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Can Scientists Find God?
Warning: I am not a quantum physicist, nor do I play one on TV!!!!!!
I have always been a strong believer in the scientific search for the origins of the universe. While I fully understand that many scientists do not believe that their scientific quest has anything to do with God, I trust that any honest endeavors in this matter will eventually end up with God. As the creator of the universe, God established “the science” of this world and how it works — biology, chemistry, astronomy, zoology, and physics. Today, I want to look at some basic physics. While I am the farthest thing from being a physicist, I have come to understand some very basic physics concepts that may help unravel the mysteries of creation and, at the same time, help us better understand our Bibles.
Many times, students of the Bible get bogged down with theology as they read. Theology comes with its own restrictive paradigms that limit us in truly understanding God. I am going to try to make a small attempt to set us all free from theology and help us understand the word in terms of science, namely quantum physics.
Quantum physics is a fundamental theory that describes nature at the smallest scales of energy levels. Basically, it is a theory about things we can’t see. Quantum physicists believe that there is something that brought everything into existence and sustains everything in the universe, but it is unseen. They are constantly in search of that unseen instigator of all things.
Being the consummate quantum physicist, God tells us that we are to always consider the unseen world.
While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal. – 2 Corinthians 4:18
By faith we understand that the worlds were formed by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are seen. – Hebrews 11:3
Clearly, the Bible supports that idea that there are things that we cannot see but do exist, nonetheless. And even more, these unseen things are the originating source for those things we do see.
Determined physicists are looking for these unseen things.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is a research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. From the CERN website: “Physicists and engineers at CERN use the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter — fundamental particles. Subatomic particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives us clues about how the particles interact and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature. We want to advance the boundaries of human knowledge by delving into the smallest building blocks of our universe.”
Physicists have long speculated about the existence of an unseen energy field that permeates the universe and gives mass to everything. In other words, this field “creates” things in the universe. For years, scientists at CERN searched for a sign of this field. On July 12, 2012, they found it: the Higgs boson, or Higgs force. The Higgs boson particle (named after physicist Peter Higgs) is important because it signals the existence of the Higgs field, an invisible energy field present throughout the universe that interacts with matter particles and gives them mass. After an interaction, the field leaves behind a telltale sign: the Higgs boson particle. In 2012, CERN scientists found evidence of this particle.
Do you know what the scientists’ nickname is for this Higgs boson particle? The God particle.
According to these scientists, if the Higgs field didn’t exist, particles would not have any mass. For those of us who believe in God, I will translate this into Bible-eze: Without this energy field (I’ll call this field God), creation would not exist.
In a previous article posted to Ricochet titled “Did God Really Say That?”, I wrote about the science of waves, frequencies, and vibrations and how God spoke into existence everything in the universe and that it is the continued vibrations of this cosmic speech that keep the universe from collapsing.
Did the CERN scientists confirm that God’s word (known to them as the Higgs field) created and sustains the universe? They may not admit it yet. But I’m patient. I’ll just wait for them to catch up with the premier quantum physicist.
Check out my blog, my podcast “Torah Talk Podcast,” and my books @ www.torahtalk21.com.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Flick, but I’m not saying that. I’m not saying that life doesn’t reverse entropy locally. I’m simply observing that life, in bringing organization to disorganized matter, doesn’t reduce entropy in the universe. It increases entropy — it just does it somewhere else. There’s no violation of thermodynamics going on here, and what is happening isn’t unique to life (other than, perhaps, as a matter of degree).
If entropy is increasing, and if inanimate chemicals self-organizing into self-reproducing patterns is one aspect of increasing entropy, then we should be able to see it happening all the time.
Actually, plants are made of sunlight and CO2.
I think we can probably agree that entropy is increasing.
Inanimate chemicals self-organizing into self-reproducing patterns (as in the cases of ducklings and quartz crystals, for example) isn’t an aspect of increasing entropy, per se. Rather, it’s an example of a localized decrease in entropy that is offset by a global increase in entropy.
