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- Title
WHAT MAKES A QUANTUM PHYSICS BELIEF BELIEVABLE? MANY‐WORLDS AMONG SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST: with Mark Harris, "Quantum Theology beyond Copenhagen: Taking Fundamentalism Literally"; Shaun C. Henson, "What Makes a Quantum Physics Belief Believable? Many‐Worlds among Six Impossible Things before Breakfast"; Emily Qureshi‐Hurst, "The Many Worries of Many Worlds"; Elise Crull, "Interpretation Neutrality for Quantum Theology"; Wilson C. K. Poon and Tom C. B. McLeish, "Is There a Distinctive Quantum Theology?"; and Ernest L. Simmons, "The Entangled Trinity, Quantum Biology, and Deep Incarnation."
- Authors
Henson, Shaun C.
- Abstract
An extraordinary, if circumscribed, positive shift has occurred since the mid‐twentieth century in the perceived status of Hugh Everett III's 1956 theory of the universal wave function of quantum mechanics, now widely called the Many‐Worlds Interpretation (MWI). Everett's starkly new interpretation denied the existence of a separate classical realm, contending that the experimental data can be seen as presenting a state vector for the whole universe. Since there is no state vector collapse, reality as a whole is strictly deterministic. Explained jointly by the dynamical variables and the state vector, "this reality is not the reality we customarily think of, but is a reality composed of many worlds," wrote Everett's colleague Bryce DeWitt. In this essay, I account briefly for the change of status in conventional scientific terms, yet chiefly in extended terms of three sets of ideas that I argue can be understood to affect believability in both scientific and religious contexts, illuminating helpfully the MWI phenomenon, and its engagement with theology: orthodoxy and heresy, language and reference, and faith and agnosticism. One's orientation relative to the variable content of these dynamic, socially oriented categories helps to make belief in ideas as metaphysically challenging as Everettian Quantum Mechanics, or particular ideas about God, either more or less believable. The categories will have the same function in a theology engaging Everett's theory, and in any theology at all written in a society deeply marked by what I further argue is a subtle, powerful, and pervasive mode of quasi‐scientific thinking we can call societal constructive agnosticism, of which anyone doing theology today must be aware.
- Subjects
QUANTUM biochemistry; QUANTUM theory; THEOLOGY; INCARNATION; QUANTUM mechanics
- Publication
Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science, 2023, Vol 58, Issue 1, p203
- ISSN
0591-2385
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/zygo.12872