A Cascade of Errors

It's amazing how some mechanisms in the human body work.  Blood clotting is one example that has always struck me as nothing short of miraculous.  Seemingly the whole system had to be in place from its onset because of the "cascade" effect of thinning and thickening required for a cut on the human body to heal over without either bleeding out or seizing up.  In some instances in human thought, however, the cascade effect is obvious and just as disturbing and the blood clotting mechanism is fascinating.  In an article in our local paper today originally published by the McClatchy News Service, author Shawn Lawrence Otto has written a book about the lack of scientific discussion by political candidates (particularly presidential candidates) in recent history. You can link to the article here. 

Mr. Otto begins innocently and correctly enough by postulating that there is a necessity in an efficient government  for a well-informed electorate.  He states that "Without the mooring provided by the well-informed opinion of the people, governments may become paralyzed or, worse, corrupted by powerful interests seeking to oppress and enslave."  He also plumps for decisions to be made on information based in factual reality.  Beyond these opening points, however, there is a cascade of poor reasoning.  He goes on to suggest that politicians in general, and the Republican party in particular, have jettisoned all acknowledgement and reference to science in making policy decisions due to the influence of religion.  He states that the Republican party has "gone anti-science" partially due to the fact that "evangelicals got involved in politics."  So apparently for those belonging to the Republican party, there is a pre-requisite or at least an overwhelming pressure to be "anti-science" because the party is "pro-evangelical."

My nature prior to my conversion to Christianity was to be sarcastic to the extreme.  I fight against the continued temptation to be snarky and sarcastic in any thought process or discussion.  In this instance I will go with a measured response only laced with sarcasm pointed directly at the idea just posited, not at Mr. Otto personally.  To wit:

"So the idea is that those who have a cogent and internally consistent answer for the four most important questions in human existence; those of origin, meaning, morality and destiny, and have among their ranks a host of the most prominent names in many of the most important scientific discoveries in human history, and have a good reason both to engage in the discovery of new empirical physical truths and an explanation for the ought of the usage and temperance of use and distribution of new discoveries should be expelled from the discussion because those who are politicians by career take advice from their advisors and political constituents policy decisions with an emphasis on scientific data less than would be deemed necessary by those who choose for their careers fields in the scientific - is that correct?"

It just seems so blatantly ridiculous to even bring the evangelical view into the discussion in the first place.  It seems the spectre of "separation of Church and State" raises its head to choke off serious consideration of deeply important topics any time politics and government is involved.  Of course science is important and should be considered as the data is available on policy issues in which science comes naturally to the fore.  However, it seems wildly irresponsible to accuse evangelicalism as the primary source of a lack of drive to enact laws relative to global warming (or climate change as it has now been articulated).  What I find most ironic is the charge that the one area of human reasoning that can even speak about the morality of laws being adopted, the only realm that can make decisions of ought that would hold abuse and corruption in check (namely the Christian world and life view) is summarily discarded because of its stand against science, which is in itself a complete misrepresentation and misapplication of any reasonable Biblical position.

I guess i'm just continually flummoxed by the inability to recognize that one recognize that science is absolutely critical for making empirical evaluations for the physical issues experienced and influencing all of humanity and that science must be tempered by religion because of its complete impotence with regard to the metaphysical and moral issues that run hand in hand with any scientific discovery.  The Bible is not a science textbook and was never intended to be such, and science has been and will continue to be fruitful in making amazing discoveries relative to the make-up and intricate workings of the universe we inhabit, but science cannot and will never be able to stand alone in providing any information whatsoever as to how we ought to engage in or properly utilize that information within the interpersonal reality of human existence.  It seems inevitable that the two must not be put at odds with one another, but rather be inextricably tethered, else monstrous results be manifest.

