For me, the best thing about working for the John Templeton Foundation was being exposed to ideas that normally I wouldn’t have encountered, inasmuch as I didn’t pay more than casual attention to science and its interaction with the world of the spirit until I did my 2009 Templeton-Cambridge journalism fellowship. It was my work at Templeton that introduced me to the amazing world of quantum physics. The more you read about physics, the more you may wonder why religious believers are so focused on evolutionary biology as the battleground for science-versus-religion/materialist-versus-immaterialist worldviews. (The books for the generalist to read are physicist Stephen F. Barr’s “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith,” Paul Davies’s “God and the New Physics”, or anything by John Polkinghorne; for the record, all are scientists, but Barr is a Roman Catholic, Davies is not a religious believer, and Polkinghorne is an Anglican priest).

Anyway, New Scientist has a piece out now speculating on how quantum processes, which are very, very strange, may be present in biology. Excerpt:

On one level, you might think, we shouldn’t be surprised that life has a quantum edge. After all, biology is based on chemistry, and chemistry is all about the doings of atomic electrons – and electrons are quantum-mechanical beasts at heart. That’s true, says Jennifer Brookes, who researches biological quantum effects at Harvard University. “Of course everything is ultimately quantum because electron interactions are quantised.”

On another level, it is gobsmacking. In theory, quantum states are delicate beasts, easily disturbed and destroyed by interaction with their surroundings. So far, physicists have managed to produce and manipulate them only in highly controlled environments at temperatures close to absolute zero, and then only for fractions of a second. Finding quantum effects in the big, wet and warm world of biology is like having to take them into account in a grand engineering project, says Brookes. “How useful is it to know what electrons are doing when you’re trying to build an aeroplane?” she asks.

Might this received wisdom be wrong?

The Oxford University quantum physicist Vlatko Vedral explored this in depth in a cover story from the May issue of Scientific American. The full article is only available to subscribers, but the magazine summarizes it like this:

• Quantum mechanics is commonly said to be a theory of microscopic things: molecules, atoms, subatomic particles
• Nearly all physicists, though, think it applies to everything, no matter what the size. The reason its distinctive features tend to be hidden is not a simple matter of scale.
• Over the past several years experimentalists have seen quantum effects in a growing number of macroscopic systems.
• The quintessential quantum effect, entanglement, can occur in large systems as well as warm ones—including living organisms—even though molecular jiggling might be expected to disrupt entanglement.

I have one two occasions — once with myself, unaware of what was happening, and once with my sick child, who was also unaware of what was happening — seen a healer cause observable physical changes in a human body (mine and my son’s) from a distance measured in miles. The healer is a religious man, but he says what he does has nothing to do with religion. He doesn’t really understand how it works, and according to what we know about physics, it’s not supposed to work … but it does work. He firmly believes that it has to do with natural processes that will be explained one day by science. My hunch is that this work on quantum biology may well one day explain what this man can do.

The world is far more mysterious than we often think, and that the strict separation of the world of matter into the Natural and the Supernatural is misleading.