No.

(Drops mic.)

But, hey. If you really need to know why that is absolutely and indisputably the answer, read on.

In my recent article Is God Needed for “Information” and “Laws”? I pointed out how a lot of god-belief—and even slick Christian apologetics—is built on science illiteracy, making belief in God, really, an artifact of our lousy education system that prepares students for nothing but wage-slave drone-work, not real science literacy or critical thinking. There I used the Bumblebee Argument as a representative example of the naive things that fool people into believing in God. But “scientists can’t explain how bumblebees fly; therefore God exists” is just the most face-palmingly stupid example (spoiler: scientists have explained how bumblebees fly—and whoever told you otherwise lied to you, or was lied to by someone else, and you just gullibly believed them). We see this kind of science illiteracy flaming out in all kinds of bollocks now, from lizard people ruling the planet to flat earthers inventing dumb stories about the Atrtemis mission being fake.

But some science illiteracy is a product of shallow educating on complex subjects, and not straightforward buffoonery like “bumblebees can’t fly” or “solar radiation would have melted all the astronauts.” And one of those is this misunderstanding of how quantum mechanics actually works, owing to some bad analogies physicists ineptly teach the subject with to muggles. The idea (which you will hear even from serious Christian, indeed even Catholic, broadcasters and theologians—although I’m not going to name them because they don’t deserve your attention or my pingback) is that “quantum mechanics says observers must already exist to collapse every wave function; but no observers existed before we did; therefore God exists.” God, you see, is then the needed “observer” who collapses every wave function.

Of course, this is immediately self-refuting—if God being present (and thus observing everything) collapses wave functions, then there would never be any uncollapsed wave function, and so we would not observe superposed (uncollapsed) states. Yet we do, a lot—which now becomes concrete empirical refutation of the existence of God. Oooops. Either God is not observing those states (and thus is not omniscient) or God’s observing them doesn’t collapse them (refuting the claim that observations collapse wave states) or God does not exist to observe them. Obviously, it’s the latter. But already the God Collapses the Wave Function argument has catastrophically failed and there is literally no way to get it to work after this.

And yet it’s even worse than that. Because the only reason we know about quantum mechanics—the only reason quantum mechanics explains anything at all—is that uncollapsed waves are everywhere around us. The only reason we get a wave-particle duality “result” from double-slit experiments, for example, is that the photon passing through the slits has not yet decohered into a single outcome. If God were observing everything, and if observing collapsed waves, then photons would always behave like discreet particles all the way through and the world would never act like quantum mechanics describes. It would obey straight classical mechanics all the way down, all the time.

So obviously either God is not watching almost everything happening in the world (uh oh!), or his watching it cannot collapse superposed states—or, of course, there is no God.

But That’s Not the Problem

Well, it is sort of. I mean, the God Is Observer argument is self-refuting that way and thus is dumb, even on its own suppositions. But the bigger problem here is that this is all pseudoscience to begin with. None of this is correctly describing actual quantum physics. The central error is at the central premise: that superposed states require “an observer” to decohere (to “collapse”) into a single state. That’s bollocks. Yes. I know. “Physicists keep saying this.” But those who do suck at science communication and thus don’t realize they are misinforming you about the physics. Maybe they think you are too stupid to understand a correct explanation so they leap to bad analogies. But that’s on them. What’s on you is a failure to check if what they are telling you is correct. Because if you actually understood the physics, you’d know such analogies are bogus and misleading—and thus why the God as Observer argument is wrong even on the science.

The confusion begins at the word “observer.” When a physicist says “observer” you think they mean “a mind,” but in fact they mean literally “any stick poked in there,” whether minds are involved or not. Minds have nothing to do with quantum mechanics. It is not “minds” that interact with superposed states (or have reference frames for that matter). Minds report on them. Because minds are only the readouts, not the instruments. What instead does interact with superposed states is bodies. Photons interact with cells in your eye. Any decoherence that results has already happened by then—long before any information about that reaches your brain; indeed, even if there is no brain to reach. We can carve out your skull and leave your corpse to stare at a double-slit experiment with its dead eyes and the results would be the same. In fact, we don’t even need your eyes there. As soon as a plate of film is shoved in to an experiment, it is observing. The film is an observer. It is not a mind. Or even a dead eye that used to be attached to one.

