The Atheist As Spiritual ‘Beyonder’

Peter Higgs, co-winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for physics, reportedly is an atheist. In the 1960s he postulated the existence of a subatomic entity – which came to be known as the Higgs-Boson particle – that gave mass, or substance, to the cosmic interplay of pure energy.
 

The Higgs-Boson is the reason that there is something rather than nothing, that there are planets, and stars, and atoms and scientists. Earlier this year the giant hadron collider in Switzerland, CERN, demonstrated through rigorous experimentation that the Higgs-Boson exists not only as a mathematical abstraction in a highly complex formula but also in actuality.
 

CERN’s proof bagged the Nobel for Higgs, who is said to be averse to the popular name given to the Higgs-Boson: the ‘God particle’. As a scientist who is also an atheist – the two often, though not necessarily, go together – Higgs’s reported dislike of the term is understandable.
 

Science and philosophical atheism – the denial of God not out of sense of personal grievance or victimhood (why does He allow bad things to happen to me?) but on the basis of profoundly reasoned argument – have in common what some seekers of spiritual truth call ‘beyonding’: the perpetual extension of consciousness without recognition of limits and boundaries. By the vocations that they profess, scientists and atheists are ‘beyonders’ in search of the limitless.
 

What is called the scientific method is founded on an acknowledgment  of working hypotheses which are deemed to be valid until qualified  by a new hypothesis, which goes ‘beyond’ the previous one. Peter Higgs would be the first to say that, far from being the end of his quest as a scientist, the ‘proof’ of the Higgs-Boson is only the beginning of a new search of what lies further in the infinite mystery that is the cosmos.
 

The trouble with the ‘God particle’ – as with the whole God concept – is that it precludes ‘beyonding’. ‘God’ is a conceptual Lakshman rekha beyond which believers cannot go: It’s not for us to understand the ways of God; submit yourself to the will of God, and leave everything in God’s hands.
 

Like atheism, science has no ‘God’, no limiting factor, no line drawn in the sand, beyond which it dare not go. Indeed, lines drawn in the sand are seen as provocations to cross them, to go beyond them and on to the next one, and then go beyond that, and beyond that again.
 

Similarly, philosophical atheism recognises no frontiers to the expansion of consciousness, no incontrovertible ‘truth’ engraved in eternal stone which permits no questioning. Such ‘positive negativity’ which is boundlessly sceptical of all full and final conclusions has been variously exemplified by spiritual masters. The Tao that can be spoken of is not the real Tao.
 

The Queen in ‘Through the Looking-Glass’ claimed that she could believe six impossible things before breakfast. As a mirror image of her, ‘beyonders’ can try and disbelieve six proven things before breakfast, as a form of calisthenics for the consciousness to keep it supple and infinitely elastic and prevent the onset of the rigidity of faith, of God-given truths.
 

God particle? Had it been called the ‘anti-God particle’, Higgs might have approved. Perhaps.