The Disappearing God

In a previous post I argued that our intuitions about the physical reality are often misleading, and that at every paradigm shift in physics we have had to unlearn yet another set of our preconceptions to be able to better understand the world. Still, one might ask, there must have been signs well before each shift that the current body of knowledge about the world is incomplete. How were they explained away?

Well, that's what we have God for.

Or, rather, that's what we used to have it for. Because as science advances, we have seen the need for such a one-size-fits-all explanation for everything not yet explained being reduced to close to nothing. When the Greeks thought that energy was needed to keep things moving, the arrow that continued to fly even after it had lost contact with the string of the bow presented a clear counter-example. What kept it moving? Was it the air around it that continued to propagate the energy released by the archer? Was it a spirit or a god from their pantheon that kept its glide?

With Newton, and his explanation of inertia, God was finally deprived of this role, of the role of the prime mover. It was reduced that that of the watchmaker who set things in motion at the beginning of times, but, after that, could merely watch as they reach their fate according to his eternal laws. (Much like a programmer squirming helplessly in his seat watching his code rushing toward the inevitable segmentation fault.)

And now, with our more and more detailed understanding of what could have happened during the Big Bang, we don’t need God as the prime origin, either. With our intuitive and teleological view of the world having been proved almost completely wrong, we understand that we need nothing but mathematics and experiments (and sometimes only mathematics) to advance our knowledge of the physical world. The concept of God has been steadily disappearing as a component of scientific knowledge, and it will be interesting to see for how long it will continue to influence our understanding of ethics, social issues, and political decisions.