Salvation and Schrödinger's Cat

Great Bishop of Geneva! : 1) Makarios · 2) Once Saved, Always Saved - True for Church, Not True for All Christians Individually · 3) Protestants - Not - Getting Around Matthew 28 Last Three Verses: John Calvin's Attempt · 4) Barnes NOT getting around Matthew 28:20 ... · 5) Since St Francis of Sales had Real Objections to Calvinism ... 6) Contra Sproul 7) Barnes on Jewish Tradition 8) If Constantine had Founded the Catholic Church ... 9) Salvation and Schrödinger's Cat Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : 10) ... on Apostolic Succession, both as to Reasons and Answering an Objection or Two (quora)

When Schrödinger opens the box, he will know if the cat survived or died in a nitroglycerine explosion. Or whatever the lethal danger was. In our case it is called sin.

Schrödinger's cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e., a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.

Saying a Christian is at once sinner and justified as Luther did reminds of the Copenhagen interpretation of Schrödinger's cat.

It is obviously wrong about the cat. And Luther was obviously wrong about your soul.

However, what is true is that as long as the box is not opened, you don't know about the cat's survival.

And as long as you are not dead, you usually don't know whether you are going to Heaven or Hell if you die right now, not with complete certainty.

While one interpretation of 1 Timothy 1:15 is that St Paul is talking of his past life, he could also be treating his soul as the cat of Schrödinger : admitting it might be dead. And measuring the amount of deadness, if so.

I don't really know if St Paul is using historic present or describing a brief moment of mortal sin or else is taking the worst possibility into account.

But we do not need to take the Copenhagen school of what happens to Schrödinger's cat. And we do not need to take the Luther school about what St Paul meant. It is not without cause condemned in Trent or in Exsurge Domine or both.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris XI
Laetare Sunday
26.III.2017