(Written in 2024)
Every other month or so there is news of yet another and even stranger ‘particle’ discovered by the Large Hadron Collider (hereafter, LHC). Unscientific folk like myself might have been forgiven for supposing that the discovery of ‘the God particle’ some time ago signalled the end of the grand quest but no, it seems that even the identification of the elusive Higgs Boson (the ‘God particle’ according to the press reports) is not the end of the story. Which greatly pleases me in a way, because I find the whole enterprise hugely amusing and entertaining.
First of all, there is the LHC itself. What a marvellous name! Mind you, there is a hint of menace there. Costing untold millions of dollars and secreted underground near the Franco-Swiss border, the LHC is not the sort of thing you would want to collide with on a dark night without a fat cheque book and a good rating from Standard and Poors.
Then we come to the various ‘particles’, now over fifty in number. In my youth, the atom was supposedly made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons, all whizzing about. Nowadays, all manner of exotic particles and forces have supplanted this older, simplistic model. Such is their number that the scientific folk have found it necessary to adopt a sort of Linnean classificatory system. We could begin with fermions, which are further subdivided into quarks and leptons. The quarks (the name was pinched from James Joyce), no less than the leptons, are further subdivided into 6 species – up, down, strange, bottom, top and charm (I kid you not). The leptons include our old friend the electron, the muon, the tau, the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino. But, as they say on those tv ads, there’s more!
As well as these ‘matter particles’, there are ‘force carriers’ – a whole tribe of bosons of which the Higgs is but a member. There are photons, gluons (from Star Trek, perhaps?), Z-bosons and w bosons. The bosons are an unfortunate bunch. Being neither bottoms nor bosoms, they occupy a sort of anatomical field of indeterminacy. No wonder they eluded discovery for so long. I daresay by the time I finish writing this article, newer members will be added to this already large family of subatomic entities as the LHC ‘slouches toward Bethlehem’ to give birth to what its enthusiastic supporters suppose will be the very nub of things.
But even within this burgeoning ecosystem of particles and forces, all is not well. For this ‘standard model’ (the name given to this collection of particles and forces) does not sit all that well with the other great modern explanatory system – the theory of General Relativity. Both are needed, but both cannot be true (inasmuch as the word ‘truth’ has any meaning today) at the same time. Of course, it may well be that one day some sort of reconciliation is achieved, and we have a unitary explanatory system. Exactly what, though, would it explain?
This brings me directly to Plato. Two and a half thousand years ago, at the very birth of what we once proudly called ‘western civilisation’, Plato posed the very same question to himself as that posed by our latter day LHC enthusiasts and Webb telescope barrackers: ‘What is the ultimate explanation of things’? His answer – as valid now as it was then – was ‘the idea of the Good’. In short, there was no answer to be found by interrogating matter but, rather, you must interrogate your own intellect and exactly how it apprehends being – the very existence of things and of your own being. To quote the famous Plato scholar of last century, Francis Cornford:
You cannot, by taking visible things to pieces, ever arrive at any parts more real than the whole you started with. The perfection of microscopic vision can bring you no nearer to the truth, for the truth is not at the further end of your microscope. To find reality you would do better to shut your eyes and think.
The whole business is like peeling an onion to get at the very core of the thing. You finish up with a mere collection of shells – and tears. And yet, the idea persists, in the popular media at least, that one day we will arrive at some mechanistic understanding of nature and the cosmos which ‘explains everything’. Just the other day, I saw a headline on one of those annoying ‘pop-ups’ which seem to arrive unbidden on my computer screen: ‘The Webb Telescope may allow us to look back to the Big Bang – the very beginning of the universe’.
Let us suppose, in a moment of idle fancy, that the telescope can indeed, locate the very limit of the supposedly expanding universe. What might eventuate if they focus just beyond this point? It is conceptually difficult to think of nothing. And why, pray, was there a ‘big bang’ anyway? Certain pundits speak knowingly of a multiverse or pluriverse etc. and thereby suppose that this will proffer some sort of explanation. As if being can be so divided. If such alternate universes were to exist, they must necessarily belong to a single order of being, else we could not even conceive of them. All we do, basically, is to elongate the causal chain.
Other and similar ‘online’ articles have headlines that are no less nonsensical: ‘Can an infinite universe arise from a finite point?’ Or this one: ‘How the physics of nothing underlies everything’. The latter goes on to tell us that ‘[physicists] have encountered a growing multitude of types of nothing. Each has its own behaviour, as if it’s a different phase of a substance. Increasingly, it seems that the key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a careful accounting of these proliferating varieties of absence.’ The violence that such writing does to language is almost beyond comprehension. There are category errors here so gross as to take reason captive and paralyse criticism. We may as well ask as to whether the sun wears braces or the moon suffers from constipation.
