Three Paths to One Structure: Quantum Mechanics, Process Philosophy, and the Bahá'í Metaphysics of Relational Reality

Three independent intellectual traditions — modern quantum physics, the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and the Bahá'í writings of Bahá'u'lláh and 'Abdu'l-Bahá — converge on the same structural description of reality: that existence is constituted by relationship, that properties emerge only through relational interaction, and that the force sustaining those relationships is, in each tradition's vocabulary, love. This paper makes three related arguments. First, substance ontology is formally incompatible with quantum mechanics: Bell's theorem (1964), combined with the experimental violation of its inequalities (Aspect 1982; Hensen et al. 2015), makes local realism untenable and undermines the substance-ontological assumption that systems carry intrinsic properties prior to measurement, making Whitehead's process ontology arguably the most systematically developed internally consistent metaphysical framework available for quantum reality. Second, the Bahá'í writings constitute an independent prior instantiation of process ontology, articulating its essential claims decades before Whitehead (1929) named the framework philosophically and roughly a century before physics confirmed it experimentally. Third, these two findings together establish a triadic convergence: three traditions built by three different civilizations, using three different methodologies, across roughly 170 years, detect the same feature of reality. The convergence is formalized through six structural isomorphisms (relational ontology, nonlocal interconnection, observer-dependence, decoherence, holographic order, and motion as life) and the Relational Coherence Theorem, developed in a companion physics paper, which translates the philosophical claim into testable quantum-mechanical predictions.