I have always been drawn to the insight that appears when two very different ways of seeing the world overlap. Physics asks how things work. Philosophy and religion ask why there is anything here at all, and whether existence has purpose. Can one inform the other at the intersection?
For me, one of those meeting points has always been quantum mechanics. When I first encountered it, I was especially struck by the Planck scale: the scale at which our familiar concepts of space, time, and measurement begin to fail, and where our present theories no longer provide a complete description. It seemed to suggest not just a technical limit, but something almost spiritual: a boundary beyond which we are not permitted to see clearly.
Planck and the Discovery of a Granular World
Max Planck’s work at the turn of the twentieth century began with a practical problem: how matter emits light as it heats up. A poker in a fire starts black, then glows red, then yellow, then white. Classical physics could not fully explain this. Planck’s great step was to propose that energy is not emitted continuously, but in discrete packets: quanta.
This gave us the Planck constant, usually written as h, and with it the beginning of quantum mechanics. Light, which behaves as a wave, also arrives in packets we call photons. Already, reality had begun to look less smooth and more “bitty” than common sense had assumed.
Planck’s constant can also be combined with the speed of light and Newton’s gravitational constant to give the Planck length: an unimaginably tiny scale below which we can not know. It is not simply a smaller ruler. It points towards a frontier where our present theories cease to give a complete description.
The Limit of Seeing
That frontier has always seemed significant to me. In this life, we are not allowed to know everything. Our senses, instruments, and theories take us a long way, but not all the way. Beyond a certain point we move from measurement into trust, imagination, instinct, and belief.
The biblical story of Thomas captures this human limitation. Thomas wants contact, proof, the physical placing of a hand into the wound of Christ. He is not mocked for wanting evidence; he is human. But the story also suggests that there are truths which cannot be reached by evidence alone. The Planck scale has always felt to me like a scientific echo of that same boundary: a smallness beneath which our usual ways of knowing dissolve.
Tim Palmer and Rational Quantum Mechanics
More than a century after Planck, in fact only last year, Tim Palmer at Oxford proposed an intriguing development called Rational Quantum Mechanics, or RaQM. The idea is not that quantum mechanics has failed. On the contrary, quantum theory remains astonishingly successful. Palmer’s question is whether some of its mysteries arise not from nature itself, but from the mathematics we use to describe nature.
Standard quantum mechanics relies heavily on the continuum of real and complex numbers.* Palmer asks whether physical reality may instead be constrained by rational numbers: numbers expressible as ratios of whole numbers. One half and one third are rational. Numbers like pi are not.
A simple picture helps. Imagine a perfectly smooth dial: you could turn it to any position whatsoever. Now imagine a dial with tiny clicks or cogs: it can still point in many directions, but only to permitted positions. If Palmer is right, then at the deepest mathematical level the universe may be more like the second dial than the first. It is not smooth all the way down. It is granular.
Einstein, Randomness, and the Search for Order
This matters because quantum mechanics is often taken to imply that randomness is woven into the fabric of reality. Particles appear not to have definite properties until measured, and events at the smallest scale seem governed by probability rather than certainty.
Einstein was never comfortable with that conclusion. His famous remark that “God does not play dice” was not merely a religious aside. It expressed a deep conviction that the world should be intelligible, lawful, and ordered beneath its apparent strangeness. This was, after all, broadly consonant with Newton’s view. There is a purpose behind this material world.
RaQM can be read as a possible ally of that instinct. It does not pretend that quantum experiments are simple or ordinary. Rather, it suggests that what looks like randomness may arise from our limited access to a deeper mathematical structure. Chance, in this view, may be perspectival: real to us because our view is partial, but not ultimate in the structure itself.
The Block Universe and the View from Outside Time
Einstein’s relativity also changed the way we think about time. In the block universe view, past, present, and future are not separate realms, with only the present being truly real. They are different locations within one four-dimensional spacetime. What we call “now” is the point from which we experience the whole.
From inside time, events unfold. We decide, wait, regret, hope, and wonder. But viewed as a completed whole, reality may be more like a vast structure in which every event has its place. This does not make ordinary experience meaningless. It simply reminds us that our experience may be a local view of something much larger.
Aquinas and the Question of Why
This is where the 13th-century Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas becomes relevant. Aquinas was not offering a primitive substitute for physics. He was asking a different question. Science can describe how things behave within the universe. Aquinas asks why there is an intelligible universe at all.
For Aquinas, God is not one cause among other causes. God is not another object inside the cosmos, competing with gravity, quantum fields, or mathematics. God is the ground of being itself: the reason why there is something rather than nothing, and why that something is ordered enough to be known. In a deep sense, Aquinas was expressing something that later resonates with Einstein’s conception of spacetime.
That distinction matters. Physics answers questions of mechanism. Theology, at its best, asks questions of existence, intelligibility, and final meaning. The two need not be enemies, provided we do not force either to answer the wrong kind of question.
A Universe Made as One Thing?
Put together, these ideas suggest a powerful possibility. Planck points us towards a limit of measurement. Palmer suggests that the mathematics of the quantum world may be discrete rather than continuous. Einstein urges us not to surrender too quickly to ultimate randomness. The block universe offers a picture of reality as a completed whole. Aquinas asks why such a whole should exist, and why it should be intelligible to minds like ours.
None of this proves God in any crude or mechanical sense. It does something subtler and, to my mind, more interesting. It shows that modern physics has not made the old philosophical questions disappear. Instead, it has sharpened them. If reality is not finally chaotic but ordered; if time may be part of a larger completed structure; if the deepest laws of nature are mathematical and intelligible, then the ancient idea of a rational Logos begins to look less like an outdated metaphor and more like a profound way of naming the mystery. The English Book of Common Prayer refers to God as “the Word existing beyond (space and) time.”
Perhaps randomness is not the last word. Perhaps it is what order looks like when seen from inside the world, through finite minds, finite instruments, and finite time. The deeper question remains: why should there be an ordered reality at all, and why should we be capable of glimpsing it?
*Integers are whole numbers, including zero and negative values, while rational numbers are exact fractions made from those integers. Irrational numbers are real values that cannot be expressed as fractions because their decimals continue infinitely without repeating. Together, rational and irrational numbers form the continuous one-dimensional line of real numbers. Complex numbers extend this continuum into a two-dimensional plane by incorporating an imaginary unit.