The Entangled God

Divine Relationality and Quantum Physics

Kirk Wegter-McNelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136651694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión y ciencia

In The Entangled God, Kirk Wegter-McNelly addresses the age-old theological question of how God is present to the world by constructing a novel, scientifically informed account of the God–world relation. Drawing on recent scientific and philosophical work in "quantum entanglement, " Wegter-McNelly develops the metaphor of "divine entanglement" to ground the relationality and freedom of physical process in the power of God's relational being. The Entangled God makes a three-fold contribution to contemporary theological and religious discourse. First, it calls attention to the convergence of recent theology around the idea of "relationality." Second, it introduces theological and religious readers to the fascinating story of quantum entanglement. Third, it offers a robust "plerotic" alternative to kenotic accounts of God's suffering presence in the world. Above all, this book takes us beyond the view of theology and science as adversaries and demonstrates the value of constructively relating these two important areas of intellectual investigation.

1 Setting the Stage

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.”

Genesis 1:26a (New Revised Standard Version [NRSV])

Since the time of the early church, Christians have wrestled with the idea that creation's “otherness” vis-à-vis God does not contradict but rather reflects the fullness of God's infinite being. How can something “other” exist in relation to the infinite? According to the trinitarian thinkers of the early church, otherness is basic to God. The being of the One whom Jesus called Abba, said the church's first theologians, is “Being-in-Relation”—an idea that achieved technical expression in the notion of the “perichoretic mutuality” of the trinitarian persons within the Godhead. Subsequent generations came to associate their belief in God's faithfulness across human history with the fundamentally faithful character of God's primal decision to grant existence to creation as “other.” Within Christian thought God's identity as creator has come to be regarded as an outwardly, otherly, and faithfully fecund expression of the inner-eternal life of God, within which otherness already is and always has been.

Each new generation must take up the challenge of reflecting on what it means to say that God is relational, that God's interaction with the world— even the very act of bringing it into existence—faithfully reflects who God is. The relational view of divinity that grew out of the church's early struggles to understand what it means to say that Jesus reveals God has reappeared with new emphases and accents in our own day. This vision of God can be found in a variety of contexts, most prominently in the widespread desire to norm the constructive and destructive dimensions of human relationships (both among humans and with the planet) against a larger vision of sustaining mutuality.

This book aims to contribute to ongoing theological discussions about divine relationality by introducing a theological audience to one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the twentieth century—the detection of correlated or “entangled” behavior in the physical world. Variously interpreted as evidence for the existence of faster-than-light communication, instantaneous physical connection between objects persisting across arbitrarily large distances, the coalescence of distinct physical objects into a larger, nonseparable whole—and in yet other ways, as we shall see—the discovery of entangled relations among physical objects calls into question our everyday intuitions about what it means to exist in the world as distinct and separate “individuals.”

Those who are unfamiliar with the term “entanglement” or who associate physics with the low point of their high school years may approach this book with some trepidation. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the mathematical and philosophical portions of the book are intended for the scientific insider. The story told in the following pages is for anyone who thinks that serious interdisciplinary engagement with the sciences is not beyond what can or should be expected of today's student of theology. It aims to make such engagement possible for those with minimal exposure to scientific and mathematical reasoning. Granted, this book may not occasion the kind of experience one typically associates with reading a theological text, but that is because the interdisciplinarity promoted herein implicates not only the act of writing but also the act of reading. This is not just a book with interdisciplinary origins, but one meant to facilitate an interdisciplinary experience. Living into the deepest questions of existence requires determined engagement with multiple ways of knowing (Belenky et al. 1986).

The story of entanglement is a story worth knowing in its own right, regardless of one's own theological proclivities. It is the tale of several generations of physicists reluctantly coming to grips with a peculiar type of relationality among physical objects. After two, say, electrons have become “entangled” with one another, they unfailingly modulate their own subsequent behaviors to account for whatever their companion does, no matter how widely separated they might come to be. What's more, the entangled nature of their relationship can be seen only “globally” in the joint behavior of both electrons, not “locally” in the individual behavior of either one. In brief, the story of entanglement takes one beyond the classical, Newtonian world of billiard balls bumping around blindly and predictably into a quantum world of subtle relationality and effective unpredictability. Entanglement is well on its way to being regarded as one of the most important discoveries ever made within the history of physics—on par with those of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. The empirical confirmation of entanglement, which Alain Aspect has dubbed “the second quantum revolution” (see his preface to Scarani 2006, xii), carries immense potential to stir new constructive theological work on the nature of divine and creaturely relationality.