And it does happen all the time, though not usually with the flair and panache of life. The universe is a vast sea of energy, waves and waves interacting with each other, sometimes amplifying (decreasing local entropy) and sometimes canceling (increasing local entropy), but always, slowly and inexorably, increasing the global entropy.
We often don’t recognize it when we see it. When a volcano erupts and creates a Pacific island, that mass lifted farther from the Earth’s core represents a store of energy — a localized decrease in entropy. When a hurricane forms over the Atlantic, that’s a concentration of energy — a spontaneous, temporary, self-organizing localized decrease in entropy. Eventually the island weathers away, the storm abates — and life expires.
Time’s arrow seems to point in only one direction, and everything eventually moves that way. Some things are simply more noticeable than others.
It is not just religious people who are sure about everything. Let’s be realistic. It is people that are sure about everything: skeptics, religious, scientistic, Luddites, and so on. Bold certainty is equal opportunity and not a unique feature to religious people (whatever that generalization even means). :-)
Absolutely. Hubris is, I think, our great failing.
A corollary to your comment: Years ago I was in a conversation with a fellow rational materialist who expressed the opinion that organized religion is a net negative, a belief he held because of what he perceived to be abuses by religious institutions. I pointed out that the abuse of authority is hardly unique to religious institutions, and that in fact many non-religious governments have a spectacularly bad track record when it comes to abusing authority. (People who are hostile to religion are rarely persuadable, in my experience.)
Yes, I understand the overall balancing that you have been arguing regarding the total amount of order in the universe. And this would seem significant to consider as it is said it leads to universal heat death. But to organization is also to create. And a purely material view of the universe is ungodly. God continually intervenes within and holds the universe together. And the epitome of this organization is the human being, made of material but enlivened by the breath of God. To say that anything but a materialistic view, as currently understood, is to lower the glory of God is, I think, misplaced.
And water and soil and a predetermined organized structure.
Pretty much by definition, I would say. Since I’m an agnostic, this doesn’t weigh heavily on me. But my point isn’t about whether or not God exists — a question which I think is probably beyond our ability to answer — but rather about the wisdom of attempting to reach religious conclusions through scientific inquiry, and vice verse.
Yes, certainly one’s existing world view sets boundaries for further thought and conclusions.
True. Not the point of my comments, but true.
It’s the description of our differences. You fundamentally lean on a godless philosophy and intellectualism. I lean on a godly (specifically Christian) world view. This is why I see see life as emanating from Life and fundamentally different from entropy, and you see life as a mechanistic process defined by the prevailing scientific view, and in which God not necessarily need be involved.
Public health experts on Monday. The same experts on Tuesday with different views. And so on.
Agreed. Disorder is increasing toward the end of the universe. But that doesn’t answer anything. Who created the order in the first place? Especially if it was even more ordered to begin with before now. All you’ve done is observed a trend and moved the point of observation away from the origin.
Agreed again. So one of my first comments here still holds. You have a choice. Either you believe in probabilities of both sequential and parallel events occurring, amounting to probably billions to one odds of happening or you can believe what most civilizations on earth intuitively believe in a creator. That intuition by the way I would say is reason. I choose reason over the faith of billions to one odds of occurring.
Early on many people noticed that the Big Bang theory had some uncanny resemblances to the Bible’s story of creation in which everything was created out of the void in one big event, an event that had no known cause and which cause could never plausibly be investigated scientifically as it occurred before (if time is even relevant in this context) the universe existed.
This caused a lot of discomfort among some physicists, and so they set about coming up with alternative theories. The Multiverse theory, in which ours is one of a possibility infinite number of alternate universes, and the quantum singularity, in which one big bang after another takes place as the universe spontaneously expands and then contracts back to a singularity that “bounces” to form another universe, literally ad infinitum, are two of these theories.
These theories are pure speculation, impossible to test scientifically, that exist only to warm the hearts of atheists and assure them that the idea of God isn’t necessary.
So I doubt that these guys will ever come around to any genuine realizations about God.
It was named “the Big Bang” by Fred Hoyle. He was making fun of it.
