Finding The God Particle

Why I wrote a romantic comedy about science and religion

If you’re a sitcom writer like me, the first question people usually ask is ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ John Cleese had an answer for this:

I get them from a Mr. Ken Levingshore who lives in Swindon. He sends them to me every Monday morning on a postcard. I once asked Ken where he gets his ideas from, and he gets them from a lady called Mildred Spong who lives on the Isle of Wight. He once asked Mildred where she gets her ideas from and she refused to say. So the point is, we don’t know. This is terribly important. We don’t know where we get our ideas from. 

If you’re a quantum physicist or one of the scientists who works at some kind of Hadron Collider, you are going to be asked about ‘the God Particle’. It goes with the job.

In this article, I explain how I, a sitcom writer, ended up writing a play about science and religion called The God Particle that you can now watch online, and why I thought Professor Alice Robert’s Easter Tweet was quite funny.

I’ve always been interested in quantum physics. My brain was primed by Johnny Ball back in the 80s, and then I latched onto an episode of Channel 4’s Equinox which did a good job of explaining how space-time worked using a squidgy table and some hard balls. It all made sense at the time. Or space-time.

My understanding is that the Standard Model was a good theory but couldn’t quite explain why some particles are very heavy while others have no mass at all. Brout, Englert and Higgs proposed an invisible “Higgs field”, which related to the Higgs boson particle. Finding evidence of this particle would, in sub-editorial journalese, explain how God put the universe together.

Explaining God Away

Sceptics of religion would frame this scientific quest differently. They would say that the Standard Model gives us a workable ‘Theory of Everything’, and finding the Grand Unified Theory is just a matter of time, which is all relative anyway. So now we’ve found the Higgs Boson, aka The God Particle, we no longer need God to explain anything. Thanks God. You are no longer needed. Please shut the door on your way out. No need to get your hand stamped. You’re not coming back in.

Scientists tend not to speak in such hyperbolic or definitive terms, much as the media would like them to, not least because much of this debate is not scientific but philosophical. But there are still a few high-profile scientists who are more than happy to career out of their lane and get onto the slip road taking them off into the land of Theology.

Professor Alice Roberts did just that over the Easter weekend, ruffling a few feathers on Twitter with an oddly punctuated post on Good Friday which read:

Just a little reminder today. Dead people - don’t come back to life.

@thealiceroberts 02/04/2021 at 18:32

Some said this was a thoughtless tweet. But that’s one thing you can’t say. It was a tweet clearly timed to cause offence. And I have no problem with that. Jesus deliberately caused offence. So in a sense, Professor Alice Roberts is being Christian, as in being like our Lord and Risen Saviour Jesus Christ. I put it like that knowing it would offend or irritate her. (Not that she’ll care two hoots about this article.)

Her tweet was also supposed to be funny. I would defend the tweet on those grounds too. It was quite funny. While Christians all over the world are remembering the death of God Incarnate, this short little tweet is saying ‘dead people - don’t come back to life’ as if ‘duh’. That’s funny. That this is being pointed out by a Professor from the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham makes it even funnier. It’s still not a brilliant joke, but it has an understated charm about it.

The tweeter being a Professor of Public Engagement in Science makes it funnier still. Pointing out that people don’t rise from the dead almost seems beneath someone who is trying to explain science to the general public. The public already know that. Including the Christians – and we’ll come onto that shortly.

Reacting to Roberts

Plenty of people liked the tweet, which was shared over a thousand times and liked by ten times that number. Naturally, plenty of others clutched their pearls, tutted or rolled their eyes, accusing Professor Roberts of being mean. And on Good Friday of all days. But that’s the joke. Being mean about the resurrection of Jesus on Good Friday is what makes the joke funny (to some). That joke can only really be made at Easter, or else it loses its comic juxtaposition and timing.

What Did Jesus Do? (Apart from rise from the dead)

What is a Christian response? What would Jesus do? Make a joke back. That’s not just what he would do. It’s what he did. As I argue in The Sacred Art of Joking, if we read the New Testament we see Jesus constantly being challenged, and joked about. He gave considerably better than he got. (see Gospels passim)

I rather enjoyed a response from Canon Stephen Jones who wrote:

Just a little reminder today...modern history shows us what a quaint delusion it is to place our faith in humanity.

This is not particularly funny, but broadly true. I enjoyed the use of the phrase ‘quaint delusion’.

