LucidLunatic

Bishop,

I am an atheist/agnostic who was raised Episcopal, and learned canonical Greek to read the New Testament in the original language many years ago. When I was considering my own faith, I could not get passed the fact that the central text of Christianity, the New Testament, was written by man. At the stage of translation, I can see how some meanings were changed or obscured. Of the many gospels, including those unknown and now apocryphal, those that were chosen for inclusion were chosen by men with political goals at the Councils of Nicea and Rome.

While this does not prove or disprove the existence of God, nor the truth of the scripture, it is indicative of the fact that everything of religion that we learn and know has first passed through the hands of people. According to scripture, these people have free will, experience temptation, and so on. Thus, for me, an act of great faith in humanity would be necessary to believe in the accuracy any of the materials or teachings associated with the church presented as facts of the distant past.

Is this something that you have worked through? I would be interested in how you resolve the acts of man in assembling the articles of faith for your own practice.

Thank you for your thoughts.

The difference, for me, with many other matters we have an ability to confirm or disprove what we are told. I have myself had the experience of reading a paper from another physicist, going into the lab, reproducing their steps and finding a different result. When I am fortunate, I can determine the cause of the discrepancy. I cannot do this to affirm the original source of divine revelation. If I could, no faith would be required on these counts.

I suppose my failing is that I wish faith in the divine were only required to determine if it were worthy of following, much as it is for any mortal leader, not for determining provenance and existence. Thank you, Bishop.

As a physicist (and atheist), who knows relatively little of modern neuroscience: there is still a great deal we don't understand about the brain. Some of this boils down to the chemical and electrical impulses within the brain which, at a very low level, are governed by quantum mechanics, which are non-deterministic. Even without that, it is a finely balanced, very intricate system, aspects of which are chaotic. This means that while it IS deterministic, you can get widely varied outcomes based on small differences in the starting parameters... which are in essence impossible to measure, and any measurement could change them.

So while decisions can absolutely be influenced by chemical stimuli, there is room for them to not be pre-determined. Scientifically, I cannot say that free will is assured; but it is possible.

What real world applications for Quantum Computing do you think are likely in the next 5-10 years?

Do you believe there is an upper limit on the number of qubits we will be able to meaningfully integrate into a single processor? (At least one mathematician thinks that noise will make a large number impossible: https://www.quantamagazine.org/gil-kalais-argument-against-quantum-computers-20180207/)