Deepak Chopra's God 2.0

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In most surveys, nine out of ten Americans respond in the affirmative to the question “Do you believe in God?” The other 10 percent provide a variety of answers, including a favorite among skeptics and atheists: “Which god do you mean?” And then they offer a litany of classical and non-Western deities: Aphrodite, Amon Ra, Apollo, Baal, Brahma, Ganesha, Isis, Mithras, Osiris, Shiva, Thor, Vishnu, Wotan, and Zeus. “We’re all atheists of these gods,” the stock reply concludes, “but some of us go one god further.”

I have debated many theologians who make the traditional arguments for God’s existence: the cosmological argument (prime mover, first cause), the teleological argument (the order and design of the universe), the ontological argument (if it is logically possible for God to exist, then God exists), the anthropic argument (the fine-tuned characteristics of nature, making human life possible), the moral argument (awareness of right and wrong), and others. These are all reasons to believe in God only if you already believe. If you do not already believe, these arguments ring hollow, having been refuted over the ages by philosophers from David Hume to Daniel Dennett.

This past spring, however, I participated in a debate with a theologian of a different stripe, the New Age spiritualist Deepak Chopra. His arguments for the existence of a deity take a radically new tack. During our exchange, which was taped by ABC’s Nightline and viewed by millions, Chopra set out a series of scientific-sounding arguments for the existence of a divine quantum force capable of nonlocal “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein famously described quantum entanglement. Call this new theology God 2.0.

Chopra provided a preview of these arguments in his 2006 book Life After Death. Consider this passage:

The mind is like an electron cloud surrounding the nucleus of an atom. Until an observer appears, electrons have no physical identity in the world; there is only the amorphous cloud. In the same way, imagine that there is a cloud of possibilities open to the brain at every moment (consisting of words, memories, ideas, and images I could choose from). When the mind gives a signal, one of these possibilities coalesces from the cloud and becomes a thought in the brain, just as an energy wave collapses into an electron.

If this has the flavor of medieval scholasticism, it is no accident. During the Middle Ages, the learned doctors of the Church devoted long treatises to the tight relationship between the microcosm (the earth) and the macrocosm (the heavens). They described an elaborate, interdependent system that linked together bodily organs, earthly minerals, and heavenly bodies. Gold corresponded to the sun, which corresponded to the heart. Silver corresponded to the moon, which corresponded to the brain. Mercury corresponded to the planet Mercury, which corresponded to the gonads. The four elements of earth, water, air, and fire were astrologically coupled to the four humor-based personality traits of melancholy, phlegm, sanguinity, and choler.

Chopra’s New Age theology is essentially an updating of this medieval scheme, with ample borrowings from the vocabulary of particle physics. This upgrade from God 1.0 to God 2.0 can be summarized in the following chart (inspired by my friend and colleague Stephen Beckner):
 

God 1.0	God 2.0
omnipresent fully man/fully God miracle leap of faith transubstantiation Council of Rome supernatural forces heaven hell eternity prayer the Godhead the Trinity forgiveness of sin virgin birth resurrection	non-local wave/particle duality wave-function collapse quantum leap Heisenberg uncertainty principle Copenhagen interpretation anti-matter dark energy dark matter space/time continuum quantum entanglement general relativity special relativity quantum erasure quantum decoherence virtual reality

Chopra believes that the weirdness of the quantum world (such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) can be linked to certain mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness). This supposition is based on the work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but little light in scientific circles.

Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. Penrose and Hameroff conjecture that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave-function collapse that leads to the quantum coherence of atoms, causing neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons. This, in turn, triggers the neurons to fire in a uniform pattern, thereby creating thought and consciousness. Since a wave-function collapse can only come about when an atom is “observed” (that is, affected in any way by something else), “mind” may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms to molecules to neurons . . . and so on.

In reality, the gap between quantum effects and the world of ordinary events is too large to bridge. In his 1995 book The Unconscious Quantum, the University of Colorado particle physicist Victor Stenger demonstrates that for a system to be described in terms of quantum mechanics, its typical mass m, speed v, and distance d must be on the order of Planck’s constant h. “If mvd is much greater than h, then the system probably can be treated classically,” that is, according to the physical laws discovered by Newton. Stenger computed the mass of neural transmitter molecules and their speed across the distance of a synapse, and he concluded that both are about three orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential.

Chopra’s use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle,” which consists of stringing together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and asserting that they explain something in our daily experience. But the world of subatomic particles has no correspondence with the world of Newtonian mechanics. They are two different physical systems at two different scales, and they are described by two different types of mathematics.

Chopra’s theology notwithstanding, the hydrogen atoms in the sun are not sitting around in a cloud of possibilities waiting for a cosmic mind to signal them to fuse together to form helium atoms and thereby to throw off heat and light for our planet. The ordinary laws of physics are sufficient for these purposes. If large enough, a cloud of hydrogen gas collapsing under the force of gravity reaches a critical point of pressure. Hydrogen atoms then fuse together into helium atoms and give off heat and light — and they would do so even if there were not a single mind in the entire cosmos to observe it.

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University. His books include The Science of Good and Evil, Why Darwin Matters, and The Mind of the Market. He can be reached at mshermer@skeptic.com.