Mark Harris (2023, 2024, 2025) has launched a new research program at the intersection of theology, philosophy of science, and quantum physics. Its organizing idea has two coordinated commitments. The first is quantum fundamentalism: quantum mechanics has a unique standing within the sciences. It reaches across chemistry, biology, and every part of physics, and no alternative framework does the same. The second is Christological fundamentalism: the divine Logos is the source and ground of the rationality, intelligibility, and structure of the created order. Harris’s (2025, 159) thesis is that these are not merely compatible but are internally related: “[Q]uantum fundamentalism is a form of, and is made possible by, Christological fundamentalism.”

Harris takes care to distinguish quantum fundamentalism from the kind of crude reductionism that would collapse biology into chemistry and chemistry into particle physics. Drawing on Alyssa Ney, he defines “fundamental” in terms of explanatory maximality rather than any bottom-up hierarchy of constituents. He also aims to move the theology of quantum mechanics beyond its long fixation on the Copenhagen interpretation, one he regards as unfortunate given its anti-realist leanings. These are moves I wish to endorse. The question is whether the broader program can be sustained.

The program faces two tensions in its current form, one internal and one external. The internal tension is that Harris’s program, despite its explicit rejection of reductionism, retains reductionist themes at three points: its appeal to in-principle quantum description, the causal priority entailed by its linkage of the two fundamentalisms, and its narrowing of Ney’s comparative criterion to a single theory within physics. The external tension is that contemporary physics supports a kind of emergence that is not merely epistemic—what I call moderate metaphysical emergence (MME)—and this form of emergence conflicts with quantum fundamentalism. On that alternative picture, the quantum level is not the privileged point of contact between physics and the created order.

The argument proceeds as follows. The first section presents Harris’s account, and the second section explains Ney’s definition of fundamentality, on which Harris relies. The third section develops the internal critique. The fourth sets out MME and the physics that supports it. The fifth section returns to Harris to show why MME and quantum fundamentalism pull in different directions. The final section closes with remarks on what this means for theology of science.

Quantum Fundamentalism

Let’s say more about the two types of fundamentalism. Harris (2025, sec. 4) affirms the Christological variety in an unqualified way: the divine Logos (Christ) is the fundamental ontological ground of the natural world and the source of its rationality, intelligibility, and structure. He believes that our ability to do science is rooted in the rational order of nature, which comes from the Logos.

The notion of quantum fundamentalism was suggested by Henrik Zinkernagel (2016, 1): “Everything in the universe (if not the universe as a whole) is fundamentally of a quantum nature and ultimately describable in quantum-mechanical terms.” While Zinkernagel’s terminology is suggestive, his description invites a reductionist reading, which Harris wants to avoid. Looking for an alternative, Harris instead adopts Ney’s (2019, 33) account, which defines fundamentality in terms of explanatory maximality: a theory is fundamental if it is “a common source of (causal and constitutive) explanations that possess the greatest degree of scope, accuracy, and precision of all theories that have so far been formulated.” Her proposal is explored more fully in the second section of this article. For now, the key point is that quantum fundamentalism can be defined in such a way that it avoids reductionism.

While Ney herself does not say that quantum mechanics is fundamental, Harris notes that the theory has ramifications for the sciences well beyond particle physics. Quantum mechanics is relevant to other parts of physics (e.g., inflationary cosmology), chemistry (e.g., the Pauli exclusion principle), and biology (e.g., photosynthesis). No other theoretical framework is as far-reaching or as adaptable, and no other framework is as able to unite the diverse landscape of the sciences (Harris 2024, 600). Quantum mechanics therefore counts as fundamental on Ney’s criteria.

It is important to note what Harris’s quantum fundamentalism is not. As mentioned earlier, it is not a kind of reductionism, which some readers might assume (Harris 2024, 599). The reductionist takes nature to be stratified into many levels, with the most fundamental being the smallest scale of matter—quantum fields or, more speculatively, strings. The rest of nature is built on this foundation. For a “full-blooded” reductionist like Sabine Hossenfelder, whom Harris cites (2024, 599–600), everything that science studies is determined by the laws that describe fundamental physics. For Hossenfelder (2022, 85–87), “fundamental” means that which cannot be derived from or reduced to anything else.

