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How the “Higgs boson” stoked the debate over the existence of a creator God

Peter Higgs, the 2013 Nobel laureate in physics who predicted the existence of a fundamental building block of a matter often called the “God particle”, has died at age 94.

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While the scientific community was elated when CERN officially affirmed Higgs’ theory back in 2012, many conservative Christians — particularly in the United States, where creationist theories remain relatively influential — were infuriated. They feared that this new discovery – seeming to prove the “Big Bang” theory – would be invoked to refute the existence of a creator God.

“The Higgs boson is a nail in the coffin of religion,” asserted Oxford researcher Peter Atkins during a July 2012 interview with the BBC. Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, believed that this particle “sets forth a new story of our creation” independent of a supernatural creator.

The “God particle”

In efforts to popularize this discovery, the “Higgs boson” is often referred to as the “God particle”, mainly because the boson is everywhere, yet is strangely elusive. This nickname is often attributed to the 1998 Nobel laureate in physics, Leon Lederman. He wrote a book in 1993 called The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What Is the Question?The American physicist originally wanted to call it the “Goddamn Particle”, but his editor at Dell Publishing convinced him not to.

Higgs frequently stated his objection to calling the boson the “God particle”. Although he was an atheist, he feared calling it such might offend believers.

At the intersection of religion and science, the debate even reached Rome at the time. Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit astrophysicist and director of the Vatican Observatory, insisted that the term “God particle” was a joke. According to him, it could be alternatively understood as a “gift from God to help explain how reality works in the world of elementary particles”.

“A wrong reason to believe in God”

“This way of filling in our gaps [in knowledge] with God is not only a wrong reason to believe in God, but it is also bad science,” emphasized the Jesuit lay brother, while publicly acknowledging the major scientific discovery.

Other religious figures saw the discovery as a powerful example of God’s creation. When the French Catholic magazine La Vie reported the news in a July 6, 2012 article, it quoted a tweet from Anglican priest Nicky Gumbel: “Let’s honor the scientists who discovered the ‘God particle’ and worship the God who created it and them.”

On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:

Arif Ahmed, Sir David Attenborough, Mark Balaguer, Horace Barlow, Michael Bate, Patricia Churchland, Aaron Ciechanover, Noam Chomsky,Alan Dershowitz, Hubert Dreyfus, Bart Ehrman, Stephan Feuchtwang, David Friend,  Riccardo Giacconi, Ivar Giaever , Roy Glauber, Rebecca Goldstein, David J. Gross,  Brian Greene, Susan Greenfield, Stephen F Gudeman,  Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Theodor W. Hänsch, Brian Harrison,  Hermann Hauser, Roald Hoffmann,  Bruce Hood, Herbert Huppert,  Gareth Stedman Jones, Steve Jones, Shelly Kagan, Michio Kaku,  Stuart Kauffman,  Lawrence Krauss, Harry Kroto, George Lakoff, Elizabeth Loftus,  Alan Macfarlane, Peter Millican, Marvin Minsky, Leonard Mlodinow,  Yujin Nagasawa, Alva Noe, Douglas Osheroff,  Jonathan Parry,  Saul Perlmutter, Herman Philipse,  Carolyn Porco, Robert M. Price, Lisa Randall, Lord Martin Rees,  Oliver Sacks, John Searle, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Schaffer, J. L. Schellenberg,   Lee Silver,  Peter Singer,  Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ronald de Sousa, Victor Stenger, Barry Supple,   Leonard Susskind, Raymond Tallis, Neil deGrasse Tyson,  .Alexander Vilenkin, Sir John Walker, Frank Wilczek, Steven Weinberg, and  Lewis Wolpert,

In  the third video below in the 150th clip in this series are his words and  my response is below them. 

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)

Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)

A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)

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Below are two letters I wrote to Dr. Higgs and in the letter from September 2015 I respond to his quote:

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Enjoy the pictures of an amazing life

Harry Kroto with his father above

Margaret with David and Stephen

leaving Liverpool for Canada 1964

June 11, 2016

Dear Dr. Higgs,

Since I wrote you last  I was very sad on April 30th to  learn of the passing of the great scientist Harry Kroto. Not only was Harry Kroto a Nobel Prize winning chemist but judging from comments of his close friends, Kroto was  an even better man personally.

