Entanglement

Entanglement

 

Acts 17:22-31

Paul's message to the Athenians 

 

17:22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, "Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way.

 

17:23 For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, 'To an unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.

 

17:24 The God who made the world and everything in it, is Lord of heaven and earth, and does not live in shrines made by human hands,

 

17:25 nor is God served by human hands, as though God needed anything, since God himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.

 

17:26 From one ancestor he made all people to inhabit the whole earth, and God allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live,

 

17:27 so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for God and find God--though indeed God is not far from each one of us.

 

17:28 For 'In God we live and move and have our being'; as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we, too, are God’s offspring.'

 

17:29 "Since we are God's offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.

 

17:30 While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now God commands all people everywhere to repent,

 

17:31 because God has fixed a day on which the world will be judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this God has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead."

 

 

What if I told you that science has proved the bizarre theory that two subatomic particles—photons—can be given a like charge, and then split apart as far as the East is from the West, and because of something called “quantum entanglement,” if the nearest one has its charge reversed, the other particle, with which it is entangled, will instantaneously change its charge to match? And this “entanglement” phenomenon seemingly happens at much faster than the speed of light, which the General Theory of Relativity (Einstein’s work of genius) says is impossible. Now, there are lots of “explanatory” theories as to how this may happen, the most unusual of these having to do with how the very act of observing the particles itself changes them. But how can one particle know what is happening to the other, especially if it has been sent halfway across the galaxy? This is the “magic” of quantum entanglement. I say “magic” because it is, actually. The stuff of quantum theory that has already been proven, much of it in the laboratory, has left little room for questioning its validity. The quantum understanding of the nature of existence is so “real” that we have already tapped its “magic” to build the earliest of quantum computers. I read recently that one of these “primitive” quantum computers, when fed mathematical “chum” (complex problems set up by a “regular” computer of current technology), was able to perform calculations that would have taken the current “fastest” computers over 10,000 YEARS to do, and it did them in a matter of seconds. You see, a quantum computer is not limited to the “off” and “on” binary states of current digital computers, but has all of the various quantum states as operators. Unbelievable.

 

No, I’m not going to tell you more about quantum entanglement and quantum mechanics, because most of what you have just read is all I know, and this is after years to reading about it and trying to understand it. And, believe me, most of what you have just read will be disputed, corrected, and even totally debunked by the latest of quantum theorists. I’ve already read, for example, that the “Bell’s theorem” about the entangled photons may be true because the two “particles” (and yes, there are serious questions in quantum mechanics as to whether “particles” actually exist) may not be “apart,” even when we think we have moved them thusly. Their relationship to each other, according to this wrinkle, cannot be altered, even when we think we’ve done so. Think this is weird? How about the little particle we have dubbed a QUARK? Quantum theorists tell us there are six “flavors” of Quarks they have named: up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charm. These are the kinds of strangeness the just-emerging quantum computer can tap to do its magic! You think we have a problem with computers now, just imagine when they are millions of times faster, come in “flavors,” and are so “related” to each other through entanglement that we can’t turn them off. Where can we go to make any sense out of this stuff? How about the Bible…

 

Yes, the Bible. Some in the community of faith believe the Holy Spirit “inspired” the writers of the Bible to get it perfect, which is how we must interpret it and believe it. Not me. My belief in the Holy Spirit “inspiration” of the Bible comes from its postulates that sound a lot like modern Quantum physics, yet written thousands of years ago, and no, aliens weren’t involved. You know that little, modern praise ditty we sing, “Our God is an awesome God”? I like to redact it to “Our God is a Quantum God,” which is actually more awesome than the original songwriter could have imagined. 

 

If we believe God exists, and has been around for a long while, at least long enough to have been the Creator of all we are and see, then we would necessarily have to believe that God is also the author of all of this Quantum weirdness out of which we somehow exist. If I were to put my life experiences up against the Quark’s, I think I can match it, for my life has seen up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm, many times and manifest in many ways. And after 49 years dedicated to the same partner, I can say that we are close to mastering entanglement, and yet this relationship definitely has had its “strange” and “charmed” moments. Just this morning, in fact. 

 

If there is a biblical author with even a primitive scientific context to his work, it is Dr. Luke, the author of this weekend’s text. Of course, he’s reporting on what the Apostle Paul allegedly said to the gathered braintrust of the Areopagus, the Athenians who liked to parse the meaning of life. And we should not forget that Paul was highly schooled, himself a student of the great Gamaliel, so he was no piker when it came to throwing out some astute postulates to rattle his intellectual audience. Paul starts with their statue to an “Unknown God,” a kind of catchall deity they crafted as a contingency for those things not covered by the myriad other gods festooning the Areopagus. Nothing like a little educated “CYA,” as they say. However, Paul takes the “Unknown God” to extremes, suggesting this God doesn’t just exist to pick up the loose ends, but is instead the CREATOR of it all. It certainly got their attention. He tells them this God can stand alone quite well, thank you, and has no need of anything, particularly from US, whom this God actually created in the first place. This REALLY got their attention, for I’m pretty sure the Areopagus gang felt that by standing around philosophizing, they were “doing God’s work,” and were invaluable to the continuance of reality. I have to ask myself, how far have we progressed from this idea? 

