A new quantum theology

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/06/2022 (1520 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last month, Dr. Frank Wilczek, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won the Templeton Prize.

The Templeton prize is given annually to a person who uses science to “explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.”

For Wilczek, 70, the goal is to try to understand the universe through the lens of quantum mechanics.

He started on that path when he couldn’t reconcile traditional religious teaching “with how the world really works,” he said in an interview.

For him, scriptures written thousands of years ago aren’t sufficient for understanding the universe today.

All they can do, he said, is represent the contemporary human knowledge of ancient times — the writers could only write about what they knew, observed and understood about the world around them.

“The ancient texts, which are the basis of most of the traditional religions, don’t do justice to what we know about the universe now,” he said.

“They don’t have a notion that the universe could be enormously large, much less that it could contain extravagant numbers of dimensions and quantum mechanics, or that it’s so very old.”

That knowledge “left a void,” he said. “It left me with a hunger that I’ve been trying to satisfy ever since.”

His comments sparked my curiosity. I am not a scientist, and I know little about quantum mechanics, also known as quantum physics. I wondered if it had any implications for religious belief, and our understanding about God.

So I did some research. That’s when I found a term I had never heard before: quantum theology.

But before that, a basic overview of quantum mechanics.

In quantum mechanics, objects have dual natures. They can be both waves and particles; they can be in more than one state at once; and you can’t know exactly the location and velocity of a quantum object.

(The latter is an example of Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, which posits that the observer, by simply observing something, changes the thing that is observed — something that renders the exercise unavoidably subjective.)

The quantum universe is a world of probability, not certainty; indeterminism, not deterministic; possible, but not predictable.

The Newtonian worldview, which quantum mechanics is replacing, is the opposite. Newton posited a clockwork universe which works according to predictable patterns according to predetermined laws, with all phenomena, no matter how complex, being able to be understood in terms of those laws.

What does this have to do with theology?

While thinking about this, I realized the theology and view of God I had been brought up on was based in a Newtonian view of the universe with its framework of knowability, certainty, objectivity and predictability. It was a world of true/false, either/or, yes/no.

But the quantum worldview is not that way. Things can be both/and. And certainty is no longer certain.

What does this mean for religious belief? Especially for Christian belief, since I am a Christian.

Since I’m not smart enough to figure this out, I looked for people who are. That’s how I found Arnold Sikkema, a professor of mathematical sciences at Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C.

Sikkema has given this some thought. He agrees the ancient scriptures can’t do justice to the universe as we know it now — it is much larger, older, and more complex than those writers thousands of years ago could know or possibly imagine.

And he doesn’t think of God as a micro-manager, managing every detail of world events and individual lives with a preconceived and predictable clockwork type of plan.

“If everything is determined, we are not able to choose,” he said.

But this new quantum world is not a problem for him or his faith. He still believes in God. But “how God works in the world is not clear,” he said, adding “I’m comfortable with that mystery.”

Rather than a cause to jettison faith, Sikkema sees Christianity as a good fit for a quantum world of unpredictability and uncertainty.

“People have choices to make,” he said. “We are not predestined or just going through the motions … there is a resonance between Christianity and quantum physics.”

John Polkinghorne, an Anglican priest and theoretical physicist, noted in his book Science and the Trinity that the quantum world “must be encountered on its own terms and in accordance with its Heisenbergian uncertainty … there is no universal epistemology.”

By that, he meant there is no one-size-fits-all approach for trying to explain the world, or to come up with an all-encompassing theory of knowledge for who God is and how God works.

In this quantum world, it would be “epistemically disastrous” to try to insist on the Newtonian sense of certainty and clarity about religious belief, he said.

So: where does this leave us? I’m not exactly sure. But in a world where the old certainties about the universe are being swept away, maybe we need a different approach to knowing who God is and how God works — a new quantum theology.

I’m looking forward to learning more about it.

faith@freepress.mb.ca

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