Day 34: Living Daily in Reality: Quantum Physics and Parallel Universes’s
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One of the most difficult things to understand is theodicy. How can we
have free wills yet live lives foreknown or foreordained by our Creator?
The Maker of the universe must know the potentials of what he has made
and therefore must know in detail what will happen to every bird, proton,
and human being. This presents a problem if he wants any of his creatures
to have the freedom to reject his will: how can he make a creature like
man who could choose nothingness rather than him? How can he reconcile
with his own love the creation of a person who will choose the
nothingness of non-existence? In other words, how can the Creator make a
free-will agent who can choose to love him or decide to hate him – if
loving is wanting the best for another?

For more than fifty years now, quantum physicists have been studying the
behavior of the tiniest particles that make up our universe. They have
produced and rejected countless theories of how these sub-atomic
particles like neutrons and quarks operate. One of the most
incomprehensible actions they have observed is the seeming influence of
one electron’s spin on the action of another electron ten billion
light-years away: yet they know about each other in a split-second!
Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance” and rejected its
possibility in this universe. Since then physicists like Bell have shown
it to be true, and for years scientists have tried to reconcile this fact
with relativity.

Gradually physicists have come to respect the theory of an American
physicist called Everett who has posited the theory that there are
parallel universes – many of them – as many as the choices you make
moment-by-moment in your life. So, faith does not seem so incompatible
with reason when it states that God has made an old Adam and a new Adam:
the old rejects Him and embraces autonomous nothingness and the new Adam
embraces Him as our loving Father upon whom we depend. As we acquiesce in
one or the other so goes our life here and beyond! So our omniscient
Maker knows everything that will happen and governs it all by his honest
love for each one of us.

Gradually the world of science and the world of faith seem increasingly
to merge. Just as physicists are driven to the idea of parallel worlds to
explain the simultaneous influence of electrons on one another separated
by millions of light-years, so theologians are driven to the idea of two
worlds to explain the simultaneous action of the Creator’s will and man’s
will. As David wrote in Psalm 139, “even before a word is on my tongue,
lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether; in thy book were written the days
that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them”. Only the
Maker’s protective attitude towards our free wills prevents his
omnipotence from forcing upon us “the building we have from God, not made
with hands, eternal in the heavens”. But we are here in the space-time of

earth to choose whether we’ll live in that or in a personality cobbled
together by our own independence.

So here in the sequential temporal world we see life without God in all
the horror of its increasing violence, brutal indifference, and
destructive greed on one side; and on the other, shafts of sunlight from
the simultaneous eternal world that makes life bearable with
unselfishness, kindly acts, and encouraging words. So every day we are
faced with the freedom to choose whether our own knowledge of good and
evil will govern our lives or whether the Christ-life from our Maker will
course through us. Finally there is only one reality and one Creator, but
he is a loving Father who sees all of time in one millisecond – yet
endures patiently the distortion of his world until we acquiesce in what
he has planned for each of us.