We cannot understand the world exhaustively; only God has such knowledge. We cannot gain God’s knowledge by ferreting out the tiniest particles we can find, or by speculating about what the whole must be. God has made the world so that each of these quests, atomism and holism, will end in failure—or, as it appears to faith, in mystery. That is to say, God has made the world so that if we want to understand the world, we must turn to him. God in his wisdom cuts the Gordian knot of merely human philosophy.