- On Einstein, quantum mechanics and God’s omniscience
Albert Einstein, the father of general and special relativity, also fathered quantum mechanics – albeit accidentally. He didn’t like this unwanted offspring nearly as much as his earlier ones. Well, who are we kidding? – he hated quantum mechanics as it grew up, and only accepted it reluctantly in the face of mounting evidence. But he kept on insisting till his last day that it could not be the complete story. Einstein had an unshakable belief in complete law and order of nature, and not even an extremely dysfunctional love and married life could cure him of this enthusiasm.
Throughout the optimistic age of science, it had been believed that if we had enough knowledge of laws of nature, we could accurately predict future events. Having launched a paper plane from the roof of a building one could predict exactly where and when it would land. How a marriage would work out may be a much more complex question because it involves human psychology. But human psychology ought to ultimately depend upon how brain atoms and their constituents behave; and the problem should be similar to the movement of planets around the sun, only more complicated. Therefore, knowing the laws explaining how the human mind worked and equipped with all the inputs to it, in theory, one ought to be able to predict how the world (or something in it) would be after a certain time interval. The prediction may be off, but that would purely be due to lack of understanding of the laws of nature and/or absence of precise information about the initial conditions. There ought to be nothing probabilistic or random about it. That’s classical physics for you.
Along came quantum mechanics, and it was obvious from the start that it was having none of this determinism. The likes of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were adamant that the problem was not that of insufficient knowledge (a gap that scientists had hoped could be bridged with time and effort), but that there was an inherent uncertainty or randomness in nature when it came to the very small scale; and therefore, when talking of atomic and subatomic particles, we could talk of probabilities at best. That this dependence on chance was the way the world was, and that laws based on the macro-level ‘certainties’ observed in everyday life were based merely on averaging out of those small-scale probabilities. This seemed to give no end of grief to Einstein. He famously said that God didn’t play dice with the universe; to which Bohr quipped that Einstein should quit telling God how to run the universe.
By most accounts Einstein wasn’t religious in the traditional sense, so he could only be complaining about the unpredictability of nature. But the inherent randomness of nature has important implications for the philosophy of religion.
By most accounts Einstein wasn’t religious in the traditional sense, so he could only be complaining about the unpredictability of nature. But the inherent randomness of nature has important implications for the philosophy of religion. On the one hand, by halting the deterministic march of science, quantum mechanics has taken the stuffing out of the armchair atheists’ ‘justification’ to dispense with God. (‘Who needs God when science can predict everything?’ may leave much to be desired logically, but it has been an effective layman argument.) On the other hand, the inherent randomness apparently strikes at the heart of God’s omniscience as well. If the world is unpredictable – not owing to lack of knowledge, but by its very nature – then even an Omniscient being (God) shouldn’t be able to predict how events will pan out in future. Or should He?
Well, the answer depends on the God we may have in mind. Spinoza’s God, for example (something Einstein was partial to, by his own admission) is synonymous with nature (which he refers to as coextensive with whatever is). All such pantheistic concepts of God do suffer from the limitation of being inside the scheme of things – the universe that is, and therefore dependent on time to know the outcome of an experiment or an event that is not subject to any law. For such outcomes are unknowable before the fact so to speak, outside the language of probability. Perhaps this was the reason for Einstein’s extreme unease.
Any God, however, who is outside the scheme of things – outside the universe that is, and hence not subject to time and space – need not have any such limitation. For things are unknowable only before the fact. Even ordinary mortals like us get to know about the outcome of a random event after it has happened, do we not? A God that is independent of time has no such limitation because as applied to Him, words such as ‘past’, ‘present’, ‘future’, ‘before’ and ‘after’ don’t mean anything. Everything is in front of Him simultaneously. Therefore, Gottfried Leibniz, Spinoza’s successor in the famous trio of Continental Rationalists was superior to Spinoza in this respect at least, though the latter had no rival among Western philosophers when it came to gentlemanly conduct.
There’s no denying quantum physics, however counterintuitive it may be. But Einstein appears to be right too about God not playing dice. But, then, it’s hard to reconcile this with any pantheistic concept of God.
