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Current physics says the continued operation of the earth is deterministic and runs according to laws we've already determined. If you want some exterior intervention, you need to say why certain of those laws were modified or ceased to operate.

Really, why does he have to do that?

I guess if you insist that current physics is deterministic, you must be using a classical hidden variables interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which case (thanks to the observed violation of Bell's Inequalities) you're stuck with action-at-a-distance. (Last I heard we both have neurons whose firing is dependent on single quantum mechanical events, so if you want determinism, your stuck with action-at-a-distance.)

And even if you have supreme confidence that thermal effects prevent any macroscopic consequences of quantum mechanical events (except maybe the disturbance in the air caused by physicists whooping it up when a 'quantum eraser' experiment gives a bizarre counter-intuitive result), what possible operational meaning can your 'determinism' have when so many of the models we have for classical dyanamical systems (weather and climate for instance) exhibit chaotic dynamics so that even were there an exact correspondence between the physical system and the Platonic ideal of the mathematical model, epistemologically there is no determinism anyway, since one can't know the initial conditions precisely enough to make predictions?

I guess if you insist that current physics is deterministic, you must be using a classical hidden variables interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which case (thanks to the observed violation of Bell's Inequalities) you're stuck with action-at-a-distance. (Last I heard we both have neurons whose firing is dependent on single quantum mechanical events, so if you want determinism, your stuck with action-at-a-distance.)

Nope. You just need to abjure separating the universe into system and observer. The Schrödinger equation gives a precise, non-probabilitistic equation for the evolution of the wavefunction of the universe.

And even if you have supreme confidence that thermal effects prevent any macroscopic consequences of quantum mechanical events (except maybe the disturbance in the air caused by physicists whooping it up when a 'quantum eraser' experiment gives a bizarre counter-intuitive result), what possible operational meaning can your 'determinism' have when so many of the models we have for classical dyanamical systems (weather and climate for instance) exhibit chaotic dynamics so that even were there an exact correspondence between the physical system and the Platonic ideal of the mathematical model, epistemologically there is no determinism anyway, since one can't know the initial conditions precisely enough to make predictions?

Talk your way out of i hbar d(psi)/dt= H psi.

See a random operator in there?

I'm not talking about epistomological determinism. I'm talking about physical determinism. Show me how something can 'guide' the system that isn't part of the Hamiltonian.

You said that so much more better and more gracefuly than I could have...