Slashdot Mirror
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
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 :)
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
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.