Religion in an Age of Science by Ian Barbour
Chapter 4: Physics and Metaphysics
III. Metaphysical Implications
2. Life, Freedom, and God
Is there any connection between atomic-level indeterminancy and biological life, human freedom, or God’s action in the world? These questions will all be discussed in later chapters but may be briefly considered here.
1. Biological Life
Quantum theory is the basis of the periodic table and the properties of the chemical elements and molecular bonds, without which there could be no life. But indeterminacy at first appears irrelevant to phenomena at the level of a living cell containing millions of atoms, among which statistical fluctuations will tend to average out. Quantum equations give exact predictions for large ensembles, though not for individual events.
Moreover, atoms and molecules have an inherent stability against small perturbations, since at least a quantum of energy is required to change their states. However in many biological systems individual microevents can have macroconsequences. Even in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, small random changes can have large-scale effects. One mutation in a single component of a genetic sequence can change evolutionary history. In the nervous system and the brain, a microevent can trigger the firing of a neuron whose affects are amplified by the neural network.
Holmes Rolston portrays the interaction patterns between cells and atoms: "The macromolecular system of the living cell, like the physicist’s apparatus, is influencing by its interaction patterns the
behavior of the atomic systems... There is a kind of downward causation that complements an upward causation, and both feed on the openness, if also the order, in the atomic substructures."36 Rolston says that
"biological events are superintending physical ones." Physics leaves out this "upstairs control" but it does allow for a looseness among the lower- level parts. He broadens this analysis to include the action of the mind and human freedom:
If we turn from the random element of indeterminacy to the interaction concept also present, we gain a complementary picture. We are given a nature that is not just indeterminate in random ways, but is plastic enough for an organism to work its program on, for a mind to work its will on. Indeterminacy does not in any straightforward way yield either function, purpose, or freedom, as critics of too swiftly drawn conclusions here are right to observe. Yet physics is, as it were, leaving room in nature for what biology, psychology, social science, and religion may want to insert, those emergent levels of structure and
experience that operate despite the quantum indeterminacies and even because of them. We gain space for the higher phenomena that physics has elected to leave out.37
2. Human Freedom
Clearly we cannot identify freedom with randomness. Within physics, the only alternatives are determinate cause and indeterminate chance, and neither can be equated with freedom. But several physicists have asserted that whereas Newtonian determinism excluded human freedom, quantum indeterminacy at least allows for it. They have usually assumed a mind/body dualism; they suggest that a free immaterial mind can
determine the behavior of brain atoms which would otherwise be indeterminate.
In place of such a dualism I shall defend the idea of levels of
organization and activity. Human experience as an integrated event shows a new type of unpredictability derived not from atomic
indeterminacy but from its unitary activity at a higher level. Atomic indeterminacy and human freedom are not, on this view, directly related to each other, and they occur on quite different levels. Coordinated individual events at various levels have multiple potentialities, but only at the level of human selfhood is there freedom in which choices are made in terms of present motives, future goals, and moral ideals. We can talk about freedom only in relation to a model of selfhood that includes past conditioning, continuity of character, personal decision, and individual responsibility.
3. God’s Action in the World
Some authors have suggested that atomic indeterminacies are the domain in which God providentially controls the world. William Pollard, a physicist and priest, has proposed that such divine action would violate no natural laws and would not be scientifically detectable.
God, he says, determines which actual value is realized within the range of a probability distribution. The scientist can find no natural cause for the selection among quantum alternatives; chance, after all, is not a cause. The believer may view the selection as God’s doing. God would influence events without acting as a physical force. Since an electron in a superposition of states does not have a definite position, no force is required for God to actualize one among the set of alternative
potentialities. By a coordinated guidance of many atoms, God
providentially governs all events. God, not the human mind, collapses the wave function to a single value.38
Pollard’s proposal is consistent with current theories in physics. God would be the ultimate nonlocal "hidden variable." But I have three objections to his ideas: (1) Pollard asserts divine sovereignty as total control over all events, and he defends predestination. This seems to me incompatible with human freedom and the reality of evil. It also denies the reality of chance, which becomes only a reflection of human
ignorance of the true divine cause. (2) For Pollard, God’s will is
achieved through the unlawful rather than the lawful aspects of nature.
This may be a needed corrective to deism’s opposite emphasis, but it
seems equally one-sided. (3) There is an implicit reductionism in assuming that God acts at the lowest level, that of the atomic components. Do we not want to allow also for God’s influence on higher levels, "from the top down" rather than "from the bottom up"?
Isn’t God related to the integrated human self, for example, and not just to the atomic events in the brain?
Arthur Peacocke takes quantum effects to be only one example of chance, which occurs at many points in nature. Moreover, he portrays God as acting through the whole process of chance and law, not
primarily through chance events. God does not predetermine and control all events; chance is real for God as it is for us. The creative process is itself God’s action in the world. We will examine this view in detail in chapter 6.