The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

In the 1970s, string theory became the Holy Grail of science, the final theory that would unify force and matter in a model integrating gravity and quantum mechanics. There is some skepticism about string theory: Richard Feynman, for example, dismissed it as “crazy nonsense,”49 but some string theorists have admitted that their discoveries cannot be either proven or refuted experimentally and have even claimed that no adequate experiment can be devised to test what is a mathematical explanation of the universe.50 The wonder of modern cosmology seems derived in no small measure from the physicists’ inherent inability to answer all its questions.51 They know that the terms they use to describe these natural mysteries—big bang, dark matter, black holes, dark energy—are metaphors that cannot adequately translate their mathematical insights into words. Unlike Newton, of course, modern physicists are not introducing God or the supernatural into their cosmos. But the obviously mythical character of these terms is a reminder that what they point to is not readily comprehensible; they are straining at the limits of scientific investigation, and these terms should carry an air of mystery because they name what cannot yet be investigated.