Over at First Things, physicist Stephen Barr has written a long article on the "Faith and Quantum Theory", a topic I have addressed in a lengthy essay of my own, "Time, Eternity, and Quantum Mechanics", as well as many blogs. Now "the meaning of QM" is perennial favorite of physicists, who rarely, if ever, write essays on "the meaning of Newtonian mechanics", though occasionally one will read an essay on "The Beauty of Maxwell's Equations", which was the tenor of Barr's earlier, and very excellent 2003 book, "Modern Physics and Ancient Faith", where he discussed all the joys of seeing the deep symmetries of particle physics without delving into the great problem of what exactly is a particle, which was the paradox of QM. So when I saw the title of this essay I looked forward to the crowning chapter, the dessert to a full meal. But first I had to wait two months for it to be released without subscription.

Upon devouring it, I had the sensation of eating one of those "lite" cheesecakes that turns out to be whipped gelatin;  I had expected calories and substance, but all I got was graham crumbs and non-committal. I won't repeat the scientific aspects of his article, (he is, after all, far better qualified than I), but here is the Barr's intro and conclusions:


Now there is a certain approach toward knowledge, a code of ethics drilled into every academic all through his education, that he is to remain emotionally aloof from his work. The reasons for this detachment are painfully obvious if anyone has encountered the opposite--a scientist who invests too much of his own value into his pet theories. (Global warming anyone?)  It is somewhat like the professionalism admired in American Marines, who are trained not to get angry when their comrades take a hit, or when 12-yr olds drive a bomb-rigged suicide car  with passenger children. However there is a great difference between "remaining in control" and "lacking emotion". The former is a virtue, the latter a curse.

So when Barr comes to the end of his essay, and comments that many people draw various conclusions, cites his favorite, and concludes "QM is as mysterious as ever", I hear the words of an academic curse. But when he cites Wigner suggesting that this mystery is nothing less than a belief in spirit, then perhaps his self-referential comment on the unknowability of QM is not cursing, but a controlled attempt to tell us that science reveals the Spirit. If that be the case, then we are in agreement as to the conclusion, though we differ greatly in the methods. But I would argue that in a Trinitarian approach to science, the advances are not independent of the journey, the content is contingent upon the method, and we are at best fooling ourselves and at worst deceiving our colleagues if we are agnostic about methodology.  Therefore to understand QM, and to understand Barr's academic reticence, it behooves us to consider the ways in which we adopt our explanations.

The Vulcan Death Grip

I think much has been made of the supposed emotional detachment of rational science.  I confess that I too idolized this characteristic of Dr Spock of the starship Enterprise. What surprised me to learn was how ancient is the attestation to this virtue, expressed by both Epicurus and Siddhartha Gautama in the 5th century BC. And yet neither the Greeks nor the Indians nor the Chinese developed the rational science that this attitude was supposed to promote.  Rational detachment, while perhaps permitting discourse and dialogue, simultaneously removes any desire for it, which one should note, is the opposite of the effect of wine. (Perhaps there is some truth to the graduate student claim that beer is an essential component of education.  Privately I wonder if that is why wine seems to have a special function in almost every human culture.) That is, we must neither weary of doing good nor of damning evil, lest we succumb to the tepid condemnation of Rev 3:15.  Decisions carry consequences for both good and evil, and choosing a QM theory is choosing a view of the world. To not choose is as much a choice as to choose, and Barr has said volumes with his non-choice of a Copenhagen dualism.

Let me say it one more way. Suppose one is manning a checkpoint in Baghdad, and a car is speeding toward you, not heeding the signs and warning shots to stop and be examined. Do you shoot the driver in fear that he may be a suicide car bomber, or do you hesitate to kill a possibly unarmed civilian? To not choose, is to choose. If QM denies determinism, and determinism is the main opponent to Christian theism, do you promote QM and take the wrath of atheist academics, or say nothing and permit a determinist Dawkins to rob the faith of another generation of students? Just as war is not for children, neither is metaphysics for the faint of heart.

Suppose now that you shoot the driver, and find out that he is an unarmed escort to a female journalist for an Italian Communist newspaper, and now a Roman court has indicted you for murder.  You have a lot of time to think over your split second decision, to second and third guess your choices. Would emotional detachment have helped make a better decision? Should all such decisions be based purely on rational thought? Or is it even possible to separate the decision from the mortar attack that occurred just previous to the event, or the preceding day's car bombing? Imagine, for a moment, that all guardposts were equipped with .30 caliber machine guns connected to a radar gun, would that be preferable to the human decisions of a scared boy?  (And if you answered yes, then you are undoubtedly in favor of automated radar-gun speeding ticket machines.)

There is a place for emotion, and as it turns out, the more important the decision, the greater the need for it. Agnosticism's great crime is not that it refuses to make an uninformed decision, but that it has already decided the issue is unimportant.

