The forthcoming announcement from scientists at the Large Hadron Collider regarding the existence of the so-called God particle or Higgs boson made me think. Not that I understand quantum stuff, but supposedly the existence of the Higgs is predicted by the Standard Model of sub-atomic physics.
Are scientists the only ones who make such forecasts? I wonder if process theologians have ever made an experimental prediction, based on their cosmology?
It seems to me that process thinkers might have predicted, for instance, that consciousness and subjectivity are much more widespread in the animal world than most scientists believed in the early and mid 20th century, when behaviorism and crude stimulus-response models of learning obtained among most researchers.
I recently read Brian Greene’s book about The Hidden Reality and multiple universes, describing an infinite number of worlds—where basically everything that can happen does happen, and not only that but happens over and over again. This kind of surmise, for example, strikes me as being at odds with a process view of reality, where each of the momentary events that constitute the world includes an element that’s creative and unrepeatable.
I haven’t really thought this through. But I’d welcome your reflections. Could theology ever pose testable hypotheses that could be supported or disproven by experimental observations? Or is that not the business of theologians?
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