God and the Quantum Mechanic

You’d be forgiven for thinking that I am an expert in philosophy. I am only a humble physicist. And while physics can instruct us on the merits of one philosophy over another, it cannot necessarily point us to the right one. It is rather the reverse: Every physicist, deep down, has a philosopher struggling to get out because, without philosophy, we are merely wranglers of equations, slingers of predictions, and collectors of measurement data. Without philosophy, physics is just shutting up and calculating.

Now, I love a good calculation, but at the end of the day, to understand what that calculation means, I need philosophy.

The philosophy I choose can have vast repercussions on how I interpret findings, what theories I find most appealing, and what direction I want my research to take.

In this way, physics is not that different from theology. But whereas theologians have great respect for philosophy, physicists have a tendency to treat it like a waste of time. This is even though all of the most fundamental concepts in physics: time, space, matter, causation, probability, measurement, observation, and even the concept that physics exists at all are based in philosophy.

For centuries, Western civilization has been based upon the philosophy of the Greeks: Plato and Aristotle. Medieval theology drew life from them. Concepts like substance, potential, essence, form, and ideals formed the backbone of how theologians understood God, the soul, heaven, hell, and humanity’s place in the cosmos. Scientists, likewise, understood time, space, and matter similarly. Objects had substance and form. Even as Galileo and Newton swept aside Aristotle’s physics, they kept his understanding of the universe as made up of objects that had essential natures. These objects related to one another, Newton taught, through forces, all the while an impersonal, absolute time moves everything forward.

In fact, classical physics, as we now call everything before the dawn of quantum mechanics, fits perfectly well into this philosophical framework. As theology marched forward with Calvin and his double predestination, where an absolutely sovereign God chooses who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. Laplace argued that because all the laws of physics are deterministic, the future is likewise determined, and one could, with perfect knowledge, predict all future outcomes.

All this was to come crashing down with the invention of quantum mechanics. Suddenly, it became clear that what underlaid the foundations of the cosmos was not necessarily order and clear direction but indeterminism. Suddenly, physics needed a new philosophy.

Niels Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, was deeply fond of the philosophy of Kant. Kant argued against the idea that we could ever really know things. He believed that we could know some things. (It would take Heidegger and finally Wittgenstein to argue we couldn’t know anything.) Therefore, Bohr believed that quantum theory was just a representation of how particles interacted with measuring apparatus. Purely symbolic but useful.

Others, like Heisenberg, wanted to reapply Aristotle, arguing that wavefunctions were similar to Aristotelian potentiality. Aristotle had this idea about potential things transmuting into actual things, and to Heisenberg, this was very similar to what was happening in quantum mechanics. A wavefunction represented potential things, and when a measurement was made that potentiality was converted into the actual reality, the measurement made. Nevertheless, Heisenberg kept the idea of substances meaning objects moving through time and space. The only difference now was that those objects embodied potentiality before measurement and actuality afterward. They still retained their identity. When the wavefunction has not yet been measured, the particle does not exist. It only potentially exists.

This is not unlike a young person growing up. They are full of potential; no one knows what they are going to be. As they grow, they become more and more actualized (if they are lucky), and that potential becomes reality.

Albert Einstein opposed the interpretations that Bohr and Heisenberg were proposing. He believed that quantum mechanics was fundamentally incomplete and that a truer theory would be discovered that would accord better with how he viewed the universe. Einstein saw the universe as largely fixed, like a book that had already been written. We just happened to be reading it one page at a time. Einstein’s concept of God was as a Being who had written this book all out, including all the laws governing its pages. This is not that different from ancient and medieval philosophy, such as the timeless, changeless God of the Roman philosopher Boethius and the medieval friar Saint Thomas Aquinas, who stood outside time, watching all of history simultaneously. This God never changed His immutable mind. He had a feeling well up in his impassible heart. God does not suffer. This is what the church has believed since almost the beginning.

In Aristotelian terms, God cannot have potential. He is entirely actualized.

Life would be simple if quantum mechanics were all we had to contend with. But quantum mechanics is merely a special case of quantum field theory. In quantum field theory, the particles that are so important to quantum mechanics are mere excitations of the field, like a toddler jumping on a springy bed. They are here today and gone in the blink of an eye. In a way, fields are another kind of potentiality. Sometimes particles emerge from fields that we can detect. When we can’t, we can still detect fields influencing particles that we can detect, like magnetic fields drawing iron filings to them.