The idea that the universe had been around forever also grounded the lazy assumption that with enough time, a bunch of atoms could eventually collide just right and make an amoeba. If you roll a pair of dice often enough, you can get a thirteen. The Big Bang changed the paradigm from an infinite big empty with accidents to an unfolding with a lot of surprisingly favorable conditions and features built-in such that it almost looks purposeful.
The Big Bang doesn’t eliminate the preposterousness. It only pushes it around. It, like God at the bottom of the atheist’s glass of natural science, is still there.
This is a good discussion and I include all the comments in this thought. It’s the kind of useful exchange that sharpens some tools and dulls others.
Science doesn’t really have any limits except time and there is scientific reasoning that says time may not be an issue either. Think about that for a minute. The issue with a scientist finding God as the OP seems to be heading is the scientist would need to first come up with a theory related to the quest and then set about to validate the theory. Accidental discoveries may add to science, but they are not science in action.
Here is another perspective. People find God every day, so there is no reason a scientist could not do so. I see no reason why a scientist, using scientific methods, could not come up with a theory related to the existence of God and through observation, validate the theory. I think this is actually how every intelligent mind approaches God; in a somewhat logical way.
Einstein had some good thoughts about God from a scientific perspective, but he could not get past the individual relationship nature of God. He related how he thought religious people needed to give up the idea of a personal God for science to advance. I think he may have believed there was a God, but being the scientist he was, wasn’t going to speculate beyond the idea something ordered things. This is my idea of his thoughts based on what I have read.
Another thought is we actually have scientists who study the knowledge of God. We call them theologians. Some might say, well that’s not science. which is simply incorrect. Science is knowledge and a scientist is one who studies knowledge. Reserving the terms for some knowledge and not others is completely unscientific, especially since the body of knowledge about God probably dwarfs all other knowledge combined. It’s impossible to wrap a single mind around it all.
I guess I should have expanded that.
I’ll let Werner do it.
Religious people can hold on tight to as many strange ideas as they want to have, as long as they do not inflict their thinking on others in society who have not pledged to be part of their belief system.
Of course modern day ministers who are ego-centric get around the logic of my statement by telling the congregation: “If you have friends or acquaintances who do not share your beliefs in the beliefs that I have told you to adopt, it is best to avoid them. After all, their contradictions of the irrefutable and infallible Truth could endanger your beliefs. Once you abandon those beliefs, you will go to hell.”
In my county, such authoritarianism has led to one congregation of church goers avoiding another. And that congregation avoids them back.
Their two ministers despise one another, and both men act as if that hatred is approved of by their God, who for whatever reason has chosen their hatred over the other’s minister’s hatred.
Very well stated.
However: People of faith can limit the God of their beliefs by their attitudes towards science.
But God will still go on being unlimited. (Or God would not be god.)
No, scientists cannot find God. But God can find them.
Asking who created the universe doesn’t tell us anything about how the universe came into being. Who is simply asserted as a stand-in for an unknown how: “How did it come into being? Someone/something able to create it created it.” But as to the how, creationism offers no answers. I appreciate that that might be a comforting formulation, but it isn’t one that provides much explanatory power — at least, not from a scientific perspective.
Last point first: I think there’s good evolutionary reason why people are drawn to beliefs in the supernatural. We’re drawn to fill the gaps in our knowledge, and will be as inventive as necessary in order to do that. Perhaps that explains the great diversity of religious belief.
As for probabilities….
We really have no idea. We estimate that there are probably on the order of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe — and that the portion of the universe we can’t observe may easily dwarf that number. We now believe, based on the 10,000 or so planets we’ve discovered orbiting other stars, that most stars probably have planets around them. We think the universe is more than three times older than our own sun, so multiply all those stars by some factor to account for the ones that have come and gone.
We don’t know if life requires water. We only have one example — as far as we know — of life beginning, and the life of which we’re aware certainly requires water. There is liquid water on Earth; we think there was once liquid water on Mars; we’re pretty sure there is liquid water on some of the moons of Jupiter, and perhaps some of Saturn’s as well. It seems increasingly likely that there is an awful lot of water in the universe. There’s also a lot of carbon out in the universe, and a lot of organic compounds. The building blocks of life are not rare.
