Physics and Religion in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries PDF

Physics Richard Olson This essay provides a broad overview of interactions between physics (or natural philosophy, the term formerly used for physical science) and religion from the early eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. In the eighteenth century, Newtonian natural theology sought pr...

Physics Richard Olson This essay provides a broad overview of interactions between physics (or natural philosophy, the term formerly used for physical science) and religion from the early eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. In the eighteenth century, Newtonian natural theology sought proof of God’s existence and attributes in the structure and operations of the physical universe. In the nineteenth century, in response to Kantian claims that no religious propositions could be inferred from natural knowledge, a more limited natural theology sought merely to establish the compatibility between traditional Christian doctrines and the workings of the physical universe. At the same time, some natural philosophers sought to develop heterodox scientistic religions. In the twentieth century, scientists such as Albert Einstein, David Bohm, and Freeman Dyson and theologians such as Wolfhart Pannenberg explored the religious implications of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Richard Olson received his Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University in 1967. He is a professor of history emeritus at Harvey Mudd College and an adjunct professor of history at Claremont Graduate University. His publications include Science and Religion, 1450–1900: From Copernicus to Darwin (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004), Science and Scientism in Nineteenth- Century Europe (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), and Technology and Science in Ancient Civilizations (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2010). He is the series editor for the ten-volume Greenwood Guides to Science and Religion. ( p h y s i q u e [French], physicae [Latin], physic [Ger-man]) became widely used in its modern sense (i.e., excluding the life sciences, geology, and chemistry) during the second half of the eighteenth century. As late as 1879, however, the major English-language textbook that covered what we now call physics was Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907) and Peter Guthrie Tait’s (1831–1901) Treatise on Natural Philosophy, and university courses in Britain and America were still labeled courses in natural philosophy Hence, this discussion of the religious elements in, and the implications of, physics begins at the end of the seventeenth century and counts as physicists many figures who identified themselves as natural philosophers. The periodization of physics and its labeling is inconsistent with general philosophical and historical usage. Topics treated before the last decade of the nineteenth century—such as mechanics, optics, heat, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, and hydrostatics and hydrodynamics—coupled with the theories and procedures that existed before 1897 to treat them are said to be parts of classical physics, whereas modern physics is said to comprise a group of topics that emerged after about 1885, including natural radioactivity, quantum physics (subatomic, atomic, molecular, plasma, and solid-state), as well as special and general relativity. Modern physics not only challenged the physical intuitions associated with classical physics, but it also seemed to many to suggest very different religious implications. Newtonian Religions and Their Critics During the first half of the eighteenth century, the most important interactions between religion and natural philosophy occurred in connection with the works of Isaac Newton (1643–1727) and his followers and critics, so we begin with a consideration of Newton’s religious views as they related to his natural philosophy. Newton articulated his fundamental public stance regarding the relation between natural philosophy and religion in the General Scholium to the third edition of the Principia, in which he insisted that “to discourse of God from the appearances of things does certainly belong to natural philosophy” (Newton 1756, 8). His most detailed views about natural theology, however, appeared in a series of letters to Richard Bentley (1662–1742). Bentley had been chosen to initiate a series of lectures established under the conditions of the 1691 will of Robert Boyle, which would “promote the truth of the Christian Religion in General without Descending to the Subdivisions among Christians” (Olson 2004, 122). Bentley decided that he would base his lectures, A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World, on Newton’s work and that the best way to learn about the theological implications of Newtonian philosophy was to ask Newton. Some of Newton’s arguments were not original. Thus, for example, he repeated an argument made by Galileo that the precise arrangement of masses, gravitational pulls, and initial transverse velocities of the planets in the solar system required a cause that was “not blind and fortuitous, but very well skilled in mechanics and geometry.” But at least two of his arguments were both original and of long-term significance. Newton emphasized the need for some kind of active, nonmaterial agent, either God or something added by God to matter, to account for