The Question

 
In the year 587 BCE, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and brought many of the Jews back home as captives. Among them was the prophet Ezekiel. During this dark period of Israel’s history, God promised Ezekiel that Israel would rise again. We can read about it in the Book of Ezekiel, where God leads His prophet out to a battlefield in a valley, strewn with the dry, dusty skeletons of Jerusalem’s fallen army. There, God makes Ezekiel a strange request: He tells him to command the bones to live again. Ezekiel does as God says (telling his silent audience to “Hear the word of the Lord!”), and as his voice echoes through the valley, the earth begins to shake. The scattered bones reassemble themselves, and are covered with knotted lines of sinew. Over them grow new layers of flesh, skin, and hair. The breath of God, carried by the wind, blows over the bodies, and just as breath animated Adam, so too do the rebuilt bodies lying on the dust of the battlefield rise up, awake. By the power of God, “a great and immense army” now stands on its feet. Israel will rise again (Ez. 37:1-14).

The Bible offers many other examples of death and resurrection, written in the centuries following Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones. There is the resurrection of Lazarus (John 11:38-44), the dead saints who emerged from their tombs at the hour of Jesus’ death (Matt. 27:52), and of course Jesus himself (Mark 16:9, John 20:14). These are all easy enough for us to picture in our minds; Lazarus and Jesus were both dead for only a very short time, their bodies bound up securely in folds of linen. Though Lazarus’ family had feared a stench when Jesus asked that his tomb be opened up, we can still imagine some process reversing his dead state or somehow rejuvenating him. The same goes for the dead arising in the tombs in St. Matthew’s gospel; though perhaps dead for many years, their bodies had remained undisturbed in their tombs until the day of Jesus’ death. And the same is true for the bones in Ezekiel's vision: Though the dead men Ezekiel saw being raised up were nothing but dust and dried bone, the remains of those soldiers slain on that battlefield remained (more or less) together.

The Challenge

 
Christianity is predicated on the possibility of resurrection, and the belief that on Easter, Jesus defeated death once and for all. More than that, He had the power to extend His new life to others, allowing them to share in His immortality. This is why, once the early persecutions of the Christians were underway, the Romans went to great lengths to discourage the belief in bodily resurrection. According to Eusebius of Caesarea, one group of Christians executed by the Romans had had their corpses left to rot for a week, unburied (so that they would be denied proper funerals). The remains were then cremated, and finally dumped into the Rhone River. As the ashes washed downstream, one of the overseers remarked aloud, “Now let us see if they will rise again!”

While the Romans might have worked hard to destroy the bodies of Christians, they really need not have bothered. In reality, just as human remains decay, so too do they disperse. In the valley Ezekiel saw in his vision, birds of prey would have already picked the bones of Jerusalem clean, carrying parts of the dead soldiers away with them in their beaks and bellies. And if the bones had remained lying there longer, they would have eventually crumbled into dust and been blown away in the wind, or washed out by the rain.

Now, think of all the people who have ever lived, and what has become of most of them over the past 200,000 years. Their tombs are lost, their bones long gone, consumed by predators, floods, landslides, at the mercy of the elements, or (perhaps) lying beneath the foundations of modern cities. With a very few exceptions (such as the Pharaoh Tutankhamen, whose untouched tomb was discovered in 1922, some 3,200 years after he was laid to rest) the inevitable, natural process of decay has utterly destroyed what remains of anyone who lived more than a few centuries ago. The Romans of Lyon need not have tried so hard!

Atheists are right to point out that this poses a serious problem for most Catholics alive now, who hope for resurrection and eternal life in the future. There are of course exceptions, examples of people who lived long ago, whose bodies remain intact until today: Pharaoh Tutankhamen, of course, the bog-people preserved in the medieval swamps of northern Europe, and the incorrupt bodies of a few special saints. But what about the rest of us? Our remains might one day be scattered across the planet, be consumed by worms, fertilize the grass, be consumed by cows, and be consumed by eaters of hamburgers.

If Catholics really believe in the possibility of resurrection, and wish to convince atheists that death is not the end of life, they must find a satisfying answer to this question. Explaining the "mechanics" of resurrection indeed poses a formidable challenge.

