Life, Matter and the God Particle

Many atheists believe that no Creator has ever existed—that instead, humans have invented a supernatural God to worship.

In the course of defending that atheist worldview during an Intelligence Squared debate several years ago, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss and his teammate, Michael Shermer, advanced the motion that science actually refutes God. Krauss then offered an observation about his terminology:

“… the motion isn’t science disproves God. It’s science refutes God. And that’s very important because you can’t disprove a notion that’s basically vague and unfalsifiable.”

According to the Oxford American dictionary, to ”disprove” is “to refute…” meaning “to prove (a statement or theory) to be wrong or false; disprove“. The words are synonyms. If science does not disprove God, it does not refute Him either, unless one decides that the word “refute” means something else here, which changes the footing of the dialogue.

Krauss also offers the opinion that God is a “notion that’s basically vague and unfalsifiable.” Of course, I could argue that the existence of the Higgs boson (ironically dubbed the “God Particle”) is equally vague and unfalsifiable; after all, the existence of such a sub-atomic particle, much like the existence of God, was posited only through inference, defined only by its attributes, and described only by experts in the field. In fact, the Higgs boson is not directly knowable even by experts—it can only be measured by its impact on particles that are knowable. Scientists have never seen it—they only know it exists by inference, by studying its effects.

Dr. Krauss and I share a significant belief that inference is a perfectly good scientific tool. Though neither of us has ever seen nor is likely to ever see a Higgs boson, we must trust that the specially-trained and equipped scientific authorities have measured it in some way. We must trust their testimony about the existence of the “God Particle” if we have faith that they do, in fact, possess the expertise to give that testimony.

Knowledge from authority is an idea familiar to people of faith. Krauss may object that authorities in physics proposing the existence of an unknowable God Particle is different than authorities in metaphysics proposing the existence of an unknowable God. But that is merely his opinion. The messengers and prophets claim a rather more direct experience with God than Higgs and company claim with the particle they proposed. Even I have a better chance of fact-checking claims of divine subject matter expertise than I do most scientific claims; and I can do it by applying the same tools that Krauss would use: observation, experience, experimentation, logic and rational inference.

Ironically, Krauss himself wrote an article on the Higgs boson that lays out the problem the find entails. I take the liberty of including a brief excerpt here:

In physics, too, we are uncomfortably close to what many of us would consider the nightmare scenario. The initial buzz of the Higgs discovery has faded, and now we face a monstrous hangover: What happens next? Briefly, the Higgs is an elementary particle predicted 50 years ago during the development of the standard model of particle physics. The standard model beautifully describes three of the four fundamental forces in nature and is one of the most remarkable theoretical constructions in the history of science. Specifically, the Higgs was predicted in order to provide a natural mechanism to explain what now appears to be an amazing cosmic accident: the fact that some particles have mass and others don’t. – The Higgs Boson Hangover, Slate, January 4, 2013. (emphasis added)

So, the existence of the “God Particle” was predicted (that is, inferred) to provide an explanation for something for which there was seemingly no explanation—a “cosmic accident.” But that is precisely what Krauss would be among the first to criticize religion for—predicting God as an explanation for certain features of the universe, such as natural laws and human intelligence.

Moreover, Krauss refers to the Higgs as a “remarkable theoretical construction” because the Higgs’ existence is not an empirical fact. Scientific propositions that are highly theoretical are often among the most important, because a number of other propositions depend on them—but they are also among the least supported by empirical knowledge.

Another significant case Dr. Krauss tries to make is that there are many faiths but only one physics. It’s true that there is only one real set of physical laws that we know of, but the interpretations of them by different “sects” of scientists vary. This is so much a parallel to religion that I was surprised that Ian Hutchinson—a physicist representing a religious point of view in the debate—failed to comment on it.

The scriptures of the Baha’i Faith teach that there is one God and one religion, progressively revealed. Even religions we have come to think of as polytheistic insist that there is One Supreme Spirit above all else. The ancient Egyptian Papyrus of Ani relates that:

“God is one and alone, and none other existeth with Him—God is the One, the One who hath made all things….“

Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita, speaks in similar terms: “God is pure and ever one.…” The Buddha stated that “there is one truth, not two or three” and that all things are ”developing according to one Law”. Muhammad observed further that: “Knowledge is one point, which the foolish have multiplied.”

In other words, the reality of the universal laws and/or the universal Lawgiver are one; it is our conceptions of them that vary. The Baha’i teachings uphold that ancient wisdom:

The essentials of the divine religion are one reality, indivisible and not multiple. It is one. And when through investigation we find it to be single, we have a basis for the oneness of the world of humanity.