Quantum Physics and Christian Faith

In the subatomic world of quantum reality, nature contradicts our most commonsense notions: events happen without cause, electrons "know" they are being watched, and particles exist and don't exist simultaneously. Quantum physics confronts mankind with phenomena that not only expose the limits of human logic, reason, and rational thought, but brashly defy them. At the quantum level, things happen that scientists can barely believe, much less explain, at least not without grand leaps of faith that strain credulity. It's more rational to believe that Christ filled 5,000 stomachs with just a few loaves and fishes than to believe in quantum phenomena. Indeed the "foolishness" of the gospel (1 Cor. 1:25) makes more sense than what physicists themselves call the "absurdness" of quantum reality.

Birth of Modern Physics

In the 1600's European scholarship started to break away from the scholasticism modeled on the Greek philosopher Aristotle, which had dominated Western intellectual tradition for centuries. As the chronological odometer reached 1700, great strides had been made in all areas of thought, especially physics. Owing to the extraordinary achievements of Isaac Newton, the fundamental view of the world had been radically and unalterable revolutionized.

By the early twentieth century, however, Newtonian (or classical) science couldn't account for certain phenomena concerning light and the amount of energy emitted by hot glowing objects. New paradigms had to be advanced. The result was the birth of modern physics, which was divided into two branches, relativity and quantum theory. While relativity (general) deals with the macrocosmic world (gravity, stars, galaxies, the universe itself), quantum theory goes into the opposite realm: that of subatomic entities, infinitesimally small and in some ways immeasurable. And though general relativity can strain credulity (for example it teaches that gravity is nothing but mass, warping space-time, in the quantum world the limits of human reason are made embarrassingly blatant.

The Double-Slit Experiment

The place to begin quantum theory is with the simple double-slit experiment. If one drops a pebble in a pool of water, the water spreads out in waves. If between that pool and another pool there is a thin barrier with two holes, the waves will go through both holes and make smaller wave patterns on the other side. If the holes are close enough, those two smaller sets of waves will meet and merge with each other, creating a distinct "interference pattern" on the other side of the barrier.

Light acts similarly. When shown through two holes in a barrier, light goes through each hole, making small waves on a photographic plate on the other side. Each "wave" of light passing through the slit mingles with the other on the opposite side–like the wave patterns in the water–and forms an interference pattern on the photographic plate.

If you close one hole and shine light through the other one, the light merely piles up on the part of the photographic plate behind the hole, much like throwing rocks through a hole in a wall will cause the rocks to pile up behind that hole. Scientists can, in fact, shoot just one photon at a time (it also works with electronics and atoms), through one opening, getting the expected build up right behind it.

So far, so good. Now if, while shooting photons one at a time through the single hole, scientists open up the second hole, one would expect nothing to change. The photons should gather behind the first hole, just as if rocks thrown through one hole would gather behind it even if another hole, out of range of the trajectory, were opened. The second hole shouldn't influence what happens at the first. Right?

Wrong, at least at the quantum level. If, as photons, electrons, or atoms are being shot one by one through the first hole and the other hole is opened, an interference pattern forms on the other side! In other words, the same pattern appears as if the particles were going through both holes.

How could that be? The individual photons are being fired, one at a time, through just one hole. The presence of the other opening should, from a commonsense perspective, make no more difference than would a second hole in the wall make a difference when throwing rocks through only the first one. Yet the photons, electrons, or atoms "know" that the other slit is open, go through it too, and as a result, make an interference pattern on the photographic plate!

"Although each photon starts out as a particle," wrote astrophysicist John Gribbin, "and arrives as a particle, it seems to have gone through both holes at once, interfered with itself, and worked out just where to place itself on the film to make its own minute contribution to the overall interference pattern. This behavior encompasses two mysteries. First, how does a single photon go through both holes at once? Second, even if it does this trick, how does it 'know' where to place itself in the overall pattern?"

The Uncertainty Principle

Quantum physics presents another phenomenon that leaves human reason in the dust. It's called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (which Cambridge astrophysicist Stephen Hawking calls "a fundamental and inescapable property of the world), and it states that it's impossible to know both the velocity and the position of a subatomic particle. While that concept itself might not sound so strange, what's strange is why we can't measure both–and that's because observing one aspect of the particle changes the other. In other words, the act of observing a particle alters its reality.

