"God doesn't play with dice": does QM's randomness really contradict religion?

Question

Everyone knows Einstein's popular phrase on Quantum Mechanics - "God doesn't play with dice", implying that the randomness theory that the universe "popped" into existence randomly doesn't align with Einstein's perception of God (which is Spinoza's). (Edit: as was noted several times, Einstein didn't make a theistic statement here. The issue for Einstein was the lack of systematic view that the randomness idea created.)

I'd like to question that and ask, must QM's random theory really contradict common God perception (Christianity, Judaism, etc)? Is there anyone who tried to make the theory compatible with a religious standpoint, or vice versa, make a religious standpoint that's compatible with QM?

Edit: as I see I haven't made that clear, I'd like to state that the main focus of the question is of creation of the universe.

Edit 2: separating Einstein's quote and the theistic issue, the question is in two parts: the theistic issue that randomness (may) have with the idea of intentional creation, and Einstein's issue with the mechanism system randomness creates.

Answer 1

Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.
_{- Théophile Gautier}

came to my mind. It is a view that you can sometimes encounter in the Catholic Thinking. Quantum randomness would be a very effective way to hide for God that would also enable him to have full control of everything. He just need to make it look random. Note that while it was proven that there can not be any hidden local deterministic variables, alternative non-local determinism has been showed to be consistent with experiments. So this wouldn't be a problem for a non local God.

Answer 2

Einstein was a proponent of hidden-variable theory. The gist is that, if something appears random, then it's really just chaotically dependent upon information we don't have.

So, God (the universe) doesn't play dice. Subsets of it might, but Einstein held that a complete description of the universe would be fully deterministic. Any description reliant on randomness merely omits the hidden variables.

Answer 3

This is a interesting question. I've never heard anyone arguing from QM to God, or nobody with a strong conviction and a sound knowledge of QM and theology. I'm not sure how such an argument could be made.

But there is plenty of literature arguing from QM to a religious standpoint. This is because, as the early QM pioneers noticed, QM is consistent with the Perennial philosophy. For a general survey of their views there is Ken Wilbur's Quantum Questions.

Three other writers come to mind. Bernardo Kastrup, who has worked at Cern, is making waves writing about Idealism from as scientific perspective. Also there is Ulrich Mohrhoff, who has written a student text-book called The World According to Quantum Mechanics - Why the Laws of Physics Make Sense After All. He endorses Schrodinger's view that the metaphysics of the Indian Upanishads is correct. The book is mostly maths but he makes the connection clear.

Note though that using QM as an argument for the Upanishadic view is not at all the same thing as using it to support commonplace theism. These two religious views are chalk and cheese. I see no reason why randomness or indeterminism should undermine the exoteric or objective idea of God but it does not bode well for Him, while QM seems to many people to be more or less a proof of the the Upanishadic view and the nondualistic idealism of advaita Vedanta.

If you can handle the maths then Ulrich Mohrhoff would be worth following up. If not, then Ken Wilbur's collection of quotations from physicists is non-technical and an easy way in to the issues.

Answer 4

Einstein's quote is generally thought to be a claim of determinism along the lines of the 18th and 19th century "billiard ball" or "clockwork" version of mechanics, i.e. if one could precisely describe everything in the world, then one could predict the future with exactitude. Theologians of the Judeo-Christian variety are not of one mind with regard to determinism. Determinism could arguably exclude miracles or other forms of divine intervention. I specifically do not agree that the comment was regarding the creation of the universe, but rather argue that it was a statement about the evolution of the universe from some present state.

It does seem possible that a less fully determined model of the universe might open the possibility of an omniscient entity "steering" the universe along chosen paths, say encouraging certain molecules to polymerize on a nascent Earth to promote the formation of RNA or DNA and "populate" the natural world, or even forcing more recent improbable outcomes that did not violate other physical laws.

You might also want to review the line of thinking in quantum mechanics that deals with a mythical creature called Maxwell's Demon. Discussions of such a creature undercut my somewhat whimsical suggestion that some god's steering of the evolution of the universe and the emergence of life might be consistent with QM.

Answer 5

Aristotle already points out in his Metaphysics that some philosophers took chance to be a cause. So in the very early thinking on physics chance wasn't ruled out as a cause.

It was ruled out in the modern era due to the success of Newtonian Mechanics that installed strict determinism as a principle of Nature and this was principally due to the influence of Laplace. However there were dissenters, for example in the book Philosophy & Physics, its pointed that Antonin Cournot, the 19th C French mathematician and economist, stated that chance ought to be considered as a cause in physical thinking. This view was of course vindicated in the early 20C when chance was discovered in physics - radioactive decay and then more fundamentally in QM.

This dethroning of Newtonian determinism had its dissenters , most prominently by Einstein. However he found the loss of locality in QM far more problematic. Given that General relativity was the culmination of a long search since Newton for local theories of physics, which was first achieved in electromagnetism and then gravity - this is not so surprising.

