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I've decided to serialize my book to make it more readily available to people. Of course, if you don't want to wait for the next installment, you can always by the book (paper or eBook) on Amazon.com!

Introduction

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory
has not understood it.—Physicist Niels Bohr

I’m not really qualified to write this book. Heck, I’m barely qualified to read it. But that’s part of why I wrote it in the first place. There are more than a few books on science and theology, but they tend to be weighty volumes meant to impress scholars, not to help ordinary people resolve the tensions between their scientific and religious beliefs. Most books that relate modern physics to religion do so by talking about Eastern religions like Buddhism. As far as I know, there’s no book that takes both physics and Christianity seriously, and that does so in a way that people like you and me can understand.

And so that’s why I had to write this book, because no one else had written it, and I wasn’t sure that anyone would. Besides, I thought that I had at least a little something to contribute along these lines. I have a Master of Divinity degree from a reputable seminary (which I won’t name so they can stay reputable) and spent almost three years as a Presbyterian minister. Then I became a technical writer for a well-known computer company (ditto). To make sure that my nerdiness was not limited to hardware and software, I continued to exercise my biblical aptitude by teaching Sunday school and tried to keep my lunchtime reading list as broad as possible.

That’s what led me to The Physics of Consciousness by Evan Harris Walker. This book, a compelling mixture of quantum mechanical theory, Zen Buddhism, and personal reminiscences, started me on the path of questioning both my understanding of what science tells us about the world and what traditional Christianity tells us about God. I learned that the universe is not a precisely engineered machine, but a roiling cauldron of innumerable random and sometimes weird events. I also realized that the common image of God as an old, bearded man surfing the clouds, even when abstracted to something along the lines of a Great Spirit motif, couldn’t really mesh with the picture of reality painted by quantum theory.

That led me to further reading on the subject, and the Reading List at the end of the book tells you about the books I found most useful. The one thing that struck me about most of those books, though, is how dauntingly opaque they are. A few of them had so much advanced theory (for me, at least) that I had to skip over whole sections just to keep my head from exploding. And even though many of them looked at the religious repercussions of quantum theory, they did so in the context of Eastern religions that talk about a world that is, at its core, just an illusion. It’s a lot more difficult to talk about Christian faith in the context of a description of reality that doesn’t fit the notion of a creator spinning the universe into being like a potter working clay on his wheel. So I decided to accept the challenge of writing a book that tries to do so, even if I’m not the best qualified person for the job. If that person would kindly step forward, I’ll be more than happy to hand over the responsibility to them.

Then again, even though I’m undoubtedly not the best qualified, perhaps I’m qualified enough. While I lack the certifiable scientific and theological chops that would make this book both informative and credible, I at least have 20-some-odd years’ experience as a professional communicator that has taught me the importance of writing to my audience, a skill that most scholars notoriously lack. So possibly I understand the subject matter just well enough to interpret it for readers who have just a little less understanding but are seeking to gain more.

So, Gentle Reader, the book you hold in your hand isn’t intended to overwhelm your skepticism with footnotes and formulas, much less to use them as a device to prove the existence of God or the fundamental truth of the Christian faith. Rather, it’s my hope to give you a taste of the frankly bizarre universe portrayed by quantum physics and to show how the very nature of that bizarre universe actually leaves room for God’s existence and activity in a way that classical science could not. Finally, I want to take a fresh look at the Christian faith in light of those insights and consider which traditional beliefs can be sustained and which must be radically redrawn.

In the end, I pray that you will approach this book with an open mind. If you do, even if it doesn’t change your opinions, at least it will give you the opportunity to better understand your beliefs and how they are being challenged by the a scientific worldview you probably didn’t learn much about in school. That’s really all that I ask of this book, and I hope you will, too.

I’d like to add a brief note about the language I used to refer to God. Although my time in seminary and other corners of Christianity has made me sensitive to the problems that come from using masculine language (he, his, him) to refer to God, and even though I really don’t believe God is somehow more male than female, I deliberately chose to use masculine language to talk about God. I did so because, frankly, I didn’t want my refusal to use traditional language to become a stumbling block for those of you who haven’t yet adapted to a more gender-neutral view of God. Even more important, as I talked about God in the light of quantum physics, I found that the portrayal of God sometimes became so abstract that it began to verge on turning a personal God into a thing. That wasn’t my intention, so I continued to use personal pronouns (which, in English, are unavoidably gender specific) to struggle against that tendency. To those who are put off by the results of that decision, I apologize.