Quantum Mechanics and Divine Action

"Disgrace indeed, to be caught in a metaphysical position!  But it seems to me that in this matter I am just pursuing my profession of theoretical physics." — John Bell, on assuming that experimenters have free will, 1977¹

Summary

Quantum mechanics is the most precisely tested theory in physics.  It is also the theory most often quoted for conclusions it does not reach:  that the universe is random, that minds create reality, that free will is proved, that God hides in subatomic chance, or that the universe came from nothing.  This article separates what the experiments show from what the interpretations add, and then tests the five claims built on them.

1. The experiments settle less than either side says. The predictions of quantum mechanics are not in dispute. John Bell proved in 1964 that no theory in which each particle carries its own instructions, and no influence travels faster than light, can reproduce all of them. In 2015 three teams, in Delft, Vienna and Boulder, ran the test with every major loophole closed at once and found the violation Bell predicted. So "local hidden variables" are dead. What the experiments cannot do is choose among the interpretations: Copenhagen, Everett's many worlds, Bohm's pilot wave, spontaneous-collapse theories and QBism all predict the same results for every experiment done so far. Physicists split among them, and no interpretation has a majority.
2. Bell's theorem leaves three doors open, and Bell named them. A theory may be nonlocal, as Bohm's is. It may deny that each measurement has one outcome, as many-worlds does. Or it may deny that the experimenters chose their settings freely, which Bell called "super-deterministic."² Nor do the tests force a preferred frame of reference: Bohm's theory needs one, but a relativistic collapse model and many-worlds do not.
3. Physics has not shown that nature is random. On Copenhagen, collapse theories and QBism, single outcomes are undetermined. On Bohm's theory every outcome is fixed in advance, and on many-worlds every outcome happens. What quantum mechanics has done is end the nineteenth-century claim that physics proves the world is a closed deterministic machine.
4. Chance is not freedom. An event that nothing determines is not thereby chosen. Hume said that liberty opposed to necessity "is the same thing with chance,"³ and libertarian philosophers since have had to answer that point, not cite physics. Quantum events in a warm brain lose their quantum character in far less time than a neuron takes to fire. Quantum indeterminism is at most room for a free agent to act, not a source of freedom. The more striking fact runs the other way: every Bell test assumes the experimenters chose freely, and Bell defended that assumption as part of doing physics.
5. "Consciousness causes collapse" is consistent but marginal. John von Neumann showed in 1932 that the point where a measurement "happens" can be placed anywhere in the chain from particle to observer. Eugene Wigner placed it at the observer's consciousness, and Henry Stapp builds a theory of mental effort on the idea. No experiment refutes it, because it predicts the same results as every other interpretation. But Heisenberg, for the Copenhagen school itself, said the outcome is settled by the physical interaction and "is not connected with the act of registration of the result by the mind of the observer."⁴ Bell asked whether the world had to wait for "some more highly qualified measurer — with a Ph.D."¹ The Penrose-Hameroff theory is different: a physical collapse in brain microtubules. Its physics is under heavy pressure, and the simplest form of Penrose's gravitational collapse was ruled out by an underground experiment in 2021.
6. God acting through quantum events is coherent, possible, and unneeded. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy and Thomas Tracy propose that God decides outcomes that physics leaves open, so that providence never breaks a law. The proposal depends on an indeterministic interpretation, on an unsolved account of when outcomes are decided, and on God determining harmful events as well as good ones. Alvin Plantinga argues that the worry it was built to avoid, that divine action would be an illegal "intervention," was never a finding of physics, classical or quantum. Classical Christian theism, in which God upholds every event, needs no gap.
7. Quantum "nothing" is not nothing. James Hartle and Stephen Hawking in 1983, and Alexander Vilenkin from 1982, wrote down quantum descriptions of a universe with no earlier time. Both begin with the laws of quantum mechanics and a space of possible universes. Their "nothing" is the absence of space and time, not of laws. Sean Carroll, a naturalist cosmologist, calls the phrase "come into existence out of nothing" "a misleading way of putting it."⁵ Whether the universe began, and whether it needs a cause, belongs to The Big Bang and The Cosmological Argument.

Verdict.  Quantum mechanics neither proves nor refutes theism, free will or the soul.  It does three modest things a skeptic should grant.  It removes physics as a witness for strict determinism.  It shows that experimental physics must assume experimenters who choose.  And it shows that "creation from nothing" in physics means something other than creation from nothing.  Apologists should stop claiming that it proves that consciousness creates reality or that God needs quantum chance in order to act.

Part 1: What the experiments establish, and what is interpretation

The measurement problem

Quantum mechanics describes a system by a wave function.  Between measurements the wave function changes smoothly and predictably, by the Schrödinger equation.  It usually spreads over several possible results at once:  an electron's spin is a blend of "up" and "down," and a particle's position is spread over many places.  Yet every measurement gives one result.  Textbooks bridge the gap with a second rule:  at a measurement the wave function "collapses" to the result found, with a probability the theory supplies.

The two rules work perfectly in practice.  The trouble is that the theory never says what a measurement is.  A measuring device is made of atoms, and atoms obey the Schrödinger equation, which by itself never produces a single result.  John Bell, the physicist whose theorem is discussed below, put the complaint this way:  "It would seem that the theory is exclusively concerned with 'results of measurement' and has nothing to say about anything else."¹  This is the measurement problem.  Every interpretation of quantum mechanics is an answer to it.  The five main answers follow, each in its defenders' words and each with its strongest objection.

