Reviews by Hubie Goode: Quantum Physics Killed Karl Marx

Quantum Physics
Killed Karl Marx
(Part 2)


So let’s continue today with the second part of this blog post on Karl Marx and materialism. Materialism offers no explanation whatsoever for the fact that each one of us is aware of our own existence. Due to this consciousness, we are also aware of the passage of time. This is one of the most fundamental aspects of our existence. Dead matter, rocks & bookcases and Dodge Vipers know nothing about the passage of time. Majestic sunsets, beautiful music and tender love are the exclusive providence of human life. To assert that nonliving particles bounced themselves into awareness, is a bit much to believe.

If human life came from a magical distribution of physical matter, then the laws that govern physical matter would logically rule us also. All laws governing physical matter require initial conditions for them to take place.

For example, a bullet fired from the horizon of the Earth, follows a parabolic path, not a straight line. How high the bullet will go and where it will land is determined by the angle at which the rifle is held, and its muzzle velocity at the time it is fired. These initial conditions are specified by intelligence, not by dead physical matter. The angle at which the rifle is held and the amount of gun powder used are all decisions made by an intelligent being. These decisions are not mandated by quantum laws governing physical matter. Therefore, the ability to make a conscious choice in order to effect an outcome and the involuntary unfolding of physical matter are separate and distinct ideas.

Recently I read an article in Discover magazine where a known scientist was trying to convince us that evolution gave us everything we are, even our personalities. However, the presupposition that physical matter produces all that we see and are fails in the most profound way, for it ignores the scientific law that constrains physical matter from systematically generating information. This doesn’t work for intelligence though.

The New Generalized Second Law of Thermodynamics imposes fundamental limits on the information producing capacity of nature. In effect, it castrates nature from being able to produce information. Now, taking that in to effect, how can we explain the beginning of the universe, living cells, and mankind himself? Understand that matter and its motion are characterized by random activity that is incompatible with irreversible evolutive processes. In and of itself, this does not necessarily discount the evolutive hypothesis, but it does demand a source for the information contained in the blueprint that guides it. The New Generalized Second Law disqualifies matter as information’s source because it mandates that nature loses instead of gains information. Dust has less information than a human body and yet all human beings end up as dust, or as a representation of less information than they were at their inception. If not, then nature is a perpetual motion machine. But does that happen? Do we go round and round in circles from dust to body to dust to body to dust to body? No, that doesn’t happen.

Theism, however, suffers no such constraint because it introduces the element of intelligence, which we KNOW produces information.

The belief that reality is matter and its motion has a basic flaw. It forces a human being to fundamentally consist of a special arrangement of subatomic particles and their motion. (Particles that are smaller than the atom are called subatomic particles. The three main subatomic particles that form an atom are protons, neutrons, and electrons. The center of the atom is called the nucleus.) But the quantum laws that describe the location of these particles tell us that in the absence of an observer a special arrangement is not possible, due to the fact that they are not confined to any specific place. Instead, they are “smeared” throughout space. It is therefore ridiculous to imagine mankind as a magical distribution of subatomic entities because to do so requires that their material substance be located in specified regions of space. To break it down: Physical matter must be localized in order to form a human body, then the body must preexist in order to localize the physical matter. Confusing?

Okay, consider a large lawn with green grass extending in all directions. A boy cuts the grass and rakes it all into one corner of the lot. Before the lawn was cut, the grass was “smeared” across the whole lawn. In the absence of an observer this is how physical matter behaves; like grass on a lawn, it is spread out throughout space. But the act of an intelligence observing the physical matter is like the boy who cuts and then rakes the grass into a pile. Observing physical matter brings it together in a pile that is confined to one region of space.

Usually, we call this heap a particle. If we have a large portion of them, their location and velocity in space is called a distribution, a magical arrangement of locations and velocities of particles. But, as we have seen, man must first exist in order to bring the magical arrangement together that is alleged to produce man. Chicken or the egg? We need man to produce man. Since not only is man intelligence, he doesn’t just pop into existence without the required honeymoon night.

