Does a Pluriverse Describe Reality or Destroy It?

We must choose between
a science that discovers a world
and a science that settles for
a shared hallucination.

When Physics Forgets the World

By John D. Wise, PhD

Phase I: The Illusion of the Pluriverse

Quantum mechanics has a reputation for being strange. Lately, it is being asked to persuade us that objective reality may not exist at all.

A New Scientist article by Jo Marchant, “Forget the multiverse. In the pluriverse, we create reality together,” March 16, 2026, begins with the genuine puzzles of quantum measurement and quickly crosses a philosophical Rubicon. Because physics cannot provide a “God’s-eye view” of the universe, we are told that perhaps there is no objective universe to view.

Can we reconcile scientific evidence with a cosmos that includes us and the choices we make? The answer, I found, was yes. But only if we are prepared to radically rethink what reality is and who we are. [emphasis mine]

In its place, the article offers “QBism” and the “pluriverse,” a patchwork of perspectives where events are “hammered out as we speak.” This is a dramatic conclusion, but it is also a very old one. Long before quantum mechanics, idealist philosophers argued that reality is inseparable from mind.

What is new today is not the idea, but its venue. The language of physics is being used to perform a 19th-century sleight of hand: it pulls the world down into the mind of the observer, leaving no objective reality outside the human frame.

Premise: QBism mistakes our blurry vision for a blurry world.

 

Phase II: The Category Error of Perspective

This shift trades on a once-hidden, but here open, collapsing of epistemology into ontology. Ontology asks what exists; epistemology asks how we know. It is entirely correct that all human knowledge is gained from particular perspectives. This follows from the fact that we are finite and localized beings, not infinite perceivers. But when QBism redefines the electron as a “personal prediction,” the object of inquiry is collapsed into the act of inquiry, turning what is predicted into the prediction itself.

Take the mind-bending quantum paradox of ‘Wigner’s friend,’ in which experimental results seem to break a fundamental law of logic:

Wigner’s friend measures a particle while Wigner stands outside the lab, oblivious to the result. The two participants observe different – mutually exclusive – quantum states, implying physical reality is somehow two opposing things at the same time.

QBism resolves the quantum paradox in this way:

But if quantum states are personal beliefs, the clash makes perfect sense. Similarly, with Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment, no strange back-in-time effects are needed because there’s no particle “out there” to change. Every measurement – even if it relates to what we think of as the past – is an experience for a particular individual that becomes true for them at the time they get the result. [emphasis mine]

But as the author herself suggests, there is a cost. The success of science rests not on the pliability of the world, but on its independence. Experiments matter because reality can resist us, correct us, and overturn our expectations.

Reality Check: Quantum weirdness is not a sign that we are constructing the world; it is a sign that we are discovering it.

Long before modern physics, Heraclitus argued that we cannot step into the same river even once, because reality is only a dynamic flow. Stability (and thus identity) is an illusion. To follow this path is to suggest that because we cannot stand where God stands, there is no ground at all.

Premise: QBism is wrong to imply that our inability to see everything means there is nothing to see.

 

Phase III: The Genealogy of the Wound

How did we arrive at a place where it feels plausible to say reality is an “hallucination”?

QBism flips the refrain that our perceptions are hallucinations. What if physical reality is the hallucination? [emphasis mine]

For over a century, science has defined itself by “methodological naturalism” (MN). In its modest form, this was the implicit practice of scientists who believed they were investigating a rational creation. They sought material explanations because they believed in a supernatural Author of Reason.

But in the 19th century, mirroring the ‘dialectical materialism’ of Darwin[1] and Marx (who inverted Hegel’s Absolute idealism), this practice was weaponized. What is announced as a method becomes a filter. What began as epistemic restraint became an implicit ontology. By turning a ‘way of working’ into a definition of reality, science did not so much deny[2] the Transcendent as legislate it out of the conversation. In doing so, it evicted the very ‘observer’ who – being made in the rational image of the Creator – was the only one capable of the scientific discovery it sought to perform.

Premise: 19^th century science turned a useful rule for investigating created order into a blindfold that prevents us from seeing what is actually there (and what it logically implies).

 

Phase IV: The Self-Inflicted Wound

This is the crisis quantum theory has exposed. By rejecting the “God’s-eye view” – the independent, rational grounding of the universe – modern science has left itself with a hollow materialism. To make sense of this void, it is forced to “immanentize” reason/consciousness, pulling it down into the material system itself. According to the article, QBism’s

… big innovation is to say there is no transcendent truth; nothing exists from a “God’s eye” perspective, regardless of the individual ways we look. Rather than treating our personal worlds as hallucinations or models of the physical world, what if our experiences are components of a different kind of reality, with causative powers of their own?

Methodological naturalism is not a safeguard to science.

It is a self-inflicted wound threatening its very existence.

When the practice is made absolute, it no longer engages something real; it only reflects the practitioner. This is why idealism always haunts a materialist metaphysic: once you lose the transcendent Creator, you eventually lose the creation, leaving only the “joint project” of human perspectives.

Reality Check: We are the proof of transcendence that methodological naturalism forbids us from seeing.

Premise: A science that denies its own ground is no longer an encounter with the world, but merely an echo of the observer.

 

The Return to Discovery

Science lives by discovery, and discovery requires a world that exists without our permission. If the distinction between knower and known is not restored – and not merely as a matter of method but as a feature of reality itself – then science will continue to drift toward idealism and subjectivity. It will move not into deeper knowledge of the world, but into increasingly sophisticated ways of talking to ourselves in the dark.

If scientific investigation is to mean anything, there must be a reality that precedes our speaking of it. We must reclaim the objective world from the “patchwork of perspectives” and recognize that the surprises of the quantum world are not invitations to invent reality, but proofs that reality stands over against us, independent and defiant.

Conclusion: We must choose between a science that discovers a world and a science that settles for a shared hallucination.

Endnotes:

[1] Critics may object that it was exclusively Marx, not Darwin, who adopted dialectical materialism. While the label is Marxist, the logic is Darwinian. Darwin was the first to successfully instantiate a closed material dialectic, demonstrating how apparent “ends” could be achieved through the purely material friction of opposing forces. In Darwin, the Hegelian Spirit is replaced by the Selective Process, but the metaphysical result is the same: a universe that is a self-generating, self-contained monologue. While the history of their mutual influence is complex (I won’t tell a Darwinian story about the “evolution” of the idea), the logical trajectory is inescapable: Hegel provided the grammar, Darwin the biology, and Marx the sociology for a reality that has no need for a Speaker.

[2] They didn’t have to deny it, as the logical structure they adopted (see note 1) already did so. Hegel’s dialectical logic immanentized reality.

---

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.