Physics and Religious Faith; A Discussion with Tim Andersen
APA Substack Newsletter: Public Philosophy Digest
This month’s newsletter extends an ongoing APA Blog discussion concerning the relationship between faith and knowledge. Initially, I explored how philosophical Eros could lead to faith in an interview with Jacob Howland about his book, Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith. I then explored the topic further with Samuel Kimbriel in a recent APA Blog Newsletter where we discussed his essay Thinking is Risky.
Today, we are going to assess the topic from a physicist’s perspective. Tim Andersen is a principal research scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute and the author of The Infinite Universe. Tim’s earlier pieces for the APA Blog serve as a foundation for my questions about the aspirations of physics and limits of objectivity.
Tim, thanks so much for your willingness to continue the dialogue with the APA. Your prolific writing often touches on the efficacy of scientific explanation and I would like to start by drawing on your initial Blog post, Wittgenstein, Feynman, and the Limits of Intuition and Objectivity in Quantum Theory. To summarize the upshot for my first question, you essentially conclude that nature is absurd and should be accepted as such:
“Richard Feynman, over the course of his long career, wanted to convince students and even the public that quantum theory does not make sense. In his 1965 textbook on Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), the theory for which he won the Nobel Prize, he wrote:
The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you accept Nature as She is—absurd”.
Drawing on Wittgenstein, you go on to highlight how physics is not discovering underlying truths, but rather immersed in its own conventions and quantum theory is best construed as a kind of language game: “In an article I wrote for Aeon some months ago, I addressed how Wittgenstein’s philosophy could shed light on debates over objectivity in quantum theory. In that article, I concluded that interpretations of quantum phenomena that did not deviate from existing quantum theory in any experimentally verifiable way failed to solve anything because they were tautologous. They added nothing new to science other than to remind us of what we already know”.
To reinforce this perspective, I would like draw on your latest Blog post where you highlight that the question of “why we are here?” has moved from the religious to the scientific realm, where the physicists are the “high priests of creation”. You describe the insufficiency of two prominent theories - the Multiverse and Anthropic Principle.
First, you note how the answers address Einstein’s theory demonstrating that the universe was not static but growing. This leads first to the notion of “fine tuning” and the solution of the Anthropic Principle, where the universe is finely tuned to the extent that “we are here to observe it. If it weren’t so, then we wouldn’t be here and nobody could ask the question.
This is a neat but unsatisfying philosophical answer because it assumes the universe just appeared randomly with no explanation”. In a sense, this is less of a theory then a default mode - the universe was tuned because, in retrospect, it’s the only way to account for the current state of the world.
Taking the opposite tack, the Multiverse theory effectively concludes there are too many possibilities. In this case, we can’t determine which one is real. There cannot be an explanation because there is an infinite regress of simulations. As you explain, there are “in fact, a large number of possible universes in which human life could exist if produced randomly. The simplest of these is a Boltzmann Brain universe, attributed to Ludwig von Boltzmann, one of the fathers of statistical mechanics. In this universe, we are simply brains containing fake knowledge about the universe. We think we are here in some corporeal form for some duration of time when, in fact, we just got here, we are leaving in the wink an eye, and all this is an illusion. We can’t disprove that we are in a Boltzmann Brain universe because our knowledge is fake. We have no information to go on.
A similar, more modern version of this argument is the simulation universe. In this case, as philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued, we are living in a simulation created by our descendants or maybe some other alien species, living in another universe, perhaps the “real” one or maybe another simulation”.
My first question, then, concerns the viable objectives for physics. If quantum theory is a language game, providing some utility, but no answers, and the prominent origin theories are inadequate, what are the prospects for science? Have we inflated the potential for knowledge itself?
I think first up, it is really important to emphasize, particularly to my physicist colleagues that Wittgenstein's philosophy is not in support of logical positivism or any purely empirical philosophy of science. Later Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations skirts the line between empiricism, realism, and anti-realism because he denies that we can assert any of these to be true using philosophy. At the same time, because he denies that one can assert that physics develops knowledge about the real world, our prospect for knowledge is that we must focus on our ability to calculate and recognize that the language we use about physics is a game that is more deeply connected to how humans think about physics than the real world. Now, it is entirely possible that our ideas about physics do correspond to the real world in some way, but that knowledge is inaccessible to us via philosophical inquiry alone. The only way we can assert this to be true is to appeal to a Creator, a being who gives meaning to our language beyond human activity. There are extensive arguments that God is required in order to assert any absolute universals about reality (rational or moral). You can see the writings of David Bentley Hart on the topic. But Wittgenstein shows that we cannot assert any knowledge at all, absolute or relative, outside of language. We can, however, get around this issue if we believe without proof (for the very concept of proof is language) that God gives our descriptions of reality meaning. This is probably small comfort for many physicists though I do take some in it.
