Quantum Mechanics, Creation, & God

The book "Quantum" by Manjit Kumar weaves together both the discoveries and theories of Quantum Mechanics along with the personal and spiritual lives of the physicists involved. 

QM began with Max Planck's discovery in 1900 that the relationship between heat and the frequency of light generated by a heated body is not a smooth line on a graph. Rather, when Planck examined the most minute increases of heat, he found the light freqency would hold steady and then suddenly jump. 

The personal story behind this is fascinating. Planck was the last person you'd expect to make this discovery. He was told when he wanted to major in physics that almost everything had been discovered in this field. The job of a physicist was simply to extend the decimal places on all the known constants. But this kind of science suited the conservative and methodical Planck. Little did anyone know that he would blow the roof off classical mechanics. 

In classical mechanics we understand the physical world through cause and effect. Strike a baseball with a bat, and we can predict where it will go and how far, etc. Yet in the atomic and subatomic world we have discovered effects that just don't make sense. Light shining on a photo cell produces an electrical current giving us the impression that light is a particle. Light shining through two slits creates wave patterns showing that it is a wave. Fire a single electron at two slits and things get really weird. It seems as though the electron passes through both slits and apparently is capable of ending up in several different places that only God knows and why.

That last statement is what this book is really about. Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg took these discoveries and emphasized the randomness and unpredictability of the physical world. Albert Einstein and Erwin Schroedinger felt that this was not a complete understanding of the weird effects of QM. The author mentions a number of times Einstein's famous dictum: "God does not play dice." When Bohr died, the last drawing on his blackboard was that of Einstein's Light Box mind experiment which challenged the idea that the physical world is ultimately random. 

QM just boggles the mind, which is why I appreciate Richard Feynman, who said no one understands it. 

However I think QM is important because it points to the realty of things that the Bible teaches such as creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) or that things are not always what they appear to be! 

The author doesn't really go into the spiritual beliefs of Max Planck, but I hope to learn more about that. Here is a quote by Planck about science and religion:

While both religion and natural science require a belief in God for their activities, to the former He is the starting point, to the latter the goal of every thought process….No matter where and how far we look, nowhere do we find a contradiction between religion and natural science. 
(Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, 1949, p. 184; pp. 185-186.)

The Philosophical Black Hole of Atheism

There are important questions that all of us should think about:

1. Where did I come from?
2. Who am I?
3. What should I be doing?
4. Where am I going?

The Christian answers:

1. From God ("So God created man in His image..." Genesis 1.27-28)
2. God's child ("See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God..." 1 John 3.1)
3. Loving God and my neighbor ("Love the Lord Your God... and your neighbor as yourself." Matthew 22.37 &39)
4. To be with God eternally ("For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day." John 6.40)

The Atheist answers:

1. An accident of nature.
2. What I do... an engineer, teacher, mother, etc.
3. What pleases me.
4. To nothing.

The Atheist considers the Christian answers nothing more than imaginative constructions to give him a sense of meaning and hope. But the Atheist denies God so that he can imagine the universe to be God. There are no absolute morals, only molecules. For this reason the Atheist lives in the middle, lives for the moment, does what is pleasing for now.

Those choices are all arbitrary. Ultimately everything becomes a mechanical, mindless process of evolution. And if that is so, why care about poverty? Why care about the environment? Why care who lives or dies? Why? Does the sodium ion argue with the chloride ion about becoming salt?

The philosophical black hole of atheism is to deny the spirit in nature. In the Nicene Creed we confess: "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth AND of all things visible and invisible." God created us with a spirit, and it is through the spirit that we are able to believe in God.

The Ichneumon Wasp and the Problem of Evil

One of our members brought me an Ichneumon Wasp that he found buzzing around in his garage recently. This wasp would give most people a scare with what appears to be three, five inch long stingers dangling from it abdomen. But as it turns out they are not stingers, rather they are "ovipositors." With these long tubes the wasp is able to lay eggs near beetles and other insects that are deeply embedded in trees. The larvae then feed on the bugs, and in this way they are extremely helpful for controlling pests.

I was amazed to hear how this little creature operates, and how God has designed this world with a delicate balance between "every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." Charles Darwin didn't think so. In a letter to American botanist Asa Gray, Darwin wrote: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."

Why did I immediately see God's design in the Ichneumon while Darwin saw something unworthy of a "beneficent and omnipotent God"? The reason is that Darwin's view of God is just too small. Most atheists reject God because of the problem of evil. They can't believe in a God who can be good and all-powerful and also allow evil to exist. (I don't think wasps eating beetles is necessarily evil, but Darwin was a very sensitive man!) Darwin's view of God did not include the possibility that, along with allowing evil to rise up in this world, God might turn evil into good.

Wasps killing beetles or cats playing with mice may not seem very nice to us. But I believe that God knows what He's doing, and I'm amazed that even in a fallen world God is still working everything together for good. Jesus is certainly the ultimate example of God's good overcoming this world's evil.

Galatians 1:4-5 [Jesus] gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

For more on my approach to Creation and Evolution, see my Bible study (with Audio files, handouts, and Powerpoint slides).