Understating the Case

December 14 and dateline Geneva, the Associated Press has published a story entitled Physicists close in on elusive subatomic particle in which praises are being sung for the real possibility that the Higgs boson will soon be discovered.  Richard Higgs is attributed with postulating the existence of a subatomic particle that explains the existence of mass in the elements that make up the atom.  Equations in physics that have been used and work out in the real world (i.e. correctly and accurately explain observed behavior) assume that electrons, for example, have mass.  Frank Wilczek said, "Since the equations have worked so brilliantly now for decades, it's really nice to dot the i's and cross the t's."  A theoretical physicist at FERMI has explained the Higgs boson this way:

"What hides the symmetry between the weak and electromagnetic interactions? That is the question we hope to answer through experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. When the LHC is commissioned, around the year 2005, it will enable us to study collisions among quarks at energies approaching 1 TeV, or a trillion (10¹²⁾electron volts. A thorough exploration of the 1-TeV energy scale will determine the mechanism by which the electroweak symmetry is hidden and teach us what makes the W and Z particles massive.

"The simplest guess goes back to theoretical work by British physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s. According to this picture, the giver of mass is a neutral particle with zero spin that we call the Higgs boson. In today's version of the electroweak theory, the W and Z particles and all the fundamental constituents--quarks and leptons--get their masses by interacting with the Higgs boson. But the Higgs boson remains hypothetical; it has not been observed. That is why particle physicists often use the search for the Higgs boson as a shorthand for the campaign to learn the agent that hides electroweak symmetry and endows other particles with mass.  Chris Quigg in Scientific American 

So the quest that is stated to be coming to a head is actually finding the correct range of possibility and nailing down with some certainty the existence of a theoretical particle that explains why equations in physics actually work. Chriss Quigg says elsewhere in the same paper "Over the next 15 years, we should be able to find a real understanding of the origin of mass. The interest lies not just in the arcana of accelerator experiments but suffuses everything in the world around us: mass is what determines the range of forces and sets the scale of all the structures we see in nature.

This is very exciting stuff. Human beings able to "see" subatomic particles that explain the mass of all the structures we see in nature. Not it must be noted that there are other theories if all the supercollider experiments do not show the Higgs boson. The two most well accepted both assume there is not one single particle, but a number of as yet undiscovered sub-atomic particles that are associated with known particles. Supersymmetry assumes several Higgs bosons, while dynamical symmetry breaking assumes the Higgs boson is a composite that is made up of multiple constituents that will need to be discovered once the Higgs boson itself is observed. In any event, the use of supercollider technology to experiment at high energy ranges allows for discoveries at the subatomic level with great expectation for remarkable results.

As interesting as all the physics and possible discovery is the statement made by physicist Howard Gordon of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York when he said, "It's hard to find, not because it is especially tiny, but because it is hard to create." I would say that a decade of construction and research into a 17-mile tube charged to 1 TeV (trillion electron volts) would classify as hard. The really funny thing about this comment is that all this effort has gone in to discover the range in GeV within a range of statistical certainty the Higgs boson might exist within to declare it has been observed. Not really creation at all, is it. The Higgs boson is also called the "God particle" as it is hoped to explain why anything in this universe has mass and why after the Big Bang everything slowed down instead of just racing outward to infinity and all we know never came to be as we know it.

Supposing a range with statistical certainty is achieved such that the Higgs boson is "observed", or multiple Higgs bosons are "observed", or a whole range of new particles and their possible constituents are "found" what physics still cannot tell is where the first elements necessary to produce the "Bang" came from, nor why knowing any of these things matters (why there is something rather than nothing). Science is completely impotent regarding these matters. We certainly aren't creating anything, as all the elements and particles already exist and are "waiting" for us to observe them. We also continue to find more and more intricate interaction between elements and particles in science whether it be in particle physics, microbiology or other field of study. We know an astronomically detailed and complex series of particles and elements work independently and in concert with others in ways we cannot yet fully describe or understand but which must be so for our tests to even be performed in the first place. We should be excited about how far we have come in such discoveries, we should be amazed that even at the level of observation now possible there is still so much we do not know and must theorize about, and we should be humbled that there is no good reason for any of it to be this way and yet we are capable of participating in such exploration. As complicated and detailed the scientific discoveries will continue to be in the future we must remember that all these observed particles, elements and particles came from absolutely nothing (no energy, substance or potential) and the sum total of all scientific discoveries provides no meaningful answers to even the most basic questions of relationships between the discoverers and anything else in existence.

We need not pursue a "God particle", but the God who created all things and who holds all things together, and who provides a reason for human existence, a purpose for our existence, and the possibility of relationship with the One who is sovereign over all we observe and understand. Let us not understate the case, nor let us discover in vain.