Higgs Boson and Religion and Science
Philip Clayton, philosopher and theologian, asks in the Huffington Post Does the Higgs Boson Discovery Resolve the Religion-Science Debate? Colbert’s response is priceless:
The perfect example of this debate was played out in a Colbert interview with Lawrence Krauss recently; it’s worth re-watching in the wake of the Higgs. Krauss, the New Atheist, touts his new book, "A Universe from Nothing." There are three kinds of nothing, he insists, and according to the laws of quantum mechanics, each one left to itself will produce the something that we see around us. "It sounds like the ultimate free lunch," Krauss admits, but there you have it; it’s just science. "The universe is more remarkable than the fairy tales that were talked about by Bronze Age illiterate peasants."
"Why does it have to be an attack on my God?" Colbert asks. "There’s just no evidence for God," replies Krauss, "All I’ve said is that you don’t need Him." Colbert, as always, gets the last word, however. Suppose that something always comes from nothing. "If there is no God, no ‘thing’ called God, if He is nothing," concludes Colbert, then by your own theory "can’t something come from Him?"
When they announced the discovery of physics’ most elusive particle this week, scientists didn’t overreach. They just did damn good science. The fans and the foes of religion, by contrast, are overreaching on both sides. The quest for the Higgs boson, and its ultimate discovery, neither proves nor disproves God.
Yes, do watch the Colbert interview with Lawrence Krauss
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Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
It is ironic how he painted himself into a corner. If one wants to consider “proofs” of God, I recommend Thomas Aquinas.
How come we have a scientist pontificating on theology? Next we’ll have theologians discovering atomic particles! Having had a life-long interest in both disciplines, I’ve come to the conclusion that neither are both as smart as they might imagine. In the 1930′s Kurt Godel proved that in every rigorous system of mathematics, there are propositions that can neither be proved nor disproved, on the basis of the axioms in that system. The most successful attempts at rigorous analysis to date were Russell & Whitehead’s “Principia Mathematica”. A specific example of Godel’s theorem was given by Paul Joseph Cohen in 1966, demonstrating that the “Continuum hypothesis” was independent of the axioms of set theory. .
I suspect that attempts to prove the existence of God are in a similar category, notwithstanding Aquinas, Kant, or anyone else’s attempts, ladudable as they may be. .
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and not rely on your knowledge. In all ways, acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight.” Proverbs 3:5-6.
That is not to say that there are not propositions that can be either proved or disproved.. This gives the lie to post-modernists who claim that there can be no objective knowledge, and that therefore everything is subjective. The point I was striving at, was that very likely the existence of God cannot be rigorously proved as an objective truth. In many cases we have to fall back on likelihoods, and probability, for much of what passes for actual knowledge. Essentially I assert that the existence of God is a matter of an INFORMED Faith.
After all it may not be the bosson of Higgs yet…http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428428/higgs-boson-may-be-an-imposter-say-particle/?ref=rss
Yep. “IT” wasn’t actually found. Years may pass before we know exactly what was found. At the same time it might be relatively quickly that we can rule out Higgy Baby yet still have a bosson on our hands.
“Old Spice means quality said the Captain to the Bosson!”
Oh, forgot to say none of it, no matter what the outcome, has anything to do with Religion or Theology.