Category Archives: Science and God

Science and God

Does Quantum Mechanics Invalidate the Law of Non-contradiction? Part 2

26 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 of this series, Walt Tucker gave an explanation of the two slit experiment and its relation to quantum mechanics.  In part 2, Walt explains why this experiment does not violate the law of non-contradiction.  Below are Walt’s words.

The quick answer is: if a particle could actually be observed as A and not A at the same time, that would violate the law of non-contradiction. Since that cannot be done, even in the quantum world, there is no violation!

Quantum superposition is the mathematical addition of probability densities of all of the possible states of a quantum system.  The result of the superposition of the densities is used to calculate the probability of observing the system in one of the states.  In a binary probability space there is a chance that a quantum event can be observed as A or as not A.  

In the two slit experiment, it is the probability of a photon going through slit A or slit B.  Slit B would be not A.  When you don’t observe the slits to know which slit the particle went through, you find that it goes through both.  So, this guy is saying that both A and not A exist simultaneously and the law of non-contradiction is violated.  But that is not exactly the case!

When the quantum system is observed, it is observed in the context of a particle with specific location and it can only be A or not A, it can’t be both. But when the system is not being observed, it is not in the form of a point like particle, it is in a wave form where the quanta of energy is spread across the possible states as a wave.  It is in the wave form until it is observed. The observation collapses the wave to a point like particle where the law of non-contradiction is also observed (like popping a whole balloon by a pin at only one point on the surface of the balloon).

One could say the law of non-contradiction is only valid in the world of observables (the world in which we interact). But it can also be said that since the energy is in a wave form when it is not being observed, that it is not true that it is A and not A at the same time, but that it is something else, a wave, that only has the potential to be either A or not A once it is observed.  In other words, it is a whole other form that makes no sense in terms of A and non-A.

It is like saying a potato is mashed potatoes, French fries, and a baked potato all at the same time, when it is not any of them when it is a potato in the garden.  The potato has the potential to be any of those forms of potato, but isn’t any of them until one takes the potato and does something with it.  The same thing applies in the quantum world.  A wave has the potential to be observed at slit A or slit B (since a quanta of energy must be observed at one point), but while it is still a wave, it cannot be observed at both slits at the same time because an observation would cause it to no longer be a wave, but a particle.

Bottom line is that having the potential to be one thing or another does not violate the law of non-contradiction.  If the particle could actually be observed as A and not A at the same time, then there would be a violation of the law of non-contradiction!

[Bill Pratt]  Thanks for the explanation, Walt.  Great stuff.

Science and God

Does Quantum Mechanics Invalidate the Law of Non-contradiction? Part 1

46 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

This seems to be a common misconception, one that I have seen many times on the blog.  Recently, one of the most helpful commenters on the TQA blog, Walt Tucker, wrote a detailed response to this claim as a comment on another post.  He has given me permission to share his commentary in this blog post.  Every word below is Walt’s unless I indicate otherwise, and I thank him for giving me permission to use his excellent response.

A friend of mine was using his apologetics know-how with an atheist and using principles that are self-evident in nature, such as the law of non-contradiction, to argue for the existence of God.  The atheist claimed that quantum superposition violates the law of non-contradiction and thus my friend’s whole argument was null and void.  Knowing that I have knowledge in quantum theory and apologetics, my friend asked whether quantum superposition does violate the law of non-contradiction. 

Since this comes up so often with skeptics and atheists who try to use arguments from quantum mechanics against the classical apologetic argument for the existence, or at least the certainty of the existence, of God, I thought I would post my reply to my friend here for all of my Christian friends to use who might come across a person who tries to use the ill-fated quantum approach against God.  (Of course God created the quantum world, so it isn’t so likely that such arguments can be used against His existence.  Such attempts show either a misunderstanding of the nature of God, or a misunderstanding of nature itself.)

