How do Christians understand the omniscience of God in relation to the Uncertainty Principle?

The more you will learn about Quantum Mechanics, Infinity, Zero, One, Pi, and Randomness, the more you'll understand the omniscience of God in relation to the Uncertainty Principle.

Math, Science, Logic, and Reasoning are only bound to some point of certainties. And we humans are really good in these stuffs because that's what we can comprehend the most. But we cannot deny the fact that uncertainties do exist.

For example:

• Trust
• Faith
• Hope

Although these uncertainties can't be measured accurately by any tool yet they play great roles in Science.

I trust the results of this journal/paper, so I'm gonna include it in my references. I have faith that this research will get published. And I hope in some ways I will be able to contribute to Science.

These uncertainties are driving us all the time without us knowing. Which is very powerful.

For me as a Christian, that's how I understand the omniscience of God in relation to the Uncertainty Principle

Christians don't hold a personal philosophy that revolves around which way an electron spins about its axis or doesn't spin or just disappears completely.

If monks spent all day contemplating the electron instead of contemplating Christ they would by hard pressed to find any joy in their vocation.

Suppose for instance that 3 postulants at St. Therese of Lisieux priory in Chattanooga, TN were assigned the task of completing a 9 day novena starting on March 16th and ending on March 25th (The Feast of The Annunciation).

The novena was to consist of being assigned one freshly minted hydrogen atom (a New Atom, if you will) and contemplating it, mediating on its mysteries. Then they were to report their findings to the abbot.

The first postulant went to his chamber and got out his microscope, at first he didn't see anything but upon further inspection he noticed an electron that spun around in a normal and ordered way. He concluded that God made the universe and set it in motion and knows all the possible outcomes. "God must be all knowing," he said to the abbot.

The second postulant went to his chamber and got out his microscope, he saw an electron right away but it was moving in a way he didn't expect. He leaned over closer and the cross around his neck popped out of his robes and the electron popped off it and bonded to a radioactive cobalt isotope in his cross which was otherwise going to poison him and give him cancer. "God must be all merciful," he said to the abbot.

The third postulant went to his chamber and got out his microscope, he didn't see anything at all. Then his chamber exploded and he was put in the infirmary until the end of Lent. Somehow the first and second postulants managed to track down the atom and brought it to him after Holy Thursday Mass. He examined it in the microscope and he saw 3 electrons spinning in perfect harmony around the atom. "God must be all powerful," he said to the abbot and his friends.

(And that, my friend is why we call the three days before Easter the Tritium, or in some circles Triduum)

The abbot concluded that they were all of them correct, but felt there must be a deeper mystery connecting the three findings. He never was able to find out what it was but he did come to a deeper understanding of God.

I am not an expert in quantum mechanics, and this is a christian stack exchange, so we should probably not write a formal mathematical description of the problem. However, I have thought about this problem before, worrying that it was somehow incompatible with the idea of an omniscient God. But, there is no reason to worry. The reason why the uncertainty principal holds is because of purely mathematical reasons associated with the description of quantum particles. The concept of position and momentum not only cannot be measured in violation of Heisenberg's inequality, but cannot even be defined in violation of the inequality. William Craig has pointed out that while God is omniscient, he cannot perform acts that are logically impossible, for example God cannot create a stone that he cannot lift. Likewise, it is impossible for God to know the position and momentum simultaneously to accuracy in violation of Heisenberg's inequality because it is logically impossible for God to know that which does not exist.

The U.P. isn't a law about what can and can't be measured; it's a principle about what properties a particle actually has. A particle DOESN'T HAVE a precise position and a precise momentum at the same time. A particle DOESN'T HAVE an exact amount of energy at an exact time. The notion that a particle might have a precise position is a misconception, due to humans attempting to apply macroscopic concepts to microscopic entities.

Therefore, when speaking about the position, or momentum, or energy of a very small particle, there's nothing for an omniscient being to know. It's like asking whether God knows the colour of unicorns.

The way I "square this fact" with my "belief in an omniscient God", is that since God created the universe, dimensions, time, etc, then He exists outside of them. What is uncertain to us is known to Him.

Referencing an article I wrote a few years ago,

Perhaps God is infinite to us, and to all who interact with Him, because He exists above the dimensions we can experience. If a planar projection is the shadow of a three-dimensional object, could it be that we, as three-dimensional objects, are projections or shadows of the fourth dimension in which we exist, that of time? And perhaps, since God created time for us, He exists in a realm above that of time. Certainly, if He has existed – eternally – since before time began, and will continue to exists eternally into the future, He can’t be bound by time (which would be irrational since He made it: you can’t really be bound by something you create).

If you take the matter wave interpretation of quantum mechanics, the problem with the uncertainty principle is not that the measurements are imprecise, but that the actual distribution of the position and wavelength of a particle cannot be reduced to zero at the same time. So it can be viewed not that the momentum is unknown if the position is exactly fixed, but that the momentum is actually undetermined.

In that case, the uncertainty of momentum might not be a failure of knowledge, but simply a property of the object (which itself might be well known and understood), and therefore not be a problem for omniscience.

There have been several objections to Heisenberg and Bohr's interpretation of the Uncertainty Principle, most notably the work of Albert Einstein and Karl Popper. In the end it comes down to a question of belief - does the uncertainty principle only provide a mathematical description of a deterministic reality, or does reality really act that way? So even among prominent scientists, the question of what the Uncertainty Principle means at a metaphysical level is unresolved.

However, I don't believe that deterministic reality vs non is the most important determinant of the answer to this question. God created the universe and continually sustains it - there aren't waves and particles and whatnot apart from him, and there's no reason his reality can't be based on quantum formulae rather than just being a constant. He's not a "big guy with a beard sitting on a mountain somewhere observing," with the parts of the universe being somehow separated from him. The universe is (not in origin, but every second of every day) because He is. If it's just a probability cloud, he provides and understands that probability cloud.

To state it simply, this question takes the presupposition that God, the author of creation, is bound by the laws he created for this universe. And he simply is not so bound. He is outside of this creation. Not only that, but he sustains this creation by his will - were it not for his continuing upholding of it, it would pop out of existence, quite possibly with the same Big Bang with which it popped in.

We are limited by our perceptions. Have you heard the old mathematical thought experiment about an existence where everything was restricted to a two-dimensional plane, and if a sphere were to pass through this plane, it would appear to be a circle that grows larger and smaller without any discernible cause for its change in size?

If we keep this concept in mind and extrapolate a bit further out, it's not difficult to conceive of God as a being capable of measuring and understanding things that we, trapped as we are within our limited nature, are not capable of measuring and understanding.

We're also limited by our knowledge and our vocabulary. The concept of infinity is not something that we have any consistent way to reason about, especially not when mixing it with finite concepts, without arriving at bizarre contradictions. So attributing infinite attributes to God and then attempting to analyze him with finite logic is an exercise in futility. For all I know, maybe God can't get around the Uncertainty Principle, but he knows enough about how the universe works that he doesn't need to. Or maybe he understands some higher principle that we don't know about. Either way, it's kind of pointless to speculate about; something like this doesn't affect our salvation one way or the other.

The way I understand omniscience and omnipotence is that God has all the knowledge and power necessary to fulfill his will and bring to pass his plan, and that's enough to serve as a foundation for my faith. The details of exactly where the boundaries, if any, lie are irrelevant.

The apparent contradiction comes from the fact that you are misunderstanding the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. From Wikipedia:

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states precise inequalities that constrain certain pairs of physical properties, such as measuring the present position while determining future momentum of a particle.

Of course, God does not have to measure the present position of an atom, or its velocity, to know those values - precisely because he is omniscient!