God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (22 page)

This reasoning has led gurus of quantum spirituality, such as bestselling authors Deepak Chopra
²²
and Rhonda Byrne
²³
to conclude that we can change reality—past, present, and future—just by thinking about it. In
chapter 9
we will discuss the recently published claim by psychologist Daryl Bem that he has empirical evidence for the human mind affecting the past. As with all such reports, and there have been many over the past century and a half, this contention has not stood up under critical scrutiny and was not replicated by an experiment that followed the same procedure.

DIVINE ACTIONS WITHOUT MIRACLES

Basic to all three Abrahamic religions is the belief that God is the controlling agent in the universe who acts as needed to make sure things work out the way he wants.
²⁴
This was unnecessary for the Enlightenment deist god who created the Newtonian world machine. Why would a perfect God need to step in after he created a universe in which everything is already divinely predetermined?

To some theologians, the uncertainty principle, which eliminated the Newtonian world machine, suggests a way for God to act in the universe without the need to perform visible miracles.
²⁵
No miracle has ever been confirmed by science. That is, no observation has been made that cannot at least be plausibly and more simply explained by known natural means. To be consistent with that fact, rather than simply denying it, theologians (to their credit) have attempted to show how God can act in such a way as to avoid his miraculous actions being detected.

Obviously God could have simply made his miracles observable to science. However, according to one argument, he needs to be devious, or mysterious, so that we accept him on faith. Why he wants to do that escapes me. As has been noted, a perfect God doesn't need to create a universe with troublesome human beings since he is already perfectly content. And even if he did, why would he want to spend eternity surrounded by clueless toadies? If he sought good conversation, you would think God would prefer the company of Bertrand Russell to Pat Robertson.

So, how does the uncertainty principle help? Macroscopic and even most microscopic objects have tiny uncertainties and behave deterministically to a high degree of precision even given the uncertainty principle. So to act without performing miracles, God must direct the motions of submicroscopic particles
within the boundaries allowed by the uncertainty principle in such a way that his action is undetectable to humans. Now, changing the motion of one atom isn't likely to produce an important change on the everyday scale. God would have to really micromanage, simultaneously affecting the motions of a trillion trillion atoms at a time. Imagine how busy God would have to be, controlling the movements of 10
⁷⁹
atoms in the visible universe and the countless number of atoms beyond our light horizon and possibly an unlimited number of other universes. No wonder he doesn't have time to listen to prayers.

Physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne and others have suggested a way to amplify the influence of a few atoms manyfold using the
butterfly effect of chaos theory
.
²⁶
Under certain conditions, a tiny change in the initial conditions of an otherwise deterministic macroscopic system can produce widely different results. In the usual example that is given, it is as if a flap of a butterfly's wings can affect the weather next week. Such a system is called
chaotic
because of its unpredictability.
²⁷

Many authors misinterpret this result as implying that indeterminism extends to Newtonian physics. This is not quite right. The path of the chaotic system is still fully determined by the initial conditions and by the laws of classical mechanics. Chaos theory is properly called
deterministic chaos.
Unpredictability arises in practice because of the inability to measure the initial conditions with sufficient accuracy. If the accuracy exceeds the limit of the quantum uncertainty principle, then we have indeterminacy. But that indeterminacy is quantum in origin, not Newtonian.

THE END OF DUALITY

Now let us see why quantum spirituality fails. Along with Christian apologists such as Grassie, McMullin, and Clayton, quantum spiritualists Chopra and Byrne have misinterpreted the wave-particle duality. What quantum physicists discovered was that every physical entity has both particlelike and wavelike properties. In fact,
empirically
they are all particles
while their so-called wavelike behavior does not exist for an individual particle but appears only as a property of a large ensemble of particles. Let me explain.

Recall from
chapter 5
that in 1803 Thomas Young demonstrated the wave nature of light by observing the interference of beams of light. Today such experiments can be performed with far greater precision than was available to Young two centuries ago. In particular, we can use detectors that are sensitive to single photons. When the double slit experiment is performed with an array of such detectors one photon at a time, localized individual particle hits are registered. No wavelike interference pattern is seen until a large number of photons are accumulated. Then the pattern emerges as the statistical distribution of photon detections. But each individual photon itself does not behave like a wave. It behaves like a localized, nonholistic particle.

When we talk about the “wavelength of a photon,” we are not referring to a property of an individual photon but to a characteristic of the mathematical function that describes a statistical ensemble of identical photons. The same experiment can be done with electrons or any other particle. The electron, photon, and all other submicroscopic objects are localizable particles and their wavelike effects refer only to the statistical behavior of a large number of them.

It does not matter whether you are trying to measure a particle property or a wave property.
You always measure particles
. Here is the point that most people fail to understand: Quantum mechanics is just a statistical theory like statistical mechanics, fundamentally reducible to particulate behavior. In statistical mechanics you use the average behavior of particles, following the laws of mechanics, to calculate collective quantities such as pressure and density fields. In quantum mechanics you use the average behavior of particles, following the laws of mechanics, to calculate collective quantities such as the wave function field. Neither theory specifies the motion of any given particle, only the statistical behavior of the ensemble. The wave function often (but not always) looks like a wave, hence its name. It is not the vibration of any medium, like a sound or water wave. The formulation of quantum theory developed by Schrödinger was originally called “wave mechanics,” which, as mentioned, is the most familiar but also the least advanced.