We inflate the potential value of physics to give us deep truths about reality. What physics can do is offer ways to think about reality, but Wittgenstein would deny that there is any primitive ontology. The problem with primitive ontology is that there are often multiple ways to describe the same phenomenon in physics that have markedly different ontologies. A good example is the Schroedinger and Heisenberg pictures of quantum mechanics. The Schroedinger picture's primitive ontology includes a wavefunction spread across space which determines both the correlations between observations made at distant points (as with entanglement) and how observations are affected by interactions of the wavefunction with macroscopic objects (such as the double slit experiments, Schroedinger's cat, and so on). The Heisenberg picture, meanwhile, suggests a local primitive ontology where the wavefunction is a static background feature and the ontology of the particle is held in evolving observables which are quantum operators. These observables are local but require us to believe that quantum information that is inaccessible to experiment exists and persists as measurements are made. Nevertheless, these two pictures, with radically different ontologies, are mathematically equivalent!
Why should this be so? A realist might say that only one is true and the other is false. An anti-realist might say that neither is true and both are mental constructs of how human beings observe the world. A Wittgensteinian, however, would say that we cannot answer which is true. Both, instead, are different language games. The Schroedinger picture is far more popular with physicists and so its language game is dominant. What if the Heisenberg picture were dominant, what would we gain and what would we lose?
That question brings us to the crux of the issue. From a physics standpoint, we lose and gain certain features with each approach. In the Schroedinger picture, we gain a useful understanding of particles as represented by an entity, the wave packet, which makes an easy analogy to wave mechanics in classical physics as an object spread in space evolving in time. That is primarily why physicists preferred it. The Heisenberg picture is more naturally relativistic, however. Lorentz invariance is manifest in that picture because the wavefunction doesn't differentiate time and space. The problem of time in quantum gravity, in particular, becomes much simpler in the Heisenberg picture. Dirac invented a hybrid of the two, which we call the Interaction Picture. The Interaction Picture is preferred in field theory because you can use it to construct many-body interactions as solutions to free particle problems with some interaction parts. Equations that work in the interaction picture, where you can have operators interacting at different times, may not hold in the other pictures. This means that we may prefer Schroedinger when trying to understand how individual particles interact with the experiment apparatus (the main case when quantum mechanics was invented), Heisenberg when understanding how fast moving particles behave, and Dirac when wanting to understand how many particles interact with each other.
How is it, then, that approaches which are mathematically equivalent, essentially just a change of basis of the Hilbert space, have different applications in physics? This is because physics is mathematics with meaning. Its numerical quantities are defined to mean something based on how they relate to one another: time, space, probability, measurement, all have meaning. Certain mathematical transformations to equivalent spaces can change what things mean. What was time to one observer becomes space to another under a Lorentz transformation. These have different meanings depending on our point of view and hence our language games about them must change based on our perspective. A language game is always relative to the observers playing the game.
To ask what the "right" ontology for physics is might be as absurd as asking what the "right" reference frame is in relativity. There isn't one and that's the whole point. There are many and they all have a clear relationship to one another. Thus, we fight off the realists who want to force us to choose as well as the anti-realists who want to tell us it is all relative. The meaning of the quantities we talk about in physics do not have meaning because of some deep reality but rather some practical perspective.
Tim, I feel like you are kicking me away at the top of Wittgenstein’s proverbial ladder. I was unduly optimistic that you might telegraph a way out of this relativistic bind. Before I return to your initial remarks and the potential for an arbiter (God), let me explore another topical example of a language game that struck a nerve on Twitter (X) - a viral conversation about whether electrons exist. The philosophers may have been out of their league in this debate – so can the physicists find the electrons we have all cherished? Secondly, how would Wittgenstein think about the question?
This was mostly treated as a joke amongst physicists. None of them really cared if one could make a philosophical case for the existence of the electron. In truth, we have a hard time making the case in physics for particles existing at all. The only definition for a particle is something that is invariant to Poincare transformations. That just means that no matter how you move: speed up, slow down, rotate, accelerate, move far away or closer, whatever, a particle won't ever disappear. It may change its characteristics, but it will still be there. Now, you could say: how do we know that electrons exist? Well, there is an experiment called the Millikan oil drop experiment that demonstrated their existence. What this experiment actually demonstrated is that electric charge comes in integer multiples of a certain value. Those integer quantities are individual electrons. We can measure other properties that come in integer multiples to prove that electrons exist as discrete entities. Does this mean that electrons are "real"? Wittgenstein says that it doesn't matter. What matters is that we have to invent language in order to talk about these discrete charges and so electron fits. Our motivation here, however, is not mathematical or predictive but philosophical. We have to have an ontology as part of our language whether we want to or not.
