Not My God

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At times, arguments will be placed against God that describe Him in such a way that makes Him not the God of the Bible. I might describe it as a "straw man" argument, though that means someone is "intentionally misrepresenting" a position. I don't think that's the case, but let me give some examples of arguments I've heard against God and let's talk about why they wouldn't match the God I know and love.

"Creatio Ex Nihilo" Not Possible?

The Bible explains that God created the heavens and the world with His word (Psalm 33:6, Hebrews 11:3). This would be creating something without materials (a material cause). The argument against this is:

  • Nothing comes from nothing. The Roman philosopher Lucretius said, "if things were created out of nothing, any breed could be born from another; nothing would require a seed. People could pop out of the sea."
  • Everything we observe being made in the universe comes from some type of material. This is true in the laboratory as well as the big wide world.

An argument against this is that the Christian is not arguing for things to be able to pop into existence at any time. There is the requirement that God must be involved for that to happen. So people will not pop out of the sea unless God wills it. By placing the requirement that God must obey the laws of the universe when things are created, you are restricting my God and His power. You are defining a god who is not able to do what my God can do.

When Jesus fed the five thousand with five loaves and two fish, He was able to do so by creating "matter" out of nothing to provide enough food for everyone (Matthew 14:19-20). He didn't need to pull matter from somewhere else in the universe and convert it into a fish.

Absolute Reference Frame Not Possible?

Another argument placed against God is: if He is all knowing, or omniscient (Psalm 147:5, Romans 11:33), and He is everywhere, or omnipresent (Jeremiah 23:24, Psalm 139:7-10), then that would mean He has an Absolute Frame of Reference, and General Relativity states that is not possible.

In General Relativity, a reference frame is defined by where we are measuring from. Time can pass differently for people depending on their frame of reference. A popular example of this is the person sitting at a train station who witnesses two lightning strikes happening simultaneously: one at the front of the train and one at the back. A person sitting on the train as it moves would see the front lightning strike first, and then see the back. This is due to the fact that the lightning striking the back would need to "catch up" to the person moving with the train in order for them to detect it, assuming they sat in the middle.

So I would ask this person placing the argument against God: where is God measuring from for His frame of reference? What is His point of origin when the lightning strikes the train? Could it not be that God has knowledge of what the lightning will look like to anyone sitting on the train station as well as on the train itself? God should not be limited to one interpretation of when the lightning struck. He would know all reference frames at all points in the universe for when the lightning struck the train!

Uncertainty Principle and Omniscience Not Possible?

Double-slit

A final argument I will list for this page is: if God is all knowing, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would make that impossible.

To explain this one, I want to explain some quantum stuff first because it's not my field, and if I state it then you can check my work and make sure I know what I'm talking about. I need to summarize with you the Double-slit experiment and Superposition. Then we'll get to the Uncertainty Principle.

With quantum mechanics, we can see that a quantum object, such as a photon, is a particle and a wave with the double-slit experiment. What you do is take a gun firing photons, and point this at a screen that has two slits in it. Then you place another screen behind this one. If the photons move as particles, then you would expect to see two images shaped like the slits on the screen in the back. But we don't see this. Instead we see an interference pattern, which is something you would only see from things moving as a wave. So maybe the particles are interfering with each other as they move through the slits. So they reduce the gun to firing one photon at a time to see the result. But the big surprise here is that the interference pattern is still there, if we fire one photon at a time, multiple times over. So we can conclude that the photon is moving through one slit, or the other one, or none at all, or both at the same time!

This is called the Superposition: all available paths the photon can take are possible until the photon contacts the screen. Or rather, "until it is measured". What they then tried to do is place a measuring apparatus next to each of the two slits to see which one the photon was moving through (Nice video of this). When they did this, the photon went back to behaving like a particle, only hitting the screen behind in the shape of the slits, not in an interference pattern.

Uncertainty Momentum 1

So then we get to the Uncertainty Principle, which states that you cannot measure a quantum object and know both its position and its velocity at the same time. You can kind of see this result by using another experiment with only a single slit. If you fired a laser through a slit and saw an image on the screen behind it, you would see a narrow beam. As you closed the slit smaller and smaller, limiting the position the photons could be at, the laser on the screen would suddenly spread out, due to the velocity going into an unknown state. In other words, as our certainty of where the photon was in position went up, the uncertainty of the velocity would go down (unless it's diffraction?). In the same way, if we opened the slit, the laser would hit the screen right in front of it. The velocity would stay consistent to the velocity it had when fired from the laser, but the position would not be as well known, because our slit was wider.

This is a physical representation of the Uncertainty Principle, but the same impossibility of knowing position and velocity exists in theory as well. What we saw when we checked to see which slit the photon was going through in the double-slit experiment, where the act of checking its position disturbed the photon to make it behave like a particle, this is called the Observer Effect. This is not related to the Uncertainty Principle at all, though many assume this is what causes the photon to be unable to be calculated, both its position and velocity. If you calculate its position, then you've disturbed it, and so its velocity would change, right? However, you can see that when we forced the laser to go through a tiny slit in the single-slit experiment, the velocity still changed, even though we weren't "measuring" the photons, but we were forcing them to be in a particular position.

This is because all quantum objects exist in a Superposition state until they are measured. In the double-slit experiment, when the photon moved through both slits to hit the screen in the back, from the time it was fired, until the time it hit the screen, it was traveling through both slits and interfering with itself, showing that even without the Observer Effect there was uncertainty. Unfortunately this is the most I can say about this topic. I would love to talk about the conjugate variables in the Uncertainty Principle and how the math works out so you just cannot know both position and velocity, but I have no understanding of such things!

But what I will say about how this relates to God is this:

  • How do we know how God observes quantum objects? Does He need to?
  • We could just as easily state that the universe has a speed limit, which is light. Therefore God cannot be omnipresent! However people do not say this because it doesn't make sense that God would be restricted by the universe and its laws. When you talk about the Uncertainty Principle it sounds more mysterious and ominous, and so I assume people think if we can't know something even mathematically, then how could God know? However the Bible tells us that God is "upholding all things" (Hebrews 1:3). He wouldn't need to measure a quantum object to know where it was, if He was the one that put it there!

Conclusion

By saying, "God could not have created the universe because He didn't have the material", you wouldn't be describing my God of the Bible. Or saying, "God could not know every Reference Frame because either His position in space was limited or He couldn't know every possible Reference", wouldn't be describing my God. Or by saying, "God needed to observe quantum objects to know where they were", would mean you're talking about a god who is not the God of the Bible. So the next time you hear an argument against God, first check to see if they have reduced God in power and grandeur in some way. And remember, our God is awesome (Psalm 68:35), mighty (Job 36:5), great and abundant in strength (Psalm 147:5), and who provides life and joy (Psalm 16:11).