Entanglement by Maya Panika
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Quantum Community

Sci-fi and gothic fantasy have constituted the new practical theology for almost two centuries, paradoxically exploring things that are beyond language within language. Large numbers of people love it; I suspect because at their best these relatively new genres riff on perennial theological themes buried within the accumulated cultural sludge we all slosh around in. Entanglement is a good example of how this transition from theology to sci-fi/fantasy works.*

Christianity and Judaism both have ancient traditions of communion with the dead. The Christian doctrine of the Community of Saints holds that the dead who made it to the top of the moral pile have pull with the divine for the benefit of the living; and that those who have not fared quite so fortunately in their spiritual fate can benefit from the prayers of the living. In Judaism the idea is that the Avot Zacuth, the grace earned by the merits of the Jewish Fathers, in fact all pious Jews, can be used for the benefit of those Jews in need of strength or succour.

These are more than quaint traditions. They are ethical considerations which are only incidentally metaphysical. They have their real significance as reminders that almost all of what we are as human beings - intellectual as well as physical - is inherited. Respect for those, whom we cannot know by name, is the least that we owe. The idea that we can interact with the dead is a religious expression of what we otherwise find commonplace as we learn things like Isaac Newton’s calculus, or consult the opinions of Marcus Aurelius. By extension this community reaches back into pre-history including our pre-human ancestors whose fossils and footprints we interpret with much care and interest.

Modern science has created a new addition to this idea of ethical communion and with that raised some interesting associated issues. Quantum theory suggests, for example that there are multiple universes - at every quantum event the universe bifurcates, duplicating itself with only quantum level variations, a sort of cosmic genetic evolution. The connections among the worlds are hidden but real. They are also staggeringly complex and beyond any theory we may ever possess.

If there are such bifurcating worlds, what is the appropriate ethical relationship among them? The question is not dissimilar to that confronted by the first Europeans who encountered the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas and Australia, particularly about the ethical status of these beings who didn’t fit within established definitions of human. Unfortunately for the original inhabitants, the answer came only after their effective destruction.

The observable, and observed, effects of quantum entanglement are equally disconcerting. According to EinsteinIan physics, the speed of light forms an upper limit of communication within the universe. Yet quantum events occur instantaneously regardless of distance. It’s as if time has been collapsed and ceases to exist for quantum level events.

The implication is that we are part of a community which is literally universal, connected immediately to every part of the cosmos. And since the ‘light-based’ notification of events in this community may be billions of years old, many of the members of this community have been dead for quite some time. They are potentially both present with us and dead simultaneously - like Schrödinger’s cat. The quantum community, therefore, extends far beyond the primordial ooze of our planet as far as the Big Bang, perhaps farther.

So in the case of quantum universes and instantaneous action at infinite distances, the communitarian connections are not simply among the living or between the living and the dead, but with the not-living-here and the not-dead-here, entirely novel categories of existence. What are the consequences of communication among such universes? In one sense, such a world is as alien as any conceived by an Asimov or an Arthur Clarke. On the other, it is a world intimately connected to us by history and physical structure. Such a world looks just like ours and is peopled exactly like us, in fact some of these people are us with some minor difference. What responsibility should we take on in that kind of world?

The concept of spirit takes on a rather interesting meaning in this world, what Panika calls My World, for anyone who succeeds in establishing contact with the broader quantum universe. The traditional word to designate a being which exists simultaneously but separately in another dimension is ‘ghost’. Similarly ‘angel’ is the connection, or messenger, who can communicate with that dimension and therefore with ghosts, some of whom may have found themselves ‘stranded’ in an alien dimension through the simultaneous quantum effects of instantaneous action and universal bifurcation.

Angels are dangerous creatures according to Thomas Aquinas. Theological rumour has it that at least some of them are jealous of human beings reportedly being created ‘above’ them. There is no mention of them in the creation stories of Genesis, Aquinas says, because their existence could become a distraction. They are signifiers of the overwhelmingly Big Picture, for which Aquinas uses the word ‘divine’.

But the intense brightness of angelic pure knowledge can blind mortal beings to the divine. In other words, angels are unnatural and can be demonic, a random spanner thrown into the smoothly functioning works of creation. They represent a crack in reality which threatens to spread within and among universes. Their capability is the quantum equivalent of the knowledge of good and evil in the creation story of Genesis. Perhaps their ability to move across quantum dimensions is the fundamental design flaw of creation, the original evil.

The quantum community, consisting of the related beings across dimensions, is what Panika’s fictional meditation is about. Like all sci-fi, there is an element of tongue-in-cheek that is an inevitable part of the genre. But, like the best sci-fi, there is a serious cultural core which both motivates and justifies it. Theology is the poetry of the unexplainable. To consider it as more (or less) is a profession of cultural ignorance. Entanglement certainly qualifies as some good modern theology.

*See here for other good examples: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Postscript 4April2019: Apparently there is serious resistance in some sectors of global society to the sci-fi/fantasy usurpation of conventional theology. Catholics in Poland, it is reported, have held a massive auto-de-fé of the Harry Potter books as blasphemous and encouraging witchcraft. I take this as a confirmation of my point.

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