Feynman seemed to understand this issue instinctively and you can see it from how he talks about the meaning of mathematical quantities. In the Feynman Lectures on The Vector Potential, which describes electromagnetic fields, he asks the question " is the vector potential a “real” field?" Here is his answer:
First we should say that the phrase “a real field” is not very meaningful. For one thing, you probably don’t feel that the magnetic field is very “real” anyway, because even the whole idea of a field is a rather abstract thing. You cannot put out your hand and feel the magnetic field. Furthermore, the value of the magnetic field is not very definite; by choosing a suitable moving coordinate system, for instance, you can make a magnetic field at a given point disappear. What we mean here by a “real” field is this: a real field is a mathematical function we use for avoiding the idea of action at a distance.
This is critical because Feynman is offering up an ontology that is based not in some definition of reality but in the need for language to talk about what is causing two charged particles to interact. It's like we have a game of chess and we have to have some way of talking about how the pieces interact. For example, one chess piece "attacks" another when it takes an opponent. What does this word mean? In the context of the game, it is very clear that in an attack, the attacker comes to rest on the square where the attacked was and the attacked piece now comes off the board. It bears no relationship to how an attack might work in the real world. There is no actual fight. But in the context of the game, it is critical to have this word. Likewise, in physics, it is critical to have words for the discrete entities we measure, particles, and the way they interact, fields.
An interesting difference between physics and human made games like chess, however, is that many of the words we invent for things come not from rules we knowingly invented but from measurements and careful experiments. This gives the appearance that we are discovering reality in the one while in the other we are using words by analogy. But the words we apply in physics are simply words repurposed for certain mathematical quantities. But if you imagine that you simply had to discover the rules of chess, that no one could tell you but you had to learn by merely watching two players silently (and perhaps you couldn’t even see them but only the pieces and board) and invent your own words for what they were doing, your words might not be the official ones and they may be your discovery, but they are still a game based on what you think you are seeing. This game is critical to teaching others not only how to make their own observations but further progress in describing ontologies for those observations. There is no harm in developing these ontologies provided you don’t become too caught up in what they mean. Physics has value in providing better frameworks for talking about the world than we would otherwise have.
Thanks Tim, we clearly have a conundrum because “better than nothing” is jarringly incomplete. As you suggest – “on truth, human beings have to remain silent because they have no access to it. What they do, instead, is create tautologies. These are conclusions derived from premises. Tautologies are not truths but lines of reasoning or argument that are intended to remind people of what their assumptions imply.” You go on to note how “Wittgenstein’s philosophy fits into this narrative, not by suggesting wisdom comes from God, but that humans are incapable of recognizing or manufacturing truth. They can neither create objective nor subjective truths, in fact. They have no control over it. All they can do is use words to influence the actions of other beings”.
We are left to appeal to a Creator. The case, as you noted, is well argued with extensive claims that only God can ground universals. My third question, then, is how a Creator could give meaning to our language beyond human activity and whether that is a form of knowledge? Is faith a form of certainty? Alternatively, to draw on Kierkegaard defining faith as risk, do we break out of the tautologies because we have abdicated reason?
Firstly, in a world where there is no God to give truth to our words, we are really in trouble because any truth valued statement an Atheist makes is self-contradictory. Wittgenstein got around this because he denied philosophy existed as a truth giving discipline. Truth exists within the context of a language game, but this is not a thesis about the world. Instead, truth is just part of the game, like points. It is a closed system. Wittgenstein argued this at the end of his life although he was a Christian! I always lament that Wittgenstein didn't integrate his faith more into his philosophy. In any case, if we acknowledge the existence of a Creator, it offers a way out. Why? Because the Creator presumably created human beings to understand the world as it is, and our evolution of language was not a random adaptation but a gift from that Creator in order to describe and understand the real world. This means that language is not merely a mechanism for carrying out language games but a universal language, as many claim that mathematics and science are. While Bertrand Russell failed to prove you could ground mathematics in some complete, self-consistent set of axioms, we can ground mathematics in the assertion that mathematical language and the concepts and axioms which underlie it are gifts from the Creator.
How can we prove this to be true? Well, we can't because you can't prove truth to exist. We can't prove that mathematics is a universal language.
