This is more-or-less the end of this long series of posts on the theological implications of quantum mechanics, although it's a topic I'll return to in various ways in future. Here I make a positive argument for identifying that which is beyond the law of non-contradiction with god.
The argument so far:
1) Experimental violations of Bell's Inequalities demonstrates that there is an aspect of reality that violates the laws of non-contradiction and local causality, which define the conditions of "being" in the ordinary sense of the word. That is: quantum entanglement implies the world we can experience is underlain by something that is omnipresent, beyond space and time, incomprehensible, singular, infinite, and sustains all of existence as we know it.
2) That list of properties is sufficiently close to the traditional list of properties of "god" that it would be churlish to refuse to use that name for what is beyond the bounds of the law of non-contradiction. This is a synthesis of Maimonides and Spinoza's views of god: neither "God is beyond nature" (Maimonides) nor "God is nature" (Spinoza), but "god is that part of nature that is beyond us." And by "beyond" I don't mean simply, "I don't get it" but "No one can get it", and not "No one can get it because it's complicated" but "No one can get it because it's beyond the law of non-contradiction." There's a simple test for this: if you can perceive it by any means whatsoever--meditation, drugs, prayer, wide-eyed wonder at the beauty of nature--it is not "beyond us" in the relevant sense.
3) Not only is god incomprehensible (because god violates the conditions of comprehensibility) the violation of Leibniz's law (the identity of indiscernibles) by indistinguishable particles implies that god is silent: there is information accessible to god that is absolutely inaccessible to us. That is, not only can't we perceive god, god can't speak to us by any means whatsoever.
4) Therefore god--as defined by theologians and philosophers--exists, at least for a certain value of "exists". But the personal, intervening God of any scripture or revelation whatsoever is a purely human artifact that has nothing at all to do with god.
At this point both atheists and theists are objecting. The atheists don't really have a point: I've done all the things they complain that theists ought to do: I have defined god and produced evidence for an aspect of reality that fulfills that definition. They just don't like attaching the word "god" to it, but since theologians have been attaching the word "god" to just such an aspect of reality for thousands of years, it isn't clear what the basis for their complaint is, other than "we don't like the word".
Like I care.
Theists are even more annoyed, because they really, really want their scriptures or revelations or personal experiences to have something to do with god.
They don't.
They can't.
And we know this, because god tells us so, despite being silent.
This is where this gets a little uncanny, and for me at least it generates the sense of existential awe or wonder that I've identified as the feeling of the divine.
I've established that god cannot communicate with us by any means whatsoever... and yet: we can know that, not by virtue of any act of communication, but by the structure of the universe itself. It's almost like it was been made that way. Maybe it wasn't, but then again, maybe it was.
We know communication from god is impossible, not because of god but because of us. Communicating with the beyond is beyond us, beyond the conditions of our existence: the impossibility of it is what makes the beyond, beyond... and by the same token, it is what makes us, us. We are the children of time. Our existence is constrained by the laws of non-contradiction and local causality. In the beyond there is no time, nor space, neither. There have been various attempts at sketches of theories of what it might be like, but so far no one has been clever enough to figure it out.
We know that any such theory will be non-geometric, because the beyond does not have any geometry or dimension.
My own bias is that it any viable theory of the beyond will be essentially thermodynamic in structure, with some kind of counting of ways in some kind of primordial stuff giving rise to the three dimensions of space and one of time that we experience. But that's literally nothing more than my bias and prejudice speaking, which are not a good guide to reality.
Such a theory really would be a "theory of the mind of god", and it would show how time and space emerge from the timeless and spaceless. This is the thing about the beyond: because it is beyond--outside of space, external to time--there is no possibility of action on the part of god, because action takes place in space and time, and the beyond encompasses all of time at once, and maybe more, for all we know. And we know this because two photons entangled immediately after the Big Bang will still be entangled today, even if they are billions of light years apart: this is required by conservation laws, which are as certain as anything we know. Whatever connects entangled particles in the beyond is independent of the distance between them, instantaneous, outside of time. This is what quantum theory tells us, and this is what the experimental violation of Bell's inequalities confirms is the case.
So one can't even talk of the beyond as the creator of the knowable universe, or ask what was god doing before the universe was created. We can't even say god was or is simply "being", because "being" is something that happens in time, under the law of non-contradiction, which says "A thing cannot both be and not be the same thing at the same time and in the same respect." This is the most general condition on what it means "to be", and the beyond violates it.
The universe only has a beginning from our perspective within it.
There is no verb for god, because verbs describe actions and actions happen in time. So we can say that god does not verb, no matter what the verb is: to be, to create, to speak, to hear... none of these things are possible for god.
The nature of god lacks anything like intentionality, because intention happens in time and god does not: god does not want, demand, respond, punish, reward. There are no acts of god, because god does not act. Action is the dance of the children of time.
But...
There is still the structure of the knowable universe itself, which is, like god, timeless. The law of non-contradiction is an eternal, timeless, constraint on being. Likewise the law of local causality. Likewise the statistics of counting that Bell's inequalities depend on.
And structure conveys information. Action--even if action were possible for god--does not.
Consider a building. Suppose I were to tell you that within its walls the following things had happened over the past year: some people read books, others argued, others sang, others had sex, others prayed, others had meetings and long discussions. Some people swept the floors and others cleaned the windows. Some people cooked.
