Ok, I've never posted here before, but I have been thinking about this problem for a while, and was wondering what some thought. This will probably end badly, but, what the hell.
These are only ideas that I kick around in my head, and do not represent my actual beliefs, lest some of you get the wrong idea about me.
Suppose their was a God. Now, either this God is bound by the laws of nature or he is not. If he is not bound by the laws of physics, then all of human logic is wrong, pursuant to the whims of a Creator who can send floods and locusts at will. Certainly if this is the case, he doesn't act in a way that would convince most of the world to believe him. This seems unreasonable, because if there was a God who loved us, then he would definitely give us a reason to believe in him, aside from a book that was set down 1500 years ago, longer if your Hindu, shorter if you're Muslim.
The God I am interested in thinking about (note: not necessarily believing) is one who must abide the laws of physics. If you do not agree with this, then you can stop reading here.
Now, if you want a god who is consistent with physics, then you are led only to one conclusion, I think. Such a god cannot interact with this universe, except possibly at the instant of the Big Bang. At that instant, however, the universe must have been very small. There is, in some sense, a "wavefunction of the universe". These are seminal papers by Hartle and Hawking (see wikipedia), and others, attempting to define the evolution as described by a path integral. Because the wavefunction's evolution is governed by a differential equation, to specify the solution completely, one needs initial conditions. Then, given a differential equaiton and a set of initial conditions, one can describe the evolution of the system at arbitrary time.
Now the point. If one wishes to believe in God AND natural law, then they must accept that God is decoupled from nature, in the sense that the last interaction of God with the universe was at time t=0. At this time, God could have prepared a wavefunction and imposed suitable boundary conditions, including various miracles obsreved by people throughout the history of faith. God could have tuned the initial parameters in such a way that evolution occured to give the end product of humans, at exactly this point in space and time.
What this also means is that, if you want this kind of God, you must accept that there is no such thing as free will. This also means that God must (essentially) make all of the quantum mechanical measurements in the history of the universe
So, I submit that a God consistent with physics is not consistent with free will.
Discuss.
These are only ideas that I kick around in my head, and do not represent my actual beliefs, lest some of you get the wrong idea about me.
Suppose their was a God. Now, either this God is bound by the laws of nature or he is not. If he is not bound by the laws of physics, then all of human logic is wrong, pursuant to the whims of a Creator who can send floods and locusts at will. Certainly if this is the case, he doesn't act in a way that would convince most of the world to believe him. This seems unreasonable, because if there was a God who loved us, then he would definitely give us a reason to believe in him, aside from a book that was set down 1500 years ago, longer if your Hindu, shorter if you're Muslim.
The God I am interested in thinking about (note: not necessarily believing) is one who must abide the laws of physics. If you do not agree with this, then you can stop reading here.
Now, if you want a god who is consistent with physics, then you are led only to one conclusion, I think. Such a god cannot interact with this universe, except possibly at the instant of the Big Bang. At that instant, however, the universe must have been very small. There is, in some sense, a "wavefunction of the universe". These are seminal papers by Hartle and Hawking (see wikipedia), and others, attempting to define the evolution as described by a path integral. Because the wavefunction's evolution is governed by a differential equation, to specify the solution completely, one needs initial conditions. Then, given a differential equaiton and a set of initial conditions, one can describe the evolution of the system at arbitrary time.
Now the point. If one wishes to believe in God AND natural law, then they must accept that God is decoupled from nature, in the sense that the last interaction of God with the universe was at time t=0. At this time, God could have prepared a wavefunction and imposed suitable boundary conditions, including various miracles obsreved by people throughout the history of faith. God could have tuned the initial parameters in such a way that evolution occured to give the end product of humans, at exactly this point in space and time.
What this also means is that, if you want this kind of God, you must accept that there is no such thing as free will. This also means that God must (essentially) make all of the quantum mechanical measurements in the history of the universe
So, I submit that a God consistent with physics is not consistent with free will.
Discuss.