gravitational attraction. The first option appealed to both Bentley and Newton’s successor as Lucasian Professor, William Whiston (1667 – 1752), who expressed the view that “’tis now evident that Gravity... depends entirely on the constant and efficacious, and if you will, the supernatural and miraculous Influence of Almighty God” (Olson 2004, 123). Samuel Clarke (1675 – 1729), another Newtonian Boyle lecturer, was more inclined to see a divinely added immaterial cause for gravity. Regardless of whether they sought recourse directly to God or to some immaterial agent of God to account for gravity, Newtonians generally agreed that gravity provided irrefutable evidence against atheism. In many ways more important was a second line of argument suggesting that while the solar system might be stable if each planet interacted only with the sun, interactions with passing comets or among the planets could lead to the collapse of the solar system. Bentley argued that the direct special providential activity of God was occasionally necessary to stave off collapse, and Colin McLaurin (1698 – 1746) carried this argument to larger audiences, writing that “the Deity has formed the Universe dependent upon himself, so as to require to be altered by him, though at very distant periods of time” (Olson 2004, 124). Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716), the co-inventor of calculus, was so angered by the idea of such an incompetent God that he argued that this “argument from imperfection” was enough to call into question the entire Newtonian philosophy. More important in the long run was the discovery by Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736 – 1813) and Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 – 1827) that a more ex-tended mathematical analysis of the motions of the sun and planets under- mined the claim that any known causes would produce a nonperiodic element into the motions of the solar system, so when Napoleon Bonaparte asked La-place where God was in his Exposition du système du monde, Laplace is reported to have answered, “Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis” (Odum 1966, 535). As the eighteenth century wore on, and as others rejected the argument from imperfection, it was the deists and materialists who increasingly drew comfort from Newtonian natural philosophy. The Monism of Boscovich A quite different development out of Newtonian ideas was initiated in Theorie philosophiae naturalis (1758) by Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–87), a Serbian Jesuit who tended toward a universal version of materialism, but one quite unlike that of Laplace. Boscovich demonstrated that all versions of mechanical philosophy that depend on the transfer of motion by the impact of perfectly hard particles involve a set of foundational assumptions that are logical and consistent with one another. The problems of mechanism could be avoided if we simply admit that our notion of matter is drawn directly from our experience of repulsive and attractive forces. Boscovich went on to argue that particles of matter are best understood as unextended point centers of patterned forces that extend through space. Near the point center, these forces approach infinite repulsion; at great distances, however, they approach the gravitational force of attraction. Between, they oscillate between attractive and repulsive regions, accounting for such phenomena as chemical affinities, the different phases of matter, and electrical and magnetic attractions and repulsions. By decoupling the definition of matter from its traditional grounding in ex-tension and by focusing on the constitutive active powers of matter to attract and repel other entities, Boscovich undermined both the traditional grounds for dualistic ontologies and the grounds for claiming that the activity of matter must be a direct manifestation of God or something added to passive matter by God. Though Boscovich’s ideas seemed to many to encourage atheism or deism by challenging the need for an immanent God, they were appropriated by Joseph Priestley (1733–1802) in his Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777) in support of what he viewed as a crucial reform of Christianity. According to Priestley, an outstanding self-taught natural philosopher, chemist, and the founder of modern British Unitarianism, the belief in a dualism between matter and spirit derived from the contamination of primitive Christianity by Greek, especially Platonist, philosophy. Moreover, it led to such perversions of true Christianity as the doctrines of the Trinity and the immortality of the soul (which seemed to obviate the doctrine of the Resurrection) and to hopeless philosophical difficulties like the problem of how the body and soul could interact if one was material and the other spiritual. By breaking down this dual-ism, Boscovich’s physics not only avoided the confusions associated with Cartesian dualism but also pointed the way to a recovery of the original meaning of Christianity, including its central doctrine of the resurrection, which now became the complete reconstitution of the mortal person by God. Boscovich’s work also illustrated another central feature of Priestly’s faith, which was that progress in science was God’s way of gradually eliminating error and prejudice, of ending usurped authority in religion and politics, and of leading to the ultimate triumph of Christianity. Kantian Influences on Natural Theology In Germany, the development of