God and the Quantum Realm
Thoughts on the debate between Emily Qureshi-Hurst and Paul Davies
Justin Brierley has once again put together an outstanding episode of Uncommon Ground, bringing together Atheist theologian Emily Qureshi-Hurst and astrophysicist Paul Davies to discuss purpose, consciousness, and their relationship to quantum theory. It was a thoughtful, well-articulated, and gracious conversation. Although neither guest is a Christian, both engage thoughtfully with the idea of God in their writings. I want to share my thoughts on their conversation and offer a needed Christian perspective.
Purpose
The opening prompt for the discussion was whether the universe had a purpose. Both guests find the word “purpose” problematic. Qureshi-Hurst is concerned that “purpose is an agent-centric idea” and, as an atheist, finds no compelling evidence for a “Purposer.” Davies, similarly, has a problem ascribing purpose to the universe, believing it to be a culturally loaded term, but nonetheless is “happy to say that the universe is about something.” They both agree that the cosmos has a direction but are hesitant to call it a goal.
Is it possible that rather than disliking the word “purpose,” Qureshi-Hurst and Davies fear it? Simply acknowledging that the universe is moving in a direction cheapens what it has actually accomplished. The universe isn’t stumbling forward but appears to be on a trajectory. It is a vector moving in a particular direction, accumulating magnitude as it passes through increasingly miraculous points of interest. It begins with something from nothing, then proceeds from life to non-life, from simple to complex, from non-sentience to sentience, and finally from non-consciousness to consciousness. Each step radically more innovative than the one before, requiring enormous inputs of energy, matter, and information. All the scientific data suggest that the universe, rather than taking the path of least resistance, has taken the road less traveled.
I think the guests take for granted the effort the universe had to expend to reach where it is today. A work ethic that led the once-skeptical astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle to conclude that “a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” If the forces aren’t blind, they have a vision. If they have the resolve to leap daunting entropic hurdles, there is a will. Clashing with the second law of thermodynamics takes a certain amount of chutzpah, suggesting that Somebody believed the universe was worth fighting for.
Purpose as Cause
Aristotle offers guidance to ease our worries about assigning “purpose” to the universe by framing it as a logical necessity rather than as a way to insert God into a gap in our understanding. Stephen Iacoboni, in his excellent book, “Telos: The Scientific Basis for a Life of Purpose,” argues that we have taken for granted the telos, purpose, or final cause Aristotle believed was necessary for something to come into being.
Aristotle’s reasoning led him to this conclusion: All things have a designated form that defines their usefulness (formal cause), are made out of some particular material (material cause), are constructed in some particular way (efficient cause), and all for just one reason, which is to serve their particular purpose (final cause)…Aristotle divined these concepts based not on human artifacts but rather on his observations of the natural world. He was overwhelmed with the all-pervasive demonstrations of purpose on display right there in plain sight among living creatures.” (Telos – The Scientific Basis for Life.)
Like Darwin, Davies and Qureshi-Hurst underestimate the importance of purpose in evolutionary theory.
“Is not the idea of struggling to survive exactly the same as acting purposefully to survive? Of course it is. In other words, Darwin’s theory of natural selection can only work within an environment where all creatures are already purpose-driven to survive….It’s from Darwin’s theory that all the talk about purposelessness comes. Even as he assumed a purpose-driven biosphere of creatures in their struggle for survival, he ended up concluding that there was no purpose after all. The contradiction is as transparent as it is tragic.” (Telos – The Scientific Basis for Life.)
Scientists focus on material and efficient causes because they are easily tested in the laboratory and align with a materialist worldview. While this strategy may yield a solid research publication, it is metaphysically insufficient to explain the world around us. Without a plan or purpose in the universe, all that is left is mutating lifeforms, hoping that two wrongs will make a right.
Evolutionary Extravagance
Animals don’t care about the four causes, but surprisingly, humans, who are just a few mutational steps above their monkey ancestors, are obsessed with them. If we are just evolved animals, why did we become interested in thought experiments rather than shovel-ready survival projects? Davies agrees with Brierley that this consciousness seems to be an “evolutionary extravagance.”
