In starting out, I want to be up front and honest. I have not worked out my theories in fine detail. I am still working through these issues and trying to formulate my thoughts. That being said, please feel free to make suggestions, give insight, and provide input that you think might would help further our understanding of this subject.
Introduction
From the opening pages of scripture, we are confronted with a God who not only creates, but acts in our world. This idea is central to the biblical witness of scripture. God acts when he calls Abraham and when he splits the Red Sea for the children of Israel. He upholds all things by the power of His word, and he heals, stops the sun, and raises the dead. God makes new and miraculous things happen. Through his mighty acts he both creates and saves. This notion is usually referred to as providence. God’s providence can be broken down into two areas: 1) Ordinary Providence, 2) Special Providence. In this note, we will look at the biblical notion of providence in light of the implications of quantum mechanics.
Ordinary Providence
When we speak of ordinary providence, we are speaking of God’s continual involvement in the universe (multiverse). This doctrine affirms that God is the ground of all being and that He has a continued care and purpose for His creation. There are three main points in the doctrine of providence.
1) Preservation- The world continues to exists because of God’s unceasing involvement and because He is constantly upholding all things (Heb. 1:3; Rev. 4:11).
2) Concurrence- God’s power that guides, influences, and makes possible all natural operations and every human choice, which moves history in the direction to His predetermined end (Acts 17:28; Eph. 1:11).
3) Government- God’s continued activity in which He rules all things and directs them to secure the accomplishment of His divine purpose (Rm. 11:36).
Special Providence
Special providence is a way to refer to how God acts/interacts with his created order through miracles. In ordinary providence, God works through secondary causes in accordance to the laws of nature (more on this later), while in special providence, He works without the mediation of secondary causes in their ordinary functions. In other words, it’s God’s immediate acts such as raising the dead.
Modern Science and God’s Providence
With the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century, and the philosophy of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, many began to reject the traditional view of God’s providence as outlined above. This is primarily because Newtonian mechanics said we live in a causally closed universe. This basically means that there was no longer any room for God’s special providence.
About a century later, philosopher Pierre Simon Laplace took the determinism of Newton’s equations and combined them with metaphysical (the nature of being and the world) and epistemological (the nature and scope of knowledge) reductionism. He thus painted a picture of all of nature as an impersonal mechanism. This also led to famous philosopher David Hume’s challenge to God as first cause and as designer.
In response, Immanuel Kant came up with a new metaphysical framework in which he argued that religion and belief in God doesn’t lie in the act of pure reason, but in our sense of moral obligation. By arguing thus, he separated the domains of science and religion into “two worlds”.
Protestant theologian Karl Barth joined this discussion in the first half of the twentieth century. He wanted to circumvent this Kantian split of “two worlds” by strongly affirming the objective action of God in creating and redeeming the world. Catholic theologians were advocating Thomistic metaphysics, which argues the principles of non contradiction and causality. Thus, any being that does not contradict these two laws could theoretically exist. However, this view point runs into problems with objective special creation, since God can only act through secondary causes.
And we have been stuck here for years: A closed universe presents us with two main options. 1) Conservative approach- God must intervene in this closed system by breaking or suspending the laws of nature. 2) Liberal approach- God acts uniformly in all events to sustain them in existence. Branching off of this is deism, which states that God created the world then left it to function on its own, and pantheism, which states that God and the created world are one and the same. Is there another possibility? Because of quantum mechanics, the answer is “yes”.
Quantum Mechanics and God’s Providence
There is a way in which we can construct a view of both God’s ordinary providence and special providence which holds that God can both act in the world objectively without breaking or suspending the laws of nature.
The quantum world is not like world in which we observe on a daily basis. Quantum particles are constantly popping in and out of existence, with what seems like no prior cause. There is a random fluctuation back and forth between existence and non existence. As weird as this seems, it is nonetheless true.
Yet regardless of the truth we have discovered in the quantum realm, it seems to fly in the face of the evidence that we see in our daily lives, with our own eyes. Our world appears orderly and deterministic to us, with the clear presence of cause and effect. Quantum physicists say this is because our world just “appears” to be deterministic. In other words, these quantum fluctuations are just balancing themselves out, giving us an orderly world. Theoretically, this means that at any time, the desk which I am sitting at could just go “poof” and disappear. But the odds of all the particles of my desk going out of existence at precisely the same time are astronomical. So, my desk is still here.
Here is the bottom line: what quantum mechanics tells us is that even though the world may appear orderly and deterministic, it is in actuality non-deterministic and probabilistic. In other words, our universe appears “open”.
The Open Universe Theory
This view has begun to exercise great influence in how some Christians understand God’s ordinary providence. Because the universe is non-deterministic on the quantum level, things just happen. This means that all of the sudden, a quantum jump alters a strand of DNA and causes a child to be born with some sort of defect. This defect has nothing to do with God, but is just an unfortunate event of living in a non-deterministic world. This view is adopted by those who hold to what is called “open theism” or “open theology”. This view is a severe undermining of God’s providence because it removes him from working in the world. It is actually a form of non-deterministic deism, therefore it must be rejected.
A New Model: Quantum Providence
Providence means that God is upholding, guiding, and governing all natural operations and human decisions. This must include the quantum realm also. In other words, scripture requires us to see a deeper determinism behind the random appearance of the quantum world.
Therefore, when we throw God’s providence in the mix with quantum physics, we have neither a strictly deterministic nor strictly non-deterministic universe. What we have is something similar to God as a first cause influencing and working through second causes, but at the quantum level.
In other words, God has planned and determined to create the universe through chance and law. The order God is creating is the order of quantum chaos. Therefore, it is not so much that God creates order out of chaos, but that God creates order through the properties of chaos. This is concurrence at its finest.
If we recognize that the deterministic world that we see is not a given, but a result of the quantum world, we should have no problem recognizing that God can act in this quantum world without intervening in the classical world by suspending or breaking the laws of nature. The laws of the classical world are rough equivalents to the laws of quantum mechanics which tell us how the classical world, with all its regularity, arises directly from the quantum. If we accept the evidence that the quantum world reflects indeterminism and a wide range of possibilities, then we can argue that God can act together with nature to bring about all events from the quantum level, and that these events give rise to the deterministic world of classical physics.
Thus, God acts in all quantum events, whether they lead to ordinary providences or special providences. He is always acting in a way that affects matter. With regards to special providences, God acts in a manner in which matter is affected more than usual. For example, God is working at the quantum level to sustain the laws of gravity. However, when Jesus walked on the water, God did not suspend the law of gravity, rather he worked on the quantum level in such a way that matter was affected more in that moment to allow for that event. In other words, God moved things around on the quantum level to bring into effect Jesus walking on water in the natural world without suspending the law of gravity or changing the consistency of water.
In closing, I want to emphasize what Christian philosophy and theology has always emphasized: God is the first cause that makes possible all the secondary causes. He is holy in his workings and uses secondary causes to accomplish his purpose, especially at the quantum level. Furthermore, God working through the quantum level to affect secondary causes means that Christians no longer have to assert that God had to either suspend or break the natural law. Atheists have argued that there is no room in modern science for the Christian God who intervenes and works in the world, because we live in a closed system. Quantum physics now enables us to deflate that argument by opening up a way that God can intervene without breaking any natural law that he has put in place.