David Solway is a Canadian poet, essayist, and philosopher. His most recent prose book is Profoundly Superficial (New English Review Press, 2025).We are often told that science and religion stand at opposite poles: one grounded in reason and evidence, the other in faith and superstition. This opposition is comforting in its simplicity. Unfortunately, it is false. At their deepest point of inquiry, science and theology collide with the same wall, and neither can pass through it.That wall is our origins.Modern cosmology asserts that the universe began with the Big Bang, an event that produced not only matter and energy but space and time themselves. Theology claims that God created heaven and earth. Both accounts seek to explain how everything began. And both fail at precisely the same moment: when asked what came before that first instant..VARNER: Iran is not collapsing, but it is becoming more dangerous.The problem is not merely technical; it is logical. Creation in time presupposes the existence, or functioning, of time. Creation outside time is unintelligible. Creation from nothing smuggles the need for something back in under a different name. Whether one invokes divine fiat or quantum fluctuation, the question remains unanswered. Something had to be there already — or nothing could have happened at all.Science cannot escape this paradox. Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss has argued that the universe could have arisen from “nothing,” by which he means a vacuum teeming with virtual particles popping in and out of existence. But this “nothing” is not actually nothing at all. It assumes the prior existence of space, time, and the laws governing their functioning. Krauss’s theory is, at best, an empty stage with an elaborate backstage infrastructure already in place.Theologians fare no better. Genesis begins with God creating the world, but tells us nothing of what preceded the act itself. What existed before creation? What did God create from? Theology draws a veil at the same point where science runs out of equations. This imposes humility on both fields — or at least it should..Such humility is reinforced by another feature of modern physics that rarely enters public discussion: the universe operates under two radically different systems of law. At the quantum level, reality is probabilistic, indeterminate, and non-local. In classical physics, reality is stable, deterministic, and predictable. These two regimes obey different rules, contradict one another, appear utterly incompatible, and yet somehow coexist to produce a single, coherent world.For example, quantum particles exist as clouds of probability until they are observed. Objects in the everyday world exist at definite locations and times regardless of observation. One realm violates the principles that make the other intelligible. And yet both are real. The universe depends on their coexistence.Physicists invoke “decoherence” to explain how the quantum world gives rise to the classical one. But decoherence is not an explanation so much as a placeholder. It describes a transition that, according to the underlying laws, should not be possible. It works, but no one can say how — or why..OLDCORN: Liberals $200 million racist slush fund.Add to this the phenomenon Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” quantum entanglement. Particles separated by vast distances remain instantaneously correlated, transmitting information faster than the speed of light.These are not marginal curiosities. They are central features of reality. And they are inexplicable within the very frameworks that reveal them.What emerges is not a tidy scientific picture of the universe, but a paradoxical one. Reality is stitched together from apparently incompatible laws, sustained by processes that defy explanation, and rooted in an origin that cannot be reached by reason or measurement..Religion does not resolve these mysteries. But neither does science. Both stop at the same boundary. The physicist and the clergyman are equally frustrated in their search for primal absolutes, and the subjects they deal with must remain fundamentally unexplained. There is thus ample reason for a shared humility. The question is not whether science should surrender to theology, or theology to science. The question is whether either side is justified in claiming epistemic supremacy when both confront an identical limit.Theologians speak of mystery. Scientists increasingly encounter it. At the deepest level, the universe resists final explanation. That resistance is not evidence of ignorance or superstition; it is evidence of the structure of reality itself.English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon understood this over four centuries ago when he insisted that the human intellect must be governed by “right reason and true religion” acting together — not because they answer the same questions, but because they acknowledge the same limits. What cannot be known is common to both..WIECHNIK: Oil and gas still 'run the world', someone should tell Mark Carney.Science is indispensable in describing how the universe behaves. Theology is indispensable in confronting the question of why anything exists at all. Neither can absorb the other. But neither can dismiss the other without intellectual dishonesty.The universe exists. That is the one incontestable fact. How it came to exist — whether through divine will, quantum instability, or some reality we lack the language to name — remains unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable.That is not a defeat. It is a reminder. As the Victorian-era poet Robert Browning wrote:Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,Or what’s a Heaven for?David Solway is a Canadian poet, essayist, and philosopher. His most recent prose book is Profoundly Superficial (New English Review Press, 2025).The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.
