Reconciling Faith and Science: Quantum Physics

One of the most interesting topics about faith and science to date is quantum physics. First, some background. For the majority of the history of modern science, scientists operated on something called Newtonian physics – based on the work of Isaac Newton.  For centuries, physics was understood in broad sweeping terms – big, simple, measurable, systematic, mechanistic, etc. According to Newton’s world, the universe could be measured in large scale equations. And rightfully so. Everything seen with the naked eye looked big and vast, so the physical properties underneath were assumed to be big and simplistic as well.  And anything that was worth investigating could be measured using classical methods of science. This is part of the reason that those who embraced the view that science and religion were not compatible had no qualms about dismissing God. He did not easily fit into the classical physics mold.

But then quantum physics was born through the work of Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg. Quantum mechanics describes physical things at an atomic and subatomic level. For example, a quantum is the name for the smallest unit of energy – and it’s tiny. Add to that more particles like quarks, gluons, and hadrons and things change drastically. Rather than try to measure things as we have in the past, Planck came up with a constant that made measuring anything very, very small. Planck’s constant looks like this: 6.626176 x 10^-34. The number I want you to notice is the 10^-34. That’s an infinitesimal number. To measure our world, we had to stop using kilometers – now we use nanometers. Heisenberg added to this confusion (or revelation) by introducing the uncertainty principle. He said that when you are measuring two physical properties against each other, the accuracy of one eventually restricts the accuracy of another. In other words, the more you can measure one thing at the quantum level and use it as a reference point for another, the more the second object becomes immeasurable. And scientists have also discovered something called superposition – that these particles can jump from place to place – sometimes existing simultaneously in two different places.

So, what does this stuff mean for people attempting to integrate faith and science? It changes everything, actually. Science in continuing to discover more about our world also exploded our previous understanding of how the world works. The stable uniform world we thought we knew for the past several centuries is now a whirling mass of infinitesimal particles that won’t stay still long enough for us to learn anything about them. Furthermore, general relativity and quantum physics are basically incompatible. So, not only do we have a new way of seeing the world, we can’t even reconcile it with previous models that we know also have supporting data. Scientists are presently attempting to reconcile general relativity and quantum physics with something called string theory (which states the world is made of ridiculously small strings that operate not in three or four dimensions, but in nine or ten). But string theory operates on a scale 16 orders of magnitude smaller than anything we can currently measure.  As with other areas of science, the more we delve into the complexities of the life, from the universe to the structure of a cell, the more issues are raised for which we have no answer. But I want to point something out to you: string theory is considered a rational scientific field of study. Yet, there’s no empirical evidence for its existence other than a hunch or two derived from our inability to perfect quantum mechanics. So what guides the day to day experiments of physicists working in that area? Faith. Faith in the idea that string theory will be able to reconcile all other physical disciplines.

Here’s something else to notice in all of this. In the area of quantum physics, the unknown or “gray” areas of conceptual thought are considered not only appropriate, but are expected. Yet, when theology is experiencing a “gray” area, it is often dismissed as unscientific. In fact, theology is held to a stricter standard of proof than those investigating string theory or chaos theory, much less some grand unified theory. For science, the unknown gray areas somehow represent progress or hope while for religion, they are conceived as doubt. But they both represent the humanness of our endeavors and should be treated with the same level of respect and care. There’s a great verse that Jesus spoke about removing the beam from your own eye before mentioning the speck in another’s. We don’t do that with science and religion – instead, we parade our experts across the stage to discredit the other. We fire shots across the bow or each other’s ship. But both ships are floating on a sea of philosophical beliefs, assumptions, worldviews, and…well…faith. Faith sends one person to church on Sunday while it sends another to the laboratory. And for many scientists who have accepted faith as part of being human, it sends them to both places in the same week.

Reading and Listening…

Time for a book and music update. I haven’t found a ton of interesting music in the last few months or so. But here’s a few:

The Bird and the Bee, Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future.

Audioslave, Revelations.

Lo-pro, Self-titled.

I’ve mostly been reading for my Sunday school class, specifically in the area of science and faith. This has been a huge challenge for me intellectually and spiritually. I grew up in a conservative home that forcefully stood up for the belief in a literal Genesis and saw science and faith as contradictory. Now, I know there’s a lot more to the Genesis account than the literalness one finds in a car manual. I also know that the measurable half-lives of uranium, potassium, and stronium put the date of the earth at 4.5 billion years. I believe science and faith can be affirming of each other - though I’m not sure of all the details. I’ll let you know how all of that turns out after I’m done. Anyway, along with frequent cyber-visits to the Faraday Institute, here’s my list I’ve been reading – it’s an enormous hodge-podge of various positions. I don’t plan to immediately adopt one over the others after I finish them all (I’m about halfway through), but I do have a responsiblity to relay each position accurately to the congregation I serve. Ordered by topic:

Intelligent Design:

Gonzalez and Richards, The Privileged Planet

Owen Gingerich, God’s Universe

Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box

Michael Behe, The Edge of Evolution

Fazale Rana, The Cell’s Design

Dembski and Ruse, eds., Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA

Creationism:

Grady McMurtry, Creation: Our Worldview

John Whitcomb, The World that Perished

Theistic Evolution:

Francis Collins, The Language of God

John Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics and Theology

John Polkinghorne, Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion

David Snoke, The Biblical Case for an Old Earth

Secular Evolution:

Johnjoe McFadden, Quantum Evolution

Brent Dalrymple, The Age of the Earth

Other:

John Haught, God and the New Atheism

Brian Appleyard, Understanding the Present: an Alternative History of Science

Anthony Flew, There Is a God

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the relationship between faith and science as I prepare to teach my class. Are science and faith enemies or friends?