This gets back to what Wittgenstein argued. All knowledge is part of the language game. Change the game and that knowledge may become nonsense. My belief in a Creator is, in some sense, just a new part of the language game. Some people are willing to play with those rules; others are not, but as I argued above the language game that has come to dominate the world today, if it doesn't have a Creator, it has a big, Creator-shaped hole in it. That justifies the belief as knowledge because it is only by this addition that the rest of my language game, which assumes some relationship between mathematics, science, and the real world, exists. An anti-realist could play a different game, but far less satisfying to me and argue that everything is simply an illusion of the mind. But, in a sense, that just replaces the Creator with yourself. If you establish objective truth at all, you need a Creator. Human beings, however, are largely unable to behave as if all truth is subjective. It is part of our evolution, I think, similar to how we cannot act as if we have no free will.
There are quite a few famous arguments for the existence of God. These began with St. Anselm and the ontological argument and then Aquinas added his cosmological arguments which were later refined. How do we reconcile these with Wittgenstein? I think Aquinas came close. Aquinas had a deeply mystical experience a few months before his death. This experience was so powerful that it made him stop writing. He would not finish his masterpiece, the Summa Theologicae. He called it all "straw" meaning worthless. I believe this is because the mystical experience taught Aquinas, in a very direct, non-linguistic way, that all the arguments he was making were part of a language game. Now, I don't agree that Aquinas' work was mere "straw" but rather I see cases for both faith grounded in reason and faith grounded in experience. Faith straddles the chasm between these two. Thus, there are two kinds of certainty in faith. In one we stay comfortably within our tautologies but in the other we do have to take the risk of breaking out of them and experiencing God directly. The latter we call "mysteries" which has come to mean something we don't understand but originally meant a secret rite, an encounter with the divine. In the Christian tradition, we also call these sacraments. My tradition is sacramental, meaning we approach rites like baptism and the Eucharist as direct encounters with God. These encounters have theological explanations which are important, but they are not the rites themselves nor can they capture what it is like to participate. Those unfamiliar with this approach to faith may understand better by thinking about psychology. Whenever we experience powerful emotions, we have to both articulate them and experience them in order to process them. If we only articulate them, we can become cut off from ourselves, disassociated. If we only experience them, we can become lost in their chaos, like we are drowning in a rough sea. Logic and language give us a kind of boat with which to navigate the roiling sea of experience. A boat on dry land is useless but being at sea without a boat is dangerous. We need both.
Tim, I did not anticipate that level of detail, but I should have, given your exacting analysis! I would like to tease out your interesting distinction of moving beyond the tautologies by directly experiencing God. Specifically, where monism falls in the dichotomy, especially in Spinoza’s case - where he is commonly misunderstood as a Pantheist (or even an Atheist). One of my favorite pieces from the APA Blog is the interview with Clare Carlise because she persuasively contends that Spinoza has a religious vision. Being-in-God, as Clare suggests, is a theological idea: “God makes us exist, and makes us intelligible; God makes everything exist, and makes everything intelligible”. For Spinoza, we can participate in the divine nature in a kind of immanent or realized eschatology, which Clare explains can be found in the first Letter of John, which was one of Spinoza’s favorite New Testament texts.
I also raise monism because of some of the theories from the leading edge of physics (such as non-locality) might be vindicating a form of uncompromising monism, reflected in Michael Della Rocca’s strict Rationalism, described is his book, the Parmenidean Ascent. I discussed the import in the last Public Philosophy Digest newsletter, exploring intellectual ambition with Samuel Kimbriel. I believe inter-disciplinary insights - in the manner of the 17th Century polymaths and natural philosophers - are possible if philosophy draws on the physical sciences. I’ve also explored this topic with theoretical physicist Heinrich Pas, who expands on the case suggesting that quantum physics reveals the unity of the universe.
The question, then, is where does monism fall relative to sacramental experience? Are there Creation theories stuck between the tautologies with partial truth and directly experiencing God? Can they qualitatively differ in the way you said physics does not necessarily correlate to reality, but is a better framework for understanding the world?
