The Confessing Seventh-day Adventist

According to the celebrated Nobel laureate, Richard P. Feynman, all mainstream physicists believe that the quantum mechanical view of the world will be with us forever and that the outcome to a given circumstance is impossible to predict. Quantum physicists are persuaded by extraordinarily compelling scientific evidence that the only thing that can be predicted is the probability of different events.

It isn't our ignorance of Nature that is questioned. It is the nature of Nature to act unpredictably:

We have implied that in our experimental arrangement (or even in the best possible one) it would be impossible to predict exactly what would happen. We can only predict the odds! This would mean, if it were true, that physics has given up on the problem of trying to predict exactly what will happen in a definite circumstance. Yes! physics has given up. We do not know how to predict what would happen in a given circumstance, and we believe now that it is impossible—that the only thing that can be predicted is the probability of different events. It must be recognized that this is a retrenchment in our earlier ideal of understanding nature. It may be a backward step but no one has found a way to avoid it.
No one has figured a way out of this puzzle. So at the present time we must limit ourselves to computing probabilities. We say "at the present time," but we suspect very strongly that it is something that will be with us forever—that it is impossible to beat that puzzle—that this is the way nature really is. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 3, pp. 1-10,1-11.

Feynman has summed up the essence of quantum mechanics in surprisingly simple terms:

A philosopher once said, "It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results." Well they don't! —Richard P. Feynman (1965)

Here again is Richard P. Feynman saying unmistakably that the essential nature of physical law is entirely probabilistic:

Philosophers have said that if the same circumstances don't always produce the same results, predictions are impossible and science will collapse. Here is a circumstance—identical photons are always coming down in the same direction to the piece of glass—that produces different results. We cannot predict whether a given photon will arrive at A or B. All we can predict is that out of 100 photons that come down, an average of 4 will be reflected by the front surface. Does this mean that physics, a science of great exactitude, has been reduced to calculating only the probability of an event, and not predicting exactly what will happen? Yes. That's a retreat, but that's the way it is: Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed. — Richard P. Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), 19.

You can find truly startling illustrations of quantum mechanics in The Foundation of Molecular and Quantum Creationism.

It appears that an inescapable conclusion to be drawn from mainstream quantum theory is that methodological naturalism isn't science.

http://www.everythingimportant.org/video/Richard_Feynman_naturalism.flv

Newton begat physics, and physics begat Lagrangian mechanics and Lagrangian mechanics begat Hamiltonian mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics begat quantum mechanics. Then quantum mechanics repudiated methodological naturalism.

Einstein summed up his feelings about quantum mechanics in the phrase, "Gott wurfelt nicht!" (God does not play dice)! Stephen Hawking replies, "But all the evidence indicates that God is an inveterate gambler and that He throws the dice on every possible occasion" (Black Holes and Baby Universes, p. 70). My response to Einstein's metaphysics used to be "God not only plays dice with the universe, —He cheats." I now believe that the quintessence of modern physics is best expressed in the New Living Translation of Proverbs 16:33. "We may throw the dice, but the LORD determines how they fall."

Science as practiced today is methodologically naturalistic: it explains the natural world using only natural causes. —RationalWiki

That comment on science clearly denies the reality of the foundations of quantum theory and is therefore obviously false.

Explanations of observable effects are considered to be practical and useful only when they hypothesize natural causes (i.e., specific mechanisms, not indeterminate miracles). Methodological naturalism is the principle underlying all of modern science. —Wikipedia

I agree that the principle called methodological naturalism is popular among the vast majority of scientists but the belief that methodological naturalism underlies quantum physics is extraordinarily naïve.

How is it possible for quantum events to happen for no reason whatsoever?

Jay W. Richards wrote:Much has been written on the question of whether intelligent design is good science, or even whether it qualifies as science at all. In fact, many ID critics argue that some or another definition of the word “science” disqualifies the discussion on intelligent design before it ever gets started. They claim that science must adhere to a principle so-called “methodological naturalism.” According to this tidy dictum, scientists can believe whatever they want in their personal lives, but they must appeal only to purposeless causes when explaining nature. That means that anyone who dares speak of purpose or design within science or when discussing scientific evidence ceases to be a scientist. The background assumption of this claim is usually the belief that intelligent agency is “supernatural” and so unscientific (that does not follow, but I won’t pursue the point here.)

I must confess that I find this argument not only unpersuasive, but also a diversionary cul-de-sac. After all, the universe is under no obligation to conform to anyone’s definition of science. What everyone wants to know is if there is evidence of design in nature, which is presumably the object of scientific study. Natural science is committed to finding out what nature is like. Why would anyone think we can do that with a semantic debate about the meaning of a word?

Jay,

Do you have any scientific fact to justify your claim that "What everyone wants to know is if there is evidence of design in nature"? The only people that I can imagine wanting to search for evidence of design in nature already believe in the Designer. As a Christian, I believe that evidence of design in nature is obvious for every theist and that no design argument would satisfy or interest more than a few atheists.

Intelligent Design is defined as "the theory that life, or the universe, cannot have arisen by chance and was designed and created by some intelligent entity." Such a theory is not a scientific theory for one exceptional reason. In science, a scientific theory refers to a body of well-developed scientific knowledge such as probability theory, group theory, or the theory of relativity. Intelligent Design has no results or valid arguments. But don't be disheartened. Your critics that claim that science must adhere to “methodological naturalism” are scientifically naive and incorrect.

All mainstream quantum physicists believe that no deterministic theory could possibly exist that might account for the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. In effect, it isn't our ignorance of nature that forces us to settle for probabilistic laws of physics. Rather, it is the nature of nature to act unpredictably. Supposedly, everything happens for no reason whatsoever and the only certainties are averages that may be computed from fixed but ultimately probabilistic laws. My argument then is that the fundamental laws of nature fit a supernatural paradigm that is dramatically opposite to what methodological naturalism asserts.

I believe that quantum theory has a straightforward Biblical interpretation. I'm not able to demystify the entire subject but I can summarize all the laws of physics with a simple illustration:

In the interest of maintaining a consistent reality, imagine that God had decided that all the laws of physics were to be entirely probabilistic and had agreed to never disobey His fixed set of rules. These are the equations of His quantum mechanics and the law of large numbers. In other words, God is continually exercising control over all the particles of light and matter and does whatever He wants with them (Colossians 1:17, Acts 17:28) but we can never catch Him cheating at the game of physics or at any other game, such as dice. He is always statistically consistent with the mathematically determined outcome of the laws of nature and the odds are always in His favor. As I said, this interpretation is entirely Biblical. Scripture says, "We may throw the dice, but the LORD determines how they fall." (New Living Translation of Proverbs 16:33).

Prominent physicists appreciate this theological point of view.

Freeman Dyson wrote:The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind … Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. [1]

Freeman Dyson is a Professor Emeritus of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

See Richard Feynman: The Messenger Series, Lecture 6: Probability and Uncertainty – The Quantum Mechanical View of Nature.

Thanks for the link. Finally I have found what I was looking for. That helped me a lot.

Spontaneous quantum creationism is no longer an esoteric concept that is only appreciated and taught by mathematical physicists. The concept is now acknowledged to be real science in the popular culture.