LHC Forces Bookmaker To Lower Odds On the Existence of God

A UK bookmaker has lowered the odds on proving that god exists to just 4-1 to coincide with the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider. The chance that physicists might discover the elusive sub-atomic object called the "God particle" has forced the odds lower. Initially the odds that proof would be found of God's existence were 20-1, and they lengthened to 33-1 when the multi-billion pound atom smasher was shut down temporarily because of a magnetic failure. A spokesman for Paddy Power said, "The atheists' planned advertising campaign seems to have renewed the debate in pubs and around office water-coolers as to whether there is a God and we've seen some of that being transferred into bets. However we advise anyone still not sure of God's existence to maybe hedge their bets for now, just in case." He added that confirmation of God's existence would have to be verified by scientists and given by an independent authority before any payouts were made. Everyone getting a payout is encouraged to tithe at least ten percent.

while i'm glad

[circletimessquare]

the LHC has captured the public's imagination, calling the elusive particle in question the "god particle" is obviously just a flowery turn of phrase

unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon your point of view, it has apparently devolved/ evolved into a powerful public relations gimmick

personally, i feel that you want the general public engaged in science, any way you can, even if that involves purposeful misconceptions or blowing things out of proportion. sometimes you need cheap gimmicks to captures people's attentions, and really, what's wrong with that? who cares how you get them in the door, as long as they get in the door

get the general public interested and engaged in scientific questions which aren't even remotely tangentially related to their lives, because for every 10 people who get the wrong idea, and start making bets on silly things like proving the existence of god, as if that could ever be actually settled with a science experiment, there is an eleventh person, perhaps a 13 year old kid, who's imagination is sparked by wonder at the larger concepts in play

sometimes its hard to tell the difference between a misconceived turn of the phrase and a genuine attempt at drawing a larger and deeper inference and connection in a subject matter. who am i, or any of us, to throw cold water on the idea of a god particle? isn't discovering the deeper mechanisms of how our natural world works poetically or literally akin to touching the mind of god, whatever the poetic idea of the "the mind of god" might mean to you, atheist, or religious?

so let the god particle be particle physics' new public relations ambassador. and for those of you who are so literal as to be mediocre: don't poo poo the god particle. milk it for all it is worth. beacuse that 13 year old kid might be the next niels bohr

Re:Hahaha

[mashiyach]

The mere fact that I have my conscious experiences proves that they are real.

My will is free, at least how far I can tell from my own experience. This means that the algoritms implementing my mind either:
1) implement free will
2) make me believe that I have free will

The rest of you discussion is bullshit because it deals with potential properties of a deity, properties which are irrelevant for the discussion.

Proving God sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

One with omnipresence would be easy to prove. What would be accepted as proof of God ? There are more than enough structures in space that are omnipresent ... The gravity field of, well, anything, is by definition omnipresent (even though it's not so at every last moment in time, it's just everywhere any human will ever go, or even any photon that will ever touch a human). The laws of nature are omnipresent and eternal. Force carrying particle fields are omnipresent and eternal, ... If you only need a "mechanical" God, the bet is won already.

These fields are "capable of doing anything that's possible" since they actually DO anything that happens (if you push someone down the stairs, these fields are the "thing" that actually create the force on your victims body causing him to start to fall). And they are omnipresent, omnipotent and eternal.

So that bet would be won by just looking up in a physics book, and pointing out that such structures exist.

You can't prove that there is or is not an omnipresent omnipotent entity that can choose whether to act or not : the basic demand of an experiment would be that it would have to be repeateable. Since presumably this entity would tire of those experiments and would stop responding, any experiment that "proves" the existence of God would stop doing so after a while. When God parted the sea in the exodus, that could be said to prove his existence, however, the next day there is no proof left, and anybody could correctly claim that there is no proof God exists.

This is an unsolveable problem : let's assume some idiots' dream comes true today : Jesus comes down from heaven, beats the crap out of every existing army by waiving his hand, throws all muslims and all other unsavory individuals into hell, and builds a final country where he is king and everything is happy.

Would that prove the existence of God ? Well no. There are problems :

• it's not repeateable (it's the end of the world, you just ain't going to do it twice)
• it doesn't "prove" omnipotence, just proves this guy is very, very, very powerfull
• it doesn't "prove" omnipresence, after all how would you know if he missed a terrorist somewhere that realizes that after what happened to his fellow muslims, he'd best stay quiet

Since that would not be accepted as proof, what exactly do you suggest WOULD prove (and be repeateable) that God exists ?

The problem is that the basis of religious dogma, namely that there are eternal, unchangeable and unchallengeable laws that must be obeyed, or dire consequences will follow, is a basic assumption of science. Without that as a given, not a single experiment would be doable, nor would it prove anything.

