Welcome to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. In this program, we want to encourage you in your Christian faith by showing how scientific evidence supports the Bible, particularly the Genesis account. The book of Genesis lays the foundation for all matters addressed in the rest of the Bible. The nature of God, His sovereignty in creation, man's purpose, sin, marriage, family, and why we need a Savior are all introduced and explained in Genesis. When we see that the first and most foundational book of the Bible can be trusted in all matters, including science, it builds confidence in the rest of the inspired word all the way to Revelation.
On today's show, we'll hear from Dr. Jake Hebert, physicist and research associate with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Hebert. On July 4th, 2012, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced the likely detection of what is called the Higgs boson, which has been nicknamed by some the God particle.
And this particle was the last remaining elementary particle to be predicted by what is called the standard model of particle physics.
Now, some were quick to claim that the discovery of this particle was a blow to the Christian faith. There was one Cambridge University professor who said this was another nail in the coffin of religion. And there was a well known theoretical physicist and popularizer of science who implied if he didn't outright state, That the Higgs boson was the particle that caused the Big Bang. But where does the reality end and the height begin?
Well, in order to get a feel for this subject, we have to cover some very basic background material. Generally speaking, you can classify particles into two categories based on the quantum mechanical rules they obey. One group is called fermions, and the second is called bosons. And the Higg particle, the Higgs particle is called a boson because it falls into the second group.
Well, what is a particle anyway?
Well, there's a branch of physics called particle physics. And in this view, in this field of physics, you see it's really the fields that are fundamental. There are these quantities called fields. And if you've had a high school physics or college class, you may remember that when you studied electricity and magnetism, that the idea of an electric field was represented by drawings with lines, and the lines had little arrows on them. And so the directions of the arrows indicated the direction of the electric field at that location and how close.
Together, the lines were at a given location tells you the relative size or strength of the field at that location.
Well, the electric field is one kind of field, but the field associated with the Higgs boson is another kind, what they call a scalar field. And the Higgs boson, roughly speaking, is a ripple. In this quantity called the Higgs field.
Now, of course, this was all of great interest to theoretical physicists, but what about the claims that this discovery is a blow to religion or that it somehow proves the Big Bang?
Well, these are simply outrageous exaggerations, and I'd like to explain why.
Now, however, first, I will candidly admit I'm not a particle physicist. Yes, I am a physicist, but this particular branch of physics isn't my specialty.
So in a sense, when I was studying this issue, I was something of a layman myself. And also, I didn't really think they were going to find the Higgs boson. When I was in grad school, they were still looking for it. And I was working in a completely different branch of physics. And I was basically kind of biased against the Higgs particle and the standard model because of that nickname, the God particle.
As far as I'm concerned, it's sacrilegious and blasphemous. And so I had a bias against it. And of course, you can see why, right? With a nickname like that, surely the Higgs boson and the Standard Model had to be inherently atheistic, right?
Well, it turns out that wasn't really the case. In fact, one of the leading researchers looking for the Higgs boson said he can't stand that nickname. He says that even Even though he's not particularly religious himself, he felt that name was an inappropriate slap in the face to religious believers. And even physicist Peter Higgs, for whom the particle was named, feels basically the same way, even though he's a professing atheist.
So when this announcement was made, I began diligently searching for and reading articles that explained what those who were experts in this field thought about the Higgs boson. And it very quickly became obvious that these hyped claims were unsubstantiated. And I want to encourage you, as lay people out there who are listening to this radio broadcast, you can do the same thing. You too can learn to find problems in evolutionary arguments. Most of the problems in evolutionary claims are not in the mathematical details, although that's sometimes the case, but rather they're usually basic logical fallacies that you can learn to spot with a little practice.
So, why were they claiming that the Higgs boson was a death blow to religion?
Well, really, I'm not sure. There doesn't seem to be any real basis for it, and it seems like the people who were making those claims were basically shooting from the hip. But there was another claim made at the time that the Higgs boson was the cause of the Big Bang itself.
Now, that is another matter. Obviously, we at ICR reject the Big Bang because it's patently unbiblical, not to mention that it's got lots of scientific problems. But if they were claiming that they had discovered the cause of the Big Bang or found evidence for the cause of the Big Bang, then that's another matter entirely. And that really would seem to be a challenge to a straightforward reading of scripture and to the Christian faith.
So where did this idea come from that the Higgs boson was the cause of the Big Bang?
Well, it came from theoretical physicist and science popularizer Mikio Keiku. You've probably seen him on TV. He's the Japanese-American physicist who has the sort of long white hair.
Well, the day after the announcement of the Higgs boson discovery, he wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled, The Spark That Caused the Big Bang.
