Question from :
What would be your best argument against someone using the Unpanishads and Quantum Physics as a justification for their belief in God?
Answer by SmartLX:
For those like me who may never have seen the word before, The Unpanishads are the source of a lot of central Hindu concepts. The doctrines behind this particular justification concern the importance of consciousness and awareness to the universe, and the timelessness of certain entities. The argument is that these correspond to the observer effect in quantum mechanics and the general unchanging nature of the fundamental physics of the universe. Here’s an example of an article making this point.
This fits into the general category of a claim of divine foreknowledge. The appropriate category in my article on prophecies and predictions is #4: Shoehorned, because people are taking established science and fitting it to the most relevant parts of a religious text after the fact. No one read the Upanishads and realised as a result that observing individual particles of light would affect how they appeared. Nor does anyone expect to be able to scrutinise the Upanishads now and find new practical details that will advance science any further.
The major complication for someone actually using this as an argument for their particular god is the existence of a huge number of arguments along the same lines using both Christian and Muslim scripture. I’ve covered many of these separately and as a group. A Hindu (or Buddhist or Jainist, since they also use the Unpanishads to a degree) would have to explain why there’s so much similarly accurate-looking material in mutually exclusive texts, or make the effort to debunk everyone else’s claims. Christians in particular have worked to do just that.