Thursday, July 1, 2021

Assuming Reality

 https://www.npr.org/2021/05/27/1000444659/helgoland-offers-a-new-way-to-understand-the-world-and-our-place-in-it

Quantum mechanics continues to scream at us that what we think we see and measure are actually not "real" in the sense we think. The electron is BOTH a wave and a particle until we observe it. 

The current materialist worldview says that what we "see" when we move to quantum physics is "nothing to worry about" ... it is all "stuff" (material), all the way down, including us. No "ghost in the machine", we are purely "meat machines", no spirit, no meaning, just random emanations from the big bang and a lot of very unlikely coincidences. One of the current theories for explaining "everything", is that there are something like 10 to the 500th universes, so even the "impossible" (which we seem to be) can (and has) happened, because we believe we are "here". 

So is that "true"?  

To get a feeling for Rovelli's perspective, imagine of a blue bowling ball that's 10 in. across and weighs 25 lbs. We think those properties — the ball's color, weight and size — are real in and of themselves. If the bowling ball were the only thing in the whole universe, it would still be blue, 10 in. across and weigh 25 lbs. But the lesson Rovelli wants us to learn is that nothing has any properties at all until it interacts with something else. And between those interactions there are no properties at all. What quantum mechanics is teaching us, Rovelli says, is that reality is a vast net of interactions where there are no things, only relationships. "This is the radical leap," he writes, that "... everything exists solely in the way it affects something else."

For Christians, this seems to make a part of our faith "observably" true. Rather dangerous idea actually, because we have faith in what is NOT "seen", to only have faith in what is seen at least borders on idolatry. 

"If the physical world is woven from the subtle interplay of images in mirrors reflected in mirrors," he writes, then "... perhaps it becomes easier to recognize ourselves as part of that whole."

All that matters is our relation to God. 



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