What is the purpose of the building? I have no idea: it could be an office, a home, a church, a skating rink... The activity taking place within it tells us nothing.
The structure of the building, on the other hand, tells us so much that an archaeologist can pretty easily tell a fortress from a temple, an administrative building from an apartment block, a barracks from a theatre from a brothel, even when looking at the ruins of a culture that is long dead and gone.
Structure carries information. Structure allows the builder to communicate with the inhabitants, no matter what barriers lie between them.
And that is how a god that cannot communicate with us… can communicate with us: through the fixed, static, eternal structure of the universe, not the transient actions of the stars or comets, the vagaries of the weather, or the flight of birds.
We can know that the beyond is present. This is astonishing. There's no particular reason to believe it's necessary. Maybe it is, somehow. Maybe the experimental violation of Bell's inequalities is a necessary, accidental, consequence of the structure of both the beyond and the universe of experience.
What we know is that despite the absolute impossibility of communication from the beyond, we have in the structure of the universe what might be interpreted as a message from god.
And god's message is simple and comprehensible:
"I am here."
That is the whole of it. I can and will make an argument for a more elaborate interpretation, but I'm not an idiot: I know that any deeper interpretation is going to be full of me. It will reflect my priorities, my desires, my biases. Every interpretation beyond that most basic message will.
The whole of god's message is the fact of god's existence.
I sometimes liken this to Neanderthal art. Thirty-thousand years ago in a cave in what is now France a thinking, questioning, being--maybe one of your ancestors, if you have any European ancestry--crawled deep into a cave and blew ochre dye out of his or her mouth to leave a hand-print on the wall. Others had done so before. Others would do so after. Maybe they came in groups. Maybe they came alone.
We know nothing about them. We don't know how they felt about life, or the afterlife, or JK Rowling. We don't know why they were doing what they were doing. Maybe it was a deeply significant tribal ritual. Maybe it was the teenage Neanderthal equivalent of graffiti or gang tags.
But across the distance that separates us we are still able to receive one message from this act of art: "I am here."
The only thing it tells us is the fact of the artist's existence.
This does not imply that the universe is art. I'm just making an illustrative analogy, not an existential assertion, although I have no doubt if I ever get these ideas into widespread circulation that will be one of the popular misinterpretations. "Scientist says god is an artist!" The false headlines practically write themselves.
Still. I know that god has no intentionality. I know that god cannot communicate with us. I know that any attempt to imagine, think about, contemplate, meditate on, or consider god in any kind of human terms is doomed to fail, because god is not bound by the law of non-contradiction, which is the foundation of all our understanding. It is what makes understanding possible.
But: when I look at the structure of the universe, which tells me all of the above, I also see this message: "I am here."
And that gives me a sense of existential awe, of fundamental wonder at the fact of existence as such. That beyond this world and everything in it there is a deeper structure, unimaginable and in a certain respect incomprehensible, although who knows what theories we might yet formulate. This deeper world, which we know is there, sustains us and ensures that the machinery of time and space and causality run in such a way that we can exist.
And we do exist: time exists, space exists. I've never understood the claim that if something can be explained in terms of a deeper underlying substrate it doesn't "really" exist. No one claims temperature or heat doesn't exist, do they? Heat is fully explained by the motion of atoms, but stick your hand in the fire and you'll still get burned. It exists.
Likewise, the fact that there is something underlying space and time does not mean they are not real. What else would they be?
This world is not an illusion. Everything is real.
But space and time and matter and energy are not all that there is, and we know this, because beyond our world there is god, and god has told us: "I am here."
This is the positive argument for identifying the beyond with god. The negative argument is simply, "Why wouldn't we, given the traditional, theologically uncontroversial definition of god?" But by inspiring existential awe, the beyond has a positive claim on the divine.
The beyond is literally within us and all around us, sustaining our existence in its every aspect, for good or ill. And we can know that, which is the true source of existential wonder.
Some might argue it's all a grand cosmic coincidence, or the anthropic principle at work: of course the universe sustains our existence, they will say. If it didn't, we wouldn't exist to wonder about it. And that's a fair observation, except it doesn't address the point, which is: we can know about it. The anthropic principle cannot explain that. An unknowable beyond that sustains reality? Sure: anthropic. And unknowlable beyond that sustains reality and we can know about? Not anthropic.
There is an essential aspect of the universe, an aspect that is necessary for our existence as children of time, children of change and identity and causality and non-contradiction. It is essential to our existence in the most profound and basic way, and it is at the same time beyond us in the most absolute terms. It cannot communicate, it cannot intervene, it cannot send visions or revelations. The existence of any conduit that could under any circumstances pass information to us would break the universe of time and space that we live within, that we are part of.
And yet, despite all of that, this universe is tuned up structurally such that we can know the beyond is here, omnipresent, with us here and now, persistent throughout all of space and time, and yet forever outside of our perception.
It's wrong to impute any motive or intention to the beyond: it is after all without time, and motives and intentions happen in time.
But when I look at the universe of space and time, and understand the presence of god beyond it, and the fact that our knowledge of that presence depends on the most esoteric structural loophole in the laws of metaphysics imaginable, I cannot help but think of something that looks a great deal like love.
After reading this I feel I have a much better grasp of the idea. I found the architecture analogy especially helpful. (Not surprising. Lol)
Thank you for explaining it to the lay person.