However, there is an important difference between statistical and quantum mechanics. While we know the basic laws of particles behavior underlying statistical mechanics, we have no idea what those laws are for quantum mechanics, if any. We will talk more about this issue later.

In a few words, no incompatibility exists between the particle and wave picture. They are simply two different ways to describe the same phenomenon, namely, a beam of particles. A single particle is always a particle, never a wave. Physics teachers and authors use sloppy, incorrect language when they say, “An electron is either a particle or a wave.” An electron is always a particle while an ensemble of electrons is treated as a wave.

Let me use another analogy that will be familiar to many. A communications engineer will sometimes describe a signal as a series of pulses localized in time, as if it were a beam of particles, or as a spectrum of frequencies, as if it were a combination of sine waves. The engineer's toolbox contains a mathematical device called the
Fourier transform
, invented in the nineteenth century by the brilliant French mathematician Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (died 1830), which enables the engineer to go back and forth between the two representations. The quantum uncertainty principle can be mathematically derived directly using the Fourier transform.
²⁸

Wave function collapse, described previously, seems to violate Einstein's rule that no signal can move faster than the speed of light. When the wave function collapses, it does so instantaneously throughout the universe. Einstein never believed it and called the whole idea a “spooky action at a distance.”
²⁹
But that's what quantum spiritualists are seeking—spooks.

QUANTUM REALITY

Philosophers of science have attempted to give names to the various points of view found in science about what science has to say about reality. Most physicists would probably agree with the following doctrines:

Commonsense realism

A reality exists that is independent of what people think about it.
³⁰

Scientific realism

The aim of science is to give us an accurate description of what reality is like, including aspects of reality that are unobservable
.
³¹

In addition, most physicists would hold to some form of:

Empiricism

Observation is the only source of knowledge about the world. This is not meant to include forms of abstract knowledge such as mathematics or linguistics, which do not exist (as far as I know) independently outside our heads
.

Many experimental physicists also hold to a view opposed to scientific realism:

Instrumentalism

Scientific theories should be seen as instruments used to predict observations, rather than as an attempt to describe the real but hidden structures of the world that are responsible for the patterns found in observations
.
³²

This is known in the field as “Shut up and calculate.”

On the other hand, most theoretical physicists and mathematicians seem to follow:

Platonism

The mathematical functions and laws of the theories of physics are the “true reality” while our observations are shadows on the wall of Plato's cave
.
³³

Except for the New Age gurus who claim we can “make our own reality” just by thinking we can, few rational people doubt that the objects we see with our naked eyes are real and independent of our thoughts. But what about those objects not visible to our naked eyes, such as electrons, atoms, molecules, and bacteria, which form much of the substance of physics, chemistry, and biology? These require the instruments of science to detect.

Now, few will argue that the bacteria a biologist sees with her microscope are not real, in the same way that few would deny the reality of a planet or star seen by an astronomer with his telescope. Many telescopes and microscopes today do not simply magnify images for the human eye but utilize more sensitive light detectors that send signals directly to a computer where the data can be stored and analyzed with greater precision and quantity.

And visible light is not the only means by which a scientist can observe an object. Astronomers utilize the whole electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays. Furthermore, other particles besides photons are used. In 1987, a supernova in the Magellanic Cloud just outside our galaxy was detected in neutrinos. In the late 1990s, I worked on an experiment in Japan that “saw” the sun in neutrinos, right through the Earth in the middle of the night. Similarly, on a much smaller scale, microbiologists and chemists can use the electron microscope to see individual molecules.

What about atoms? Although they were first postulated to exist in ancient Greece, indirect evidence for their existence first began to accumulate in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the great physicist and philosopher of that period, Ernst Mach (died 1916), refused to believe in atoms because he couldn't “see” them. Even today I read in books that “atoms are invisible.” This is wrong. If you look at the frontispiece in my 1990 book
Physics and Psychics
, you will see a picture of an array of chromium atoms taken with a
scanning tunneling microscope
.
³⁴

So, where do we draw the line? Surely what we see wearing glasses is real, and glasses are scientific instruments. How are fancier instruments, such as the scanning tunneling microscope, fundamentally different? As we get below the scale of atoms to elementary particles such as electrons, the detection process becomes more and more technical. During the early years of my research in elementary particle physics I worked with a now-obsolete device called the
bubble chamber
, in which charged particles left lovely trails of bubbles in a superheated liquid that we photographed and identified. I saw thousands of bubble tracks that tightly spiraled in the magnetic field inside the chamber and were easily recognized as produced by electrons. If they spiraled in the opposite direction, they were equally clearly identified as the tracks of antielectrons, or
positrons
. Were these electrons and positrons real? I don't see how
you can say they were not real while insisting that the moon and that book in front of you are real.

The electron is one of the fundamental particles in the standard model of particles and forces. What about the other particles in the model? Few are observed as unambiguously as the electron and a number of similar particles such as the muon and tauon. Since they are uncharged, neutral particles such as photons and neutrinos do not leave tracks in our detectors, but they can be inferred fairly unambiguously from other tracks and the application of some well-established principles such as conservation of energy, momentum, and charge. In any case, the elementary particles were introduced into the standard model in order to explain empirical anomalies of one sort or another that could not be explained otherwise.