Five answers, in their defenders' words

Copenhagen.  The view of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg treats the wave function as a tool for predicting what measurements will show, not as a picture of what is there between them.  Heisenberg wrote that "the word 'happens' can apply only to the observation, not to the state of affairs between two observations."⁴  He was explicit that "observation" here means the physical interaction with the measuring device, not a mind.⁴  The strongest objection is that this is a rule for using the theory, not an account of the world.  It never says where the quantum system ends and the "classical" apparatus begins.  Bell said the founders "rather prided themselves on giving up the idea of explanation."²

Many worlds.  Hugh Everett's 1957 paper proposed "to regard pure wave mechanics (Process 2 only) as a complete theory."⁶  Process 2 is the smooth Schrödinger evolution, so there is no collapse at all.  Every possible outcome happens, and the observer splits with it:  "All branches exist simultaneously in the superposition after any given sequence of observations."⁶  The theory is deterministic and, its defenders say, local.  Its strongest objection is the one its defenders name themselves.  Lev Vaidman, who holds the view, calls it "arguably the most serious difficulty.  How can probability exist if all possible outcomes occur?"⁷  Bell thought the whole picture "an extravagant, and above all an extravagantly vague, hypothesis."¹  Many worlds does nothing for the fine-tuning debate, because every branch has the same laws and constants;  The Multiverse explains why.

Pilot wave.  The theory of Louis de Broglie and David Bohm keeps the wave function and adds particles that always have definite positions.  The wave function guides them.  Its modern defenders describe it as "a version of quantum mechanics in which the notions of observation, measurement, and the macroscopic world play no fundamental role."⁸  It is fully deterministic:  given the starting positions, every result is fixed.  Its strongest objection is the price of that determinism.  The motion of one particle depends at once on the settings of instruments acting on another, however far away.  Bell, who admired the theory, wrote that "in this theory an explicit causal mechanism exists whereby the disposition of one piece of apparatus affects the results obtained with a distant piece."¹

Spontaneous collapse.  In 1986 Giancarlo Ghirardi, Alberto Rimini and Tullio Weber made collapse a physical process.  Their theory, GRW, assumes that "each elementary constituent of any physical system is subjected, at random times, to random and spontaneous localization processes."⁹  The rate is set so that "a microscopic system undergoes a localization, on average, every hundred million years, while a macroscopic one undergoes a localization every 10⁻⁷ seconds."⁹  A single atom is left alone.  Anything large enough to see is localized within a fraction of a microsecond.  Bell liked it for that reason:  "The cat is not both dead and alive for more than a split second."¹  The strongest objection is that GRW adds new constants of nature, chosen to make the theory work, and it predicts tiny departures from standard quantum mechanics.  That is also its virtue, because it can be tested.  Experiments have already ruled out some of its variants and are closing in on the original values.⁹

QBism.  Christopher Fuchs, David Mermin and Rüdiger Schack treat quantum probabilities as an agent's degrees of belief.  "Since probabilities are the personal judgments of an agent, it follows that a quantum state assignment is also a personal judgment of the agent assigning that state."¹⁰  Collapse is then just an agent updating beliefs.  The view removes every mystery about distant influence, because the theory describes only one agent's experience:  "There is no nonlocality in quantum theory;  there are only some nonlocal interpretations of quantum mechanics."¹⁰  The strongest objection is that it buys this by declining to say what the world is like apart from agents' experience.

All five reproduce every experiment done so far.  Only collapse theories predict anything different, and only in regimes not yet reached.  So the choice among them is not, at present, an experimental question.

What Bell's theorem proves

In 1935 Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen argued that quantum mechanics is incomplete.  Two particles prepared together show correlated results however far apart they are measured.  Einstein thought each particle must carry its own instructions, "hidden variables," that the theory leaves out.

Bell showed in 1964 that this idea makes a testable prediction.  If each particle carries its own instructions, and nothing travels faster than light, then the correlations must stay under a certain limit.  Quantum mechanics predicts that they exceed it.  Bell's conclusion:  "In a theory in which parameters are added to quantum mechanics to determine the results of individual measurements, without changing the statistical predictions, there must be a mechanism whereby the setting of one measuring device can influence the reading of another instrument, however remote."¹

Experiments from the 1970s onward found the quantum prediction.  Each left a loophole:  detectors missed too many particles, or the stations were close enough for a signal to pass between them.  In 2015 three teams closed the main loopholes at once.  In Delft, Bas Hensen and colleagues entangled electrons 1.3 kilometres apart and ran 245 trials.¹¹  In Vienna, Marissa Giustina and colleagues used photons and found a probability under local realism that "does not exceed 3.74 × 10⁻³¹."¹²  At the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Lynden Shalm and colleagues reported "p-values as small as 5.9×10⁻⁹."¹³  The Delft team stated the result plainly:  it "rules out all local realist theories that accept that the number generators timely produce a free random bit and that the outputs are final once recorded in the electronics."¹¹

What the tests leave open

That sentence names its own conditions, and they matter.  Bell's theorem assumes three things:  that no influence travels faster than light, that each measurement has a single outcome, and that the settings were chosen independently of the particles.  The experiments show that at least one of the three is false.  They do not say which.

