This was a Q&A exchange with a blog reader:

I first became aware of your writings thanks to your post on Uncommon Descent, and then I naturally found my way to your townhall blog. I was hoping you could answer a few short questions for me, which I'll try to make brief.

1) I often hear that quantum mechanics either challenges materialism, or out and out undercuts it. I've read a lot about QM (well, a lot for a mere non-scientist layman), including the delayed choice quantum eraser experiments, Paul Davies' general musings, etc. How would you best explain the challenge/defeat that QM offers materialism?

2) One claim I've seen as of late is that QM proves that 'something is really coming from nothing' (virtual particles), which is explained as ex nihilo creation and thereafter annihilation of particles, thus we 'know' that things just pop out of nothingness all the time, ergo there is no use for God. Now, I know right away that a vacuum is not a vacuum, but has zero-point energy. But just to be sure, are virtual particles truly popping in and out of 'nothing'? And how would that be proven anyway, rather than the particles simply coming from/leaving to 'another place'?

3) What do you think of simulation arguments a la Nick Bostrom, etc? Do they offer anything of use in considering/discussing God? It seems to me that the simulation hypothesis potentially results in at once bolstering the reasonableness of 'miracles', while at the same time defanging materialism as an argument against God.

4) Do you think an eternal universe would be evidence against God? I seem to recall Aquinas at the time worked under the assumption that the universe was eternal, but that it was still dependent on God.

I will try to answer your questions as best I can, but there are entire courses on these topics! So this will be brief, but I hope enlightening.

1) QM vs Materialism
Materialism has its origin in ancient Greece, ~500BC as a challenge to Aristotle and Plato. There were three principle tenets of materialism (see also my lecture notes at http://rbsp.info/rbs/RbS/HTML/Cosmo03/aug_paper.html. They are also available on the website in RealMedia lectures if you can stand to watch a talking head for 40 minutes.) Those principles were:
  a) nothing comes from nothing
  b) atoms are point-like particles that cannot be further subdivided, nor destroyed and make up everthing there is,
  c) atoms are uninfluenced by external (god-like) forces.
This is not my summary, but that of Titus Lucretius Carus who lived in 50BC and wrote a long poem in Latin, "De Rerum Natura" explaining Epicurean (and Democritus) materialism. I sum up those three points by saying materialism eliminates the gods by declaring atoms have, "No beginning, No ending, and No Messing Around Inbetween."

QM contradicts every one of those tenets.
(a) E=mc^2 says that we can make particles out of nothing any time we want.
(b) Likewise we can destroy particles too. Nuclear bombs do it all the time.
(c) QM replaces the point-like particle with a spread-out wave, so spread out it can fill the galaxy. So there are lots of ways to influence particles with "god-like" forces. Einstein actually wrote this down as a refutation of QM in his famous 1935 EPR paper "Can a QM description of reality be considered complete?"

So yes, QM refutes classical materialism. Of course, there are modified versions, but the theory that existed from 500BC to 1930 is toast.

2) Yes, there are virtual particles. What this *means* is quite another thing. Yes, we believe the math of QM, what it *means* has been debated for 80 years. We detect the existence of virtual particles by their influence on macroscopic experiments that we can measure. We are quite unable to "see" them directly. Now it may turn out that there are other explanations for our experiments, and overnight people would be ready to call them virtual "waves" instead, the point is that they are virtual so they allow calculations of other physical quantities "as if they were there".
 
One experiment is to take two polished metal plates and bring them close to each other. Suddenly there is this attraction between the plates that can be measured as a 1/d^5 effect, called the Casimir force. This force can be calculated by assuming that there are virtual particles popping in and out between the two plates, and that when the plates get close to each other they interact with the particles. On the other hand, I've known of at least two nano-machine attempts to manufacture a microchip motor to make use of this force, and both have failed. (You might google "Casimir force motor" and see all the speculation)

Also, I know a physicist, Richard Lieu, who looked at starlight and even galaxies from Hubble Space Telescope, and checked to see if the light was "coherent". According to his calculations, all those virtual particles should have scattered the starlight and made it incoherent. It was coherent, and he couldn't find any effect from virtual particles.   So in my mind, there are several serious problems with the present "virtual particle" model, despite its success by Richard Feynman and others to explain several scaling laws and QM experiments. We should be careful of ascribing too much reality to these virtual things, it may turn out to just be a math trick.

As for the fact of their existence disproving God, it's a bit like the schoolboy argument that "can God make a rock bigger than he can lift?", and whatever you answer, the reply comes back, "then there's something God can't do!" with the corollary, "So I don't have to believe in a weak God anyway."

No matter what the result of experiment shows, such people will find it a reason to disbelieve in God. But belief is not a forced decision, belief is not like an experiment. Jesus said it best: "Unbelief is sin." Belief is a moral and ethical choice about what is our ultimate reality. Like virtual particles, there are lots of ways to explain phenomena that have nothing to do with ultimate reality.