Tim Logan, chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Florida State: “What always brought out the best in Harry was his wife, Margaret. Margaret and Harry were always together, until the end of Harry’s life. She served as his business manager, scheduling his many speaking engagements around the world, organizing the travel, and supporting him in many, many ways. What I found so remarkable is that even after 57 years together, they were so obviously in love. Harry would include photos and sketches he made of her in his lectures, and he always acknowledged her as his moral compass.” 

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHY I WAS PROMPTED ORIGINALLY TO WRITE YOU? It was because Harry Kroto took the time in 2014 to correspond with me. After I wrote him in  the spring and summer of 2014 he emailed me twice and then sent me a letter in November of 2014. In that letter he referred me to a film series  Renowned Academics talk about God that featured your comments. 

Furthermore, your full interview appears on the VEGA website which Kroto founded, and he was so proud of his videos from the VEGA website that he played some of them  during his speech at  a BEYOND BELIEF CONFERENCE (he actually spoke there in 2006, 2007 and 2008 and all those speeches are on You Tube). I have always been fascinated by brilliant individuals and recently I had the opportunity to come across a very interesting article by Michael Polanyi, LIFE TRANSCENDING PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY, in the magazine CHEMICAL AND ENGINEERING NEWS, August 21, 1967, and I also got hold of a 1968 talk by Francis Schaeffer based on this article. ISN’T IT AMAZING THAT JUST LIKE KROTO’S FAMILY POLANYI HAD TO FLEE EUROPE BECAUSE OF HITLER’S INSANE GRUDGE AGAINST THE JEWS!!!!I know you don’t believe in God or the Devil but if anyone was demon-possessed it had to be Hitler.

Polanyi’s son John actually won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. This article by Michael Polanyi concerns Francis Crick and James Watson and their discovery of DNA in 1953. Polanyi noted:

Mechanisms, whether man-made or morphological, are boundary conditions harnessing the laws of in
animate nature, being themselves irreducible to those laws. The pattern of organic bases in DNA which functions as a genetic code is a boundary condition irreducible to physics and chemistry. Further controlling principles of life may be represented as a hierarchy of boundary conditions extending, in the case of man, to consciousness and responsibility.

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Francis Schaeffer (30 January 1912 – 15 May 1984^[1])  and his wife Edith  (November 3, 1914 – March 30, 2013)

James Watson (1928-) and Francis Crick  (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004)

Michael Polanyi, FRS^[1] (11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976)

John Charles Polanyi,  (born 23 January 1929)

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John Scott Haldane (2 May 1860 – 14/15 March 1936)

J. B. S. Haldane
Haldane in 1914

(5 November 1892 – 1 December 1964)

Maurice Wilkins (15 December 1916 – 5 October 2004)

Erwin Schrödinger (12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961)

Sir Peter Medawar ( 28 February 1915 – 2 October 1987)

Barry Commoner (May 28, 1917 – September 30, 2012)

I am sending you this two CD’s of this talk because I thought you may find it very interesting. It includes references to not only James D. Watson, and Francis Crick but also  Maurice Wilkins, Erwin Schrodinger, J.S. Haldane (his son was the famous J.B.S. Haldane), Peter Medawar, and Barry Commoner.

Thank you for your time. I know how busy you are and I want to thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher,

P.O. Box 23416, Little Rock, AR 72221, United States, cell ph 501-920-5733, everettehatcher@gmail.com

September 21, 2015

Dear Dr. Higgs,

On You Tube I saw this quote from you:

I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past. I certainly know a lot of scientists in my field who are believers and I accept that. I don’t happen to be one myself, but maybe that’s just more a matter of my family background than that there’s any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two.

I like your attitude towards the subject of God. You seemed to keep an open mind.

Recently I had the opportunity to come across a very interesting article by Michael Polanyi,LIFE TRANSCENDING PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY, in the magazine CHEMICAL AND ENGINEERING NEWS, August 21, 1967, and I also got hold of a 1968 talk by Francis Schaeffer based on this article. Polanyi’s son John actually won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. This article by Michael Polanyi concerns Francis Crick and James Watson and their discovery of DNA in 1953. Polanyi noted:

Mechanisms, whether man-made or morphological, are boundary conditions harnessing the laws of in
animate nature, being themselves irreducible to those laws. The pattern of organic bases in DNA which functions as a genetic code is a boundary condition irreducible to physics and chemistry. Further controlling principles of life may be represented as a hierarchy of boundary conditions extending, in the case of man, to consciousness and responsibility.

