I Have a New Article on TheOoze

Some of you may remember the story about Sherri, one of God’s itinerant workers and how we met one day in Western Maryland. She’s the lady that has devoted her life to spreading the Gospel across this country on the back of a bike.  TheOoze has decided to publish this story and it comes out today; “The Apostle Sherri: Bicycle Disciple”. Please check it out on: http://www.theooze.com/articles/article.cfm?id=1818

If you’ve never visited that web site I think you’ll be pleased with what you find there.

Quantum Miracles: Physical Spirituality

OK, please bear with me here. Other than the fact that I am as curious as a cat (and live with three of them) I haven’t the foggiest notion what I am talking about. Still, there just might be something to this.

In 1935 the Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger envisioned a scenario that illustrated some of the mysteries of quantum mechanics. This famous thought experiment became known as the dilemma of “Schroedinger’s Cat.

Here is a description of Shroedinger’s Cat that I found a bit easier to digest.

Schrodinger’s Cat

A cat is in a box with a lid that is shut. Within the box is a radioactive nucleus that has a 50-50 chance of decaying in an hour. If the nucleus decays this triggers a mechanism that breaks a vial of poison gas that kills the cat. The cat has two states: alive or dead. Schrodinger argued that if quantum mechanics is regarded as a fundamental universal theory then it must be applicable to all systems be they small or large. If so, then we must write, for the cat’s state,

|cat> = a|alive> + b|dead>,

that is, the cat apparently is in a superposed state of life and death! Then we open the box.

According to the measurement hypothesis (discussed next) when we open the box, we are performing a measurement of the cat’s state; this is said to cause the cat’s superposed state to collapse into one base state or the other |dead> or |alive>. The cat is found either pushing up the daisies, or purring for its milk. Schroedinger considered this to be so absurd that (like Einstein) he concluded that quantum mechanics could not be the final word; something was missing.

This is such a strange notion, a cat that is somehow both alive and dead, and, more to the point, contrary to what appears to happen in the macroscopic world that there seems to be only two possibilities: either quantum mechanics works only on a microscopic scale, in which case it is not a universal theory, or it is a universal theory in which case it cries out for a better understanding of the notion of superposition.

Since the advent of quantum theory, many physicists have tried to devise different interpretations of the superposition of states.

From “The Quantum World” , Florida State University Physics Department.
http://www.physics.fsu.edu/users/ProsperH/AST3033/quantumworld.htm

So, in a layman’s nutshell: Just the act of observing an experiment will affect the outcome. The tree falling in the forest makes no noise.(The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle makes a similar statement, but let’s not go there right now.)

 

The reason I wanted to talk about Schroedinger’s cat is because I think it might just have some bearing on the validity and relevance of miracles. A group of us have been engaged in a discussion over some of the works of CS Lewis and recently the topic was his essay “Miracles”. Lewis, for those of you who do not know, is considered by many to be one of the greatest of Christian apologists, practicing the art of intellectually and rationally explaining the Christian faith to those who do not believe.

In this essay it is his premise that the miracles that have been witnessed by many people over the centuries present clear evidence, to anyone who is interested, that there exists a God, particularly the God of Christianity. One of the people in our group took issue with his suggestion, a suggestion that is not unique to Lewis and is considered a part of Christian doctrine as told in the various creeds.

She contended that so many of these miraculous events are easily explained away by non-religious people and the more that science reveals of our natural world, the less people are likely to accept supernatural explanations. There also tends to be a lack of consensus among spiritual believers over what constitutes a miracle, from dramatic healings to the finding of lost keys.

I would have to agree with her. I have witnessed events that I can only describe as being supernatural evidence of God but rarely have I presented them to others as being miraculous. When I have witnessed those attempts at convincing a skeptic that God does work miracles in this world, they have never been successful. That doesn’t mean that miracles have never drawn someone closer to accepting spiritual possibilities, but I have never seen it happen.

The evidence of miracles had very little to do with my turning away from atheism, and the same can be said for my family and friends. I can not recall ever witnessing a miracle (before I found my faith in God) that I would have identified as such. But since I now enjoy a relationship with God, through Jesus, rarely does a day go by that I do not encounter a miracle or two. Some of them may be considered mundane but more than a few cannot be easily explained away naturally.

So could it be, that because I have changed my perspective on life, miracles do exist for me as I observe them? And when a skeptic observes the same event, there is no miracle, because of his particular vantage point? I am not suggesting here that our perception causes us just to see things differently (though that is certainly true) but that in many (perhaps all) instances it is our actual physical observation that helps shape the outcome.

In other words; the skeptic opens the box to find the cat dead because his rational mind, weighing the evidence in hand, tells him it must be so. When the person of faith opens the box, she witnesses the miracle of a live cat even though the same evidence was clearly visible to her. Her faith has effectively changed the outcome of the event.

And he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith.
Matthew 13:58

What do you think? Other than perhaps I should consider putting a little less catnip in my pipe.

*If God Is In The Details Why Does Genesis Offer So Few?

All things are possible with God. So it could very well be that the universe was created precisely as it has been laid out in the book of Genesis. Science certainly has not been able to prove otherwise, but for many of us the culmination of the evidence does paint a slightly different picture.

It is often said that God is in the details. The closer we scrutinize nature and observe its intricate workings the more God reveals himself to us. We often come upon paradoxes that would only seem to be explicable as long as there is some benevolent intellect at work behind the scenes. (For example: proteins are manufactured in cells yet cells need proteins to exist).

But if God is in the details, Genesis surely does not present us with too many of them. Perhaps the creation account is correct but the picture it paints has been made with broad, flowing strokes of the author’s brush. Perhaps there was no felt need at the time to be very detailed and precise in describing the process of God’s creativity. We should remember that the Bible was originally an oral history. How much detail could be retained and then passed on from generation to generation? How much detail was even necessary to convey God’s message of love and beauty? We need only to look around and it is all there for us to behold.

As creation surrounds us, it bedazzles us, inspires us and nurtures us. It also intrigues us. Being creatures in his image we are obsessed with the rest of God’s creation. The longing for God’s nature drives us to uncover more of his mysteries. How and why do things happen? To what purpose is there to the observable world, if any at all? The more we study our universe the more we learn about ourselves as well as the artist who first imagined us.

There are some very concise (yet hypothetical) explanations by various highly accredited scientists, theologians and philosophers that bring Genesis and science together with little trouble. The problem seems to be that many good people on both sides of this debate feel that the wall of separation is too high to be able to see over.

Maybe both arguments are correct. Before I am accused of relativism here let me try to explain by analogy:

Statement #1) In 1863 Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.
Statement #2) In 1865 the Union finally defeated rebel forces thereby ensuring the emancipation of the slaves held by the Confederate states.

Although both the above statements are true, neither one is complete. Some people may even think that these statements are virtually at odds with each other.

Is it possible that Genesis says all that is necessary but is deliberately lacking the detail to fully explain God’s artistic process, that it describes the picture without identifying the medium or the technique? Isn’t it also possible that secularized science does a good job of identifying the palettes, pixels and mediums involved in the painting yet fails to see the hand of the artist, the passion that the artist has for his work? Every work of art denotes an artist and every artwork is the culmination of an intricate combination of materials and processes used by the artist. It is often hoped by the artist that his work be studied, pondered and examined and that truth may be revealed to the observer in the process. With all good art there are usually more questions raised than answers given but the truth will shine through.

How else could it be in the hands of the Maestro?