Comedian Milton Jones responded:

…yet the 'scam' continues to go miraculously well...

Here’s what I tweeted in response:

So dead people don’t come back to life. But all life on earth, all the amino acids and proteins, forming complex DNA and human consciousness came from... no life. Sure.

I was keen to point out that Christians are mocked for believing a man rose from death, and yet we are constantly invited to believe that life came from nothing. We don’t know how to create life, and we can’t do it. We can only procreate. Bill Bryson engagingly explains the problem in his delightful A Really Short History of Nearly Everything.

The problem is proteins…. By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn’t exist …To make collagen, you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right sequence. But—and here’s an obvious but crucial point—you don’t make it. It makes itself, spontaneously, without direction, and this is where the unlikelihoods come in. The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil. It just isn’t going to happen. To grasp what a long shot its existence is, visualize a standard Las Vegas slot machine but broadened greatly—to about 27 metres, to be precise—to accommodate 1,055 spinning wheels instead of the usual three or four, and with twenty symbols on each wheel (one for each common amino acid). How long would you have to pull the handle before all 1,055 symbols came up in the right order? Effectively, for ever.

Dead people don’t come back to life? Living people shouldn’t even exist, let alone have any kind of shared consciousness, empathy or sense of purpose.

Edit following comment: Bryson, not a Christian believer, then goes on to argue that the age of the earth and new discoveries essentially solve this conundrum of high improbability. For me, billions of years don’t solve the problem of irreducible complexity, but that’s one for another time.

What I Should Have Said

Here’s the other thing I wanted to say in response to the tweet that dead people don’t back to life:

“I KNOW. How could you think I don’t know that dead people don’t come back from the dead? And this has been a prevailing reality for all of human history. We die. Yeah. We get it. We spend a lot of time and energy trying to avoid death. But Jesus rose again. And then, even more amazingly, ascended into heaven without wings, strings or a jetpack. There were witnesses. At least eleven more than witnessed the creation of life or the Big Bang (now largely discredited, anyway).”

But that’s more than 240 characters so I thought I’d write it here instead.

Christian are easily embarrassed. There are many influential, persuasive, or aggressive voices who do a terrific job of making Christians feel ashamed for believing what the Bible says, and what is believed by billions of people today and down the ages (which, granted, doesn’t make it true). I don’t blame the atheists for having a go. But let’s have a go back, shall we?

Back the The God Particle

That’s why I wrote The God Particle. I wanted to write a play about science and religion that showed what a debate could look like. But I didn’t know how to do that. I only know how to write sitcoms. So I wrote a romantic comedy about science and religion.

Very early on, I had this idea of a vicar and a quantum physicist handcuffed together, stuck with each other and forced to get along and figure it out. That’s how Gilbert and Bex end up in the play. Literally trapped and cuffed. How did they get there? And how do they escape?

I toured the show around the UK several times, and Christian audiences found it very refreshing, not least because Gilbert and Bex have a proper conversation. It’s very different from how religious debates are normally portrayed in the mainstream media and TV dramas – where the Christians always loses, having somehow never had their faith questioned before. In the play, this exchange normally gets quite a good response from the audience:

Gilbert: Well, I’m an Anglican. Not a Catholic.

Bex: Is there a big difference?

Gilbert: Depends what you call a difference.

Bex: Oh. Well. All Roads Lead to Rome.

Gilbert: What an unfortunate choice of phrase.

Bex: How do you mean?

Gilbert: A lot of people died because they felt all roads do not lead to Rome.

That some roads lead away from Rome.

Bex: Well, that figures. That’s what religion gave us. The deaths of millions

of innocent people.

Gilbert: And quantum physics gave us the atom bomb. Probably makes us even?

That’s the kind of conversation I want to have on Twitter and in the public square: a Chestertonian one. And that’s why I called the vicar Gilbert, even though he gives a different reason for the name in the play. But then you’ll have to find that out by watching it.

Get The God Particle

You can buy access to The God Particle for you and your household – and another household. OR you can buy a ten-household pass, send round the link to your housegroup, bookgroup or circle of friends, watch it, and have a chat about it afterwards. There are even some discussion questions if you find that sort of thing helpful.

By paying for it, you’re also supporting my next endeavour in this area which is a one-man show that I’ll be doing about the miracles of Jesus. Although, wait. Maybe I should check with a Professor of Public Engagement in Science to find out if it’s possible to turn water into wine.

Here’s a trailer: