Entangled Intelligence: A Trojan Horse for Materialist Science
Assumptions are being
undone by data about
the “material” brain.
Never let it be said that Creation-Evolution Headlines lags behind science. A few weeks ago I stumbled on a mention by Darren Orf of quantum physics in the brain. I had long suspected this, but it’s gratifying to see evidence piling up.
Let’s begin with a headline from our friend Darren at Popular Mechanics, dated July 10, 2025:
Indeed! And in this rare instance, a high score on the perhapsimaybecouldness index may work in our favor!
Here’s another from Quantum Insider (August 3, 2024) with supplemental information.
The Gates of the Citadel
If the findings of this ongoing research hold up, they don’t just tweak a theory of consciousness, they breach a scientific citadel and reignite a war “won” long ago with an unconditional surrender. The Materialist gates were sealed tight well before Richard Lewontin famously admitted that science commits itself to a materialist explanation “no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying.”
Deterministic (sometimes called “eliminative”) materialism declared the “problems” of consciousness, free will, and the soul solved. The solution? They were all, not to put too fine a point on it, illusions. Ok … there were some details to work out – loose ends and residual puzzles, but those details were just reductionist mop-up work – finding and cataloging the predictable evidence. The war was over.
Determinism had won.
The Data Fights Back: Quantum … biology?
But quantum consciousness is no ordinary anomaly. What’s rolling through the gate now is a Trojan Horse – and future scientists may well rewrite the old saying: “Beware of neuroanatomists bearing data.”
… the brain is ultra-efficient, its energy is renewable, and it’s capable of computational feats that even the most advanced computer can’t pull off. In many ways, the inner workings of the human brain make up an unknown computational frontier.
One of the “mop up” problems is explaining this magnificence from a purely materialist framework. As we saw in my last article, the idea of a quantum brain as a potential solution is not new – Orch OR was proposed by Penrose and Hameroff in the 1990’s, but it lacked empirical support and seemed to violate “known” engineering principles.
This study suggests otherwise:
“Consciousness within the brain hinges on the synchronized activities of millions of neurons, but the mechanism responsible for orchestrating such synchronization remains elusive,” the paper reads. “The results indicate that the cylindrical cavity formed by a myelin sheath [on neuronal axons] can facilitate spontaneous photon emission from the vibrational modes and generate a significant number of entangled photon pairs.”
These paired photons might then serve as a communication resource for networking nerve cells:
“When a brain is active, millions of neurons fire simultaneously,” Yong-Cong Chen, a co-author of the study, told New Scientist. “If the power of evolution was looking for handy action over a distance, quantum entanglement would be [an] ideal candidate for this role.”
Evolution is a “power” seeking solutions to a communication problem?
When will it become evident that an engineering intelligence is directing things, not blind mechanism? When will it dawn on the researchers that the language forced upon them by their data is not just a helpful heuristic metaphor, but an unacknowledged reality, a Trojan horse in the citadel?
It was the data, not its evolutionary interpretation, that took down evolution for me in 2024. It seems to be cascading.
One last point worth emphasizing: this research proposal doesn’t appear in a fringe blog or B-rated journal, but in Physical Review E.[1] The authors admit proof of these speculations will be difficult; catching biphotons in living tissue is a monumental experimental task. But the very fact that peer‑reviewed physics now entertains the idea means something unknown and potentially unpredictable has entered Materialism’s citadel: “spooky action at a distance.”
Freedom Returns Fire: Sapolsky vs. Mitchell (Psychology Today, April 3, 2024)
While quantum theorists poke around the mind’s “machinery,” another of those pesky mop-up problems has resumed resistance: free will versus determinism. Determinism was once “settled science,” but free will is now back under serious discussion.
The very fact that anyone in mainstream science is defending free will is astonishing enough. But even more surprising is who is lining up on each side of the battlefield.
On one side stands Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurobiologist and primatologist whose latest book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, offers a definitive declaration: we are meat machines, programmed by biology, culture, and circumstance. The idea that we “choose” anything is a comforting illusion.