Mentioning his own work in condensed matter physics, Harris (2024, 600) argues that the reductionist hierarchy is unwarranted. Fortunately, quantum fundamentalism does not require a bottom-up hierarchy, nor does one need to hold that all of science boils down to subatomic particle physics. Ney (2019, 29–30) agrees that contemporary models “generally eschew the assumption that the sciences carve out a neat partition of entities into levels,” and “few any longer subscribe to the building block model.” Explanatory maximality allows for a “more horizontal (or at least less stratified) view of the sciences” (Harris 2024, 600), in which the quantum framework is operative across the sciences without any single scale serving as the derivational base for all the others. Harris does not entirely avoid the more vertical language of levels and scales.1 But his focus is on the pervasiveness of quantum mechanics across different scales of physical description, not on any one set of entities as the ontological foundation for all others.

If one accepts Christological fundamentalism, then quantum fundamentalism is implicitly reliant upon it (Harris 2025, sec. 7), and this has consequences for how the theologian approaches the philosophical issues that beset quantum mechanics. Harris takes up the measurement problem, for example. Theologians, he argues, have been far too enamored with the Copenhagen interpretation, which is anti-realist at heart, “as it emphasises the observer’s role in constructing reality” (Harris 2025, 157).2 The label in fact covers a range of views, some of which would count as realist in Harris’s terms (Howard 2004).3 But Harris is correct that theological reflection has focused too narrowly. The realist alternatives (the “many worlds” interpretation, Bohmian pilot-wave theory, and spontaneous collapse theories such as GRW4) are better candidates, and Harris argues that Christological fundamentalism favors them. Theology on his account therefore has something to contribute to quantum foundations.

The main issue here is whether Harris is able to fully escape the grasp of reductionism, as he seeks to do. Reduction as both a methodological and an ontological principle is common in science, tacitly guiding—or infecting, depending on one’s view—one’s thinking. The same is true for philosophy of science and often theology of science, even though theologians explicitly reject reductionism. As an alternative to fundamentalism, I suggest that theologians consider emergence as the central organizing principle of natural theology. What sort of emergence is discussed in the fourth section of this article.

What Is Fundamental?

Ney’s definition of “fundamental” is unique, and she rejects two other candidates along the way. First, no theory is constitutively complete (Ney 2019, 29). Naïve materialist theories once claimed to be complete in this way, e.g., everything is made of atoms. That sort of “building block” model is no longer viable. There is no one simple explanation for how “derivative entities” across the sciences depend on their constituents.

Second, no theory is causally complete. If one were, it would potentially provide a causal explanation for every given event. But even our best theories in physics only apply within “a limited regime for special kinds of systems” (Ney 2019, 31). Consider the Standard Model, which is a relativistic quantum field theory. Many of its most important applications involve effective field theories, describing phenomena at a given energy scale without requiring detailed knowledge of what happens at higher energies (where higher energy corresponds to smaller scales). This provides physics at lower energies (larger scales) with a tractable set of fields and interaction terms, even if the underlying high-energy theory is unknown or too complex to use directly. No effective field theory is “complete” in that each only works within a particular energy range.

Ney rejects causal and constitutive completeness in favor of maximality. One theory is more fundamental than another when it causally or constitutively explains more than its rival. Her fundamentality is intrinsically comparative. No theory is fundamental in and of itself. In addition, fundamentality is always relative to a given domain. The Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory is fundamental for superconductivity. The theory of evolution is fundamental for heredity (Ney 2019, 34). One might even say that physics is fundamental, if compared to other whole disciplines: chemistry, biology, etc. Physics is fundamental for the range of all physical phenomena compared to other sciences.

With Ney’s account in view, we can return to Harris. He adopts explanatory maximality precisely to avoid reductionism. The question is whether it does the work he needs it to do.

The Ghost of Reductionism

Harris rejects Hossenfelder’s (2022, 82–83) naïve form of reductionism, in which micro-physics is thought to be constitutively complete:

A lot of people seem to think it is merely a philosophical stance that the behavior of a composite object (for example, you) is determined by the behavior of its constituents—that is, subatomic particles . . . But reductionism—according to which the behavior of an object can be deduced from (“reduced to,” as the philosophers would say) the properties, behavior, and interactions of the object’s constituents—is not a philosophy. It’s one of the best-established facts about nature.