The famous (and catastrophically silly) analogy physicists ineptly made famous is Schrödinger’s Cat. What physicists forget to tell you (indeed, what many haven’t even been told) is that Schrödinger invented that example as a joke—he was making fun of quantum theory. Indeed, he was reacting to Einstein’s private suggestion that a keg of gunpowder could be in a superposition of both exploded and unexploded, which was again meant to illustrate how ridiculous this theory is, because the described state is obviously impossible. And it is easy to explain why. But in truth, the problem with his joke is not that it is in some sense on the money (it is successfully refuting one version of quantum theory—not supporting or explaining any correct one), but rather, that it straw mans the actual theory it was intended to refute: macrostates can’t be superposed that way, because they interfere with themselves and thus always auto-decohere. No one has to observe this. The system to be observed is so interactive it is its own observer.

If you are unfamiliar, Schrödinger’s Cat is a scenario whereby there is a poor cat in a box, such that you can’t see whether the cat is alive or dead until you open the box, and inside the box is a cyanide capsule that is cracked open when a radioisotope emits a particle, detected by a Geiger counter that activates the capsule-cracking mechanism (instead of emitting a loud tick, it just cracks the capsule). The ridiculous result Schrödinger was mocking was that this would create a situation wherein the cat is in a superposed state of being both alive and dead—until someone opens the box and looks inside, then suddenly (instantaneously? faster than the speed of light even?) the cat resolves (“decoheres”) as “either” alive or dead.

There are endless things wrong with this, and they were the very things Schrödinger intended to call attention to. First, of course, the cat is an observer. So it would collapse its own wave function as soon as it observed whether it was fine or choking on cyanide. But worse than that, even if the cat were drugged into unconsciousness, its body is an observer. It will either be fine or start choking on cyanide. It’s not like the cat’s cells “don’t know” whether cyanide is burning them or not. And even worse than that, the Geiger counter that cracks the capsule is an observer. It will resolve the superposition long before cyanide even reaches the cat (or fails to); indeed before the capsule is even cracked. It is a sensor. And by definition all sensors are observers (that’s what makes them “a sensor”). Minds are not required. They are not even involved.

Schrödinger’s point was that “making an observation” was actually a catastrophically lazy way of saying “push a stick in there” (see “Most People Don’t Get Schrodinger’s Cat” and “‘Standard’ Quantum Mechanics Is Obviously Wrong”). Scientists should never have been using misleading words like “observation” here. The real thing that collapses a superposed state is just any thing that pokes it. The Geiger counter is effectively “poking a stick” at the contents of the box, just as a plate of film is “poking a stick” into the double-slit apparatus. As soon as you poke any stick in there, the wave collapses. Which means no minds are ever needed here. A universe void of any sentient being is still “full of sticks” (macroscopic objects that interact with and thus decohere quantum states) and thus never needs a mind to observe it to decohere.

The question is what makes the difference between a stick that’s poking so as to collapse a quantum state and a stick that doesn’t poke hard enough to collapse it. Subsequent to Schrödinger it was worked out sort of where that line was, which is why we have since been able to build and observe superposed states without collapsing them. Note that I use “observe” here in the colloquial sense of “a sentient mind experienced the presence of a superposed state” which is not the physicist’s sense of “a stick poking the thing until it collapses.” The semantic error thus runs both ways. Obviously a mind observing a thing doesn’t automatically collapse it because we can “observe” un-collapsed states.

Take the recent record example of thousands of sodium atoms being teased into a superposed state in Vienna: we know the atoms were in that state by how they behaved, which is an observation. But not the kind that collapses the state. To collapse the state requires more direct poking than that—and it’s the poking, not the scientist doing the poking, that causes that collapse. To prevent that, the Vienna team used extreme cryogenic isolation and arduous massaging to gently tease the atoms into the mixed state and prevent any outside “bump” collapsing it. It was extremely difficult to keep the atoms in that state, and it required extraordinary efforts at isolating them from any macroscopic interference; and even then, it only lasted for a microscopic time. That’s how delicate the state was. Like balancing a spinning top on the edge of a razor.

For example, in Schrödinger’s joke example of the cat, even the surface of the box the cat is in is an observer—it is effectively a black body whose specific heat will change whether the cat dies or not, changing the thermodynamic properties of the room the box is in, and thence the planet, and thence the solar system, and thence the total heat signature of our galaxy received by the surfaces of planets a galaxy away, and ultimately changing the overall temperature of the universe. So to prevent “the box itself” from interacting with the quantum state inside the nucleus of the radioisotope that may or may not trigger the cyanide requires extraordinary measures to prevent any exchange of photons (or anything else) between the box (and anything else in the box, like the air molecules, or the cat or Geiger counter) and the emitter (the atomic nucleus we are trying to keep in a superposed state of radiating and not radiating a particle). Typically this means (at a minimum) maintaining extreme cold and ultrahigh vacuum. Those conditions would instantly kill the cat even from the start.