For a more lengthy exploration of Spinoza, you can see my Substack article, but I'll address monism more directly. On the one hand, the concept of sacrament that I have laid out, as a direct encounter with God, contradicts monistic materialism. We are not just a bucket of matter and energy arranged just so. On the other hand, could all things be in unity in a non-materialistic sense? I'll go back to Aquinas for this. Aquinas, despite predating both, walked the line between Spinoza's monism and Descartes' dualism. Aquinas had his own form of dualism but it was much weaker than that of Descartes. He saw human beings in particular as having a dual nature, part divine soul and part material, that was unique, but unlike Descartes and, also, Plato, our divine nature is imperfect without our material nature. And unlike Aristotle, our divine natures can exist separate from our bodies, but we are, in a sense, shadows of ourselves. Aquinas would disagree that we are simply emanations from God. That would be a Gnostic position, heavily steeped in middle Platonism. He would argue that we are purposeful creations by God, distinct from God. Our divine natures seek unity with God not because they are of the same substance as God but because they are made for relationship with him. Thus, difference is necessary for relationship.
One question is whether the dualism of Aquinas has a place in physics or if we can rely on Aristotlean monism. First, what kind of monism doesn't work in physics? Anti-realist (anti-material) monism. A good example of an anti-realist monist would be the physicist John Wheeler who coined the term "it from bit". In essence, all is information. Wheeler even supposed that space and time were merely information that particles carried about where they were and when they were and indeed once you got through cataloguing all the information about a particle, you'd find there was nothing left. I disagree with this point of view. Matter consists of both information and physical substance, i.e., material. Without information, matter is formless, much like the prime matter of Aristotle. Without matter, information is non-corporeal, like the Aristotlean form. Matter requires information as its form while information requires matter to be manifest. (This becomes easier to see if you use the Heisenberg Picture of quantum mechanics.) Hence, we arrive at a very clear monism for the physical universe. In fact, Aquinas would entirely agree with this, matter and form exist as one. He would add, however, the exception of human beings. Only humans possess a soul and therefore an intellect capable of separating from physical form. Thus, his dualism is restricted to the human species. Some modern theologians (N.T. Wright comes to mind) disagree with this dualism and argue that, instead, the human soul is, by divine intervention, united to God's spirit at death. Hence it merely exchanges one form of monism for another, that of matter and form, for Spirit and form. Nevertheless, this requires a dualism between God and his Creation with the human soul traversing the gap between the two but unable to exist alone, sort of like copying data from a harddrive to the cloud. Rather than a monism, again, we have a dualism, God and Creation, that is in relationship but we are effectively united to one or the other, no Cartesian dualism.
In order for a Creation theory to make sense, it has to take into account both the matter and the information content of the universe, but it also has to take into account that we are beings that exist within the universe and are experiencing the universe. Thus, the universe is created with matter and form that is capable of experiencing itself. Creation theories that attempt to account only for the matter and form part but ignore the experience or suggest it is an illusion are incomplete. A creation theory based on experience, however, is a very different thing from a creation theory based on the logic of cause and effect. Experience knows nothing of cause and effect because it always lives in the moment. The universe of experience is continually created at every moment. And that is exactly how we see God as Creator, not as a demiurge initiating the universe at a point in the past, but as a Being who creates continually. When we encounter God, we always encounter him creating and he invites us into partnership with him in making that creation. Thus, we become creators alongside God. How this happens, however, is and should remain a mystery. It is easy to get sucked into an anti-realist stance like that of John Wheeler that we, as observers, are creating reality by our observations. We can't say that we are creating reality by our observations nor can we say that we are observing real things apart from our observations. This is the trap when we try to transfer our conscious experiences into the realm of language. We arrive at multiple competing ontologies.
Finally, I have heard people talk about the universal wavefunction, the wavefunction that describes all space, time and matter. That is a nice illustration but the very idea of the wavefunction as a real thing is just one ontology based on Schroedinger's wave mechanics. That said, I think we find a very clear monism in the unification of matter and information as I mentioned above. Is that all there is? I don't think so.
Tim, this has been quite a ride and I greatly appreciate your ability to make complex subjects accessible. The challenge of the universe capable of experiencing itself - where we neither create reality by our observations nor observe real things - aligns with the previous newsletter as Samuel makes the case to open the aperture for intellectual ambition by accounting for and grappling with the knower. Although the continuous creation of experience cannot be described by language, living in the moment is a reflection that the truth is proximate.
It has been a scintillating discussion because the epistemic question is absolute. To draw on Michael Della’s Rocca’s Blog interview: “explanatory demands that propel philosophical theories ultimately undermine themselves, so philosophy - if it is to proceed - cannot have as its aim the explanation of anything that really exists”. As Wittgenstein said in the Philosophical Investigations: “Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain.”
Thank you so much for your time, using the forefront of physics to highlight enduring existential concerns. I look forward to sharing more of your profound work in this venue!
Further Reading:
Medium - The Infinite Universe
From the APA Archive:
Quantum AI Invigorates Spinoza
What else I’m Reading:
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