Is God a theoretical term of quantum mechanics?
Ignacio Silva
DPhil Student
Harris Manchester College
University of Oxford
It is a theological necessity to formulate an account on how it is possible to understand that nature has its own laws and activities, and on the other hand, that God can participate actively in the production of natural effects, given that the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is not a God of the sidelines: God is the living God, who is not only the creator of all that exists, but who has intervened and continues to intervene decisively in the history of the world and humans.
However, it seems that were God to intervene or interfere within nature, He would be breaking, suspending or simply not following the apparent lawful order that He created in the universe. Hence, it would seem that God cannot act in a deterministic universe such as the one that Newtonian physics describe. If this would be false, science would loose its own basis.
In the last two decades many innovative proposals have been formulated for solving this dilemma. Following the emergence of an indeterminist account of nature, given by the development of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century, theologians explored the possibility of an understanding of divine action through indeterminist events. Such a possibility would rule out any divine intrusion in the laws of nature, because the very laws of nature show that there are events which are open to several distinct outcomes. In such an image of nature, God could ‘choose’ which outcome to bring.
This proposal, however, brings new difficulties in the understanding of divine action. This talk will focus in one particular problem. I will argue that the notion of divine action is taken as a theoretical term of quantum mechanics. Using the distinction between theoretical terms and non-theoretical terms [1] – as presented by the semantic approach to the philosophical study of scientific theories – it can be seen that, although the term ‘divine action’ is brought to the discussion as a theological term, and hence it could not be conceived as a theoretical scientific term (given that is not an empirical term), because of how it is used to show how God and nature act, it turns to be a term which can only be understood were this theory true. I will present it, however, as a new kind of theoretical term.
In conclusion, the quantum divine action proposal to explain how God acts in the world ends up by using the term divine action as a term which can only be understood according to one particular theory (quantum theory in this case), which turns a theological term into a scientific term.
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[1] See Bar-Hillel, Y. (1970), “Neorealism vs. Neopositivism. A Neo-Pseudo Issue” in Bar-Hillel, Aspects of Language, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, The Hebrew University: 263-272; and Sneed, J. (1971), The Logical Structure of Mathematical Physics. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.