St. Augustine, Meet the LHC

"But how did Spirit get there?"
"It didn't get there, it was always there," said Dawn. "It had to wait, that's all." (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 30)

If you've been won over by the new Story of Everything, you've got to be watching the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, which promises to reveal the secrets of Matter. You're watching it because of Matter's new place. It comes first in the story, "in the beginning," before there's even a thought of Spirit. In the leadoff spot there are daunting responsibilities. Sooner or later, Matter has to bring about consciousness, souls, our innermost being.

One way tellers of the New Story anticipate what's coming is by making Spirit inherent in Matter, even the original Matter:

If "dead" matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialist that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful powers. (Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey)

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Sketch of a Personalistic Universe)

We might say that the simplest atomic structure, the hydrogen atom, already expresses a radiant intelligibility, a psychic as well as a physical aspect of reality. (Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts)

In this point of view, Spirit is destined to arise out of Matter. It comes after Life, so you'd be correct in calling it Matter's "third stage."

But Matter had to wait--a long, long time--to reach that stage. Which brings to mind the Christian saint Augustine, who lived from 354-430 CE. A teller of the Old Story, but far from a literal interpreter of Genesis, Augustine suggested that living things did not exist when God's creation was complete. Only their seeds were present, including the seed of the human body. In order to germinate, the seeds had to wait for the conditions of earth and water to be just right.

One thing was not seeded in the beginning, however: the human soul. In recognition of the tremendous leap that inner life represents, Augustine required a second creative act on God's part. In their own way, contemporary thinkers honor that same leap. Ken Wilber does when he says that "pure consciousness is not an emergent." And in a backhanded way Stephen Jay Gould does as well. Life, he says, was chemically destined to arise from Matter, but human intelligence was a random fluke. Play the tape of evolution a second time, you wouldn't get us at the end.

Seeds wait. Because Augustine's metaphor is so congenial to the fact of cosmic evolution, I have a suggestion for him. Why not come to Geneva and bring your commentary on Genesis? Shake hands with the folks at the LHC. Show 'em your book. Maybe they'd keep an eye out for your metaphorical seeds while they're picking up those pieces of proton. Maybe they'd shoot the breeze about the potential for Life. Maybe--it would knock your sandals off--they'd even bring up a potential for Spirit.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 JOHN N. KOTRE

Memo To Matter

Memo To: Matter
From: JK
Date: September 12, 2008
Subject: The REAL Secret

The pressure is on, baby! Forget about the rack, forget about waterboarding. They've turned on the LHC and they're waiting for you. In case you haven't heard, or don't care, that would be LHC as in Large Hadron Collider. Or as in Let's Hear the Confession. You see, they want you to give up the secret.

I don't know why it came this. You used to be so simple, so solid, so there. I grew up seeing you, bumping into you, counting on you. Matter was the one reality I couldn't deny. Nobody could. But now I'm told you're sort of there. What's really there are atoms. And atoms are really protons, neutrons, and electrons. And protons, neutrons, and electrons are really gluons, leptons, mesons, muons, quarks--a whole zoo of nano-nano things, hadrons being in there somewhere. And all these subatomic things, deep down, are really something else. So why not spill the beans? Tell us what they are. Forces? Geometric points? Chunks of space-time? Strings of energy? Membranes? No one seems to know.

They're going to smack you around a bit to find out. Put you in the largest "experimental" chamber science has ever built. This sucker is seventeen miles in circumference and runs through two countries. Don't take my word for it, take a look. Pretty impressive, eh? You can feel important if you'd like, but I'd be terrified. They're going after the smallest stuff you've got. I don't know why it takes something so big to twist the truth out of something so little, but that's the deal. It's not how it works in outer space.

Right now they've shot a few of your protons into the LHC. They're shaping them into a beam and revving them up to the speed of light (well, 99.9999991% thereof). Sometime this fall they'll direct one beam into another and the demolition derby will begin. Six hundred million head-on collisions per second, each one spewing out thousands of particles. Sounds ouchy to me, but if that's what it takes to get you to talk . . . .

I can save you a lot of grief by telling you what they want. They want the secret. They want the Higgs. The Higgs field, the Higgs particle, the Higgs mechanism, whatever. They think the Higgs will tell them how energy converts into mass, how a "field" becomes a "particle," how Matter ends up as something we all bump into. Sounds like creation to me--and to them. That's why they call the LHC the Genesis machine. And why they call the Higgs the most fundamental particle there is, even the God Particle.

So if you've got a Higgs somewhere, fork it over. If you don't have one, if, omigosh, there is no Higgs, . . . well, let's not even go there. Once the LHC gets cooking, about a year from now, one ought to pop up every 2.5 seconds. Finding it will be the trick. It's not like a needle in a haystack, it's like a needle in a million haystacks. You could save us all some trouble with a few "Here" signs.

If you "cooperate," if you really start talking, you could even tell us about the Big Bang. And that's a big deal. But not as big as the REAL deal, the REAL secret. No one's talking about it right now, but shortly after the Bang you were nothing but hydrogen. That was the universe. The REAL secret is how you turned into opera, into love and hate, truth and lies, compassion and vengeance. How did hydrogen get around to reading memos? That's what I want to know, and I'm afraid the LHC will never get it out of you.

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