But you can disprove specific religions :

• islam clearly states that you can't fire an arrow in the direction of mecca. Well I suggest you test just how stupid this is. BTW : this is not like the "contradictions" in the bible, it's not part of a story, islam clearly, directly and plainly states that you can't fire an arrow in the direction of mecca. It states the "arrow would refuse to fly". Since there is nothing symbolic in that sentence or any sentence around it, it's just a plain claim. Or you could check islam's inheritance laws, and notice that they don't add up. Quran 4:11 and 12 clearly specify how to divide the inheritance of a dead man, and in many cases you have to divide 9/7th of the inheritance over the children (and wive(s)). Since that's impossible, and is a direct law, it is wrong.*
• you can check buddhism : since the world only exists as part of the mind of people, it is not possible for people to cause accidents due to "not knowing" something, since they know about the entire world. So dig a hold in the sidewalk, camouflage it, and if someone falls into it you're sure buddhism is wrong.

• The problem of doing this with the bible is that it hardly makes any direct claim at all. Sure it claims that allowing murder will have dire

Re:Hahaha

[destroyer661]

Over the last few millenia we've chipped away at God's domain until almost nothing remains,

While I do slightly agree with you, this 'chipping' was started in large parts even before Christianity began. Philosophers in ~5-600 B.C. thought lots about whether gods domain was truly eternal, truly immortal, truly pure and good, etc. You should read some Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and Pythagoras as well. I can't say these gentlemen invented what you're eluding to, but they surely did much to make skepticism and the 'usefulness' of god's presence in the general population a large topic. Sure, they were still religious in some sense, but more like most people in North America are religious today. Aristotle, for sure, was focused more on what we might call individual spirituality where God is attributed to something in the individual (e.g. what the mind perceives god to be for them) rather than being the centerpiece of a weekly gathering which demands money, or a god which commands his 'subjects'.

Re:Hahaha..But..

[Anonymous Coward]

Vaporising people is not evidence of a deity.

How would God go about proving to a scientist that He had created the universe... and why would He bother.

I find this rather amusing

[Chalnoth]

Come on, the LHC prove God? How exactly would it do that? Do people somehow think that a probability of producing some particle X has anything to say one way or another whether or not a god exists? What about particle Y? Or when you slam atoms together instead of protons? The fact remains that no god concept has anything to say one way or another on these questions. I find it rather absurd that anybody would consider the LHC to have anything to say here. As for whether or not a god can be proven, of course, that depends entirely upon the god. If you provide a specific definition that is testable, then it can be tested for. The problem is that most people who believe in one god or another refuse to do this. They stick only to words and phrases which are, by their very construction, completely untestable. I'm talking here about things like, "God is love," or, "God created the Universe." You just can't test these things. Sometimes, of course, they make very specific predictions, such as, "God heals as a response to prayer," or, "God will cause the world to end in 1922," which, once tested, invariably come out to be false. One wonders why they continue to believe that the existence of a deity is even reasonably likely.

Re:Proving God sucks

[Mr. Slippery]

you can check buddhism : since the world only exists as part of the mind of people, it is not possible for people to cause accidents due to "not knowing" something, since they know about the entire world. So dig a hold in the sidewalk, camouflage it, and if someone falls into it you're sure buddhism is wrong.

Uh, no. The hole exists in the subjective world of the person who falls into it, as soon as they discover it. That subjective world exists only in that persons mind.

Whether an "objective" world exists or not is irrelevant to the core teachings of Buddhism, which are concerned with the nature and relief of human suffering. If the hole is on a holodeck, or if the whole thing is some Matrix-style illusion, doesn't matter: the relevant question is, what you you do now that you're having this experience of being at the bottom of the hole with a broken ankle?

Of course some stupid ideas have been glommed on to the various schools over the years, but the essence of Buddhism is that 1) suffering exists, 2) suffering is caused by the mental activity we call "desire" or "attachment", 3) a solution to suffering exists, and 4) the solution is the cultivation of a lifestyle and mental habits that reduce desire and attachment-thinking. (More here [infamous.net], if you're interested in my take on it.)

This is not something that can be disproved by digging a hole and watching to see if people fall in.

The problem of doing this with the bible is that it hardly makes any direct claim at all.

It makes plenty. Your apology for the contradictions as "over-analyzed" is curious indeed; given the significance of the book to many in the Western world, of course it's been analyzed a lot. Doesn't change the contradictions. Like "No man hath seen God at any time" in John 1:18, and "And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend." in Exodus 33:11. Things like that blow the doors off of Biblical inerrancy.

Of course, not all Christians believe in Biblical inerrancy. Nor do all Muslims belief that the Qur'an is a literal document.