Quantum mechanics and the Trinity
Trinitarian interpretations, that is, interpretations of the Christian concept of the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and…
Trinitarian interpretations, that is, interpretations of the Christian concept of the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and interpretations of quantum mechanics, the study of small particles and systems have a lot in common. Both talk about something, i.e. God or a particle, being one and many at the same time. Both try to make sense of what we observe versus what our doctrine says is going on. And both have contentious histories of debate over what it all means.
Indeed, the early ecumenical councils of the church, back before the Great Schism of 1054, when Latin and Greek churches were (mostly) unified, focused on what to make of the nature of Christ and the Holy Spirit and how they related to the Father God of the Old Testament. Eventually, the church settled on a definition of what the Trinity was and was not. The shorthand for this official definition is that God is three different persons in one substance. When they came up with this, it was based on what they had been told or read God had revealed to human beings. Thus, it is not a theory of who God is so much as what God has chosen to reveal, i.e., what we have observed of God.
Likewise, in quantum mechanics, interpreting it is based on what we have observed. We see that particles can contain many contradictory observations in one observable of the particle. Thus, you can have, for example, three different observations in one observable (of the particle’s wavefunction). An example of this is when you look at the spin of an electron and find that it can have spin in the x, y, or z axes. All of these can be true simultaneously until you measure the electron spin and you find that it has only one of those. Thus, it is like three contradictory things in one, which defies the bounds of logic, but there it is with over 100 years of experimental evidence to back it up.
There have been so many attempts to understand how to interpret quantum mechanics and the Trinity that I wanted to see how quantum mechanics interpretation theories might apply to reasoning about the Trinity. How do the interpretations stack up when you translate from one to the other?
I don’t mean for this to be a serious theological treatise (nor a serious scientific one). Rather, this is a game of translation by analogy from the scientific to the theological.
The interpretations of quantum mechanics that I want to try are these:
Superselection
Modal Interpretation
Consistent Histories
Many Worlds and Many Minds
Dynamic Reduction
What these words mean isn’t that important, I’ll describe what is important below. The point is to try to describe Trinitarian doctrine using the same interpretation from quantum theory.
Superselection
In quantum mechanics, superselection basically limits what we can observe without limiting what is there. The De Facto or For All Practical Purposes (FAPP) superselection interpretation, suggests this only applies to us mere mortals and isn’t a general rule of the cosmos. So, if I have an electron with spin in the x, y, and z axes in my wavefunction, and I measure only spin in the x axis, the spin in the y and z axes are still there, they are just somehow hidden from me.
Of all the quantum interpretations, this one is the closest to what I think “official” Trinitarian doctrine is. Basically, in every manifestation of God, the fullness of the other two are present even if they aren’t visible to us mere mortals.
Modal Interpretation
There is a Trinitarian interpretation that is generally regarded as false called Modalism (aka Modalistic Monarchianism) which says that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all properties of God, sort of like different jobs or roles He fulfills, rather than distinct persons. The modal interpretation of quantum mechanics is not that. Rather, the word modal here comes from modal logic.
The modal interpretation says that the electron carries all the spins, x, y, and z as possibilities but that it actually has only one of them.
This is like the multiple personalities interpretation of the Trinity where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are like God’s different personalities, and at any given time he takes on only one. The other two just get dragged along for the ride. The important thing here is that the other two are there only as potentialities whereas in superselection they are actually there, just not observable.
Consistent Histories
In this interpretation, whatever we observe can be used to describe a history of events going back in time that is consistent with our observations. Thus, if you observe the electron as having spin x, it is because it randomly selected to have spin x before it hit your detector.
Applied to the Trinity, this is similar to early Gnostic beliefs in a divine pantheon where different persons were emanations of God from the beginning of time. Anyone who encounters the Holy Spirit can interpret that she was the Holy Spirit all along. The unified God never really comes into the picture except as an abstract set of pre-encounter possibilities. Thus, the one God is invisible and remote.
Many Worlds and Many Minds
Every time we encounter God, the world splits into three and each world has a different Person of the Trinity.
OR
Every time we encounter God, our mind splits and each mind experiences a different Person of the Trinity.
Dynamic Reduction
God squeezes down to one and only one person before encountering a human being.
Conclusion
You might ask what was the point of this exercise. Is it to justify a Trinitarian belief or a quantum mechanical belief? Neither I think. Rather by drawing parallels I aim to illustrate both by means of mutual analogy.
You also might ask what about alternative Trinitarian ideas like Arianism (the denial of the divinity of Christ). Most of these would fail basic tests of quantum mechanics if applied by analogy in a certain way to observables. Quantum mechanics is fundamentally weird and the idea that something can be multiple contradictory things at once is just part of how the theory works. We know, for example, that we can have an electron that has three different, contradictory spins in its quantum description at once and yet it only has one spin. Continuous observables like position and momentum have an infinity of possibilities, yet we measure one. That doesn’t even get into nonlocality. Like God, quantum particles can be everywhere in the universe at once. They can also appear and disappear randomly and turn into other particles through annihilation and creation processes.
Whatever your take on this is, one thing is for certain, compared to the weirdness of quantum mechanics, the doctrine of the Trinity is pretty tame.