Quantum Physics and the Foreknowledge of God - (or why it might be ridiculous to think we can explain everything about God)
Queen of the Night Arise! Unveil! by Henry Moore, 1885
This will by no means be an easy read, but if you like to blow your mind from time to time, then you are in the right place and I will make this as simple and succinct as I can.
Recently, I participated in an online discussion dealing with an excellent question that has been posed to me countless times over the years. Let's frame it as follows ..."If God already knows that in 2023, Pete will choose to blaspheme God, then how can we say that Pete has free will - isn’t it already determined?"
The person who posed the question did a very nice job of describing the problem. He pointed out that if Pete's decision can be represented by a fact we call 'Y', and God's foreknowledge of Pete's decision can be represented by a fact we call 'X', then whatever 'X' is, 'Y' must be the same, so Pete must do whatever 'X' is. In other words, when 2023 rolls around, Pete will have no choice but to do what 'X' said he would do and blaspheme God.
Let's look at some possible responses.
Maybe we do not have free will
The simplest response is that free will is an illusion. God's foreknowledge is a consequence of what God in His sovereignty determines Pete will do. In other words, God’s foreknowledge 'X' determines Pete’s decision Y'. Pete might think he is choosing to blaspheme God, but he is mistaken. It is actually God making Pete do it via the different causal inputs that God totally controls. God, in his sovereignty, blasphemes himself through a tool we call "Pete".
God, in his sovereignty, blasphemes himself through a tool we call "Pete".
There is an enormous problem with this, however. It results in a type of God who makes people do things that he hates and not do what he loves. For example, God said of the Jews living during the Babylonian destruction of Judah,
"They have filled this place with the blood of the innocent and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, a thing which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever enter My mind." (1)
The above passage ends with God giving the reason they have not listened to God …
“because they have stiffened their necks so as not to heed My words.”
What kind of a god makes people do things he hates, that have never even entered his mind, and then blame them for doing what he made them do? It is as if I grabbed a bullwhip and started whipping an innocent child, and while I was lashing the child, I yelled at my whip saying, "What you (the whip) are doing is an outrage, I hate it and it never even entered my mind that you would do such a thing! You are deliberately not listening to me! (while my arm continues to wield the whip)". Bystanders would think that either I had completely taken leave of my senses, or that I was incredibly evil, making a mockery of the evil I knew full well I was carrying out.
The Bible is so thoroughly filled, from cover to cover, with people doing things that God clearly hates while, at the same time, he constantly tells them to stop and repent that, if we have no free will, we wind up with a bizarre type of god who is self-defeating, self-contradicting, the origin of both evil and good, and who hates all the terrible things he does against himself via the tools he totally controls. Let us consider a different possibility.
Contingency
The second option is to grant that God, in his sovereign power, has given Pete the gift of free will, but God's knowledge of 'X' is contingent upon what God permits Pete to freely decide in 2023, not the other way around. To clarify, Pete's decision is the cause of the truth value of 'Y' which, in turn, is the cause of the truth value of God's knowledge 'X'. Consequently, God's knowledge 'X' does not cause Pete's decision 'Y' to blaspheme God, rather, God’s knowledge is a result of Pete’s decision. If Pete had decided something different in 2023, then 'X' would have reflect that different decision instead.
It is as if I stepped into a time machine, went forward in time to the next national election, observed the results of that election, and then returned to the present. I now know how the population will vote but it does not follow that I have determined the outcome of that election. Rather, the outcome of that election was determined by the population and I merely observed it. What I now know is completely contingent upon my observation of their decision.
But this raises a much more difficult question - how does God know these things?
The B-theory of time:
One theory is to regard time as a dimension, and all events that ever occur are located at different coordinates within that dimension.(2) From your perspective, some things are 'future' or 'past' but from the perspective of ‘I AM’, the God who transcends time, all events can be observed simultaneously and there is no 'future' or 'past'. The problem with this is that everything that ever 'happens' is essentially a 'frozen' event at a particular coordinate and it ‘always’ was frozen (in a timeless sense of “always”). In this view, free will decisions are problematic, though not impossible to conceptualize. How is it that the dimension of time contains all the events that will ever occur, in a frozen, eternal, changeless, timeless coordinate system?
Quantum weirdness:
What I am about to say is not intended to be the actual explanation of how God's foreknowledge works. Rather, I want to awaken the reader to the possibility that we tend to simplistically and naively think that the human mind should be able to understand everything about God.
I will try to keep this as simple as I can. but I do need to explain three things, 'entanglement', 'non-locality', and 'wave function'. In the field of quantum mechanics, each object has something associated with it that we call a wave function. The wave function describes the state of that object at any point in time. This is the case for everything from subatomic particles right up to a wave function for the entire universe itself, as suggested by Steven Weinberg (3). Human beings can change the state of a wave function by doing something so simple as merely observing the object's characteristics at some point in time or making decisions that affect the objects in their environment and, therefore, the wave functions for those things.
Entanglement occurs when there is some sort of correlation due to an interaction between the state of one object and another. An example occurs if those two things had a mutual origin or interaction in the distant past. Later on, if one takes a measurement of one, it instantly affects the state of the other even if they are now many light-years distant from each other. This connection in space is called non-locality.
