Pretty much everything I know about quantum theory I learned from reading Stephenen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and I’ve always been wary of people who attempt to draw broad philosophical implications from it. To Keith Ward’s credit, though, he is pretty circumspect in his treatment of the topic.

Unlike earlier major scientific revolutions which seemed to threaten a religious view of the world, quantum theory, Ward says, actually calls into question the dogmatic materialism that gained ground in the 19th and early 20th centuries. If it tells us anything about the fundamental makeup of the universe, it’s that the old materialistic model of atoms bumping and shoving each other is not an accurate description of the constituents of the physical world. Quantum theory gives us a rather mysterious world of probability waves and particles that don’t even have a precise position and velocity until someone measures them. At its fundamental level, physical reality is literally unimaginable by us, and can only be precisely described in the language of mathematics.

While there’s no agreement on what metaphysical consequences (if any) should be drawn from this, at the very least it suggests a world in which consciousness plays a greater role in constructing the physcial world as it appears to us. Whether this takes the form of a radical Berkeleyan idealism or a more moderate Kantian idealism, it seems that there is a gap between the physical world as it appears to us and the physical world as it exists in itself.

An analogy is with perceived colour. Objects have no colour when they are not being observed, for colour arises when wave-lengths of light reflected from objects impinge on the eye and coded information is transmitted to the brain. Objects have properties that give rise to sensations of colour when observed, but colour is not an intrinsic property of objects. So in the unmeasured quantum world there are no particles with precise dynamic attributes, such as position and momentum. But on this interpretation of quantum theory, probability waves, whatever exactly they are, generate such particles when they are observed in a specific way, or when they are fixed in time by an experimental apparatus that will give a precise position or momentum when observed. (p. 86)

Some physicists, Ward says, go as far as to posit an intelligible world of mathematical “forms” as the ultimate basis of physical reality, a theory highly reminiscient of Plato. Of course, it’s difficult to see how such forms could give rise to the physical world since they aren’t really agents. Ward speculates that we might see these forms as existing in the mind of God who actualizes certain possibilities.

Such ‘perfect’ intelligible Forms, perhaps the basis of the ‘hidden’ world of quantum physics, might themselves be realities that exist in some form of consciousness. The reason for thinking this is that the intelligible world is a fundamentally mathematical or conceptual world. If we hold, with most mathematicians, that mathematics is in some sense a construct of minds, and if mathematical truths are objective, if they exist apart from any human mind, then the natural conclusion is that they are constructs of a non-human, objective mind, the mind of God. (pp. 87-88)

Ward recognizes that there are several interpretations of quantum physics and that God is by no means the only way for accounting for it. But, he contends, quantum physics does indicate that “old-style atomist materialism is dead” and “quantum physics opens up the possibility of understanding mind and consciousness as much more integrally involved in the basic structure of physical reality than anyone might previously have suspected” (p. 88).

This stuff is all way too slippery for me to feel much confidence in the argument. Perhaps the best that can be said of it is the same that can be said of any version of the cosmological argument: However we conceive the basis of physical reality, its contingency at least raises the question of whether there is a God who brings it into being. As Diogenes Allen argues in his book Christian Belief in a Postmodern World, questions like “Why does the universe (or the collection of finite beings) exist at all?” and “Why does nature have this order rather than some other possible order?” are meaningful questions which point to the possibility of God, even if they don’t admit of definitive answers.