Spero Consulting

There is an excel­lent col­umn in today’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal enti­tled, A Dark Mat­ter Breakthrough?

In it, the physi­cist Lawrence Krauss writes about dark mat­ter, which may or may not exist. It does exist in many the­o­ries that seem to require it to elim­i­nate oth­er­wise incon­gru­ent obser­va­tions, and there may be empir­i­cal evi­dence that sup­ports its exis­tence, or not.

If it does exist, it may have a mass that is ten times greater than vis­i­ble matter.

When we read arti­cles like his, a few things come to mind.

First, although Mr. Krauss makes no men­tion of God, it’s dif­fi­cult not to think of Him when some­one men­tions mas­sive, unseen forces that influ­ence every­thing in the Uni­verse. More­over, we sus­pect there are many (athe­ists) who believe in dark mat­ter because it is from “sci­ence,” but not God, because they can­not find evi­dence of Him. That reminds us of two things: (1) the absence of evi­dence is not evi­dence of absence, and (2) do they appre­ci­ate the irony?

Sec­ondly, Mr. Krauss writes:

For the the­o­rist work­ing at his desk alone at night, it seems almost unfath­omable that nature might actu­ally obey the del­i­cate the­o­ries you develop on pieces of paper. This is espe­cially true when the the­o­ries involve ideas from so many dif­fer­ent areas of sci­ence and require leaps of imagination.

We’re not really dis­agree­ing with Mr. Krauss, but it does depend upon ones perspective.

If one views sci­ence and sci­en­tific knowl­edge as a proper sub­set of rea­son – the empir­i­cal, ver­i­fi­able part of rea­son – and if via the first chap­ter of the Gospel of John, one equates God with rea­son (logos, the word, thought) then one shouldn’t be sur­prised that, regard­less of ones moti­va­tion, one can learn more about God’s cre­ation through thought alone.

We think that Saint Thomas Aquinas said it best:

“The final hap­pi­ness of man con­sists in the con­tem­pla­tion of truth…. This is sought for its own sake, and is directed to no other end beyond itself.”

That’s why it is the first quote on our Quotes page.

By the way, inter­ested par­ties can read the lit­tle that we know about epis­te­mol­ogy in Uncer­tainty Man­age­ment or scan our reli­gion archive. Unearthly Dis­ci­pline and Freewill is the most closely related post.

Merry Christ­mas.