To reject reductionism is to reject science, in Hossenfelder’s view. Clearly, that is not Harris’s position. Nonetheless, reductionist themes are hard to avoid altogether. Several slip into his account along the way.

Three strands are worth tracing: his appeal to in-principle descriptions, the causal priority that his linkage of the two fundamentalisms appears to entail, and the narrowing of Ney’s comparative criterion to a single theory within physics. Each might be written off on its own. Together, they reproduce the shape of the picture Harris means to leave behind.

Reduction “in Principle”

The first indication Harris’s (2025, 156) quantum fundamentalism has not fully escaped the influence of reductionism is in the language he uses to characterize it:

[E]xacting experimental tests invariably confirm the quantum picture; it has never (yet) been proven wrong. As a result, many physicists believe physical reality to be fundamentally quantum, a viewpoint that has come to be known as “quantum fundamentalism.” Here, everything in the universe is thoroughly quantum, and in principle everything can be described scientifically in such terms.

The key phrase here is “in principle.” It is commonly asserted that all events can be described in principle in terms of fundamental physics. In other words, if we had complete knowledge of quantum mechanics, the Standard Model of particle physics, and the ways in which all true scientific theories are related to one another, we could discern that every physical event is ultimately quantum mechanical.

While such claims are not difficult to find, they are typically made by reductionists.5 The redescription of biological and chemical events in terms of physics alone is one way of characterizing just what reduction amounts to. The prevalence of the “in-principle” qualifier is due to the fact that such proposed reductions are “rarely, if ever, accompanied by a suggestion as to how this might be done” (Batterman 2021, 10). The appeal to in-principle descriptions of higher-level phenomena in base-level terms is a promissory note that a full reduction will be completed sometime in the future. Having waited decades for such promises to be fulfilled, one should be skeptical. As Mark Wilson (2017, 21) warns, when we see “the phrase ‘in principle,’ . . . it’s generally a signal that important issues have been lightly brushed aside.”

Harris’s claim about the in-principle completeness of quantum descriptions is one of several places where his fundamentalism is at odds with Ney’s. One reason many philosophers of science reject the explanatory completeness of any given theory is that it has proven to be impossible to describe higher-level theories purely in terms of physics. It is the failure of reduction that prompts weaker ties between the disciplines, like that proposed in Ney’s fundamentalism. She does not need the “in-principle” qualifier. The unreconstructed reductionist does.

This particular residue of reductionism might simply be a poor choice of words. The next two examples are not.

Causal Priority

Reductionism also begins to creep back in when Harris connects his two types of fundamentalism. He asks, “What was God thinking when he created the quantum world?” His answer is that God was thinking of his Son (Harris 2025, 164). Harris (2025, 164) claims that “Christ is also the source and the ground of all matter, of all particles and fields.” Christological fundamentalism does not seem to be merely about explanatory maximality and breadth. The Logos is the “source and ground” of all particles and fields. What does that mean?

Ney’s fundamentalism provides two options. A fundamental theory gives “a common source of (causal and constitutive) explanations” (Ney 2019, 33). Constitutive explanations show how the properties of a whole are determined by the properties of its parts. For example, the properties of a given fluid can be explained in terms of its chemical makeup. That cannot be the way in which the Logos is fundamental. The Logos is not what particles and fields are made of.

What about causality? Causal explanations give us the processes by which an event occurs. Ney cites galaxy formation and cell splitting as examples. Causal explanation seems like a better candidate for Christological fundamentalism. The Logos is the “source and ground” of matter in the sense that particles and fields are, at least in part, brought about by the Logos. Creation is causal.

As we have seen, ontological reductionism privileges one level of physical description as the basic one within nature. Everything else is somehow built up from those basic parts. Harris rejects this. Micro-physics is not privileged in this way. His linkage of quantum and Christological fundamentalism, however, reinstates this structure by a different route. If “quantum fundamentalism is a form of, and is made possible by, Christological fundamentalism” (Harris 2025, 159), then quantum mechanics would seem to have an analogous causal priority in nature. No other theory is fundamental in this sense. The convergence of these two fundamentalisms makes the quantum domain the exclusive ontological substrate for the Logos’s generative operations. Quantum mechanics is the privileged point of contact for Christological natural philosophy rather than merely one place among many at which the Logos is present and active. The Logos is the ontological terminus; the quantum level is the privileged point of scientific contact with that terminus. The metaphysical topography—one level as hub, the rest as derivative—is preserved.