1. Give up locality. Bohm's theory does this. Alain Aspect, whose Paris experiments of 1982 were the best-known early Bell tests, said they "demolish" only hidden variables "based on Einstein's ideas such as separability. Some hidden variable theories still remain possible: the hidden variable theories of David Bohm, for example."²
2. Give up single outcomes. Many worlds does this. If every outcome occurs, the theorem's bookkeeping of "the" result no longer applies, and Everett's theory is local.
3. Give up free settings. This is superdeterminism. Bell described it himself: "the world is super-deterministic. That not only is inanimate nature deterministic, but we, the experimenters who imagine we can choose to do one experiment rather than another, are also determined."² The Boulder team called it "the fundamentally untestable idea that all events in the universe are preordained."¹³ The Delft team agreed that "no Bell experiment can exclude the infinite number of conceivable local realist theories."¹¹ Experiments can push the setting choices back in time, and a 2018 test used light from quasars to exclude a local conspiracy acting more recently than about 7.8 billion years ago.¹⁴ No experiment can push them back to the beginning. Sabine Hossenfelder and Tim Palmer, who argue that superdeterminism deserves a hearing, grant the logical point: "Bell-type tests cannot tell us which of the two options is correct."¹⁵

Does entanglement require a preferred frame of reference?  Time, Relativity, and Divine Eternity left this question here.  Some presentists hope it does, because a preferred frame would give a universal "now."  The answer depends on the interpretation.  Bohm's theory, extended to relativity, needs a preferred way of slicing spacetime into instants;  its defenders concede that this "would seem to imply a clear violation of Lorentz invariance," though they argue the slicing can be generated by the wave function itself.⁸  But Roderich Tumulka built a relativistic version of GRW that "is nonlocal and violates Bell's inequality though it does not make use of a preferred slicing of space-time."¹⁶  Many worlds needs no preferred frame either.  So entanglement is compatible with a preferred frame but does not require one.  Tumulka's model has a limit worth stating:  it covers particles that do not interact with one another.

What physicists believe

No interpretation commands a majority.  In 2011 Maximilian Schlosshauer, Johannes Kofler and Anton Zeilinger polled 33 participants at a conference on the foundations of quantum mechanics.  Copenhagen drew 42%, information-based views 24%, Everett 18%, objective collapse 9%, and Bohm's theory none.¹⁷  The authors warned that the poll "cannot claim to be representative of the communities at large."¹⁷  In 2025 Nature surveyed 1,101 researchers who answered an invitation sent to more than 15,000, most of them physicists.  Copenhagen led with 36%.  Information-based approaches drew 17%, many worlds and the related "consistent histories" view 15%, Bohm's theory 7%, collapse theories 4%, and superdeterminism 1%.¹⁸  Only 24% thought their favoured interpretation was actually correct.¹⁸  Neither survey is a random sample, and both show the same thing:  the experts agree on the predictions and disagree on what they mean.

Part 2: Is nature random, and does that help free will?

What determinism was, and what quantum mechanics did to it

In 1814 Pierre-Simon Laplace gave determinism its classic form.  Given "an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it," then "for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes."¹⁹  For a century this read as a summary of physics.  If every particle in a brain moves by fixed law, every thought and decision was settled before the thinker was born.

Quantum mechanics broke that inference, though not in the way it is often said to have done.  Two identically prepared atoms can give different results, and the theory predicts only the odds.  Whether anything decides the result depends on the interpretation:

1. On Copenhagen, collapse theories and QBism, single outcomes are undetermined. Nothing in the prior state fixes which result occurs.
2. On Bohm's theory, every outcome is fixed in advance by the particles' starting positions. The randomness is our ignorance of those positions, as in a coin toss.
3. On many worlds, the whole wave function evolves deterministically and every outcome occurs. What looks like chance is the observer's not knowing in advance which branch he will find himself in.
4. On superdeterminism, everything was fixed from the beginning, including the experimenter's choice of what to measure.

Physicists lean toward real chance.  In the 2011 poll, 64% called randomness "a fundamental concept in nature," 48% called it "irreducible," and no one chose "There is a hidden determinism."¹⁷  But a lean is not a result.  The Stanford Encyclopedia's survey of libertarian free will states the position fairly:  "there is nothing approaching a consensus on how to interpret it.  …  Perhaps the best that can be said here is that there is currently no good evidence that determinism is true."²⁰

So both popular slogans fail.  "Physics has proved the world is random" overstates the evidence, because two live interpretations are deterministic.  "Physics has proved we are machines" is a nineteenth-century claim that physics no longer supports.  What quantum mechanics has done is remove physics as a witness for determinism.

Does chance make room for free will?

The hope goes back to the astronomer Arthur Eddington.  Paul Davies, a physicist, summarises it:  because the uncertainty principle leaves a range of possible outcomes, "it is easy to conjecture that consciousness, or mind, could have a vote in deciding which of the available alternatives is actually realized."²  An electron in a nerve cell poised to fire need only be nudged one way.

There are two answers to this, one from philosophy and one from physics.