Now, let's say you saw that headline on July 5th, 2012, the day after the discovery was announced. What are you going to think?
Well, of course, you're going to think that the Higgs boson is what caused the Big Bang. And that's what Keiko seemed to be saying.
Now, if you read the fine print, which most people don't, unfortunately, he does acknowledge that the Big Bang was supposedly caused by a particle, or really more precisely, by a field like the Higgs field. But that was no doubt lost on most people. And we're going to talk a little bit more about this in the next section. Let's take a short break. Stay with us.
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Yeah. Welcome back to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Hebert. Well here we are talking about the Higgs boson and the impression that a lot of people had that the Higgs boson was the cause of the Big Bang or that somehow this discovery of the Higgs boson was support for the Big Bang.
Well, as we said in the first segment, this idea came about largely because theoretical physicist and science popularizer, Michio Keiku, wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled The Spark That Caused the Big Bang. And basically, he seemed to be saying in that article that the Higgs boson is what caused the Big Bang. Again, if you read the fine print, which most people don't, he sort of hedges on that. He admits that it's really something like the Higgs field that is supposed to cause the Big Bang, but most people didn't pick up on that. And he did something very similar in a CNN interview with Ashley Banfield.
And in the interview, Ms. Banfield says to Keiku that the discovery of the Higgs boson could be the start of a very big conversation and that it could somehow disprove religion.
Well, Keiku did nothing to dispel this erroneous notion. He agrees with her, and he goes on this long-winded speech about the Higgs boson that basically goes all over the place. He has snippets of inflation theory, which is part of the Big Bang model thrown in there, even though he doesn't call it that. He starts talking about parallel universes, and he even talks about Elvis Presley still being alive in a parallel universe somewhere.
So he goes all over the place in this little interview. By the way, you can watch this on YouTube. It's still on the internet. And from that interview, he gave a whole lot of people the impression that the Higgs boson, which had just been discovered, was the cause of the Big Bang.
Well, there's just one small problem with this. Nobody believes that the Higgs boson is a very good person. Caused the Big Bang. Even the Big Bang advocates themselves don't believe that.
Now, they may have believed that in the past, but they certainly don't believe that today.
Now, they do believe, many of them, that the Big Bang was caused by. A field similar to the Higgs field that they call the inflaton, but they've ruled out the Higgs field as being the cause because it doesn't have the right properties. In fact, the field that they think caused the Big Bang hasn't even been shown to exist.
So even militant Big Bang advocates have acknowledged this. Lawrence Krauss, he's a very militant anti-theist. He's a Big Bang proponent. Even he has acknowledged that the discovery of the Higgs particle does not explain why the alleged Big Bang would have happened. And Keiku was brutally criticized by other physicists for his misleading statements.
There's a particle physicist named Matt Strossler who has a blog of his called Of Particular Significance. He's a particle physicist. His blog is Particular Significance. Get it?
Okay, but on his blog, he wrote this anguished article entitled, Why, Professor Keiku, Why? And he basically castigated Keiku for what he described as spectacular distortions. And so the bottom line is, despite some of the hype you may have heard, the Higgs boson doesn't prove the Big Bang.
Now, there is a subtle tangential connection between the Big Bang model and the Higgs boson, but even a secular media outlet acknowledged. There's no direct evidence for this hypothetical connection.
So, yes, the discovery of the Higgs boson is a great triumph for particle physics, but the claim that it's a nail in the coffin of Christianity is unsubstantiated hype.
Now, of course, there's a lot more we could say about this. We have an article online at icr.org entitled The Higgs Boson and the Big Bang that you can freely read if you'd like to read more about this. And we have also a number of great resources to help you to learn to think critically and to spot problems and arguments made by uniformitarian and evolutionary scientists. And with practice, you can do this. And again, most of these problems with these claims are not within the details of the mathematics themselves, although sometimes that's the case.
Some of my research right now deals with that. Although, when you really get down to it, the mistakes I'm seeing, even though they're mathematical, ultimately they're logical mistakes anyway. The real problem that they make is that these evolutionary arguments are riddled. With unspoken assumptions and logical fallacies. And just remember that we should give glory to the God who really did create everything as we are told in Genesis and not to a so-called God particle.
Thank you for joining us on Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. That's all the time we have for our program today, but we would love to connect with you through our website at icr.org. For over 45 years, ICR has equipped believers with evidence of the Bible's accuracy and authority by showing how science supports the Genesis creation account. Our scientists research the evidence for creation and communicate their findings through books, articles, DVD series, and conferences. Please visit our website at icr.org for more information about the latest scientific discoveries, to subscribe to our free magazine and devotional, and to locate our next creation conference at a venue near you.
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