Should Logic And Quantum Mechanics Rightfully Preclude God?

PR Log (Press Release) – May 07, 2009 – There are many scientists who attempt to reconcile their belief that god miraculously created the universe through the big bang (although not fully explaining the meta god that created this god). So, can we therefore safely assume that following this event he repletely folded his arms and stood back in admiration at the laws of nature he invented?

Collins rather specious theory of the BioLogos, a term for theistic evolution, is heartily resolved by invoking quantum mechanics to argue that god still intervenes in ways undetectable to scientists.

He says: "It is thus perfectly possible that god might influence the creation in subtle ways that are unrecognisable to scientific observation. In this way, modern science opens the door to divine action without the need for law-breaking miracles. Given the impossibility of absolute prediction or explanation, the laws of nature no longer preclude god's action in the world. Our perception of the world opens once again to the possibility of divine interaction."

So, his theological quantum theory states that because of "the possibility of divine interaction" it is somehow worth the effort in praying for divine guidance. For me he's holding aloft a philosophical construct of meaningless symbol-shunting procedures that are mapped on to his "truths" about the world, or isomorphisms. Because while one may believe in god and another may believe in Darwin, neither resolves into intelligence as they only reinforce pluralism.

On the surface of pluralism, strange loops emerge, such as in Epimenide's paradox of a single sentence that reads: "this sentence is untrue", so perhaps we should revisit Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's "Principia Mathematica" , a treatise meant to banish self-reference in set and number theories. The same goes for all formal systems, especially those we can never really understand or know.

For example, do you believe in holism or reductionism? By answering positively to one, you deny the other's existence. That can't be true. The brain has a formal system of neuron representations for conceptualising the world, and one that exhibits self-reference and self-modification in a tangled hierarchy. This strange loopiness of these formal systems, within the concept of isomorphisms, brings one to some sound philosophical conclusions about human consciousness and that the best method of untangling this hierarchy of the human mind is by invoking the Zen concept of MU, where neither 'yes' or 'no' can suffice, or unask the question.

However, the belief in evolution can only be evolutionary in nature once the "system of evolution" has been established. God cannot "evolve: so humans tend to ask what created the system? Certainly not evolution. And certainly not some spurious notion of god. So what did create the spark of existence?

Backtrack over 2,000 years: the idea that a group of desert-dwelling Bronze Age goatherders - who thought that every living creature was located within a couple of kilometres from Noah's boat and believed the "Fall of Man" was caused by a scrumping incident - were going to write a book of short stories that might have relevance to a civilisation in the 21st century, is fast becoming the rightful object of ridicule.

All religions claim to know what no human mind can possibly know. There are by now plenty of neuro-psychological windows on to why the human mind has evolved to believe in supernatural causality and causality violations/interventions.

Ultimately, all Christian teaching subscribes to Intelligent Design ("Creationism") by imagining that there is a "reason" for the universe's existence. Theories of Everything tend to treat the past and the future as countries or separate universes within a multiversal overall structure that is both fractal and infinite, though possibly unbounded.

The other intellectual catastrophe for religious fundamentalists involves their aeons-old embrace of materialistic reductionism which makes of the human mind a kind of epiphenomenon, a mere ghost (the 'soul') as in Descartes split-level machine.

Perhaps if the entire homo sapien sapien species were to suddenly cease to exist, the pre-established ecology would not be affected in any detrimental way at all. In fact, if we're honest, the entire ecology would be better off without the evolution of homo sapien sapien - a species who has yet to explain why it is killing its own planet.

To my mind Collins strays into pseudo-babble scientific speculation simply to keep faith with his belief in god instead of accepting that we're a product of pure chance.

Collins reasonably asks if you can you both pursue an understanding of how life works using the tools of genetics and molecular biology, and worship a creator god? But how can a scientist who believes in genetics, logic and quantum mechanics also subscribe to the resurrection and the causal scrumping incident that led to our materialist "fall" from grace in order to substantiate his own identity?