The overarching purpose of this book is to probe the history and interpretations of entanglement for the sake of developing the concept as a theological metaphor for God's relational being and the relation between God and creation. As a part of that larger purpose, the final chapter considers the traditional theological question of how God acts. Against the ideas that God creates the world out of undifferentiated and absolute nothingness (creatio ex nihilo), on the one hand, and that the world flows naturally and without any intentionality from God's plenitudinous being (emanatio ex deo), on the other, I argue that a trinitarian account of creation should begin with the idea that God creates the world out of the divine relationship (creatio ex relatione). On this view, the world exists not by the act of some generic God, but rather by the act of the trinitarian, entangled God who “relates” or “entangles” into existence a world characterized by its own modes of relationality. I then deploy the metaphor of entanglement to characterize God's ongoing presence in the world, especially in light of the pervasiveness and persistence of evil and suffering. A God who is entangled with the world does not overwhelm but allows each part of creation to be what it is, all along loving it into the fullness of what it might yet become.

The shape of the trinitarian argument laid out in the preceding reflects the overall epistemic posture of the project; namely, it begins from an explicitly trinitarian stance in order to consider afresh the relational nature of the Christian God in conversation with contemporary scientific and philosophical reflection (cf. Polkinghorne 2010b). Such an approach has aptly been called a “theology of nature” (Barbour 1997, 98–105; see also Wegter-McNelly 2000) and should not be mistaken for an au courant “natural theology” bent on leveraging the latest scientific discovery (entanglement) to warrant a particular theological claim about the character of ultimate reality (trinitarian relationality). “Natural theology” and “theology of nature” draw their epistemic inferences in opposite directions, with the latter rooting theological conviction primarily in communal life and discernment rather than in empirical observation.

What is broadly at stake in these pages is the standard to which Christians ought to hold themselves when calling God “creator.” If we fail to use this term in ways that connect to our awareness and understanding of the world as it is revealed through the sciences, we risk invoking a god who created some imaginary world instead of the God who created ours. Sallie McFague has said that theology “is not about ‘God and the world,’ but about God and a particular world, some concrete interpretation of the world” (2000, 71; italics in original). We need to be clear about what particular world we have in mind when we speak of God as its creator. When we call God “creator,” we speak “creation” in the same breath, and vice versa. Thinking theologically about entanglement opens an intriguing possibility: God's own relationality becomes the source of all creaturely relationality—not just our own, nor that of all life, but also that which characterizes the physical world in general.

It is worth pondering at the outset whether Christians who live long after the revolutions inaugurated by Newton, Darwin, and Einstein still experience the physical world as creation. To put the matter in the form of a question: Do Christians today find any theological meaning in the intricacies of the physical world? When the needs of “the whole world” are lifted up in worship, how broad is the intended scope of reference? The Earth? Only humanity and other forms of terrestrial life? What does it mean to speak of the “whole” world? According to the Gospel of John, all of creation has its origin in Christ, the Logos of God: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:3, NRSV). Within the Pauline tradition, too, the world coheres in the one through whom it was made: “all things have been created through [Christ] and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16b–17, NRSV). The biblical writers understood their world to be something more than an agglomeration of disparate realities. They understood it to be a unified whole with a single origin and purpose, not through its own power but through the power and will of its creator. What will it take to bring the physical world back into our theological field of vision (cf. Tracy 1981, 215)? How can we “re-create” the physical world in our own theological imaginations so as to reintegrate it into the stories we tell about God as its creator? The rise of modern science in the early modern period did much to dissolve medieval theology's clear perception of creation's integral wholeness, replacing this worldview with a reductionistic vision that—it must be said—allowed scientists to make enormous progress in understanding how the world works. But in recent decades the science of quantum mechanics has begun to bump into the limits of reductionism. From a theological point of view, the discovery of the physical phenomenon of quantum entanglement comes as a glimmer of relational wholeness that might allow us to speak of the world around us as something much more than a mere agglomeration.

