A meditation on quantum physics, theology, and the harmony between them—exploring how energy, the Higgs field, and divine creation might intertwine.
Posted: 2025-Jun-26
June 19, 2018
I've made my deliveries and shut down for a reset. I had five minutes left on my 70-hour clock when I got parked, so I used every bit of those 70 hours. No time to make it home before the reset finished.
Just a couple of thoughts. I listened to different podcasts on quantum physics, trying to clarify things and make sure I understood properly. I think I mentioned in my note earlier this morning about the E=mc² equation—realizing that it's not that energy is converted into mass, but that mass is a quality or characteristic of energy.
I listened to several different podcasts talking about quantum physics, time, matter, gravity, and quantum fields. Here's the short version, summarized as best as I understand it now:
At the moment of the Big Bang, there was a unified field. The fields were all unified, but gravity has broken off, and the quest for the unified theory of quantum mechanics is an ongoing quest. You have gravity, which is broken off. You have the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and I think there's a fifth one I'm forgetting. The details don't matter for now.
The idea is that these fields are present everywhere in the universe, even in a vacuum. The vacuum of space—these fields are present there. They have no mass, there is no matter in those fields, but they exist. When energy is supplied to these fields, particles come into existence, rising up out of the field. I think of it as a natural blanket: when you supply energy, it's no longer smooth and flat, but particles arise and it takes on a three-dimensional form.
In the electromagnetic field, you add energy and you get electrons and bosons. The Higgs field is what has recently been experimentally confirmed. The idea is that the quarks that are made up of muons—which are basically photons in the nucleus of atoms—come into existence because of energy supplied to these fields. The energy is bound by both the Higgs field and the bosons that come into existence.
So the idea is that mass is energy. The mass of a particle is derived from the energy of a particle—they are the same thing. Mass equals energy divided by the speed of light squared. That's Einstein's original formula.
Trying to tie all these things together: if God is energy, if I am energy, if I have always been energy—you can neither create nor destroy energy, it just changes form—then by definition, energy is eternal. It always exists.
The thought I had is this: if God is energy, then God is the source of the energy for the Big Bang. That energy has always existed. I don't know how to think of it—whether that energy is God, or whether God controls pre-existing energy. Either God is that energy, or God controls an existing source of energy that has always existed.
Here's something fascinating: photons and particles, even electrons, have no mass unless they are constrained. So long as they are free to move at the speed of light, they have no mass. At the speed of light, there is no mass and no time—time stops. Mass arises when particles cannot move at the speed of light, and that would be because of inertia. You know, a body at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by a force; a body in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by an opposing force.
There's a thought experiment about a massless mirror box that would reflect photons. As those particles bounce off the inside walls of the box, you would restrict their movement, and the system would take on mass. It would have kinetic energy. Or if you move the box, the photons would experience pressure—positive pressure on the side moving into the photons, negative pressure on the side moving away. You are constraining the particles so they are not free to move at the speed of light. This kinetic energy, this potential energy—that is mass. It's not that energy gives mass; it is mass.
Instead of thinking about a box, think about the quantum fields. The Higgs field acts like that box for the quarks and muons in the nucleus. It constrains those particles—they are bound, and in binding them so that they cannot move at the speed of light, they have mass. They are mass.
This is where it gets beautiful. The Genesis account of creation—at least the Mormon version—is that God organized matter. If you think about the fields as organizing, if God binds and gives structure and restrictions to the movement of these particles, first of all, he would create them by supplying the energy from which particles would arise in the fields. Initially they would have no mass, but by organizing them, by constraining them, they then have mass. These particles can then form together to create atoms and molecules and substance.
It's from that infusion of energy and the organizing of it—the constraint of it, the limitations on movement of the particles that come into existence in the quantum fields—that we get creation. You supply energy to the quantum fields, particles come into existence, you constrain those particles in the fields so they have mass, and those particles can become atoms, and atoms become molecules, and molecules become the various substances of the universe.
To me, this is seamless. Quantum physics and theological explanations of creation are one and the same. Whether you're talking about the origin of man, the physical creation, the Genesis account versus the evolutionary account, the nature of matter and time and space—theology and science are talking about the same concepts in different languages or different disciplines. They fight against each other, but for me it is seamless.
God is energy. That energy is the source of life, completely and literally. Light—the muons and quarks are photons, they are light. That light is the energy that is constrained in the Higgs field. The boson is the particle that's created in the Higgs field, and because it is constrained, it has mass. It's from that that we exist, that the universe exists.
This is the most sense anything has ever made to me about God in my life. I have never felt conflict between science and religion. I have always felt free to let my mind ponder and pursue both theological and scientific explanations, realizing that they would be harmonized at some time. I just didn't know that it's two sides of the same coin.
God has spoken to people through the millennia, and the language used to convey that understanding is what we know as theology. Now we try to derive it ourselves through science, and I believe that same knowledge is still given through God. Notwithstanding Neil deGrasse Tyson thinking that our big brains have allowed us to hypothesize and understand the creation of the universe on our own—it's God who gave us that capacity. God is that energy, or he is the organizing energy that created the universe for us.
I am energy, but I didn't organize the universe. I don't have that capacity.
I am so grateful. I don't even know how to put it into words. Six months ago, my personal theology was crumbling. The theology I had grown up with was crumbling, and I didn't know what would replace it. I knew I had to keep going, but I didn't imagine the beauty of the theology I have now. I still know it's just a facet—there is so much I don't understand. It's still a false theology because I have a false, incomplete understanding, but it is a less false theology than what I had before.
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I was born in the last year of the Baby Boom into an essentially all-white, all-Mormon community in Southern Utah. Six decades later, I am no longer Mormon, no longer white, and finally ready to share my story. The map is not yet complete, and new pathways beckon. Shall we see where they lead?
If these words resonate in your own journey, I'd love to know which passages lingered with you. Let's continue the dialogue.