Before I present the reply, I need to give some background on how the argument the atheist is using arises in quantum mechanics.  There is a classic experiment used to demonstrate the non-intuitive nature of the quantum world.  It is called the two-slit experiment.  Light is made up of discrete packets of energy called “quanta.”  You can never have a half, or any fraction of, a quanta.  In one sense, it is like having a gum ball from a gum ball machine. You get a whole gum ball. You can smash it, chew it, or whatever, but you still have the same about of gum and it only comes in whole gum balls.

So, light is generated from atoms and absorbed by other atoms as quanta packets of energy (called a photon).  The light we see in a room with a typical incandescent light bulb is many millions of quanta, so one quanta of photon energy is very, very small.  In the experiment, a single quanta of light is shot towards the double slit (see figure below). 

There is a piece of film on the other side. When both slits are open, the light appears to go through one of the two slits and be absorbed by the film at one point at a random position. But when this is done over millions of shots, the image on the film is an interference pattern as if the photons went through both slits at the same time (the image on the film is the classical wave interference pattern of light).  An interference pattern is the crossing pattern you see when you drop two pebbles in a pond as the same time and the waves interfere – high crests and low crests – with light it is bright and dark areas.  

But since only one photon is shot at a time, it is odd that the film shows an interference pattern when intuition would say a particle of light, the photon, would only go through one slit or the other, but couldn’t go through both. To test that, one can put a detector at the slits to try and see if the photon goes through one slit or the other, or both. When that is done, the photons are detected at only one slit or the other, randomly, and the interference pattern on the film disappears (it is what you would expect if the photons did go through only one slit or the other).

So, knowing which slit the photon goes through destroys the interference that appears on the film that would appear when you don’t know which slit the photon goes through. Quantum mechanics is a mathematical formulation of this behavior for predicting the outcome of experiments called observations.  Each detection on the film would be an observation. As such, what is called an observation does not require a human observer, but does require some sort of detector, whether it be a film, a photo-detector, or anything that could absorb the photon. Now knowing the weird behavior of the quantum world, I give the reply to the question. 

[Bill Pratt] In part 2 of this series, Walt completes his explanation as to why quantum mechanics does not violate the law of non-contradiction.

Science and God, Top Ten Posts of 2011

What Are Four Things Science Will Never Explain? – #1 Post of 2011

12 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

I’ve been reading physicist Edgar Andrews’ book Who Made God? and he claims that there are four things science will never explain.  Here they are:

  1. the origin of the universe
  2. the origin of the laws of nature
  3. the origin of life
  4. the origin of mind and thought

Andrews understands that when he claims science can never explain these four entities, all sorts of protests ensue.  He says:

Of course, atheists (and even some theists) will immediately cry foul, declaring that just because scientific explanations are not currently available it doesn’t mean they never will be.  Science is progressive and new discoveries are being made all the time, so that what seems scientifically impossible today may be scientifically explicable tomorrow.

I recognize the force of this argument but intend to stand my ground. The claim that, given time, science will explain everything is simply the atheist’s version of the God of the gaps. The gaps in our knowledge can be plugged, they say, by future (but as yet unknown) scientific advances. Thus the ‘God of the gaps’ is simply replaced by the ‘future science of the gaps’ — same gaps, different deity. It’s what philosopher of science Karl Popper called ‘promissory materialism’.

You’ll have to read Andrews’ book to see why he thinks these four will not be explained by science, but the basic reason is that each of these four (universe, laws of nature, life, mind and thought) consist of properties that transcend the material world.  Since science is only able to investigate the material world and not what transcends the material world, science cannot, in principle, ever explain these things.

I highly recommend Who Made God? as a very accessible and entertaining read that posits the God hypothesis as an explanation for the universe, laws of nature, life, and mind, and then presents evidence to uphold the hypothesis.  It might even be a nice Christmas present for the skeptic in your family!

Philosophy, Polls, Science and God

How Should Religion and Science Interact?

7 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

During the Renaissance and Enlightenment, philosophers continuously changed their views on how science and religion should interact.  Philosopher William Lawhead describes the continuum chronologically in his textbook The Voyage of Discovery.

Initially, most scientists and philosophers “saw religion and science as co-equal partners in the search for truth.”

