Is Science Becoming More Religious?
We like to assign labels to things. Atheists assign the labels “superstition” and “religious” to anything they don’t understand or don’t want to believe. Some fundamentalist Christians still think that anything scientific is “anti-Christian”.
We have done this for centuries. During the Dark Ages, we didn’t really know anything about the nature of things or science, and were suspect of everything we didn’t understand. Everything was either religious or mystical and supernatural.
When the Renaissance came, with Newton’s discovery of equations for gravity, mass, and motion, we changed to believing that everything had a cause and that the effect could always be calculated.
This was the age of “Determinism” because we thought we could “determine” the effect and outcome of any event through mathematics and science. If we were given the original conditions of any event, we could apply some equations and find out what its future would be. This was all very neat and orderly, and fit everything that we could observe.
Then came Einstein and Relativity, and Newton’s “deterministic” universe was replaced by one in which everything was relative and flexible, including time and space. That was a little uncomfortable to some in the science community who still wanted to apply Newtonian physics to everything in the universe.
Neils Bohr and Max Planck upset everyone’s notion of reality when they introduced Quantum Mechanics and suggested that nothing was deterministic or absolute and that every event had a degree of probability that was never zero nor 100%.
This idea was slow to catch on, as many scientists are still trying to prove that the universe cannot possibly be that “fuzzy”. The state of particle physics was such that many physicists started to call it “The Particle Zoo”.
As the 21st century dawned, there was hope that a light would emerge from the end of the tunnel. Physicists who were on the forefront of the field began to offer a “Standard Model Of Particle Physics” that greatly simplified the landscape by showing that the myriad of particles could be re-defined with only a few basic particles from which all the others were formed. String Theory became the “light at the end of the tunnel”. However, the predictions of String Theory, are just as unsettling as "the particle zoo" was, with "external universes", and other "multidimensional worlds".
The “Standard Model” had some gaps however, but with the construction of the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, they hoped to fill those gaps with the predicted particles that String Theory said, ought to exist. Those were the Higgs Boson, the one called “the God particle”, and the Graviton. Just recently, the Higgs particle was confirmed to exist, and just this year, gravity waves predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, were seen for the first time. These two discoveries almost prove that String Theory is valid and that the “Standard Model” is correct. All that is left is to finally detect the “graviton” as a particle.
Today, through further discoveries of the nature of quantum mechanics, we see the universe becoming less black and white, and more indeterminant. As we see the “simple” laws of time and space become more and more complex, some think we can never fully understand the nature of the universe through physics. String theory suggests that events in the Bible that were once ridiculed as “supernatural” or superstition, can actually happen on some level of reality, (though theorists themselves would never suggest that the Bible was actually correct). They are saying that there may actually be other universes, (heaven and hell?) and that those places may not have the same physical laws as the one we live in.
Most scientists would agree today that the “age of determinism” is fading and another age controlled by the laws of probability is replacing it. There are still some who don’t understand quantum mechanics, that cling to the outdated “Newtonian” physics in their arguments against God, and religion in general.
Are we entering the 21st century with a new vision of the universe where science and religion may actually come together? If we do, it won’t be because religion or science was wrong, but that both just misunderstood what the truth is. Science may eventually prove that the term “supernatural” simply means “natural laws that we don’t yet understand”. For the first time since the beginning of the 20th century, scientists are willing to admit that there may be more “natural” laws that we don’t know about than the ones that we do.
In fact, the more we know about the “unknown” laws of quantum physics, the more science may start resembling what we have referred to for centuries, as “religion”.
