Oh My God particles are so named ironically because science’s big accomplishment (besides the atom bomb and the vaccuum cleaner) has been the eradication of God from the scientific discourse. It’s not God per se that bothers us, it’s the idea that God could be responsible for all this nonsense that we call science and reality and being that we find utterly bothersome and eminently unbelievable. How could God create such and such particles, or these elements, or those multi-cellular organisms? If He is God, then it follows that He is infinite, omnipresent, and ipso facto a Being unlike anything that has to do with matter. God has no place in science precisely because He is God, because he is not matter, not reality, not the slab of existence we call life. Science deals with the cold hard facts, the truisms, the axioms, and laws of nature and the design of reality. God is none of these, nor does His theoretical hand belong in any of them.
God is okay when left in the spiritual realm. Let the mumbo-jumbo believers posit the unverifiable from the pulpit. Matter is the domain of science, not a being beyond the natural order of things. And matter takes precedence over non-matter, being over superbeing, this over the other.
Or so we’ve pretty much been brought up to believe.
Yet when we curse, it’s not as if a “buddhadamned” works to instill righteous indignation in the recipient’s ears. “Jesus Christ” is an epithet more often than it is the name of a historical figure who claimed to be God. One could say cursing is the essence of dirt and matter (what do you think shit is?), since it exemplifies, characterizes, and personifies the crudity and baseness, indeed the very foundation of existence. Why do we marry the crudeness of matter to the so-called scientific invalidity of God? Why do we hasten to express our disdain, disgust, and antipathy at life in terms of the divine? Is it a complex historical human psycho-dependence on the very things we have attempted to leave behind in our attempt to discover the infinite, a pseudo-Freudian spiritual wet dream that conjures distant memories of a past time where wonder hadn’t been replaced by reason? Perhaps it is reflexive, like muscle action in anticipation of a blow. Natural. Instinctive. Life affirming.
There is something divine here. Something that sits in the spaces between the elementary particles. Not empty space, not a vaccuum of reality. But something not quite of this world, either. The infinite surrounds the finite, and our very being is infused with it.
And Science can’t explain a bit of it.