Chance is not choice.  If an event is undetermined and nothing else settles it, it happens by chance, and a chance event is not something the agent did.  David Hume put it bluntly in 1748:  liberty, "when opposed to necessity, not to constraint, is the same thing with chance."³  Philosophers now call this the argument from luck:  "If the causation is nondeterministic, it will simply be a matter of luck, a matter of nature's 'role of the dice' … whether the action occurs."²⁰  A free will that rests on quantum noise would be a coin toss inside the head.  Libertarians answer by saying that the agent, not a random event, settles the outcome.  On agent-causal views "an agent is in a strict and literal sense an originator of her free decisions, an uncaused cause of them."²⁰  That may be right, and it is close to the classical Christian view of the soul.  But notice what it does with physics.  It needs indeterminism only as room, and it adds the agent from philosophy.  Quantum mechanics supplies the room on some interpretations and supplies nothing else.  Whether the agent exists is a question for Mind, Reason, and Consciousness.

The brain is not a quantum computer.  Max Tegmark estimated in 2000 how long a quantum superposition in a neuron or a microtubule could survive the warm, wet surroundings of the brain.  His figures run from about 10⁻²⁰ to 10⁻¹³ seconds.  Neurons fire on a scale of 10⁻³ to 10⁻¹ seconds.  So "the decoherence timescales … are typically much shorter than the relevant dynamical timescales," by "a margin exceeding ten orders of magnitude."²¹²¹  Davies made the same point less formally:  the quantum-mind idea "is not really taken very seriously, not least because the electrical activity of the brain seems to be more robust than that."²  Tegmark's numbers do not show that no quantum chance ever touches the brain.  The opening of a single ion channel is a chancy molecular event, and on an indeterministic interpretation its timing may be undetermined at root.  They do show that the brain cannot hold or process quantum superpositions as such, so any role for quantum chance would be as scattered noise.  The Encyclopedia's verdict on the evidence is the honest one:  "our current understanding of the brain gives us little evidence one way or the other."²⁰

The experimenter's freedom

The more interesting connection runs the other way.  Every Bell test assumes that the settings are chosen independently of the particles.  Bell called this treating the settings as "free variables," and when critics said that rested on unproven metaphysics, he answered that "I would entertain the hypothesis that experimenters have free will" and that in doing so "I am just pursuing my profession of theoretical physics."¹  The only way to keep local determinism after the 2015 tests is to deny that independence, which is superdeterminism.

This should not be oversold.  The assumption the experiments need is statistical independence of the settings, not libertarian freedom.  A good random number generator in a deterministic world would satisfy it, and the 2015 tests used machines to pick their settings.  What Bell's remark shows is narrower and still worth stating:  the practice of experimental science treats the experimenter's choices as not fixed by the system under study, and the one interpretation that denies this is the one most physicists reject.

Part 3: Does consciousness cause collapse?

The argument, from von Neumann to Wigner to Stapp

John von Neumann's 1932 textbook gave the measurement problem its exact form.  A measurement is a chain:  the particle affects a thermometer or a pointer, light carries the reading to an eye, the retina sends signals to the brain.  Each link is a physical system, so each can be described by the Schrödinger equation.  Somewhere the smooth evolution must stop and a single result appear.  Von Neumann showed that the predictions come out the same wherever that point is placed.  "That is, we must always divide the world into two parts, the one being the observed system, the other the observer.  …  The boundary between the two is arbitrary to a very large extent."²²  It can be pushed into the observer's brain, all the way to what he called the observer's "abstract 'ego.'"²²

Von Neumann proved that the cut can be placed anywhere.  He did not prove that it must be placed at the mind.  Eugene Wigner, a Nobel laureate in physics, took that further step.  In his 1962 essay "Remarks on the mind-body question" he wrote that with quantum mechanics "the concept of consciousness came to the fore again:  it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness."²³  His argument was the thought experiment now called "Wigner's friend."  A friend looks at a flash and reports what he saw.  If the friend were only a quantum system, he would be in a blend of "saw it" and "didn't" until Wigner asked him, and Wigner found that absurd for a being who has impressions.  "It follows that the being with a consciousness must have a different role in quantum mechanics than the inanimate measuring device."²³

Henry Stapp, a physicist at Berkeley, built a theory of mental effort on the same foundation.  With Jeffrey Schwartz and Mario Beauregard he argued that quantum theory leaves a gap a mind can fill:  "the manner in which this choice itself is determined is not specified."²⁴  The choices that set up a measurement are "free choices" in that sense.²⁴  Their proposed mechanism is the quantum Zeno effect, in which "repeated and closely spaced observational acts can effectively hold the 'Yes' feedback in place."²⁴  On this view, attending to a thought is a way of holding a brain state steady.

The position deserves a fair statement of its strength.  It contradicts no experiment, because it predicts the same results as every other reading of the formalism.  It takes the measurement problem seriously rather than waving it away.  And it was held by two of the century's great physicists.

Why most physicists reject it

1. The founders of the Copenhagen view did not hold it. Heisenberg said that the transition from possible to actual happens "as soon as the interaction of the object with the measuring device, and thereby with the rest of the world, has come into play; it is not connected with the act of registration of the result by the mind of the observer."⁴ In the 2011 poll only 6% gave the observer a "distinguished physical role (e.g., wave-function collapse by consciousness)," and the authors added that the popular link between Copenhagen and consciousness "is to misunderstand the Copenhagen interpretation."¹⁷
2. It cannot say which minds count. Bell's question has never been answered: "Was the world wave function waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer for some more highly qualified measurer — with a Ph.D.?"¹
3. The environment destroys interference without anyone looking. In a 2003 Vienna experiment, Klaus Hornberger and colleagues sent C70 molecules through an interferometer filled with a thin gas. "Collisions with gas molecules localize the molecular center-of-mass wave function leading to a reduced visibility of the interference pattern," because the struck gas molecule "is left in a state distinguishing the path taken."²⁵²⁵ The pattern faded smoothly as the gas pressure rose, as decoherence theory predicts. No mind read the gas molecules. This does not refute the consciousness view, since decoherence explains why interference disappears, not why one outcome is seen. It does remove its strongest motive, the thought that without a mind the world would show its quantum blur.
4. Wigner himself gave it up. Raymond Mackintosh, citing a 2019 paper by Leslie Ballentine, reports that Wigner "publicly disavowed the proposition that consciousness causes collapse."²⁶ Wigner's own essay already marked the view as provisional: "It may be premature to believe that the present philosophy of quantum mechanics will remain a permanent feature of future physical theories."²³