1 THE SCRIPT

The narrative structure of this book proceeds from theological beginnings to theological endings by way of intermediate chapters on the history, science, and philosophy of entanglement. The opening theological moment begins in Chapter 2 with a consideration of the recent convergence in theological writing around the topic of “divine relationality.” Turn the pages of almost any contemporary Christian theological text on God's nature and activity in the world—whether by a process, feminist, postliberal, liberation, trinitarian, ecological, evangelical, political, or Eastern Orthodox theologian (and the list could go on)—and one finds “relationality” both identified as the lasting inheritance of the trinitarian tradition for contemporary theology and invoked as the key category for understanding God's nature, purposes, and presence in the world. The purpose of this chapter is not to argue for a new view of God but to demonstrate that “divine relationality” has indeed become a major theme among Christian theologians over the past fifty years. (An appendix at the end of the book provides a list of recent monographs treating the subject at length.) Those who have engaged the sciences on the topic of relationality typically work with images and metaphors from classical (i.e., pre-quantum) science, whether physics or biology, unwittingly drawing upon a scientific paradigm unfriendly to the idea that being is constituted (whether partly or wholly) by relations. From the classical perspective, relations have a strictly secondary ontological status and thus a limited role in how the world works; the possibility of being a cause lies primarily with the particulars of the world, i.e., with individuals instead of the relations among them. Individuals may interact in highly nonlinear ways that give rise to a kind of holistic behavior, but as objects in the world individuals remain individuals. The classical sciences thus offer a limited range of possibilities for thinking more holistically about relationality.

Chapter 3 explores an important empirical consequence of the classical (i.e., pre-quantum) perspective. At the heart of the chapter are three hallmark principles of classical physics: definiteness, separability, and locality. The chapter begins with a brief and thoroughly classical account of “photons,” i.e., particles of light. This opening section serves as a touchstone for subsequent discussions. The three hallmarks of definiteness, separability, and locality are especially helpful for understanding the famous objection leveled against quantum theory in 1935 by Einstein and his two colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (hereafter, EPR). They argued that if quantum theory is a complete description of physical processes, then something like entanglement must obtain (EPR 1935). Thinking that no sane person could possibly accept such a problematic conclusion—Einstein disparagingly called entanglement “spooky action at a distance [spukhafte Fernwirkungen]” (Born 1971, 158)—they reasoned that quantum theory provides only a partial description of physical processes. The climax of this part of the story came in the 1960s when another physicist, John Bell, recast EPR's objection to quantum theory into empirically testable form (1964). The fruit of Bell's labor, commonly called “Bell's theorem,” requires a particular experimental outcome if the world follows classical rules. Sophisticated variations on Bell's theorem have since been constructed, but the basic force of the theorem in its simplest form can be apprehended without any advanced mathematics—only algebra and the smallest bit of trigonometry. Part of the interdisciplinary experience of reading this book involves reconstructing a simple version of Bell's theorem in just a few pages. The theorem is one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century physics, and anyone with a basic education and a modicum of determination can understand it.

Whereas the ideas introduced in Chapter 3 all fit tidily within the world of classical physics, the ideas and experiments introduced in Chapter 4 do not. Enter: the strange world of quantum physics.¹ The results of the many Bell-type experiments that have now been performed in laboratories around the world clearly violate the outcome predicted by Bell's theorem. What's more, they agree precisely with the prediction given by quantum theory. The weight of evidence overwhelmingly confirms the existence of entanglement in the world—to the apparent demise of the “commonsense” view of classical physics epitomized in the three principles of definiteness, separability, and locality. But how can this be? In particular, how does quantum theory “see” the world such that it flouts Bell's prediction?