Newtonian philosophy led in a much different direction through the highly influential works of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In his Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical Elements of Natural Science, 1786), Kant argued that attractive and repulsive forces constitute the essence of matter and that they are therefore not something added by a spiritual entity. Indeed, no argument derived from natural phenomena could prove anything about the existence or attributes of God. Religious issues were fundamentally moral issues, and the ‘oughts’ of moral philosophy could not be derived from the ‘is’ of natural philosophy. This Kan-tian separation of religion from science had a major impact on German scientists and theologians, leading to their minimal interest in natural theology. Kantian perspectives entered British natural theology through the writings of William Whewell (1794–1866) and Scots like Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847). In Britain, however, although Kantian arguments changed the character of some claims of sophisticated natural theologians, they did not undermine the traditionally close linkages between science and religion. Beginning with Whewell’s Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (1833), British natural theology largely abandoned its attempts to derive the duties of Christians from the natural world as well as its claims that natural theology actually provided proof of God’s existence. Henceforth, most British works in natural theology, such as The Unseen Universe; or, Physical Speculations on a Future State (1875) by physicists Peter Guthrie Tait (1831–1901) and Balfour Stewart (1828–87), admitted that they could not prove God’s existence. Instead, they limited themselves to demonstrating the compatibility between the structure of the physical universe and the doctrines of Christianity. Stewart and Tait began by bemoaning that disbelief in life after death, a key feature of Christian doctrine seemed on the rise and that such disbelief was linked in the popular mind to the materialistic implications of modern science. Their explicit goal was not to demonstrate the truth of the doctrine of life after death from physical arguments but rather to “show that we are absolutely driven by scientific principles to acknowledge the existence of an Unseen Uni-verse, and by scientific analogy to conclude that it is full of life and intelligence—that it is in fact, a spiritual universe and not a dead one.” While physics could tell one very little about the character of this universe, its existence alone would undermine the arguments of those who confidently denied the possibility of life after death, for their denial rested on the assumption that there is no spiritual world beyond our physical world into which our souls might be received. Religious Implications of Thermodynamics For most natural theologians at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “the heavens declare[d] the glory of God,” and William Paley’s incredibly optimistic, widely circulated, and frequently reprinted Natural Theology of 1802 summed up their view of the world as a beautiful, harmonious, and ever-improving place. The discovery of the law of conservation of energy, or the first law of thermodynamics, in the 1840s, seemed to reinforce this view. James Prescott Joule (1818 – 89), for example, wrote that the conservation of matter and forces maintain the order of the universe: “Nothing is deranged, nothing ever lost, but the entire machinery, complicated as it is, works smoothly and harmoniously... the whole being governed by the sovereign will of God” (Kragh 2008, 27). And William Ludvig Colding (1815 – 88), Julius Robert Mayer (1814 – 78), and Peter Guthrie Tait insisted that the conservation of energy joined with the doctrine of the immortality of the soul led to the conclusion that forms of physical energy might be transformed into psychic, or spiritual, energy, thus undermining arguments for materialism. Similarly, in a draft of his 1851 paper, “On the Dynamical Theory of Heat,” in which he expressed his version of the second law of thermodynamics, William Thomson (1824 – 1907) wrote, “We may regard it as certain that, neither by natural agencies of inanimate nature nor by the operations arbitrarily effected by animated creatures, can there be a change in the amount of mechanical energy in the Universe; and the belief that the Creative Power alone can either call into existence or annihilate mechanical energy enters the mind with perfect conviction” (Kragh 2008, 29). It was the second law of thermodynamics, however, that seemed to carry the most compelling and interesting theological implications. Articulated in a variety of ways between 1850 and 1854, the second law is most simply stated in the following way: There is a quantity, S, called entropy, which is defined for any closed system as Q divided by T, in which Q is the energy in the form of heat and T is the temperature of the system. In any natural process, the entropy, S, of the system must increase over time. Alternatively, it can be stated as follows: in any natural process occurring in a closed system (i.e., a system in which no energy can enter or leave), some of the energy initially available to do work will be turned into heat, so at the end of the process there will be less energy available to do work. In his 1851 paper, Thomson pointed out that for a finite universe, the second law had two critical consequences, one