I don't see how taking chance to be a cause is problematic for either Islam or Christanity. As in both, the physical world is ruled by Gods law in the world which is then merely seen as physical law, and chance as a cause is nonetheless ruled by physical law.

Answer 6

I am just a layman but bear in mind that science describes the nuts and bolts of reality the methodological "why" and not the metaphysical "why" i.e. the purpose. It cannot as a matter of logic "explain away" God as some scientists may preen themselves on being able to do. As far as I know there is no rational explanation for the intelligibility of the umiverse (or why it should continue as Hume realized) - the existence of which is the basis of what we call laws of nature.

Answer 7

I believe (by which I mean 'think') your "common God perception" refers to macroscopic activities, i.e., good/evil/etc don't apply to individual atoms, per se. And, for example, the microscopic randomness of molecular motions/transitions/whatever doesn't affect the completely deterministic nature of thermodynamics, which describes the statistically-mechanically-averaged behavior of ginormous ensembles of such individually-random molecules. The probability that all the air molecules in your room will suddenly and randomly migrate to the half of the room you're not in, leaving you to suffocate in a vacuum, is ... zero.

Likewise, the ginormous number of molecules in a single eukaryotic cell, like a neuron in your brain, completely overwhelms (like zillions of times overwhelms) any underlying molecular randomness. So your good/evil/etc intentions/decisions/actions/whatever can't be attributed to that kind of randomness. (Those Deepak-Chopra-like discussions conflating "quantum mechanics" and "brains" are utter foolishness, except that maybe he makes some money off of the utter fools who listen to that kind of cr*p. Don't drink the quantum Kool-Aid.)

Nevertheless, there's still plenty of room for non-random/intentional free will, which I guess "common God perception" requires. But it has nothing to do with quantum randomness; rather, it arises from the fact that deterministic laws can still lead to unpredictable behavior due to emergent chaos (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory). And that kind of unpredictable-yet-deterministic chaotic behavior can emerge from extremely simple systems, much less brain complexity which is pretty much beyond any sensible comprehension.

So quantum randomness doesn't "contradict common God perception" on the one hand, by preventing the formation of non-random personal intentions/actions/etc; and determinism doesn't contradict it on the other hand, by pre-determining them all. Common sense, however, may or may not contradict it, depending on your point of view.

Answer 8

I would highly recommend reading Spitzer's "New Proofs for The Existence of God" which takes into account modern physics (and goes far further in depth than most books of its genre).

There are multiple arguments presented in the book, such as the fact that irrespective of which scientific theory you follow (short of a theory of a multiverse where every mathematical possibility exists because it has to [which has far more philosophical issues]), there has to be a reason for why the universe is an instance of that theory (supposing we actually arrive at a theory that truly models reality) and how it is actually material (Actual) as opposed to a Potentiality. Stephen Hawking (before he started trying to figure out loopholes in the problem) phrased this in the question:

What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

The BGV theorem also suggests that current science points towards there being a definite need of a first cause, while most philosophers also argue that it is impossible to have an infinite past, due to the fact that we would have had to have accomplished the infinite past to get to the present, which is impossible (as opposed to an infinite future, which can be described as simply unending and provides no paradoxes).

Furthermore, as stated by user103766, there are also deterministic theories of QM, such as Bohmian Mechanics, which suggest that there are existent particles that move in a deterministic way, guided by a waveform.

The main issue in terms of QM in terms of being a stochastic theory is the question of Free Will. Does QM allow us to have any choice (and is this choice hidden away within the stochastic results of QM) or are all actions entirely random. This possibly actually provides more "room" for the possibility of Free Will than a deterministic Classical Mechanics does (especially in bizarre theories such as the Many Minds theory). However, philosophers should be cautious about this as it is an attempt to put Free Will in a gap of our understanding (and therefore has an analogue with the flawed God-of-the-gaps position). There are of course many alternative suggestions to this problem, such as Emergence or a Neo-Aristotelian perspective which tries to explain why Special Sciences are valid and model reality well, and how Free Will could arrive from structure.

Answer 9

Addressing the QM question: No, QM's randomness does not contradict religion. Nor does it create a theistic issue. God knew the "best" method of creating a universe - and He used it! He knew that the "best" universe is obtained when He "interferes" the least with it. In keeping with this, all He did, was provide an unimaginable amount of energy and a few "assembly/interaction" rules. The creation of the Universe - as it is (QM's randomness included), was intentional!

Answer 10

Keep in mind that god is not an exclusive words used by people who believe in divinity.

For non-religious, it is a pseudonym used for natural or chaotic systems (in contrast to synthetic systems as created by a conscious being such as a human).

Thus when Einstein said that, what he meant was that natural systems are not random and that they also follow a logical path (unlike what was claimed by QM at the time).

The statement had no religious context.