Lawhead continues: “Gradually the viewpoint emerged that the claims of revealed religion should be accepted, but only after they have been trimmed down to conform to the scientific outlook.”  Put another way, religious claims must be confirmed by science.

The third stage of development was deism – the belief that the world is wholly rational on its own and that human reason alone can answer questions of nature, religion, and morality.  The deists retained God as the Creator of the universe, but believed that God did not intervene in nature after he created it.

Following deism, “Agnosticism or religious skepticism began to appear in the works of such thinkers as David Hume.  The agnostics urged that we must suspend judgment concerning God’s existence, for reason does not give us any grounds for believing in a deity, although it cannot prove that one does not exist.”

Lawhead explains that “finally, full-blown naturalism or atheism appeared. . . . Its proponents claimed that the philosophical and scientific evidence is stacked against the God hypothesis.  Therefore the rational person will reject it, just as we have the flat-earth theory and the theory that diseases have supernatural causes.”

What is fascinating to me is that all of these views are still held by our contemporary society, hundreds of years later.  That is one reason I find the study of philosophy to be so useful; the ideas never go out of style.  In fact, the same ideas are repeated over and over again throughout history.

What about you?  Which of these five views do you hold about the interaction of science and religion?  Please vote in the poll below and leave comments explaining your vote.

Science and God

Why Does Science Work?

18 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Very few people ever think about why science works; they just take it for granted.  Some of the great scientists, however, have wondered about this question.  Philosopher John Lennox, in his book God’s Undertaker, quotes Albert Einstein’s ruminations on the question of why the universe is comprehensible:

You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery.  Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way . . . the kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different.  Even if man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori.  That is the ‘miracle’ which is being constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.

Einstein is saying that we should expect a chaotic world, a world which cannot be grasped by the mind.  The fact that the world is able to be understood by human minds is a ‘miracle’ that deserves explanation.  In particular, why does physical reality map to mathematics?  Surely this fact demands an accounting.

Lennox notes that Paul Davies finds this mapping to be truly astounding.  Davies comments that much of the mathematics applied to modern science “was worked out as an abstract exercise by pure mathematicians, long before it was applied to the real world.  The original investigations were entirely unconnected with their eventual application.” (emphasis mine) Why?  Surely this is strange.

Lennox continues, “The relationship between mathematics and physics goes very deep and it is very hard to think of it as some random accident.”  Professor of Mathematics Roger Penrose has this to say: “It is hard for me to believe . . . that such superb theories could have arisen merely by some random natural selection of ideas leaving only the good ones as survivors.  The good ones are simply much too good to be the survivors of ideas that have arisen in a random way.  There must be, instead, some deep underlying reason for the accord between mathematics and physics.”

Not wanting to posit an agent behind this mystery, some skeptics will say that science itself explains the accord between math and physics.  But this cannot be so.  Lennox recounts the following words of John Polkinghorne: “Science does not explain the mathematical intelligibility of the physical world, for it is part of science’s founding faith that this is so.”

So why does science work?  Why do math and physics work together so well?  Lennox offers the Christian answer to this question:

The intelligibility of the universe is grounded in the nature of the ultimate rationality of God: both the real world and mathematics are traceable to the Mind of God who created both the universe and the human mind.  It is, therefore, not surprising when the mathematical theories spun by human minds created in the image of God’s Mind, find ready application in a universe whose architect was that same creative Mind.

The non-theist is left with a real quandary.  Without a Mind behind reality, the fact that abstract mathematics directly applies to reality remains a profound mystery.  The non-theist is left, in essence, with blind faith in science.

Science and God

The God of the Gaps?

4 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

A frequent refrain from skeptics of Christianity is that any time God is posited as the cause of just about anything, the Christian has committed the sin of “God of the gaps.”  Philosopher John Lennox explains the sin as follows: “the introduction of a god or God is an evidence of an intellectual laziness: we cannot explain something scientifically and so we introduce ‘God’ to cover our ignorance.”

Referring back to the previous blog post, is the supposition of Mr Ford as the cause of the motor car engine a “God of the gaps” move?  Lennox answers “no.”

