Creating Entangled Photons from a Helium Atom
Quantum Physics and the Incorporeality of God
Armstrongist Anthropomorphism in a Quantum Reality
By Scriptor
Theology must be informed by science. Otherwise, theology will be bound to an archaic world of unrealism. The Genesis creation account, for instance, is based on ancient Near Eastern cosmology. A cosmology in which the sky is an arcing vault made of some kind of solid material and it is blue because there is water stored behind it and it is close enough so that birds can fly up to it and stars are little tiny lights in this firmament and one might even build a tower to reach it and God lives just on the other side of the vault. My guess is that nobody reading this article believes this today even though it is written in the Bible. If you never had a science course in public school at least you watched Star Trek. The Bible content was written up during a certain period of time, by a certain people with a certain level of scientific development. That does not limit its efficacy as a literary presentation of moral principle. Science may change. Moral principle does not. This is the backdrop for this essay.
Quantum Entanglement and the Idea of Space
Our world is a world of big stuff – rocks, trees, water. But this world of big stuff emerges from another world of very, very tiny stuff – most of it particulate or resembling particles. Light is composed of photons, for instance. And this world, called the quantum world, behaves very differently than our world of large things. This may seem irrelevant but it has very high relevancy to theology.
Here is something that will be used in this essay that has an impact on theology but comes out of the quantum world. It is called quantum entanglement. Two photons can be entangled or, let us say, “connected.” These photons then may act as a pair. An effect on one, like maybe changing its direction of spin, will immediately, in the same segment of time, cause the spin of the other to change. They have identical, linked behavior. The really amazing thing, something that Einstein called ‘spooky behavior at a distance’, is that it does not make any difference how far away the two photons are from each other. One could be in your backyard and its twin could be 10 light years away and if you changed the spin of the one in your backyard, the spin on the one ten lights years away would also change identically. Scientists don’t really know what happens here but they know it happens. It is as if in the quantum realm the idea of space does not exist. And in this reality of the incredibly small, Physicist believe that distance does not exist (Not all of them, of course. You can never get agreement from all of them on most anything.)
If you have a level of reality that is fundamental to our level of reality and distance does not exist in that fundamental reality, it has implications for whether or not God has a bodily existence in his essence. This concern will be further developed below.
God is Incorporeal – The Scriptures
Before we proceed with quantum mechanics, an exegesis from the New Testament concerning God’s ontological nature will give us a necessary point of departure. Jesus is the culmination of the Law and the Prophets. In Matthew 5:17, Jesus said “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” So, Jesus can be consulted on all those places in the Law and the Prophets where it speaks about God because he is the culmination of the message. He knows what the text means because he personally is the fulfilment of the words of that message including all the words that describe God as having eyes, hands and other body parts. Jesus was semantics in being and action.
And Jesus said, “God is a Spirit (John 4:24).” God, in his essence, is Spirit. But to us Spirit is something like attitude or mood. How could a Being be nothing but that kind of Spirit? So, Jesus explained it further in another place by using an analogy to something we know from our created world. Jesus stated in John 3:8:
“That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit…The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”
From this we know that Spirit has the following properties:
1. It has existence.
2. It is not visible to humans.
3. It does not have form, as the wind does not have form.
4. It is of a totally different category from flesh.
This has to be a puzzle for Old Testament literalists. They must believe that God has a body and that Moses saw God. Yet, the New Testament tells us that God is pneuma. But humans also have pneuma. Humans are viewed in the New Testament as being composed of pneuma, psuche and sarx – spirit, animating principle, and flesh. In the verse above, when Jesus said “God is Spirit” the word recorded as Spirit is pneuma. When, 1 Corinthians 2:11, Paul speaks of the “spirit in man” the word he uses is pneuma. We then are beings with a pneuma where mind resides. But doctors, people who can be trusted to be careful, scientific observers, have never seen a visible, formed spirit emerge from the human body at death as the Old Testament literalists would believe. We have come to understand that Moses really just saw a theophany of God, a vision prepared by God for human discernment – like a metaphor in action. Jesus, who should know, said, “No one has seen God at any time…”
The Invention of the Idea that Spirit as Substance with Form
In spite of the words of Jesus, in John 3:8 and 4:24, some who have fallen under the influence of Semi-Arianism believe that there is a way to support the idea that God has a body. This is by defining spirit to be a substance that will hold form like matter in our realm. There are some difficulties with this idea. The first is, if God exists as a formable substance, who formed him? Is he not the only God? If he formed himself, does that not say that in his original essence, he had no form?
Some assert that any artifact that is in heaven, such as the heavenly Temple, is made of spirit. While there may be formable substances that angels and other spirit beings use to fabricate artifacts, this is not necessarily true. In the Book of Revelation, our only real window into the heavenly realm, John of Patmos saw objects made of gold and various precious and semi-precious stones (Rev 21:18-21). John’s inspired understanding of these building materials indicates that they were composed of matter as we know it.
Moreover, in the writings of those who support the idea of spirit as a formable substance, spirit is a single type of substance. This is a requirement because if you want to bridge the idea of spirit as formable substance from the artifacts of the heavenly Temple to God’s supposed body, it must all have the same properties. But that is an unproven and unprovable assertion. Nowhere in scripture does it refer to heavenly artifacts as pneuma, but God is pneuma. Some heavenly artifacts may be made out of some ever-enduring formable substance, something we might call “spirit” because we have don’t know what it is, but there is no exegesis that will show that God, who is pneuma, is made out of this same substance. The term “spirit” is bandied about indiscriminately.
God is Incorporeal – The Quantum Mechanics
Physicists speak of entangled particles, like the photons we discussed earlier, as having “non-locality.” The quantum particles are not really bound by location and distance. If God had a body he would be bound by location and distance. A bounded object in 3-space would model this idea. If God were at point A in 3-space, he would not be a point B. If God wanted to go to point B, he would have to cover some distance to get there. And when he arrives he will be at point B and no longer at point A. Yet, photons function as if space and distance do not exist. This means that God is constrained by distance but photons are not.
This creates a dilemma. Would God make particles with greater freedom than he himself has? Or more to the point, could he even make particles with more freedom that he himself has? Do you think he could make something that could do something that he himself could not do and yet be omnipotent? The rational conclusion is that God is not constrained by distance and the physics of large material objects moving in space, a characteristic of bodily existence, does not apply to him. So, the entire creation is present with him at once – something called omnipresence in orthodox Christianity.
Summation – God is Transcendental
While what I have written I believe is a better explanation than believing that anthropomorphisms are literal, I understand that God cannot be known; my views for me are just a placeholder until the real understanding comes.
A few months back, a contributor to this blog said God is comprehensible. I had just made statements about God being transcendental. His feeling was that if you could not understand God, what’s the point. I think he thought that God was a kind of Superman and maybe we are all Clark Kent and one day we would take off our human suit and put on Superman clothes – Superman who was really quite human except for a few super powers. This is the natural outcome of the idea that God has a body – and is like us. That God is not really transcendent – just a more powerful version of us. It makes the bumptious idea that one day we will be “God as God is God” seem like something within reach. But God says in Isaiah 65:18, “But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create…” If we will be equal to God, wouldn’t we be doing our own creating and rejoicing at our creations instead? It is clear that God expects this to be the eternal condition of our relationship with him – he creates and we rejoice. Yet, being a Creator is the principal part of what God is. If you are going to be God as God is God and you do not create, you are missing the principal part of being God. I am glad that God created quantum reality and scientists can barely understand it even though they can experiment with it. It informs my personal theology that God happily transcends all that we children of God know.
Forever.
God is Great!