The particle is like the actualization of the field, but the field is not nothing either. Fields have many, many particle interactions inside them. Most of these are virtual interactions, meaning that the particles aren’t quite real. Yet, they still have a measurable effect.

In 1948, a way of understanding field theory was introduced by a Ph.D. student who had suspended his studies during WWII to help with the Manhattan Project. 

He wanted, in a way, to turn field theory, which was very abstract at the time, into something more tangible, more like classical physics, where you could picture what was going on. We can picture things like cannonballs rounding the Earth even if we have never seen it, like this one drawn by Sir Isaac Newton himself:

But how can we make sense of an infinite-dimensional summation?

His solution was to turn those summations into diagrams that picture what’s going on in the field theory, the sort of thing that might happen in a particle accelerator or even a nuclear explosion.

This is one of the diagrams that he published in 1949:

It shows two electrons, the straight lines, exchanging a virtual photon, the squiggly line, a common interaction that causes the electrons to, for example, repel one another.

Here are three more examples of these diagrams. These are all from a process, like the one above, called Compton scattering:

What’s interesting about these diagrams is that all the external lines are the same, yet each diagram is different. In fact, the external lines aren’t the most important part. Unlike the diagram for the trajectory of a cannonball, they don’t go anywhere specific or come from anywhere we care about. The placement of each intersection of lines is, likewise, unimportant. Like subway maps, these diagrams don’t necessarily tell you anything about where particles go in physical space and time, nor do they tell you where they come from. What they do tell you is the stops they make along the way. For example, one diagram, on the left, tells you that two electrons exchanged a photon and continued on their way. The middle one says that they exchanged two photons. The right one says they exchanged a photon, which turned into an electron-positron pair, which annihilated and turned back into a photon.

In this sense, these diagrams do not describe objects because objects are not stable in field theory. They transmute into other things and back again. Instead, they describe events. They tell you what happened.

That Ph.D. student, whose name was Richard Feynman, went on to make many more discoveries, but perhaps none so philosophically profound as this pictorial way of representing what field theory represents: the primacy of events over objects.

Events, after all, are part of the fabric of spacetime in a way objects aren’t. Events are what happen while objects are impermanent and in flux.

A philosophy that better represents field theory is not one of potential and actualization of things, but one where events are the primary content of the universe, and objects are merely strings of such events that maintain some similarity to one another. Consider that we only perceive the electron when we observe it, and to observe something, it has to, in field theory parlance, scatter off of something. In other words, we never see the lines in the diagrams. We only see the vertices.

Process philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead argue that this is a better way of understanding the world and, indeed, God as well. Events are fundamental. Particles don’t exist with events happening to them. Rather, events are all there is.

In his book Process and Reality, Whitehead argues that the universe is made up of events called actual occasions. These are momentary events of becoming. Thus, all things are always becoming, not being, even you and me. Every event integrates influences from the past and actualizes one of many possibilities. These possibilities now become part of the past. Each of these events is an example of the universe experiencing itself and producing novelty. For Whitehead, the future has not been written yet, and we are the genuine authors of our own experience, given the chance to write our own stories.

Whitehead’s slogan was that the world was composed of “drops of experience” and is considered a panexperientialist. All matter is capable of some kind of experience, even atoms. (This might be considered a generalization of panpsychism, the idea that all matter has some experience of consciousness. Experience is somewhat ill-defined but may not be what we think of as conscious experience.)

Thus, atoms and we are not beings but becoming as patterns of experience, and if field theory is any guide, this might fit best with modern physics.

One of the realities that quantum physicists must ignore most of the time is that all our descriptions of quantum reality focus on possibilities and their probabilities for becoming real. Nature, however, has a poorly understood mechanism for transforming possibility, embodied by the quantum wavefunction, into actuality. Depending on what this mechanism is, process philosophy might be a very good or a very poor description of reality.

Essential to process philosophy is this concept of events, which turn possibility into actuality. In the case of human beings, we call this free will. Reality is indeterminant. The future is being written by matter all the way from electrons up to human beings and beyond.

If, however, no actualizing is happening and the universe is entirely deterministic and predictable, then process philosophy is a poor fit. There is no experience happening, no actualization. Rather, the universe is simply unfolding in a way that Einstein understood well.

This is why process theory is much friendlier to interpretations of quantum theory where wavefunctions collapse. Recall that wavefunctions represent what is possible. Therefore, the collapse of the wavefunction into a single reality is, in essence, a conversion of possibility into actuality. Many physicists over the years have proposed that collapse happens when human beings observe particles, but that need not be the case. After all, the only reason we can observe particles is by using detectors, which are large, complicated objects made of many, many particles. Perhaps it is these and not human minds that cause the collapse.

