(image: Martial Trezzini/KEYSTONE/Associated Press)

On this birthday of the greatest scientist of the 20th Century, Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955), it’s amazing to watch as the mechanics behind the Universe are slowly revealed. CERN Physicists working at the $US10 billion Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, believe they have confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson particle, greatly solidifying our knowledge of the fundamentals of the universe.

Unfortunately, the intellectual chasm between the guys revealing the origins and mysterious underpinnings of our universe, Einstein and his successors, and the rest of us, is still so massive that ‘creator’ and ‘interventionist’ gods can still profitably fill the gap. It was only a little under 400 years ago that the Catholic Church and its inquisitors, locked up Galileo and threatened him with torture, for the heresy of suggesting that the Bible was wrong in that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe. Those fearful and blinkered churchmen must have trembled at the thought of the consequence of his heresy. For, if a book of absolute truths, written as the word of God, could be disproved in only one part, then that would call into question the whole. Now the heresy is a largely accepted theory and a settled consensus of fact for humanity.

Likewise, the widely accepted Theory of Evolution, will one day soon achieve the same settled status and Creationists will be relegated as an embarrassing joke in history.

Science has now largely abrogated the notion of a god as an omnipotent being who can miraculously disrupt the laws of physics and chemistry on our behalf. These magical beings will soon be archived alongside Norse gods of an earlier age when simple but incomprehensible things like storms, rain, lightning, life, the sun and the moon, needed supernatural explanation: Odin (the ruler of the gods), Thor (the god of thunder) and Hel (queen of the underworld). As famed cosmologist, Carl Sagan put it when dismissing the existence of a sentient interventionist god, “it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.” What will become of all those magnets of greed and wealth, the televangelists, when the core message of their wealth ministries, that God showers money on followers, is finally confirmed as the folly it is.

So with the ‘interventionist gods’ on very shaky ground, that leaves just the ‘creator gods’.

The Higgs boson particle is key to current understanding of the Big Bang.
First theorized in 1964 by British physicist Peter Higgs, as part of the Standard Model of Physics, the Higgs boson was until very recently, the only Standard Model particle yet to be discovered. The model explains how the constituent particles of matter interact.

CERN scientist, Professor William Trischuk explains, “The Higgs field is everywhere around us, and all particles are moving in the presence of this field,” All these particles “interact more or less strongly with it, and they are either slowed down or not slowed down so much and that’s what gives them mass. The heavier ones interact strongly with this field and the light ones interact very weakly with this field.”, he said.

Now with the confirmation of the Higgs boson Particle’, one of the last pieces of the puzzle needed to explain the origin of our universe, has been confirmed, and the Big Bang is also a little closer to being settled (if they could just figure out that pesky ‘dark matter’). With this significant step, the ultimate fate of the creator gods is also closer.

In his 2010 book, The Grand Design, the world’s most famous living scientist and Big Bang pioneer, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that, “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” he writes. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.” Hawking added that, “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

And, if a universe can be created spontaneously, there’s no need for a ‘creator god’ to explain why we’re here.

In time, humans may look back on our time in much the same way as we look back on those arrogant and misguided men of God who imprisoned Galileo in 1633; as a time when people who, frightened for the existential consequence should their god prove not to exist, desperately clung to a vision of life on Earth as a court room for sentient, judgmental gods who held humans in special regard and rewarded the deeds of followers and burned the rest.

I predict that it’ll be less than 50 years before a final consensus is reached when all the interventionist and creator gods and their blood-soaked history, can finally be retired.

Happy birthday Albert.

Check out the New York Times report on the confirmation of the Higgs boson:
• CERN Physicists See Higgs Boson in New Particle (NYT, 14 March 2013)
Also see this Huffington Post Report:
• Higgs Boson Discovery Confirmed After Physicists Review Large Hadron Collider Data At CERN (Huff. Post, 14 March 2013)

Will the deity religions be able to hang on for another 50 years? Will a religion fueled war emanating from the Middle East, devastate the world in the meantime? Will fusion propulsion open up exploration of our solar system? will we solve the mystery of ‘dark matter’ any time soon? What do you reckon?

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