Quantum Physics Is Not Jesus Magic, Ross Douthat
Welcome to Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat. This is a podcast that examines the book, line by line, page by page, written by Ross Douthat, a right wing Christian nationalist commentator, a pundit.
He wrote a book called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Ross Douthat claimed that it’s a reasonable, logical book explaining how everyone has to be religious. He claimed that he's going to be able to prove that to you using the force of logic, of rationality.
On page 30 and 31 now, we’re going to examine a new argument, and based on physics. In the last episode, Ross Douthat was claiming that the universe's physical properties, its basic structure, was determined, was chosen consciously by a God in order to create the planet Earth so that human beings could live on it, to worship that God.
We talked about that idea in the last episode. Go back and look at that if you want to deal with that issue. Today we're dealing with another issue in physics.
On pages 30 and 31, Ross Douthat is claiming that consciousness can impact physical reality. Of course, human consciousness does impact physical reality, in a sense. I mean, you choose with your consciousness to move your body and you can do things like picking up a rock and throwing it. That impacts physical reality.
Ross Douthat, however, is talking about something else. He's talking about shifting reality, not through the body, but through the force of mind itself, consciousness itself. Physicists, he says, have observed how simply being observed by a conscious mind changes what that little subatomic particle does.
That’s a really fun idea, and there is something about that in quantum physics, something like that, but not exactly that.
This is a case in which Ross Douthat has gone slip sliding over a slope by taking a presumption and amplifying it, misunderstanding quantum physics when it suits him.
There is an idea that there are particles that are so small, subatomic particles, that the way that they move is not like the way that we watch large objects move. This has absolutely been demonstrated in experimental quantum physics. You see that little subatomic particles can sometimes act like waves, sometimes like particles, and they can be entangled, in a sense, to move in a certain way, in coordination with each other over a distance.
It's weird. There is no doubt that quantum mechanics is weird.
However, what Ross Douthat is claiming is that by having a human consciousness specifically look at a subatomic particle, that changes its behavior. He's going to use that to say that consciousness is the building block of physical reality. Therefore, physical reality itself is consciousness, and that's God, see, so it all makes rational sense. It's all scientifically proven.
He's also going to use his claim about quantum mechanics later on, by the way, to justify all kinds of supernatural belief in things like psychic powers, ESP, premonitions, and ghosts, and in essence, religion and supernatural powers of all different kinds and beastly creatures and monsters.
Once you start down that path, you open it up to all sorts of things, and soon you're talking about demons and ghosts and fairies, but for right now on pages 30 to 31, he’s not bringing that in yet.
What Ross Douthat is saying is that consciousness affects subatomic particles, that when you look at a subatomic particle, it changes it from one condition to another.
Here’s the thing: There has been something very close to that in the Copenhagen Theory, which Ross Douthat does accurately name, but he sort of doesn't represent fairly what the Copenhagen theory actually supposes that when there is a concrete determination, which is sometimes “the observer,” When there is that concrete determination of where a subatomic particle is, it changes the nature of that subatomic particle.
Ross Douthat writes that the human mind seems to play some decisive role in making physical reality take shape with that. “The conscious observer places a mysterious but essential role in collapsing quantum possibility into physical reality.”
This is kind of about making a kind of wave of quantum potential get condensed down into a physical particle. Ross Douthat says that requires human consciousness.
Ross Douthat cites two physicists, in particular, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg as he makes that claim, but here's the trick. Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr both explicitly and publicly refuted the misinterpretation that Ross Douthat makes of of this experimental observation.
I'm going to start by citing Werner Heisenberg, famously of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.
“Of course the introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to imply that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of nature. The observer has, rather, only the function of registering decisions, i.e. processes in space and time, and it does not matter whether the observer is an apparatus or a human being.”
You don't have to have human consciousness for this impact to take place. You can have a physical device registering that something happened at the subatomic level, the quantum level.
Now let's go on to Niels Bohr. Niels Bohr says this:
“Unambiguous information concerning atomic objects is derived from the permanent marks such as a spot on a photographic plate caused by the impact of an electron left on the bodies which define the experimental conditions. Far from involving any special intricacy, the irreversible amplification effects on which the recording of the presence of atomic objects rests, rather remind us of the essential irreversibility, inherent in the very concept of observation. The description of atomic phenomena has in these respects a perfectly objective character, in the sense that no explicit reference is made any individual observer.”
Again, you don't have to have a conscious mind for this to take place, a physical photographic plate can register a specific impact. What we're talking about is the distinction between potential and actuality in the quantum realm, and that's weird enough, but human consciousness, it turns out, has nothing to do with this.
Another physicist, Richard Feynman said this:
“Nature does not know what you are looking at, and she behaves the way that she is going to behave, whether you bother to take down the data or not.”
Once again, Ross Douthat fails to understand the science that he attempts to describe, that he attempts to pull in to use to justify his faith. Ross Douthat has faith in the truth of his religion. He has faith that it's true, and he goes around looking for excuses to justify it. For people who are not already, in that faith, it just doesn't make sense, and it certainly isn't rational.
That's why not everyone believes Ross Douthat.