God is Out There

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.

Jane Wagner, writer of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, as performed by Lily Tomlin.

SueBE and I are really in sync this week – her post was about science, and mine is as well.

I found an interesting documentary called “Particle Fever” on Netflix the other day, and as I was watching physicists brainstorm about the origin of matter, I came up with a theory of my own.

Physics is the flip side of faith.

After all, faith and physics both search for an intangible “something” that has to exist for life to make sense for us. We both focus our energies on finding that missing part that animates all of our theories.

We call this missing part, “God.” They call it “Higgs” – the so-called God particle.

So while I sit here, quite confident that God does exist, and so grateful and glad that God is out there, the scientific community has a vastly different perspective. They think God is “out there.”

To physicists, the very idea of God is wild, ridiculous, far-fetched. How could any thinking human being truly believe there is some deity holding everything together? How would that even work?

But their worldview hinges on similar leaps of faith. The Higgs particle is the theoretical center of each atom, and it must exist, they say. There’s no other explanation!

As the documentary illustrates, even the factions within physics are similar to religious denominations – they have the Theorists vs. the Experimentalists. There are also tensions between those who espouse the theory of Supersymmetry vs. the Multiverse.

Maybe people of faith and scientific die-hards are not so different, when all is said and done. We fight for what we believe and hope to sway the ones we feel are “unenlightened.” We want to find our place in the universe, and while we’re here on planet Earth, we hope to make our lives matter. Even though we seem to live in different worlds, it may well be that we’re on the same side, after all.