To clarify - think of entangled non-locality as two objects that are holding hands (figuratively speaking). As they become more distant from each other, their arms stretch so that they can continue to stay in immediate touch with each other. So if anything happens to one of them, the other one immediately ‘knows’ it (figuratively speaking) and is instantly affected. In other words, the two objects do not have to wait until a message is sent from one to the other - because they are ‘holding hands’ they know it instantly, even if they have moved apart many light-years apart in space.
This is where things get weird. In 2013, a paper by Eli Megidish in Physical Review Letters (4) showed that our understanding of events occurring in time is simplistic. The shocker is that entangled objects can also “hold hands” between the past and the future. An object can also “hold hands” with another object that does not yet exist but will someday. If you want a more technical explanation, here it is …
“In the scenario we present here, measuring the last photon affects the physical description of the first photon in the past, before it has even been measured. Thus, the ”spooky action” is steering the system’s past. Another point of view that one can take is that the measurement of the first photon is immediately steering the future physical description of the last photon. In this case, the action is on the future of a part of the system that has not yet been created.”
If your brain is hurting at this point, here is the takeaway. We tend to see things as ‘future’, or ‘past’, or ‘present’. But entanglement in time means that things in the future are ‘holding hands’ with things in the past and vice versa. In one sense, there is a simultaneity between them while, in another sense, one is in the past and the other is in the future. So let’s allow our imagination to run a bit wild at this point and think about implications for what we call “foreknowledge’.
Implications for God's foreknowledge
What if God, at the instant of creation, knows the states of the complete set of wave functions for the universe and, as a result, knows everything about the entire future history of the universe thanks to the temporal non-locality he has programmed into the laws of quantum mechanics?
What if God, at the instant of creation, interprets the complete set of entangled wave functions for the universe and, as a result, knows everything about the entire future history of the universe thanks to the non-locality he has programmed into the laws of quantum mechanics?
If everything in physical reality has a common origin in God, then everything in physical reality is entangled, which affects all the wave functions of all the objects that have ever existed and ever will exist within the physical time of the universe. If God knows and comprehends the state of every wave function, then he fully comprehends the entire future history of the universe as one simultaneous complex fact at the very instant he created it, including how every future free agent’s free decisions affect every wave function back to the moment of ultimate entanglement at creation. This is all connected through temporal non-locality. This comprehension of the entire future of the universe would be simultaneous with the moment he brings the universe into existence due to the ability to know the state of every wave function at that moment and how they have been affected by future events.
There is one other thing you should know. There seems to be something about human beings that suggests they can change the state of wave functions but are not themselves, described by a wave function. This was mentioned by Steven Weinberg in an article in 1991. (5) Although it has the greatest explanatory power for what we observe in quantum mechanics, he completely rejected it due to the implication that there would be something non-physical about human beings, and he was a firmly committed materialist. The reason I raise this is that free will requires that we are not determined by the laws of quantum mechanics or the laws of physics in general, and it follows that neither is God. He is the origin of the objects and their wave functions but not, Himself, determined by them.
Now here is where it goes to another level of mind-boggling complexity. Given the above, at the moment of creation, God would already know all the people he will bring into the world. Thanks to entanglement and temporal non-locality, the state of the wave functions at the moment of creation would be a consequence of all the free decisions humans would ever make, along with all the interactions God would introduce to accomplish his purposes. God could run through trillions of combinations of his own interactions to fine-tune or tweak the resulting world such that it would be the best of all possibilities. To use a term from quantum mechanics, God could perform a very large number of measurements, all in the instant of time when he created the physical world. This would result in God not only knowing, but experiencing, the decisions of all future free agents, as well as all his own interactions such that his ultimate purposes would still be accomplished in sync with all the free decisions of human beings … and he could do all this in a moment of simultaneity at the foundation of the world.
Bottom line: God’s foreknowledge and middle-knowledge (knowing all counterfactuals of freedom) would be complete thanks to temporal non-locality, which he, himself, has built into the laws of nature that govern quantum mechanics. We could describe this method of orchestrating history, bringing his plan into sync with the decisions of free agents who he foreknew, predestination. More succinctly, temporal non-locality could provide a way for God to ‘see’ in complete and minute detail, the complete future, including every free decision and its effects forward and backward in time.
Implications:
First, let me emphasize that what I have just described is not intended to be an explanation of how God's foreknowledge works - I laugh at the thought that any mortal has that level of intellectual horsepower! I merely wish to suggest that we often have an extremely simplistic view and understanding of God and the world. We think that we should be able to understand and explain how God does things, but I suspect we suffer from a badly over-blown estimation of human intelligence. Yet I see this assumption every day by skeptics and atheists, and even by Christians.
A human-invented god would be entirely understandable and explainable. The real God should be orders of magnitude greater than our very limited cognitive abilities to explain.
A fundamental problem in countless discussions today is that the type of god people argue about is far too small. We try to fit the real God into a box that is tiny enough to suit our human intellect so we can deal with him. The real God staggers the mind just to begin to comprehend him.
That being said, God loves us to know him as best we can, and he has gone so far as to become a human being, Jesus Christ, who lived among us for a while, died for our sins, rose again, and returned to a level of glory that exceeds our mortal ability to face. God says,
"Let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who exercises lovingkindness, justice and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things,” (6)
References:
Jeremiah 19:4-5.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/#TheoBTheo
Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Reality. (Amazon)
You can download the original paper here If you can read a popular-level version.
I have lost my original copy, so I'm relying on my memory here but I am pretty sure it was his article in Scientific American's special issue on 'Science in the 20th century', January 1, 1991.
Jeremiah 9:24
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