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In his best-selling book "A Brief History of Time",
physicist Stephen Hawking claimed that when physicists find the theory he and
his colleagues are looking for - a so-called "theory of everything" -
then they will have seen into "the mind of God". Hawking is by no
means the only scientist who has associated God with the laws of physics. Nobel
laureate Leon Lederman, for example, has made a link between God and a subatomic
particle known as the Higgs boson. Lederman has suggested that when physicists
find this particle in their accelerators it will be like looking into the face
of God. But what kind of God are these physicists talking about?
Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg
suggests that in fact this is not much of a God at all. Weinberg notes that
traditionally the word "God" has meant "an interested
personality". But that is not what Hawking and Lederman mean. Their
"god", he says, is really just "an abstract principle of order
and harmony", a set of mathematical equations. Weinberg questions then why
they use the word "god" at all. He makes the rather profound point
that "if language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and
preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of
nature." The question of just what is "God" has taxed theologians
for thousands of years; what Weinberg reminds us is to be wary of glib
definitions.
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| Contributed by: Margaret Wertheim
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