I would like to send you a CD copy of this talk because I thought you may find it very interesting. It includes references to not only James D. Watson, and Francis Crick but also  Maurice Wilkins, Erwin Schrodinger, J.S. Haldane (his son was the famous J.B.S. Haldane), Peter Medawar, and Barry Commoner. I WONDER IF YOU EVER HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO RUN ACROSS THESE MEN OR ANY OF THEIR FORMER STUDENTS?

Below is a portion of the transcript from the CD and Michael Polanyi’s words are in italics while Francis Schaeffer’s words are not:

My account of the situation will seem to oscillate in several directions, and I shall set out, therefore, its stages in order. 

I shall show that:

1. Commoner’s criteria of irreducibility to physics and chemistry are incomplete; they are necessary but not sufficient conditions of it. 
2. Machines are irreducible to physics and chemistry. 
3. By virtue of the principle of boundary control, mechanistic structures of living beings appear to be likewise irreducible. 

4. The structure of DNA, which according to Watson and Crick controls heredity, is not explicable by physics and chemistry. 

5. Assuming that morphological differentiation reflects the information content of DNA, we can prove that the morphology of living beings forms a boundary condition which, as such, is not explicable by physics and chemistry (the suggestion arrived at in the third item). 

…The relationship between the two controls–the devices of engineering and the laws of natural science--is not symmetrical. The machine is a machine by having been built and being then controlled according to the principles of engineering. The laws of physics and chemistry are indifferent to these principles; they would go on working in the fragments of the machine if it were smashed. But they serve the machine while it lasts; machines rely for their operations always on the laws of physics and chemistry. 

You can think of it for example in an automobile. The man building the automobile must take in account the structural properties he uses. But when the automobile is junk and put into the automobile graveyard and smashed by the giant press into a small piece of metal it is still open to the same analysis and it has the same chemical and physical properties. The mere fact of these same chemical and physical properties existing does not mean we still have the automobile.

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Stephen C. Meyer, Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute;  on October 7, 2008 wrote the article, “A Scientific History and Philosophical Defense of the Theory of Intelligent Design,” and here is a portion of it:

Just as the mathematicians at Wistar were casting doubt on the idea that chance (i.e., ran­dom mutations) could generate genetic information, another leading scientist was raising ques­tions about the role of law-like necessity. In 1967 and 1968, the Hungarian chemist and phi­losopher of science Michael Polanyi published two articles suggesting that the information in

DNA was “irreducible” to the laws of physics and chemistry (Polanyi 1967: 21; Polanyi 1968: 1308-12). In these papers, Polanyi noted that the DNA conveys information in virtue of very specific arrangements of the nucleotide bases (that is, the chemicals that function as alphabetic or digital characters) in the genetic text. Yet, Polanyi also noted the laws of physics and chem­istry allow for a vast number of other possible arrangements of these same chemical constitu­ents. Since chemical laws allow a vast number of possible arrangements of nucleotide bases, Polanyi reasoned that no specific arrangement was dictated or determined by those laws. In­deed, the chemical properties of the nucleotide bases allow them to attach themselves inter­changeably at any site on the (sugar-phosphate) backbone of the DNA molecule. (See Figure 1). Thus, as Polanyi (1968: 1309) noted, “As the arrangement of a printed page is extraneous to the chemistry of the printed page, so is the base sequence in a DNA molecule extraneous to the chemical forces at work in the DNA molecule.” Polanyi argued that it is precisely this chemical indeterminacy that allows DNA to store information and which also shows the irre­ducibility of that information to physical-chemical laws or forces. As he explained:

Suppose that the actual structure of a DNA molecule were due to the fact that the bindings of its bases were much stronger than the bindings would be for any other distribution of bases, then such a DNA molecule would have no information content. Its code-like character would be effaced by an over­whelming redundancy. […] Whatever may be the origin of a DNA configuration, it can function as a code only if its order is not due to the forces of potential energy. It must be as physically indetermi­nate as the sequence of words is on a printed page (Polanyi 1968:1309).

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Thank you for your time. I know how busy you are and I want to thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher,

P.O. Box 23416, Little Rock, AR 72221, United States, cell ph 501-920-5733, everettehatcher@gmail.com

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