[QUOTE=Liberal]
But your description of reality is one side of the tautology confirming the other. A man is a bachelor because he is unmarried, and things made of atoms are real because things made of atoms are accessible to them. The eyes and ears and nerve endings with which you observe the universe are themselves a part of the universe. If that’s all reality is, it is very uninteresting.
[/quote]
What I mean is, they are the only type of “reality” which science can address. This is, I’ll fully acknowledge, defining reality in pragmatic, mechanical terms, but it’s the only workable definition for experimental or observational science. All else is in the realm of metaphysics.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
You can observe either the location or the momentum or a particle, but not both. I don’t mean to be demanding, but that seems like an awfully puny examination of “whatever is actually going on at that level”.
[/quote]
Not true; you can observe both, but (at least as provided by QM) only to a theoretical limit of precision. The problem with observations on the quantum level is that the observer is an inherent part of the system merely by the act of trying to inspect it.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
Well now, hold on. Setting aside how flippantly you’ve described God, you buy into lots of things as being real that won’t ever happen again. Like the Big Bang, for instance. Or the collapse of an electron’s orbit. Or the blessedly final election of George W. Bush as president of the US.
[/quote]
But “real” events–even those that are unique–can be observed in multiple ways, and each of those observations used to correlate to or falsify a hypothesis. Claims of divine miracles or intervention, however, defy–by definition–any standard framework of causal behavior. If God wants to make cows fly through the air, His will be done, and nothing one says about the improbability of this in Newtonian mechanics, aerodynamic theory, or basic zoology has any standing against it.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
But that’s what I said at the outset. Science is not the appropriate tool for examining God.
[/quote]
On this we agree firmly, I think. My point–and I apologize for not making it more explicit–it that a comparison to quantum mechanics as somehow also being supernatural or not real in like manner is not a very apt analogy. Systems on the quantum level aren’t literally a Schrödinger equation flying through Hilbert space; this is merely the model we use which happens to fit, and satisfy repeated experiments. Why it fits is, despite nearly a century of pondering and dozens of competing interpretations, none of which have any strong claim as being more correct than any other, is an unknown, and possibly (though I hope this not to be the case) fundamentally impercievable. This doesn’t make the resulting behavior any less real (again, in a pragmatic sense that can be tested) but merely that we can’t see beyond the veil of all of the mathematics that work so senselessly well. If you don’t ever open the hood of your car, it doesn’t mean that a bunch of tiny ponies are running on a treadmill to drive the transmission; we can be certain–by the rumbling of the engine, the consumption of gasoline, and the blue cloud that is exhausted 'cause we haven’t changed the oil in 50k miles and the rings are worn–that there is, in fact, an internal combustion engine, or something very much like it (and not at all like a horse) powering the vehicle. There is something “real” going on at the quantum level, and our crude, straining analogies and cleverly accurate but ultimately unrevealing models don’t protray it in any way that gives credence to one interpretation over another.
With God (or any belief in supernatural entities) we essentially have to take someone’s word for it or experience some kind of inner revelation which is not objectively testable. This personally strikes me as being very arbitrary and suspect precisely because it can’t be tested scientifically.
Stranger