A problem for theists in particular.  A Christian who holds that any mind's knowing collapses the wave function faces a difficulty of his own.  God knows every outcome as it happens.  If divine knowledge collapsed wave functions, every superposition would collapse the instant it formed, and no interference pattern would ever be seen.  Interference is seen every day.  So a theist who holds the view must say that God's knowledge is not "observation" in the relevant sense, or limit the effect to creaturely minds.  Either may be defensible, but neither comes from physics.  This objection is this article's inference, not one found in the sources above.

Bell, the sharpest critic of measurement talk, was no materialist on this point:  "As regards mind, I am fully convinced that it has a central place in the ultimate nature of reality.  But I am very doubtful that contemporary physics has reached so deeply down that that idea will soon be professionally fruitful."¹  That is the fair verdict.  Consciousness is unexplained, and the measurement problem is unsolved, but no one has shown that the first solves the second.

Penrose and Hameroff: a physical collapse in the brain

Roger Penrose's proposal is different in kind.  Penrose thinks collapse is a real physical event caused by gravity, in which a superposition of two different mass distributions decays in a time set by their gravitational energy difference.  The anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff proposed that this happens in microtubules, protein tubes inside neurons.  Their joint theory, "Orch OR," "proposes that consciousness consists of a sequence of discrete events, each being a moment of 'objective reduction' (OR) of a quantum state."²⁷  Consciousness here does not cause collapse.  Collapse, orchestrated in the brain, is consciousness.  The theory is physicalist, though its physics is new, and it gives no support to a soul acting on the brain.

Its authors list twenty testable predictions, which is to their credit.²⁷  The theory has two weak points.

1. Survival time. Orch OR needs quantum states in microtubules to last long enough to matter. Tegmark's estimate of 10⁻¹³ seconds was far too short.²¹ Hameroff and his colleagues replied that Tegmark modelled the wrong system and that corrected inputs lengthen "the decoherence time to 10⁻⁵ − 10⁻⁴ s."²⁸ That is still ten to ten thousand times shorter than the 10⁻³ to 10⁻¹ seconds over which, on Tegmark's figures, neural processes run, and the authors' further gains depend on assumed shielding by ordered water and gel states.
2. The collapse law. The simplest form of the gravitational collapse that Orch OR relies on has been tested. In 2021 Sandro Donadi and colleagues searched, in a germanium detector under the Gran Sasso mountain, for the faint radiation that such collapses would produce. They found none, and their bound "rules out the natural parameter-free version of the Diósi-Penrose model."²⁹ Using Penrose's own estimate for the crystal, they concluded "that Penrose's proposal for a gravity-related collapse of the wave function, in the present formulation, is ruled out," and that the idea "will probably require a radically new approach."²⁹ The Stanford Encyclopedia now says the model "has been falsified experimentally (Donadi et al. 2021), at least in its simpler formulation."⁹ Versions with a free size parameter survive, at the cost of a number chosen to fit.

The popular misuses

Most of the quantum claims a reader meets are not von Neumann's or Penrose's.  They are slogans:  the observer creates reality, thought shapes matter, quantum healing, "the universe is conscious."  Bell described where they come from:  "Scientists say that matter is not possible without mind!  All possible worlds are actual worlds!  Wow!  And the journalists can write these things with good consciences, for things like this have indeed been said."  They were said, he added, "out of working hours" and "by great physicists."¹  Two corrections cover most of them.

1. "Observer" means a measuring interaction, not a mind. A detector, a gas molecule or a photon that records which way a particle went destroys interference whether or not anyone reads the record.
2. Quantum effects in the lab need isolation. Superpositions survive in vacuum chambers, near absolute zero, or in tiny systems. They do not survive in a warm body for long enough to carry intentions, as Tegmark's numbers show.

Christian writers sometimes use the slogans too, to argue that physics has rediscovered the primacy of mind.  That argument should be dropped.  The primacy of mind may be true, but quantum mechanics is not the evidence for it.

Part 4: Does God act through quantum events?