A Possible Solution

 
In 1935, Albert Einstein and two of his younger colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathen Rosen, proposed one of the most famous thought experiments in modern physics. The paper they wrote (with the lengthy title, "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?") describes a quality of physical reality known as "locality". Because of locality (location in the physical world), a domino at the front of a line cannot directly knock down a domino at the end of the end; it can only do so indirectly (via the movement of all the dominoes standing in between).

In the EPR paper (so named because of the initials of its authors), though, a perceived "fatal flaw" of quantum physics is revealed, in which locality plays a crucial role. But it is, in fact, not a flaw at all—it is a mystery! The paper describes a bizarre paradox that seemingly flies in the face of common sense (a paradox upon a paradox, as those familiar with Schrodinger's cat already know), yet which has been since verified many times in the laboratory.

To explain the paradox, let's keep talking about dominoes. Suppose I randomly take two dominoes from a pile and look at the number of dots on each. Let us say one has no dots at all, and the other has twelve. I shake the two dominoes in my hands, mix them up, and then look at the one on top. I see that it is the one that has twelve dots, and automatically know (even though I am not looking at it) that the one I cannot see has no dots.

This makes sense, until we start thinking about a similar situation on a quantum level. A quantum particle called a pi meson decays into a positron and an electron, which spin off in opposite directions. But their spins are not independent; they correlate with the original state of the pi meson before its decay. As a result, a physicist observing the electron will automatically know the state of the positron, just as I (in the above example) can tell you the number of dots on the domino I cannot see, so long as I am looking at the other one.

How is this a paradox? Well, in quantum physics (and the example of Schrodinger's cat), the state of a particle depends upon the presence of an observer. The properties of a particle (its position and momentum, for example) are undefined until an observer observes them (like Doctor Who's Weeping Angels, who have no definite, solid existence unless they are being watched ... don't blink!). Particles have no definite position or momentum until they are observed, yet by observing the electron a physicist can also know the state of a positron. Einstein, Podolksy, and Rosen, then, had apparently found a contradiction within quantum theory: the properties of particles really do exist, even if no one is looking at them.

The only other possibility would be what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance": the idea that an observation here can affect reality there. But that would be impossible, Einstein, thought, because of locality (just as knocking over a domino at this end of the line does not directly cause a domino to fall at that end of the line).

Or is it?

As I said already, this "spooky action" has been empirically verified many times in the 80 years since the EPR paper was written, perhaps most effectively by the Swiss physicist Niculus Gisin and his colleagues at the University of Geneva. In 1997, they sent pairs of entangled photons through a network of fiber-optic tubes to locations eleven kilometers apart, one north and the other south of Geneva. And yet even at that distance (keep in mind that these are subatomic particles!), the behaviour of one particle correlated with the behaviour of the other; when the paths of each member of the pair were compared, they were symmetrical. Though there had been many possible pathways through the tubes, what one particle had done, the other had done as well. Even though the two particles were separated by a large distance and had no way of influencing with or "communicating" with one another, the movement of one affected the movement of the other, from a distance.

This is the phenomenon of entanglement. Entanglement occurs constantly, everywhere. While we do not consciously perceive it with our senses, it nevertheless ties together all the most fundamental particles composing reality. Whenever two things, whether photons (light particles), electrons, or atoms interact, they are tied together, sharing a single "experience" and losing their separate existence. On the everyday, human level, these entanglements do not endure for very long; in our bodily experience, new interactions inevitably occur, resulting in new entanglements of new, shared experience. But these interactions have been observed and tested on both microscopic particles and macroscopic objects.

This shared relationship was demonstrated recently with diamonds large enough to be seen by an unaided eye. Physicist Ian Walmsley and his colleagues at the University of Oxford were able to cause two diamond strips to vibrate simultaneously across a fifteen-centimeter gap. This may not sound terribly impressive at first, until we realize that the experiment was conducted at room temperature; the heat of the laboratory and the air particles filling the room would have interfered with the entangling connection between the two diamonds (most entanglement experiments deal with atoms or subatomic particles at temperatures approaching absolute zero, in order to prevent atoms from jostling one another. Walmsley’s experiment involved macroscopic objects at, again, room temperature). Ultimately, Walmsley’s experiment showed that the ties of entanglement may continue to bind particles together, on a larger scale and in spite of outside interference.

