11AR16-07
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Apologia Report 16:7 (1,057)
February 23, 2010
Subject: Physics reveals "nonmaterial beings act in the world"?
In this issue:
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM - British PM blames multiculturalism for deadly "homegrown Islamic terrorism"
ISLAM - profiles of "the world's largest and most influential Islamist movement"
ORIGINS - Discover magazine examines "a controversial search for God within the fractured logic of quantum physics"
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RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
"Britain: Has Multiculturalism Bred Extremism?" (no byline) -- opens: "Prime Minister David Cameron has launched a 'devastating attack' on '30 years of multiculturalism in Britain.... [Cameron said] that multiculturalism is 'fostering extremist ideology and directly contributing to homegrown Islamic terrorism.' Cameron said that in the future 'only organizations which believe in universal human rights' - including women's rights - would be eligible for British government funds. He blamed toleration of 'segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values' for planting the seeds of terrorism, and openly questioned 'why it is that so many young men in our own country get radicalized in this completely unacceptable way.'
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"Let's not forget 'that British culture rests on more than a thousand years of Christianity,' said the Mail on Sunday in an editorial. But in recent decades a 'politically correct salad of equality, diversity, and human rights' has undermined the 'collective identity' of Britons. Cameron was right to highlight the 'damaging effects' of multiculturalism, 'which has encouraged different cultures to live separate lives.' (The harmonious cultural mix currently found in the city of Leicester is briefly described as a contradictory example.)
"Schools, police, and others have 'sometimes been guilty of excusing appalling or dangerous behavior instead of confronting it. When it comes to horrid customs like genital mutilation, forced marriage, or honor killings, 'the state should never turn a blind eye to cruelty and crime out of some misguided sense of cultural sensitivity.' ... Cameron insists we need 'boundaries of acceptable behavior - cultural, social, political - to be set in line with modern liberal notions of equal rights' and applied uniformly across society. 'Who could disagree?'" The Week, Feb 18 '11, p16.
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ISLAM
"The Muslim Brotherhood" (no byline) -- profiles the international group and considers its ties to the recent uprising in Egypt. "The world's largest and most influential Islamist movement [was] founded in 1928 [and] established ... to promote traditional Sunni Islamic morals ... 'as a prelude to establishing an Islamic state' - ideally a re-established caliphate, stretching from Spain across the Middle East and Central Asia to Indonesia, to be governed according to Islamic sharia law. But today's Muslim Brotherhood is not a monolithic organization, nor does it have a rigid doctrine. While many of its older members are deeply conservative, many of the younger ones are modern and reform-minded." The Brotherhood "has thrown its support to [Egypt's] secular-opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency.
"Its leaders now renounce violence, at least publicly. ... In fact, the group's insistence on nonviolence caused Egyptian surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri to leave the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1980s and eventually join Osama bin Ladin as al Qaida's No. 2. Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that controls the Gaza Strip and strongly advocates violent struggle, began as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. But Hamas's ties to the Egyptian group are now tenuous." The Week, Feb 18 '11, p13.
Charles Levinson, in "'Brothers' in Egypt Present Two Faces," explains that "The question for many is: Which Brotherhood?" While the group has a young, more tolerant and pragmatic wing, "the more conservative, anti-Western old guard … still make up by far the bulk of the group's leadership."
"It's never entirely clear with the Brothers," says Josh Stacher, a political science professor at Kent State University who spent years in Egypt studying the organization. "It's a big group, with lots of different points of view. You can find the guy always screaming about Israel and then you got the other guys who don't care about Israel because they're too busy worrying about raising literacy rates." Wall Street Journal, Feb 15 '11, n.p. <www.j.mp/elgiWX>
On the other hand, in "The Quran Is Our Law; Jihad Is Our Way" Ayaan Hirsi Ali argues that "Anyone who believes that a truly democratic outcome in Egypt is the real goal of the Muslim Brotherhood has failed to understand - or purposefully ignored - the group's motto." Wall Street Journal, Feb 18 '11, n.p. <www.j.mp/dXPMeA>
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ORIGINS
"Physics of the Divine" by Zeeya Merali -- subtitled: "A group of scientists are embarking on a controversial search for God within the fractured logic of quantum physics."
Profiles the work and influence of "the particle physicist turned Anglican priest" John Polkinghorne and reports that "21 years ago, in a move that made many eyes roll, Polkinghorne began working to unite the two sides [of science and religion] by seeking a mechanism that would explain how God might act in the physical world. Now that work has met its day of reckoning. At a series of meetings at Oxford University last July and September, timed to celebrate Polkinghorne's th birthday, physicists and theologians presented their answers to the questions he has so relentlessly pursued. Do any physical theories allow room for God to influence human actions and events? And, more controversially, is there any concrete evidence of God's hand at work in the physical world? ...
Nobel laureate Abdus Salam "a practicing Muslim and one of the physicists to mathematically unify two of the fundamental forces of nature - electromagnetism and the weak force, which governs radioactivity - identified with Polkinghorne's quest. ...
"Reviewing the evidence at Polkinghorne's birthday conference at Oxford last July, [another physicist and theologian, Bob] Russell concluded that the best place to seek scientific support for God is in quantum mechanics, the physical laws describing the subatomic realm.
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"At the quantum scale ... equivalent events are intrinsically indeterministic: The universe simply does not contain enough information for you to predict a result. This fundamental indeterminism has been repeatedly confirmed in the lab. ...
"Russell notes that the known laws of physics do not force a quantum experiment to yield a certain result but allow a choice of outcomes. Perhaps God makes that choice, he argues, swooping in to manipulate the outcome and influence an event in the physical world. That interpretation not only allows a place for God but addresses a philosophical mystery that long bothered Einstein and many of his followers: Is there some deeper determinism that controls the outcome of seemingly random quantum events? A major criticism of Russell's view of uncertainty as God's tool for shaping the world is that quantum events usually play out only on the subatomic level. ...
"Through the machinery of chaos, a tiny change in starting conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes over time. One common metaphor for how this might work is the so-called butterfly effect, the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Los Angeles could trigger a series of events that ends with a hurricane in China. Polkinghorne sees room for God in the deep mysteries of chaos theory and the limits of prediction. ...
"Quantum physicist Antoine Suarez of the Center for Quantum Philosophy in Zurich argues that the God seekers are better off pursuing another quantum effect, entanglement. In entanglement, two particles become twinned in such a way that the measurement of one always determines the properties of the other, no matter how far apart they may be. ...
"'There is no story that can be told within the framework of spacetime that can explain how these quantum correlations keep occurring,' Suarez says.
"These results have intriguing philosophical implications, he notes, especially for the spiritually inclined. 'You could say the experiment shows that space-time does not contain all the intelligent entities acting in the world because something outside of time is coordinating the photons' results,' Suarez says. 'Physics experiments cannot demonstrate the existence of God, but this test shows that today's physics is compatible with all major religious traditions. There is strong experimental evidence for accepting that nonmaterial beings act in the world.'" Discover, Mar '11, pp49-52. <www.j.mp/dDWUzj>
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