3) I'm not familiar with Nick Bostrom's paper, though it was easy to Google. The abstract looks like it is setting up a false dichotomy: "do you go out or at night? Do you walk to school or carry your lunch?" One can construct many such false dichotomies, but they don't advance knowledge much. They are a favorite with philosophers who tend to want to show off their technique, but aren't too interested in absolute questions like the nature of God and the meaning of man. Socrates despised them, calling them Sophists, and my cursory reading of Bostrom's abstract gives me that impression.  There is one trick that sophists love, but which I take to be characteristic of God-like things, and that is recursion. Bostrom appears to be using recursion in his argument, and if so, he may have stumbled on the one sure road to belief. I'd have to read the paper and see.

4) An eternal universe is denied by Jewish, Christian and Moslem views of a Creator God. So it is incompatible with most major monotheistic views. That is because the divine character of *eternal* makes it compete with God. This is not a problem for pantheism and polytheism, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. Aristotle was not a monotheist, nor Plato, having lived 400 years before Christ, 1000 years before Mohammed, and probably not aware of Judaism (though my suspicion is that after the fall of Jerusalem in 550BC, Jewish thought had arrived in Greece and precipitated Socrates.)

Thank you for the very complete answers! One problem I've had with materialism as a topic is that it seems as if there's a shell-game going on on a popular level. I often read about how materialism has been proven correct in every way for the past several hundred years - then I turn around and read Paul Davies, or Henry Stapp, and they insist that not only has this not been the case, but materialism was dealt what amounted to a death-blow by QM developments. In Stapp's case, he argues that this is known but purposefully ignored in essence. Other scientists have an apparent attitude of 'Okay, QM has undermined something philosophically important, but we have to downplay this otherwise the public will come to bad conclusions or be suckered by guys like Deepak Chopra.' So for someone lacking scientific expertise like me, it gets confusing.

The reason I bring up Nick Bostrom's simulation concept is out of a pet philosophical interest that he doesn't get into, though his thought on the subject is interesting in its own right. One common complaint I've heard about God/religion is that such a belief usually entails the miraculous. But miracles (even God, some insist) are 'magic', they're inexplicable, they violate nature. While I avoid that false dichotomy of 'Did God do it or nature?', I think there's a potentially powerful reply to the objection, and possibly an argument against even updated materialism or naturalism as well, insofar as those philosophies are marshalled to deny God. I put it this way: If I make a computer simulation of a natural world and then interact with that simulation, did my interaction amount to a supernatural act? It doesn't seem like there's any right answer to that question for mats/nats, since the programmer-computer relationship seems like it could be, however loosely, analogous to a God-universe relationship.

As for the eternality of the universe, one thought of mine has been that if the universe is eternal, atheism seems like the least-likely-to-be-correct metaphysical view. My reasoning is that eternality of that type not only demands that matter/energy infinitely precedes our own existence, but minds as well, and minds vastly more powerful than our own at that (Since eternity would make it no longer reasonable to ask 'What came first, matter or mind?' - This before getting into, again, simulation theories.) In that case, what are the odds we find ourselves in the state we're in, in the universe we're in, utterly unintended, unpurposed, and unforeseen on all levels? I don't think those odds can be calculated, but it seems to me that the moment eternality is accepted in principle, everything falls apart for the atheist case.

I apologize if all of this seems rather unorthodox. I throw my lot in with christianity (I'm a Byzantine Catholic by birth and choice, though I love reading the insights of religious across the spectrum), but like Locke and Thomas More, atheism is my greatest concern, for the same reasons both viewed it in a very particular light.

When you call yourself a Byzantine Catholic, I would assume you are using byzantine in the generic sense, and not in the sense of Eastern Orthodox. In other words, I can parse that byzantine Catholic, or Byzantine catholic, and I assume it is the former. One day the Patriarch of Constantinople will permit communion to Roman Catholics and then we can all be Byzantine Catholics, but alas, that day has not yet come.

The shell game of titles and names is more pervasive than you think.Today in lecture, the professor made a Kantian distinction between phenomenal and noumenal, and then turned around and filled it with Barthian categories which were the exact opposite of Kant! Last week, a writer on my private blog had made such a distinction about rationalism, and then put Aristotle in the non-rational camp! So categories are just about worthless because of the polemical use these categories are used for. Just number them or something, but don't give them names or you'll confuse someone for sure.

Okay, atheism. You're going to have to stop this "likely to be correct" talk, which may be scientific but not philosophical. All decisions are moral decisions. Correct or not, all I've really said when I talk that way is what I'm betting my life on. Make up your mind, get it over with, and move on to the next decision. There's no other way to live. Pascal's gamble, after all, wasn't about which view was more correct, but the consequences of choosing badly. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there aren't any agnostics either. An agnostic is just an atheist who thinks he has time to smoke a cigarette.

