A recent announcement in the news has generated some extraordinary claims.
Possible sighting of the elusive ‘God particle’ caused one scientist, Michio Kaku, to state on CNN that it ‘takes us to the instant of creation itself’. Notorious atheist Peter Atkins claimed on the BBC that its discovery was ‘another nail in the coffin of religion’. Does this particle really have implications for faith in God? Is there reason for a Christian to be unsettled?
Explaining mass
The particle is properly called a ‘Higgs boson’. Its existence was predicted in 1964 by Professor Peter Higgs at Edinburgh University. Scientists assumed it must exist because it explained why matter has ‘mass’. It is a bit like the way we predict the existence of all sorts of everyday things we cannot see. When a letter lands on the doormat we assume the existence of a sender even if we do not know who they are. There are many phenomena in the universe that lead scientists to predict the existence of other things we cannot yet observe. We will hear more and more about ‘Dark Matter’ in the years to come.
