A Christian view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality

Years ago, I read about this famous debate in which Bohr spoke of objects coming into existence as quantum waves ‘collapsed’ because of an observation. Einstein refused to believe this could be and spoke as if he were defending common sense.

Years ago, I also read “Critique of Scientific Reason” by the philosopher Kurt Hubner. He talked about this debate but I didn’t remember his restatement of the debate:

Einstein was claiming that reality consists of substances which remain unaltered by their relationships with other substances while Bohr was claiming that it is the relationships which are primary and those relationships bring substances into existence.

Over the past year, I pulled this book out of storage several times to rewrite Hubner’s discussion of this argument. It occurred to me that this argument puts Bohr’s ‘radical’ interpretation of reality in line with Christian beliefs. Einstein’s seeming common-sense is that of a hardheaded pagan who believes that matter exists eternally and independent of the will of God. God may be in charge in this world, in Einstein’s view, but He couldn’t be the Creator in quite the way that Christians believe Him to be.

How did God Create the world? How did the world and all of us come into existence?

The world came to be because God loved the world before it existed, loved us before we were conceived.

The world came to be as the result of God’s free-will decision to
love it even before it existed.

Pay attention to the line of argument but be aware that time-related language, such as ‘before’ should not be taken literally. That is, it can denote what philosophers would call an ontological relationship rather than a time relationship. The world could, in theory, be eternal when we consider whatever exists on the other side of the so-called Big Bang — more accurately, the beginning of the current expansionary phase of the universe.

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