The Case of the Many Worlds Theologian

Given the title of this blog, you can be sure that the moment I saw the article The Curious Case Of The Quantum Cardinal by Rupert Goodwins, I couldn’t resist reading it. I must say that, while I liked the title, the article did make me cringe more than a few times in it’s description of quantum theory and quantum computing, but, as I’ve mentioned before, I have this reaction to a lot of popular science writing these days. What I did find interesting, however, was the claim that quantum computing is a direct challenge to the dogma of the Roman Catholic church. Whah? Quantum information scientists are the Galileo’s of our modern times?
But of course, this should have been obvious. Suppose, just for fun, that you are a believer in the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory (caveat: I’m giving a rather flippant version of the interpretation here. This is not meant to offend, but only as an exercise in a certain form of reasoning which I can only describe as “newspaper article writer reasoning.”) In the many worlds interpretation, one believes that the different components of a quantum superposition are actually different universes, and that while sometimes these universes can merge back together (when quantum interference occurs, for example) most of the time these universe branch and then are totally inaccessible to us for the rest of time. (OK, I agree this sounds really strange, and well, all I can only say: “yep, pretty strange.”) Now think about this from a theological perspective. Certainly one would expect that there are many universes out there in which Jesus did not lead the life he lead as described in the New Testament. One would even expect that there are many universes out there in which Jesus did not even exist. This may or may not trouble Catholic theologians, but I can at least see that it must at least cause a bit of consternation. Somehow this whole thing reminds me of this webpage.