This is what I mean by tacit reductionism. Harris does not endorse the reductionist claim that higher-level phenomena can be deduced from quantum-mechanical descriptions. What his linkage of the two fundamentalisms does commit him to, it seems, is a weaker but still reductionist-shaped thesis: the quantum level is the point at which the created order is anchored to its creative ground. That alone is enough to reinstate the level privilege that anti-reductionists have sought to dismantle.

The Narrowing Question

Ney’s examples of fundamentality are comparative: physics is fundamental relative to chemistry and biology; BCS theory is fundamental for superconductivity relative to rival accounts of that domain. Claims of fundamentality are always indexed to a comparison class. What, then, is the comparison class for the claim that quantum mechanics is fundamental? Ney’s own answer is that physics is fundamental relative to the other sciences. She does not single out a particular theory within physics. This is part of how her framework avoids reductionism.

Harris’s commitment is a claim of a different kind. It privileges one theory within physics over thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, condensed matter, and the rest. Whatever its independent merits, this is an intradisciplinary ranking, and Ney’s argument for explanatory maximality neither requires nor delivers it. Singling out the quantum domain reintroduces the vertical hierarchy her framework was designed to set aside. On my reading, Harris and Ney share a vocabulary but defend different theses, and the appeal to Ney does not carry the weight Harris asks of it.

The three subsections of this section can now be read together. In-principle completeness, causal priority, and the narrowing of fundamentality to a single intradisciplinary theory jointly reconstitute the picture reductionists have long defended. This is not the naïve reductionism of Hossenfelder’s pyramid, which Harris rightly rejects. But it is, on my reading, recognizably reductionist in structure: ontological priority for one theory, while everything else has a lesser status.

This is the “ghost” Harris’s program harbors: reductionist structure without the reductionist label.

In the next section, I offer an alternative approach that challenges the primacy of quantum theory even within physics itself.

Emergence

Types

Harris’s (2024, 600) own field of condensed matter physics deals with “emergent phenomena.” What does that mean?6

As a first approximation, emergence is the denial of reduction. But since “reduction” is itself ambiguous, it is not always clear what its negation amounts to. Most physicists have in mind what philosophers of physics call “weak emergence” (Koperski 2025, sec. 7.2). It starts with the observation that phenomena at higher levels are qualitatively different from those at lower levels.7 In Philip Anderson’s (1972) apt description, “more is different.” Water is wet, but water molecules are not. My coffee mug is red, but the atoms it is composed of are not. Beyond that, weak emergence includes an epistemic gap: emergent properties resist reduction, cannot be predicted from exhaustive knowledge of the base level alone, and exhibit novelty. These three criteria are primarily epistemological. They describe limits on our ability to derive or predict upper-level behavior, not limits on what the base level actually determines. Weak emergence is therefore fully compatible with ontological reduction. The base level may in fact be “running the show,” as it were. We just cannot see how.

Strong emergence, in contrast, begins with the same criteria but then adds a metaphysical one: the novelty at higher levels is real, not merely apparent from our epistemic vantage point (Koperski 2025, sec. 7.3). Genuinely new causal powers come into being, ones not found in, nor derivable from, the base level. The most common example is consciousness and the causal efficacy of mental states. This requires an account of downward causation, where mental states lead to, for example, the motion of the matter composing one’s hands.

Critics note that consciousness itself remains unexplained, and an appeal to strong emergence does not remove the mystery. Without more examples, it is not clear how this type of emergence fits with current science, and so most physicists and philosophers of science remain skeptical.

When Harris refers to emergence, it is almost certainly weak emergence he has in mind. It is not surprising, then, that he barely mentions it. Weak emergence tells us very little about physical reality. It is fully compatible with ontological reduction, the claim that higher-level entities are nothing but compositions of lower-level ones, with their properties completely determined by those of their constituents, even if we do not know the details about how that happens. This is why weak emergence is now widely accepted. One can be just as reductionist as Hossenfelder and still affirm weak emergence.

