If you haven’t heard of the Large Hadron Collider, you’re probably… normal. Think of it like those electronic race cars sets, and you’re the kid that always put two cars going in opposite directions to see them smash each other up. Instead of flying race cars around the track, the LHC shoots protons and neutrons at each other to blow them up and see what happens. It’s probably the geekiest, biggest, most expensive man-toy ever created, and this week thousands of adult geeks gathered around their giant toy and said: “Ha! That has the potential to maybe be something like what we think might exist if all our theories are remotely close to being possible.” That’s geeky lingo for: “We gotta run more tests.”
Quick summary: why does matter exist? If you don’t believe in God, then you have to ask why everything isn’t simply nothing instead. If there is matter, how does it get generated? One analogy often used is photographers around a celebrity:
Imagine you’re at a Hollywood party. The crowd is rather thick, and evenly distributed around the room, chatting. When the big star arrives, the people nearest the door gather around her. As she moves through the party, she attracts the people closest to her, and those she moves away from return to their other conversations. By gathering a fawning cluster of people around her, she’s gained momentum, an indication of mass. She’s harder to slow down than she would be without the crowd. Once she’s stopped, it’s harder to get her going again.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/cern/ideas/higgs.html
That’s what they’re looking for (by blowing up protons and neutrons… I know, geeks to the core). The Higgs particle is often called the “God Particle”, pun totally intended. This is science saying clearly: there’s no need for an omnipotent God who “creates” and we’ll prove it, we can quantify everything.
Read the article. Do you think if all their wildest dreams come true that God becomes irrelevant?
Then ask yourself: What does this have to do with Church and State? Short answer: everything. Science and religion always “collide” over empirical evidence versus supernatural explanations. This is science’s trump-card. If they can authoritatively say: “Look, there never has and never will be a god, because look ‘wablamo’ Higgsy’s got it all right there,” then the whole prayer in schools thing, creationism, etc… stick a fork in it.
So: Does a verifiable Higgs particle make God irrelevant, or prove God’s non-existence? Would that fix them religionists for good?