So there literally is no way to make a real “Schrödinger’s Cat.” Or a Schrödinger’s “keg of gunpowder,” either, which also can never explode when supercooled and stuffed in a vacuum. Even what you maybe could do, like get some weird thing to happen inside a supercooled ultravacuum with something meticulously teased into superposition and kept teetering there with immense effort, won’t last long. Because if you don’t have any flood of particles or fields buffeting that delicate quantum flower, eventually some W or Z particle will still hit it hard enough and boom, off goes a radiated particle into the Geiger counter. And “eventually” is a serious word here: there is literally no way to stop that from happening at a statistically random rate; which is why radioactive decay is random, yet occurs at a fixed rate called a halflife. You couldn’t stop that if you tried. And that’s because of all the virtual particle chaos going on down at that level, which eventually, randomly, will generate some stick that pokes your flower. No mind needed.

So there is no special role for “minds” to play in quantum mechanics. It is not observers in the common English-language sense that collapse wave functions in quantum mechanics; it’s poking. It just so happens that, in experiments to observe and explain quantum mechanics, it’s scientists who are doing the poking, and then calling that an observation. But they don’t mean that the way ordinary people on the street do. It was not the scientist’s brain that poked and thus decohered the experimental thingamajig. It was the instrument they poked it with—a probe, a finger, a photoreactive plate, a barrage of particles. Anything that creates a statistically large enough effect that it “bumps” the coherent state enough to undo it (which always means some quantum of energy has been transferred from one object or state to another—rather than just keeps spinning or coasting along—and whether and when that has happened is actually what superposition and decoherence are entirely measuring).

And indeed, if the scientists left it alone, something would poke it anyway. Random radioactive decay is itself evidence of decoherence regularly being caused by W and Z particle collisions inside atomic nuclei. No scientist even has to be present for that to happen. It would happen anyway. W and Z bosons are just a different kind of stick, poked into nuclei by inevitable forces rather than by scientists. That’s why opening the box ten years later will not show that your failure to observe the stuff stopped it from radiating until that tenth year. It will have been radiating the whole damn time, right on track to its halflife. It’s not the Bugblatter Beast of Traal. Wave collapse doesn’t stop happening just because you don’t look at it.

And Then the Trivial Stuff

That should be enough to explain why the God as Observer argument is ignorant pseudoscientific dumbery and not an argument anyone should be falling for, much less using. But one could point out many more errors in its assumptions, such as that (so it supposes) humans couldn’t collapse wave functions into the past. On standard quantum theory, that is absolutely possible, such that the universe could evolve in an entirely superposed sate until that state produced and thus entangled an observer and immediately the entire wave form would collapse all the way into the past producing a complete, ancient universe for that new observer to “observe.” And thus there would be no need of a God to have observed things in the past. Just as Schrödinger’s cat is alive or dead “in the past” by the time you open the box (and tons of history already played out—cold and stench molecules diffused through the air in the box, if it resolves as dead; heat and pheremones, if it resolves as alive).

If the world actually worked that way, it entails reverse causation—the entire history of the body of the cat and its effects on the box and the air in the box gets resolved when you open the box. It is not like you open the box to watch the cat then die, as if opening the box caused the radioisotope to emit or not emit a particle. That is precisely not how superposition works. You cannot prevent radioactive decay by never opening the box. When the cat is superposed, it is cohered with all possible states—meaning, every instant at which it could have died is in the superposed state, along with all its downstream effects. So If Schrödinger’s Cat were actually how quantum mechanics worked, it would entail backwards causation, thus requiring no past observers to explain the universe having a past history, any more than previous openers of the box are required to explain when the radioisotope emitted a particle (thus killing the cat), or how long it went without doing that (thus keeping the cat alive). All possible histories are in the superposed state. So collapsing that state resolves an entire history, past to present.

So, still no God needed. But this is a trivial point because it still plays on a misunderstanding of quantum effects—granted, it is a misunderstanding required by the God as Observer argument and thus is another reason that argument is self-refuting. But when we replace its bogus science with the real science, we never even have to make this point, because countless things and events can collapse quantum states—and would have done so, eons before any “minds” existed. The first human looking up at the sky did not “open the box,” collapsing the universe and its history into one state rather than another. That box was already opened by macroscopic collisions of mindless stuff before even light existed, much less stars. And then the stars were observers. The dustclouds forming stars were observers. Even the virtual particles boiling in atomic nuclei became observers—the moment they randomly stuck around longer than a quantum moment could dissolve them before they collapsed any nearby superposition.

So the God Is Our Quantum Observer argument is just another Bumblebee argument: scientifically illiterate babblegunk. It needs to be filed under “we should have asked someone who knew what they were talking about before falling for this.”