“One of the oddities of human intelligence is that its level of advancement seems like a case of overkill. While a modicum of intelligence does have a good survival value, it is far from clear how such qualities as the ability to do advanced mathematics…ever evolved by natural selection. These higher intellectual functions are a world away from survival “in the Jungle.” (Davies – “Are we Alone?”)
Davies sees a fascinating link between humans and the cosmos that goes beyond sharing matter to include conscious participation. He makes this case in his book, “The Fifth Miracle.”
“The laws of nature are rigged not only in favor of complexity, or just in favor of life, but also in favor of mind. To put it dramatically, it implies that mind is written into the laws of nature in a fundamental way.”
Qureshi-Hurst, however, believes that consciousness, rather than being a fundamental part of the universe, is an evolutionary afterthought that gradually emerges from matter as an enormously helpful tool for survival. She attributes this “extravagance” to the human mind’s remarkable ability to accumulate knowledge and develop culture.
“We’ve evolved to be able to navigate the world and survive in particular conditions, and yet, through the development of human culture and intellectual history, we have been able to build on the discoveries of those who went before us, and develop more and more sophisticated ways of understanding the world.”
However, if consciousness merely emerged from complexified matter, why would selfish genes waste their time calculating cosmological constants? Why would random mutations care about fine-tuning? Why would nature, red in tooth and claw, feel the need to award Nobel Prizes to white-jacketed physicist nerds? If consciousness were just an evolutionary spandrel, why do so many of us consider it a weight-bearing wall? Why waste our time contemplating multiverses when we should be singularly focused on the one we inhabit? From an evolutionary perspective, it would seem that a lizard brain is a better use of our neurons than a beautiful mind.
Consciousness, whether emerging late in evolutionary history or present at the beginning of the universe, has granted us the ability to contemplate the universe’s navel, and rather than finding cosmic lint, we have discovered a mind-blowing quantum realm.
Quantum physics
Our evolutionary extravagance has led us to look under the hood of a universe that has run reliably for millennia, only to find it is powered by a quantum engine that exceeds the expertise of scientific grease monkeys and requires input from meta-mechanics, such as theologians, philosophers, and even the often-ignored prophets of technology, science fiction writers.
One of the key concepts in quantum theory is that particles exist within a probability field, or wave, of possible positions. However, once particles are observed or measured, they are reduced to a single position, a process known as wave function collapse. As Davies explains it:
“When you make a position measurement of an atom or an electron or whatever particle you’re interested in, you are bringing into being an atom at a place from a prior state of positionlessness.”
Theoretical physicist Niels Bohr summarized this process quite humorously.
“A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.” (Niels Bohr)
Quantum cosmology takes this wave function collapse and applies it to the universe, suggesting that an immaterial wave of possibilities becomes material when observed or measured. Because he is fascinated with the intelligibility of the universe, Davies believes that conscious observation is necessary for this actualization to occur. In contrast, Qureshi-Hurst prefers to exclude consciousness from this process and focus on measurement. She is concerned that concentrating on the observer makes the process unnecessarily anthropocentric, thereby limiting the range of theoretical possibilities.
“As far as I understand it, it is measurement, interaction with the system, that causes this quantum event, this wave function collapse to occur. It’s not something fundamental about consciousness…It’s about physical observation that alters the system rather than something weird about consciousness that collapses the wave function.”
Collapsing Thought
Quantum and classical physics, while radically different, mysteriously work together. Qureshi-Hurst describes this in her excellent book, “Decoding the Cosmos.”
“Physics contains two highly successful and beautiful theories: general relativity and quantum mechanics. The former describes the very big (the cosmos, stars, planets, etc.) and the latter describes the very small (sub-atomic particles, photons, etc.). The problem is, they’re incompatible.”
How do they interact to create a world that is comprehensible and navigable? Qureshi-Hurst believes that trying to understand their relationship is important for formulating a worldview. She adopts the Hugh Everett interpretation.