Mr Ford is not to be found in the gaps in our knowledge about the workings of internal combustion engines.  More precisely, he is not to be found in any reason-giving explanations that concern mechanisms.  For Henry Ford is not a mechanism: he is no less than the agent who is responsible for the existence of the mechanism in the first place so that it all bears the marks of his handiwork – and that means the bits we do understand and the bits we don’t.

Bringing this point around to God, Lennox quotes philosopher Richard Swinburne.

Note that I am not postulating a ‘God of the gaps,’ a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained.  I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains.  The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order.

Science can explain what science can explain.  As we’ve developed previously on this blog, science is a limited enterprise that can give us knowledge about recurring physical mechanisms and physical events that occurred in the past.  To press science beyond these realms is folly.

Lennox concludes with these words:

The point to grasp here is that, because God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps. On the contrary, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise.  It is important to stress this because influential authors such as Richard Dawkins will insist on conceiving of God as an explanatory alternative to science – an idea that is nowhere to be found in theological reflection of any depth.  Dawkins is therefore tilting at a windmill – dismissing a concept of God that no serious thinker believes in anyway.

Science and God

Does Our Understanding of How the Universe Works Negate God’s Existence?

29 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Some skeptics of Christianity are known to argue that the great success of science revealing the physical mechanisms of the universe should lead us to conclude that the God hypothesis is totally unnecessary.  Science will ultimately reveal the laws of nature, and once we know these laws, the need for God has vanished.  Does that follow?

Not according to Philosopher John Lennox in his book God’s Undertaker.  Lennox says, “Such reasoning involves a common logical fallacy.”  Here is how he illustrates the fallacy:

Take a Ford motor car.  It is conceivable that someone from a remote part of the world , who was seeing one for the first time and who knew nothing about modern engineering, might imagine that there is a god (Mr Ford) inside the engine, making it go.  He might further imagine that when the engine ran sweetly it was because Mr Ford inside the engine liked him, and when it refused to go it was because Mr Ford did not like him.

Of course, if he were subsequently to study engineering and take the engine to pieces, he would discover that there is no Mr Ford inside it.  Neither would it take much intelligence for him to see that he did not need to introduce Mr Ford as an explanation for its working.  His grasp of the impersonal principles of internal combustion would be altogether enough to explain how the engine works.

So far, so good.  But if he then decided that his understanding of the principles of how the engine works made it impossible to believe in the existence of a Mr Ford who designed the engine in the first place, this would be patently false – in philosophical terminology he would be committing a category mistake.  Had there never been a Mr Ford to design the mechanisms, none would exist for him to understand.

How does this illustration apply to God and the universe?  Lennox explains:

It is likewise a category mistake to suppose that our understanding of the impersonal principles according to which the universe works makes it either unnecessary or impossible to believe in the existence of a personal Creator who designed, made, and upholds the universe.  In other words, we should not confuse the mechanisms by which the universe works either with its cause or upholder.

Hawking, Dawkins, and other atheistic scientists fail to understand this basic philosophical point.  One day, if there is a full and complete physical explanation of how every particle in the universe behaves, if we arrive at a set of equations that explains every physical mechanism, the fundamental question of where these equations came from will still need to be answered.  Scientists will not have eliminated the existence of Mr Ford.

Science and God

What Happened In the Huxley-Wilberforce Debate?

7 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Another favorite story told by those who want to argue that religion and science are at complete enmity is the Huxley-Wilberforce debate of 1860.  The debate was between T. H. Huxley (a Darwin supporter) and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, and was to be about Darwin’s The Origin of Species which had been published 7 months prior.  Philosopher John Lennox recounts the circumstances of this debate in his book God’s Undertaker, so we will rely on his synopsis.

Lennox starts by reminding us that “this encounter is often portrayed as a simple clash between science and religion, where the competent scientist convincingly triumphed over the ignorant churchman.”  Lennox says that historians have shown that “this account is also very far from the truth.”

