WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 25 May 2026(What’s a moment that made you question reality?)
Core Message of the Reflection
At its emotional and spiritual centre, the reflection says:
“The deeper we honestly investigate reality, the more we encounter mystery — and that mystery can become an invitation to humility, wonder, and faith rather than disbelief.”
A concise thematic version could be:
“Quantum physics opens questions that philosophy and faith have long contemplated: Why does reality exist, and what ultimately sustains it?”
When Science Made Me Fall to My Knees
There is an experiment so disturbing that Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, said it “has in it the heart of quantum mechanics” — and that “nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
He was not being modest. He was being honest.
The experiment is called the double-slit experiment. It goes like this: fire individual electrons, one at a time, at a barrier with two narrow slits. On the other side, a detection screen records where each electron lands. Logic — solid, Newtonian, common-sense logic — tells you that each electron will pass through one slit or the other and land in one of two bands directly behind the slits.
That is not what happens.
The electrons build up an interference pattern — the same rippling, alternating bands of light and dark that you would see if you threw two stones into a pond and watched the waves cross each other. As if each electron passed through both slits simultaneously. As if it existed, for a moment, in two places at once.
Here is where reality buckles.
The moment you place a detector at the slits to record which path the electron actually takes, the interference pattern vanishes. The electrons begin behaving like ordinary particles again. Something about the act of measurement — the physical interaction between the particle and the detecting device — collapses the shimmering wave of possibilities into a single, definite outcome.
At this point, I need to be precise — because popular accounts of this experiment, including ones I have read and repeated, sometimes blur an important distinction. In physics, an “observer” is not a conscious human mind peering through a lens. It is any physical system — a detector, a photon, even a stray molecule of air — that interacts with the particle and causes quantum information to leak into the surrounding environment. This process has a name: quantum decoherence. The particle does not wait for a person to look at it. It responds to any physical entanglement with the world around it.
That clarification matters. It is also, if you think carefully about it, no less astonishing than the romanticised version.
Because what quantum decoherence tells us is this: at the most fundamental level of reality, particles do not have fixed, definite properties until they interact with something else. They exist in superposition — a cloud of all possible states simultaneously — and it is only through physical relationship, through contact with the rest of the universe, that the possible becomes the actual.
I had to put the book down when this landed on me properly. The chair beneath me, the walls around me, the neurons firing in my brain — all of it, at the quantum level, a vast web of interactions continuously actualising what would otherwise remain mere potential. Not solid. Not self-explaining. Not self-sustaining.
Which brought me, not as a physicist but as someone trained to follow an argument wherever it leads, to a question that physics itself cannot answer:
If physical reality consists of potential being continuously actualised through interaction and relationship — what grounds the existence of that potential in the first place?
The Question Science Opens But Cannot Close
Science is often presented as the great alternative to faith — the cool, clear light of reason dispelling the warm, uncomfortable fog of belief. That framing has always seemed to me not only intellectually lazy but empirically false. The more honestly one engages with what science actually reveals, the more one finds oneself standing at the edge of a mystery that science cannot, by its own methods, resolve.
The double-slit experiment, properly understood, does not prove God. No experiment can, nor should we ask one to. But it does something almost more important: it dismantles the confident assumption that the universe is a self-sufficient machine that ticks along perfectly well without anything behind it. Quantum mechanics reveals that at the basement level of existence, reality is radically contingent — dependent, relational, indeterminate until actualised. It points, inescapably, to the question of why there is a coherent, mathematically ordered universe at all rather than nothing.
The physicist Eugene Wigner once called it “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” — the baffling fact that abstract equations written on a blackboard turn out to describe, with extraordinary precision, the behaviour of particles that no human eye has ever seen. Why should the universe be mathematically intelligible? Why should it have laws at all? These are not scientific questions. They are metaphysical ones. And they press upon the honest mind with considerable force.
Aristotle intuited twenty-four centuries ago that potentiality requires something to actualise it — that the chain of contingent, dependent things cannot explain itself. Aquinas built a careful metaphysics upon that intuition. And now the most sophisticated instruments human beings have ever constructed are confirming, in the language of quantum field theory, what the philosophers of faith expressed in the language of being: existence is not self-grounding. Something holds it.
St. Paul, writing to the Colossians, put it with a precision that still astonishes me:
“In him all things hold together.” — Colossians 1:17
Not merely that God created things and stepped back. But that in this very moment, at this very quantum level, all things are being held — sustained, grounded, called from the shimmering cloud of the possible into the firm ground of the real. The language of Scripture and the language of physics are not in competition here. They are, unexpectedly, in conversation.
The Question That Changes Everything
The moment that made me question reality was also, paradoxically, the moment reality became more real than it had ever been.
Because if the universe is radically contingent — if at its deepest level it consists of potential awaiting actualisation, of existence that is fundamentally dependent rather than self-grounding — then it points beyond itself. And if it points beyond itself, the question is not whether to believe in something greater. The question is whether we have the honesty and the courage to follow the argument wherever it leads.
Science asks: What is?
Philosophy asks: Why is there something rather than nothing?
Faith answers: In him all things hold together.
The double-slit experiment, in its quiet, precise, unnerving way, does not answer that final question. But it opens the door wide enough that only a determined incuriosity could resist walking through.
And I have never been able to look at an ordinary evening sky — or a laboratory result — quite the same way since.
What moment made you question reality? Share your experience in the comments — I would love to read your story.
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Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 25 May 2026.
Note: This reflection does not claim that quantum mechanics proves the existence of God. Rather, it explores how certain discoveries in modern physics raise philosophical questions that resonate with longstanding theological ideas about existence, order, and reality.
Johnbritto Kurusumuthu
Founder & Principal Author
RISE & INSPIRE
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