for the end of the world and one for its beginning. On the one hand, “the end of this world as a habitation for man, or for any living creature or plant existing in it is mechanically inevitable.” On the other hand, looking backward we come to a time “beyond which mechanical speculations cannot lead us” and beyond which “science can point to no antecedent except the will of a Creator” (Kragh 2008, 35). The first of these statements is often identified with the concept of the ‘heat death of the universe,’ and it is best understood in the form articulated by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821– 94) in 1854: If the universe be delivered over to the undisturbed action of its physical processes, all force [read energy] will finally pass into the form of heat, and all heat will come into a state of equilibrium. Then all possibility of further change would be at an end, and the complete cessation of all natural processes must set in. The life of men, animals, and plants could not, of course, continue if the sun had lost its high temperature, and with this his light.... In short, the universe from that time onward would be condemned to a state of eternal rest. (Kragh 2008, 36) Thomson sought to evade the apparently dire implications of the second law in 1862 by pointing out that heat death only held in a finite universe. He found it “impossible to conceive a limit to the extent of matter in the universe,” but a number of physicists, including James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79), Peter Guthrie Tait, and Balfour Stewart, were associated with the evangelical theology of Thomas Chalmers, which emphasized the degeneration of the physical universe and the salvation of the elect. They welcomed the second law as a support for their belief in the degradation of this world. In their Unseen Uni-verse Tait and Stewart emphasized the heat death of the observed world and posited the divine institution of the unseen universe as God’s method for preserving the immortality of the souls of the saved, but not their bodies. The second of Thomson’s observations seemed to provide a much stronger argument for God’s creation of the universe than the first law. According to the second law any isolated system will eventually reach thermal equilibrium. But the present universe is not at equilibrium, so it cannot be infinitely old and must have had a beginning from which its entropy has been increasing. If it began, there must have been a creative act prior to the onset of the second law, and only God has the power to create on this universal scale. Maxwell made this point in an 1870 speech, arguing that pushing backward in time, “we arrive at the conception of a state of things which cannot be conceived as the result of a prior state of things.” Furthermore, he pointed out that Thomson had demonstrated, using Fourier’s theory of heat, that this state of things was “separated from the present by a finite interval” (Kragh 2008, 54). Indeed, in the absence of knowledge about natural radioactivity, which heats the earth, Thomson had shown that the earth could be no more than a few million years old. Virtually all late-nineteenth-century scientists agreed that the second law effectively put to rest any materialist theory that implied that the universe has existed forever. Religious Uses of the Electromagnetic Ether The concept of ethers entered into classical physics with the wave theory of light, becoming ever more important in electrodynamics, especially after Hein-rich Hertz’s (1857 – 94) demonstration of the transmission of electromagnetic waves through apparently ‘empty’ space and the attendant identification of light as an electromagnetic phenomenon. For those who demanded some kind of physical intuitions to accompany the mathematical formulations of electromagnetic theory, waves had to be waves in some kind of medium, which came to be called the ‘ether.’ Though attempts were made to view ethers as purely spiritual or as purely material phenomena, many physicists viewed the ether as a semi-spiritual and semi-material entity, which made it a natural mediator between matter and spirit and an important entity for those who opposed any purely materialist interpretation of the universe. The hybrid character of the ether seemed to be a necessary consequence of the extraordinary properties of a medium that was not directly observable, not subject to the second law of thermodynamics, and that seemed to offer no resistance to the motion of physical objects moving through it, even though it was sufficiently rigid to support the transverse strains associated with electromagnetic waves. Once again, The Unseen Universe was among the first treatises to interpret ether from a religious perspective. It became for Stewart and Tait the medium through which energy was transferred into the invisible and timeless (i.e., non-entropic) universe: “when the motions of the visible universe are transferred into the ether, part of them are conveyed as by a bridge into the invisible universe, and are there made use of or stored up” (Noakes 2005, 436). Many physicists followed George Gabriel Stokes (1819–1903) in arguing that the existence of the ether in some sense legitimized belief in the miraculous and supernatural, and some of them became fascinated with psychic phenomena. If the ether offered a mechanism by which energy could be transferred from the physical into the unseen universe, perhaps it offered a reverse path by which dead souls could send