Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by questor

Someone please explain to me why we have to argue floods and dates when we try to determine whether or not the universe was created? Why do we only consider a mythical happening one one infinintesimal planet?

Forum-wide, we don’t. The idea that various religious creation stories are metaphorical rather than literal is an interesting, if centuries old, one, worthy of many threads. However, this thread is about the idea that a particular creation story could be literally, because, according to some interpretations of quantum physics, nearly anything can be true.

We’ve not yet much discussed in this thread the concept of interpretations of theories of quantum physics, as opposed to the theories themselves, in particular the many-worlds interpretation, which explains the probabilistic nature of quantum physics with the idea that everything that can happen actually does in some “alternate universe”, or world-line. According to this interpretation, in some universe other than our own, the most literal reading of the Genesis account actually happened. In another, the clearly factious one of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism happened. In another, a creation story never imagined in our universe happened.

In yet others, some past happened, then the universe spontaneously changed so that all evidence reveals that something different happened. In some “chaos” world-lines, pasts and futures are so disjoint that, for all practical purposes, causation is not a meaningful concept

In short, in some universe, any arbitrary creation story, including every completely senseless one, happened.

The MWI is well known and very controversial. One of the major objections to it is that, in it’s pure form, it’s physically irrelevant. The many world-lines are causally unconnected, which means that, by definition, they can’t interact in any way. In a sense, separate world-lines are less than imaginary, as even imaginary worlds are real in the sense that they exist as configurations of neurons and chemicals in the brains of the people imagining them. Alternate world are not even connected to our universe in this manner – there’s no causal link between them and our universe whatever.

IMHO, a similar objection applies to any sort of “quantum theory of creation”. Any arbitrary past might possibly have occurred, but the practical value of this, scientific or religious, is nothing.