Schrödinger's Calvinist
Most people have heard in one form or another the idea of the ill-fated and potentially furious cat from Shrödinger's famous thought experiment. Now I'm not a great scientific mind and it isn't my intention today to explain how that concept works or doesn't, so apologies to anyone who understands it better than me if I over-simplify it here. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, in the mid 1930's a fellow named Shrödinger was involved in the scientific discussion about how to understand quantum mechanics, and came up with an analogy that highlighted some of the issues he saw as potentially problematic in dealing with quantum entanglement by bringing the microscopic up to macro scale. (if you didn't understand all of that, it's okay – it's pretty complicated, and not necessary to follow the rest of the text here)
In his thought experiment (meaning he didn't actually do this, just thought about it) a cat would be placed into a sealed box with a machine that would potentially and randomly kill the cat, or possibly not. The point was that there was a 50% chance that the cat was either alive or dead when someone came to observe, but the outcome could not be known until it was observed. The idea being that, unobserved inside the box, the cat was in what was called a “superposition” being both alive and dead at the same time equally – and at the instant of being observed, the cat would fall into one or other of the positions and either lie in the box like a sack of beans or leap out and attempt to rip off the face of the nearest observer – who would as a result be in absolutely no doubt of the present state of the cat.
One might just as easily suggest that a tree that falls in the forest where no one can see or hear it both falls, and doesn't, until such time as someone wanders by and notices that it's lying on their car. Or that if you flip a coin and it falls down into a sewer, it is both heads and tails until someone goes down there to get it because you ought not to have used their bus money for your silly thought experiment. This thought experiment is perplexing for a lot of people and feels like something of a waste of time because we instinctively know that the outcome of something like flipping a coin doesn't need to be a superposition of undecided possible ends, it's much simpler to see the world as a place where things objectively happen and are resolved, observed or otherwise, and our observation of them changes nothing but our perception of the outcome from unknown to known. Now I'm not going to discuss superposition or quantum entanglement because at this point I'm about at the extent of my understanding of it, but thinking about this got me to an interesting idea which I wanted to share. I should state that I’m probably a marginally better theologian than scientist, but I don't claim to be a great theological mind any more than a great scientific one, but I do frequently encounter discussions about free will and predestination, and it seems to me this concept might bear some reflecting on. The issue people bump into when dealing with predestination often looks a bit like this.
- God knows everything (including the future). Heb 4:13
- God made us the way we are (including our inclinations) Ps 33:13-15, Prov 16:9
- God knows us well enough to unfailingly know what we will do. Ps 139:1-4, Eph 1:4-5
- God orchestrates events to ultimately serve his will. Rom 8:28, Rom 9:18-20
- We feel like we have freedom to choose our actions. Prov 1:29
- God treats us like we are responsible for our decisions. James 1:13-16
- God's desire is that all be saved from death and hell. 1 Tim 2:3-4
- Scripture tells us some will be saved and many will not. Matt 7:13-14
I've certainly over-simplified and caricatured these positions here, but we tend to call the two positions Arminianism and Calvinism respectively, although the people they are named for probably wouldn't recognise them if they were still alive to see them today. Now I'm not going to pretend that I can resolve this argument in one short document when denominations have had decade and century long discussions about how to reconcile these ideas, but I had an interesting thought that I wanted to share.
One idea we get in the study of quantum physics and such is the idea of parallel worlds. If you happen to be a science fiction fan you've no doubt encountered the idea a lot, but for those who aren't, the idea is that reality as we know it is not like a line where I throw a coin in the air and it comes down heads and then I throw it again and it comes down heads again and that is simply what happened and no other possibility exists now because the past is written in stone, but rather like a tree in which my first decision to throw a coin resulted in two versions of events being played out in two identical worlds – one where the coin was a head, which I now experience and another that I am unaware of in which the coin came down tails instead. My second time throwing the coin similarly produces two versions of events for each of the two (making three that I am now unaware of, and one in which I got two heads in a row and wondered if my coin was unevenly weighted). There might also be several more in which I chose not to throw the coin and instead ate some cheese or went to the zoo. The result being that there are now dozens of possible worlds in which I made all manner of different decisions all being played out by various versions of me that are basically the same, but are possibly in some ways different (the one who could afford to go to the zoo is undoubtedly wealthier).
Could it be that in some reality I have a debilitating gambling addiction, or am I trying to be a faithful missionary in Uganda, or both? Perhaps in one version I was recently the first person to set foot on Mars. How many of those versions of me are followers of Christ and how many are not? I have no way of knowing. All I could ever see would be this version in which I find myself now.
But assuming this is the nature of reality (and it is only speculation – I'm not suggesting I've figured out the true nature of the reality) when you imagine how God sees my life, spread across hundreds of versions with all manner of outcomes, and he says he knows them all because he can see their end from before the beginning of time as we know it, it doesn't really impinge on what I perceive as my own freedom to act. All of my decisions are mine and create the unique shape of the tree of my multiple lives all branching from the single point at which I first existed.
He knew me (all of them) before any of my days came to be.
Perhaps it is as though I exist in a “superposition” of being all of those variations at once until the end of all of those collective lives, at which time my experience of this temporal existence ends, at which point it all collapses into some shape that represents the best of me - the ideal toward which Christ has been leading me - and all the versions of me that were not prepared to cooperate with Christ’s redemptive work are ultimately cast away.
Could it be that in this way every person (in one version or other) might become a genuine follower of Christ, just as every person might succumb to their basest impulses and do horrendous things we might be unwilling to forgive. I can never know if this is true – it is an un-testable hypothesis. And I should stress, it is just a theory, less than a theory, a supposal. But equally, I can never know for sure what the outcome of this version in which I live will be for me, let alone all the other people who live in this version of events. All I can know is that for this version of me, I know Christ and I do my best (however ineptly) to be a faithful follower of him because I know I can do no other. To which version of you am I communicating – the one who knows Christ already, or the one who is destined to experience an encounter with him tomorrow? I can never know, but I do know that his desire is that you would know that he loves you like he does me, and it's my job, and my pleasure, to tell you that, after that it's up to him... or possibly you.
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