The Deep Mystery of Being

Science is as much a myth as religion.

If you don’t believe me, start looking into particle physics. Particles are what stuff is made of. Everything you experience—your body, your clothes, your house, your car, your friends—literally every thing is composed of particles.

Every thing is composite.

Particle physicists study particles. The basic gist of what they spend their time doing is, they split particles open, attempt to isolate the constituents of such particles, and then they study those constituents.

The idea, it seems, is to finally arrive at the Constituent of all Constituents: the fundamental, foundational (initial?) particle.

Which is sort of a fool’s errand, but it gives particle physicists job security for as far into the future as they wish to continue the search.

When scientists first discovered the atom, they believed that they had located the fundamental particle. The word “atom” comes from the Latin átomos. In Latin, “a” means not; and “tomos” means divisible. Atom: not divisible.

Which ended up being a misnomer because it turns out that atoms are divisible. We call their constituents subatomic particles, or hadrons. That was the science I was being taught way, way back, when I was in high school. I remember studying and being fascinated by the various combinations of neutrons, protons, and electrons that form atoms, and from atoms elements.

(I pay homage now to my high school science teacher, Mr. Lindsey J. Forester, III.)

So basically particle physicists keep on breaking stuff open and coming up with new stuff, which then requires a further breaking open—this is reductionism. They’ve even built a huge machine (over 17 miles long) called the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, Switzerland. This machine uses magnets to accelerate particles to near the speed of light, then smashes them into each other. Particle physicists watch all this to see if any other particles are generated by this high-energy/low mass collision.

And they’ve discovered some weird and mysterious stuff. For example there is a particle called a gluon which is massless.

Try to get your head around the idea of a particle which has no mass. If you’re a hard-core materialist there will be a quiz on this later.

Well I’ve got some news for everyone: there is no end to reductionism. Which means there is no fundamental particle or thing. Even if scientists were to build a collider the size of the universe, a fundamental particle will never be discovered. There will always be more.

It’s turtles all the way down.

Down to what? No one will ever be able to say. It’s not something, and it’s not nothing. And it’s not neither something nor nothing, nor is it both. It is not even an “it.”

I have realized this from meditation and contemplation of certain Buddhist philosophical ideas which hold that every thing is a composite—made of other, ever smaller things. So every time particle physicist tear apart one thing, the constituents of that thing will themselves be comprised of other things which are themselves composite.

The regression is infinite.

Thus there is not now and never will there be found a fundamental particle. Which means particle physicists will always have more things to play around with. If you were to die and be reborn 2500 years from now, lots of things will have changed. But there might very well still be a contingent of the future version of particle physicists building larger and larger colliders, busily in search of the so-called God particle.

Imagine if there were a fundamental particle and someone discovered it. That person would be awarded a Nobel Prize and their stature would immediately eclipse that of Newton. But then of course the science of particle physics would shut down and particle physicists would all need to get new jobs. So this Buddhist philosophical idea that I’m talking about should be celebrated by particle physicists, to the extent that they enjoy their work and desire job security.

Here’s the way it works at a more fundamental philosophical level: As long as there is a strong enough collective desire to search for new particles, new particles will emerge to be “discovered.”

It’s sort of like a Mandelbrot set.

The same thing happens with respect to time. And now I wish to pivot and discuss very briefly the sciences which deal with the origin of the material universe—mostly cosmology and quantum mechanics. As long as there are curious scientists, the mysteries of deep space, black holes, the Big Bang (or not), inflation theory, string theory, etc. will continue to deepen. Some mysteries will be apparently resolved, while others will remain forever intractable. To the extent that a mystery becomes resolved via science, the resolution itself will spawn further mysteries. And so on.

Science therefore fails ultimately to provide any rational explanation for anything. All of the discoveries of science rest on premises and principles which are not now and never can be understood or explained. Kurt Gödel has already proved this mathematically.

So science is simply a way—one way—to attempt to make sense of and explain what most people perceive as phenomenal reality. Religions and mystical traditions offer other ways. One way is not necessarily better or more true or more accurate than another.

People who believe that science is the end-all, be-all of everything don’t really understand science. They haven’t looked deeply enough into it.

The best technique is to study and understand as many different metaphysical systems as one dares, seeing them all as mere conceptual frameworks superimposed over some great mystery which is not and can never be within the purview of human understanding.

In short, science is as much a myth as religion.

By taking this view, science and religion begin to harmonize and complement each other, rather than standing in mutual contrast and opposition.

Whatever you believe is your reality.

So you’d better be careful what you believe. The best option might be to abandon all belief in anything except God, which is just a simple word I sometimes use to describe the deep mystery of being.

Peace