The Elegant Universe

"Eleven dimensions, parallel universes, and a world made of strings. It's not science fiction. It's string theory." Probably the most significant thing about string theory is that it hammers the last nail in the coffin of methodological naturalism. It essentially says that matter is energy, that vibrating strings are the smallest bits of existence and are almost infinitely malleable, and make up the entire universe. And this is all within nature, though it may be outside of common experience. "Nature" no longer refers to what we sense directly. String theory predicts 11 dimensions, 7 of which exist in the subatomic realm, outside our common experience. It says that our universe may not be the only one. More than that, our universe may be inside a super-dimensional space wherein reside many universes. Where is the boundary between this kind of thinking and belief in a "spiritual world" outside our common experience? If a person could have power over the fundamental forces of nature - gravity, electro-magnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear force - doing amazing things would not be difficult. The loaves and fishes thing would be a piece of cake. Even rising from the dead would be possible, because what is death but a different form of this universal matter/energy matrix? Miracles can happen, within the bounds of natural phenomena! Einstein could not conceive of a way that the fundamental forces of nature could be related - but string theory does, briding the gap between quantum theory and subatomic particle theory. If God can do all things, we may have a better idea of just how this is possible. The difference is that He has power over nature at the subatomic level, and we do not.