Quantum Mechanics: A Dialectical Approach to Reality

The Thomist 65 (2001): 223-38 QUANTUM MECHANICS: A DIALECTICAL APPROACH TO REALITY WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL The Priestly Fraternity ofSt. Peter Wigratzbad-Opfenbach, Germany In a recent article, Wolfgang Smith states that "the ongoing deChristianization of Western society is due in large measure to the imposition of the prevailing scientistic world view."1 One need be neither a philosopher nor a scientist to notice that deChristianization makes its presence felt in every aspect of the life of a citizen in the modern West-familial, professional, cultural, and religious. Thus it opposes the two-and-a-half-millennial tradition that began in ancient Greece and achieved its full development in medieval Christian philosophy. This tradition is one of constant refinement and crystallization, continuously coupled with and catalyzed by the divine plan of salvation of mankind from the bondage of original sin. This complex phenomenon was well encapsulated by Etienne Gilson: It is hardly possible to realize the continuity that prevails through the whole history of Western culture, unless one keeps in mind the important part played by the Church in the work of its transmission. The Greek and Latin Fathers of the Church had so carefully preserved the classical notion of man that when St. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, undertook to build up a complete exposition of Christian truth, he did not scruple to borrow for his technical equipment from the pagan Aristotle, whose logic, physics, biology, ethics and 1 W. Smith, "From Schrodinger's Cat to Thomistic Ontology," The Thomist 63 (1999): 49. 223 224 WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL metaphysics were then transformed by his medieval disciple into as many elements of Christian synthesis.2 This Christian synthesis is central to the understanding of science as an integral part of the classical Western world view. In it all beings are perceived as purposefully ordered in their natures towards their ultimate goal, which is the glory and praise of God. In his Summa Theologiae St. Thomas writes Therefore since sacred scripture considers things insofar as they are divinely revealed, according to what has been said all things whatsoever that are able to be divinely revealed share in the one formal object of this science, and so they are included under sacred theology as under a single science.3 This position radically contradicts the currently dominant mind set that goes back at least to Descartes's decoupling of philosophical and theological wisdom, with its bifurcation of nature into res cogitans and res extensa.4 As the term extensa indicates, in Cartesian philosophy matter appears to the human mind clearly and distinctly only under the aspect of quantity. All the other Aristotelian categories of accident are thus reducible to quantity. As a result the human mind is unable to discern natures, and so is cut off from the possibility of investigating change, the object of physical science.5 The Cartesian assimilation of corporeality to pure mathematics, based on Descartes's own distrust of sense experience, has boxed science into, one could say, living a life of extension without any reference to the nature of reality. The mathematicism of Galileo, and in some ways that 2 E. Gilson, The Unity ofPhilosophical Experience (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 221. 3 Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 3. • One of the most striking examples ofscientism practically bordering on mythology is the Darwinian theory of evolution. The drastic imposition of stochasticism on the vital mechanisms of natural generation with minimal experimental evidence seems more like an attempt to carry out a deliberate philosophical agenda than an honest scientific investigation. A solid refutation of Darwinian theory based on microbiological and biochemical evidence can be found in Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Touchstone, 1996). 5 Aristotle, Physics 2.2.193b31-35. QUANTUM MECHANICS 225 of Isaac Newton, further implanted a conviction in the modern mind that physical phenomena can be accounted for simply by the use of mathematical equations. The implications of such reductionism were well summarized by Alfred North Whitehead: The laws of nature are nothing else that the observed identities of pattern persisting throughout the series of comparative observations. Thus a law of nature says something about...