Contents
- The Nihilist Search for Truth
- The Limits of Sight
- Damnable Gravity
- The Theory of Mathematical Guesses
- The Endless Pursuit of the Unprovable
- What Does This Say About Reality?
- Resources
The Nihilist Search for Truth
Humans come up with stories to describe the world.
Some are true, some are wrong, and some (like string theory) seem to exist in a realm of perpetual speculation.
Science defined as an evolving set of narratives, rather than a pursuit of absolute truth, suggests the heart of the problem.
Modern Science does not believe in Truth.
“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head.”
G.K. Chesterton
Modern Science has swapped wonder for abstraction, choosing convoluted math over concrete reality.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The Limits of Sight
Seeing something requires interacting with it. That’s the nature of the materialist world.
At the quantum level, observation itself changes the thing observed. This is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, often demonstrated with the wave/particle duality double-slit experiment.
But the leap from this limitation to a purely mathematical description of reality is where things get murky.
Next thing you know, it’s turtles all the way down.
Damnable Gravity
The real problem is gravity.
Unlike the other fundamental forces, gravity isn’t mediated by particles but by the very fabric of space-time. This has frustrated physicists for decades, leading them to increasingly complex workarounds like string theory.
But instead of considering that they might be missing something fundamental, many scientists double down on ever-more-abstract models, as if reality will eventually conform to their equations rather than the other way around.
This is reminiscent of the ancient Gnostics, who believed salvation came through secret knowledge—complex theories only the enlightened could grasp.
We have no reason to believe truth isn’t both knowable and accessible.
If a theory of everything is so complicated and abstract that no one can test it or prove it, what utility does it provide?
The Theory of Mathematical Guesses
String theory treats elementary particles not as points but as vibrating strings, supposedly reconciling gravity with quantum mechanics.
The catch?
It requires ten dimensions—six more than we actually experience. Scientists have tried various tricks to “hide” these extra dimensions, but so far, nothing works.
This feels suspiciously like theological speculation.
String theorists essentially ask us to have faith in an untestable mathematical model. But faith must be grounded in reality.
The Incarnation, for example, is a mystery, but it’s not speculation—it happened in history, in flesh and blood.
If your theory requires six invisible dimensions and no experimental proof, maybe it’s time to rethink your premises.
The Endless Pursuit of the Unprovable
No prediction of string theory has been proven in an experiment.
Yet many physicists defend it as “useful” and “promising.”
“Relativism, which considers all opinions equally valid, is the greatest problem of our time.”
Pope Benedict XVI
To hell with falsifiable hypotheses, give us metaphysical speculation dressed up in equations.
If a theory doesn’t predict anything concrete, it’s not science—it’s Godless theology, a term nearly synonymous now with Modern Science.
I suspect someday they will come to the answer, ’42,’ and still have no way of asking the right question.
What Does This Say About Reality?
The video suggests, “we don’t yet know what the true nature of reality is, but we’ll keep coming up with stories to try and find out.”
That’s fine, as long as we remember that not all stories are equal.
Some stories lead to deeper understanding, while others are just convoluted distractions.
A more sophisticated view of the universe is neither anti-science nor blindly speculative—it embraces reason and faith, reality and mystery. As St. Augustine put it, “All truth is God’s truth.”
So, if a theory of everything doesn’t bring us closer to understanding reality in a tangible way, maybe it’s not a very useful story after all.