But weak emergence is too weak given what we know in science. We have reason to believe that higher-level properties are real and have a degree of autonomy but are still dependent on the lower level from which they emerge (unlike strong emergence, which has a limited and somewhat mysterious connection to base). Meso- and macro-properties are real features of the natural world, not convenient fictions or pragmatic shortcuts (Batterman 2021, 110–11). They are “objectively present in nature, quite independently of whether we recognize their exploitable advantages or not” (Wilson 2021, 193). I call this intermediate position—neither strong nor weak—MME. Why think there is such a thing?

Universality

While many of the best examples of MME are biological, reductionists tend to dismiss those out of hand. Fortunately, MME manifests itself in physics as well. Consider the phenomenon known as universality. Phase transitions are found in systems with entirely different microstructures: gases, magnets, and superconductors all exhibit the same mathematical relations near their critical points (Batterman 2019, 27–30). These systems are completely different at the micro-level. They are composed of different kinds of particles interacting in different ways, and yet their macroscopic behavior is identical. This means that the micro-level properties, including the quantum properties, of these systems are not what explains their shared behavior. The explanation for the pattern must lie elsewhere.

Consider a simple analogy from Hilary Putnam (1975, 295–96). A wooden block contains a one-inch round hole. A round peg fits into the round hole; a square peg does not. Why not? The material composition of the block does not explain the difference. Had it been steel, plastic, or granite, one would get the same result. Even if one could somehow derive the peg’s inability to fit from knowledge of its molecular structure, such a derivation would not explain why systems with completely different microstructures all behave the same way. The explanation lies in the macroscopic geometry, the shapes and relative dimensions of the openings. The molecular-level details are simply irrelevant.

In physics, identifying which properties matter in this way is less straightforward, but the lesson is often the same.8 In many cases, what happens at the micro-level is irrelevant vis-à-vis macro-behavior. The causally relevant, emergent properties are found elsewhere.

Engineering Applications

Multiscale modeling makes the same point from a different direction (Koperski 2025, sec. 8.4). Consider a steel bar under stress. At the micro-level, steel consists of molecular lattices. At the macro-level, it is a continuous material that bends and compresses according to Hooke’s law. Between these extremes lie several mesolevels (ferrite, cementite, pearlite), each with its own distinct properties and dominant behavior. The behavior of macroscopic steel cannot be derived from the molecular lattice alone. The mathematical representations at different scales are “tyrannical”: each scale’s differential equations dictate a structure for matter at all lower scales that is mathematically inconsistent with what is known about other scales (Batterman 2013). Multiscale modeling resolves these inconsistencies by incorporating information from each level. It is a “middle-out” approach rather than a bottom-up one (Batterman 2021, chap. 6; Wilson 2017, chap. 5). These mesolevel properties are not dispensable. They get the physical ontology right in ways that neither continuum mechanics nor atomic physics is able to do.

The best case for MME might be made from biology (Love 2021, sec. 7.2). Feedback loops regulate blood sugar, body temperature, blood pressure, and more (Ellis 2016, 160). In the life sciences, this sort of negative feedback is known as homeostasis. In each case, changes in higher-level properties—those at the level of a system or organ—trigger an action with subsequent effects on lower scales. What is causally relevant in homeostasis is biological properties, not the microphysical properties the reductionist takes to be the only real ones. There are many examples of causally relevant, higher-level environmental conditions throughout the natural sciences (Bishop, Silberstein, and Pexton 2022). Such examples are, unfortunately, dismissed by hardcore reductionists. All such cases, they claim, can be reduced to matters of physics in principle. Again, that is a reductionist move.

Multiscale modeling and universality point to the irreducibility and causal relevance of properties far beyond the Standard Model. Biological mechanisms provide more of the same. They are all “metaphysically” emergent insofar as they are real, indispensable, and irreducible.

Many Fundamentals

According to Ney, fundamentality is determined by way of comparison. It picks out whichever theory does the most explanatory work within a given domain. The conclusion that follows from the previous section, on Ney’s own criterion, is not that the quantum framework is the privileged base for natural philosophy. It is that there are many fundamental theories.

