Introduction to Quantum Theology

god and the beyond

A couple of weeks ago I introduced the idea that there is an aspect of the world we know is infinite, singular, one, omnipresent, beyond space and time, utterly incomprehensible and unknowable to us, and underpins all of reality as we know it. And I argued this “beyond” should be called "god" because that list of attributes is uncannily similar to the list of attributes that many theologians give when asked about the nature of god.

Last week I showed that god is (almost) silent: because we know that the difference between indistinguishable particles is unknowable, and yet the difference that separates "two identical particles" from "one particle" exists in the beyond, therefore whatever is beyond must be utterly, absolutely, and completely inaccessible to us as children of time. If we want to use the word "god" to describe the beyond, we must also say that neither scripture nor revelation, neither meditation nor mushrooms nor anything else, is capable of bringing us any knowledge of god whatsoever. This should not be entirely surprising.

However, there are people who object to the idea that the beyond is god, both theists and otherwise. Theists--whom I call "scripturalists"--get offended by the idea that this god exists outside of the possibility of scripture, revelation, or anything else that would justify the claim that they personally have privileged access to god's thoughts and therefore have a right to tell the rest of us what to do with our bodies and minds. Atheists get offended by the idea there is a god at all.

Let me deal with the atheists first. After all, business comes before pleasure.

In the sciences we routinely come up with concepts that have no referent. We look at the world and say, "Y'know, things would make a lot more sense if there was an entity with these properties..." Then we go looking for an entity with those properties. This is the step that distinguishes science from everything else. Sometimes we find what we're looking for. Sometimes we don't.

For example, caloric was a fluid that was supposed to be heat. We didn't find it, and in fact showed it could not exist. Proving negatives is something experimental physicists do a lot: we say "If X exists then Y must happen under circumstances Z. We have created circumstances Z and observed that Y does not happen. Ergo, X does not exist." There's always wiggle room, of course, but only non-Bayesians want things to be "100% certain for sure", so the existence of wiggle room is not very interesting.

In more recent times, the Higgs boson was conceived of as a scalar field whose broken symmetry accounted for the masses of elementary particles. After decades of existing as a purely theoretical entity we found it.

And still more recently, dark matter is a speculative kind of matter that explains the motions of galaxies at very large scales in the universe. We haven't found it yet.

There are even specific kinds of dark matter that are purely theoretical: weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and massive compact halo objects (MACHOs, inevitably) and so on. We have a theory of something that may well not exist.

Theoretical entities are commonplace in the sciences, and they are reified (made real), or discarded, or modified as the data rolls in. The so-called "missing link" between apes and humans has been largely abandoned because we now know the evolutionary story is more complicated than that simple-minded idea of linear evolution implies, but the "chimp-human-latest-common-ancestor" (CHLCA) has replaced it. We just don't yet know what actual, concrete, species the CHLCA is.

Theoretical entities have suspect ontologies: we don't really know what they'll be like until we meet them. We know the Higgs boson exists, for example, but there are a number of sub-types allowed by theory and other measurements, and we aren't sure which it is yet.

Any theoretical entity necessarily has a handful of characteristics that define it, and part of the discipline of science is that when we find an entity that has those defining characteristics we accept it as a real instance of what was previously purely theoretical and we accept all of its characteristics as being characteristics of that entity, including ones we didn't expect or didn't know about.

This is absolutely foundational to the business of creating knowledge. We would get no where if, for example, scientists set out to generate the electromagnetic waves implied by Maxwell's equations, found phenomena that fulfilled the definition, and then said, "Oh, but those aren't really what Maxwell's equations predicted!"

What possible warrant would we have for such a declaration? That we didn't like some aspect of their behaviour? That some aspect of them was not as we had naively conceived of it? That our observations of them resolved an experimental quandary in a way we didn't like? Or that someone else, or someone we didn’t like, or someone who is “just not the right sort” discovered them first?

It would be frankly ridiculous for us to find a fossil that based on genetic or morphological evidence was clearly ancestral to both humans and apes, and to say, "Oh, this isn't the CHLCA!" simply because it was, say, found in Europe rather than Africa, where we expected it to be... because being found in Africa is not part of the definition of the CHLCA. It can't be: by definition we don't know where the fossil will be found. Geographical location is simply not part of the equation. We have expectations that it'll be found in Africa, but there is already evidence of very early hominid ancestors in Europe, and we know that while there is no serious question that H. sapiens evolved in Africa, there is no particular constraint on other hominids evolving elsewhere. Neanderthal, for example, are likely a purely European lineage.

So we have a well-established and well-justified principle here: when we find something that fulfills the definition of a theoretical concept, we say, "Hey, we've found that this theoretical concept describes reality! It's not theoretical any more! It's real!" And we call the real thing we’ve found by the name of the theoretical concept. This is what we did with the Higgs boson, with electro-magnetic waves, and so on.

There is no warrant for not doing this with the concept of "god".

This answers any objections atheists might have. They quite reasonably ask for a definition of "god" and I've provided one from the annals of theology, where there is fairly broad agreement among thinkers going back to Aristotle as to what the Unmoved Mover should look like.

What philosophers and theologians did not know and could not show was whether or not anything that fulfilled their definition of god was actually present in the world. But we should be grateful that they hammered together the scaffolding that we can hang our knowledge of the world on.

The one quibble I can see in this regard is the question: if we didn't already have this concept of the beyond as divine, would we be thinking about it now?

I dunno. Maybe. Maybe not.

And what even is "the divine" anyway? I’ll get to that in time, but for now the notion of divinity brings me to the objections of the theists in general and the scripturalists in particular, which are going to have to wait until next week for an airing.

What I will say is that theologians--at least the ones I have any respect for--are generally concerned with a transcendent god, which is what I've been dealing with here: one that is beyond the universe and beyond us.

What scripturalists are necessarily concerned with is an immanent god: one that is present in the world.

Now, as I've said, the god we actually have is nature in a very real sense, but precisely that aspect of nature that is beyond us. Therefore god is both immanent in the sense of being intimately entwined with our electrons and protons and transcendent because that intimacy is incomprehensible to us and always will be.

That is, god's immanence allows us to know of god, but not know god.

God is silent... almost.

The "almost" is where this story veers into the uncanny, which I’ll also get to eventually, and I’ll show why to my mind it makes the isomorphism between god and the beyond even more difficult to deny.

Before that, I want to talk about how God's silence is where scripturalists, revelationists, and everyone else who has anything resembling conventional religious or spiritual beliefs really goes wrong.