God Is More Than a Particle

I am about as far as you can get from being a physicist. Yet I am fascinated by the search for the Higgs Bosson. Commonly called the God Particle, the Higgs is expected to explain why matter has mass. This is evidently important and many scientists are excited about it. My interest is more about the whole solving a mystery of the universe. There is something appealing about cosmic questions.

So what happens if, at the press conference called for July 4, the Higgs exponent scientists declare that they have found the Higgs and it goes from theory to reality? What happens if they find the God Particle?

To be fair to the scientists who have spent years on this experiment, they do not like the moniker "God Particle" to describe the Higgs. It overstates the importance and implies that there will be no more questions after it is discovered. They assure that this is not the case. So finding the Higgs does not mean finding God. But that very fact might just teach us something.

The name "God Particle" took off so easily in part because the Higgs represents what God is to many people in Western society; a mystery that seems far off yet ultimately possible to prove or disprove in the end. We lack a vocabulary for the divine in mainstream society. For those of us who embrace as valuable such ideals such as independent thought, critical thinking and the compatibility of faith and reason in the same mind, the rigid orthodoxy of American evangelicalism and fundamentalism provides little help.

And, to be fair, the silence of mainstream theology has contributed little either.  For the last half century mainstream religion has allowed its vocabulary of faith to be supplanted by the vocabulary of scientific method and proof. For my part, I have no trouble with the scientific vocabulary of contemporary society. It is what keeps science science. However, this one vocabulary is not enough for a full life that includes both belief in God and confidence in science. If faith and reason are to co-exist in one life, we need to learn to be bilingual. We need to learn the language of both.

When the only language you have is uncritical faith and you try to explain the physical world, you end up with creationism and so-called "young earth theory."

When the only language you have is that of scientific proof, you end up with a "God Particle" that cannot live up to its name or the hype.

The world needs both. We need to learn again to hold in our lives the language that empowers humanity's ability to look beyond the atom and understand even more fundamental elements of the universe AND the language that lends the ability to look beyond the horizon of our own imaginations to a reality in the divine that cannot be proven because it cannot be replicated, isolated or controlled.
I was asked in a bible study today, in reference to the idea that we need to be as children to enter the kingdom of heaven, why God would give is critically thinking minds if what God wants is for us to be simple like a newborn. I wish, in retrospect, I had the presence of mind then to say tht what God wants is less about not being critical and more about being humble. In other words, I think God wants us to be bilingual- speaking both the language of faith and wonder and the language of science and reason.

The God Particle is not going to prove or disprove God to us any more than the Bible can prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs. What the Higgs may do is give us an even deeper understanding of the universe and ourselves. As someone who believes that we are all wonderfully made by the hands of God, I can't imagine how that knowledge can be a bad thing.