Angels in the Economist

There's something quite apocalyptic about the fact that the Economist just printed a three-page article on angels. I found it an odd and interesting read. The article makes no mention of the financial crisis, which surprised me -- I think an article like this one can be written because of today's economy, and a sort of cultural longing for rescue. But the Economist's purported reason for the article? Modern science has a few explanations for angels, and in fact, it can even make the idea of angels more acceptable. One of the most interesting points:

Oddly enough, modern science—so antithetical to angels—has made the world a more receptive place for them. In the age of the internet, scientific and technical language evokes angels all the time. Invisible networks and the world wide web are their natural and eternal business; from Ancient Greece onwards they have had instant access, global reach and universal applications. (Their very name, from the Hebrew, means “one going”, continuous action.) As Aquinas put it in his “Summa Theologia”, “The angel is now here, now there, with no time-interval between…angels exist anywhere their powers are applied.” Indeed, as fast as bytes flash, angels will always go faster. It is sheer speed that makes them invisible.

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The knowledge universe is therefore the ideal home of angels, and their natural place. Anyone who supposes that the potential of the human mind is scarcely yet tapped or appreciated, and that its operations may extend to levels far subtler and higher than the senses can grasp, is leaving space for an angelic realm. And where there are still gaps in the grand unified theory of the universe that scientists dream of, angels fill them, agents of motion and illumination otherwise unexplained.

No doubt, in the future, these agents will acquire some sub-sub atomic label; just as, presumably, whole classes of angels have been replaced by photons and quarks. In some mystical quarters, the vibrating strings that are now posited to make up the created universe are happily compared to angels’ harps or the motion of their wings. And the web of unseen, unknown material that scientists call dark matter, holding everything together, might as well have been spun by the angels until the Large Hadron Collider proves otherwise.