Helicopter Seeds

In Defense of the Counter-Intuitive

I’ve spent the last 27 years carefully refining my sense of causality. This is not a profound statement; as individuals, it would seem we are made to be keenly and constantly aware of causalities all around us. The whole of any one person’s knowledge is simply an accrued total of remembered cause-effect relationships. From our first breaths to our last, our brain is constantly compiling the simple linear causalities that we are constantly experiencing. As infants, we quickly begin to make such associations: “Too much heat = pain,” “Crying = Someone will hold me,” etc. As adults, these associations grow continuously more complex: “Deadlines = Stress,” “Change = Uncertainty,” or “Crying = Someone will hold me” (I had to throw that in there). No matter how seemingly complicated a given causality may be, it can eventually be broken down into a number of simple irreducible linear elements. It is how we learn– our brains respond to basic causes and effects with differing levels of the chemical serotonin; generally the more serotonin is present, the more pleasurable the experience. In a process that we are generally not conscious of, our brains are constantly reducing the endless stream of incoming sensory “causes” into their more manageable simple factors and then responding with the appropriate chemical-release “effect”— think of it as a Pavlovian response at the cellular level. It is a fascinatingly binary system, reducing all of our good/bad sensory experiences into the simple on/off of neurotransmitters. As such, the way we perceive and experience the world around us becomes skewed somewhat to fit this causality processing context.

Within that context, we have finely honed intuitions regarding how the world around us works. We know that to open a door, we must physically push or pull on that door with sufficient force to open it. Even in the case of an automatic door, photons of light must bounce off our bodies into a photosensitive material which converts those photons into electricity. This in turn causes a solenoid to close an electrical circuit, which prompts the copper atoms within an electrical wire to exchange electrons in such a way that electrical current flows through a motor with sufficient force to open the door. In either case (or in any case, for that matter) there has to be a physical interaction between the observer and the door before it will open. It is the basic intuition that all of us have regarding everything around us; there is a linear and sequential series of causalities that leads-up-to and proceeds-from any given happening. It is an intuition called ‘locality.’

Within a local universe, every cause and every effect can be observed and measured, and thereby we can understand the mechanics of existence; this is the basic assumption of the scientific method. It is also a purely rational assumption and as such it eschews the irrational and the non-local. Albert Einstein, who did more to define our understanding of locality than just about anyone that has ever lived, once said of maintaining its integrity: “If this axiom were to be completely abolished… the postulation of laws which can be checked empirically in the accepted sense, would become impossible.” As such, the presence of non-locality would not only be irrational and counterintuitive, it would be deeply unsettling to our understanding of the universe. God is by definition a non-local element; and at a very basic level this is why the concept of God (and metaphysics in general) has been dismissed from intellectual thought since the time of the Enlightenment. It is a simple matter of Epistemology: if it can’t be understood then it is not worth knowing.

There is, however, a flaw in this reasoning, and the more we investigate it the more significant it becomes. Our seemingly local universe is comprised entirely of non-local elements. As the field of Quantum Mechanics has progressed it has become more and more apparent that sub-atomic particles, the tiniest constituents of existence, behave with no regard for things like space and time. Physicist Werner Heisenberg (formulator of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) concluded that we can either know where a sub-atomic particle is or where it is going, but we can never definitively know both. Physicist Neils Bohr insisted that “it isn’t that we don’t know the facts about these particles’ locations, it’s that there AREN’T any such facts.” Physicist Dennis Overbye says of the behavior of sub-atomic particles, “they must be regarded as being everywhere and nowhere at once.” According to science writer David Albert, “The problem is not epistemological (about what we know) but ontological (about what is).”

There is another complication presented by this ontological problem: as observed, it directly contradicts Einstein’s special theory of relativity which is one of the essential foundations of modern physics. Special Relativity relies on the assumption of physical locality. The great unanswerable question in science right now is ‘How do we reconcile Special Relativity with non-locality?’ and Cosmologists, String Theorists, Quantum Field Theorists, and Configuration Theorists have put forth a number of interesting explanations. At the core of each of these explanations is the idea that reality as we know it is a small part of a highly dimensional ‘actual reality;’ parts of which completely transcend our ideas of space and time. As humans we can only experience our three spatial dimensions and linear time, because that is all that our causality informed minds can fathom. The problem is not epistemological, but ontological.

I believe we are living in an era that, like the Enlightenment of the 18th century, will see drastic changes in our perceptions of the world around us. Already, metaphysical speculation has become not only common place, but depended on in the realm of scientific thought. From a logical standpoint, the idea of a deity that transcends space and time is less preposterous than at any time in history. Evolutionary Biologist and stalwart atheist Richard Dawkins even conceded in a recent Minnesota Public Radio interview, “I could imagine a good case being made for a deistic god, a fundamental intelligence at the beginning of the universe that laid down the laws of physics.”

Colossian 1:17 says of God, “He is before all things and in Him all things consist.” The problem is not epistemological, but ontological. He is.