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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.
Scientists being required as part of the proof to earn the payout that God exists? Damn, bookies sure do know how to make it a safe bet.
So, if there were a god and we were part of the creation an independent verification would have to come from outside this existence.
Bizarro perhaps?
Surely God would be something a bit bigger than a particle.
This article is jibberish. The 'God Particle', aka the Higgs Boson has nothing to do with whether God or Gods exist. Is this 'bet' that people are placing a bet on the Higgs Boson, or are they actually betting on whether a God exists?? I am very confused, but probably less confused than the person who wrote the article!!
-Bill
... seems rather hard within the realm of an empirical science.
At least, that was the case in pre-modern times.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
God do I hate that thing being trudged out for every idiotic theism "debate". It's basically a combination of a tautology (requires a non-zero probability of God's existence) and a few preposterous assumptions (voluntarism, the notion that "wagering for God" does not affect your life, the "other gods" complaint, which can result in infinite "misery" for a "for" wager, etc).
It's cute enough as a philosophical experiment, but the typical layman interpretation of it is just plain idiotic.
sic transit gloria mundi
You'd think the "Paddy" in the name would be a giveaway - it might be a stereorotype, but it's something. Either that or the head office in Dublin... it's like 1916 never happened, and I'm not even Irish myself. Oh well, what else to expect from a bunch of Americans who think Scotland is in England. 8)
(this is not a
Nonsense. Most of the members here have never seen any evidence of real, live females, yet they believe in them through faith alone. You know what they say - everyone needs something to believe in :)
The over/under on the Higgs boson's mass is +147 GeV.
To be fair we can using genetics/biology, a vast array of history, logic and obviously quantum physics to prove with a high degree of accuracy that women do in fact exist. And rest easy, no theoretical math was used at all (that stuff keeps me up at night ... i shouldnt be on at 4am but i had a nightmare about number theory).
No, it's not faith, we have pictures! :-) Lots of pictures. Mmmm boobies.
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 :
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 :
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
Of course you can prove that god doesn't exist.
Dead bodies don't rise from the dead.
People can't walk on top of water without cheating.
No one can ascend to the heavens without cheating by using technology.
Omniscience isn't possible given the speed of "c".
The same goes for omnipresence and omnipotence.
Omnipotence also violates the second law of thermodynamics.
The list goes on and on and on. So many scientific theories and laws of mother nature provide direct testable evidence that no gods are possible in objective reality.
It doesn't even take accurate scientific theories to prove god doesn't exist. Newton's Laws work just fine... Einstein just puts the nail in gods coffin.
Remember valid scientific theories tell you as much about what is possible as they tell you about what is NOT possible.
Newton proves that it's not possible for a human being to jump from the Earth to the Moon without the aid of technology.
Face it, god is a belief stricken faith based delusional myth that has gripped and stolen the lives of a huge portion of humanity.
It's easy to see what happens after death: we rot and are eaten by bugs and scavengers or we are consumed by fire on Earth. No magical ride to the pearly gates. No utopia awaits. Not even blackness for once your bio-electro-chemical brain functions and cell functions cease you're dead and can no longer perceive nada. No magical "soul" that leaves your body... just a cessation of the biological processes that provide you with the illusion that you are you. In fact you are many billions of cooperating cells that simply stop.
Delusional fantasies of an afterlife for each of us after our deaths only provide comfort against the harsh realities of nature.
Live your life to the fullest. Live your life minimizing the harm you do to others - preferably no harm to others. Don't support others who would harm others.
What is your purpose in life? Other than survival life has whatever purpose and meaning that you choose for it, even if it's a delusional fantasy. It's just better - in my humble opinion - to live one's life closer to objective reality than living it with delusional belief stricken delusions that stifle one's thinking requiring one to suspend critical thinking just because on hopes that the universe will spare each of us our own personal universal cold death.
Peace.
Oh, and if you want to have your "faith" - aka stupidity - in magic then fine be stupid and believe all you want in magical invisible non-existent mythological super beings all you want, just don't make anyone else join your death cult.
Remember to kill god if you see him for he has a large list of crimes against humanity stacked up.
Why are you on /. honestly? Blind faith is the antithesis of being a nerd. Aside from trolling is there any purpose at all for you to be here?
You don't participate in many of the programming threads, do you?
Paddy Power's annual turnover is in the region of two billion euros; they have a huge internet presence and a healthy telephone business; they run 248 betting shops including 187 in Ireland, where gambling is virtually a religion and religion is actually taken seriously.
After two months trading, they have taken only five thousand pounds on this book. They take more than that in five minutes for a low-grade dog race on a wet Wednesday afternoon.
This is just a publicity stunt by a bookmaker known for this sort of thing.
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Scientist 1: Turn on the LHC!
* Click... Whirrrrr *
Scientist 2: It's on
* Foooooooom! *
Scientist 1: What the? God?!
God: Yes, it is I
Scientist 1: But, what are you doing here?
God: I'm here to collect my winnings. I put down a $1m with Paddy Power that I don't exist.
Scientist 2: So you made $4m?
God: No, I've made $33m because I placed my wager when they lengthened the odds.
Both Scientists: Wow!
God: Yes, that's why I'm God.
Summation 2
http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/
Squirrel!
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.
I'm an agnostic. When God (or whatever name he, she or it wishes to go by) comes down here and does something to prove his/her/its existence, then I'll believe in God. Until that point, or until I die, I'll simply acknowledge that God's existence is neither proven or disproven, but possible.
:D
Chances are, the only time we'll find out for certain is when we die. We'll wake up in heaven, hell, purgatory or whatever realm the dead go to, or... we won't. At that point, what does it matter?
Thing is, if I had a bit of spare cash to make it worthwhile, I'd place a bet on God's existence.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
This is a silly argument. The response of C.S. Lewis was that omnipotence does not mean "ability to do things that are inherently impossible." A square circle is a non-thing, therefore even an omnipotent God cannot make it. Nonsense doesn't become sense just because you insert the words 'God can'.
If something is logically possible, an omnipotent God could do it. And we may guess incorrectly about what's possible. But what you're doing is knocking down straw men. The God you're disproving is the one of childish belief.
"There is no such thing as laws of nature. Every so called law of nature is mankinds attempt to put the things mankind perceives into understandable terms."
Just because our efforts to codify the laws of nature are not yet perfect does not mean that there are no laws of nature. If we follow your logic then nothing exists because all we observe is just our senses turning what they perceive into understandable terms.