Quantum Mechanics is an innovative physics field, the math of which is certainly beyond my expertise, and that has merit as a study of how sub-atomic particles behave and interact. But despite physicists’ insistence, specifically those dedicated to evolutionary processes, it concerns operational sciences rather than origins. And what we run into is the lesson told many years ago by Socrates, that the smartest of us often think themselves wisest because of expertise in one subject they deem most important. This is born out in the poor philosophical conclusions of Hawking, and others, in my opinion, and since they were wise in one area, and share a world-view with main stream scientists, their perceived intelligence and respected reputations prevented critical examination of their philosophical conclusions.
So much so that Hawking gets a pass when he says “because there is a law like gravity, the universe will create itself from nothing.” When he makes the truth claim that “free will is an illusion” without realizing he is admitting we have no reason to trust his own truth claims, including that one!
Or how no one bats an eye when Biologist, Richard Dawkins has to remind us to ignore the appearance of design during his never-ending campaign against a designer: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”
Without evidence of any kind, Dawkins appeals to faith-based occurrences beyond nature while in the same book, (God Delusion) smugly attacking Christians for doing the same: “There are probably ‘superhuman’ alien civilizations elsewhere in the universe.” “There may well be a plethora of universes.”
He is not rebuked for obvious circular reasoning: “We exist here on Earth. Therefore Earth must be the kind of planet that is capable of generating and supporting us.” Brilliant. (insert eye-roll emoji.)
According to Socrates (and Plato) it is okay to be ignorant, because you can remedy it by learning. What is a dangerous enemy of knowledge is being caught in the illusion of knowledge while in fact being ignorant, because of pride.
In the age of google warriors, and misinformation, it is often those who are smart at one subject who have the strongest opinions about many others, especially that which they don’t know much about. (The fact that atheists and scientists would levy this same charge at me is not lost on me. I am a student of many things, but do certainly attempt to hang my world-view on an authority higher than my own whenever possible. That being said, I would stipulate that I am not immune to that criticism either).
Since Max Planck’s Nobel prize in 1919, Quantum Mechanics has been a tangent from classical physics (Newton) and was furthered by guys like Heisenberg, Einstein, and Bohr. The math supports the theories, and it solved problems that classical physics could not.
But here is where the practicality and the problems lie. When you examine the functions, the math shows that wave functions exist as a superposition of all possible states. In this way, we can describe the characteristics of a particle. This makes all positions true simultaneously, and each position inevitable. Extrapolated to the absurd, this acceptance that all possibilities are true is one of the reasons for atheist/evolutionary appeals to a multi-verse, yet another unprovable fudge factor needed to explain the Big Bang Model in naturalistic terms, due to how impossibly finely tuned our universe is. (Stephen Hawking tinkered with this idea late in his life).
It is already well documented in many works the dedication modern scientists have to materialism, evolution, and the anathema of Intelligent Design within the halls of academia; accept anything to prevent a “divine foot in the door”, even that which is absurd, by their own admission. This leads of course to faith in the impossible, the unprovable, the unobservable, and faith in these things, they persist, is supported by QM, because all possibilities exist at once.
In this New Age, or post-modern age, this leads to a morally relativistic view of QM, that reality should be taken as subjective, or based on the observer. Both Einstein and Schrödinger didn’t like the mysticism known as “the observer collapses the wave function,” and even the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment, a now famous pop-culture reference from the Big Bang Theory show, was actually a purposeful reduction to the absurd, as Schrödinger relied more on the law of non-contradiction, rather than relativism.
The basic, true laws of nature and logic, like causality, identity, non-contradiction, were not abandoned by the fathers of QM theorists, but has been popularized today as more and more appeals to a Godless universe meet headlong with direct observable facts that keep proving the Big Bang theory is poor science. Hence the need for faith based beliefs and fudge factors, such as dark matter, dark energy, the Inflaton, the multiverse, etc. You will notice, all of these fudge factors, the physicist and cosmologist must have “faith” in to keep hoping that the universe is Godless. But they do not attribute it to faith, as they lean on the crutch of relativity that QM provides for them. Since it is their specialized, elite field they hold in high esteem above the average plebian’s paltry understanding, they fall into the trap of valuing their elegant math-based conclusions over obvious empirical observations we see and understand every day. They surmise in their own minds every possibility is inevitable without God, as long as they don’t have to observe those conclusions today in real time. This appeal to deep time, or enough time, is the magic elixir poured into each opinion to add credence, and is done so with impunity, since this pillar of evolution is automatically ensconced in the public’s mind as “fact.” In this manner, they can criticize the Christian as ignorant, stupid, or insane (Richard Dawkins) while employing the same tactics themselves, faith being the evidence of things not seen (Heb 11:1).
When we speak in laymen’s terms, it boils down to very smart scientists and mathematicians being so hyper focused on the minutia of QM, that they miss the forest for the trees. This is of course coupled with utter dedication to the presupposition that inorganic evolution is true, as it must be if we are to believe that directionless, purposeless, unthinking inorganic material somehow create intelligent order. We are once again faced with this persistent axiom, Romans 1:22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. Again, this is simply because all possibilities exist simultaneously, including one where there is perfect order.
Doctor of Physical Chemistry, Jonathan Sarfati, a respecter of Newton, science, and a creationist, states it this way: “It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory.”
Bottom line, QM works, has strong support, and is not a threat to creationism. In fact, some studies highlight its usefulness in nature, (sense of smell, photosynthesis, bird navigation). But with presuppositions on both sides, what we see is the confusing of QM with interpretations of QM. Luckily we have observable reality to rely on, and in that reality, we know how nature reacts unmanipulated by intelligence, and no amount of insistence that explosions create perfect order naturally will change that.
God uses natural causes, to be sure, but can they explain everything? A materialist atheist, and a Christian both believe in natural causes. Of course we can find causality through natural means. But what about things that are forensic in nature, meaning, those things that are not repeatable in a lab, or observable on any level, and more to the point, contradict what we DO observe! Such as the creation of matter? Life from non-life? Creation of new elements?
J.R. Cooper - Author 