www.back2.church — From Faith to Doubt and Back Again. Science from its first drops through its quantum wonder, by Dr. Clayton Hess MD MPH.
My life as a radiation oncologist, physician, father, truth-seeker, and a hobbyist theoretical physicist is defined by an ongoing synthesis of science, faith, and service — and by the struggle that comes from the juggle — all bound up with a deep love for my pioneer roots and heritage.
My journey from faith, through doubt, and back again was catalyzed by my engagement with two of the most unsettling and best-verified results in modern physics: the non-deterministic character of quantum theory, and the experimental confirmation of quantum entanglement recognized by the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. Together they form the foundation of my back2.church movement. I read the universe's fundamental uncertainty not as a defeat for meaning, but as a demonstration of a profound, non-local reality that remains fully compatible with a purposeful Creator.
As a published scientist, I found my earlier, more deterministic worldview challenged by two ideas. Quantum field theory — the mathematical framework underlying the Standard Model of particle physics — extends quantum mechanics to fields and describes a world that is fundamentally granular and probabilistic rather than smoothly predictable (Kuhlmann & Stöckler, 2018). At its heart sits Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: nature imposes a fundamental limit on how precisely certain pairs of properties, such as position and momentum, can be known at once (Heisenberg, 1927; NIST, 2022).
In such a universe, definite values do not exist until measurement; probability is built into the structure of the theory itself (Myrvold, Genovese & Shimony, 2024). That led me to a metaphor: the physical world is less a solid, pre-written book than a "pixelated," continually emerging projection.
In 2022 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science" (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2022). This work was central to my own turning point.
John Bell proved in 1964 that no theory respecting local realism — the classical assumptions that influences cannot travel faster than light and that physical properties exist independently of being measured — can reproduce all the predictions of quantum mechanics (Bell, 1964). Building on the testable inequality of Clauser, Horne, Shimony, and Holt (1969), Aspect, Dalibard, and Roger (1982) measured entangled photons with rapidly switching analyzers and found Bell's inequalities violated by five standard deviations. Decades of ever-tighter experiments, culminating in the Nobel-cited work, confirmed that nature is not locally real. To me, this non-locality — correlations that hold across any separation — speaks of a foundational unity that is not contained by space and time.
My return to faith, and the founding of the Church of Faith and Reason, rests on a reframing: these mysteries are, for me, not threats to belief but its most striking evidence.
Rather than read quantum uncertainty and non-locality as undermining faith — as the rise of science has so often been said to do — I came to see them as compatible with, and even suggestive of, the divine (Priest, 2024). The universe is not the perfectly wound clock that Einstein had in mind when he insisted God "does not play dice" (Einstein to Born, 1926, in Born, 1971), but a dynamic, inherently unpredictable, deeply interconnected whole. Its non-local unity I take as a sign of a reality that physical things continually depend upon — a "pixelated" cosmos being actualized moment by moment.
I hold this as conviction, not as proof: the most rigorous, experimentally verified facts of physics do not contradict faith, but, for me, supply its elegant underpinnings. My life's work — its joys, its tragedies, and the long tension between church and science — is a testament to the belief that faith and reason can, and must, build together.
—Clayton Hess
Bell, J. S. (1964). On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox. Physics Physique Fizika, 1(3), 195–200. DOI:10.1103/PhysicsPhysiqueFizika.1.195
Clauser, J. F., Horne, M. A., Shimony, A., & Holt, R. A. (1969). Proposed experiment to test local hidden-variable theories. Physical Review Letters, 23(15), 880–884. DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.23.880
Aspect, A., Dalibard, J., & Roger, G. (1982). Experimental test of Bell's inequalities using time-varying analyzers. Physical Review Letters, 49(25), 1804–1807. DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.49.1804
Heisenberg, W. (1927). Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik. Zeitschrift für Physik, 43(3–4), 172–198. DOI:10.1007/BF01397280
Kuhlmann, M., & Stöckler, M. (2018). Quantum Field Theory. In The Philosophy of Quantum Physics (pp. 221–262). Springer International Publishing. DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-78356-7_6
Myrvold, W., Genovese, M., & Shimony, A. (2024). Bell's Theorem. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bell-theorem/
NIST. (2022). Quantum Mechanics: 5 Concepts You Can Understand Without Math. National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. (2022). The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 [Press release and scientific background]. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2022/
Priest, S. (2024). Quantum Physics and the Existence of God. Religions, 15(1), 78. DOI:10.3390/rel15010078
Born, M. (Ed.). (1971). The Born–Einstein Letters (letter of 4 December 1926). Walker & Company.
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