Throwing Dice? Thoughts of God in a Quantum World

Henson, Shaun C.

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190277154.003.0014

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The second call, the well-rehearsed measurement problem, is one arising conundrum among many since Max Planck's Nobel Prize-winning proposal that the observed emission and absorption of radiant energy on a blackbody would fit observation to theory neatly if that energy was in the form of discrete energy packets he called quanta rather than waves. Simple experiments with quanta using double slit apparatuses have revealed a small-scale world wildly unlike that which we experience at the large scale (Henson 2016). The reality revealed is "impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way…" (Feynman 1989, III: sec.…”

Section: Orthodoxy and Heresy-a Brief Doctrinal History Of Eqmmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Makes a Quantum Physics Belief Believable? Many‐worlds Among Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Henson¹

2023

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An extraordinary, if circumscribed, positive shift has occurred since the mid‐twentieth century in the perceived status of Hugh Everett III's 1956 theory of the universal wave function of quantum mechanics, now widely called the Many‐Worlds Interpretation (MWI). Everett's starkly new interpretation denied the existence of a separate classical realm, contending that the experimental data can be seen as presenting a state vector for the whole universe. Since there is no state vector collapse, reality as a whole is strictly deterministic. Explained jointly by the dynamical variables and the state vector, “this reality is not the reality we customarily think of, but is a reality composed of many worlds,” wrote Everett's colleague Bryce DeWitt. In this essay, I account briefly for the change of status in conventional scientific terms, yet chiefly in extended terms of three sets of ideas that I argue can be understood to affect believability in both scientific and religious contexts, illuminating helpfully the MWI phenomenon, and its engagement with theology: orthodoxy and heresy, language and reference, and faith and agnosticism. One's orientation relative to the variable content of these dynamic, socially oriented categories helps to make belief in ideas as metaphysically challenging as Everettian Quantum Mechanics, or particular ideas about God, either more or less believable. The categories will have the same function in a theology engaging Everett's theory, and in any theology at all written in a society deeply marked by what I further argue is a subtle, powerful, and pervasive mode of quasi‐scientific thinking we can call societal constructive agnosticism, of which anyone doing theology today must be aware.

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Section: Orthodoxy and Heresy-a Brief Doctrinal History Of Eqmmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Makes a Quantum Physics Belief Believable? Many‐worlds Among Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Henson¹

2023

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Is Evolution a Chance Process?

Alexander

2020

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It is commonly thought that evolution is a chance process, an idea found in popular writings on evolution, but also in academic writing in a broad range of scientific disciplines: scientific, philosophical and theological. One problem is that words such as ‘chance’ and ‘random’ are used with a range of different meanings according to context, and in evolutionary biology the word ‘chance’ is sometimes used in a way that is different from its use in mathematics and philosophy. The present article aims to clarify the range of meanings and to argue the case that the evolutionary process is far from being a ‘theory of chance’ from biological, mathematical, or indeed philosophical and theological perspectives.

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Throwing Dice? Thoughts of God in a Quantum World

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

What Makes a Quantum Physics Belief Believable? Many‐worlds Among Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

What Makes a Quantum Physics Belief Believable? Many‐worlds Among Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Is Evolution a Chance Process?

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