Angelus News | August 2-9, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 27

no objective reality or truth, and only
exists to humans as we perceive and
measure it.
Twentieth-century Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Neils Bohr summed it
up with this disturbing phrase: “There
is no quantum reality … only a quantum
description.”
This conundrum plagued scientists
for decades and led to various
attempts to square metaphysical explanations
with this effective yet troubling
system —“from the more or less
weird to the patently absurd,” DeLano
asserts in the film.
(One explanation,
for example, claims
that a countless
number of universes
exist that contain
every possible event
that could have happened,
but has not,
in our own observed
world.)
Smith faced the
same paradoxes until
the 1990s, when he
came to a simple yet
pivotal realization
about the theories
of quantum physics:
All of them assumed
what he called “the
Cartesian split,” referring
to the work of René Descartes.
The 17th-century French Enlightenment
philosopher, famous for
asserting, “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think,
therefore I am”), built his philosophy
on the premise that man’s access to
truth is limited to intellectual understanding.
When taken to its full extent, argues
Smith, it reduces what is accepted as
true to what can be proven with mathematical
certainty. Everything else,
including the perception of qualities
in the world, belongs to the subjective
world, or the realm of the mind, and
cannot be relied upon in scientific
analysis.
Descartes’ work has long been
acknowledged as one of the most influential
on modern philosophy, and
as the film highlights, that influence
has given rise to a moral dilemma in
both science and society at large.
“Qualities pertain to essence, and to
Philosopher René Descartes.
being no less,” DeLano asserts in the
film. In other words, if we disregard
qualities, we refer to a world of just
potentiality, not the world we know,
experience, and live in.
All of this tells us that while quantum
physics can give a mathematical description
of something like our world,
it cannot capture the actual nature of
the real world.
What the quantum theorists missed,
in other words, is that you need something
else, something substantial and
not merely potential, to give form and
make that transition
from not being to
being. And that
something, Smith
realized, must come
from above.
“Qualities have
primacy,” he states.
“[They are] the light
of higher spheres
shining into this
world.”
FRANS HALS/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
This discovery is
what led Smith to
turn to philosophy
in the first place.
First, he turned
to Indian writers,
whom he admired
for acknowledging
a higher realm and
revering it in their lives. Still, something
was missing.
After traveling to India and making
many inquiries, Smith found himself
unsatisfied with the Indian philosophers’
assertions that the supreme,
spiritual state of being necessarily
abandons the particulars of human
nature.
Was there no view of the world that
reconciled the material with the
spiritual? Finally, Smith concluded
that the answer was yes, and he found
it in the Catholic Church.
“God became man so that man
can become God,” says Smith in the
documentary. Through the mystery
of the Incarnation, he found, “Our
humanity is not disintegrated but can
be deified.”
With this new inspiration, Smith
hurriedly returned to the Faith he had
abandoned long before. As Smith’s
story continues to unfold, the film
August 2-9, 2019 • ANGELUS • 29