It gets worse. In the quantum world a subatomic particle doesn't seem to "exist" until it is observed. It is (according to one interpretation) in a "ghost" state–not a physical particle, but merely a nonmaterial "probability wave" the collapses into a particle only when someone looks at it. And even then one can know only its position or motion not both, because quantum reality is so nebulous that the act of trying to measure one aspect of the particle's existence disturbs the other

The Uncertainty Principle has even more bizarre implications for the double-slit experiment. If you were to place an electron detector at each of the holes, then even when the electrons go through both, the expected wave interference pattern that would normally appear on the other side doesn't appear. Instead the electrons just pile up outside each hole. Why? "The act," wrote John Gribbin, "of observing the electron wave makes it collapse and behave like a particle at the crucial moment when it is going through the hole."

Observing the electrons altered them! In fact, even with a detector at just one hole, the wave function still collapses, and no interference pattern forms on the other side because, Gribbin states, the electrons going through "the second hole 'know' that we are looking at the other hole" and thus behave like particles as a result.

"Spooky Action at a Distance"

Another aspect of quantum reality shows even less mercy to rational thought. Assume that two subatomic particles, created in a collision, are a million light-years apart. In the quantum world, at the moment the spin of one of the particles is observed, the other particle, no matter how far away, will immediately (at a speed faster than light!) spin in the opposite direction. It's the same as (sort of, anyway) having one cue ball spinning in Podunk and another in Paris. The moment someone observes the spin of the ball in Podunk, the ball in Paris spins in the opposite direction!

"This is quantum weirdness," wrote Berkeley physics professor Timothy Ferris. "Interfering with one part of the quantum system alters the results observed in another part, even when the system has been enlarged to enormous dimensions.... It is as if the quantum world had never heard of space–as if, in some strange way, it thinks of itself as being in one place at one time."

Albert Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance" and to his dying day never could quite reconcile himself to the theory. Others, especially the quantum pioneers, had severe struggles with the implications of their work. Commenting upon the inexplicable phenomena of subatomic reality Danish physicist Niels Bohr wrote, "If someone says that he can think about quantum physics without becoming dizzy, that shows only that he has not understood anything about it."

Quantum Physics and Christian Faith

However complicated, quantum phenomenon does make a simple point: if such a "hard" science as physics itself confronts us with aspects of reality that go beyond human reason, why shouldn't the gospel do the same? That Jesus Christ, the Son of God, would incarnate into humanity and die for our sins is not a truth that logic, reason, and experience alone can discern. Logic alone might lead one to a Creator, but not to Calvary. The gospel is a truth that has to be told us; otherwise, we'd never know it, no matter how much reason and logic we used.

And even after being taught the gospel, we still have to accept it by faith, because if it was purely logical, we wouldn't need faith to believe it. To believe that "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8, NIV) isn't the same as believing that 2 + 2 = 4 (though in quantum math, 2 + 2 = 4 isn't necessarily true because one can never know for sure what value 2 has!). Who needs faith to believe that the sum of the angles of a triangle equals 180 degrees? Faith is needed to believe in the "foolishness" of the cross (1 Cor. 1:18) precisely because the cross can appear foolish.

Of course, so can quantum phenomena, and even more so. From logic alone, it is easier to believe "that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures" (1 Cor. 15:3, NIV) than to believe that merely observing the spin of a subatomic particle can reverse the spin of another particle more than a million light-years away. Unlike quantum physics, the gospel doesn't ask us to defy logic, only to transcend it. Quantum reality cuts against our most fundamental notions of reality in ways that the gospel never does. However far beyond the scope of mere logic alone, there's nothing illogical about Christ, from pure love for fallen sinful human beings, bearing the penalty of our sins so we never have to.

The bottom line? If something as solid, as tangible, and as accessible to our senses as matter, as material itself, can evade the reach of reason–how much more so should reason's limits be apparent in something like faith, which encompasses a reality far more complex than the mere materialism of quantum physics?

Werner Heisenberg (for whom the Uncertainty Principle is named), musing about the early days of quantum science, wrote: "I remember a discussion with [Niels] Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighboring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: can nature possibly be as absurd as it seems to us in these atomic experiments?"

Perhaps he should have studied something more logical.

Like the gospel.

–Clifford Goldstein, Adventist Review, August 27, 1998, pp. 8-11.

1John Gribbin, Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 1995), p. 5.

2Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 55.

3Gribbin, p. 13.

4Ibid.

5Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 269.

6Quoted in Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Quasar (New York: Freeman Press, 1994), p. 165.

7Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 43.