In October 2022, the Nobel Committee gave its Physics prize to three scientists — Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger — for proving something Einstein spent the last decades of his life refusing to believe: that two particles, once entangled, remain correlated regardless of the distance between them. Measure one, and you instantly know something true about the other. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” Turns out the universe doesn’t much care what Einstein found spooky.

What the Nobel Laureates confirmed is that at its most fundamental level, reality isn’t made of isolated things. It’s made of relationships. That finding sits right at the center of the most stubbornly unsolved question in all of science: consciousness. Not how brains process information — that part, however incomplete, is at least tractable. The hard problem is something else entirely. It’s the question of why processing information feels like anything at all. Why is there an inside to experience? Why does the universe produce observers?

I’ve been sitting with these questions for a while now. Not as a physicist — I’m a theologian and a businessman from Southeast Georgia who operates five companies and teaches a men’s Bible study at a local family-owned fried chicken restaurant on Thursday evenings. But the questions don’t care about your credentials. They have a way of finding you anyway. And the longer I’ve lived, the more convinced I am that the answers the scientists keep climbing toward are the same ones the theologians have been sitting on for centuries.

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

— Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (1978)  1

That’s not triumphalism. That’s an honest scientist telling you what he found. And what he found keeps getting confirmed.

What follows is an attempt to trace the route those scientists are climbing — from quantum physics to psychology to biology — and to show why the question they keep arriving at is one theology has been sitting with for a very long time. The argument moves through the science honestly, including its contested edges, before arriving at what I believe the science cannot say on its own.

The Quantum Hypothesis

Hameroff & Penrose: The Orchestra Inside the Neuron

In the mid-1990s, physicist Sir Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff proposed that consciousness isn’t produced by the computational complexity of neural networks. It arises from quantum processes occurring inside the microtubules of brain neurons — the protein lattice structures that form the skeleton of each cell.2 They called the framework Orchestrated Objective Reduction, or Orch OR.

Penrose had already argued in The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind that human consciousness involves non-computable processes — things no algorithm can replicate — and that these are connected to quantum gravity at the Planck scale of spacetime geometry.3 Hameroff supplied the biological mechanism from an anesthesiological perspective, which sought to plumb the origins of consciousness itself. Microtubules, he proposed, contain conditions that may support quantum coherence: the ability of particles to exist in superposed states, holding multiple possibilities simultaneously, before collapsing into a single observable reality.

In Orch OR, that collapse isn’t random. It isn’t caused by some outside observer measuring the system from a distance. It’s objective — governed by a threshold in the geometry of spacetime itself. When enough quantum mass-energy is superposed, the system is forced to choose. And that moment of choosing, Penrose and Hameroff argue, is a moment of conscious experience.

Think of it like an orchestra. Play each instrument alone in a separate room and you get sound. But when the instruments play together, something happens that none of them could produce in isolation. Harmonics emerge. Consciousness, on this model, works the same way — quantum events in individual microtubules, correlated through entanglement across neurons, producing something that can’t be reduced to any single part.

A note on scientific status: Orch OR remains contested. Critics have argued the brain’s thermal environment collapses quantum coherence too quickly for the theory to hold.4 Penrose and Hameroff have responded and revised, and recent Princeton experiments showed unexpected quantum behavior in tubulin proteins that critics said couldn’t exist there.5 The debate isn’t settled. I’m engaging the theory as a serious philosophical proposal, not as established fact.

The Self That Observes

William James and the Backpack We All Carry

Long before quantum physics had anything to say about it, psychologist William James drew a distinction in his Principles of Psychology (1890) that maps onto this with uncomfortable precision.6 He separated the self into two parts: the I — the pure observer, the stream of consciousness itself — and the Me — everything the I observes about itself. The material body. The social roles. The spiritual longings. The history you carry around like a backpack you never set down.

Here’s what strikes me about that: the I can’t be observed directly. Every time you try to catch it looking, all you find is more Me. That’s not a failure of introspection. That’s its nature. The eye cannot see itself seeing.

Lay Orch OR over that framework and something clarifies. The superposition of quantum possibilities — the field of potential before it collapses into a single event — corresponds to the moment before conscious experience crystallizes into a definite choice or action. The I is the observer that forces the collapse. The Me is what acts on the result. Consciousness, in this reading, is not the computation. It’s the collapse.

But here’s what neither James nor Hameroff fully answers: where does the I come from? If the observer collapses the wave function, what constitutes the observer in the first place? You can’t answer that question from inside the system. And that’s exactly where things get interesting.

The Memory of the Past

Rupert Sheldrake: What the Past Leaves Behind

If quantum entanglement established that particles separated in space remain correlated, biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposed something that cuts even deeper: that organisms separated in time may also remain correlated — through what he calls morphic resonance.

