The headline in a weekly news magazine announced, "Scientists Capture An Elusive Beast." But it was no mysterious fabled creature from Loch Ness or from the snow-capped Himalayas. To physicists it was even more exciting. After years of research and experimentation a new discovery had just been made in the realm of particle physics.
The "beast" was a boson—a subatomic particle supposedly responsible for transmitting one of the basic forces that physicists believe govern our universe. "From the scent of a flower to the blaze of a star," the news report claimed, "everything in nature is governed by four fundamental forces." Newsweek, January 31, 1983, p. 76. The magazine then proceeded to describe these so-called material forces and to analyze the theoretical role of the newly discovered particle.
Students of Christian Science, however, seeking to understand the nature of divine Truth, bring a different kind of analysis to the questions of how the universe operates and what governs its action. First, they approach these questions from a radically new consideration of reality—reality that is wholly spiritual in origin and design. (One of the subjects of the weekly Bible Lessons in the Christian Science Quarterly asks specifically, "Is the Universe, Including Man, Evolved by Atomic Force?" And the answer in Christian metaphysics is, if "atomic force" is defined in terms of matter, no.)
