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This thread on the role of magic and miracles in the modern secular worldview. It represents solely my own personal beliefs and experiences.
Part 6 How Quantum Mechanics Proves the Existence of God
I was a third year physics major in university when I first encountered Quantum Mechanics. On the first day of class my professor started the lecture with something like “Listen I’m going to level with you. Everything you’ve been taught about physical reality is a lie. In truth anything can happen for no reason and we don’t understand why.”
He was telling the truth, quantum mechanics feels like magic. In QM particles are constantly teleporting around, popping in and out of existence and other similarly bizarre things. Nor is it limited to size. The equations behind QM work for anything regardless of scale including you. We calculated the probability that we would randomly teleport into orbit.
A common misconception about Quantum Mechanics is that it only applies to extremely tiny things on the level of atoms while larger things on the human scale follow Newtonian Physics. This is an illusion created by statistics, the Schrödinger equation applies on all scales. I’ll explain using analogy and a little math, don’t worry.
If you flip a fair coin once you have a 1 out of 2 chance for it to come up heads. Flip 10 coins and there is a 1 out 2^10=1,024 chance of all the coins coming up heads. This is unlikely, but it’s not so unlikely that it should never happen. If you repeated this experiment every day you would expect this result about once every three years. If we extend this experiment to a thousand coins then there is a 1 out of 2^1,000 chance which is so astronomically unlikely that we should never see anything like it our entire lives even if we repeated the experiment a million times a day.
Some people would say that this is an example of the law of large numbers and that the results of the coins must converge towards their expected value, but this is misleading. There is no physical law that causes this, it’s just a consequence of the math. Technically 1,000 simultaneous heads is a valid result, it’s just exceedingly rare. The same effect occurs in Quantum Mechanics. There is no physical law preventing larger objects such as you and me from behaving like smaller objects such as electrons, the math just becomes more unlikely. Technically, there’s a chance that I will randomly teleport into orbit while writing this, but I would’t bet on it. The larger the scale the more the expected results of Quantum Mechanics converge to the predicted results of Newtonian Physics.
However, this assumes the probabilities are fixed. If we simply change the probabilities then we can achieve all sorts of wacky and miraculous results. While studying QM I had a mystical experience and vision. In the vision I was playing a slot machine and saw that I could reprogram it on the quantum level to achieve any results I wanted. I even wrote a poem about it but didn’t realize the full significance until more than a decade later.
The way we reprogram reality and perform miracles is through love, unconditional and divine love. The type of love found between souls. This might seem strange to you, it certainly did to me at first, but I’ve seen far too many miraculous events in casinos, hospitals and daily life to deny it. These events were so unlikely that they should have never occurred during my entire lifetime and the common theme among all of them was love. Even signs from our spirit guides are acts of love, my smoke alarm didn’t just randomly malfunction on its own.
The general rule is that the most loving and balanced outcome becomes the most likely. I like to visualize love as a giant magnet that you place underneath a pinball machine. The ball might bounce around for a while, but eventually it’s going to end up at the magnet.
God According to Quantum Mechanics
A major hurdle for people studying quantum mechanics and spirituality is rejecting the Newtonian paradigm. Remember Newtonian physics is not reality, it’s how people in 17th century Northern Europe expected reality to behave based on their religious assumptions. We’ve been teaching people to ignore their own experiences and contradictory evidence through public education ever since.
In newtonian physics the universe is objective and measurable, but in quantum mechanics it’s the complete opposite. The universe is subjective requiring an observer to collapse the quantum wave functions and manifest reality. You only measure what you observe.
To put it another way, wave-particle duality implies that all matter is both a particle and a wave. Alternatively, matter is neither a particle nor wave, but a third thing (that doesn’t have a name) with properties of both particles and waves. Either way you put it, you end up with the result that everything in the universe has a quantum wave function. This wave function includes complex (imaginary) numbers meaning that we can’t see and interact with it. It’s either immaterial or exists in a higher dimension that we don’t have access to. However, when the particle is observed its wave function collapses down to a point and becomes real. Before that it existed in a superposition of all states.
The way I like to think about it is like there are two universes. The first is the universe of potential which we cannot see and is technically infinite, the wave functions are unbounded. The second is the observable universe which we manifest into existence through observation. In this way we literally create our own unique realities. The observable universe is completely subjective, physics can’t occur in quantum mechanics without an observer. Before observation everything is in a superposition of all possible states.
Wait a second, you might say. I understand that observation collapses quantum wave functions, but what happens when nobody’s around? How did stars and galaxies form before humans ever looked at them through a telescope? This reminds me of the old zen koan, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s around does it make a sound?
The answer in QM is yes, the tree can observe itself. All matter can create observations and is technically “conscious” according to QM’s definition as any physical interaction will collapse the quantum wave function and manifest potential. As bizarre as it sounds rocks are conscious according to QM.
In order for both these facts to be true:
1) Collapsing the quantum wave function requires observation
2) All physical matter can collapse wave functions
There has to be an omniscient field that permeates the entire universe and is capable of creating observations. This omniscient field would be everywhere at once, in every particle of every atom, and also omnipotent. By simply choosing what to observe and using love to alter probabilities it could manifest whatever reality it wanted out of the infinite potential. Many people call this omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent being Re or Source. I prefer to call it God or Daddy.
If this is confusing to you, I apologize. Quantum mechanics is not easy and took me many years to learn. I tried to explain with as little math as possible. To summarize:
1) Quantum Mechanics proves the existence of God. Or at least an omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent being that I call God. Unlike the calvinists who believed God would be so hands-off that you might as well ignore him (ie. Nietzsche’s death of God), he’s always there running things in the background while you’re not looking.
2) We create our own reality. We do this through observation and collapsing the quantum wave-function to manifest reality from the infinite potential. Our realities are all unique and subjective, they can’t exist without an observer. The one exception is the existence of God and God’s love which is common to everyone. It’s the one exception that proves the rule and allows all realities to exist.
3) Miracles occur through unconditional love. Quantum mechanics says that anything can happen for no reason. Practically nothing is impossible, just improbable. We make things more probable by having pure and loving and intentions and reality tends to converge to the most loving and harmonious outcome over time.
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