I frequently engage in religious discussions and debates on social media, and I am happy to see more and more freethinkers participating. The arguments are well fleshed out and generally focus on faith versus evidence, evolution, cosmology, the Bible, a little history, and of course, the burden of proof. Religious believers often insist that nonbelievers must prove that their god doesn’t exist; however, the burden of proof rests with the one making the claim. Still, a very powerful argument can be put forward to demonstrate that gods, if they do exist, have nothing to do with us.
This is an argument few people are aware of, and yet, in my view, it is clearly the strongest evidence against the existence of personal, theistic gods who interact with us. This is the science of quantum field theory or QFT. Britannica describes QFT as a framework—a body of physical principles combining the elements of quantum mechanics (QM) with those of relativity to explain the behavior of subatomic particles and their interactions via a variety of force fields. QFT has proved to be the single most sweeping and successful physical theory ever invented. I work in the broadband satellite industry, which is entirely dependent on QFT working as advertised.
In layman terms, QFT tells us what our observable universe is made of and how those components interact. A particle is a “quantum excitation of a field” or, more simply, a vibrating point in a field that pervades our observed universe. Integrated by four fundamental forces, it turns out that we and our natural world are composed mostly of quarks and electrons, and we know what interactions these subatomic particles are capable of. Particles have degrees of freedom, dictating which way they can move, and states (spin, mass, and charge). These parameters change in precise ways when they interact with other particles. Thanks to particle accelerators such as the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), we can observe and measure the effects of these interactions. We know what does and does not interact with the stuff we are made of. For example, trillions of neutrinos flow through us on a constant basis, yet they do not interact with the particles that comprise us.
The data assures us there are no unexplained interactions involving the particles we are made of. How then does God reach in from outside space and time and interact with those particles to influence events here? If God was interacting with us, we would have found a “God field” by now, like the Higgs field we discovered in 2012. In that case, we knew we were missing a piece—how some subatomic particles acquired their mass—and eventually we found the Higgs boson, confirming the existence of the field. There are no other missing pieces for what interacts with the components we are composed of. Any god, devil, soul, ghost force, field, or particle that interacted with the things we are made of, in a way that would be meaningful, would have been discovered and documented by now and would no longer be supernatural.
This question has been asked before. In the 1640s, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes exchanged fifty-eight letters. One of the topics they discussed was Descartes’s “mind-body dualism” proposal. She asked him, “How can the soul of a man determine the spirits of his body so as to produce voluntary actions (given that the soul is only a thinking substance)?” She wanted to know how the soul and body interact. How does the soul make the body do something, and how does the body impart information to the soul? Descartes did not have a satisfactory answer then, and the situation has markedly worsened for those who propose interacting souls and bodies today.
Let’s look at the soul, which many religious people believe exists. In our subjective experience, there is an outside world full of motion and activity. There is also an internal world with pain, pleasure, emotions, and inner dialog. It’s natural to believe that these things are separate and to suppose that one can exist without the other. Religion leverages this perception to insist that we have souls that can detach from our bodies and continue to exist in some other realm. This is easy for humans to accept because most people don’t want to die.
If our consciousness somehow persists in a soul, after the body has decayed, what particles is this soul made of? How does the “information” that is a lifetime’s worth of neurons firing get transferred to this soul thing and persist? What holds it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter? Advocates for life after death don’t even try to explain how the basic physics of our fundamental particles would have to be altered for this to work. Any who have tried will have quickly discovered the absurdity of the task.
As theoretical particle physicist Brian Cox notes, if this soul is an integral part of us, it must interact “very strongly” with matter, and we know very precisely, thanks to decades of experiments, how the matter we are composed of interacts at normal room temperatures. Cox says we can safely claim that souls that interact with matter are ruled out. He uses ghosts as an example. A ghost is something that carries the imprint of a person, so it must interact with the matter making up the person. If it is an imprint of a person, it carries a pattern. If it has a pattern, it carries information. If it carries information, there must be an energy source. In the case of ghosts, some people claim to see them, which means it interacts with light, and such interactions have been ruled out again and again through experimentation.
The soul is said to be immaterial, meaning it is outside our laws of physics, yet unless a mechanism exists to retain memories, emotions, knowledge, etc., this soul would not be of much use. If our thoughts, memories, and emotions are part of the soul, then the soul must have some ability to manipulate our actions. It must have agency. What we know beyond any doubt is that unless neurons fire in specific patterns, there are no thoughts, no memories, no emotions. Thus, if the soul is going to have agency, if it is going to direct our actions in some way, it must directly or indirectly force neurons to fire in precise patterns, because, as far as mental states, nothing happens until neurons fire. So how does it do this? And conversely, how does information generated by the firing neurons get transferred to the soul?
