God does exist, and he’s messing
with us.
We study his world and we call our
study science. We learn more all the time and we think we are homing in on the
truth, but God knows better. Every time we think we
are beginning to understand His creation, He adds something new to mess up our
understanding and humble us.
When
Newton defined his laws of mechanics; that was how the universe worked. There
were no gravity waves, no speed of light, no E=MC2. But after a
while we understood the rules too well and started to use the rules to calculate
force and impact and other stuff. God doesn’t like us to be too clever. He
wants to stay a few steps ahead. One omniscient being in the ‘hood is enough, and
He wants to be sure it’s Him. So He created Einsteinian mechanics and relativity.
Once
upon a time, atoms were the smallest things. We did stuff with atoms and God
foresaw the day when we would be able to see atoms. So He created electrons,
neutrons and protons and thought we wouldn’t be able to see them. But when we did,
He decided that there should be quarks and leptons. We called them ‘fundamental
particles’ and just when we became convinced that they were basic and
indivisible, God said “Let there be strings”. He just likes to mess with us.
And
He isn’t done yet. I once read that ‘we know relativity is wrong and we know
quantum mechanics are wrong, we just don’t know what’s right’. But some day,
we’ll find out and God will have to get back to work. Of course, it’s always
possible that He’s been too smart for His own good, and relativity and quantum
mechanics can’t be unified. Maybe we’ll catch Him out.
And
now there’s this. We used to know that the universe was expanding, and that was fine. But now,
there is a ‘pretty serious’ mathematical discrepancy in the rate of expansion.
‘New particles’ are a possible culprit. Not very original, but new particles have
always worked for Him in the past, so why not stick with them.
What’s
clever about this is that God doesn’t change what we know, He just adds a new
level of complexity. We didn’t need Einsteinian mechanics until we started
flinging stuff round the solar system, and we still use Newtonian mechanics for
the mundane, Earth-bound stuff. He didn’t get rid of atoms, He just subdivided
them, once, and again, then gave the smallest ones an internal structure. And
to give Himself a path forward for the future, He added some new dimensions
that can only be detected by some fancy math.
But
maybe we can use this process to outsmart God. If Newton had shown that light
passed the sun without being bent, if Rutherford could have shown that there
was nothing smaller than an electron, God would have had a limit set on what He
could change. Of course if all He has to do is create a new particle, there may
be no limits but if we could define the required properties of the particle and,
when it appeared, show that it contradicts our observations, we might have Him
in a corner.
So
there’s the story. A brilliant young scientist, aided by her sexy blond
associate, finds something odd on their radio telescope or particle accelerator
observations. They conduct experiments to rule out all possible explanations,
thus backing God into a corner. What does God do?
And
another interesting thought. As we look deeper and deeper into space, and
wonder about life and intelligence on other worlds, maybe aliens will come to
replace particles as the all-purpose explanation for strange observations. We
are already testing the waters with this idea. Alien mega-structures. Apparently, aliens read Larry Niven. Or intra-galactic spaceships. Rendezvous with Rama?
But
one day, we’ll see something that doesn’t have another explanation. Then what
will God do?
