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Schrödinger’s Birds: God’s Existence Is What We Do

It was finally spring in my house after the ups and downs of the indecisiveness of temperatures over winter. My lilacs had frozen in bud, so had my bleeding hearts and butterfly bushes. Even the lavenders he had planted last year, hybridized for their hardiness in this difficult mountainous area, seemed unable to survive. Time to prune, fertilize, water and pamper in this high desert place, where he had been challenged as a caretaker like never before.

Then, on that beautiful and finally warm Friday morning, I decided it was time for a general exterior cleanup as well. The three colorful birdhouses that our friend Bill had built for us were looking dilapidated. I couldn’t remember the last time my husband and I took them apart, cleaned out the old nests and repaired. The back panel of one in particular was split open by the pressure of what was inside and needed to be re-nailed. I placed my three rung ladder against the pine tree, looked inside the house for a live nest, saw nothing and lowered it. Another was taken to my husband’s workbench in the garage. Soon they would be settled and back in place, ready for the Mountain Chickadees, who preferred the nesting boxes each spring.

On Saturday morning, almost exactly twenty-four hours later, I went into the garage to see the two birdhouses. Why, I can’t tell you. As I approached the workbench, I heard the unlikely sound of a peep. Hadn’t you checked to see if there was occupancy? In disbelief and horror at what I had done, I saw the unmistakable presence in one of the birdhouses. They were begging for food so much, I wondered how those mouths could fit inside the little box, let alone all four babies. But there they were. I accidentally had
take them from their mother.

I was quick to enlist my husband’s help to replace the birdhouse in the exact spot it came from. It took less than ten minutes, but every second was critical. The birds had been without care for a day, a day when they would have been fed every ten or fifteen minutes. My husband and I, both animal lovers, were devastated as we walked away from our rescues, again demandingly chirping.

For the next few days, we couldn’t even talk about the babies, and certainly not speculate on the remote possibility that they would be discovered in time to save them. One day I stood quietly by the aviary, hoping to hear signs of life. But nothing.

I felt so bad that I couldn’t sleep. Until six nights later I decided I had a choice. I could believe that the babies had died and feel guilt and remorse for my mistake; or I could believe that the babies had been found and fed and feel happy. Number two thing, I actually did, one of the few times I could control how I thought about something, and I went to sleep.

The next morning (again Friday, an outdoor watering day) I heard an unknown bird song. I followed the sound stealthily until I spotted the little singer at the top of the pinion where the unfortunate birdhouse hung. It was a mountain chickadee on a loud call that he didn’t know what they were doing. She continued for a few more bars and then she was gone, bent on leather, a woman on a mission. I watched her go, wondering if she was the mother she had stolen her chicks from. And then I heard the chirping of the birdhouse, loud and clear and loud, a refrain, I guessed, of about four voices.

There is a famous thought experiment, called Schrödinger’s cat, created in the 1930s by physicist Erwin Schrödinger to illustrate a principle of quantum theory called superposition. The experiment essentially concluded that if you don’t know what the state of any object is, then as long as you don’t look to check it, it’s actually in every possible state at once. But what about the influence of choice on those possible states? Could a powerful belief select the state an object is in? Which came first, my decision to believe that the baby tits were alive or that they were really alive?

And so it is with God.

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