Quantum Theology [Paperback]

O'Murchu does an excellent job of introducing quantum theory (and to a lesser extent chaos theory) as a potential source of theological enlightenment. But one suspects he brings a lot of prior (Marxist?) baggage to the table that in places seems to contradict his central thesis. For example he makes a valid point of the wholeness of good and evil, light and dark, etc. and deplores our traditional way of dealing with these as polar opposites or dualisms. Fine so far, but then when he describes some of the "sins" of the contemporary world, he does so in much the same polemical way of any conventional "politcially correct" attack on the forces of evil as a typcial left-wing activist defines it. He proposes engagement with our shadow side as an alternative to the traditional Christian response to evil, however defined. But when listing his pet "sins" of today, O'Murchu promptly lapses into the traditional attack mode response himself and he seems oblivious to the contradiction.

For example he is highly critical of competition throughout the book and urges cooperation in its place. I agree that is often called for, but at the same time competition and cooperation often complement each other. In fact competition often has the effect of enchancing cooperation in a wide range of arenas such as team sports, etc. O'Murchu never invokes his broader understanding that these two modes are complementary aspects rather than polar opposites. For example O'Murchu himself describes how the competitive invasion of a virus into the body soon invokes a cooperative antibody response by the immune system. Yet he ignores the fact that something similar is often at work in the social body.

He also mentions alcoholism at several points but only as a "family disease" (which it certainly can become. But he hints that the individual alcoholic has no personal responsibility for making a decision to submit to addiction or not. He leaves the impression that it is caused by an unfair social order "which drives people to drink". That is of course nearly every alcoholics favorite excuse. Oddly enough O'Murchu ignores Alcoholics Anonymous which has had the greatest success by far in getting people to abstain from drink mainly by entering into a spiritual life much like the one he seems to be advocating.

Still, despite these criticisms, I liked the book and thought it well worth reading. It is loaded with excellent insights. It gives a good overview of the contemporary theological scene as well. And as I said, O'Murchu well explains how quantum theory opens the door to a fruitful theological and spiritual discussion that classical Newtonian physics precludes. However, for those who want greater depth of understanding on just how and why the wave/particle duality of quantum theory opens this door, I recommend reading Lothar Schafer's 1997 book, In Search of Divine Reality (U. of Ark. Press)

I agree with other reviewers that this book has bias issues, the least of which is not a strong Feminist bias. But beyond these biases, there are serious factual errors in its presentation of modern physics. I will list only two:

1. On page 17, the author says that we know that the earth has existed for at least 15 billion years. In fact, modern theory has it that the universe has existed for about 15 billion years while our earth has only existed for about 5 billion years, our sun being a second or third generation star. This error is in some very elementary material. Confusing the ages of the earth and the universe raises an immediate red flag to me and throws a shadow on the remaining contents of the book.

2. On page 31, the author refers to passing a beam of light through a "Stern-Gerlach device" in which the (magnetic) field seperates the initial beam into two weaker beams. The Stern-Gerlach experiment in fact involves sending a beam of (uncharged) particles (not light) through an inhomogeneous magnetic field and observing their deflections. The results show that, while the particles do, in fact, possess intrinsic angular momenta, analogous to the angular momentum of classically spinning objects, these momenta are quantized and take on only certain discreet values. Light is not involved at all in the Stern-Gerlach experiment. Confusing a beam of light with a particle beam is another serious error which (for me) throws into question everything that the book claims to teach about quantum mechanics (or about modern science in general).

There have been many books that have attempted to combine religion or mysticism with quantum mechanics. This one was recommended to me by a friend who is a Catholic nun. I spotted the errors while scanning the pages of the book prior to actually reading it. Perhaps it is best simply to leave such disciplinary mixtures as physics and religion/mysticism alone since they are more like oil and water in their mixing properties, forming an emulsion rather than a solution, than, say sugar and water, in which the sugar really does go into solution.

I do not recommend this book.

This book fails to set up and maintain a logical flow to advance its thesis. He should have started with the appendix as a list of axioms, then proven statements from those axioms to construct his theory. Instead, the text is rather scatter-brained and lacking in conciseness. He fails to give good definitions of many terms used (light, dark, etc), which leaves them as free parameters instead of giving them precise moral values.

To me, the objective of furthering the implementation of quantum physics within theology is admirable, though questionable in its justification. His principles are vast, unproveable generalizations of a poorly understood physical theory which itself is only an approximation to more fundamental theories (such as string/M-theory, if it turns out to really be a physical theory). So, even ignoring the free parameters, the applicability of his axioms to our universe is unclear.

Moreover, as faith is the one truly subjective human pursuit, completely lacking in objective data to ground together multiple viewpoints, any arguments involving faith fail to compel. This is because there is no reason for all beings to share the same faith, no evidence to draw or repel potential believers. Some may argue that holy scriptures are pieces of such evidence, however they are analogous to a report on a physical experiment conducted long ago which states only the results of the experiment, with no description of the setup itself. In this case, the experiment is not repeatable, since we don't know how it was conducted, and we have no way of knowing how much the authors' personal prejudices or mistakes influenced his/her report. Holy scriptures give, at best, second hand accounts of the true objective data (the miracles, revelations, etc) and since we are unable to witness those miracles, etc, for ourselves we are simply left with interesting, useless tales.

Thus, O'Murchu's axioms which ascribe a definite nature to the supernatural, hence require faith to be held as true, are merely arbitrary choices within an infinite array of equally weighted possibilities. Therefore, I find his project to be flawed in both its basis and its execution.