I don’t know what you have been reading, but if it told you that photons are virtual particles then your source is wrong.
Virtual particles are real. And I don’t know any scientists who disagree with the dual nature of light. It behaves as a wave and a particle. That’s real.
And it’s an old and dangerous fallacy to ascribe to God that which we can’t explain today because tomorrow we might very well explain God away under that system of God.
This is not the direction I wanted this thread to go, but, for this one last time, I will, with the permission of those who want to discuss the second Proof of Thomas Aquinas, respond thusly:
“Virtual particles exhibit some of the phenomena that real particles do, such as obedience to the conservation laws. If a single particle is detected, then the consequences of its existence are prolonged to such a degree that it cannot be virtual. Virtual particles are viewed as the quanta that describe fields of the basic force interactions, which cannot be described in terms of real particles. Examples of these are static force fields, such as a simple electric or magnetic fields, or any field that exists without excitations that result in its carrying information from place to place.”
“The concept of virtual particles necessarily arises in the perturbation theory of quantum field theory, where interactions (essentially forces) between real particles are described in terms of exchanges of virtual particles. Any process involving virtual particles admits a schematic representation known as a Feynman diagram which facilitates understanding of calculations.”
-Wikipedia
“Virtual particles are a language invented by physicists in order to talk about processes in terms of the Feynman diagrams. These diagrams are a shorthand for a calculation that gives the probability of the process. The calculation is derived from quantum field theory.”
"What are virtual particles?
One of the first steps in the development of quantum mechanics was Max Planck’s idea that a harmonic oscillator (classically, anything that wiggles like a mass bobbing on the end of an ideal spring) cannot have just any energy. Its possible energies come in a discrete set of equally spaced levels.
An electromagnetic field wiggles in the same way when it possesses waves. Applying quantum mechanics to this oscillator reveals that it must also have discrete, evenly spaced energy levels. These energy levels are what we usually identify as different numbers of photons. The higher the energy level of a vibrational mode, the more photons there are. In this way, an electromagnetic wave acts as if it were made of particles. The electromagnetic field is a quantum field.
Electromagnetic fields can do things other than vibration. For instance, the electric field produces an attractive or repulsive force between charged objects, which varies as the inverse square of distance. The force can change the momenta of the objects.
Can this be understood in terms of photons as well? It turns out that, in a sense, it can. We can say that the particles exchange “virtual photons” which carry the transferred momentum. Here is a picture (a “Feynman diagram”) of the exchange of one virtual photon."
– Some FAQ’s about Virtual Particles
Enough of this. If someone wants to open a thread on virtual particles, please do. This thread is about a particular proof for the existence of God from St. Thomas.
JD
(i.e. don’t have real existence) or those particles may be part of how God works. In which case we would not yet have discerned their cause (as pointed out by JD) as we know so little about how God works.