[IronJack]

Since quantum mechanics we can no longer say that effect does not shape cause.

I'm sorry I'm not familiar enough with quantum mechanics to understand that. I can't say I've ever heard that claim made though. Would you care to explain, in terms a poor simpleton could comprehend?

And in any case, are you saying that God's creation of the universe was dictated by the nature of Man? I wouldn't think God was ruled by the laws He Himself created. But maybe quantum mechanics can answer that for me too.

[bvw]

Well, the first time I heard something like the suggestion was in some lecture about Feynman diagrams, which are used to model and analuze nuclear particle decays. There it was expressed as the inability to tell which way time went, forwards or backwards.

The next significant time I heard it was from someone who was studying talmud in Lakewood NJ -- and his context was "Yes our actions do change the world, and perhaps not just in the future." At the time we were discussing exactly what consciousness was, and I was asserting that it boiled down to one simple thing: whether we, in the act of observation place a valence of good or bad upon that current moment of observation. That we don't even own in full our own thoughts, much less our bodies, much less even our property. Just the current moment, the taking of it for good or bad. So that was then.

And now, in this post is (iirc) mentioned Princeton's super-theorist physicist John Wheeler's theory that the universe forward and backward in time is brought into beingness (or perhaps refined in beingness) by dint of our observations. With each observation, with each thing we each notice, the world is created backwards in time and forwards as well.

Twilight Zone stuff.

In some Jewish teaching, there are similar constructs -- a primordial Adam, who prior to becoming human in body, is a man in the ability to observe, to appreciate and make descisions, and who by that ability brings on the rest of the creation. That each human generation after Adam has a share of the Adam-soul, is rooted in that soul.

Now G-d created Adam, and the rest of all there is too, and the account in Genesis is a fidelic representation thereof. Fidelic, that is, if we were able to understand it as deeply as it is invested with meaning. Being very limited in intellect, we are not so able to do so.

All that is to say we are partners in this creation, by our observations for the good and acts based on those observations, we are to finish it. To bring it to a perfection, perhaps. To finsh the work of the Divine Week.