Why the Higgs Boson Matters

WHY THE HIGGS BOSON MATTERS

Michael H. Crosby OFMCap.

St. Thomas More Catholic Center, Yale University

September 30, 2010

Thank you. Father Bob reminded me tonight that we first met some years ago on a plane. He was sitting next to me reading a book that intrigued me. I asked about it which led to the discovery for each other that we were priests. He asked me then to come here but this is the first our calendars were able to be in synch. With great thanks I’m here; I look forward to a spirited and energizing evening.

My talk tonight has three parts. First, I will address the misnomer of the Higgs Boson as “The God Particle;” this will lead into a quick overview of theoretical atheism. Secondly I will show how the discovery of the Higgs Boson has reopened the perennial wound created by the disparateroles of science and religion, fact and faith, observation and speculation. Then, following Sam Harris, I will suggest that spirituality offers a common ground between science and religion. This will lead me to the heart of my thesis: a spirituality that is based on the key insight around the Higgs Bosonthat stresses the power of what I will call the “it” of everything and everyone. In the process I hope we can find a better balance between Religion and Science by reclaiming the reality and power of “It.”

Toward this end, as I was preparing my talk for tonight, a couple weeks ago I came across in my local Milwaukee paper, The Journal Sentinela very unique ad campaign. “Don’t avoid IT,” it shouted in a big ad in the main section. This was followed by invitations to “find out about it” and “do it.” Finally we found out that “it” involved having a colonoscopy!I hope I won’t tease you tonight in my way of discussing the “it” of the Higgs Boson with my belief in a prior “it” I call God.

I. The Higgs Boson Discovery and Increasing Atheism

One of the biggest frustrations of the British physicist Peter Higgs, for whom the Higgs Boson received half of its name, was that many people called it “The God Particle.” This is a misnomer, especially if it implies this basic element in creation isthe One some of us call “God.”

This unfortunate identificationpoints to the tendency of many in religion to promote “proofs” for the existence of a God whom nobody has seen and which the theoretical atheists continually attack. A consequence of this, I think, is found in a recent WIN-Gallup International polling. Since 2005 the percentage of Americans describing themselves as "religious" dropped from 73 percent to 60 percent, while the share identifying themselves as atheist rose fivefold: from 1 to 5 percent.[1] And this 5 percent doesn’t even include those who define themselves as agnostics.

This mention of atheism brings me to the “Four Horsemen” of theoretical atheism. First we have Christopher Hitchens. He died this year, but since he defined himself as an avowed atheist, I didn’t think I should put the cross symbol behind his name because I don’t think he’d approve. Let’s just say he died. Then we have Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. I have not included Stephen Hawkingbecause he is not an apologist for atheism like the others I’ve mentioned, even though he now does not see the need for “the intervention of some supernatural being or god.”[2]What the theoreticians of atheism do seem to agree on is important: their underlying arguments against God haveless to do with God than the “god” being promoted by the fiats and fatwas of many religions,especially Islam, Mormonism and my own Catholicism.

I won’t discuss the colorful Christopher Hitchens, especially since he now can’t speak for himself. Neither will I elaborate on Daniel Dennett, because I find him to be the hardest to understand. Rather I want to focus on a significant point raised by Richard Dawkins. He sees our attitudes toward God involving a continuum of seven stages ranging from absolute belief in God or certitude about God’s existence to absolute nonbelief in God or pure atheism. As for himself, he admits that he is not a #7 on his continuum insofar as he won’t say he does not believe in God: he is a six, he writes, because he has not yet found and reason to believe.

In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Sam Harriscontrastsbelief, faith, religion and, we’ll see, spirituality. For Harris, “belief” implies an ultimate and primal worldview that pervades every one of us. He calls belief “a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life.” He writes: “Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional response to other human beings.”[3]

Faith organizes beliefs into creeds and codes that give rise to shared understandings. Christianity evidences this in the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds. But more specific beliefs have been promoted among people in significant ways that have led to separate “Faiths”with a capital F. Such Faiths constitute “religion” with a capital “R” asHarris discusses it as his third category.

I have yet to find a clear definition of “religion” in Harris; I think he’d agree it involves a set of theological and moral beliefs that organizes people around (non) belonging with a promise of (non) salvation. Thus, in fundamental Protestantism, one belongs to a John 3:16 church. In Catholicism one is equally fundamentalist by interpreting Matthew 16:17-19 to stress the power of Peter without the balance of Matthew 18:18-20 that includes the power of the people.

II. Addressing the Challenge (Conflict) Raised by Science and Religion

This moves us to part two: can science and religion ever find happiness together?

