"God Particle" Discovery Ignites Debate Over Science And Religion

[rodheadlee]

http://www.washingto...aWiW_story.html

" The cosmological implications are hotly debated. Can God fit in a scientific story of creation?

The answer is “no” for Lawrence M. Krauss, an Arizona State University theoretical physicist. He argued in Newsweek that the Higgs boson discovery “posits a new story of our creation” independent of religious belief.

“Humans, with their remarkable tools and their remarkable brains, may have just taken a giant step toward replacing metaphysical speculation with empirically verifiable knowledge,” he wrote.

With enough data, physics would make God obsolete, he said. “If we can describe the laws of nature back to the beginning of time without any supernatural shenanigans, it becomes clear that you don’t need God.”

I don't see how Krauss makes the connection that because matter is discovered we don't need God.

[thesometimesaint]

I don't see the connection either. How never answers the question of why.

[Stargazer]

If I hear one more mention of the so-called "God Particle" I will scream bloody murder.

Just because they paid billions and billions of dollars (and where is Carl Sagan when you really need him?) finding the Higg's boson, and suddenly the World gets excited and starts hyperventilating. The only thing that verifying the Higg's does is to validate the "Standard Model". It changes very little, except that now instead of theorizing that such a particle exists, now they can say "Winning!"

From the Wikipedia article on the Higg's: "In mainstream media it is very often referred to as "the God particle", after the title of Leon Lederman's book on the topic (1993). Although the proposed particle is both important and elusive, the epithet is strongly disliked by physicists, who regard it as misleading exaggeration"

There may be new physics coming out of this, and THAT may be exciting, but the Higg's boson, in and of itself, is merely a stepping stone. A freaking important stepping stone, to be sure, but the world has not been turned upside down.

Discovery of the Higg's is on a par with the discovery of the CBR (Cosmic Background Radiation), in my humble opinion -- it's not evidence for or against God.