A Speculative Conclusion

 
What does this have to do with resurrection? It suggests that particles may somehow remain united, regardless of the amount of space separating them (for entanglement is a non-local phenomenon, unaffected by distance).

This opens the door to two exciting possibilities. First, it is conceivable that a particular living body could continue on in some form, even after it has died and its component particles have decayed and/or physically separated (whether by an earthquake, a stick of dynamite, or a hungry bear). Second, entanglement suggests that particular events leave a lasting “mark” upon their subjects, right down to the subatomic level. Events unite particles together, whether the spin of a progenitor particle (like a pi meson), or (perhaps!) the shared participation in a particular living body.

So the efforts of the Romans to prevent their Christian victims from being raised up might have been fruitless, after all. While much more investigation is required before we can speak more definitely about this sort of thing (investigations which I will leave in the hands of physicists, though I will watch and listen with great interest), quantum entanglement offers a fascinating response to an important challenge posed to the possibility of resurrection.

In the meantime, incorruptible saints, bog bodies, Egyptian mummies, and dry bones will continue to lie in wait.
 
 
(Image credit: Planet Science)

When most people think of Albert Einstein’s contribution to physics, the theory of relativity is what comes to mind, and rightly so. What most don’t realize is that his Nobel Prize was actually awarded for explaining the photoelectric effect, a result which contradicted the classical understanding of light and helped lead to the development of Quantum Mechanics. Despite his major contributions to its development, Einstein was famously uncomfortable with the way randomness and uncertainty became so integral to the understanding of that new theory, often summed up in his quote, “God does not throw dice.”

This objection, however offhand it may seem, resonated with many physicists of the time. The glory of classical physics was how neat and tidy everything was. It offered the promise of determinism: if we could know perfectly the state of the universe at one moment and the laws that govern it, we could extrapolate forwards and backwards perfectly as far as we like. Despite the recognition that this ideal was well nigh impossible, there was comfort in the promise, and each step we took at least brought us closer to that perfection. The claim was that perfect knowledge of the natural world, the sort that is attributed to God, would ultimately be expressed in a deterministic mathematical formula.

The difficulty that Quantum Mechanics presented for Einstein and many others, physicists and non-physicists alike, is that the best picture of the physical world that it allows seems partial and incomplete. It implied that it is not just practically difficult but theoretically impossible to completely describe the current state of the world, let alone extrapolate forwards or backwards as we please. As bad as the loss of “perfect” knowledge of the world was for physicists, it further called into question the nature of God’s knowledge of the world. If some aspect of the natural order was inherently uncertain and unknowable what does this imply for God? Is God’s knowledge subject to this randomness, is he simply reacting to the whims of nature?

The image of God awaiting the results of a chance outcome is rightly viewed as absurd, but the solution was not a recovery of classical determinism. Even independent of the results of Quantum Mechanics, that view was philosophically flawed, and the attempt to understand God’s knowledge using it was even more so.

If physics could actually give us a complete description of the now and from that extrapolate forwards and backwards, then the past, present and future are logically the same and all equally “present.” In a sense, nothing “new” ever happens because everything is subject to absolute necessity. Every effect is completely defined by its cause, a picture of the world that is arguably static rather than dynamic, detracting from the very notion of time. There are a host of subtle problems this raises about necessity and contingency and what it even means to be a cause, but the most obvious difficulty with this view is that it leaves no room at all for free human activity.

Additionally, thinking of God’s knowledge in this way cripples the idea of His providence. If everything in nature simply happened necessarily based on what came before, it would seem reasonable to say that God’s knowledge is just the perfect working out of the complicated physics problem of the universe. As creator He knows how all things will work together and His providence simply becomes this human kind of foresight and His governance simply becomes setting things up to run perfectly. The danger inherent in this is to see God as the external Architect who only works on and understands the world on a natural level, more powerfully and perfectly than we ever could perhaps, but still on a natural level.