If you subscribe to an approach called “scientism,” religion has no place in your life. Equally, the result of biblical literalismis creationism instead of fidelity to evolutionary science. A few years ago The New York Times ran a story of a man at the University of Rhode Island by the name of Marcus Ross. Although he got high marks for his doctoral dissertation on mosasaurs, which, he wrote, were part of the Cretaceous era some 65 million years ago, he also interpretsGenesis and the rest of the Bibleliterally. Based on its genealogies, he believes the earth is, at most, 12,000 years old.When such contradictory pieces of information define one’s life the result is compartmentalization rather than integration.

Thankfully, the integrationist viewhas dominated official Catholic teaching during my lifetime. Pope Benedict XVI has summarized it well. He explains: “The world needs good scientists, but a scientific outlook becomes dangerously narrow if it ignores the religious or ethical dimension of life, just as religion becomes narrow if it rejects the legitimate contribution of science to our understanding of the world.”[4]

Where can we find some common ground between science and religion and, if not science and religion, at least science and spirituality? This challengetook on greater urgency for me at the dawn of thenew millenniumin a special issue of The Wall Street Journal. Rather than writing about economics and corporations, it featured interviews with expertsand academics from various fields. They were asked about the future. One of these was Edward O. Wilson, a zoologist at that other school over in Massachusetts. He won a couple Pulitzer Prizes for his books on social organizations. He’s also been a kind of cheerleader for the New Atheists.

In his interview, the reporter asked him a compelling question: “How can religion possibly survive what science is telling us?”

The reporter’squestion assumes that “the twain shall never meet” between science and religion. So let’s probe this assumption. First, it involves our two key areas: religion and science. Science involves things that are justified by fact or observable data. Faith involves something that is not observable but (hopefully) believable. While at one time in human history people found harmony between the two, today they often seem poles apart. But, helped by an insight of Karen Armstrong,[5]I suggest this need not be the case. She shows that the ancients distinguished between “Logos,” which pertains to things that can be studied by hard data and “Mythos,” which involve things unseen that may be equally real (for some people) but not able to be proven by science. They balanced what they (thought they) knew as Logos from science with Mythos addressing questions that science did not explain, especially the “who” did it or “how” did “it” become “it”? Logos involved physics and cosmology; Mythos addressed questions of philosophy and theology that Logos could not prove. Both involved different types of reality: one of fact; the other of faith.The balance gave their lives deeper meaning.

Finding some way to retrieve this historical symbiosis is imperative for us today. This task led Pope John Paul II to write a letter to Father George Coyne, then Jesuit Director of the Vatican Observatory. In it, this philosopher/Pope asked two critical questions:

If the cosmologies of the ancient Near Eastern world could be purified and assimilated into the first chapters of Genesis, might not contemporary cosmology have something to offer to our reflections upon creation? Does an evolutionary perspective bring any light to bear upon theological anthropology, the meaning of the human person as the imago Dei, the problem of Christology – and even upon the development of doctrine itself?[6]

In many ways, Pope John Paul II is echoing The Wall Street Journal’s question to E. O. Wilson: “How can religion possibly survive what science is telling us.” So I find the Pope’sconcern echoed in the challengingresponse E.O. Wilson gave to the reporter:

“Make no mistake about it. The expansion of human knowledge with science and technology, especially neuroscience, genetics and evolution, renders traditional religious belief less and less tenable, more and more difficult to justify and argue logically. The more we understand from science about the way the world really works, all the way from subatomic particles up to the mind and on to the cosmos, the more difficult it is to base spirituality on our ancient mythologies.”[7]

With Wilson’s response and Armstrong’s Logos/Mythos lens, let’s now exploresome more of the assumptions behind what Wilson said to the reporter.

Here as “Logos” he mentions three key fields. He begins with subatomic particles or physics. It also includes the mind and how we know and react to what we know as is studied here at Yale in biology and neuroscience. Thirdly, there is cosmology, including evolutionary biology and our convictions about the origins of our universe and the nature of human beings.Finally, I suggest,that what he calls “ancient mythologies” involves the realm of “Mythos.”

But here we face a key problem: while Armstrong says the ancients knew the difference between the two and the different realms of both, too many religious leaders now undermine that sacred union by implying, even insisting, that Mythos is factual Truthor Logos. I know it happens in Catholicism. Because we have not followed the ancients’ understanding of “mythos” as that truth beyond what is observable but which is real (at least to the believer), how in the world (literally and figuratively) do we understand, much less explain,many dogmas of our Catholic Church like one which saysMary “was assumed body and soul into heaven . . . “[8] While I maybelieve it, such a statement, as well as teaching about beliefs like Adam and Eve, Heaven and Helloften reflectwhat Michael Dodd calls a “flat-earth” theology arising from a cosmology that has been discredited for centuries.