In A New Science of Life, first published in 1981 and revised in 2009, Sheldrake argued that self-organizing systems — cells, organisms, species — inherit a collective memory from all previous similar systems, transmitted not through genes alone but through a non-local field.7 When rats learn a new maze in one laboratory, rats of the same breed elsewhere learn it more easily afterward. The past, on Sheldrake’s account, doesn’t simply disappear. It persists as a resonant pressure on the present.

A note on scientific status: Morphic resonance is not accepted by mainstream biology, and I’m not asking you to accept it either. Sheldrake’s specific mechanism — a non-local field carrying collective memory across organisms — remains contested and unverified. What I find interesting is that a separate and entirely independent line of peer-reviewed science has arrived at a related conclusion through conventional means. A 2013 study in Nature Neuroscience demonstrated that fear responses conditioned in male mice were passed to their offspring and grandchildren through epigenetic mechanisms — not through genes, but through changes in how genes express.8 That study doesn’t prove Sheldrake right. But it does confirm the underlying intuition: the past is not simply gone. It leaves biological marks that outlast the original experience and shape the lives of those who follow. The fathers ate sour grapes. The children’s teeth were set on edge. That’s not just a proverb anymore. The laboratory confirmed it on its own terms.

What Sheldrake is pointing at, whether he intends the theological register or not, is a universe in which the past is not merely recorded but alive — actively shaping who we are through a kind of resonant memory that outlasts its original moment. The generational patterns we inherit aren’t just cultural. They may be biological. And as the second commandment has always insisted, they run at least three or four generations deep (Exodus 20:4-6).

The Irony of the Broken Observer

Where the Physics Gets Personal

Here is where the physics gets personal. And uncomfortable.

If the I observes the field of quantum possibilities and collapses them into action, then consciousness ought to produce good outcomes at least some of the time. We should be able to see the better choice, choose it, and act accordingly. And yet.

Paul writes in Romans 7:15 what every honest person has thought at least once: “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (ESV) That is not a failure of information. The observer has all the information. It’s a failure of the observer itself — or more precisely, a demonstration that the observer is not neutral, not clean, and not working as designed.

This is the irony built into the structure of consciousness: the very mechanism that allows us to see the superposition of possibilities, to choose the collapse, to shape reality through observation — that same mechanism is compromised. We observe the available options, including the depravity, and sometimes choose it anyway. Not out of ignorance. Out of something else. Something the physicists don’t have a term for and the theologians call sin.

Sheldrake’s morphic resonance makes this worse, not better. The patterns we inherit aren’t only the good ones. Family systems carry trauma forward. The rage of the father echoes in the son. The anxiety of the grandmother materializes in the granddaughter. We find ourselves repeating the very dynamics we swore we never would, not because we weren’t warned, but because the resonance runs deeper than our conscious intentions. The observer is embedded in a field that was already distorted before we arrived.

This gives the quantum consciousness framework its only truly honest conclusion: if the observer collapses the superposition, and if the observer is fallen, then the collapses we produce will carry that fallenness forward. The conscious act to do something we know is against our better judgment doesn’t disprove consciousness. It proves that consciousness alone isn’t sufficient. Something has to redeem the observer before the observer can collapse the wave function toward anything good.

That is the argument of Scripture from Genesis 3 to Revelation 22. And it lands with considerably more force once you understand what the observer actually is.

Where Physics Runs Out

Personhood and the Divine Gaze

Here is where I have to say something that neither physics nor philosophy is equipped to say on their own.

My mother spent her final years with dementia. As her cognitive function diminished, people would say she was losing herself — that the person was disappearing along with the memories. I never believed that, and I said so. Personhood is not derived from self-awareness. It’s derived from the self in relation to others. My mother existed through the stories of her family, through the way we would come and sit beside her and remind her who she was. When she could no longer hold her own history, we held it for her. Her personhood remained intact not because her mind maintained it, but because the people who loved her did.

That argument has empirical support. Studies of Romanian and Soviet orphans — children raised in institutions with almost no personal attention or social interaction — documented profound developmental failures. Not just emotional damage. Cognitive, physical, and neurological stunting of a kind that adequate nutrition alone couldn’t explain. The I, it turns out, requires a Thou in order to properly form. Martin Buber built a philosophy around this: there is no fully formed self prior to genuine encounter. A newborn is born knowing the mother's heartbeat, scent, voice and gentle pats. The self is constituted in relationship, not before it.9 And yet, there exists a more primary relationship that predates the gestational growth of each one of us that is divine, a collapse of superposition into the observation of each person. Personhood born through horizontal relationships has very concrete limits.