“It’s the idea that instead of living in a singular universe, we’re living in a quantum multiverse, where every time, what we would typically describe as the collapse of the wave function or quantum event, occurs, instead of this range of possibilities collapsing into one specific position, of an electron say, every possibility happens, but they happen in different regions of the universe or multiverse. The universe effectively branches into as many branches as there are outcomes.”
She describes branching as occurring whenever a wave function collapses, which can happen due to direct human measurement or interactions between physical objects. Davies has a problem with this theory because you can’t just reduce the universe to things that go bump in the night, but must account for the hand of agency.
I believe the puzzling interface between quantum and classical physics is akin to the hard problem of consciousness. It is a mystery that I think the Biblical creation narrative may help us answer.
We can never grasp the extent of other people’s thoughts until they are expressed. In other words, speech is necessary to collapse our mental wave functions and make ourselves known to others.
God, similarly, spoke in order to make Himself known.
In the beginning, God hovered over a dark, formless void, gathering His thoughts before He spoke. Theologians often describe this primal state as chaos, but what if it was an opulence of divine thoughts, as yet unactualized?
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:2)
God then sheds some light on the problem by beginning to speak.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Genesis 1:3)
While we commonly think of God creating ex nihilo (out of nothing), given God’s propensity to make His voice heard, I think it makes more sense to say He created ex cogitatio (out of thought). With each spoken word, God sequentially introduces more information into the cosmos. I think the Genesis narrative does a remarkable job of explaining Davies’s fascination with the order and comprehensibility of the universe by describing a God who spoke His mind and created image-bearers fluent in God speak, capable of understanding every word He said.
Classical physics is well understood because God spoke His mind. God’s immaterial thought collapsed into physical reality once it was spoken and heard (observed, measured) by image-bearers equipped with divine voice-recognition software. Quantum physics, on the other hand, remains a puzzle because it represents God’s unspoken thoughts, which we cannot grasp because they are higher than our own. Physicist, mathematician, and astronomer Sir James Jeans put it this way.
“Today, there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the side of physics approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” (Sir James Jeans)
Unlike God, humans do not create reality but influence it by making their thoughts physically real. We didn’t create the set, props, and characters in God’s drama, but by actualizing our thoughts, we create plot conflicts that demand resolution. Since it is God’s theatrical production, He firmly established a “once upon a time” and a “happily ever after,” but all the scenes in between are the result of the wave collapse of our individual thoughts, both good and bad, made physically real through our words and actions. The Good News is that the ultimate thought-wave collapse, the Word made flesh, has redeemed every moment we have gone off script, thereby ensuring the salvific integrity of the greatest story ever told.
42
Davies suggests that one reason we find quantum physics so puzzling is that we are asking the wrong questions. He likens it to the scene in Douglas Adams’s excellent book, “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” in which philosophers await the results of a supercomputer that has been running a seven-and-a-half-million-year program to answer the question of “Life, The Universe and Everything.” The computer sheepishly announces that the answer is “42.” Needless to say, the philosophers are unimpressed.
“Forty-Two!” yelled Loonquawl. “Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?”
The computer responded:
“I checked it very thoroughly…and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”
What if the scientific answers we receive from the quantum realm feel inadequate because we fail to include God in our questions? Scientists are slowly acknowledging that, in their search for the quantum Holy Grail, they may be late to the game, since theologians have been drinking from it for thousands of years—a point made by the late astronomer and planetary physicist Robert Jastrow.
“For a scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
God isn’t silent. In fact, He hasn’t stopped speaking. His opening monologue began with a big bang that still reverberates through time. The problem for Davies is that he is content to listen to the heavens declare, yet afraid to ask on whose behalf they speak. Qureshi-Hurst hears the rocks cry out but believes it is merely an emergent burp of consciousness. Perhaps the evolutionary extravagance they both acknowledge but prefer to downplay is the image-bearing capacity to hear their Maker speak. I hope that as they continue their intellectual ascent, they will be prepared for a meet-and-greet with the God who started the conversation.
And God said…
God's Screenplay 