As a rapprochement, building on Armstrong, I suggest we consider Logos as involving our heads and Mythos our hearts and, similarly Logos as left brain thinking and Mythos as right brain thinking. With Logos everything is an “It” that involves questions around what makes something be its unique “it.” Mythos discusses questions about why we are connected. When we join the mystical way of knowing of Mythos and religious experience studied by Logos we find symbioses in “spirituality.”

From her research of young adults, Sharon Daloz Parks says that while people my age talk about faith (and losing faith) younger people talk about meaning and the loss of meaning. I think this is a critical nuance for us here.[9]The word “meaning” comes from the Greek muein. At their root, so do other words like “myth,” “mythology,” “mystery,” “mystical” and “mysticism.” So I think, especially for my purposes here, it’s safe to say meaning, mythand Mythos can be consideredas one. At their best they involve a way of knowing observable in clear patterns. Therefore they can be objects of scientific study.

The study of mysticism demonstrates how we experience something that pervades one’s whole being. While we believerscall this “God,” Sam Harrismight callit an overwhelming sense of one’s connectedness to everyone and everything. Thus, his interchangeable words for “mysticism,” “religious experience” and “spirituality.”

III. Finding a Meeting Ground for Religion and Science in the Reality of “It”

This link among myth, mystery, mysticism and meaning offers a segue to the thirdand main part of my talk: “why the Higgs Bosonmatters”not only scientifically but theologically.

Harris and other writers on mysticism outline a consistent pattern found inall religious experience. This becomes a lens that takes a person from one level of consciousness to a deeper level of understanding, connectedness and meaning. Maybe because I have been touched by this experience I probably read more than usual into the opening paragraph of the July 5 article in The Wall Street Journalthat reported the discovery of the Higgs Boson. It said: “Scientists said they found a subatomic particle resembling the long-elusive Higgs boson, a landmark discovery that could explain why particles have mass and, by extension, why stars, planets and all other objects in the universe exist at all.”[10]

Twice this paragraph uses the word “why.” Scientists have their “what” that answers their “why.” While I honor such “whats,”my faith makes me curious about the “whys.” Thus, the title of my talk: “Why the Higgs Boson Matters.”

While scientists have sought “the long-elusive Higgs boson” as their “what,” there’s something in me, like a child, that links my never-ending “whys” with “the long-elusive” One I call God. Where wemight find some common groundwith scientists, I think, comes from the realization that both of our questions involve a curiosity or search for ananswer regarding some ultimate reality or source we both call “it.” We know asLogos from science that the “it” called the Higgs Boson is essential if each “it” in time and space will be its “it.” Yet, my belief makes me ask about the “why” of the Higgs Boson. This leads me tofind an answer in God, whom I believe is the source and archetype of every “it” that is.

Centuries ago the Franciscan philosopher theologian John Duns Scotus called this unique it-ness or it-IS-nessthe haecceitas of everyone and everything. Haecceitas is the “thisness” that makes every “it” and every “one” unique. For believers, each“thisness” or “itness”is because of another “it:”the archetypal “It”called God. This God is the “underlying ‘why,’” the ultimate “It” or “I am” that has enabled every “it-is” or “I am” to be what it is in the evolutionary process.

Thus it was that in early Julypapers around the world announced that scientists in Switzerland rejoiced to find the “it” of the Higgs Bosonthat enables every other subatomic particle to be its “it.” For a believer, this discovery triggers a connection to the originating, archetypal, creative force: the “I am” enabling it and thus everything that is massed to be its unique “it” and everyone to be his or her unique “I am,” and, in the process, find ourselves connected to everything and everyone.

For a literary expression of what I’m trying to say, I turn to Alice Walker’s classic,The Color Purple. After saying that, when she realized she was imaging God as an old white man, she “lost interest,” Shug begins using the word “It” about God. So her partner Celie asks: “But what do it look like? I ast.” Shug responds: “It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself.” And then she gets to the heart of the matter:

“My first step from [thinking of God as] the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was.”[11]

While this narration of Shug’s experience of God as the One who is such an “It” is powerful, I willdare go further to stress another dimension of the God in whom I believe. Truly this God speaks to me even more powerfully of what we know from science about the way our world “really works.” For Christians God’s identity is defined in mutual and participative relationality. We call this the Mystery of the Trinity. It involves an “I am,” a “Thou art” and a “We are.” As in creation, we find that, in this way of relating, each is separate but never separated; each is a part but never apart.