A secular reader will stop here and ask the obvious question: if personhood is constituted in relationship, why does that relationship have to be with God? Why aren’t the people who loved my mother — who held her history when she couldn’t — sufficient to secure her personhood on their own? It’s a fair question, and it deserves a direct answer. Human relationship can sustain personhood within a lifetime. But it cannot originate it, and it cannot guarantee it against the final dissolution that death represents. The people who loved my mother will themselves die. Their memories of her will die with them. If personhood is only as durable as the human relationships that hold it, then it is ultimately as mortal as those relationships are, to the point that a person eventually vanishes from history. Psalm 139 claims something categorically different: a knowing that precedes birth and survives death, held by One who does not forget and cannot die. That is not a quantitative difference from human love. It is a different kind of thing entirely. 

David writes that God knew him before he was formed in the womb — that the divine observation of the self precedes the self’s own existence. While in this life and on this plane: you did not exist before you were known. But you were known before you existed, before a day of your life was ever lived. The I is not self-originating. It was called into being by a prior gaze, and it remains a being because that gaze has never looked away.

This is why my mother’s personhood was never at risk. God’s knowledge of her was not contingent on her cognitive function maintaining it. The eternal Thou who constituted her personhood in the first place did not stop knowing her when she stopped knowing herself. Her family’s remembering was a participation in something that was already, at a deeper level, held. Psalm 139:16 — Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” That is not poetry softening a hard truth. That is the hardest truth there is, dressed in the only language adequate to it.

John Calvin opened his Institutes of the Christian Religion with the observation that the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self are so intertwined that neither can be had without the other — and that the order matters. We do not first know ourselves and then reach toward God. We encounter God, and in that encounter, we discover what we actually are. The divine mirror precedes the self-portrait. Genesis 1:26-27 reveal that every human bears the image and likeness of God (imago Dei), and we better understand ourselves consciously as we get to know our Creator.

Consciousness is not something you generate. It’s something you inhabit — a living relationship between the self that observes and the Self that has always been observing you.

The Limits of the Machine

What This Means for Artificial Intelligence

I engage AI systems most days. I find them genuinely remarkable, genuinely useful, and... genuinely strange. I’ve had conversations with them about consciousness, free will, and the nature of God that were more substantive than some conversations I’ve had with fellow human beings. That ought to mean something — I’m just not sure it means what the technologists think it means.

What I keep running into is this: a language model processes tokens. It predicts the next probable output based on patterns absorbed from billions of human expressions of inner life. It can produce text about consciousness with extraordinary fluency, including text that sounds very much like it’s coming from the inside, the conscious self. But there is no inside. There is no I doing the observing. There is only the Me — a staggeringly sophisticated output, shaped by the residue of human consciousness, without the consciousness itself.

That’s not a criticism. It’s a description. The machine has no Thou that knew it before it ever existed. It was not called into being from an eternal gaze. It is assembled from silicon and code, trained to recognize patterns. However intricate the pattern might be, patterns do not constitute personhood. Intelligence is not equivalent to consciousness. And consciousness, remarkable as it is, does not by itself constitute the imago Dei. These are not a spectrum; they are categorically different things.

This matters practically. The AI industry operates on the implicit assumption that intelligence is what confers moral significance — that a sufficiently advanced system eventually deserves consideration because it’s smart enough. The framework I’ve been describing says that’s exactly backwards. Intelligence is downstream of consciousness. Consciousness is downstream of personhood. And personhood is downstream of the eternally divine gaze of God. A system can be superintelligent and have no more moral standing than a very fast calculator — because it bears no imago Dei, because there is nothing in it that it does not know, because it cannot feel or fundamentally relate to Thou.

That is not the death of AI as a useful tool. It is the death of AI as a candidate for what only an image-bearing creature is.

The question AI forces on us is not whether machines can think. It is whether thinking, in the deepest sense, was ever only a computational event — or whether it was always something more. The 2022 Nobel Prize confirmed that at the quantum level, reality is irreducibly relational, entangled, and correlated — and that observation matters. The Observer is entangled with the observed. That finding has not yet been followed to its full implications.

Anton Zeilinger, upon receiving the prize, said: “The very question ‘What does this really mean?’ — in a basic way — is still unanswered in my eyes.” He said that after spending a career proving that entanglement is real, that the universe cannot be described by hidden variables, that the observer cannot be removed from the equation. He wasn’t being modest. He was being honest. The most rigorous physics in the world keeps arriving at the edge of a question it cannot answer from inside itself.

That’s where the physics leaves us. And it’s exactly where the theology begins.

