At any rate, I think that the fundamental religious unit is the couple, not the individual. Individual man alone with his God, is either too abject or too ruthless to do much except destroy. You only have to remember the Old Testament prophets. It is when this solitude is softened by relationships with others, that a man’s skill becomes constructive in the everyday world. There is a certain parallel with chemistry, where the fundamental particle in practice is the molecule, not the atom. Except for the inert gasses, you never get atoms in practice; you get ions in solution, but not atoms. So far as I am aware, isolated atoms do not exist in Nature; and until you have grasped how molecules are formed into crystals, rock, and organic compounds, you are not going to understand much about structure. So with people; a group of isolated individuals chanting slogans is not a Church; it is a mob. Only when they are linked by a web of personal relationships, can you hope to build them into a Church which believes in something, and stands for something. Only if you view the basic human unit as the couple, which depends on trust, are you going to understand the structure of Society, the conditions necessary for its growth, and the evils which will destroy it. Neither astronomy nor nuclear physics is going to contribute much to this knowledge.
Indeed I think science has already performed its supreme contribution to modern life; namely it has given us back a cosmic view of creation, which we have not had in Europe since the Middle Ages. The rest is house-keeping, even though it might seem condescending to the enthusiastic seekers after a theory of all things, to say so.
Actually to call it a “theory of all things” that they are pursuing is most misleading. It would be like claiming that an understanding of the majesty of St. Paul’s cathedral could be obtained by studying the composition of Portland stone, as compared with the sandstone with which cathedrals were usually built, and the ability of calcite to twin and glide which allows mortar to be ever so slightly mobile, which avoids the building cracking every time a bus passes. Whereas most people would say that you should study the architecture, to appreciate how the simplicity of the design shines through the complexity of the building; then you might enquire into the remarkable engineering necessary to construct the building at all. Lastly, you might look at the foundations, to discover how deep they were. To study particle physics is to study the foundations of creation; and it does look as if even the foundations are so incredibly complicated that no-one is going to get to the bottom even of them. It ignores completely the complexity of life, and forgets that Complexity changes the Rules. It was Teilhard de Chardin who first taught me of the complexity of living creatures. For example, he did an amusing calculation that the number of nerve connections in a human brain was roughly equal to the diameter of the known universe in centimetres, and that is 15 billion light-years across.