Quantum arguments for God veer into mumbo-jumbo

Quantum arguments for God veer into mumbo-jumbo

* 18:00 06 May 2009 by Andy Coghlan

Not only does God exist, but he intervenes in our lives -- at least according to Francis Collins, the former head of the human genome project.

Collins recruits quantum physics to make his religious case, and has set up a website called Biologos. The site is funded by the Templeton Foundation, which seeks to find common ground between science and religion.

Laudable aim or not, the argument seems an odd one for Collins to make, given that he's such a renowned scientist and led such a pioneering project, one grounded so deeply in the principles of scientific enquiry and discipline.

Odd, because it undermines the case that science alone can explain how and when the world came to be. Collins sort of agrees, in his book The Language of God, but says that the Bible explains the "why" we came to exist. Fair enough. But he goes a stage further -- and for me strays into the realms of mumbo-jumbo.

Genesis and the big bang

Many scientists reconcile their belief in God with the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution by holding that God set the universe in motion through the big bang, then stood back and let the laws of nature -- including evolution -- do the rest. Genesis, they believe, is an allegory explaining how evolution unfolded.

Organisations such as the international Clergy Letter Project have backed these kinds of explanations to help religious people reconcile their beliefs with acceptance of evolution, at the same time distancing mainstream religion from the those who believe in the literal story of creation in Genesis.

But for Collins, the idea of a disinterested God who stands back and lets nature -- and evolution -- take its course is too much. Where does this leave divine intervention, and how can prayers do any good if God doesn't intervene? To resolve his dichotomy, Collins delves into abstruse quantum mechanical physics to argue that God does still intervene, but in ways undetectable to scientists, maybe through tiny, subtle nudges to nature's designs.

God's influence?

"With quantum mechanical uncertainty and the chaotic unpredictability of complex systems," Collins writes, "the world is now understood to have a certain freedom in its future development."

This means, he goes on:

"It is thus perfectly possible that God might influence the creation in subtle ways that are unrecognisable to scientific observation. In this way, modern science opens the door to divine action without the need for law-breaking miracles," says Collins.

"Given the impossibility of absolute prediction or explanation, the laws of nature no longer preclude God's action in the world. Our perception of the world opens once again to the possibility of divine interaction."

So, because God somehow tinkers in a quantumy type way, it's worth praying for divine guidance and intervention. To me, and to other scientists and commentators, Collins is straying into pseudo-scientific speculation simply to keep God in the earthly frame. Believing in God in the first place is by definition a leap of faith, and one that many scientists and many non-scientists are, after careful and reasonable thought, unwilling to take. For those who have trouble accepting that we're a product of pure chance, there is the option of believing that God set everything in motion.

Food for worms

But the idea that God can undetectably intervene when he wants to is having your cake and eating it. It disappoints me that such a gifted scientist could make this argument.

For the rest of us stuck with the realities of nature, and our inexorable fate as food for the worms, we have to struggle on alone trying to understand what we can and improve the quality and fairness of human existence through more mundane endeavours within the laws of nature. As Collins himself says, we can never know or predict everything through science. Absolutely true. To think otherwise is delusional.

But for all its faults, science is probably the best and most honest tool we've got for finding out practical truths about how the natural world operates. So let's recognise that, and not shoehorn what little we do know into abstruse and untenable explanations for divine intervention.