Dogmatic Slumber

Well, if too little passion is dangerously inactivating, so is misplaced passion. This is the disease for which a Vulcan "dispassionate reason" was the cure. If, for example, I fear for my life more than a court-martial or the safety of my fellow soldiers, then I can be intimidated and ultimately defeated. Likewise, if I care more for the glory of dying nobly than the glory of living ignominiously, I can be baited into foolhardy action. Both too little and too much concern for life are equally disadvantageous in a battle. So also, when I am passionate for the wrong reason, the wrong metaphysics, then all sorts of errors follow. This is the "dogmatic slumber" from which Kant was awakened by Hume. Yet without any passion for dogma, we despise the topic, and in our supposed objectivity, condemn all such debate to trivialities, which only insures that the next generation will ignore our legacy. But if we show too much passion for dogma, we ignore the data, we dismiss the problems, we trample over opponents, and indoctrinate our students.  Either way, our students are left without direction, without guidance, and "this also is vanity and a great evil" says Qoheleth.

Over at First Things, Kirkegaard's analysis of Socrates comes to the same conclusion.
If there is an answer to Kirkegaard, to Socrates, to Qoheleth, it must lie in the solution to the impossible balancing act between Reason and Passion, between Doubt and Dogma, between Spock and Scotty. But where is this sweet spot, where should I stand to avoid error? Alas there is no lasting solution to negotiating this tottering fence between polar extremes, there is no location that can be named, no procedure that will guarantee safety, and those that promise such security, be they gnosticism or dualism or dogmatism, never secure their promised poise. 

But Chesterton has said it best of all.

Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.

In battle, it is Chesterton's "furious indifference" to life, in scholarship it is a passion for truth while disdaining glory, in parenting it is compassionate providence without suffocating control.  Yet despite Chesterton's brilliance in putting this "conflict of the virtues" into such a memorable phrase, he gives no advice (beyond generic Christian orthodoxy) for achieving such unbalanced  poise.  What does it mean to say "balance as bias"? After three millennia of approval, is the Delphic oracle finally wrong?

Good Duals

Now there are equilibria that are good, healthy, and achievable. There is an optimal temperature for your body, neither too hot nor too cold, and you have an internal thermostat that adjusts it. When you get a fever, your body is fighting a bacterial infection by attempting to make your body less optimal for bacteria. In such cases, aspirin prolongs the disease, and increases complications. There is an optimal shape for right circular cylinders, that maximizes the volume for a given amount of area, so that the majority of cans in your pantry have the same height to diameter ratio. There is an optimal distance between carbon atoms, that minimizes the energy of both and so determines the mechanical properties of graphite and diamond. All around us we see optimizations, so we expect them, we assume them, we infer deep significance from them, which was the point of Stephen Barr's book.

So when we do not find an optimal point, when we find instead a "saddle point", an unstable equilibrium, a golf ball balanced precariously on the edge of the cup, there is an unease, an incompleteness, a disquieting feeling  we are overlooking something important. In this duality between reason and emotion,  the lack of a stable point should make us aware of our own incompleteness. Barr's inability to decide the meaning of QM, to decode the wave-particle duality should flag our need for something else. Barr expresses that longing in terms of "future mathematics" that might resolve the conflict, ironically unaware that the math of QM was never in doubt, only the interpretation of the math. But hasn't that been the problem at least since 500BC when Pythagoras tossed a Hippasus over the side of the boat for discovering irrational numbers?  Kurt Goedel demonstrated this fact in 1931 when he proved that math was essentially incomplete, unable to prove things that were known to be true. Math, reason, rationality, balance, are all incomplete, unable to provide us crucial help at those critical times when we really need them.

Barr's reliance on the "spiritual", as an entity beyond material, beyond the rational, beyond man, is an admission of that need and stability. He thinks the "irrational" aspects of QM are proof that deterministic Newtonian physics is incomplete. But we already knew that, or at least, those of us who read Chesterton, and we didn't need Bohr to tell us. The danger of finding in Bohr the savior from the Newtonian machine, is the same danger as Newton relying on a Deistic god to realign the planetary orbits every few millennia. When Laplace showed that he could solve the planetary orbit problem without interference, he answered Napolean's question about the role for God in his theory, saying "I have no need of that hypothesis."  Barr is in great danger of using QM as a similar "god-of-the-gaps" anti-determinism. And when QM is "explained" like Pythagoras' square-root of 2, we will be unable to answer the arrogance of Laplace.

The answer to Chesterton's "furious indifference", the answer to Bohr's dualism, to Barr's struggle with QM, must be found in a stability outside ourselves. Since we are such good learners, that stability must be beyond our ability to incorporate, to memorize, to intuit or absorb. If it were a set of rules, we could learn them. If it were a process or procedure, we could codify it. If it were a math problem, and humans were half as intelligent as Turing machines, we could solve it given enough time. But if it is not soluble, if, as Chesterton tells us, it is a never-ending conflict of virtues, then it means we are dealing with self-reference, we are dealing with mind, we are dealing with a Person.

Only by adding a third person to the dialogue, can we escape Hegel's dialectic. Only by a third fixed point, can we escape the unbalanced dualism. A cord of three-strands, says Qoheleth, is not quickly broken. And in that new system, the equilibrium is natural, is stable, is unique.  In that Three, is One.