On Miracles. Hume has poisoned the discussion of miracles for 200 years. A miracle is NOT something which violates the laws of nature. If you are a farmer in a drought and you pray for rain and it rains, is it a miracle? Of course. Did it violate any laws of nature? No. So why is it a miracle? Because you prayed for it. Miracles are not just unlikely events, they are also untimely events. Events occur not just in space, but in time. Dembski points this out all the time in his books. If I shoot an arrow at a barn, and then paint a bullseye around it, does that make me an excellent archer? No. But if I paint the bullseye and then shoot the arrow in the middle, Yes. The order matters, because one is specified in time, the other not.

Once we are looking for time-miracles as well as space-miracles, we begin to see them everywhere. The parking spot that opens up, the letter from a friend, the phone call when you were feeling down. Assume all these things in life are uncorrelated, and then ask what the probabilities for the events to occur in this sequence at this moment. With a little observation, you will see that an entire day is filled with small miracles. Keep this up for a month and your entire life will be filled with gratitude to the God of improbable miracles.

For the alternative is equally devastating. If we say that all these improbable events "had to happen", or were "chance events", then we are at the whim of some mysteriously malevolent force that mischievously makes every improbable event probable, every meaningful event unmeaningful, every small blessing into a curse. We become despondent, callous, ungrateful, depressed. Read Jacques Monod for an example of such a man.

You will notice in my two examples, that we find what we are looking for. This is called recursion. And your programmer-computer relation is one of recursion. Whenever we stumble over one of these "strange loops" as Douglas Hofstadter called them 30 years ago in his book "Goedel Escher Bach", we are stumbling over evidence of God. Or what I have started calling "the holy". All of these holy things point to God. And atheism can only exist if it refuses to acknowledge miracle, refuses to acknowledge the Holy, refuses to acknowledge eternity. In fact, the list of things that atheism must ignore is so large, it is a wonder that atheists can converse at all. Which is just one of many reasons why atheism, historically speaking, has been the most unpopular, most persecuted religion in the past 3000 years.

First, the confusion was my fault. Byzantine-rite Catholic is what I meant. So basically a historical mesh between the eastern orthodox and roman catholics, but under the Pope.

I understand what you mean about shell-games - I see that quite a lot. Oddly enough I see it with Intelligent Design critics (Mind you, I'm on the fence about ID, but I have tremendous sympathies for them philosophically and in many ways intellectually.) Where on the one hand it's argued that questions of design go beyond science, therefore ID is not science. But on the other hand, detecting the lack of design - 'God wasn't involved in this' - gets different treatment. Somehow many people, even many scientists, contend THAT kind of identification is scientific. In other words, design is only a scientific question if your results are negative.

As for atheism, again, I understand what you mean - at least I think so. There's a certain point at which you have to make a decision, and I've found that point isn't "when I have examined all the evidence and weighed all the possibilities and figured out the most likely answer" - because that never ends. Just today on UD a link was posted with Roger Penrose talking about a cyclic universe and how theologians will have to interact with this (Which I do not understand - Are cyclic universes/big bounce proven now? The article implies a fusion between both ex nihilo creation and cyclic universes, which sounds like 'Everything burst out of nothing, but it's been cycling for who knows how long') For awhile now I've committed myself to a belief in God, such that if Christianity were ever somehow decisively disproved, at most I'd become a deist or a convert to another faith. Both due to what I know and feel about the world (namely, the essential component of mind as a fundamental constituent of reality) and a modified version of Pascal's wager (I think Pascal was on to something big, yet at the same time misunderstood.)

At the same time, I think many atheists, certainly many irreligious, don't really grasp both what is entailed by their worldview (You give Monod as an example - William Lane Craig gave a great presentation about this, primarily referring to Sartre and Nietzche), or what is made possible/probable/likely by accepting their metaphysics with regards to the universe. My personal experience is that many who outwardly commit to atheism (specifically atheist materialism) inwardly do not - hence Dawkins, when cornered, admits that he doesn't think free will exists, but it's impossible to live consistently with such a belief so he just acts inconsistently and doesn't question it. Or the yelling about how atheists can be just as moral as theists, then when it's asked "What is moral? Where does morality come from?" there's either awkward spin or admitting that, well, morality doesn't REALLY exist, it's just a question of acting according to norms. Even the New Atheists and their fans typically talk about progress as if it were a real thing, an objective measure and procession towards the truly/undeniably better or best - but that just won't stand up while leaving the philosophy itself intact.

I agree about miracles, certainly the concept of time-miracles. I think modern technology has lent credence to space-miracles as well, more than was previously thought possible. (No, I'm not suggesting that God is a program, just that the model of divine interaction may be analogous to such.) It also has the advantage of working with a concept most people are intimately familiar with nowadays. But yes, if I pray for rain in a drought, and lo and behold, it rains.. the miracle does not suddenly become unmiraculous just because there was a freak yet observable climate fluctuation, ie, 'you can explain why it rained there in physical terms'.

I actually read through GEB when I was still in high school, though clearly I didn't grasp all of what they discussed - I remember Achilles, Mr Tortoise, the ants, etc. I'm still trying to grasp what you mean about recursion, but hopefully I'll get that down before long.