God, Subjective Idealism and Quantum Mechanics.

As is well known, so it needs no elaboration from me here, the only guarantee that there is a reality independent of our human minds in Berkeley's idealism is God - because such a reality would exist at all times in his mind. The fabled "tree in the quad" exists, even when no human is looking at it - even when no other sentient animal is looking at it - because God is doing so.

There have been a number of attempts to remove God from the subjective idealist picture since Berkeley's time, of which a recent one is Helen Yetter-Chappell's 'Idealism Without God', Chapter 6, pp.66-81 in Tyron Goldschmidt and Kenneth L. Pearce, eds. (2017), Idealism. New Essays in Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press (OUP). Jonathan Head, in Chapter 3, 'Idealism in Fourfold Root', of Jonathan Head and Dennis Vanden Auweele, eds. (2016), Schopenhauer's Fourfold Root, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, England: Routledge (Taylor and Francis), argues that Schopenhauer was not a Kantian transcendental idealist, as is usually supposed, but an atheist subjective idealist. Indeed, echoing Head, one may argue that, in saying 'The world is my representation (or idea)' (Die Welt ist mein Vorstellung - fascinatingly, 'Google Translate' turns that into 'the world is my imagination'! The algorithm is badly in need of a German dictionary), Schopenhauer is being a solipsist, especially if one places perhaps undue emphasis on the 'my'.

An atheist subjective idealism might have been possible before the twentieth century: it is impossible now, for a reason of which Helen Yetter-Chappell would seem completely oblivious, namely, quantum mechanics.

In his book, God and the Cosmologists (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1989, Chapter 6, 'Loaded Dice', pp.163-164), Stanley L. Jaki discusses the debate between Niels Bohr and Arthur Holly Compton on the subject of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Compton argued, with impeccable logic, that the Uncertainty Principle did not apply to God - as, indeed, it could not, given only that there is a God. God, being omniscient, by definition knows the exact position, linear and angular momentum of every single atom and sub-atomic particle in the Universe - and indeed, in all universes, if there is more than one. As he possesses an infinite and eternal mind, or Mind, that presents no problem! This is knowledge that no human, or any other sentient life-form, can have.

It comes as no surprise to learn, as Jaki tells us, that Bohr could not, and did not, accept Compton's argument. He dismissed all talk of God, and refused to talk about him in the context either of quantum mechanics or science, generally.

As I have made clear in an earlier post, I have my own problem with the God of orthodox monotheistic religion, on grounds associated with the theodicy question ('Theodicy, or the Justice of God'). As I see it, God can have all the attributes traditionally associated with him except that of omnibenevolence. He might be good some of the time to some people, but he isn't good all of the time to all people, or at any rate, not equally good. How else does one account, for example, for the Holocaust, or the Killing Fields of Cambodia - or for what Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine?

God is supposedly both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, but the existence in the world of evil and suffering entails that he is omnipotent or omnibenevolent. He cannot be both, given his omniscience. How can a good God, aware of every single thought in everyone's head, and of every single evil intention, not use some of his infinite power to prevent that intention from turning into an act? The so-called 'free will' defence is no defence: was the free will of the Nazis so much more valuable to God than the life of a single Jewish child murdered at Auschwitz? 

If God has foreknowledge, so that he has complete knowledge of all future events, as well as past and present ones, then there is no such thing as 'free will', and everything has been determined by God from the very beginning of time. This would put all moral responsibility for evil on him, and not on anyone else! This is one reason why I tend to agree with Richard Swinburne, in his The Coherence of Theism, Oxford: OUP, 1993, that God's omniscience does not entail foreknowledge. This, however, is not the orthodox view - but Swinburne is determined to defend the concept of free will, and so must argue as he does.

We are left with a God who knows the exact position and momentum (linear and angular) of every quantum particle in the Universe/Multiverse at all moments in cosmic time t until the present - which, incidentally, implies the existence of an absolute cosmic time. Kurt Gödel demonstrated what would happen if we dispensed with such a thing (time travel into the past, with all the causal paradoxes that would ensue), and in the process, proved that, having got rid of absolute time and space in his Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein brought them both back in his General Theory - see Gödel's1949 paper here. (As time and space are intimately linked, you can't have an absolute time co-ordinate without having absolute space, since you can measure lengths by multiplying t by c, the speed of light in vacuum, which is itself an absolute! See my paper on this issue here.)

What does this do for quantum mechanics (QM)? QM rests on an illegitimate conflation of ontology with epistemology by physicists, like Niels Bohr, who were very bad philosophers. Indeed, most of them preferred not to talk about ontology at all, as ontology is metaphysics, not physics. Epistemology comes under that rubric too, however! They wanted to deny the existence of 'objective reality', much to the disgust of Albert Einstein, but still talk about it! They were, in effect, idealists who could never bring themselves to admit their idealism.

Hence the nonsense of Schrödinger's Cat. Let us, for now, ignore all questions relating to the obvious animal cruelty entailed in this famous (or infamous) Gedankenexperiment, and focus exclusively on the philosophical issues involved. Let us assume, to begin with, that there is no God, and that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is universally applicable. The cat is in its box, the lid is shut, and - until that box is opened - there is no way that anyone at all can discover if the feline is alive or dead. It is alive and dead, so we are led to believe, according to orthodox QM!

That this is complete and utter nonsense is obvious - or it should be. Yet it is repeated over and over and over again as fact. It is even plastered over the front of tee-shirts! And all this because most twentieth and twenty-first century physicists could not bring themselves to acknowledge the existence of God, or the role he might play in creation!

For one only has to accept the possibility that monotheism (and unitarian monotheism is likely to be its more coherent and defensible form) is true to see that God would know whether the cat in the box was alive or dead, and that - consequently - the cat is either alive or dead, not alive and dead!

If Berkeleyan idealism, by which I mean adherence to the propositions that there are no mind-independent objects, and that to be is to be perceived or to perceive, is to remain a viable philosophy in the twenty-first century, given QM, then those who advocate it have no alternative but to adhere to theism in some form, however modified or heterodox it might be.

Theism, on the other hand, does not necessarily entail religious practices, such as prayer or any form of worship, or membership of any religious community. Indeed, the kind of deity I have discussed (see above) invites execration, rather than adoration. Misotheism is a viable option for those of us for whom atheism is impossible, and - given the state of our world, might well make sense.