messages back into the physical universe. The presidency of the Victorian Society for Psychical Research was filled at one time or another by physicists Balfour Stewart, William Crookes (1832–1919), John William Strutt (the third Baron Rayleigh) (1842–1919), and William Barrett (1844–1925), while J. J. Thomson (1856–1940) served as vice president and many other physicists were members. If nineteenth-century physics could be appropriated in the service of Christianity, it also could be appropriated for completely different and unorthodox religious purposes. One such interesting use was illustrated in the writings of the German Nobel laureate, natural philosopher, and physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853 – 1932). The founder of ‘energetics’ posited the identification of matter and energy in a single ‘Monist’ universe. Ostwald became convinced that scientific knowledge could replace traditional religions as the foundation for morality and happiness, ultimately arguing that science is the God of the modern world. As early as 1905 he offered the formula for happiness: G = (E + W)(E – W), where G is the amount of happiness that an individual feels, E is the quantity of energy expended in activities that one wills to do, and W is the energy expended in activities done against one’s will. Later, as chair of the German Monist League, Ostwald delivered more than two hundred radio ser-mons promoting his substitute religion, offering self-hypnosis as a substitute for prayer to a higher power, and designing naturalist holidays to replace those of the Christian churches. Modern Physics After the professionalization of natural science during the nineteenth century, though it was common for physicists to seek support for their religious belief or lack of belief in a transcendent God in their science, few reported turning to scientific study primarily out of religious motivations as had been the case during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One remarkable exception was Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955), for whom self-reported religious reasons played a major role both in motivating his own scientific work and in his interpretations of the scientific work of others. Since his views or views very much like his have strongly influenced the attitudes of many important theoretical physicists and cosmologists well into the twentieth century, they deserve special attention. Einstein’s religion was in no sense based on the notion of a personal God or even an orthodox Jewish God who demanded obedience and punished disobedience. “I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures,” he wrote. “Neither can I, nor would I, want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death: let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts” (Einstein 1952, 11). After a brief period of Jewish orthodoxy, before he was twelve, Einstein adopted a commitment to what he later identified as Spinoza’s completely impersonal and completely rational God: “A firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feelings, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God” (Paul 1982, 56). Einstein’s firm commitment to the impersonal, objective aspect of God led him to an unshakeable belief that the universe had a real existence, independent of all observers and that it had to be totally causal and deterministic. Moreover, because God was completely rational, Einstein was convinced throughout his life that a complete understanding of the natural world must ultimately be accessible to the human intellect. These commitments led him to oppose both positivist assertions that science could be nothing but the systematized record of our observations, and all acausal and statistical interpretations of quantum mechanics. Indeed, because quantum mechanics failed to stipulate the state of physical systems between observations, Einstein believed throughout his life that it must be fundamentally incomplete and that it could eventually be subsumed within a more comprehensive theory that would unify his own work on general relativity and all topics dealt with by quantum mechanics. The search for some kind of grand unified theory, or theory of everything, based on a conviction that physics must ultimately be not only consistent with our sensory experiences but also logically inevitable and capable of accounting for everything, including the reason for the origin of the universe, continued at the beginning of the twenty- first century among some physicists. Steven Weinberg (b. 1933) and Stephen Hawking (b. 1942) alluded directly to Einstein as their inspiration and persisted in arguing that their work allowed them to see into the mind of God. During the first half of the twentieth century, attempts to account for the character of physical phenomena on the astronomical scale depended heavily on Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which posits that space is ‘warped’ in the presence of gravitating bodies. This theory, which seemed to be confirmed in 1919 by the observed bending of light by the sun, offered two possible implications regarding the long-term stability of the universe. One possibility was that the universe existed in a steady state so that though it appeared to be expanding, its density remained constant because of the continuous formation of matter in empty space. Alternatively, it was possible that the universe originated in a ‘big bang’ at some point in the past. The first of these two