To say that the chaotic motion of lifeless particles eventually endowed itself with a living awareness of its own existence is to suggest the logically impossible. The chicken is needed to produce the egg, but the egg cannot produce the chicken that created it, and yet that is what must happen with the idea of life being an accident of matter, since matter is limited to its own information.

So how do we get out of this never ending cycle of impossibility? Well, there must be a point of origin, a Supreme Observer. Then, out of all the ways that matter, he could produce exactly what was needed in the right distribution to produce our world. In effect he is the lawn care guy who places all the grass in the right place. Left to its own devices, grass grows everywhere, it doesn’t cut itself into any special arrangement. In fact it tends to go where it finds the least resistance from outside sources. You never see high grass going too deep into a river, all the way to the bottom. It has no will of its own, only a blue print for performance.

Likewise, physical matter smears itself throughout space. Although he is unseen, the special arrangements of subatomic particles bear witness to a higher order of intelligence, in the same way piles of grass attest to the gardener who arranged them.

New insights into the nature of reality from Quantum Physics show that everything in the world that we commonly regard as physical or material must obey physical laws. This includes everything that we know to be real. Everything is a quantum object because it must obey quantum laws.

However, a second category of objects does not obey quantum laws. Instead, they harmonize with the system of laws that were believed to describe reality roughly before the turn of the last century (1900). These are called classical objects. A classical object would be something you would call a spirit.

This is a big discovery because it indicates that reality consists of two substances not just one. The correct view of our reality is not just matter and its motion, but observers and intelligence coexisting as separate components of a twofold system. Scientifically speaking, the simplest conclusion forced upon us by quantum laws is that the joint system of an observer and physical matter cannot be described by a wave function after they interact; instead they comprise a mixture. This new insight is the kiss of death to the materialistic philosophy and to dialectical materialism.

Karl Marx was wrong.

Reality is more than physical matter. Quantum Physics is teaching us that there really is something beyond what we experience physically. We love, we fear, we experience emotions and also the color green all because we are spirit and body. (Although many of you may say soul and body, and I understand why you would make that distinction, no arguments from me.)

Science is actually proving Biblical truths, it’s that simple. I have often said that science is the revelation of God not the refutation, and astrophysicist Johannes Kepler would have agreed with me. You don’t hear too much about him because he was Christian, unlike Issac Newton, his contemporary. And even in their day Newton worked hard at ignoring Kepler despite the fact that they were both quite brilliant on similar subjects.

The Bible teaches that the world had a beginning, and now science agrees. It teaches that the world came into existence from nothing. There is now an accepted cosmological theory which echoes this assertion. It teaches that mankind is more than just his body. Quantum laws show that the observer is indeed separate and apart from the objects he observes.

According to the First Law, the observer lives within a universe that did not arise on its own accord. Nature is not a magician that can make things appear out of thin air. (I do realize that most magician performance is all engineering and not a speck of “magic”.) Natural processes are not burps that form other worlds. Nature cannot create something out of nothing. But things DO exist. Since natural processes do not pop things into existence from nothing, the logical and obvious answer is that some UNNATURAL process did this.

For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that there is indeed some obscure natural process that of its own accord, produces an unlimited number of universes by means of quantum fluctuations. Let’s be fair and allow these fluctuations to write every conceivable permutation of physical matter. However, this process is still governed by quantum laws - these laws state that our own universe cannot come into existence unless we are present to witness it. (Our universe is that distribution of physical matter whose interactions we affirm as coherent under a pattern of logical relations in our mind that align with the pattern of physical laws we discover through measurement. We can’t build a robot that discovers a reality other than the one we program it to see. We can’t see colors outside of the known color spectrum even though they may indeed exist.)

Since observers are classical objects (soul, spirit), human intelligence is not subject to quantum laws. How then can we be the result of a quantum fluctuation that such laws brought into being?

Keep in mind that thought processes supersede the physical world, not the other way around. This is due to consciousness being the primary element. In principle, the external world can be denied, but it is impossible to deny consciousness. I think, therefore I must be. To do so is to deny the very ground your being stands on. To doubt this, is to prove the reality of consciousness. I know this sounds like an old Woody Allen movie, but to deny consciousness is to consciously deny your own denial.... consciously. (ah-hem)