Sofons, God, and Black Holes

In “The Three-Body Problem”, the sofons allow Trisolaris to communicate with Earth instantaneously, despite being 4.21 light-years away. It’s a fantastic scene. It’s also, physically, a lie—the quantum entanglement doesn’t transmit information faster than light, period. But thinking about this well-told lie made me realize something uncomfortable about faith, science, and the size of the hole we pretend not to see before jumping in.

The problem that won’t leave your mind

Anyone who closely follows astrophysics knows that the standard model is full of glaring cracks: the Hubble tension (distant galaxies moving away faster than theory predicts), multiverse conjectures with no testable horizon in sight, and the aforementioned quantum entanglement, always poorly explained by people who should know better.

If even cosmology can’t tie up all the loose ends, why should it deserve more credit than the belief in a universal architect? After all, neither can be completely proven. Both ask, at some point, for you to take a step without seeing the ground below.

It’s a good question. Good enough that I spent an entire weekend poring over various articles and books instead of doing anything productive.

Everyone jumps from somewhere

There’s a philosophical problem called the Münchhausen trilemma. It states that any chain of rational justification ends up in one of three places: infinite regress, circular argument, or an arbitrary stopping point that you simply accept to keep thinking.

Science is no exception. It starts from assumptions that no one proves before beginning: that nature behaves consistently, that instruments are reliable, that logic works. These are the axioms supporting the entire structure.

So far, my weekend provocation was spot on. Every knowledge system begins with a leap into the dark.

Not every leap has the same fall

The difference isn’t in the absence of absolute certainty—neither side has that. It’s in what happens after the leap.

Scientific theories stake their lives in public. It’s what Karl Popper called falsifiability: a decent theory needs to risk dying in front of observable evidence. The steady state theory was buried when the cosmic microwave background appeared in 1965. The luminiferous ether was killed in the Michelson-Morley experiment. The cracks we see today in cosmology aren’t the ceiling collapsing; they’re the method doing exactly what it promises: exposing its own fragility to be investigated.

The hypothesis of a universal architect, in its most common formulation, doesn’t sign that same contract. It doesn’t face equivalent risk when confronted with contrary evidence, because by definition, no physical evidence contradicts it. That doesn’t make it false. It makes the kind of confidence in it categorically different from trusting a theory that might be toppled by a new telescope next month.

A nerdy parenthesis that needed to exist

Back to the sofons: the reason so many smart people think quantum entanglement allows for instantaneous communication is precisely the mechanism we’re discussing here. The no-communication theorem proves, with math and all, that correlations between entangled particles don’t carry decodable information without a classical channel—which, you guessed it, respects the speed of light.

Liu Cixin knew this. He is an engineer, not an amateur. The choice was deliberate: to sacrifice a line of real physics for a better dramatic problem. It’s the same magic trick that pseudoscience uses—borrowing the vocabulary and prestige of real science to sell a conclusion that it doesn’t support. The difference is in fiction, it’s assumed. No one is truly trying to deceive you, just telling a good story.

The truce that solves nothing

The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould tried to resolve this whole tension in 1997 with the concept of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA): science and religion wouldn’t compete because they answer different questions. Science deals with facts and mechanisms. Religion deals with purpose and moral value. Asking who wins between the two would be like asking who wins between a thermometer and a poem.

It’s elegant. It also doesn’t survive contact with history: practically every religious tradition has made factual claims about the physical world—the age of the Earth, the origin of species, the geography of floods, and many other bizarre things. At that moment, Gould’s separation evaporates because both views begin to compete for the same territory, like it or not. NOMA works well as a social agreement for people to coexist peacefully at family dinners. As a philosophical response, it’s just a pretty way to push the question under the rug.

What remains after the dust settles

There’s a sharper discussion within the philosophy of science that helps here: the scientific realist believes that successful theories describe the world as it really is. The argument in favor is strong—it would be a cosmic miracle for theories to work so well in practical predictions (GPS, MRI, nuclear energy) without capturing something true about reality.

The instrumentalist counters with pessimistic induction: practically every extremely successful theory of the past has been declared false eventually—epicycles, caloric, ether. Theory, from this side, is a useful tool, not a photograph of reality.

There’s a middle position called structural realism: the specific entities of a theory change over time, but the mathematical structure and relationships it captures tend to accumulate from one theory to the next. General relativity didn’t throw out Newtonian gravitation—it generalized it.

And it’s precisely here that the original comparison breaks down completely. The hypothesis of a universal architect has no cumulative relational structure to defend. It doesn’t become more precise with each century of investigation because it simply isn’t that kind of bet. Cosmology gets details wrong all the time—and still, it gets more precise in the relationships it captures. One of these faiths learns from its own mistakes. The other doesn’t need to learn anything because it never counted on it.

Every leap of faith—yours, Altair’s jumping from a tower onto a haycart without knowing if he’ll survive, the physicist betting on a singularity he’ll never see up close—happens without seeing the bottom.

The difference is that only one of them goes back to check if the hay was really there.