The proposal

The idea is older than most people think.  In 1958 William Pollard, an Episcopal priest who had been a physicist on the Manhattan Project, suggested that God acts at the quantum level, and from 1988 to 2003 a series of conferences run by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley developed it.³⁰³¹  The best-known statement is by Robert John Russell, a physicist and theologian who founded the Berkeley centre:  "if quantum mechanics is interpreted philosophically in terms of ontological indeterminism (as found in one form of the Copenhagen interpretation), one can construct a bottom-up, noninterventionist, objective approach" to divine action.³²

Each word matters.  "Objective" means God really does something that would not otherwise happen, not merely that believers see an event as God's act.  "Noninterventionist" means no law is broken.  Russell's reason:  "God has created the universe ex nihilo such that some natural processes at the quantum level are insufficiently determined by prior natural events.  …  God does not violate the laws of quantum physics but acts in accordance with them."³²  The quantum laws fix only probabilities.  If God decides which outcome occurs, within those probabilities, he has acted without overriding anything.  Russell applied this to evolution:  God could act through the quantum events behind genetic mutation, so that nature is "genuinely open to objective special providence without being forced into interventionism."³³  Kenneth Miller, the Brown University biologist, made a similar case in Finding Darwin's God.³⁴

Nancey Murphy went further.  If quantum events have no sufficient natural cause, there are two options:  "complete randomness or divine determination," and "the better option is divine determination."³⁵  On her view God is "a participant in every (macro-level) event," by "his governance of the quantum events."³⁵

Thomas Tracy answered the obvious charge, that this is a God of the gaps.  The gaps here are not holes in present knowledge that science will close.  They are, on an indeterministic reading, features of nature itself.  "If we understand God to be the creator of all that is, and if the world God has made includes indeterministic chance in its structures, then God is the God of the gaps as well as the God of causal connection."³⁵

Wesley Wildman, who wrote the project's retrospective, gave its overall result:  "all of the views of objective SDA defended by participants are feasible and coherent in most respects."³⁶  SDA is special divine action.  "Feasible and coherent" is a modest claim, and Wildman meant it modestly.

The objections

The strongest objections come from the proposal's own side.

1. It depends on one interpretation. On Bohm's theory and on many worlds, quantum outcomes are fully determined, and there is no opening to fill. Plantinga, who is sympathetic, concedes: "DCC is tied to a particular version of QM; what happens if that version gets jettisoned?"³¹ DCC is his name for "divine collapse-causation," below. A doctrine of providence that a change in physics could remove is built on sand.
2. Quantum indeterminacy is episodic. John Polkinghorne, a Cambridge particle physicist turned Anglican priest, put it plainly. On the standard view, quantum chance enters only at measurements, and between them the Schrödinger equation is deterministic. "Occasions of measurement only occur from time to time and a God who acted through being their determinator would also only be acting from time to time. Such an episodic account of providential agency does not seem altogether satisfactory theologically."³⁵ Nicholas Saunders adds that since nobody knows what a measurement is, nobody knows where God's opportunities lie. "Measurements are relatively infrequent events, and thus any theory of divine action linked to them is likely to be highly episodic in nature."³⁰
3. Getting from the atom to the world is unexplained. Most quantum outcomes average out. To make a difference at the scale of people, God's choices must be amplified, by chaos or by a mutation. Murphy herself called this "the most serious weakness of this paper": what "are the possibilities for God's determining the outcomes of events at the macro-level by governing the behavior of sub-atomic entities?"³⁵
4. It makes the problem of evil worse. If God decides every quantum event, he decides the mutations that cause cancer as well as those that build eyes. Russell said so himself: "I believe the problem of theodicy is stunningly exacerbated by all the proposals, including my own, that God acts at the level of genetics."³³
5. It has to hide in the statistics. If God chose outcomes freely, the long-run frequencies might drift from the quantum rule, and physicists would see it. The proposal must say that God's choices always reproduce the expected statistics, which makes the action undetectable by design. Plantinga states this objection himself: "Wouldn't there have to be something like a divine statistical footprint, if God caused those collapses?"³¹

Saunders drew the strongest conclusion:  "The thesis that God determines all quantum events is not only scientifically irreconcilable with quantum theory but also theologically paradoxical," and a theology of divine action "linked to quantum processes is theologically and scientifically untenable."³⁰³⁰  That goes too far on the science.  Nothing in quantum theory forbids an unseen cause of which outcome occurs, as long as it respects the frequencies.  The theological objections are stronger.

Does a God who acts need a gap?

Alvin Plantinga attacks the premise behind the whole project.  The proposal exists because its authors thought that divine action outside a quantum gap would be "intervention," and that intervention is ruled out by science.  Plantinga denies both halves.

Classical physics never said the world is causally closed.  "It is no part of Newtonian mechanics or classical science generally to declare that the material universe is a closed system.  You won't find that claim in physics textbooks—naturally enough, because that claim isn't physics, but a theological or metaphysical add-on."³¹  Newton's laws say how bodies move when nothing outside the system acts on them.  They do not say that nothing ever does.  A miracle on this view breaks no law, because the law's condition, that the system is closed, does not hold.  Laws of Nature, Causation, and Information treats what laws are.

Quantum mechanics makes the charge harder still to state:  "given contemporary quantum physics, there isn't any sensible way to say what intervention is, let alone find something in science with which it is incompatible."³¹  Plantinga then offers his own version of the quantum proposal, "divine collapse-causation."  Since nothing physical decides which result a collapse yields, "It's wholly in accord with these theories that, for any collapse and the resulting eigenstate, it is God who causes that state to result.  Perhaps, then, all collapse-outcomes (as we might call them) are caused by God."³¹  To the statistical objection he replies that each moment's total pattern of outcomes, a "superconfiguration," is so improbable in itself that no one could tell whether God had chosen it.³¹  And he grants that Polkinghorne's episodic objection "seems accurate" for the Copenhagen view.³¹

The upshot cuts against the quantum proposal more than for it.  If divine action was never in conflict with physics, then the quantum gap is not needed to rescue it.  Classical Christian theism never located God's action in gaps.  It holds that the Son "upholds the universe by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3, ESV) and that "in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17, ESV).  On that view every event, deterministic or not, depends on God, and a miracle is God acting otherwise than he usually does.  The quantum proposal gives a theist one possible mechanism for providence.  It does not supply a need, and it adds the costs listed above.

