Quantum Physics and God

In this lecture, philosopher Keith Ward explains how quantum theory undermines traditional physics and the out-dated strict materialism it spawned. This is the strict, rigid materialism forced down our throats by the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins.

Ward claims that philosophical principles uncovered by quantum theory such as the effect of observation on subatomic particles, probability wave electrons, indeterminism and entanglement of subatomic particles, exposes traditional materialism as an outdated worldview that can no longer be intellectually justified.

Ward goes on to claim that quantum theory is more likely to support the premises of philosophical idealism, which maintains that the ultimate nature of reality is based on the mind or ideas. In the area of particle physics, idealism would suggest that, rather than the ultimate nature of reality being based on nothing but brute physical matter as suggested by traditional materialism, quantum theory suggests that the observer creates phenomenal reality. Quantum physics gives us a picture where the nature of the observer’s consciousness, creates the reality we perceive out of an underlying reality whose true nature must be forever hidden from us.

 

“No elementary phenomena is real unless it is observed”

(Emeritus Professor John Wheeler, Theoretical Physicist)

“Study of the external world [in quantum physics] leads to the conclusion that contents of consciousness are the ultimate reality.”

(Professor Eugene Wigner, Mathematical Physicist)

 

Ward suggests that it looks as if consciousness has a fundamental and ineliminable place in our conception of what the physical world is like. In other words, the physical is not simply there, apart from consciousness. Consciousness has to exist for physical reality to exist in the way it does, in relation to us – and we cannot get beyond that to a deeper reality, except in a purely mathematical sense. It is not just ‘secondary qualities’ like colour and smell that only exist in relation to a human observer. Now the very electrons and atoms out of which physical reality appears to be constituted only exist in relation to a mind that observes it.

 

“All real things are contents of consciousness”

(John von Neumann, Mathematical Physicist)

 

What is the nature of this underlying consciousness on which phenomenal reality relies? It is not, as some New Agers (think ‘The Secret”) would suggest – the power of our own individual consciousness that creates our reality. No, Keith Ward follows in the tradition of the famous idealist philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, claiming that the ultimate ‘cosmic consciousness’ on which our physical reality depends is God.

 

To here this fascinating lecture by Keith Ward, Religion and the Quantum World go here.