Science needed to scrap newtonian physics in order to gain new understandings of our quantum universe. Let’s not skim over this. Science, that benchmark of stability for so many people’s worldview, is not a fixed framework. Remember, science once told us that the sun traveled around the earth. I grew up in a world governed by the laws of physics, and now we are entering the quantum universe.

All true science keeps reinventing itself. The scientific theory causes ideas to be tested and evolve over time. Science presses the frontier of discovery, and thus is in both a state of wonder and confusion. Science is an endless pursuit of a wider grasp of the truth.

Quantum mechanics has forced science to go beyond empiricism to apprehend a reality that works on an entirely other level to physical science. Quantum entanglement is where a sub-atomic particle is linked (entangled) to another particle (potentially separated by light years). The mere observation of one particle alters it and instantaneously alters the linked particle. There is no lag in time nor space and observation alone is enough to influence it.

Science scratches its head and has no clue as to how this works, because science does not possess the categories or labels for such phenomenon. There is no scientific language to describe that “thing” that entangles or links two particles.

Science is finally coming around to acknowledge what spirituality has always grasped. The person who prays was always seen by science as “wishful” thinking yet scientifically ineffective. Now we know that conscious awareness, can cause an entangled particle to react by our observation of it.  While science has no name for the force that entangles two particles, religion has always known this as the love of God.

However, we aren’t quite at a place where science and religion can live happily ever after. Unfortunately, most faith systems are full of religious entanglement and not willing to widen their field of view in the way that science has. Too often it prefers the way it was to something new.

When a person has a transcendent experience, too often they fall prey to the religious  systems that want to validate, define, control, and manipulate that experience. I like theology as much as the next geek, but it is not God, it is our contrived best estimate of what we think God is like, because we (just like science) lack categories for authentic experience. If we are not careful, religion will sweep in and explain everything with its categories and labels, and we will move from experience into a tribal group think. We need religion to be willing to widen itself too, so that it can relearn what it knows in new ways just like science.

Science is not immune to its own entanglement. Science has typically been reluctant to use any categories from religion, but now in the face of quantum entanglement, we need science to acknowledge that it has entered the spiritual realm and to be honest that it has moved into a faith based system rather than empiricism.

Regardless of how we arrive at this truth, we still find ourselves facing the awareness that we and our world are intimately connected (entangled) on a level we don’t fully appreciate. It is what we do with this awareness that changes everything. You see, while I am not you, and you are not me, we are also not completely other than each other either. Otherness disease is the first illness we must cure if we would usher in the new world. We are all deeply entangled and the force that holds it all together is called love.

It turns out that quantum entanglement might just be the scientific way of saying the worlds greatest commandment; “Love God with all your heart and neighbor as yourself.”