When a perception such as sight, sound, or touch travels to our brain, it is a physical phenomenon, operating in accordance with the laws of physics, so how is it transformed into a nonmaterial thought in a soul? How is the transition made from fired neurons to something spiritual? What if the soul decides to do something? Let’s say it wants to give us a spiritual experience by firing neurons in our brain in specific patterns. The energy for this must come out of nowhere—the immaterial realm—to influence the firing of neurons. The (consistently confirmed) laws of thermodynamics state that energy cannot be created or destroyed, so how does the spiritual soul grab energy out of nowhere to produce a change in our brains?
If there were a god or soul forces strong enough to interact at the cellular level, we’d have no problem observing and measuring them, and the existence of gods and souls would be well established.
We can observe and measure fields. Take for example the grade school investigation into magnetism. You sprinkle iron filings on the desk, move a magnet near them, and easily see the effects of the magnetic field acting on the metal filings. You can also see it interacting with a compass placed nearby. If gods, devils, souls, or ghosts are interacting with our neurons, it must be at a very deep level. We go down from the cellular level to the molecular, to the atomic, and finally to the subatomic arena of quarks and electrons, and even here we can observe and measure the interactions of our fundamental particles. Countless experiments over the past few decades in particle accelerators have utterly failed to discover a god, devil, soul or ghost fields, forces, or particles. Further, there are no unexplained interactions that might lead us to believe there is still a god field out there that we haven’t found yet. QFT tells us with remarkable confidence that there aren’t any “spirit particles” or “spirit forces” interacting with our material atoms, or we’d have found them. An entirely new physics would be required, proposing a completely new reality, obeying very different rules.
In my view, QFT spells the end for the supernatural. If you are going to have a religious “experience,” you’ve got to fire neurons, and to do that, you must push around quarks and electrons. If you are going to heal tissue, turn water to wine, or rise from the dead, you must push around quarks and electrons. If we were being interacted with by gods, devils, souls, or ghosts, we’d know it. All manner of psychic experiences, ghosts, ESP, levitation, mind-reading, and other supernatural phenomena requiring quarks and electrons be pushed around by some hitherto unknown force, field, or particle suffer the same problem.
How does the believer respond to this argument? In my experience, few people, religious or otherwise, have any understanding of QFT, although this is slowly changing. Certainly, it must be a subject of deep interest and concern in the Vatican and among other religious scholars and scientists. There are a growing number of good videos out there that describe QFT for the layman. Almost nobody challenges the basics presented here, so believers generally respond by insisting that God uses QFT to interact with our universe. Some believers who accept evolution insist God uses evolution as a tool to interact with the ongoing development of our natural world. This is the same problem—needing some new divinity field to push around quarks and electrons to direct evolution in a particular direction. This also raises the unfortunate question of why a good god would intentionally evolve malaria, cancer, parasites that burrow into children’s eyes, deadly viruses, and so forth.
If God is using QFT, there is a problem because QFT tells us how our observable universe works without any requirement for gods. If QFT is not how our natural world works, then it is simply an illusion and the universe must instead be controlled by God-Magic. This would mean it is a mere coincidence that the laws of physics happen to line up with the celestial paths of planets that are guided by angels along their orbits. As theoretical particle physicist Sean Carroll says in The Big Picture, “To imagine that the soul pushes around the electrons and protons and neutrons in our bodies in a way we haven’t detected is certainly conceivable, but it implies that modern physics is profoundly wrong in a way that has so far eluded every controlled experiment ever performed. How should we modify the Core Theory equation (which describes QFT) to allow for the soul to influence the particles in our body? It’s a substantial hurdle to leap.” Can it be that our observable universe is controlled by God-Magic, and all our physics is an illusion?
I suppose this is a valid argument, but it does raise a problem—the same problem some creationists have when they claim that God planted fossils to test our faith. It makes God a deceiver, a liar, a con artist, and a cheat. Hebrews 6:18, Titus 1:2, and Numbers 23:19 assure us that God cannot lie. QFT suggests that either God is moot or a deceiving liar, and the Bible is wrong in calling him trustworthy.
I use a condensed version of this argument in forums and blogs and have yet to receive any serious objections to it. Science never claims to “prove” something, and this argument doesn’t irrevocably prove gods, souls, devils, and ghosts don’t exist. However, quantum mechanics is all about probabilities, and the chance that they do exist, as I understand it, is about the same as the chance that a living, breathing full-size tyrannosaurus rex dressed in a pink tutu is going to manifest in your living room at exactly 3:06 a.m. next Tuesday. Quantum mechanics says it could happen. It also says very confidently don’t wait up.
I mean..I know it is just going to happen.