In July of this year scientists from Europe’s CERN research centre, along with researchers in the U.S., presented evidence for a particle named the “Higgs Boson”, a particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. It has been nick-named the “God particle”, which is apparently a not-too popular name among physicists.
I am totally out of my depth when it comes to physics, so don’t expect any detailed study or analysis here, but that’s not my intention anyway. I just want to comment on the claim by some evolutionists that the Higgs Boson is a “final nail in the coffin of Christianity”.
Quantum field theory is an extension of Quantum mechanics – theory which successfully describes the behavior of matter and energy at a sub-atomic level. Rather than being little lumps of matter, quantum field theory sees such particles as “ripples” in the fields. Researchers think that one field, the Higgs field, actually gives particles mass. A Higgs Boson-like particle is being credited by some as playing a major role in the inflation of the Big Bang, both before and after, and so the creation of the universe.
In the minds of some who are eager to do away with God from our society, God has been rendered redundant. They’ve chased Him, so they think, all the way from the cells of our own bodies and out of the universe altogether (“Aha! no god would have made mass using the Higgs-Boson! We know because we know everything!”).
To my unscientific mind, this attitude is no better than that of the cosmonaut who, when he got a few miles above the earth in one of those designed (not evolved) capsules, exclaimed jubilantly and sarcastically that he could not see God anywhere. It’s like watching a child being born and concluding “There, God had nothing to do with it – it was the mother who made the baby!” In reality, God created women to have the potential to reproduce.
While the Bible is not a science manual and wasn’t intended to be, it’s not difficult for those who choose to look to see that it’s ahead of man’s research on many points. Before Einstein and Hubble came along, it was normal for those favoring evolution to think of our universe as being eternal. They now know that it had a beginning, but the Bible had already told us that:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
This statement, which even the most determined agnostic would have to admit was made at least many hundreds of years ago, declares that the universe had a beginning, and that its creation involved the beginning of mass and space. Time also began here, according to the Bible, because it all happened “in the beginning”.
More than that, scientists in the twentieth centurycame to believe that the universe is expanding, but expansion was in the Bible over two thousand years ago:
“He stretches out the heavens, and treads on the waves of the sea. He is the maker of the Bear and Orion, the Pleides and the constellations of the south (Job 9: 8-9).
Now if there was no universe at some point, where was God? That’s no problem, because the Bible not only says that He is eternal, but that He is non-physical, and that the universe cannot contain Him. When there was no matter, there is God. In the words of Jesus:
“God is spirit” (John 4: 24).
The writer of the Bible book of Hebrews, through the Holy Spirit, said:
“By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what is visible” (Hebrews 11: 3).
Paul said:
“What is seen (mass and space, and therefore time also) is temporary, but what is unseen (spirit) is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).
As with the baby being born, the process of creation of mass was begun by God, a more-than-pan-dimensional being who is not physical, and who cannot be detected by a telescope or any man made invention. He didn’t need to go around like some cartoon witch who points her wand into the air and makes a prince appear, but He did set real physical processes in motion in a way that would be sustained once the initial creation was in place. The Bible says that on the seventh day He rested, as His work of creation was “finished” (Genesis 2:2). He didn’t have to point a wand to make you “poof” into existence, and any Higgs-Boson like particle, even if it can give other particles mass, is itself a process begun as a part of the physical creation of God.
Fuel for Faith 