Before Easter we ran our Sunday evening Connected series as "God On Trial" and had a good number of people come with dissenting views about the world around us. Conversation flowed across many subjects, but inevitably returned to scientific inquiry many times. I say inevitably because most of the dissenting voices had an underlying philosophy that was basically Scientific Determinism.
It got my brain going again on various subjects that I haven't looked at for some time. One of those was quantum physics. I have for a while been meaning to get at it but hadn't yet managed it. So I went out and bought Stephen Hawking's fairly recent title, "The Grand Design". Certainly quantum physics is a very interesting area of study. Stephen Hawking presents it very well, though I am yet to be convinced by all his conclusions, especially about history on a big scale. (I need to read this book a few times before I really get to grips with everything he says in it I think.)
Anyway, for all you big thinkers (and mainly physicists I would think) out there I have some questions which Stephen Hawking doesn't address, or if he does he just fobs them off as not relevant, or with an aside that shoots down a straw man rather than deal with the issue. These questions are beyond me to answer, but I am wondering if any of you might have ideas, or places I could go to read a different (but as well thought through) perspective. Here goes:
Do the observations of quantum physics on a minute scale (e.g. quantum buckyballs) have anything to say about God as creator beyond, "this is how God made the universe"?
Is Feynman's "sum of histories" really the best explanation for the results of the double split experiment, especially where delayed observation changes the resultant distribution?
Is it really legitimate to say because an unobserved buckyball may have taken one of several paths that we can't be sure of the history of the universe? There seems to be an element of taking what we see on the minute scale and applying it on the large scale when the large scale does not behave in the same way (i.e. we know the path of an unobserved football doesn't behave the same way as an unobserved buckyball).
I am sure there are more questions to be asked, and my head is still only just starting to get to grips with all this, so the questions probably display my ignorance as much as anything. But if there are other useful places to go which will help me get my head around all this, especially from a Christian perspective I would love to know!