It took many years and much experimentation and calculation before the reality of the quantum world sunk in. Physicists eventually became comfortable with the success of Quantum Mechanics and settled into a new status quo that accepted a randomness and indeterminism underlying physics. Even those who sought alternative interpretations of Quantum Mechanics that might save determinism recognized that they had to bring in other phenomena that destroyed the crisp, clean classical worldview. Unfortunately, the damage done to the understanding of causality and of God’s providence by classical determinism remains.

Even if the natural world “throws dice” in its most fundamental interaction, this may simply be a physical manifestation of the inherent contingency of all material things. This idea would not have been so foreign to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, who saw both necessary and contingent causes in the world around them. More importantly, this loss of absolute necessity does not threaten God’s absolute knowledge of the created order, for his knowledge is not limited to the particular mathematical and formal descriptions that we are able to develop in the sciences. God’s providence, His wise ordering of everything to its proper end, is above every natural cause. The certainty of God’s knowledge does not limit his power to create natural objects that can act in a truly contingent way. Einstein was right that “God does not throw dice,” but He knows perfectly the natural order that He created to do just that.
 
 
This article first appeared on DominicanaBlog.com, an online publication of the Dominican Students of the Province of St. Joseph who live and study at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. It was written by Br. Thomas Davenport, O.P., who entered the Order of Preachers in 2010. He graduated from Stanford University with a PhD in Physics.
 
(Image Credit: Hudgins Mediation)

In a previous post I argued that a common atheist intuition about what would count as proof for the existence of God also provides a foundation for the intuition that something cannot come into existence from nothing without a natural cause. If this intuition is true, then it would provide much more support for the first premise of the Kalām Cosmological argument (KCA). For those who are unfamiliar with this argument for the existence of God, it goes like this:

• P1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
• P2. The universe began to exist
• C. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

I alluded in my previous article to observations in quantum physics that critics claim are direct counter examples to the premise, “whatever begins to exist has a cause.” These observations have also surfaced several times in the comment boxes here at Strange Notions. I’ll call them, collectively, the quantum physics objection. So what exactly is this objection?

Physics describes how objects move and behave in the world, but traditional physics has a limit when it comes to describing really small objects, such as electrons or quarks. For that we need quantum physics (also called quantum mechanics), which explains the nature and motion of atoms as well as the particles that make up atoms. Because these particles are so small, they can act in very strange ways. For example, scientists have observed so-called “virtual particles” emerging, apparently without a cause, from an empty vacuum. They have also observed atomic nuclei decay and emit alpha, beta, or gamma particles in an unpredictable way that appears to not have any cause.

If these things can occur without a cause in the quantum realm, then it seems that P1 is not true and the Kalām Cosmological argument is undermined or refuted. How could a defender of this argument respond to this objection?

Not Something from Nothing

 
The major intuitive support behind P1 is that something can’t come from nothing without a supernatural cause. The case of virtual particles “popping into existence” does not overturn this intuition because these entities do not emerge from “nothing.” They instead emerge from the quantum vacuum, or a field with a very low energy level. Columbia University Philosopher and theoretical physicist David Albert writes:
 

“[V]acuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems—are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff...the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those [quantum] fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings—if you look at them aright—amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing."

 
Albert’s reasoning also applies to alpha or beta particles that emerge from a decaying atomic nucleus, an event that is also not a case of “something coming from nothing.” Since the quantum physics objection does not invalidate the broader intuition “something can’t come from nothing” that undergirds P1 (i.e., “whatever begins to exist has a cause”), then we could reformulate the KCA and just rely on this uncontested foundational intuition:

1. If the universe began to exist from nothing, then the universe has a transcendent cause
2. The universe began to exist from nothing.
3. Therefore, the universe has a transcendent cause.¹

Some people object to this reformulation because, in the words of atheist Aron Zavaro, “[M]odern physics has seriously challenged the common-sense intuitions which have given rise to belief in P1,” such as the intuition that something cannot come into existence from nothing without a supernatural cause. Zavaro goes on to claim that, “[T]he everyday man on the street would surely tell you that empty space stays empty! The man on the street would also surely tell you that a spaceless-timeless state could never produce anything without God's help...such commonsense intuitions are false.”

