Evolving Utopia Part 13

Part 13: Paradoxes Exploded


One of the quotations that stuck in my mind long before I understood its significance was one that, in several versions, is attributed to Albert Einstein. He explained his objection to quantum mechanics by saying: "God may be a rascal, but he is not a gambler".
This can be taken to refer to the gedanken-experiment of Schrodinger's cat, where a radioactive source is set up to trigger a lethal experience for a cat in a closed container. Clearly the cat is found to be either alive or dead when the container is opened, but what is its state before the container is opened? Quantum theory would say that the cat is both alive and dead but, of course, the human observer can only observe a dead cat or a live one. This is regarded as a paradox.

But Schrodinger's cat is a paradox only because the postulated observer is human.

To a Deus ex Machina of the kind we defined earlier, the cat is clearly alive on one branch of its lifeline, and dead on another. Since the DeM observes both branches of the lifeline, there is no paradox. The paradox only exists if we expect that the human experimenter has the same powers as the DeM, which is clearly false to fact.

The problem here is that orthodox science has the tradition of avoiding any reference to religion. This means that in parables like Schrodinger's cat, in which the observer is required to have superhuman vision that can see into the box, must be set up with an observer who has the perceptive abilities of an ordinary human. In T. D. Lee's parable describing the Canonical Ensemble in Statistical Mechanics, the heat sink is presumed to be an infinite array of weakly interacting copies of the system under study, which clearly cannot be built by an ordinary human, but would be no problem for a DeM.

So the kinds of paradoxes like Schrodinger's Cat can be resolved without difficulty if we remove the constraint against using supernatural objects or entities in science as long as the use requires that, in the end, the supernatural object is not the subject of a real observation by a human observer. That should, possibly with a little rephrasing, resolve any of these kinds of paradoxes.


In the case of Einstein's quip, the false assumption is reversed. Since "God" is not limited to human perceptions, and would have at least the perceptions of the DeM, which is merely a mathematical model, there is no necessity for God to gamble: if there are two possible outcomes, God observes both. (At least the DeM can observe both if it cares to.)

The assumption that God is as limited in its perceptions as we are, which is at the implicit basis of most, if not all, quantum paradoxes, is entirely unnecessary. Einstein's God clearly had feet of clay.


This kind of theological assumption, that the qualities of God should be restricted to the perceptual limitations of a human being, is what makes historical theology inferior to science as a species of intellectual endeavor. There is no reason to retain this limitation.

If we consider the evolution of human beings from a theological standpoint, there is no reason that God should have created us (presumably through the process of evolution) with a facility for thought that stopped with some particular theologian or prophet. Just as in science we keep poking at the present accepted set of natural laws to see if we can find a glitch, I suspect that God would have created in us a facility for doing our best to understand our experiences; especially those that relate to God and ourselves.

We have an obligation to God (if there is one) to do the best we can, and not get intellectually lazy just because somebody has had a particularly striking theological insight. Jesus, Gautama and Mohammed were great contributors to the relationship between us and the universe, but they weren't gods, no matter what some may believe. If we can do better, if we can incorporate the understanding of new experiences into their insights, then we have the obligation to do so.


This essay to this point has illustrated how science, as the study of the natural world, and theology, as the study of the order in the universe that we call "God", can work hand in hand to point a way for the human species to live in accord with the workings of the planet we reside on. We can hope that other creative workers in science and theology will work together to make these notions deeper and more universal.