Amazing Grace of Quantum Physics
Authors: Faries Dillard W. 
Published: November 2022

AMAZING GRACE OF QUANTUM PHYSICS by Dillard W. Faries. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017. 268 pages. Paperback; $33.55. ISBN: 9781532614217. *What if beneath the world of everyday experience things were not as they seem? If all things did not really have predictable locations or follow predictable trajectories but instead only appear to because they are large enough that their true behavior is undetectable to our senses? If the cosmos did not consist of discrete particles acting independently of all others; that everything was somehow connected with everything else? Strange as these possibilities may seem, these are not "what-ifs"; according to quantum physics, they are in all likelihood how the real world actually behaves. How physics arrived at this quantum mechanical understanding--if, indeed, it may legitimately be so called--forms a major theme of Dillard Faries's Amazing Grace of Quantum Physics, which also seeks to unpack some of the philosophical and theological implications of the quantum mechanics (QM) shockingly counterintuitive picture of reality. *Amazing Grace of Quantum Physics consists of an introduction, 18 chapters, an epilogue, and two appendices, but is perhaps better thought of as involving three main somewhat loosely overlapping parts. The first involves introductory material and consists of the introduction and first chapter. The former introduces the main themes and offers a précis of the book. The latter surveys the main categories of classical physics that were radically challenged by QM, such as determinism and locality. *The second section roughly comprises chapters 2-10 and unpacks the main historical episodes that culminated in the development of QM, beginning with the discovery of radioactivity and culminating in competing equivalent mathematical formulations of quantum phenomena and the Copenhagen interpretation in the 1920s. Unlike other books on QM, this account focuses on how physicists, ranging from Benjamin Thompson, Michael Faraday, and James Maxwell to Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and others, offered new understandings of reality that developed, problematized, and ultimately challenged classical Newtonian physics. This is central to Faries's narrative since the classical physics that was overthrown both arose from and misinformed Western theology before it descended into a sterile deism in the wake of Humean skepticism. Thus a theme of this section is that the overthrow of classical physics by QM is good news for Christian theism. *The final section comprises chapters 11-18 and the epilogue; it carries forward the story of QM to the present day. These chapters seek to explain QM's counterintuitive and somewhat paradoxical picture of reality, suggesting a number of implications for Christian thought along the way. This section focuses on a number of issues. These include the difficulty of relating the mathematical results of QM to physical reality so that they can be interpreted in the Copenhagen sense as probabilities or, less commonly, more deterministically in de Broglie-Bohm interpretation. Other issues include indeterminacy and the EPR paradox, Bell's inequality and the impossibility of agreement between QM and local reality, and the observer effect. Along with Fermat's principle of least time, which suggests that waves somehow know the shortest path to take, Faries argues that these open up possibilities to interpret reality as purposeful and consistent with Christian theism, which Faries demonstrates by offering his own tentative interpretation of QM. He ends by inviting the reader to do the same. *On one level Amazing Grace of Quantum Physics is a serious book in the sense of offering the quantum physics as consistent with a theology of mystery in which there is room for meaningful free will and divine action. However, as Faries himself explains, he is neither a theologian nor a philosopher. This shows, in that he does little to systematically develop a theology of mystery and does not interact with the extensive recent work in the history and philosophy of physics or with the science and religion literature on quantum indeterminacy and divine action (or issues such as the scope and limits of natural theology). Instead, he prefers to offer his own sweeping suggestions and, in the case of divine action, build directly from the insights of William Pollard that have formed the backdrop to such discussions since the 1950s. So, in the end, Amazing Grace of Quantum Physics is perhaps best taken as a physicist who is a Christian explaining that he sees room for consonance between Christianity and science in the world of quantum physics. *Amazing Grace of Quantum Physics suffers from a number of flaws. The most flagrant is Faries's tendency to skip key details and insert entertaining but distracting tangents in the midst of otherwise cogent explanations. This, coupled with his tendency to allow loose analogies or hints to stand in for arguments, tends to obscure rather than illuminate what Faries is trying to convey. I often found myself having to insert key details or connections from my own knowledge, make assumptions about what exactly he was referring to, and, in a few cases, supply a missing argument. Nevertheless, between my own understanding of QM and because Faries ultimately gets around to explaining everything by the end of the book, both the physics he was trying to explain and the shape of his argument had become clear. *The book will be of value mainly to professional physicists and teachers of physics. In contrast those who are unversed in the basics of quantum physics or have little prior knowledge about its history are likely to find some parts impossible to follow (or, worse, acquire a superficial and incorrect understanding). Instead, these readers should start by reading a more accessible introduction. Some readers might also be alienated by Faries's casual jabs at Calvinism or his unnecessary use of an offensive racial slur to vivify the personality of Werner Heisenberg (which may have been done in ignorance as the slur is not a common one). *Nevertheless, those who are able to overlook the limitations of Amazing Grace of Quantum Physics will find value in its pages. It is one of the few works that seeks to offer a fairly robust overview of quantum physics along with nuggets of encouragement and pregnant hints. Here I offer two of particular note. The first is Faries's invocation of mystery as a useful but largely unexplored category in science-faith discourse, at least in the evangelical circles of which Faries is a part. The second is akin to John Polkinghorne's earlier and more theologically and philosophically sophisticated exploration of the similarities between theology and physics in his Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship (Yale University Press, 2007), in which Polkinghorne demonstrates consonance between the search for reality through physics and theology. Faries does something similar at one point in this section, offering that Christians should not feel overly anxious in the absence of a complete and unassailable understanding of how to relate science and Christian theology. In Christianity, as in quantum physics, for the time being, we can be confident resting in what we know, even when there appear to be paradoxes or explanations that seem partial, tentative, and generative of new questions as well as answers. *Reviewed by Stephen M. Contakes, Department of Chemistry, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, CA 93108.