Higgs Particle: Not more relevant than God

The recent verification (to within a whisker) of Peter Higgs's prediction made in the teeth of weighty skepticism is rightly celebrated as the inspiring stuff of which great science is made – the payoff for the intellectual commitment and scientific prowess of a dedicated international team of specialists working for many years.

The Higgs boson has been dubbed the "god particle" much to the dismay of many physicists, including Peter Higgs and Lawrence Krauss. Yet the latter, perhaps unintentionally, gives a new twist to the "god particle" epithet in his Newsweek article: "Humans, with their remarkable tools and their remarkable brains, may have just taken a giant step towards replacing metaphysical speculation with empirically verifiable knowledge. The Higgs particle is now arguably more relevant than God." Krauss has not taken that giant step himself, since his statement, far from being a statement of science, is another metaphysical speculation – a mixture of hubris and an inadequate concept of God.

What does Krauss mean by "more relevant than God?" Relevant to what? Clearly the Higgs particle is more relevant than God to the question of how the universe works. But not to the question why there is a universe in which particle physics can be done. The internal combustion engine is arguably more relevant than Henry Ford to the question of how a car works, but not for why it exists in the first place. Confusing mechanism and/or law on the one hand and agency on the other, as Krauss does here, is a category mistake easily made by ignoring metaphysics.

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seektruth

And the discovery of the particle itself DOES NOT explain how the particle works and how it got there in the first place.
"Professing to be wise, they became fools…"
Evermyrtle

More relevant that GOD???? How is that possible?? If ti is there GODmade it.
Brista

All I have to say is what is Krauss thinking the Higgs particle more than the ONE who made it in the first place? GOD will have something to say about this when HE sees Krauss at judgment time.
aceituna

We need to keep our priorities straight. God is to be worshiped as He is above everything and is our creator. Once we put something such as the 'Higgs bosum' above God we are breaking the 1st commandment. In actuality we are worshiping ourselves claiming to be as smart or smarter than God by thinking we can find a 'god particle'.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/ keyboardshark

A particle is still 'something'. And you cannot get 'something' from nothing. There had to be a Creator to get the 'something'. I know this is highly technical language, and I apologize if this is over everyone's head.
Mary Wood

Can't help but call on the 21st century master scientist on this one, to put things in perspective:

"The Silly Theory: From the day 100 years ago that he breathed life into quantum theory by deducing that light behaved like a particle as well as like a wave, Einstein never stopped warning that it was dangerous to the age-old dream of an orderly universe. If light was a particle, how did it know which way to go when it was issued from an atom? "The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it seems," Einstein once wrote to friend .The full extent of its silliness came in the 1920's when quantum theory became quantum mechanics. In this new view of the world, as encapsulated in a famous equation by the Austrian Erwin Schrödinger, objects are represented by waves that extend throughout space, containing all the possible outcomes of an observation – here, there, up or down, dead or alive. The amplitude of this wave is a measure of the probability that the object will actually be found to be in one state or another, a suggestion that led Einstein to grumble famously that "God doesn't throw dice."

accessed 082212 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/science/27eins.html?pagewanted=all
Count on the fact these scientists used quantum theory to predict the "God particle." This is not the true story yet. For the true story, we will need the ToE.
ounbbl

That's a game scientists love to play. With Higgs coming on the scene, what difference does it make at all, other than talks and re-writing textbooks in self-promoting and self-celebrating ado? When the first Russian cosmonaut claimed he could not see God out there, he was looking in a wrong direction to see God. As long as we are looking out for ourselves, we will never 'see' God, but what we see (= our SELF) is what we get ( = 'our self-serving god'). Would a Higgs that pops out make some hiccups in the spiral of the world (= humanity) going down hill to abyss?