solutions, it was noted, would clearly have undermined traditional theological arguments for the creation of the universe. In the early 1960s, empirical evidence of residual heat radiation suggested that the Big Bang theory was correct, leading to a period in which several astrophysicists and theologians, including Robert Jastrow (1925–2008), suggested that the Big Bang theory provided new support for the creation of the universe at a point in time by a transcendent God. In 1988, however, this optimism was dealt a substantial blow by Stephen Hawking, who was able to show the possibility of a cosmology based on a fusion of general relativity and quantum mechanics in which all observations to date could be accounted for in a finite universe that has neither spatial nor temporal bounds. As Hawking took specific care to point out, in such a universe, “there would be no singularities at which the laws of science were broken and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set boundary conditions for space-time.... The universe would be self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself” (Hawking 1988, 135). This argument does not disprove any creation narrative, nor does it have any bearing on notions of divinity that are not transcendent, such as those associated with some variants of process theology, but it does decouple large-scale physical phenomena from traditional supports for notions of a transcendent God. In one of the most intriguing ironies associated with recent appropriations of physical arguments and analogies by theologians, the German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928– 2014) argued that field theories in modern physics provide support for belief in God’s ongoing activity, or “effective presence,” within the universe as well as for the priority of the whole over any of its parts that play a part in all discussions of apparent evil. The irony lies in the fact that modern field theories have developed out of Boscovich’s eighteenth-century arguments, which were taken as antagonistic to the need for God’s ongoing activity in nature. According to Pannenberg, however, the tendencies of field theories to undermine the importance of traditional notions of matter and to replace them with space-filling immaterial forces suggests the analogous notion that the cosmic activity of the Divine Spirit is like a field of force (Pannen-berg 1988, 12). It is generally agreed that quantum mechanics, the central features of which were articulated almost simultaneously in different but logically equivalent forms in 1927 by Werner Heisenberg (1901–76) and Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), has had far more radical philosophical and theological implications than relativity theory. As early as 1900, Max Planck (1858–1947) had shown that the correct formula for the distribution of energy in the spectrum emitted by a heated black body can be derived from the second law of thermodynamics if energy is emitted by an oscillating charged particle only in multiples of its frequency of oscillation, the proportionality constant, h, being equal to 6.6 × 10^ – 27 erg seconds. In 1905, Einstein showed that the so-called photoelectric effect could be accounted for if the energy carried by a photon of light was h times the frequency. A few years later, Niels Bohr (1885–1962) was able to account for the spectrum of light emitted by hydrogen by assuming that the electrons circled a positively charged nucleus without continually radiating. When they did radiate, it was in a kind of instantaneous spasm produced when the electron moved from one allowable energy level to another such that the allowable energy levels were governed by Planck’s constant. These and numerous other phenomena, which could not be understood classically, all found explanations in the general theory of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg was among the first to explore some of the counterintuitive features in his ironically titled 1927 paper, “On the Intuitive Contents of Quantum-theoretic Kinematics and Mechanics.” In this paper, he focused on what he called the principle of indeterminacy or uncertainty. Within quantum theory, there are pairs of variables, q, and p, called conjugate variables such that qp – pq = h/2πi, where i is the square root of minus one. Heisenberg showed that this relationship could be given a physical meaning if one considered the experimental uncertainties in measuring p and q variables. The mathematical relationship between p and q followed if the product of the uncertainties in their simultaneous measurements was always equal to or greater than Planck’s constant divided by 2π. What this seemed to imply was that even with theoretically perfect instruments one could not simultaneously measure the values of conjugate variables with arbitrary precision. Moreover, since position and momentum are conjugate variables, it follows that one could never know perfectly the position and momentum of even one particle, let alone the position of all the particles in the universe, which is what Laplace had articulated as the condition that had to be met for a completely predictable determinate universe. Indeed, if Heisenberg were correct, and if God also created the universe without constantly intervening in its operation, not even God could predict its precise course in advance; thus, Heisenberg’s proposal raised issues regarding both the omniscience and omnipotence of God. If one considers Schrödinger’s formulation