In The Image: Hidden Variables

Death, Quantum Mechanics, and Divinity

Welcome to the May installment of In The Image — a bimonthly guest column on the intersection of faith and the arts, written by Matthew J. Andrews. In addition to serving as a previous poetry editor for Solum, Matthew is a private investigator and writer. He is the author of the chapbook I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember and the full-length collection The Hours, which was published by Solum on Easter Day.

Hidden Variables: Death, Quantum Mechanics, and Divinity

The Bible is, to put it mildly, a strange collection of texts, and there is perhaps no part of it stranger than the book of Job. In it, the titular hero is stripped of his assets, family, and health, all the result of a wager between God and the accuser, and then he engages in a long discourse, defending himself against a group of friends who insist he has sinned and deserves his fate. Job continuously demands an audience with God, and eventually, God answers him “out of the whirlwind.” But rather than address the issues of theodicy that dominate the book’s narrative, God speaks to his grandiose power and humanity’s utter inability to comprehend it. Here’s a small excerpt:

Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?
Declare, if you know all this.

Where is the way to the dwelling of light,
and where is the place of darkness,
that you may take it to its territory
and that you may discern the paths to its home?
Surely you know, for you were born then,
and the number of your days is great!

Job is left awed and without rebuttal. “See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you?,” he responds, “I lay my hand on my mouth.” Yet reading Job as a modern man, several thousand years removed from its origin, I can’t help but notice how many of the boasts in God’s speech are no longer mysteries to us. One can imagine a contemporary rendition of this story where one of Job’s friends, a scientist, stands up to say they actually can comprehend the example of the earth, that they can explain not just how the sun works, but how stars move and where they come from. In this version, God presumably slinks back into the whirlwind and Job dies mired in boils and poverty.

I’m certainly not breaking any new ground by pointing out that the relationship between science and faith these days is often fragile, if not downright hostile. The faith camp sees the science side as smug, overconfident architects of a new Tower of Babel, while the science crowd looks down their collective noses at the faithful for abandoning reason and knowledge to read fairy tales. But are there places where these two can intersect in ways that are constructive and edifying? Can diving into science bring us into the presence of the divine?

These questions have been at the forefront of my mind ever since I read Sebastian Junger’s wonderful new book In My Time of Dying. Part memoir and part scientific and philosophical inquiry, the book details Junger’s brush with death in the form of a ruptured aneurysm. Junger writes that as he lay on the hospital bed with a team of doctors working furiously to beat the odds and save his life, he saw his father standing next to him. “He’d been dead eight years,” Junger writes, “but there he was, not so much floating as simply existing above me….My father exuded reassurance and seemed to be inviting me to go with him.”

As he recovered, Junger, a self-described rationalist and atheist, became haunted by this near death experience, and the rest of the book investigates their ubiquity around the world and the common threads that unite them. As he expects, Junger finds that some features of near death experiences can be recreated via psychedelics, deprivation, and other intentional methods. But one aspect remains unexplained, and it rattles Junger to the core:

Why do the dying—and only the dying—keeping seeing the dead in their last days and hours? If there is any true mystery to all this, it’s that in mud huts and in hospital rooms, in car accidents and on battlefields, in darkened bedrooms and in screaming ambulances, deathly ill people are startled to see a loved one hovering over them. There are neurochemical explanations for why people hallucinate, but not for why they keep hallucinating the same thing.

As he investigates this question, trying to understand how someone who is dead and buried can also be at a hospital bedside, Junger falls hard into a surprising place: quantum physics. In looking for a scientific answer to his metaphysical question, Junger comes to find how scientific developments of the last hundred years have shown us just how little we know, maybe how little we can know, about the universe. Here’s Junger again, elucidating a small portion of our collective ignorance:

When a photon is fired at two slits, it passes through both as a probability until it is tracked by a photon detector, in which case its wave function collapses, and it picks just one. Stranger still, some particles were also found to be “entangled” at the quantum level, so that if you did something to one, its twin reacted as well. Unlike what was possible in the macroscopic world, the change was instantaneous and unaffected by distance. That forced a choice: either quantum information can travel faster than light, or particles have what Einstein called “hidden variables” that determine their future behavior. Neither is possible in the universe we know.

Junger never fully bridges the gap to join the faithful, but he walks away with some belief in an afterlife, whatever that may look like. What’s resonated with me is not so much Junger’s conclusion but how he got there: through his twin convictions that the world is far stranger than we can possibly imagine, and that as a result, far more things are possible than we might assume.

I won’t pretend I can speak knowledgably about quantum physics—physicist Richard Feynman is often quoted as saying "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics," and that seems like good enough advice—but the more I’m exposed to its principles, the more I see it like Junger. So much of the conflict between science and faith over the last several hundred years has been the result of science systematically finding answers and yielding finality: cataloguing species, isolating elements, tracing evolutionary lines, mapping the genome, and so on. Quantum mechanics introduces us to a world that doesn’t obey any of the laws we’ve spent so much time crafting, that acts in ways we don’t understand, where each answer births a dozen new questions. Perhaps if we were to write Job today, God would speak differently, but he would have the words to leave us in awe after all.

Science and faith have traditionally been at odds, but maybe in this strange new world of ours, there are more places for them to interact than we think. If I might be so bold: perhaps this murkiness, where grand ideas converge in the space in each individual atom, is the right environment for artists to thrive. Perhaps we can embrace science, diving deep down into the miniscule to find that Gerard Manley Hopkins was right all along: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

---

---