Quantum entanglement and apophasis

Last month my wife (Patty), our son (Jeremy), and I flew down to San Francisco for the Annual Meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion. While our primary purpose for being there was to be a cheering section for our daughter, Christy Riley, who presented a paper at an SBL session, it  also gave Patty and me an opportunity to indulge in a couple days of nostalgia. That's because 34 years ago, as employees of Scholars Press (a joint venture of the AAR and SBL and others), we helped organize and run the same meetings in the same city. (My main job was to make sure the requested AV equipment was set up, which back then meant overhead and slide projectors.)

Besides Christy's session, I was also able to sit in on a presentation called "The Entangled Universe: Physical Explications, Theological Complications" by Dr. Catherine Keller, who just happens to be a teacher at Drew University, where Christy is earning her Ph.D.  

While Dr. Keller's AAR presentation was suitably dense for a scholarly audience, fortunately for the rest of us, she shared many of the same ideas in an interview with Beatrice Marovich for Religion Dispatches magazine.

R.E. Slater, in his Relevancy22 blog, reproduces the RD article and adds some useful contextual material, including a discussion of apophatic vs. cataphatic theology. That's a distinction I wish I'd been more mindful of as I was writing Quantum Christianity, to be honest. Maybe I'll have to produce that second edition sooner than I'd hoped.

It's published!

Quantum Christianity is now available for purchase from Amazon, both in paperback and for the Kindle.

To get a peek, go to amazon.com.

What the heck is Quantum Christianity?

When most people think of the contention between science and religion, it's usually in terms of the argument over biological evolution. Somehow the apparent contradiction between Darwin's theories and a handful of verses in the book of Genesis is generally accepted as the core of this debate, when it's really just a side show, a side effect of the real conflict that is at the root of the seeming chasm between the scientific and the religious world views.

The truth is, the battle between science and religion is not between Darwin and God, but between Newton and God. After all, it was Newton who was the first to assert that, theoretically at least, the entire universe could be described by a set of mathematical equations and who took the first steps toward doing so. The result was Newton's famous laws of thermodynamics, the palette that subsequent physicists have used to paint a portrait of the universe that not only does not require a God as its creator and sustainer, but even excludes the possibility of a God who is able to intervene in its processes. For Newton and his scientific descendants, the universe is merely a perpetual motion machine that is not just independent of any divine intervention, but would cease to function if God were actually to interfere in its affairs.

This would be just yet another clash of world views, not substantially different from that between, say, Buddhism and Judaism, were it not for one disturbing (for believers, at least) fact: Science, especially physical science (its most distilled form), has proven to be the most reliable means of predicting and controlling future events and for explaining past events. What used to be the principal function of prophets and seers has been taken over by nerds in lab coats.

What most people don't realize, though, is that the primacy of Newtonian physics (and mathematics) as the fundamental way of describing the roots of reality began to be overturned over a century ago. This revolution was the result of the appearance of a new way of understanding matter and energy. This method came to be known as quantum physics because it studied how energy can be viewed as being contained in distinct chunks, called quanta. As physicists drilled deeper into this theoretical framework, they found a lot of strange things (dubbed "quantum weirdness") that not only displaced the mechanistic world view of Newton but even suggested that there might even be a place for God—or something that at least resembles God—in the quantum universe.

So that's what this blog is about, the possibility that the world view based on quantum mechanics might somehow be compatible with a (note I didn't say "the") Christian world view. I'll be posting some material I've been developing for a book on the subject as well as reacting to current events and any comments that readers post in response to my thoughts and others'. Later I'll add more information about myself and why I think I might be qualified to expound on such things (which I'm not, really) and maybe any ground rules for the discussion if things seem to be getting out of hand.