Young-earth creationists have no stake in the proposal either way.  Jonathan Sarfati of Creation Ministries International urges creationists to accept the physics:  "Quantum mechanics is well supported by the evidence.  Creationists should not reject it, since fighting on two fronts is a losing strategy."³⁷  He also rejects the consciousness reading:  "Bohr never claimed any ‘collapse requires consciousness’ view;  all that was required for an “observation” was a thermodynamically irreversible change."³⁷

Part 5: Quantum cosmology and "nothing"

Whether the universe had a beginning, and whether a beginning needs a cause, is argued in The Big Bang and The Cosmological Argument.  This Part asks a narrower question:  when physicists describe a universe arising "from nothing," what does "nothing" mean?

The two proposals

Hartle and Hawking:  no boundary.  In 1983 James Hartle and Stephen Hawking proposed a quantum state for the whole universe, computed by summing over four-dimensional geometries that have no edge.  Run back in time, the universe does not reach a first instant with a boundary.  In the past, time behaves like a direction of space, and the geometry closes off smoothly, like the surface of a sphere at its pole.  Hawking drew the theological moral himself:  "The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.  The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself."  And:  "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator.  But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end:  it would simply be.  What place, then, for a creator?"³⁸³⁸  He also said what kind of claim it was:  "this idea that time and space should be finite 'without boundary' is just a proposal:  it cannot be deduced from some other principle."³⁸

Vilenkin:  tunnelling from nothing.  From 1982 Alexander Vilenkin described the universe as tunnelling into existence, as a particle tunnels through a barrier.  A closed universe has zero total energy and zero charge, so conservation laws do not forbid its creation, "And according to quantum mechanics, any process which is not strictly forbidden by the conservation laws will happen with some probability."³⁹  "What causes the universe to pop out of nothing?  No cause is needed."³⁹  Vilenkin is careful about the status of the idea:  "The theory of quantum creation is no more than a speculative hypothesis."³⁹

What "nothing" means here

In both proposals the starting point is not absolute nothing.  It is the absence of space and time, described by the laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity, which assign probabilities to possible universes.  Vilenkin says so:  "A deep mystery remains.  The laws of physics that describe the quantum creation of the universe also describe its evolution.  This seems to suggest that they have some independent existence.  What exactly this means, we don't know."³⁹

Sean Carroll, a naturalist, criticises the language from the other side.  To say such universes "come into existence out of nothing" is "a misleading way of putting it," because "if the universe doesn't exist, there is no time, and hence there are no processes."⁵  He is equally blunt about the popular claim that "nothing is unstable," which works only "if we allow ourselves the freedom to define 'nothing' as 'a symmetric false-vacuum state.'  This has nothing at all to do with the origin of the universe itself, and certainly nothing to do with why there is a quantum wave function in the first place."⁵  He corrects a second popular picture too, the vacuum seething with particles that pop in and out:  "A quantum state is simply a quantum state, and a true vacuum state will be stationary, with nothing 'fluctuating' at all."⁵

Carroll draws a naturalist conclusion all the same, and it should be stated fairly:  "by itself, the existence of an earliest moment to time is no obstacle to describing the physical universe in completely consistent, self-contained terms.  There is therefore no requirement, at least as far as physics is concerned, that existence have an identifiable cause independent of physical reality."⁵  Note the limit he sets, "as far as physics is concerned."  Whether a self-contained physical description leaves anything to explain, such as why there are laws of this kind at all, is the question Vilenkin calls "a deep mystery," and it belongs to philosophy.

Do the proposals work?

Both face technical objections.  In 2017 Job Feldbrugge, Jean-Luc Lehners and Neil Turok redid the calculation with a mathematically sharper method.  They reported "a fundamental obstruction to any theory of the beginning of the universe, formulated as a semiclassical path integral," naming both proposals, and found that "the outcome is that primordial tensor (gravitational wave) fluctuations are unsuppressed."⁴⁰  If that is right, a universe born this way would not be smooth.  Hartle, Thomas Hertog and three colleagues replied the same year that, defined properly, the no-boundary state "predicts an ensemble of asymptotically classical, inflationary universes with nearly-Gaussian fluctuations and with a smooth semiclassical origin."⁴¹  The dispute is live.  No observation has tested either proposal, and Hawking's and Vilenkin's own words, "just a proposal" and "a speculative hypothesis," remain accurate.

So quantum cosmology does not show that the universe came from nothing in the sense a theologian means by creation ex nihilo.  It offers equations that, if correct, describe a universe with a first moment and no earlier physical state.  The laws in those equations, and the fact that anything obeys them, are where the proposals start, not where they finish.

Objections and responses

"Quantum mechanics shows the world runs on chance, so nothing, including God, controls it."  Two answers.  First, it shows no such thing:  Bohm's theory and many worlds are deterministic and fit every experiment, and the Stanford Encyclopedia's summary is that there is "no good evidence that determinism is true," not that indeterminism is proved.²⁰  Second, chance and providence are not rivals in Christian thought.  "The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD" (Proverbs 16:33, ESV).  An outcome that no physical cause settles is exactly the kind a theist expects God to be free to settle.

