The God Particle

On Evangelization in an Age of Science

The physicist, Fermilab director and Nobel laureate Leon Lederman co-authored a book in 1993 with Dick Teresi called The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? This book was largely a humorous history of particle physics, and it ended with a dive into the physics of the then-postulated Higgs boson. Ledermen’s title was very clever, it symbolized his hope that the discovery of the Higgs boson would provide the “final understanding of the structure of matter,” but that would be thwarted when the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012. There is still much to learn.

The cheeky book title earned him some criticism from members of Scientism’s informal Inquisition: Gasp! A scientist used the G word! Horrors! Likewise some believers thought it blasphemous.

The Higgs boson is direct evidence of the Higgs field, which permeates the entire universe and is responsible for giving mass to all other particles which possess mass. The boson is generated for an extremely short time if the Higgs field is excited with enough energy. You and I are here because of the Higgs field.

Just after its discovery, stories started to appear that the Higgs field might be unstable. Apparently, our measurements of the mass of the top quark are not exact enough to know if this is the case or not. If it is unstable, then a small quantum fluctuation of some kind somewhere in the universe could cause all matter to dissolve.

There are some caveats to this description.

First, odds are that if such a quantum event were likely to happen it should already have happened; clearly it hasn’t.

Second, if it did happen we would not see it coming and not notice it when it did. No one would suffer as a direct consequence.

Third, it turns out that the Higgs field is not the only physical structure of the universe that could enable such an event. There are others.

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Let us now delve a bit into theology, while we keep these scientific ideas in mind.

Panentheism is a belief that God’s power permeates the universe, in addition to extending infinitely beyond it. It is not to be confused with pantheism, which is the idea that the universe is divine, that it and God are one. It is an idea that has not found much traction in Western Christianity, except is certain Evangelical circles. It has had large influence in Eastern Christianity, and this is a likely reason why the writer Paul Kingsnorth and mythologist Martin Shaw both left paganism and were baptized into Orthodoxy.

Stated simply, panentheism says that when God in Genesis “saw it was good” He was not just cool about it. Maybe “saw it was great” would be a better translation, or even “saw it was hallowed.” It would seem there is little reason for any religious believer to disagree with panentheism (except for pantheists, of course, and dualists who believe matter is evil). I have not come across any theological criticism that would cause me to doubt it, except possibly the appropriation of the idea by some process theologians. It seems that Western Christianity could benefit from the simple version of it.

What would that benefit be? Applied to ideas like the multiverse and the Higgs field, it could hint – and no more than hint – that God’s power is somehow involved in such things, and that we are here as a direct result. Science cannot prove it one way or another, and theology can’t either. Yet it ultimately may be that matter has not yet dissolved because that is what God actively and continuously desires.

Put it another way: perhaps all the particles are God’s particles.