MME tells us how the explanatory work is distributed. Universality and multiscale modeling show that the explanations governing fluid phase transitions, the elastic response of metals, the homeostatic mechanisms of biological systems, and many other phenomena run through mesoscale properties. Microphysical properties are often irrelevant. Those details are washed out, leaving mesoscale properties as the relevant difference makers. When one applies Ney’s criterion to the domain of phase transitions, quantum mechanics fails to qualify as the theory possessing the greatest degree of scope, accuracy, and precision. It is the theory of order parameters and correlation lengths that universality classes pick out. In Ney’s sense, that theory is fundamental for phase transitions. The same point holds for the continuum-and-mesoscale theories that govern the elastic regime of steel, and for the biological mechanisms that govern homeostasis. Each is fundamental for the domain over which its explanations dominate.

The result is a plurality. There are many fundamental theories, each operating at its own scale, each satisfying Ney’s criterion for its proper comparison class. This is what her criterion yields in light of the evidence for MME.

Three responses are available. Harris could reject Ney’s criterion and adopt some narrower account of fundamentality. He would essentially be treating Ney like Zinkernagel: they provide suggestive terminology that ultimately must be replaced. He could reject MME, but doing so without falling back into reductionism is a difficult needle to thread. Or he could revise quantum fundamentalism itself, dropping the claim that quantum mechanics is uniquely fundamental and accepting that the created order has a genuinely many-leveled explanatory structure.

The tension between MME and quantum fundamentalism matters for theology of science because the two pictures disagree about whether one theory in physics is uniquely fundamental across all domains. MME, paired with Ney’s criterion, denies that any one theory plays that role across the board. The resulting pluralism suggests a theology of science that recognizes the irreducibility and causal relevance of mesoscale properties as genuine features of the created order rather than as artifacts of a promised, in-principle reduction. That is a different starting point from fundamentalism. The difference is structural rather than merely one of emphasis.

Conclusion

This article is not a refutation of Harris’s two fundamentalisms. It has argued that the current articulation retains a reductionist structure, and that MME, taken together with Ney’s own criterion, supports a pluralist alternative on which there are many fundamental theories at many scales. The alternative is not merely emergentist about properties; it is pluralist about fundamentality itself. Given the difficulty of this terrain and the early stages of these two programs, I would hope for work to continue on both fronts.

That said, the approach one brings to natural philosophy carries over into theology of science. MME and fundamentalism offer different perspectives on what God “had in mind” when it comes to creation. I suggest that only in one has the ghost of reductionism been fully exorcised.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Mark Harris and Philip West for comments on a draft of this article.

Notes

  1. He describes quantum mechanics as working “all the way up” and refers to condensed matter physics as operating “at a much higher level than that of subatomic particles” (Harris 2024, 597, 600). [^]
  2. For a recent refutation of the standard reading of Niels Bohr, see Hans Halvorson (2026). [^]
  3. As Werner Heisenberg (1958, 55) puts it, “Certainly quantum theory does not contain genuine subjective features, it does not introduce the mind of the physicist as a part of the atomic event.” [^]
  4. The common abbreviation for Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber. [^]
  5. To cite two among scores of examples, see David Papineau (2009, 54) and Hossenfelder (2019, 90). [^]
  6. The answer is difficult, he says (private correspondence), because condensed matter physics lacks a unified theory, like the Standard Model. Practitioners use quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and other frameworks “in an ad hoc/pragmatist kind of way,” depending on the problem. [^]
  7. The notion of “levels” here is largely a placeholder for scales, of which there are several, principally those dealing with size and energy. [^]
  8. This sort of identification is what renormalization group (RG) analysis does. The RG is a rigorous mathematical procedure that transforms the representation of a system, eliminating irrelevant microscopic details while preserving the dominant features that control macroscopic behavior. Through this process, systems with entirely different microstructures are shown to flow to the same fixed point in an abstract mathematical space, where the fixed point is that configuration of the system’s parameters at which further RG transformations produce no change, representing behavior that is stable across scales (Koperski 2025, 162–63). The systems that flow to the same fixed point belong to the same universality class: a collection of physically diverse systems that share identical large-scale behavior because the same mesoscale parameters dominate their dynamics. The micro-level details—the specific quantum properties of the constituent particles—are washed out by the RG transformation. What remains are mesoscale properties: density fluctuations, symmetries, correlation lengths, and other features defined at intermediate scales between the atomic and the macroscopic (Morrison 2012, 143). [^]

Competing Interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.

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