ASSUMPTIONS, ASSUMPTIONS

There was a program on the Science Channel last night about the search for the Higgs Boson.  It was interesting, and I have to marvel at the tenacity necessary to prosecute such monumental searches.  I can't help wishing I could be part of it.  How fulfilling, and at the same time, frustrating that would be. 

In science, as soon as one question is answered, there seem to be an innumerable series of other questions that come up.  Are there other bosons?  Is the boson the ultimate or composed of still more particles?  Originally, the atom itself was considered the smallest component of matter.  We now know it's not.

What disappointed me in the whole program was inanely constant references to the Higgs Boson as a "god particle."  We just can't seem to wean ourselves from the trappings of mythology -- a yearning for a simple answer to it all.  The simplest answer of all being "God did it."  Subject closed.  Don't bother me with the facts.

Talk about magic!  The universe is so complex that we have to have ever greater and more powerful machines like the Hadron Collider and physicists who dedicate their entire lives to the quest to even begin to fathom its secrets, but a "god" who would have to dwarf and put to shame all those machines along with their super-educated and dedicated operators just automatically "always existed."

Pardon me -- don't you assert that the universe is too complex to have come to be without a creator?  Yet, you assume -- on faith -- that such a creator just happened to be there in all its magnificence and just happened to be endowed with knowledge and abilities we humans have striven to accumulate for centuries just as a matter of fiat!  Would the financial magicians at the Federal Reserve ever like to hire someone with those innate chacacteristics!

No wonder we're a race staring possible extinction in the face from our own foibles and base attitudes! 

C'mon.  We shouldn't still be a gang of ignorant savages stumbling around in this terrestrial jungle chanting spells and prostrating ourselves to imaginary beings!  That mindset is potentially lethal in any time, but much more so in a super-technological age such as ours! 

We just don't know how it all began, and we may never get to the ultimate answer.  It's just certain that no magical super-being did it who had all knowledge and all power just as a matter of fiat.