Confessions of an Open Theist, Part 3: Science

If you’ve actually read these posts and the comments that followed, you have probably noticed two things: 1) you may be quite tired and 2) we keep bumping into a cosmological “frame” that informs our view of what God can and cannot do based on our modern understanding of how the world works. So, in order to explore this more fully, we have to enter the arena of science. I will tell you up front: science is not my strong suit. I rarely use Boyle’s law in my line of work. But I can shed some light on how the history of science has recently changed the paradigm of the Western world. For open theism, this is a great opportunity. I’ll explain more after a very brief look at the classical scientific worldview.

Early forms of science revolved around the goal of simplicity. If something can be stripped of its complexity and understood at a formulaic level, then it can not only be explained but harnessed for technological advancement. Simplicity was the best way to gain clarity – direct, observable, explainable. Many scientists still fall into this category and are called “reductionists.” After the introduction of Cartesian dualism, science began to look at the relationship between cause and effect as a way to explain life’s occurrences. Yet, many theolgians believed God acted in a similar fashion of simplicity, using those same natural laws to govern our world. So like the natural world around us, if God is the center of all life and his existence adequately explains the “effects” we see around us, his activity in the world can be reduced to a simplified level of cause and effect as well. Reduction to a mechanistic view of God would certainly be ontologically sound if his acts could be measured with “equation- like” simplicity. Classical theology has affirmed this view of the world – God is the cause of all and we see his effects in various natural and supernatural ways. What is the scientific “evidence” God has “acted” in the world? Well, in the causal nexus model, all the events of life reinforce the idea that God is at least the “First Cause” of everything. It’s a self- affirming system that goes something like this: “How do I know God is in control? Because a particular event happened. Why did a particular event (good or bad) occur? Because God is in control.” This circular reasoning  requires the underlying assumption that God determines everything we see. For years, “causality” looked like a slam dunk for explaining our world – for science and for theology.

Then something (or in this case, someone) happened: Max Planck. In the early twentieth century, Planck along with Werner Heisenberg came up with something called “quantum mechanics.” In essence, quantum theory forced the scientific community away from “large” explanations of the world to very small ones. Basically those guys said,  “There’s a whole lot of everything, and it’s all very, very small.” When the scientific world “shrunk,” something else happened, too - our ability to empirically measure the infinitesimal parts of the universe became impossible. And that, my friends, caused the classical understanding of a reliable tight-knit nexus of cause and effect to implode.  With it went our understanding of God acting within a predictable, orderly, and “explainable” world. And that doesn’t even include issues like “chaos theory” and “string theory”  – ideas that put the explanation of the world even further out of reach. Scientists like Larry Laudan, David Bohm, Paul Dirac, Thomas Kuhn, and Michael Polyani are coming out of the woodwork explaining the world in a different way. Things are not so tidy in the universe they say.  It’s complexity is overwhelming and scientists are acknowledging the “tacit dimension” of reality that exists beyond naturalism’s ability to measure. Of course, this would have been a huge problem when everyone thought they had the world figured out. But now, in the beginning stages of science’s exploration of infinitesimal complexity, a little help for the “subjective” side of life is not only acceptable – for many, it’s preferable.

Open theism is the only  theological system that gives significant explanation for this complexity by building it into its understanding of our world.  In fact, open theism thrives on it since it uses that complexity to explain prayer, suffering, the ambiguity in life, and a partially undetermined future. Can classical theological systems adapt (since they were created prior to the 20th century)? Sure. But it would be at the cost of losing some of their foundational philosophical (and, as we can see, scientific) assumptions. Right about now, you may be saying, “From what I can see, things look pretty ordered to me!”  Hold on there, Kemosabe – things only look that way. Here are two examples from John Polkinghorne’s Exploring Reality:

Hyperion, one of the moons of Saturn, explains how  life can look ordered when it’s really not. The small moon tumbles chaotically as it orbits Saturn. Polkinghorne says that based on quantum calculations, Hyperion’schaotic motion should cease roughly after a 37 year period. Yet Physicists already know that will not happen. Another influence on the planet makes its perpetual motions look ordered and wipes out quantum physics normal estimation that Hyperion will resolve its chaotic orbit. The moon is immersed in a low frequency radiation that derives partially from the Sun.  This radiation effectively erases any quantum process from affecting  Hyperion’s motion.  This keeps the moon in its perpetual state of seemingly changeless “order.” We see this and say, “Wow. The ‘causal nexus’ of our universe is maintaining order. Isn’t God great?” But the reality is that despite what our paradigm tells us, Hyperion’s orbit is a lesson in chaos masking itself as order. 

Polkinghorne also gives the example of an experiment using electric light bulbs, which only have two states: on and off. Stringing 10,000 light bulbs together, each bulb is correlated with two others somewhere in the matrix. Most people would expect to see a pattern emerge based on the correlation of the lights. But any pattern of simplicity seems like it would be immediately overcome due to the sheer number of lights involved.  In fact, the different states of illumination in this scenario are roughly 10^3,000 - a ridiculously impossible number to fathom. Yet when the experiment was conducted, all 10,000 light bulbs settled into a pattern of about 100 states of illumination. Once again, an incredibly complex model looks more “ordered” than it actually is. So, in the new era of science (and theology), complexity is the normal state of reality, even in cases where order seems observable to the naked eye.

Open theism at least treats the world as it is: a place of innumerable interactions and influences through which God must navigate to advance his will for humanity. In such a partially undetermined scenario, the sovereignty of God in the openness view is actually greater  than the classical understanding of sovereignty. This is the world in which we live…and in which God, in the midst of that complexity, draws us to himself.