"Bell's theorem proves we have free will."  It does not.  It assumes that the settings are independent of the particles, and a random number generator in a deterministic world would satisfy that.  What Bell's own defence shows is that physics proceeds as if experimenters choose, and that the one escape from nonlocality, superdeterminism, does so by denying it.¹¹³

"Consciousness collapses the wave function, so mind is fundamental and materialism is refuted."  That is a minority reading that most physicists, the Copenhagen founders and, in the end, Wigner rejected (Part 3).  Its truth would help the theist, but its evidence is that it cannot be ruled out, not that anything favours it.  The case against materialism has to be made from consciousness itself, in Mind, Reason, and Consciousness.

"Quantum divine action is a God of the gaps, and the gap will close."  On an indeterministic interpretation the gap is not ignorance;  it is a feature of nature, as Tracy argued.³⁵  The charge does land in another form:  if physics settles on a deterministic interpretation, the gap closes by a change of interpretation rather than by a discovery.  That is why this article does not rest providence on it.

"Any divine action would break the conservation laws, and physics shows the world is causally closed."  Physics shows how closed systems behave.  It has never shown that the universe is closed, and Plantinga notes that the claim "isn't physics, but a theological or metaphysical add-on."³¹  A God who acts from outside the system no more breaks the law of momentum than a person who pushes a cart does.

"Hawking showed that a self-contained universe leaves no place for a creator."  Hawking asked the question;  he did not show the answer.  He called the no-boundary idea "just a proposal," its consistency is disputed in the technical literature, and its starting point is a set of laws that, in Vilenkin's words, "have some independent existence."³⁸³⁹  A universe with no first boundary still needs a reason why it exists and obeys these laws, which is the question of The Cosmological Argument.

"Penrose proved the mind is not a computer, so it must be a soul."  Penrose is not a dualist.  His argument is that understanding needs new physics, and his candidate physics, gravitational collapse, has had its simplest form ruled out.²⁹  Whatever Penrose's Gödel argument shows about minds belongs to Mind, Reason, and Consciousness.

"Creationists should reject quantum mechanics, since Copenhagen denies cause and effect."  Creation Ministries International answers this itself:  the theory "is well supported by the evidence," and rejecting it opens a needless second front.³⁷  The physics is operational science.  The philosophy laid on top of it is optional.

"This article concedes too much.  If God needs no quantum gap, quantum mechanics offers the theist nothing."  It offers three things, all modest:  the end of physics as a witness for determinism, the observation that experimental science treats choices as free, and the evidence that physics' "nothing" is not nothing.  The stronger claims fail, and making them hands the skeptic an easy win.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Two founding papers were not read. Hartle and Hawking's 1983 paper and Vilenkin's 1982 paper sit behind publisher paywalls. Their positions are taken from Hawking's own popular account and from Vilenkin's 2015 essay.
2. Wigner's change of mind is reported second-hand. Mackintosh relays Ballentine's 2019 paper; Ballentine's paper itself was not read. Wigner's written statements of his later view would settle when and how far he changed it.
3. The objection that God's knowledge would collapse every wave function is this article's own. No published treatment of it was found. A theist defender of consciousness-collapse may have answered it.
4. Stapp's quantum Zeno model gets only its general objections here. Published technical criticisms of the model, by David Bourget and by Danko Georgiev among others, were not read.
5. Peter van Inwagen's "rollback" form of the luck argument and David Albert's review of Lawrence Krauss's A Universe from Nothing were not obtained. The luck argument is stated from the Stanford Encyclopedia instead, and Carroll stands in for Albert on what "nothing" means.
6. Tumulka's relativistic collapse model covers particles that do not interact. Whether a fully interacting relativistic collapse theory without a preferred frame exists was not checked, so the answer given to the sibling article on time holds for the models examined here.
7. Several physics papers are cited from their arXiv versions. The published texts of the 2015 Bell tests, Tegmark 2000, Hagan 2002, Donadi 2021 and Feldbrugge 2017 may differ in wording.
8. Saunders' claim that quantum providence "takes millions of years of action to achieve even the most simple effects" was not priced, and is not used.³⁰ It could be tested by counting the quantum events a chosen macroscopic outcome needs.

Verdict

Quantum mechanics is settled as a predictive theory and unsettled as a description of reality.  The 2015 Bell tests closed the door on local hidden variables and left open nonlocal theories, many worlds and superdeterminism.  Whether nature is truly random depends on which reading is right, and no experiment yet decides it.

On the claims built on top:  quantum chance does not make anyone free, though it ends the claim that physics proves we are not.  Consciousness-causes-collapse is consistent with the data, unfalsified, and held by almost no one, including in the end its best-known advocate;  Orch OR is a physical theory under heavy experimental pressure.  God acting through quantum outcomes is coherent and cannot be refuted, but it rests on a contested interpretation, worsens the problem of evil, and answers a worry that, as Plantinga shows, physics never raised.  Quantum cosmology's "creation from nothing" begins from laws and a space of possible universes, and its own authors call it a proposal.

A skeptic should grant that physics no longer testifies for determinism or for a universe from literally nothing.  A Christian should grant that quantum mechanics is not evidence for the soul, for mind over matter, or for any particular way God acts.  The God of classical theism, who upholds every event, needs no gap in physics, and the case for him has to be made elsewhere.

Sources