The reader might wish to read my earlier posting, A Christian’s view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality, for some background on this general issue. I follow the philosopher Kurt Hubner (see his book Critique of Scientific Reason) in claiming that Einstein’s position was that things have relationships with other things without any of those things being substantially changed by their interactions. Bohr’s position was that relationships can bring substance into being or at least change it in deep ways. I qualify this statement by further claiming that God can change substance by either bringing the underlying stuff of things into being from nothing or by shaping things. We creatures have limited but real powers to shape things by way of relationships. The ultimate relationship is love and that is what ‘powers’ God’s creative efforts. Creation came to be when God chose to actively love it. We as individuals come into being as a result of a particular love God has for us.
In The Quantum World [Princeton Science Library, 1989], the physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne provides an insightful and disciplined discussion of the issues involved in quantum mechanics. One particular problem is that of ‘reduction of wavepackets’ or quantum collapse. This reduction leads to the uncertainty and non-locality that were at issue in the debate between Bohr and Einstein on the nature of reality. Wavepackets are, from our viewpoint, a vague sort of being describable only in mathematical terms and those wavepackets reduce themselves to thing-like being for poorly understood reasons. If they didn’t reduce themselves, we couldn’t exist and neither could the most basic types of matter such as electrons or photons. I’ll make one more passing comment for the reader’s benefit: wavepackets behave in a fully deterministic way and follow very elegant mathematical rules of development over time while uncertainty and messiness of other sorts arise when wavepackets are reduced to thing-like being. The reader who doesn’t know about quantum collapse can look up “Schrodinger’s Cat” in their favorite WWW search engine. Better still: get hold of a copy of Polkinghorne’s book.
Quantum physicists noted that laboratory measurement under the control of a conscious scientist could cause a well-determined but ‘abstract’ Schrodinger wave to collapse to a particle in a particular place and having particular properties. By a leap of logic that is at least heroic and perhaps humorous, some jumped to the conclusion that it was consciousness that caused this collapse of abstract possibility into concrete photon in a particular spot with particular properties though no one was silly enough to suggest that the scientist’s consciousness somehow joined with the laboratory instrument as it made ‘contact’ with the wavepacket. It’s the measuring instrument and any photons it sends out which make are the proximate cause of the reduction and that situation doesn’t seem so different from your average star making ‘contact’ with a wavepacket by sending out photons or by generating magnetic fields or whatever.
One interesting counter-argument to consciousness-based theories of quantum reduction is based on a claim of some philosophers that has seemingly been confirmed by modern brain-scientists: consciousness doesn’t even directly control our own actions let alone dictate the existence of things around us. The regions fo the brain associated with conscious awareness respond later than those regions which control bodily movement. It’s hard to imagine how consciousness could be causing quantum reduction at the present time when consciousness doesn’t engage what’s happening now.
If we cause the collapse of wavepackets into thing-like being, it is by way of our physical interactions with our environments and, in that, we’re no different from that laboratory instrument and that star I discussed above. (See How Brains Make Up Their Minds by Walter J. Freeman for a good discussion of the nature of consciousness and related issues. The interested reader can also read my entries reviewing this book, beginning with What is Mind?: Is Christian Morality a Natural Morality? and the subsequent entries under the general title of What is Mind?. These entries can all be found under the category “Mind”.)
As a side-comment, I would emphasize another possibility for consciousness which is implied by Freeman’s views (and the similar views of Merleau-Ponty and other philosphers): consciousness allows us some limited power to change our state of being so that we act in a desirable way in the future. Over the course of our lives, our conscious self can even guide us — by a slow and often painful process — into a Christ-like state. This extends the effect of consciousness into our future, but its domain of direct interaction with the surrounding environment would still lag the collapse of wavepackets which form that environment.
But I also wish to quickly discuss a complex theological issue raised by Polkinghorne. He implies an error which I’m sure he, an Anglican priest, doesn’t support.
On page 66, he tells us:
The dilemma of those who evoke consciousness as the basis of phenomena was succinctly stated by Ronnie Knox in his limerick on idealism:
There once was a man who said ‘God
Must think it exceedingly odd
if he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.An anonymous author provided an answer along lines approved by Bishop Berkeley:
Dear Sir, You astonishment’s odd;
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by Yours faithfully, God.Such a riposte would not, however, be available to a defender of the interpretation of quantum mechanical measurement presently under consideration, supposing him to wish to avail himself of it. Divine reduction of wavepackets would be an overkill, since it would operate everywhere and always, forcing the electron each time to go through a definite slit. The point about measurement is that it only occurs spasmodically. [This observation is in accord with the classic theological understanding of creation, which sees God as the ground and support of all that is (in our terms, the guarantor of the Schrodinger equation) but not as an object among objects (no collapser of wavepackets).]
While disagreeing with this interpretation of Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy, I do agree with the main point Fr. Polkinghorne is making about God being “the ground and support of all that is (in our terms, the guarantor of the Schrodinger equation) but not as an object among objects.” Correct as stated, these words say too little and need to be supplemented else they might lead us to a rationalistic Deism.
The Almighty Lord is free to act in the way of a creature when He wishes. In fact, we Christians believe He spoke with Moses and Elijah and others. We believe He intervened directly at crucial points in the history of the Israelites. Some of us believe that angelic appearances, when not religious poetry, were manifestations by which He made His Presence sensible to the eyes and ears of an embodied creature, a human being. We Christians all believe He acted to incarnate His Son in the holy womb of Mary. He still acts directly as if a super-creature. He might well be curing the lame in the waters of Lourdes. He might well be easing the pain of that poor woman lying in the ICU with tubes and wires running in and out. To do so, God might be collapsing wavepackets, though He may have other ways to directly shape things and to bring about events in this world.
We have to be careful that we not bind God to the world He created of His own free-will but we have to also be careful not to exclude God from this world. If He can create it, He can act inside of it and the Bible tells us pretty clearly He has done so on a regular basis.
(For what it’s worth, I read Bishop Berkeley as claiming that God doesn’t secure existence by observing things. The Almighty brings things into existence by thinking of them. While a bit confused about the difference between things and the underlying stuff of things, Berkeley was making a claim similar to my claim that things are true because they are manifestations of thoughts of God.)