Chapter 4 takes up this important question. First we review some of the key experiments that established the existence of entanglement. Then we identify the key conceptual shift that distinguishes the quantum perspective from that of all classical physics: quantum theory's use of the principle of “superposition.” With this important principle in mind, we reconsider photons from a quantum perspective and show how to predict their behavior using quantum theory. Finally, we examine how these ideas lead to the quantum prediction for an actual Bell-type experiment. The results obtained by physicists since the early 1980s overwhelmingly confirm the quantum prediction, leaving little room for doubt that quantum theory gets something profoundly right about the world in which we live. Whereas the task of this chapter is to show how physicists relate experimental outcomes to mathematical predictions, the task of the following chapter is to think carefully about what the predictive successes of quantum physics mean for our understanding of the physical world.

To this end, Chapter 5 introduces readers to several of the philosophical interpretations of entanglement that have been put forward in recent years. Some physicists and philosophers have argued that the mysterious nature of entanglement disappears when one adopts a particular interpretation of the larger theory. Others have argued that, in fact, no explanation is needed. The only thing in need of adjustment, they say, is our own general sense of the capabilities of scientific theories. If we need not squeeze the “way things are” out of our theories for them to be useful, then why think of quantum correlations as a problem? They just happen. Still others have tried to salvage the classical worldview by imagining minimally disruptive ways of modifying the classical framework so as to get around Bell's theorem. A fourth group, whose work I find especially interesting, argues that entanglement reveals the existence of a particular species of relational holism that I label “nonemergent, nonsupervenient holism.” There is presently no definitive argument for or against any of these views, although future evidence may tip the scales in one direction or another. My own view of entanglement builds on the relational-holist idea that complex entangled systems have properties carried by the relationships among the parts but not by the parts themselves. I conclude the chapter by considering several aspects of entanglement from a relational-holist perspective.

In Chapter 6 I bring my own relational-holist interpretation of entanglement to bear on a trinitarian-relational view of God and the God–world relation. The chapter explores the theological ramifications of characterizing the Christian trinitarian God as “entangled,” chiefly in terms of possible connections between the nature of God's being and (1) God's creative act of bringing the world into existence, (2) the character of the world, (3) the mode of God's presence in the world, and (4) the advantages of a plerotic (plerosis = “fullness”) account of divine action over a kenotic one. The image that emerges is one of a God whose plerotic, entangled presence underwrites the freedom of creation to be and become itself, even as this presence transformatively brings creation's behavior into accord with God's own activity. I conclude with a brief reflection on the future of “entanglement” as a theological metaphor.

The theological proposal developed across these chapters makes itself empirically vulnerable insofar as it appeals to the plausibility of the relational-holist interpretation of entanglement as the basis for its own view of God and God's relation to creation. If the relational-holist interpretation were to be shown unsatisfactory in some significant way with respect to further scientific or philosophical work, this would undermine the credibility of the theological proposal. Connections made across disciplines must be advanced in full awareness that future developments could once again require radical rethinking (cf. Russell 2001, 301–305; for the contrary view, see Peacocke 1993, 28; McGrath 2001, 45–50), but contemporary theology ought to welcome the liability that comes with searching for points of contact on the edge of what is known rather than at the center of what is familiar and established. A tradition—theological or otherwise— sustains itself as a living tradition only by continually placing the insights and wisdom it identifies with its past into conversation with the exigencies and opportunities of an ever-changing present. To engage the sciences with this type of awareness from a theological perspective is to realize that theological assertions must always be advanced with fallibilist—one might say “hypothetical”—intent. Like their scientific counterparts, theological theories must remain “open to revision in light of further research and discussion” (Clayton 1989, 166).

2 METAPHORICAL THEOLOGY—A NEW APPROACH

Metaphors and analogies, it has rightly been said, prove nothing. To suggest, for instance, that the portrayal of God's wrath in the Hebrew Bible can be understood as the anger of a loving mother toward a child who repeatedly engages in self-destructive behavior does not prove that God's anger is in fact like that of a loving mother, or even that God “gets angry” at all. Such an image, however, can release fresh insight into biblical accounts of divine wrath for the sake of a theological vision in which God is understood neither as spiteful nor as abusive but whose anger at sin reflects a loving desire for human flourishing. At their best, metaphors and analogies open up personal intuitions and viewpoints for public exploration and debate. They place our hunches out on the table for inspection, so to speak. Their power lies not in their ability to establish ...