Dave's new American GUT

hi Blog fans,

Wow - that last one was a doozie!

I promised you a few in succession and I am afraid I failed with that because I had to respond to quite a few comments.

I also mentioned that my next blog would be about PR. That is also going to turn out to be false - as I have had another subject present itself.

It is right in front of me. It is my gut.

After months of fighting it off, American food and portion size has finally got the better of me, and just as Jamie Oliver is taking over TV in the US. How ironic.

I am now the heaviest I have ever been (perhaps why there are still no Hawaii pictures), and desparately need to get in shape for the half marathon in June. I HAVE to lose this GUT!

It is strange how our stomachs can make us think about necessity, and that is exactly what mine has done (that was a terrible link, I'm sorry...).

Necessity is a nice little extension of the arguments in the last blog - and also happens to appear (albeit unannounced) on one page in last week's economist - p83 in my US edition - which happens to reference both the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) and Aristotle.

But first, a quick and dirty (and therefore incomplete and inaccurate) introduction to link to the last blog.

In the Climate Change Argument for the Existence of God, I spoke about those who say they are agnostics due to pure reliance on the scientific method. You might also call these people Empiricists. One of the fathers of British Empiricism was David Hume. I shan't go into specifics about Hume's thought, but he started me thinking about necessity (at the same time as my gut) because he allowed for it in his thought - and this allowance led to a place for God.

Anyone who studied Hume would be up in arms at that description, but it is true - in the quick and dirty sense. Hume wrote that, in order for man to live, certain Natural Beliefs have to exist outside of empiricism. For example, we have not observed the Sun rising tomorrow, but we have the Natural belief that it will otherwise life would be pretty difficult to live (we'd be forever buying torches).

Hume writes that one such Natural Belief is the belief in God. Seems pretty out of character if you know of the rest of Hume's work, but it is there. 'God' in this case is not much of a God, as within Hume's thought we can know nothing about him. But in order to live, Hume thinks we need this 'God'.

So what is 'God' in this sense? I would say that this 'God' is Necessity - though I am not suggesting that my new american gut is 'God'.

What I am saying is that even if you are a follower of scientific method, you eventually need a necessity - whether you call it 'God' or not.

As a scientist you study events - one thing being changed (moved) by another. Logically there has to be, at some point, an unmoved mover.

Sounds a bit like mumbo jumbo that doesn't it?

But that is Aristotle - who worked a long explanation back from current movement to an unmoved mover.

And so we find ourselves back at The Economist p83, and back to the LHC at Cern - where science is also looking for an unmoved mover(s).

At Cern, physicists are smashing together particles at incredibly high speeds to try to uncover things that theoretical physics implies the existence of - like the Higgs boson and Dark matter. Interestingly, Paddy Power is offering odds on when and if the machine will find these particles - and particularly relevantly for our current discussion, they are also offering 100 to 1 on the LHC finding God.

That is not as stupid as it sounds - especially if for God you replace 'God', necessity - or rather for 'God' you replace GUT. Not my gut, but Grand Unified Theory, the physics holy grail - a theory that explains why the universe exists, or rather, why it is necessary that the universe exists.

Now it is a good job Cern is in Switzerland, because there are as many holes in my explanation of this as there are in that country's cheese, but if you look into what I am suggesting I am pretty sure it will hold true (Even if you quote Hawking at me in terms of linear time, there is still causality in terms of existence).

So my new American GUT is that everyone's thinking (scientists, philosophers, religionists) is linked somewhere in its darkest reaches by the idea of necessity - whether or not they interact with it on a daily basis or not.

So, a question from me that is beyond my understanding: How does this correlate with my understanding of Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle - that quantum physics deals ultimately only in probability?

DD out