Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime by Sean Carroll
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Scientific Revelation

There is more than a hint of theological method in modern physics. Carroll confirms this in his insistence that quantum physics is, in his words, not an ‘epistemic’ but an ‘ontological’ discipline His claim is that current quantum theory is a description of the way the world really is not merely a way of understanding the world. This is the traditional position of theologians who would like us all to consider God as the ultimate reality even if we find this reality to be not what we perceive it to be.

In fact Carroll defines science in general, not just physics, in theological terms. For him, the essential presumption of science is the intelligibility of the universe. This implies not just that there is a pre-existing order to be discovered but also that such order in some sense wants itself to be discovered. These implications are precisely those of what is called fundamental theology, the study of how God can be known about at all.*

The similarity between Carroll’s view of quantum physics and fundamental theology is important because in both there is no distinction possible between epistemology and ontology. How we know about the world, or God, is indistinguishable from what the world, or God, actually is. Theology has a term for referring to this knowledge of being (or Being) - revelation. Essentially, you either get revelation or you don’t. It can’t be argued about because the presuppositions about what constitute both existence and knowledge about existence are contained simultaneously within it.

Thomas Aquinas is perhaps the most well-known theologian to defend the presuppositions of revelation. In doing so, his preferred approach is cosmological, that is, treating the entire universe as an entity to be explained in terms of its existence and its history. At such a level of analysis, ordinary logic (like that of cause and effect and their priority in time) start to break down. Thus, Aquinas asks, if every effect must have a cause, what is the ultimate cause? And if human beings exhibit free will and purpose as an effect of that ultimate cause, is it not reasonable to attribute will and purpose to that cause. QED, the universe is a consequence of divine action with some divine purpose toward which it is drawn.

Carroll makes a parallel case for quantum physics and the Many-Worlds theory of Hugh Everett, formulated in the 1950’s. First, just like Aquinas, he adopts a cosmological position. The universe, he says, is one vast quantum state, a wave function of enormous complexity. This is not inconsistent with the theory of quantum physics even if it could never be empirically verified. And it fits with the strange results of quantum experimentation. QED, reality is composed 0f an indeterminate number of simultaneous universes. In other words, Everett’s theory qualifies as a revelation.

If this is the case, then this wave function will evolve according to the mathematics of the Schrödinger equations, just as it has always done. Not according to the logic of Newtonian (or Aristotelian) cause and effect but the logic of probability and entanglement. This wave function is not something temporary or local that might transform into something else, say a particle, or ‘collapse’ upon observation. Within it is not only the universe we know about but an infinite number of others that exist simultaneously.

The wave function, in other words, is the very stuff, the ultimate reality of the universe; and it doesn’t make distinctions between observer and observed or between possible and actual. Our brains and the farthest galaxies as well as everything in between, including any number of other worlds, must be part of this wave function, since there can be nothing else. So the conventional ‘Copenhagen interpretation,’ despite its usefulness, is wrong. The wave function is the Alpha and the Omega, the source and giver of not just life but also existence, the Ground of Being (as modern theologians like to say). If it explicitly isn’t called godly, it’s only because the divine has suffered a significant reduction in brand-value in recent centuries.

That all sounds logically fine, if more than a tad baroque. But the reason it all sounds fine is the same reason that Aquinas sounds fine to the Pope. Once ontology and epistemology are conflated, that is, when that which is is presumed to confirm that which we know, we have entered the realm of religion. At that point, we simply assume a cosmological guarantor in what we take as revelation. Revelation is its own assurance; it proves itself. And at that point Aquinas is about as credible as Carroll

* The most important Christian theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth, devoted himself almost exclusively to this issue. The intellectual machinations he had to employ in order to establish the intelligibility of God are really important for scientists like Carroll to consider before casually presuming an even more diffuse source of such an attribute.

Postscript 16Sep19. Another view: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/...

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