Billions of years, more planets than stars, more stars than most of us have words for. Imagine all the puddles, all the volcanic vents at the bottoms of all those oceans, all the tide pools and estuaries, all the random chemistry occurring on a billion trillion planets for a thousand million years.
None of that means that God didn’t create the universe. All it means is that asserting that God must have created the universe based on some guesstimate of the likelihood that we might have arisen by chance is, truly, a God of the gaps argument. We have far too little information to make such a bold claim and pretend it’s scientific.
No. God must have created the universe because only something outside a system can create a system. We can approximate what that something is, though we may never know (while we are alive) exactly. But something must have created the system. Nothing comes from nothing. Now I choose to call that something God, because obviously whatever that something is that can create a universe must have immense power and might. I am also a conservative. I have been blessed to have been endowed with a Judeo Christian understanding of the world. It has given me an understanding of what that Something that I call God is. It is entirely plausible and given my conservatism I believe it. You can have faith in all that statistics, but it is equally a faith, which I may add is not a conservative belief system, and it still never answers how a system can be created out of nothing.
I appreciate the seemingly commonsensical quality of that comment, but still don’t find it convincing.
We don’t know that what preceded the universe of which we’re aware was actually “nothing.” Nor do we know that, as you put it, “nothing comes from nothing.” Nor do we know that the universe hasn’t always existed.
Attempting to invoke God as a logical explanation doesn’t really work — at least not for me — because it doesn’t actually explain anything. It simply shifts all of the same questions about origins and existence from the universe to God, leaving exactly the same logical problems. It is, once again, invoking God to fill in gaps that our current knowledge can not yet address.
I agree with some of that. We’re just speaking here informally. Ricochet is not a peer reviewed scientific or theological journal. Like I said before there are those that are convinced of a probabilistic argument and those that are convinced of a creator argument. For you to tell us one can’t invoke God as a reasonable possibility is to accept your ground rules, and that’s baloney, especially when you still insist that something can come from nothing. No, nothing comes from nothing.
By the way, this little video clip explains how the Big Bang doesn’t prove God. I don’t think I’ve actually said it did, but perhaps people think I implied it. The video does show the complexity of the situation.
And if you want to try to grasp all the possibilities you can listen to this wonderful interview with Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Karin Öberg. She distinctly says you cannot have something out of nothing. It’s a half hour discussion both on the quantum physics and faith. I thought it was great.
Yes, I get that. And I don’t want to come across as having answers — I don’t, any more than any one else does.
But I do have a concern, which I’ve tried to express here without sounding like Richard Dawkins or some equally obnoxious anti-God type. I like religion — well, Judeo-Christian religion anyway. I think it’s good for us, good for our country, good for western civilization.
As an agnostic individual with a strong science bent who has spent a lot of time in Sunday School classes, attending church, reading the Bible, and thinking about science and religion, I’ve come to believe that both religion and science are undermined by efforts to force upon them a connectedness they don’t share. I think we see this most dramatically in the so-called Young Earth Creationist camp, where we get profoundly bad science marshalled to support a religious hypothesis — that of an Earth only a few thousand years old — that is neither essential nor even important to the Judeo-Christian tradition. That’s an extreme, of course. Meyer and Behe and the other irreducible complexity / fine-tuned universe people are more subtle and/or esoteric, but I think they’re ultimately engaged in the same project. I think it ultimately increases skepticism of religion and of those who preach it.
Ok. But religious minded people have a need and a right to share their views. This started as a religious minded post from a religious person. People who chimed in were mostly religious minded people. You commented with a perfectly proper counter opinion until you told us we shouldn’t be bringing up God in the debate. Well that’s not our fundamental ground rules, especially since that argument has been around for several thousand years. I found that as setting the terms of our argument and out of bounds. How about I set the ground rules that you can’t use statistics as an argument because that’s not empirical? I would think that would be out of bounds too.