A theory called the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber (GRW) theory, for example, proposes a physical process by which wavefunctions spontaneously collapse, especially when interacting with macroscopic systems. Thus, the universe is constantly experiencing wavefunction collapses. One formulation, developed by Roderich Tumulka and others, explains this in terms of flash ontology. Fundamental entities in the universe are these “flashes,” and each flash is an event in space and time. The wavefunction determines the probabilities of these flashes. Thus, reality is a network of these flashes all connected, and what we think of as matter is simply patterns of flashes, like dashes and dots over a telegraph wire.

While in the flash ontology, the flashes are purely physical, in a Whiteheadian metaphysics, each flash contains experience and creative self-determination. Thus, the flashes are not merely collapsing wavefunctions but reality inventing itself to experience itself.

What kind of God invents a universe like this?

John B. Cobb Jr. extended Whitehead’s metaphysics into process theology, where God does not control events deterministically. Rather, God offers possibilities or “lures” towards greater value. Human beings have free will to either move towards these lures or away from them through the self-determining nature of events. Each event inherits influences from its past, considers available possibilities, and determines its own final form. This self-determination requires not human beings to exist, but rather some patterns of events are humans becoming. Events link to future events in an ever-connected network of creativity.

Thus, human free will is not an exception to the determinism of nature but a higher form of the same freedom that all matter enjoys.

Unlike in classical theology, God in process theology is seen as actively participating in the universe’s unfolding. Because of the freedom conferred upon all events and all matter, God may not know the final form that each event will choose. God knows as much as is possible to know, but has given the universe the ability to surprise him. Divine power does not determine outcomes but rather persuades. God’s purpose for the universe is emergent rather than imposed.

According to Cobb, God is dipolar, having a primordial pole that generates the possibilities of the universe and a consequent pole that allows him to experience the world along with us. The future is genuinely open, and God may change with the world.

Ancient and medieval theologians, steeped in Plato and Aristotle, believed that God had to be unchanging (immutable) and unaffected by emotions (impassible) as well as outside of time (timeless) because otherwise, if he could change or be affected in any way, he would be less than perfect. In fact, these ideas come straight from the pagan Greeks rather than from any Biblical doctrine. Process theologians, however, reject this on its face, pointing to many instances in the Bible where God changes his mind or expresses emotion (e.g., Genesis 6:6, Exodus 32:11). For process philosophy, all things are becoming, and thus, to be perfect, a being must become perfectly. This is God’s nature, then: God relates to all creation perfectly by responding to all creation perfectly. God truly suffers, shares in the consequences of human actions, and works persuasively towards his greater good. He has the greatest possible capacity for relationships. While God does have unchanging aspects such as his character, his experience does change.

Some process theologians like Cobb steer clear of making definite statements about the nature of Jesus Christ. Although they reject Aristotelian concepts of substance, which makes the Trinity or the nature of Christ difficult to support in its classic form, they seem influenced by modernist, liberal theologies in downplaying the true nature of Christ as divine and of his resurrection as a genuine miracle. They instead focus on drawing “meaning” from these stories symbolically. 

None of this is necessarily a consequence of process philosophy itself, but rather a direction that these theologians have chosen, which I think is wrong. Other process theologians, however, like David Ray Griffin, have argued that miracles are entirely consistent with process philosophy and argued for the resurrection as a genuine event, while Marjorie Suchocki has argued for the real divine presence in Jesus and not merely a symbolic presence. 

Fundamentally, the Trinity, I think, has to be interpreted relationally, as love shared in the midst of God. Christ’s nature, then, flows from that relationship as the second person of the Trinity. Meanwhile, C. S. Lewis has this to say about miracles:

It is therefore inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It doesn’t…If God annihilates or creates or deflects a unit of matter He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately all Nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. (CS Lewis in Miracles, p. 94)

Thus, miracles are part of God’s own creative freedom. Any moment allows for the possibility of a miracle, even ones as shocking as the incarnation and the resurrection.

As we discover more about the universe, it seems increasingly clear that change is the only constant. Quantum field theory and quantum mechanics, in general, suggest that events that actualize possibilities into reality are a natural way to understand the universe. Will our understanding of God keep up or remain in the Middle Ages? It seems that we have a difficult tightrope to walk between updating our philosophy without throwing out everything in favor of a lukewarm scientism.