A reflection on quantum reality, mathematical truth, and what it means to be a creature who can examine the universe from the inside.
Someone sent me a video this week about quantum entanglement. It was a good explainer — clear, honest about the strangeness, careful not to oversell the mystical implications. But even in trying to close the door on those implications, it kept reopening them.
The video made the point that at the most fundamental level, reality is not made of things. It’s made of relationships. Particles don’t have definite properties until they interact. The correlations between entangled particles aren’t transmitted through space — the particles aren’t two separate things exchanging signals. They’re one system expressing itself in two locations. Separation, it turns out, may not be as fundamental as we assumed.
This is where the physics starts to press on something larger.
If It’s Relational All the Way Down
The classical picture of the universe was mechanical. Objects with definite properties, sitting in definite locations, interacting through forces that travel at finite speed. Reality as a vast and precise machine.
Quantum mechanics dismantled that. Not by replacing it with chaos, but by revealing that what looked like the foundation is actually an emergent layer. The stable, object-based world we experience is real — but it’s derivative. Beneath it is something that doesn’t behave like objects at all. Beneath it is a substrate of relationships, correlations, and unresolved potentials that only settle into definite form through interaction.
And here’s what that implies: the most fundamental layer of physical reality is already immaterial.
Not immaterial in the sense of vague or ghostly. Immaterial in the precise sense that it isn’t made of stuff. It’s made of structure, information, relationship. The quantum field isn’t a thing you could pick up. It’s a mathematical description of potentials and correlations. John Wheeler, one of the great physicists of the twentieth century, spent his later years arguing for what he called “it from bit” — the idea that physical reality emerges from information, not the other way around.
If that’s true, then asking whether there is a non-physical realm isn’t a category error. It’s almost inevitable. Because you’re already committed to an immaterial substrate as the ground of everything physical.
The Problem with Mathematics
This is where the mathematics question becomes unavoidable.
Physics describes the world in mathematics. That’s unremarkable on its face — we invented mathematics as a tool, and we use it to model what we observe. But the deeper you go, the harder that explanation is to maintain.
Eugene Wigner, Nobel laureate in physics, wrote an essay in 1960 that has never been satisfactorily answered. He called it “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics.” The problem is simple: mathematicians routinely develop abstract structures with no physical application in mind — number theory, non-Euclidean geometry, group theory — and then decades or centuries later, physicists discover that these structures are exactly what they need to describe something real. Not approximately right. Exactly right. The mathematics wasn’t fitted to the physics. It was already there, waiting.
This is very hard to explain if mathematics is just a human invention. If we made it up, why does the universe keep conforming to structures we developed for purely abstract reasons?
The alternative is the position philosophers call mathematical Platonism: mathematical objects are discovered, not invented. The relationships were there before anyone described them. The equations that govern quantum fields didn’t come into existence when Schrödinger wrote them down. He found them.
But if mathematics exists independently of any human mind — if it’s encountered rather than constructed — then you’re committed to something remarkable. There is a realm of abstract, immaterial, necessary existence that precedes and underlies the physical universe. The numbers don’t depend on us. The relationships are just there.
And then the question that won’t go away: in whose mind do they exist?
Necessary, eternal, immaterial existence that is the precondition for everything else — that’s not nothing. Augustine got to this from a different direction. He couldn’t locate eternal truths in any human mind or in any physical object. They weren’t in the world, and they weren’t in him. So he located them in God. The rational ordering principle that underlies all things. The mind in which mathematical structure is native rather than discovered.
John 1 isn’t only poetry. Through him all things were made. The logos — the rational ordering principle — is the ground in which mathematical truth lives. When a physicist does mathematics, they are tracing the structure of a mind that precedes the universe.
The Glory of Kings
Which brings me to Proverbs 25:2.
It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.
That verse is doing more work than it looks like. The concealment isn’t obstruction. It’s invitation. God hides things gloriously — not to prevent discovery but to call forth the searching. The hiddenness is the honour. And the searching, correspondingly, is the glory of kings.
We are made in the image of the one who conceals, and given the mandate to search. That’s not incidental. It’s structural to what we are. The dominion mandate of Genesis 1 — to have dominion over the earth, to name and order and steward — is the same impulse that drives science. To examine, to understand, to bring what is hidden into the light of comprehension. That’s not a secular activity that happens to be permitted. It’s a participation in the divine concealment-and-revelation dynamic.
And here’s what makes this remarkable: we are not outside observers doing the examining.
We are made of the same fabric we’re interrogating.
The carbon in our bodies came from stellar nucleosynthesis. The atoms in our hands are governed by the same quantum fields we’re trying to understand. We are — in the most literal physical sense — continuous with the universe we’re studying. We didn’t arrive from somewhere else to look at it. We grew out of it.
And yet, from within it, made of it, we can interrogate the structure of quantum fields. We can ask why mathematics is unreasonably effective. We can notice that the substrate of reality is relational and immaterial. We can follow those observations to their implications.
C.S. Lewis made a parallel move in a different domain. He argued that the one place we have genuine inside access — human experience, conscience, moral intuition — we find not chaos, but law. Not a law we invented. A law that impinges on us. It presses from outside even though it surfaces from within. We didn’t construct the moral law. We encounter it. We find ourselves obligated by something we didn’t author.
The moral law, like mathematical truth, is discovered rather than invented. We find it; we don’t make it. And two independent lines of inquiry — the mathematical structure of the physical world, and the moral structure of human experience — converge on the same conclusion. There is a rational, moral, necessary reality that precedes and grounds everything else.
What This Means
The Christian metaphysic doesn’t have to fight the physics. It turns out to be a better fit for what the physics is actually describing than materialism is.
Materialism has to explain how immaterial information and relationships give rise to solid objects, and why mathematical structure that precedes any physical instantiation happens to govern that physics so precisely, and why creatures who evolved for survival on a savanna can interrogate quantum fields at all. These are not easy questions for a worldview that starts with matter as the fundamental reality.
The biblical framework starts with the immaterial relational as primary. In the beginning, God. Not matter. Not even a void waiting to be filled. The personal, rational, relational ground of all things — and physical reality as something that emerges from and is sustained by that ground. Mathematics works because it reflects the mind in which the universe is conceived. The moral law presses because we’re made in the image of the one who is the source of it. And we can examine the universe from the inside because we were placed inside it with the mandate to do exactly that.
We don’t stand outside reality looking in. We’re woven into it. Made of the very fabric we can examine.
And in the examining — in the searching that is the glory of kings — we are doing something that was always intended. Following the concealment inward, tracing the rational structure of things, and finding at the end of that thread not an impersonal quantum field, not a brute mathematical fact, but a mind. A logos. A word spoken before the foundation of the world, in whom all things hold together.
The universe is not obligated to make sense in human terms. But it keeps doing so anyway. That’s not an accident. That’s an invitation.
What does it mean that we can understand anything at all? That question has been sitting at the edge of physics for a hundred years. Scripture has had an answer the whole time.
The video that started this conversation: The Theory of Quantum Entanglement — worth watching even if (especially if) physics isn’t your usual territory.