However, I disagree with this critic’s assessment. First, people may not properly think through a hypothetical situation involving the word “empty.” If you ask most people what it would be like to spend 24 hours in an “empty room” they’ll usually say it would be “boring,” as opposed to being “fatal” which is the correct answer because you would suffocate after spending a few minutes in a vacuum without oxygen or even air pressure.

The normal man has a correct intuition that “empty” space cannot produce anything; he is just mistaken about a factual claim related to what he perceives to be empty space. The space he thinks is empty isn’t truly empty; it contains an invisible, low-level quantum energy field. Armed with that knowledge, the average man may indeed agree that small particles could come into existence from that energy field, but he would rightly judge that these particles have some kind of cause or origin for their existence. On the other hand, there is no further analysis that will demonstrate that a true state of “nothing” (or a total lack of being) can have a hidden property which allows things to come into existence through it.

Still Causes at Work

 
It’s also debatable whether virtual particles and atomic decay are examples of “uncaused events.” Some interpretations of quantum physics describe events without causes, but others, such as the interpretation offered by the late David Bohm, include no uncaused events. Under Bohm’s view, (or the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation) the way particles behave or act is completely determined by the physical events that happened earlier in time. The eminent quantum physicist John Bell has praised this interpretation and laments the difficulty quantum researchers have in developing models that include truly free or random observers. He writes, “It is a merit of the de Broglie–Bohm version to bring this [non-locality] out so explicitly that it cannot be ignored.”²

The fact of the matter is that there is no consensus on which physical interpretation of the equations in quantum physics is correct and, more importantly, our inability to find a cause for quantum events no more justifies the conclusion that there are no causes any more than our inability to detect alien life justifies the conclusion there is no alien life in the universe.

Even if we suppose that a suitable interpretation of quantum mechanics is found that proves there are events which are uncaused, would that refute the KCA? I don’t think so because while it’s possible for events to not have causes (such as a ball to rolling to the right instead of to the left when set on a perfectly sharp cone) it doesn’t seem possible for things to not have causes (the ball just appearing for no reason at all).

Even if the event of a virtual particle coming into existence or the event of an atom decaying are causeless, it doesn’t follow that the virtual particle or the alpha particle themselves are without a cause for their existence. Their causes are the quantum vacuum and the decaying nucleus respectively. The events associated with the coming into existence of quantum particles simply have a probabilistic cause (as opposed to a predictable physical cause) which regulates their occurrence under given conditions. If this were not the case and these particles were truly mysterious, uncaused entities, then scientists would be unable to replicate in the laboratory the circumstances where these particles come into existence. John Jefferson Davis writes that:
 

“Quantum-mechanical events may not have classically deterministic causes, but they are not thereby uncaused or a causal. The decay of a nucleus takes place in view of physical actualities and potentialities internal to itself, in relation to a spatiotemporal nexus governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. The fact that uranium atoms consistently decay into atoms of lead and other elements--and not into rabbits or frogs--shows that such events are not causal but take place within a causal nexus and lawlike structures."³

 
Similarly, the actions of creatures with libertarian free-will may not have an antecedent physical cause, but that does not mean that those actions occur “without” a cause. Just because I cannot predict exactly when a person will choose to speak, this does not entail that the words which emerge from her mouth are some kind of weird “uncaused” event. The words she speaks have a real though indeterminate cause.

A critic may try to use this line of argument and say that the universe may simply be an event that occurs under probabilistic causation and came into existence without God’s creative act. I don’t think this is a successful reply because events presuppose the existence of objects, space, and time in order for the event to occur. Probabilistic causation in the absence of anything cannot produce a universe any more than a burnt down casino containing the ashes of roulette wheels could, via probabilistic causation, produce a winner of a game of roulette. However, God’s ability to create ex-nihilo could allow for the simultaneous emergence of both the occurrence of the first event (the universe coming into existence) and the existence of the first thing (the universe itself).

Conclusion

 
Uncaused events in quantum mechanics do not refute the principle that something cannot come from nothing. Furthermore, the reduction of causation in quantum events to unpredictable probabilities does not refute our normal experience that objects simply do not appear without a cause. This leaves us with sufficient evidence to believe that “whatever begins to exist must have a cause for its existence.”
 
 
(Imaged credit: Gizmag)