 

I do happen to believe that we humans are called into a “partnership” with God to the ministry of “tikkun olam,” as our Jewish siblings would say. It means “fixing the world.” But it is God who calls us into this service, and not because God “needs” us, but because we need to take some ownership in the task. If God in genie-like fashion just fixed it for us, we would promptly “subdue” it again, if not in the name of profit, then at least power. But God doesn’t “need” us, any more than a modern parent “needs” children. (There was a time in earlier agrarian America when a fleet of children were necessary to help the subsistence farming efforts of the family, but we are long past that.) We tend to have children today for a variety of reasons, the best of which is we want a family to love, and to build into a supportive, growing, and interdependent “community.” And if we do it correctly and ethically, we might just turn our children out into the world as responsible adult citizens who will continue to engage in tikkun olamin their generation, for let’s face it, there is a lot more “fixing” to do than we can get done in our time. 

 

This “partnership” God is calling us into is not furthered by our doing the “Athenian coffee hour” kind of thing, standing around “doing theology” and making up religious rules to make disinterested others do what we believe they should be doing. We are in an era when a lot of this is going around. In our own faith of Christianity, we have more than enough “thinkers” who preach a brand of Christianity that “clearly” lays out the correct doctrines and dogmas, pontificates on the “appropriate” interpretations of scripture, and tacks the label “biblical authority” on its own version of the catchall “Unknown God.” The kind of partnership God is calling us may well be helped, not hindered, by alliances with humanists and believers of other religions who share the goal of fixing the world, not proselytizing it. 

 

In a book I’m reading right now, Unapologetic: Why despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense, by Francis Spufford, he makes a case for expanding the partnership. He quotes Irish novelist and playwright, Samuel Beckett, as defining his own atheism in a single statement, “God doesn’t exist, the bastard!” Beckett, like so many other atheists, would like to believe there IS a deity who desires all humans to live together in peace and harmony, but he just doesn’t see it, and he’s sad about that. (I found Beckett’s statement both haunting and insightful, and am still pondering it.) And while I DO believe God exists, I am tempted to echo Woody Allen’s thought that God may well be an “underachiever.” But perhaps it’s WE who are the underachievers?

 

And this brings me to my final point: entanglement. Paul, at least in Dr. Luke’s testimony here, says something quite insightful that would have grabbed the Areopagus crowd right in the groin, regarding their “Unknown God”: In God we live and move and have our being, a statement Paul attributes to one of their own poets. Talk about entanglement! Couple that with what Paul tells the Colossians, that “God is all and in all, and that which holds all things together,” and you pretty much have a decent first-century description of what the Quantum scientists are telling us. We, the creation, AND the Creator are forever entangled, and even as the quantum computer people are just scratching the earliest surface of what a quantum computer will look like, so we, as humans may just be about to embark on a cursory understanding of what this entanglement with each other, God, and the universe may look like. At the very least, it pretty much kills off the “Lone Ranger” version of religious narrative. I happen to believe that this “entangled” God DOES exist, and until we “get it” about just how entangled we all are under the sun, then WE are the bastards—the ones needing reconciliation to the model. 

 

Speaking about “under the sun,” there is the Son to be dealt with. God has “so entangled the world that God sent the only Son into the world that none should perish.” Heard something like that before? God is SO entangled with us that God Almighty sent Jesus into the human world as PART of the human world, and as soon as he was able to speak, he began connecting us to the “quantum” scriptures of the Torah and teaching us about how to live as people forever “entangled” with God and our neighbor. 

 

This text ends up talking about judgment. Why do we always connect biblical talk of “judgment” with punishment? (And yes, I know there are texts that do that, but what if this “judgment” is just an entangled God’s way of saying we would be periodically “graded” to help improve our efforts at partnering with all this fixing, redeeming, and reconciling stuff? Even Paul in this text seems to equate this judgment with the hope of the resurrection, leading me to believe that this is precisely what God wants to do, when the word “judgment” is thrown around. An “entangled” God wouldn’t “judge and punish,” but would instead “grade and correct,” for to quote the immortal Steve Smith (“Red Green”), “We are all in this together.” Maybe all those quarks, mu mesons, photons, and Higgs bosons are just following our lead? After all, Jesus DID try to teach us how to cope with all of life’s up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charm moments of life! Amaze, amaze, amaze! Amen.