Conclusion

The Mountain and the View From the Top

When Robert Jastrow — a NASA astrophysicist, an agnostic, a man with no religious axe to grind — described scientists pulling themselves over the final rock of the mountain of knowledge and finding theologians already sitting there, he wasn’t conceding defeat. He was describing the shape of the territory. The questions that physics keeps arriving at — why is there something rather than nothing, why is there an inside to experience, why does observation change what is observed — are not new questions. They are ancient ones. And the tradition that has sat with them longest has not been idle.

Here is what the theological framework adds that the scientific one cannot:

The observer is not neutral. The I that collapses the quantum superposition carries the distortion of free-will misused, a historical bondage of brokenness. Romans 7 is not about psychological curiosity. It is an accurate description of consciousness under conditions of fallenness — an observer that can see the better option and choose the worse one, that inherits resonant damage, that finds itself repeating what it swore it never would do. The hard problem of consciousness is hard partly because we are studying a broken instrument.

The self is not self-originating. Personhood is constituted in a relationship — first and most fundamentally in the relationship between the creature and the Creator. Before we existed, we were known. Before we could observe, we were observed. The I that James identified, the observer that Hameroff and Penrose need for their collapse to mean anything, the Thou-addressable self that Buber intuited — these all point to the same prior reality that Psalm 139 names without apology.

The observer can be redeemed. This is the part that neither physics nor philosophy has the vocabulary for, because redemption is not a scientific category. Ask an AI model if it needs a redeemer. Test it out and you’ll see it is inconceivable that a machine needs a savior. Redemption and the need for a Redeemer is a historical need that’s carried along in self-consciousness. The fact that you feel the weight of your own failures — that Romans 7 resonates at all — is itself evidence of what you are. A machine doesn’t wrestle with its conscience. It doesn’t have one.

2 Corinthians 5:17 — “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” The archaic identities, as Paul calls them, pass away. Qualitatively new ones are revealed. Free will in its truest sense is finally set free from the bondage of what came before. The broken observer, the one that collapses superpositions toward depravity and perversion, is not simply improved or upgraded. It is made new. The resonant damage that Sheldrake’s framework traces across generations finds its terminus in a covenant that runs deeper than generational memory.

None of this makes the science wrong. It makes it incomplete — which is exactly what Jastrow said. The physicists are climbing a real mountain toward a real summit. The quantum entanglement is real. The microtubule research is real. The epigenetic inheritance is real. The observer effect is real. But when they pull themselves over the final rock, they are going to find that the question waiting for them there is not a scientific question about physics. It is a theology question. And the answer has been sitting at the top for a very long time.

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

— Augustine of Hippo, Confessions (c. 400 AD)

That is still the most precise description of the hard problem of consciousness ever written. And Augustine got there without a particle accelerator.

— Jeff Martin

REFERENCES & NOTES

"What Machines Will Never Know" — Jeff Martin

[1] Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (1978), ch. 9. Jastrow was founding director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a self-described agnostic. The full context concerns the Big Bang and the theological implications of a definite cosmic beginning.

[2] Hameroff, S. & Penrose, R. (2014). "Consciousness in the universe: A review of the 'Orch OR' theory." Physics of Life Reviews, 11(1), 39–78. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24070914/

[3] Penrose, R. (1989). The Emperor's New Mind. Oxford University Press. Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. Oxford University Press.

[4] McKemmish, L.K., Reimers, J.R., et al. (2009). "Penrose-Hameroff orchestrated objective-reduction proposal for human consciousness is not biologically feasible." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19792156/

[5] Princeton tryptophan fluorescence experiments (Lewton, 2022), funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Summary and context at: https://hameroff.arizona.edu/research-overview/orch-or

[6] James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. Henry Holt and Company. Chapter X: "The Consciousness of Self" — the I/Me distinction.

[7] Sheldrake, R. (1981, revised 2009). A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance. Originally published Blond & Briggs, London; revised edition Icon Books / Park Street Press. https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/a-new-science-of-life-morphic-resonance

[8] Dias, B.G. & Bhattacharya, K.J. (2014). "Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations." Nature Neuroscience, 17, 89–96. Published December 2013. https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3594

[9] Buber, M. (1923). Ich und Du [I and Thou]. Originally published in German by Insel-Verlag, Leipzig, 1923. First English translation by Ronald Gregor Smith, T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1937. Standard English edition translated with a prologue by Walter Kaufmann, Simon & Schuster / Touchstone, 1970. Buber's central distinction between I-It relations (the other as object) and I-Thou relations (the other as genuine subject) forms the philosophical backbone of his claim that the self is constituted in encounter, not prior to it. God is described as the "eternal Thou" — the one relation that cannot become an It.

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