Heisenberg’s Uncertainty

The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle states that for a given subatomic particle, one may know its location or one may know its velocity, but one cannot know both at the same time. While this may seem ridiculous on a macroscopic level (certainly we know both where our car is and how fast it is going at the same time), on the subatomic level, it quite clearly doesn’t obtain. It is a mathematical certainty, as clear and unabiguous as 2 plus 2 equals 4. Even God can’t make it equal 5, and likewise, even God can’t know the location and velocity of subatomic particles. It would be as absurd and contradictory as asking him to make a square circle.

We can know that given a block of uranium 238,in 4.5 billion years (4,500,000,000) half of it will decay to thorium 234 and finally to lead 206. However, we cannot ever say if a given, individual atom will decay in that time.

Encyclopedia Britannica (vol. 5, p. 502, 1984):

It is impossible to predict the instant when any given radioactive atom will disintegrate. But, when enough radioactive atoms are placed together, observation shows that the number of disintegrations per unit time is proportional to the number of radioactive atoms present. The situation is analogous to the death rate among the human population insured by an insurance company. Although it is impossible to predict when a given policy holder will die, the company can count on paying off a certain fraction of beneficiaries every month.

One can know with certainty that in a million flips of a coin, fifty percent of the time, it will come up heads, and fifty percent of the time it will come up tails. But one can never know with any degree of certainty, whether a particular flip will be one or the other. Evil may simply be an inevitable characteristic of any universe, a sort of quantum indeterminancy that cannot be eliminated by any normal means.
Modern physics has been described as “stranger than science fiction”, as the following quotation from Gary Zukov’s now somewhat dated book, The Dancing Wu-Li Masters:

According to the Many World’s theory, whenever a choice is made in the universe between one possible event and another, the universe splits into different branches.

In our hypothetical experiment we decided to throw the switch into the “up” position. When the experiment was performed with the switch in the “up” position it gave us a definite result (a certain number of clicks in each area). However, according to the Many Worlds theory, at the moment that we threw the switch up, the universe split into two branches. In one branch, the experiment was performed with the switch in the “up” position. In the other branch, the experiment was performed with the switch in the “down” position. Who performed the experiment in the second branch? There is a different edition of us in each of the different branches of the universe! Each edition of us is convinced that OUR branch of the universe is the entirety of reality….

…we are led to the Many Worlds theory in which the world continuously is splitting into separate and mutually inaccessible branches, each of which contains different editions of the same actors performing different acts at the same time on different stages which somehow are located in the same place. (The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics. New York: William Morrow and Co, Inc. 1979, pp. 319 and 321)

Not only is this very weird to think about, it could allow for a very peculiar explanation for who the angels and the demons are.

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About R.P. Nettelhorst

I'm married with three daughters. I live in southern California and I'm the interim pastor at Quartz Hill Community Church. I have written several books. I spent a couple of summers while I was in college working on a kibbutz in Israel. In 2004, I was a volunteer with the Ansari X-Prize at the winning launches of SpaceShipOne. Member of Society of Biblical Literature, American Academy of Religion, and The Authors Guild
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