The Entangled Trinity: Quantum Physics and Theology

2 Knowledge

2 Knowledge Credo ut intelligam. “I believe in order that I might understand.” –Anselm of Canterbury, PROSLOGIUM Intelligo ut credam. “I understand in order to believe.” –Abelard of Paris, SIC ET NON The human question of why always hangs suspended between the finite and the infinite. Juxtaposed between time and eternity, humans seek meaning before our own beginnings and after our demise. Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. It is quintessentially human to ask the question why? Why, for example, is there any correlation between the human mind and external reality? The great mathematician Eugene Wigner pondered this many years ago in an article titled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics.”1 Why should something as abstract as mathematics have any relationship to the external world beyond the human mind? This wonder at the regularity with which the physical world can be understood, and reverence toward its possible source, gave inspiration to both religion and science. It also opens up transcendence and spirituality within the realms of knowledge. We are a form of incarnation. The spiritual is made manifest in the material precisely in the transcending of self-interest.2 Spirituality consists in opening up 1. Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics,” Communication on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13 (1960): 1–14. 23 to the needs of the other, to transcendence of the self, and to the possibilities of meaning beyond materialistic consumption alone. Nicholas Berdyaev once observed, “To eat bread is a material act, to break and share it is a spiritual one.”3 The spiritual need not, indeed must not, be separated from the physical, for it is in the use given to the physical that the spiritual becomes manifest. So to ask questions, have doubts, and most importantly to seek understanding is a spiritual endeavor. Faith and reason need not be opposed but can complement one another in the quest for human understanding. I will attempt in this chapter to give a simplified overview of this process and to demonstrate that all human processes of knowing involve something like what I refer to as the “House of Knowing.” 1. House of Knowing A. EXPERIENCE AND ABSTRACT REFLECTION How do we “know” what we know? It sounds like a really simple question until we begin to break it down. Then we realize that what we really “know” is in our minds, and these concepts, ideas, theories, and so on are at some distance removed from our direct senses. Drawing on some understandings in linguistic philosophy, cognitive psychology, and the social-construction-ofreality theorists in sociology, we can visualize this process in a very simplified way as what I call the “House of Knowing.”4 Several centuries ago, in what some call the birth of modern philosophy or a Copernican revolution in epistemology (study of knowing), Immanuel Kant argued that the mind is active in the knowing process but that we can only know the object as it is presented to us (phenomena) and not the thing in itself (noumena, the Ding an sich). The mind is active in organizing sense perceptions and does not simply passively receive them, as British empiricist (sensory-based) philosophers such as Hume and Locke had thought. There is a foundational distinction between what something is in itself and what we can know about it. Our knowing is always our knowing, so when we try to know or understand anything, it always involves the human process of reflection, which includes abstraction, mainly through language, from the specific sense experience. Think about this 2. See John B. Cobb Jr., The Structure of Christian Existence (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967), esp. ch. 10. 3. Quoted in Langdon Gilkey, Shantung Compound (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 229. 4. This concept is a further development of an idea originally found in Richard Creel, Religion and Doubt: Toward a Faith of Your Own, 2nd ed. (New York: Prentice Hall, 1990), ch. 1. 24 | The Entangled Trinity for a moment. This abstraction from sense perception to language characterizes the whole of human reflection, even when you desperately want to know or communicate something to another human being. When you look into the eyes of your beloved and get all mushy inside and coo, “I love you!,” you immediately know it is insufficient. You feel so much more than you can communicate with words. So you say it with flowers, poetry, candy, or whatever. That is the plight of human finitude. We...