[John] Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment is a variation on the classic (but not classical) two-slit experiment, which demonstrates the schizophrenic nature of quantum phenomena…. In the delayed-choice experiment, the experimenter decides whether to leave both slits open or to close one off after the electrons have already passed through the barrier—with the same results. The electrons seem to know in advance how the physicist will choose to observe them…. The electron is neither a wave nor a particle. It is in some sense unreal; it exists in an indeterminate limbo. “Not until you start asking a question do you get something,” Wheeler said. “The situation cannot declare itself until you’ve asked your question. But the asking of one question prevents and excludes the asking of another.”

—John Horgan, The End of Science

Apart from and without Jesus Christ we can say nothing at all about God and man and their relationship one with another…. We need to see that in view of God all our activity is in vain even in the best life; i.e., that of ourselves we are not in a position to apprehend the truth, to let God be God and our Lord. We need to renounce all attempts even to try to apprehend this truth. We need to be ready and resolved simply to let the truth be told us and therefore to be apprehended by it.

—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

—Meister Eckhart, Sermons

 

Stop warring with my God,
cried the dead woman

to her doctors, who believed
that speech, pulse, and pain

betrayed a life
they were yet meant to save.

So the lift ascends
to a quick decline,

so a room assumes
one more degree of gone:

the love seat
like solid smoke,

the Goodwill card table
where she pasted

Easter seals and savored
preservatives, the weak tea

of uptown dusk
seeping onto the cot

from which she’s too tired to rise
when the new preacher stops by,

thumbing through psalms
and sympathies.

Stop warring with my God,
I told them,

she tells him,
who, a hectic hour later,

stops to look out the window
of the coffee shop

where he has been grappling
with nature and scripture,

God’s absolute otherness
and electrons that seem to read

researchers’ minds, the crux
at which to assert and to assent

become the same abrading verb.
She won’t last the weekend,

he says, who said
to the woman whose sobs

fell soft as the late unstaying snow
that touching everywhere

leaves everything
even more bare:

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted
and saves the crushed in spirit.

For there is not a word in my tongue,
but lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.

I shall be satisfied, when I awake,
with seeing your form.