How To Be An Agnostic
An obvious example of such contemporary ‘theo-physics’
concerns the so-called God particle. This is the Higgs boson,
required by the standard model in particle physics to account
for the observation that many particles have mass. But why
should an esoteric entity to do with mass gain such a weighty
theological ascription?
It was named by Leon Lederman, a former director of
Fermilab. He thought the divine reference was suitable because
the particle is so crucial to contemporary physics, and yet simul-
taneously so elusive. And is that not a bit like God? If God does
exist, then God would be the ground of everything, and also
never quite seen – only detected in the after effects of the divine
wake, like traces in a particle collider. Ponder the Higgs boson
and you ponder something of the concept of God.
Physicists profess to hate the title. But the media love it. And
that surely refl ects a wider public consciousness, sparked by
physicists like Stephen Hawking, that to have a ‘theory of every-
thing’ would be to know the ‘mind of God’. Again, there’s meta-
physics in that dream, because a theory of everything would
have many divine properties. It would be a unity – one entity
from which fl ows the diversity of all that exists. It would be
fl awless – a complete and beautiful truth that could not be added
to in any way. It would be necessary, which is to say it could not
be otherwise and is entirely self-suffi cient. God, if God is, is like
that. Again, science is reviving, not throttling, belief.
The links between cosmology and metaphysics can be drawn
in other ways. Consider speculations about extra-terrestrial life.
The interesting feature of this subject is that we constantly and
regularly return to it – in books and newspaper articles – although
precisely nothing of ET has been discovered. SETI has been opera-
tional for 50 years with no positive results. But we never cease to
be bored by the search, not just because we’re fascinated by the
possibility of ET, but because we are fascinated by ourselves.
Thinking about what intelligence might be like elsewhere is
a way of musing on our own nature. Again, it’s metaphysics.
Is extraterrestrial life (are we) massively rare, and that’s why