Can We Know?: Postmodernism (Part 1)
Imagine that you knew how fast every single particle that makes up the universe around you was moving and where it was going-- all the carbon atoms in your skin, the water molecules that make up the rain, the nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that you breathe in and out, all of it. Theoretically, then, you could know how everything about...everything, as long as you could process that data and apply the appropriate laws of nature. If you had all that information, you’d be able to see into the past and the future and nothing would be a mystery to you. Phenomenal cosmic power, all thanks to information!
That scenario, the one where if you knew the laws of nature and the location and momentum of all the particles in the universe you could know the past and the future, is known as Laplace’s Demon and it’s a hallmark of the modern, deterministic worldview brought about by classical physics. It suggests that there is a right answer to the question, “What comes next?” and we could know it once we completely understand the laws of nature and process the data. It suggests that there is one way things are and one way that things can be. Everything is more or less determined by the initial conditions of the universe. Our future is set and, in principle, knowable.
If that unsettles you a little, you’re not alone. Philosophers, scientists, and ethicists have always grappled with how our understanding of the way the universe works affects how we should live our lives; students of history track how those ideas have changed over time. The modernist viewpoint, which seeks to know the Truth about the universe, more or less held sway for much of the time from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century and tension arose for some over who dictates Truth, the Church or Science. Now, though, we seem to be less certain about that Truth altogether. We live in a postmodern era, where statistical branches of physics (like thermodynamics), relativity, and quantum mechanics have upset our idea that the universe comes pre-packaged and pre-determined. In science, as in cultural society, the truth is relativized, opening up a huge discussion as to what “truth” even means.
Twentieth-Century Physics and Philosophy
Let’s return to, say, the oxygen in the air. Imagine just one oxygen atom (well, really two oxygen atoms bound together) bouncing around in the space in front of you. Whereas classical Newtonian physics would have told you that we can know exactly where that atom is and where it’s going, quantum mechanics isn’t so sure. You’ve probably heard of the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which tells us that for a given particle, you can’t know both its position and its momentum with complete precision. It's either/or for any given moment. This isn’t a limitation of our ability to measure the particle: it’s a fundamental consequence of the mathematical systems we use to describe particles. Before you go to make the argument that the math must be wrong, consider the fact that quantum mechanics as it’s currently formulated has been quite precisely tested. The math might have some non-intuitive consequences, but it checks out.
Although quantum mechanics is infamously difficult to understand, many helpful explanations exist (1) and it is in these explanations that we’re able to dig into what some implications of theory might be for our understanding of reality. The Copenhagen Interpretation (CI) is the mainstream or orthodox view of quantum mechanics. Its name derives from the place in which it originated, Copenhagen, Denmark in the first half of the 20th century, primarily through the work of theoretical physicists Niels Bohr and our friend Werner Heisenberg.
There is little ability to describe the true nature of reality in CI. The theory does not address reality directly; instead, it describes interactions with reality. (2) Many of its adherents even claim that reality itself is of little practical importance. (3) "There is no quantum world," as Bohr explains. "There is only an abstract quantum mechanical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." (4)
Bohr’s words here make it clear CI is a metaphysical claim underdetermined by the empirical data. To say that another way, the Copenhagen Interpretation is making a statement about the nature of reality based on the room for interpretation found in the data. But many of its proponents, including Heisenberg, develop the interpretation to claim that reality does not exist until it is measured. (5) This is the kind of stuff that the nerdiest of your friends is talking about when they bring up collapsing the wavefunction or make jokes about Schrodinger’s cat. This is what is known as the orthodox version of CI, an (take a deep breath before reading this) idealist ontological interpretation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in which quantum probabilities become determinate on measurement, (6) as Heisenberg himself explains, “the atoms or the elementary particles themselves are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.” (7) Basically, under this interpretation of quantum mechanics, nothing’s really real until we observe it and the rest of the time, it exists in some other non-real state. In the strong form of this interpretation, it doesn’t matter if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it-- if no one’s around to observe it, the tree doesn’t exist at all.
