The Quantum Nature of God

				Imitating Borges

    In his attempts to understand the inner workings of the world, Man
has encountered objects far beyond his everyday experience. Nowadays
schoolchildren must get used to the existence of things they cannot see
(viruses, atom, X-rays) and sounds they cannot hear, but at least they
are permitted to visualize them as diminished or enlarged versions of
familiar sights and sounds. From a student of modern physics even this
consolation is taken - he must think of his electrons and photons as
having attributes of several familiar things, but of none entirely. He
deals with monsters with the body of a particle, the face of a wave, and
the nature of a spirit. As good spiritts do, these chimeras have no
precise place where they can be found. Should we want to hunt them, we
must enter the labyrinths of indeterminancy, known as quantum physics.

    A major property of a quantum particle is that we are unable to
measure both its position and velocity at the same time, something we
can easely accomplish with a ball on a pool table. A stream of photons,
particles of light, hits the ball, is dispersed and reflected by it,
some of these photons end up in our eyes and we see the ball, but this
steady photon bombardment hardly affects it.

    Not so with an electron, whose size is comparable to that of a
quantum of light. To see it, we must catch photons that interacted with
it; each interaction will affect our electron just as pool balls affect
each other when they collide. In other words, we cannot see an electron
without disturbing it and altering its course. We cannot enter that
river twice, because by entering it the first time we disturb and so
change the river forever. Imagine Midas trying to use his sense of
touch, or Meduse attempting to observe the variety of expressions of a
single human face.

    It occured to me recently, that God, so often accused of seeing the
horrors of this world and allowing them to unfold, has the same problem.
Maybe He is so much bigger than the world, that the latter is a quantum
object to Him. He knows that His attempt to observe our world will
change it, catastrophically.

    The day God looks upon his creation may be the Doomsday. His gaze
may be deadlier than the seven calamities and the six cups. Maybe He,
having finished Creation, turned away or put himself to sleep so that it
could continue and endure.

    Beda Venerabilis speaks of a king who was presented with a simple
wooden crate, tightly shut. Inside, he had been told, lay a drawing of
surpassing beauty, so fine that daylight would destroy it in a fraction
of an instant. The king cherished the box more than the rest of his
treasures; the legend does not tell if he had opened it and what
happened if he had. Commentators find it strange that this story in
Beda's book follows his treatise on the Apocalypse.