But the basic error in all of this is to suppose as these science popularisers do, that ‘science’ occupies some ontologically neutral position and that the ‘scientific method’ simply deals with ‘facts’, free of all metaphysics. So what is a ‘fact’ and just how is such an entity established? To quote Michael Hanby: ‘there is no metaphysically neutral starting point from which science can lift itself up by its own intellectual bootstraps’ [Hanby, Michael. No God, No Science]. Both Plato and Aristotle knew this, but our modern science popularisers are almost certainly ignorant of anything written by such ‘primitive’ folk.
This is not to suggest that scientific enquiry is futile and should be abandoned. All of us have benefited in some way from advances in scientific knowledge. The problem arises when ‘science’ is invoked to answer questions which are ontologically prior to its own enterprise. These are properly the province of metaphysics and theology. Strictly speaking, science deals in effectiveness, not truth. In fact, as Hanby has eloquently demonstrated in No God, No Science, modern science as it is represented by people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, carries its own metaphysical and deviant ‘theological’ baggage:
Irreducibly metaphysical judgments as to the nature of being, form, time, space, matter, cause, truth, knowledge, explanation, wholes, parts, and the like are the starting point of science, not its conclusions. Because they are apropos of being qua being, these judgments are not merely presupposed at the origins of scientific inquiry where they may thereafter be bracketed out. Since what is true of the whole is by definition true of every part, they permeate the entire enterprise and are operative inside of every subsequent judgment.
Modern ‘scientific’ atheism, purely because it needs the concept ‘God’ against which to erect its own contrary model is, ipso facto, ‘theological’. Here is Hanby again:
More simply, science is intrinsically related to theology because one cannot identify the object of scientific inquiry—namely, nature—without simultaneously distinguishing it from that which is not nature—namely, God—and without giving tacit specification to the character of this ‘not.’ This is confirmed by a fact which we have already noted: … conceptions of nature determine in advance what sort of God is allowed to appear to thought and consequently, the range of meanings that can be intelligibly attached to ‘creation.’
Let us now return to Plato. At the very heart of the issue concerning the validity of the ‘scientific’ view is the simple question of faith. It is, in a sense, an act of faith to believe in the validity of your own reasoning. The scientist and polymath, Michael Polanyi puts it this way:
(W)e cannot ultimately specify the grounds … upon which we hold that our knowledge is true. Being committed to such grounds, dwelling in them, we are projecting ourselves to what we believe to be true from or through these grounds. We cannot therefore see what they are. We cannot look at them since we are looking with them. They therefore must remain indeterminate. (my italics)
But the sort of ‘faith’ invoked by both Plato and Aristotle is very different from that invoked by the science popularisers. In his famous ‘divided line’ analogy (Republic), Plato takes us through the various levels of human knowledge, from mere opinion through to ‘knowledge of the Good’. That last step to the ‘knowledge of the Good’, is beyond mere reasoning and in the realm of an intellectual assent. Aristotle, too, supposes that ‘the indemonstrable first principles of being qua being which are at the ontological root of every science, command faith (πιστειν, pistein) understood … in the sense of the “yes” implicit in our reception of the world as it “communicates itself” immediately to our understanding. Aristotelian pistis is a kind of trust, a willingness to receive the world on its own terms that is constitutive of cognition as such.’ [Hanby]. In other words, Truth moves us by nothing more basic than itself.
And this, incidentally, is why those religious believers who seek to refute their atheist opponents by disputing scientific evidence or proffering alternative scientific’ explanations completely miss the point. They are unwittingly operating within the ‘rules’ set by their opponents. This approach will always fail.
In order to take up arms against the hubris of what Hanby calls “extrinsicism”, we must return to that philosophy of being which had its early roots in ancient Greece and its full elaboration (in the West) in the Christian centuries which followed, starting with St. Augustine and reaching its zenith in the high Middle Ages with St. Thomas Aquinas and the Schoolmen. It is no accident that the secular savants of the17th and 18th centuries directed most of their attacks on the philosophy of the Schoolmen, for only when the traditional notions of causation and of teleology were abolished could modernity erect its wholly materialist substitute. With the abolition of formal and final causes (regarded contemptuously as “occult” properties), the way was now clear for Baconian science to ‘interrogate’ nature and treat the latter as mere substrate. And yet the same science now calls on us to develop an ‘ecological consciousness’. How? Having deprived nature of all forms of intrinsic value, we have no means of meeting the need, short of some shallow and wholly subjective emotionalism. It was the strange, prophetic voice of William Blake – considered mad by his peers – which conveyed the truth of the matter:
The atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s particles of light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright
But perhaps the last word should rest with Hanby who rightly points out that natural theology does not begin with the Greeks and Egyptians and end with the Bridgewater Treatises. It begins with thought and does not end.
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