The Fallout
While we don’t want to imply that physics or any science completely determines the how any culture understands reality and morality, the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics is definitely a part of a wider cultural move from the more or less absolute certainty of modernism to the rejection of certainty found in postmodernism. In a nutshell, we no longer assume our truth is the truth. It means that the truth may not even exist. On the one hand, this is an extraordinarily freeing idea, opening up space for voices from the margins, such as people of color, immigrants, persons who identify as LGBTQ, or differently-abled people, to tell their stories and have them taken with the same seriousness as the dominant cultural narratives wherever they are. On the other hand, the idea of this radical uncertainty raises questions that have to be grappled with, especially in the science and religion field.
For all that it may raise interesting ideas, physics cannot entirely settle ontological questions, questions about the origin or nature of reality, nor can it definitively prove that there is nothing else to know beside the material that we know. Keeping that in mind, theologians are motivated by the metaphysical capacities of their own discipline to defend a realist view of the world, (8) to “speak of God as real, indeed as the ultimately real who gives reality to everything else", (9) including a real relationship with humanity. (10) There is a “fundamental importance” of realism to Christian theology, (11) putting it at loggerheads with philosophies that build on uncertainty about reality.
Consequently, Science and Religion theology is comprised predominantly by critical realists, as we have mentioned before, who advocate that “theories, whether scientific or theological, are not free creations of the human mind, but are constructed in response to an encounter with an existing reality." (12) This includes theologians like T.F. Torrance, Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne, Alister McGrath, and Wentzel van Huyssteen. In their view, models may require revision and active involvement on the part of the observer, but the constructive nature of theories does not compromise the ontology of reality. (13) Basically, these thinkers land on the idea that we’re not just making this all up, that there is really something real out there that we’re building our ideas on.
In academic terms, the divide between critical realism and the Copenhagen Interpretation could not be more clearly articulated than by McGrath when he says, "there seems little merit in a doctrine, such as orthodox QM, which leaps so quickly from the limits of present-day knowledge to the presumed limitations of knowledge in general or to various highly problematical consequences concerning quantum phenomena." (14) McGrath is challenging those who take the stance that CI gives us some insight into the fundamental nature of reality, or the limits of our knowledge or ability to know reality. He would, of course, offer critical realism as a better solution, one in which build and test theories with the basic assumption that there is something real out there and that we can know it.
If all this seems like a bit too much (and a bit more separated from the real world than a post about reality should be), take heart: these ideas are relatively new to humans and that makes digging into them exciting and frustrating at the same time. Take a breath, take some time to let these things settle, and then let us take you to part 2 of this post--CI and CR aren’t the only ideas out there, after all.
And now for those sources:
1. For an explanation of quantum mechanics in this context, I recommend Rodney D. Holder, “Quantum Theory and Theology,” in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, ed. J. B Stump and Alan G Padgett (Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 220–30, http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/uid=3/book?id=g9781444335712_9781444335712; or Jeffrey Bub, “The Entangled World: How Can It Be like That?,” in The Trinity and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology, ed. J. C. Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids, Mich: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub, 2010), 15–31.
2. Russell Stannard, “Paradoxes in Science and Theology,” in God for the 21st Century, ed. Russell Stannard (Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2000), 150, http://site.ebrary.com/id/10320485.
3. Ted Peters, “David Bohm, Postmodernism and the Divine,” in Science, Theology, and Ethics, Ashgate Science and Religion Series (Aldershot, Hants, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 100.
4. Jeremy Royal Howard, “The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics an Assessment of Its Fitness for Use in Christian Theology and Apologetics” (The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 134.
5. Christopher Southgate and John Hedley Brooke, eds., God, Humanity and the Cosmos: A Textbook in Science and Religion, Third edition (London: T & T Clark, 2011), 132.
6. Ibid., 134.
7. Heisenberg,1958, Physics and Philosophy.
8. John Polkinghorne, “Physics and Metaphysics in a Trinitarian Perspective,” Theology and Science 1, no. 1 (June 2003): 43, doi:10.1080/14746700309645.
9. Holder, “Quantum Theory and Theology,” 225.
10. Arthur R. Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 14.
11. Alister E. McGrath, A Scientific Theology: Volume 2: Reality (Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2002), 123; Wentzel van Huyssteen, Theology and the Justification of Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 162–163.
12. Alister E. McGrath, A Scientific Theology: Volume 3: Theory (Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2002), xi.
13. Ian Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science (San Francisco: Harper, 1990), 43; McGrath, A Scientific Theology: Volume 2: Reality, 125.
14. Norris, Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism, 35.
