future podcast, Stephen Meyer sits down with talk show host and bestselling novelist Andrew Klavan to discuss Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis. In this fast-paced conversation the pair touch on the Judeo-Christian roots of science, how fine tuning in physics and cosmology point to intelligent design, etc.. etc..
https://idthefuture.com/1530/