of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty relationships are capable of a more extended and extremely interesting interpretation. In Schrödinger’s system, solutions to certain equations are produced that have the form of classical wave-like functions. The product of two such functions gives the probability that if a measurement of some variable is made, the variable will have that value. According to Heisenberg, Schrö-dinger, and Bohr, the Schrödinger wave function represents the ‘state’ of a quantum system. If we consider solutions for the position, the particle whose position is to be measured is literally everywhere that the wave function has magnitude until a measurement is made. At that instant, the wave function collapses and the particle is found at a particular place. Many measurements of identical systems would reflect the square of the wave function at the places indicated. This interpretation of quantum mechanics highlights several startling implications. First, it emphasizes that the uncertainty relations of Heisenberg reflect an indeterminacy that is more than merely a reflection of human ignorance. This is true because two measurements of identical systems are likely to have different results. Different consequences seem to follow from the same laws applied to the same initial conditions, violating traditional understandings of the causal determinism of physical phenomena. (Of course, at another level, the wave functions are determined; it is only the results of our observations that are not.) If the universe is not deterministic several theological possibilities exist. First, as both Robert Russell and Thomas Tracy have argued, quantum indeterminacy offers a place for divine action in the world without challenging the order of nature exposed by quantum mechanics. According to Tracy, “the world at the quantum level is structured in such a way that God can continuously affect events without disturbing the immanent order of the universe” (Tracy 1994, 318). For much the same reason, others have argued that since electrical events in the brain occur at a scale in which quantum indeterminacies may be important, quantum uncertainties offer the possibilities of human freedom and responsibility. Both of these arguments challenge Einstein’s insistence on the objectivity of the physical universe and its unresponsiveness to human will. In 1935, Einstein, along with Boris Podalsky and Nathan Rosen, published an article that highlighted another odd consequence of quantum mechanics and challenged the claim that it could ever be a complete description of physical reality. They proposed the following thought experiment: They assumed that a particle composed of two protons with a net zero spin splits into two protons with opposite spin. The two protons are allowed to travel substantial distances in opposite directions. The two protons have equal probabilities of having right- or left-hand spin before the spin of either is measured, but the two spins must be in opposite directions. Now suppose that the spin of one is measured to be left-handed. Instantaneously the spin of the other must become right-handed, implying that information is passed between the two particles faster than the speed of light, which is presumed to be impossible. According to Einstein, Podalsky, and Rosen, something is going on that is not contained within quantum mechanics itself. Since 1982, when a group of French physicists managed to carry out a near variant of this thought experiment, the most widely held view seems to be that quantum mechanics is indeed complete but that quantum reality is nonlocal. When the measurement is made the quantum state does indeed change, but it does so everywhere at the same time, renewing the possibility of God’s simultaneous and instantaneous knowledge and activity everywhere in the universe. One of the more intriguing readings of the implications of quantum mechanics includes a revised version of the traditional notion of the design of the universe by an intelligent agent, coupled with an argument for free will in humans. In 1987, the Nobel laureate British-American theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson (b. 1923) argued that quantum entities, such as electrons, are active, choice-making agents and that experiments force them to make particular choices from the many options open to them. At a second level, the brains of animals appear to be devices for the amplification of... the quantum choices made by the molecules inside our heads.... Now comes the argument from design. There is evidence from particular features of the laws of nature that the universe as a whole is hospitable to the growth of mind [defined as the capacity for choice].... Therefore it is reasonable to believe in the existence of a third level of mind, a mental component of the universe. If we believe in this mental component and call it God, then we can say we are a small piece of God’s mental apparatus. (Worthing 1996, 40) Once again we see the key feature of the use of natural philosophy or physics in religious discourse since the early part of the nineteenth century. Virtually no one except those who make science into religion has argued for two hundred years that religious propositions can be proved through physical arguments. Instead, physicists and theologians have shown a remarkable interest and aptitude in demonstrating that physical laws are consistent with and even suggestive of a wide variety of theological perspectives.