Well, it's been a hell of a ride, laying rubber all over the road for the past decade. But it's time to call it a day and park the Rogue in the garage. Effective today, I am shutting down my blog to focus my attention on other endeavours. My thanks to the more than 2.7 million people who regularly joined me on these sojourns through news stories over the years that dealt with the places with issues of religion and faith intersecting with public affairs. May God bless you with a continuing desire to learn about and help disseminate the issues of faith throughout the public square. Happy trails in your continuing travels! Fr. Tim Moyle, p.p. Diocese of Pembroke
Reflections from the pastoral ministry of an Evangelical Catholic Priest.
Quantum events are random. All measurements taken over the last 100 years with increasing accurate precision lead to the conclusion that events from radioactive decay are probabilistic, having a specific probability of occurring with a period of time (hence the half life) and not influenced by outside or internal causes. Now the word cause here was used in the conventional and scientific sense of the efficient cause of Aristotle. And that's how people start off considering the first cause argument, looking at the efficient creative cause that brought the universe into being. But the author changes the cause mid way through the argument and invokes the material cause (in this case the quantum vacuum) in attributing an initial condition to the decay or a a teleological cause by saying uranium always decays into lead and not rabbits. While such linguistic sleight of hand may be acceptable in philosophical arguments, it doesn't hold much water in scientific circles.
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