I attended a lecture by noted theologian Alvin Plantinga, about whether miracles are incompatible with science. Most of it was “science doesn’t say it’s impossible, so there’s still a chance, right?”-type arguments. However, later on, his main explanation for why it wasn’t impossible that God could intervene from outside a closed system and still not violate our laws of physics was that maybe God works through wavefunction collapse. Maybe God creates miracles by causing the right wavefunction collapses, resulting in, say, Jesus walking on water, rising from the dead, unscrambling eggs, etc.
Recalling this article, I wrote down and asked this question when the time came:
“The Many-Worlds Interpretation is currently [I said “currently” because he was complaining earlier about other philosophers misrepresenting modern science] one of the leading interpretations of quantum mechanics. The universe splits off at quantum events, but is still deterministic, and only appears probabilistic from the perspective of any given branch. Every one of the other branches still exists, including ones where Jesus doesn’t come back. If true, how does this affect your argument?”
I wanted to see if he would accept a falsifiable version of his belief. Unfortunately, he said something like “Oh, I don’t like that theory, I don’t know how it would work with a million versions of me out there” and ignored the “if” part of the question. (I would have liked to point this out, but the guy before me had abused his mic privileges so I had to give it back.)
(Also, is that a fair layman’s representation of many-worlds? I’m normally very wary of using any sort of quantum physics-based reasoning as a non-quantum physicist, but, well, he started it.)
I attended a lecture by noted theologian Alvin Plantinga, about whether miracles are incompatible with science. Most of it was “science doesn’t say it’s impossible, so there’s still a chance, right?”-type arguments. However, later on, his main explanation for why it wasn’t impossible that God could intervene from outside a closed system and still not violate our laws of physics was that maybe God works through wavefunction collapse. Maybe God creates miracles by causing the right wavefunction collapses, resulting in, say, Jesus walking on water, rising from the dead, unscrambling eggs, etc.
Recalling this article, I wrote down and asked this question when the time came:
I wanted to see if he would accept a falsifiable version of his belief. Unfortunately, he said something like “Oh, I don’t like that theory, I don’t know how it would work with a million versions of me out there” and ignored the “if” part of the question. (I would have liked to point this out, but the guy before me had abused his mic privileges so I had to give it back.)
(Also, is that a fair layman’s representation of many-worlds? I’m normally very wary of using any sort of quantum physics-based reasoning as a non-quantum physicist, but, well, he started it.)