Quantum Mechanics and the Upholding Power of God – National Catholic Register

The central unifying, overarching factor or cause is God himself.

Recently, I watched a fascinating NOVA episode entitled Einsteins Quantum Riddle. It was about advances in the area of quantum mechanics specifically, what is called quantum entanglement. Wikipedia has a long, complicated article about it. But the gist of it (which the TV special summarized for the layperson) is as follows:

Bottom line (beyond all the technical mumbo-jumbo of modern physics), is that even assuming that this phenomenon is true and a fact scientists have no explanation for how it could happen as it does. Its one of those things where the knowledge of science comes to an end: like the origin of life, the causes of the origins of the Big Bang, DNA and higher intelligence, and dark matter.

Einstein, as is well-known, had serious problems with quantum mechanics, with regard to its seemingly random and irrational nature, in relation to traditional notions of cause-and-effect. He famously stated, God doesnt play dice. Einsteins god was a pantheist one at best, but he was no atheist, and recognized that the universe had an unexplainable higher order and beauty of design that any thinking person couldnt deny. I have argued that this was a broad, bare-bones version of the classic theistic teleological (design) argument.

Science often gets to a place where it is completely baffled, but because it methodologically excludes God (which has essentially been the case since Darwin), and so often doesnt recognize its own inherent philosophical limitations (empiricism being only one form of knowledge among many), it rules out what is as plausible an explanation as anything else: God.

The most obvious example of this is Big Bang cosmology. This theory was formulated by a Catholic priest-scientist, Father Georges Lematre. It expressed in scientific detail what had already long since been present in the Bible: creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing).

The theory of evolution runs into the same insuperable difficulties when it comes to describing exact sequences and causes for evolutionary change: especially across large gaps, such as the origins of life and DNA and of large classification groups to other ones. Its entirely possible as a method that God used to create (theistic evolution), but without the inclusion of God, science cannot explain many key aspects of it.

Intelligent design advocate and scientist Dr. Michael Behe believes that intelligent design doesnt necessarily require additional intervention by God after His initial act of creation.

All Christians, it seems to me, have to believe that (1) God created (Genesis, etc.), and (2) he in some sense sustains or upholds his creation.

Its a belief in a non-material or immaterial force or power or spirit, that profoundly influences the material universe and its creative processes, and which itself seems ultimately beyond purely scientific or empirical analysis.

In this view, of intelligent design and/or theistic evolution, God designed or foreordained that complex structures would evolve, and life and consciousness, etc., by some unknown non-material, overarching, guiding principle that transcends science, or concerning which science (presently) can give us no clues or answers.

He not only created scientific laws that work essentially on their own (hence can be observed and studied scientifically), but also supervises or ordains the entire project though not in an interventionist or supernatural/miraculous way. The processes and potentialities were there from the beginning, as a manifestation of his omnipotence and omniscience. Its just that some of them are supra-scientific.

I submit that the same explanation that suggests itself with regard to the Big Bang and the unexplained mysteries of evolutionary process: the creative and upholding/omnipotent power of God, is applicable and plausible also as the explanation of how quantum entanglement is possible at all. Here are biblical passages along these lines:

This is inspired revelation from God. God either does these things: establishes, preserves, holds together, allows to endure, and upholds all of his creation (which he brought into being from nothing) or he does not. Christians if they are consistent cannot disbelieve this. And Gods power is as plausible an explanation of quantum entanglement as anything else: if only methodologically atheist science will allow him to be discussed at all.

If scientists seek the vaunted unified theory in physics, its right in front of them: the central unifying, overarching factor or cause is God himself. The Bible has taught it these past 2000 or more years. Modern science keeps indirectly verifying it, in effect, by its inability to explain origins or (as in our present example) the basis and ultimate causes of experimentally verified quantum mechanics.

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Quantum Mechanics and the Upholding Power of God - National Catholic Register