First, Wilberforce was a learned scholar, not an ignoramus.  Wilberforce published a critique of Darwin’s work which Darwin himself regarded as “uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties.  It quizzes me most splendidly.”

Second, Wilberforce was adamant that the debate over Darwin’s theories be scientific.  In his summary of the critique which Darwin commended, Wilberforce wrote the following:

We have objected to the views with which we are dealing, solely on scientific grounds.  We have done so from the fixed conviction that it is thus that the truth or falsehood of such arguments should be tried.  We have no sympathy with those who object to any facts or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears to them is taught by revelation.  We think that all such objections savour of a timidity which is really inconsistent with a firm and well-intrusted faith.

Third, there were objections to Darwin’s theory which did not come from the church.  Lennox notes that “Sir Richard Owen, the leading anatomist of the day . . . was opposed to Darwin’s theory; as was the eminent scientist Lord Kelvin.”

Fourth, at the time of the debate, opinions on how the two debaters fared were mixed; there was not a consensus that Huxley defeated Wilberforce.  According to Lennox, “The botanist Joseph Hooker grumbled that Huxley didn’t ‘put the matter in a form or way that carried the audience’ so he had to do it himself.”  Lennox also records that “The Athenaeum‘s report gives the impression that honours were about even, saying that Huxley and Wilberforce ‘have each found foemen worthy of their steel.'”

As with the Galileo affair, the Huxley-Wilberforce debate fails to live up to its hype.  The debate was not emblematic of the imaginary war on science waged by Christianity.  Historian of science Colin Russell has come to the following conclusion about the alleged war between religion and science in the west:

The common belief that . . . the actual relations between religion and science over the last few centuries have been marked by deep and enduring hostility . . . is not only historically inaccurate, but actually a caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could have possibly achieved any degree of respectability.

Science and God

What Happened to Galileo?

15 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

The Galileo affair has often been put to work to demonstrate that religion has always been at war with science.  But what really happened to Galileo?  Does what happened to him prove that religion – Christianity in particular – has always been in conflict with science?

Philosopher John Lennox thinks not; he provides some unique insight in his book God’s Undertaker.  The story of Galileo is not nearly as simple as many people think.

First, Lennox notes that Galileo believed in God.  According to Lennox, “Galileo was a firm believer in God and the Bible, and remained so all of his life.  He held that ‘the laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics’ and that the ‘human mind is a work of God and one of the most excellent.'”

Galileo, Lennox notes, was initially endorsed by the Jesuit educational institution, the Collegio Romano.  So where did his opposition first originate?  Galileo himself claimed “that it was the academic professors who were so opposed to him that they were trying to influence the church authorities to speak out against him.”  Lennox explains that the secular philosophers of the day were incensed by Galileo.  Why?  Galileo’s science was threatening the Aristotelian scientific paradigm that dominated the academic institutions.

Aristotle’s astronomical speculations were left in “tatters’ by Galileo’s telescope and the academic elite of the time would not have it.  Therefore, there was increasing pressure put on the church to quiet Galileo since the church also supported the Aristotelian scientific program.

Lennox comments additionally that Galileo “developed an unhelpfully short-sighted habit of denouncing in vitriolic terms those who disagreed with him.”  A good example would be when Galileo mocked Pope Urban VIII (an erstwhile supporter and  friend of Galileo) in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Principal Systems of the World by placing the Pope’s words in the mouth of a dull-witted character in the book.

Galileo was, finally, placed under house arrest, mostly in “luxurious private residences belonging to friends,” by the Roman Catholic Church.  Lennox points out that Galileo was never tortured, contrary to popular belief.

So, does the story of Galileo prove that Christianity is opposed to science?  Obviously not.  Instead it proves that scientists who challenge the scientific majority of their day may face serious censure.  Lennox concludes, “What is clear, in Galileo’s time and ours, is that criticism of a reigning scientific paradigm is fraught with risk, no matter who is engaged in it.  We conclude that the ‘Galileo affair’ really does nothing to confirm a simplistic conflict view of the relationship of science to religion.”