“There’s not a crack anywhere in there to shoehorn in free will,” Sapolsky told Nautilus. “Your life is nothing but that: everything that came before.”
On the opposite side is Kevin Mitchell, a Trinity College neuroscientist whose book Free Agents argues that free will is not an illusion – it’s the outcome of a long evolutionary process that equipped organisms with the ability to evaluate and decide. Mitchell thinks freedom emerges, slowly, from biological complexity.
“Even bacteria do this,” he says. “We see what’s out in the world, gauge our internal state… and ask, ‘What should I do?’”
The debate is fierce, but its very existence signals something deeper. Old dogmas are cracking: mind explained by matter, choice by cause-and-effect. Here we are in the 2020’s watching top scientists – trained in the very heart of materialist orthodoxy – duke it out over whether or not we can choose.
And like the quantum question, this is no side skirmish. It strikes at the foundation of what it means to be human, and what it means to be scientific.
What’s Hidden in the Horse’s Belly?
So what? Why should any of this matter? After all, the brain using quantum effects doesn’t, by itself, disprove materialism. And if materialism can still spin a plausible evolutionary tale for choice – like Mitchell’s, then why am I excited?
Fair questions.
But this is where Sapolsky’s “meat machine” metaphor breaks down as an explanation for consciousness. Chemistry is deterministic; machines are deterministic. Determinism is a product of the macro-scale. Without it machines break down, and so also Sapolsky’s metaphor.
But the quantum scale is something … different.
So long as science could plausibly explain consciousness as the emergent product of mechanism, the deterministic causal story – inputs producing outputs – could hold. But if the “engineering” of life runs all the way down to the level of the quantum, then what we’re dealing with isn’t just complex machines. And that means life and mind may not be explainable within the system at all.[2]
Which brings us to the true threat lurking in their data.
Indeterminacy, Causality and Freedom
I think we’ve overlooked what this Trojan Quantum smuggles into determinism’s citadel.
Indeterminacy.
Not noise or randomness. Genuine causal openness—the one thing materialism cannot tolerate, like an absolute boundary for Hegelian thought. Both mean that there is something more than they are willing to admit into their system.
Quantum mechanics always dances at the edges of physics—defying measurement, collapsing wave functions, deferring to observation. The quantum, like life, is weird. Inexplicable.
And now it’s knocking at biology’s door.
Life, it seems to me, might well be quantum indeterminacy scaled upward by Divine design[3] – neither chance nor emergence, but design – precision-engineered to allow for freedom, choice, rationality, and even language to commune with The Word who spoke it into existence. If you are familiar with the arc of my work here at CEH you might sense the pattern.
Deterministic chemistry cannot choose. A mechanism cannot know, express preference or will. But a soul can. And for that, the created order must include room for something higher than cause and effect – room for something, or Some One, beyond nature.
The real payload in this quantum horse is something far more disruptive than a more complex basement for materialistic explanation. It is freedom. Not the “freedom” of random electrons, but the freedom to transcend mechanistic programming, even that of DNA.
Sailing off The Edge of the World
And here’s the final irony: Materialist science, in its mop-up operation to fill in the evidentiary gaps in its “settled” worldview, went searching for evidence to shore up its creed. But in opening the data, what’s spilling out of its belly isn’t reinforcement – it’s revolution.
They set out to fill in the details of their materialist map – but if they persist in denying what the evidence reveals and indicates, they risk sailing off the edge of their own flat-earth.
Science won’t end in this cataclysm, it will begin a restoration. The torrent of data now flooding the citadel is washing away dogmatic illusions that led science astray for two centuries. Our world is intelligible because it was spoken into being by a rational Mind. Creation scientists, like Noah and his children, are picking up the pieces and rebuilding what was corrupted, setting a new course, not from a flat earth, but from a multi-dimensional worldview that faces Reality and seeks Him with all its heart.
Footnotes
[1] The Gold Standard of scientific peer-review, not given to speculation or wild ideas.
[2] I like this, as it picks up on implications from Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorems.
[3] This is the key insight I gained from writing this paper, and like all my insights it is open to revision, criticism and rejection.
John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.