I was an atheist. Quantum physics set me on the path to Jesus

Skeptics question my honesty when I say I’m both a scientist and a Christian. They refuse to take seriously someone who believes in quantum physics and calls Jesus his Lord and Savior.

The most hate-filled among them accuse me of being a fake scientist and/or fake Christian. Their minds simply cannot comprehend the possibility that science and Christianity are entirely, comfortably compatible.

In science-speak, these skeptics have a “classical” worldview. It’s a perception of reality that is purely logical, material, and mechanistic — very much like Newton’s classical physics.

For these classicists, a body is just flesh and blood, a mind is just the product of the brain’s electrical activity, and the entire universe is just one big, awesome accident of nature. It’s a blinkered perspective that led the late Stephen Hawking to say: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no Heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

When I was a young atheist, I shared this machine-like view of reality. But I was quickly disabused of it when I started studying quantum physics.

Quantum physics turns logic on its head. Suddenly and enigmatically, the solid, material world becomes a ghostly cloud of probabilities, supernatural behavior becomes natural, and complete opposites become unified realities.

It’s precisely that utterly illogical strangeness that seized my attention when I read the New Testament for the first time. I could scarcely believe it! This alleged, Iron-Age Jesus of Nazareth spoke like a modern-day quantum physicist.

Unlike the instructions on how to live from any other sacred figure I’d ever read (by then, I had immersed myself in all the major religions), Jesus’s teachings turned logic on its head. During His Sermon on the Mount, for example, he admonished the crowd to love their enemies, that in order to live they first must die, that the first among them were, in fact, the last, and on and on.

This quantum-like language is what made me rise to the bait. It’s what caused me to further investigate Christianity with an open, analytical mind.

In the end, several decades later, more than just quantum physics convicted me that Jesus was the real deal. A critical, unblinking exploration of the Bible, an intellectually candid appraisal of what modern science was discovering about the universe and our species, and a series of stunning personal experiences left no serious doubt in my once-classicist mind that the biblical God was, indeed, the creator of the universe I was devoted to studying.

Quantum superposition

Skeptics routinely mock Christians for believing glaring contradictions such as: A.) God is both universal and personal and B.) Jesus is both fully man and fully God. These beliefs don’t make sense. They protest.

They’re right. These beliefs don’t make any sense, but neither do the truths of quantum physics. As the late physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once confessed: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

According to quantum physics, for example, light is both fully solid as a rock and fully supple as a ripple of water, which is as nonsensical as saying something is both fully black and fully white. Scientists call this illogical — but, as it happens, far from absurd — chimeric entity a “photon.”

“We are faced with a new kind of difficulty,” Albert Einstein once admitted. “We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.”

Like quantum physics, Christianity has the same kind of “difficulty.” For starters, the Old Testament depicts God as having two opposing natures: universal and personal.

In Genesis 1, the universal God — the Creator of the universe — is called “Elohim” (אֱלֹהִים). In Genesis 2, the personal God — the one who walks and talks intimately with Adam and Eve — is called “YHWH” (יהוה), a four-letter, vowelless name that scholars call The Tetragrammaton.

The New Testament, too, has the same “difficulty.” Jesus is depicted as having two conflicting natures. On the one hand He’s fully human, as demonstrated when he weeps (John 11:35), sweats blood (Luke 22:44), and dies on the cross (John 19:30). On the other hand, He’s fully God — as when He transforms water into wine (John 2:1–11), heals the leper (Mark 1:40–42), forgives the paralytic’s sins (Mark 2:5–12), and is explicitly equated with YHWH (John 8:58, Romans 10:13, and elsewhere).

Quantum physics resolves all these apparent “difficulties” by explaining that a single entity can have multiple identities. This profound truth is represented as a mathematical “superposition” of different possible states.

This explains how Schrodinger’s famous cat can be dead and alive at the same time; how light can be both fully solid and fully supple; how God can be both fully universal (Elohim) and fully personal (YHWH); and how Jesus can be both fully human and fully God.

And while we’re on the subject, quantum superposition also offers us a modern scientific explanation for how the one, true God can be both fully one and fully three — God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Where would I be now if I hadn’t been a scientific geek when I first broke open the Bible? I’ll never know, but one fact is undeniable — because of quantum physics and Jesus, I renounced my classical worldview, ditched my atheism, and ultimately became the seemingly impossible creature I am today: a man who is fully a scientist and fully Christian.

“One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!” (John 9:25 NIV).